There’s a section in my library reserved for books from dead people. The books aren’t organized in any way other than they were once written by or belonged to people I knew who are no longer living. Some of the dead authors signed their books for me. Salutations and thanks for the support, one reads. Another: To the writing life—the only way. My favorite: When we die we will know what we meant.
*
An aging railroad man forced his collection of books onto me because he couldn’t imagine it in his son’s possession: Decades-old leather-bound collections of European classics and obscure histories of the North American railroad.
A poet shipped me old paperbacks from his library written by a dead writer we both admired. He told me he was “pruning all the things he’d gathered.” The poet died of illness shortly after. His collection included first editions of unheralded mystery novels from an unappreciated American master.
A philosopher signed his books for me. He specialized in researching history and was an expert on the massacres of white settlers by American Indians. He was not an expert on the genocidal removal of American Indians by armies of white men.
A young journalist and friend died suddenly and inexplicably. I often reread the work he signed for me. I reread all the books in my library’s graveyard.
A pamphlet written by a dead musician and signed: Happy Birthday! He was my best friend despite our age difference of 40 years.
A multilingual poet who wrote about the beauty of fishing as superior to the poetry of words transfixed small crowds when reading his work in public.
*
The books span different shapes and sizes, competing textures. They were once tucked into backpacks and luggage, boxed up and stacked as freight. Now they’re with me. Someday they’ll be elsewhere and all the books in my library will be in a different graveyard, or divided and spread to other interim or permanent stops. Or it will all be thrown to the fire and pissed on.
He watched in the pre-dawn mist a black tactical vehicle roll slowly without lights onto the church grass. Armored shadows dropped from either side of the vehicle and disappeared inside the unlit building for as long as it took the witness to smoke and look on from his darkened porch across the street.
The shadow-men emerged from the church handling the priest, disheveled in his sleeping clothes, and a minute later, the alleged agitator cloaked in a blanket—a local activist outspoken in his views opposing government policies. Both had recently drawn the attention of authorities, prompting community leaders to rally in support of their freedoms to speak and peacefully convene without government intervention.
The priest, an old man with deep ties to his community, offered his church as temporary residence for the alleged agitator, a young man in his twenties with dual residency in the U.S. and Mexico. The priest knew of three citizens in his town that had recently been detained by agents in the night against their will and without due process.
They would never desecrate the people’s holy ground with their presence, the priest said publicly of his church.
The witness watched the vehicle slip away silent and dark with the shadow-men somewhere inside. Our witness imagined the priest and alleged agitator seated and crushed between the soldier-men armed with assault rifles and dressed in ballistic preventive equipment, dominating their physical space, eliminating the sovereignty and agency of the kidnapped.
Our witness watched daylight breach the night’s false innocence with angled shadows on the church grass and the vehicle’s tire impressions there.
Some writers have so confoundedconfused society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them. They are not only different but have different origins. Society is produced by our wantsinteractions and government by our wickednesslaws. The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affectionsinnovation and collaboration, the latter negatively by restraining our vicesinspires subservience or rebellion. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.1
Government of our own is our natural right. And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced that it is wiser and safer to form a constitutionuphold American democracyof our own in a cool, deliberate manner rather than trust such an eventa necessity to time and chance. If we don’t, some Massenellothe populist fascists will arise, laying hold of popular disquietudes to collect together the desperate and discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge. Should the government of America return again into the hands of Britainthe kleptocratic Republican regime, the tottering situation of things will be a temptation for some desperate adventurerbillionaire to try his fortune.2
**
To talk of friendship with those in whom our reason forbids us to have faith […] is madness and folly. Every day wears out the little remains of kindred between us and them. […] You that tell us of harmony and reconciliationa new great America, can you restore us to the time pastof our shared interests? […] Neither can you reconcile Britainright-wing fascist traitors and the un-treasonous majority. The last cord has been broken, the people of Englandcriminals of the failed coup attempt of January 6 and the Republican regime sweeping it into the margins of history are presenting addresses against us. There are injuries that nature cannot forgive; she would cease to be nature if she did. Just as the lover can’t forgive the ravisher of his mistress can the continentwe forgive the murders of Britaintraitorous failures who stormed the capitol. 3
I have never met a man either in England or Americaa blue or red state who did not confess his opinion that a separation between the countriesuswould take place one time or another was inevitable. And there is no instance in which we have shown less judgment than in endeavoring to describe the rightness or fitness of the continent for independencemaintain the health and vigor of American democracy. As all men vary only in their opinion of the time, let us, in order to remove mistakes, take a general survey of thingsthe American sociopolitical landscape, and try to find out the very time. We need not go far, the inquiry ceases at once, for the time has found us.4
Taking up arms merely to enforce a pecuniary law seems unwarrantable by divine lawthe social contract, just as is the taking up arms to force obedience to that law. […] The lives of men are too valuable to be cast away on such trifles. It is the violence done and threatened to our persons, the destruction of our property by an armed forcepolice, the invasion of our countrycommunities by fire and swordfederal officers, that qualifiesnecessitates the use of our own arms. The instance when such a defense becomes necessary, all subjection to Britainfederal law will cease and the independencedefense of America should have beenwill beconsideredupheld, as dating its era from and published by the first musket that was fired against her. This is a line of consistency neither drawn by caprice nor extended by ambition but produced by a chain of events of which the colonistsun-treasonous USA majority were not the authors.
I shall conclude these remarks with the following timely and well-intended hints: We ought to reflect that there are three different ways by which independencethe USA’s future may hereafter be effected, and that one of those three will one day or another be the fate of America.:
By the legal voice of the people in Congressvia fair election processes
Volumes have been written on the subject of theWe are engaged in a struggle betweenEngland and Americathe traitorous few and the majority.MenCitizen defenders of Democracyof all ranks have embarked on the controversy, from different motives and varying designsmust be aware and prepare. […]6
Paine, Thomas, Common Sense, Applewood Books, Massachusetts, 2002: 5. ↩︎
May noises bore into your teeth like a dentist’s drill, and may your memory be filled with rust, befouled odors, and broken words.
May a spider’s leg grow from each of your pores; may you be able to eat only decks of cards; and may exhaustion reduce you, like a steamroller, to the thickness of your portrait.
When you step into the street, may even the lampposts chase you off with kicks; may an overwhelming compulsion lead you to bow down before garbage pails; and may everyone in the city mistake you for a urinal.
Whenever you try to say “I love you,” may it come out sounding like “fried fish,” and may your own hands try to strangle you every now and then. Instead of your cigarette, may it be you that you toss in the spittoon.
May your wife cheat on you constantly, even with mailboxes; when she lies down beside you, may she turn into a leech; and—after birthing a raven—may she bear you a wrench.
May your family entertain itself by so disfiguring your skeleton that when mirrors see you they kill themselves in disgust; may your only amusement be installing yourself in the waiting rooms of dentists dressed as a crocodile; and may you fall so madly in love with a safe-deposit box that you cannot, even for an instant, resist licking its latch.
Girondo, Oliverio, trans. by Heather Cleary, Poems to Read on a Streetcar. New Directions Books, New York, 2014: 27.
“Son—You see what the catcher’s doing there? He’s signaling to the pitcher what to throw next. One finger means fastball, two fingers means curve, three fingers is a changeup. But see how he gives three signs in a row instead of one? It’s to mislead the base runner at second. The pitcher and the catcher, they gotta have a code. Otherwise the base runner could steal the sign and give it to the batter, signal what pitch is coming, make it easier to recognize.
Maybe the second sign is the real sign. Or maybe the first sign is the real sign on the first pitch, the second sign on the second pitch, and so on. Sometimes the catcher calls his pitches according to a grid system. Three different signs, each with a different purpose. The first sign is the actual pitch selection. The second sign is lateral—outside or inside, just one finger or two, depending on which side of the plate the batter is standing. The third sign is high or low. One finger would mean a pitch at the laces, two would mean the thighs, and three would mean a pitch at the letters. So if the pitcher’s looking in and gets three signs from the catcher, like a one then a one then a two, that means the catcher wants him to throw a fastball inside on the heart of the dish.
See how the runner on second is looking in, trying to read the catcher’s sign? The catcher is prepared for that. He has to deceive the base runner, change up the signs. But changing signs can confuse the pitcher, so the pitcher and catcher must practice and be consistent with their signs. The last thing a catcher wants is for a pitcher to throw a curve when a fastball was called, especially if a runner’s stealing. He’ll never be able to throw out the runner if the pitcher throws a curve.
You don’t want to use the same signs all the time. The other teams learn your signs. They learn their signs and then they learn your signs. Everyone’s trying to gain an edge, get the advantage. Remember how I showed you the other day how to keep your thighs close together when you’re giving the sign? It’s just another way you can keep the players on the other team from seeing it.
Everything’s in code. Very little of this game is obvious, in the open. Language and strategy are concealed in geometry. The actual play—the ground ball to short, the fly ball to right—this is the effect of hidden plotting, mathematical calculation, variability assessment. Everything else lies in the coded progression of the game, the subtle chess-like pace. This is why baseball will never be solved by man. Even when he thinks he’s mastered the game, a new record or a fresh young phenom resets the pattern he believed to be absolute. It destroys his studied convictions. The game continually surprises him by mis-assigning chief value to the human element, the error-prone ballplayer. This is why baseball is like life, son. This is why life is like baseball.”
Those who knew Emerson, or who stood so near to his time and to his circle that they caught some echo of his personal influence, did not judge him merely as a poet or philosopher, nor identify his efficacy with that of his writings. His friends and neighbors, the congregations he preached to in his younger days, the audiences that afterward listened to his lectures, all agreed in a veneration for his person that had nothing to do with their understanding or acceptance of his opinions. They flocked to him and listened to his word, not so much for the sake of its absolute meaning as for the atmosphere of candor, purity, and serenity that hung about it, as about a sort of sacred music. They felt themselves in the presence of a rare and beautiful spirit who was in communion with a higher world. More than the truth his teachings might express, they valued the sense it gave them of a truth that was inexpressible. They became aware, if we may say so, of the ultraviolet rays of his spectrum, of the inaudible highest notes of his gamut, too pure and thin for common ears.
The source of his power lay not in his doctrine, but in his temperament, and the rare quality of his wisdom was due less to his reason than to his imagination. Reality eluded him; he had neither diligence nor constancy enough to master and posses it; but his mind was open to all philosophical influences, from whatever quarter they might blow; the lessons of science and the hints of poetry worked themselves out in him to a free and personal religion. He differed from the plodding many, not in knowing things better, but in having more ways of knowing them. His grasp was not particularly firm, he was far from being like Plato or Aristotle, past master in the art and the science of life. But his mind was endowed with unusual plasticity, with unusual spontaneity and liberty of movement—It was a fairyland of thoughts and fancies. He was like a young god making experiences in creation: he blotched the work and always began again on a new and better plan. Every day he said , “Let there be light,” and every day the light was new. His sun, like that of Heraclitus, was different every morning.
Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Milton Konvitz and Stephen Whicher. Prentice-Hall, N.J., 1962: 31-32.
A woman walking her dog on the asphalt path found him half submerged in the water of Carter Creek with the rest of his body tangled in the waterside shrubbery. The woman told investigators that she knew he was dead because his head and torso were not moving underwater and his legs were pointed upward and impossibly corkscrewed together. The police roped off the area and examiners lifted the man from the cold water to find him headless. I’d say he’s been here longer than 24 hours, said an examiner, removing her sunglasses to wipe them with her shirt. I’ve no idea how his legs could twist up like that.
News of the grisly discovery quickly spread and the detectives requested assistance to keep the crowd of reporters away. The two worked in the bright cold of a November morning one mile south of the capitol where giant trees lined the creek’s diagonal path northward toward the glimmering symmetry of downtown. The detectives studied the body for as long as possible before it was transported to the coroner. One detective traveled with the body and the other stood where the dead man lay minutes ago. He listened to the trickling water, the chorus of curious birds watching from branches above. Other examiners stalked the area, snapping twigs beneath their feet. The detective kneeled closer to the water and studied the thorny bushes, asking an examiner to take photographs. Fabric from the dead man’s clothes waved in the chilled breeze. Two officers in wetsuits and breathing gear searched the water for the man’s head or anything else of interest to the detectives.
The detective scoured the scene for hours. The other called from the coroner’s office. Seems his head was chopped off with an axe, he said. Probably after he was shot in the chest. Two bullets near the heart likely killed him. Then he was decapitated. The body was then moved to the creek and dumped there.
The detective put the phone back in his pocket and an officer handed him a fresh paper cup of coffee. He opened the steaming lid and sipped. It was the second headless body found in the city that week. He shivered and got back to work.
The detective stopped walking to read the marquee. The main feature: Two Known Bones, an action film he’d never heard of. Two other movies played on smaller screens: Wide Minutes and Until Death Do Dawn. He continued walking south down the boulevard with his feet aching and the sunlight waning. A loner, moving or not, eating or performing any mundane task in his week, month, year. Alone even when not. Some mornings he sits at the sunlit window reading and sometimes writing in his pocket notebook, either working through a case or working through himself. Last night he dreamed of a brown bear following him through the city, trying to hide from him. His question wasn’t: Why is a brown bear in the city? but: What does this bear want from me? He strode south and west and asked himself various questions pertaining to truth and how we can know what truth is. One response arrived as a breeze on his sweaty forehead: Walk through your aches. Walk through your pain. Walk to gain clarity, focus, understanding.
The detective moved on. Who is he? Who he is matters less than what he does, what he thinks, how he moves. A timeless hero in any language, any culture. The city marked by tapestries of sound and light, heat and rancid alleyways. The city bewilders and disappoints. But it breathes life into you. He walks at night, a shadow on the cement and pavement, faded and elongated, then more defined as he moves beneath and past the streetlamp. Then he’s gone. The next object moves in, casts its shadow.
truthfront 