This barstool ain’t big enough for the both of us, my brother used to say. We were toddlers. I was into vodka back then because of all the spirits vodka most closely resembled water, which was what I really wanted. I couldn't speak many words, just grunted, pointing to the bottle of water behind the bar, croaking and banging my hand on the bartop for the bartender to bring the bottle and drip-drop it into my sippy cup. I got used to the flavor and grew to like it. Later I diversified, pointing to a different bottle, grunting at a shiny beer tap, choosing whatever I liked and nodding when asked if we wanted to charge the tab to our mom's room.
* The critics thought and wrote about him even through the years he wasn’t publishing his work. There was a fascination with him, an infatuation among his contemporaries. It wasn’t just the work they were interested in. They wanted to know about him, what he was thinking, what he was doing, what he was working on. He released nothing, but no one knew he was writing like always, tucked in his basement office as the seasons changed. Not even his editor knew. The dog lay there, her warmth curled around his feet as he sat writing away the time. His body did not change but the mind whirred, carving passages into realms present and distant. He disappeared from public following his wife’s death, gracious for the consolations but evasive, in retreat.
* He wrote his first story at age nine. The process electrified and elevated him, separated and dissociated him from himself. His identity shattered into pieces—a rivulet bubbled up, flowed, accelerated, eroded importance in everything else.
* When she presented the novelist with a local award, the mayor smiled for the cameras and shook the novelist’s hand without having read his work. She did not say from her prepared statement that the novelist had meandered into middle age healthy and productive, his name gathering readership worldwide. A drug habit sustained him when his work and marriage weren’t enough.
* He was born into a segmented world: subdivisions, suburbs, siblings. His parents had their lives and he had his. They left the novelist home with the other children to watch television but he read prodigiously and one day discovered his true self in the words he composed.
* His death occurred swiftly and without warning. Early on a Sunday with daylight breaking at his window, he lay listening to birdsong and thinking about his latest work, almost completed. His heart beat three times in rapid succession and then burst, a cataclysm in his chest. The thoughts about his unfinished work were his last in this world.
* Night provided his greatest inspiration. He climbed from his office to the backyard for stillness and quiet and to admire the sky. His wife often joined those midnight excursions when healthy. They held hands with the Earth churning beneath them, eyes fixed starward.
* He never had children of his own. He loved kids and made them laugh but secretly was terrified of them stealing time and focus from his work. His wife had interest in motherhood early in their marriage but the interest tapered with age. Before her death she regretted to the novelist that she’d never be a grandmother.
* All dreams point downward, he once wrote. They keep our bodies moored to the Earth. We would levitate and float away if we lay there dreaming our dreams up into the air.
* Public readings were a necessary evil, though he did enjoy traveling the world to greet his readers. They were passionate and dedicated. The majority of of them resided in his home country of the United States but his work was admired the world over, translated into 20 languages. His first trip to China felt to him like a journey on another planet and inspired his novel Red Sea Sleeping, a tale of conspiracy and psychosis written in the novelist’s signature style and use of language but set in Beijing.
* The first novel he wrote (An Unstable Game) became the third he published. His publisher asked him to revisit that first manuscript and add more to the story, clarify items and explain some of the novel’s mystery. The writer nearly re-wrote the entire manuscript in two months and returned it to the publisher, who, upon reading the new work, shivered and emailed the author immediately.
* Marriage isn’t for everyone but the novelist truly loved and admired his wife. They met in college, when the novelist was 30 and she 24. She played cello and sewed her own clothes. Her widowed mother invited him for Christmas and he accepted, telling jokes all weekend to counter the woman’s devastating sadness. The old lady’s misery extended to everyone in her presence, including her daughter. The malaise evaporated once back at college, and the novelist’s future wife returned to her customary easiness. The novelist proposed marriage as spring blossomed on campus and his time there ended. He wrote two unpublished novels while at school. His editor discovered the manuscripts on the novelist’s hard drive and published them to wide acclaim two years after the writer’s death.
* Cold Moon Below, the novelist’s fourth published work, won him the National Book Award and carried him to the highest levels of American literary prestige. The night he received the congratulatory call, he repeated to himself that he would only ever be as good as the last thing he wrote. He spent the remainder of the weekend in his basement, writing without sleep. He emerged from that chrysalis having finished a rough draft of The Magnificent Gaucho, which would later be published on three continents and catapult the novelist into international discussions.
* His editor worked alongside attorneys and against the wishes of publishers and others vying for the writer’s library and estate of papers. The editor fiercely protected the novelist’s works and honored his own arbitrary estimation as to what the novelist may have wanted. He quickly became overwhelmed with mounds of rewardless work and grew disgruntled with the late novelist for not properly securing his estate during his lifetime.
* Our time here, the novelist once wrote, referring to our time on Earth, is limited only by our flesh and bone, our blood. What we create between the bookends of birth and death immortalizes us.
* The editor secured the novelist’s library of work at a nearby university, thereby absolving himself of most of his responsibilities. He shrugged away the burden with relief but also regret, for it was his last lifeline to the dead writer, whom the editor admired, loved like a brother. He cried in his car in the university parking lot, having never truly mourned the novelist’s untimely death. The vast majority of deaths are untimely, he thought, and he started his vehicle and drove into another sunlit afternoon.
Richard Nixon, visiting the Great Wall of China in 1972, said: “I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall.”
Ronald Reagan, visiting the Wall in 1984, said: “What can you say, except it’s awe-inspiring? It is one of the great wonders of the world.” Asked if he would like to build his own Great Wall, Reagan drew a circle in the air and replied: “Around the White House.”
Bill Clinton, visiting the Wall in 1998, said: “So if we had a couple of hours, we could walk ten kilometers, and we’d hit the steepest incline, and we’d all be in very good shape when we finished. Or we’d be finished. It was a great workout. It was great.”
George W. Bush, visiting the Wall in 2002, signed the guest book and said: “Let’s go home.” He made no other comments.
Barack Obama, visiting the Wall in 2009, said: “It’s majestic. It’s magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history, and that our time here on Earth is not that long, so we better make the best of it.” During his visit, the Starbucks and KFC at the base of the Wall were closed.
Weinberger, Eliot. The Ghosts of Birds, New Directions Books, New York, 2016: 91.
The poet is born in a house on a mountain. His father built the house just as his father built his house on the mountain, and his father built his, and so on. The poet’s young parents have two concerns: their community of like-minded people on the mountain and their only child, the poet. Neither parent knows their child is a poet.
The boy’s father is paid meagerly to dig graves for those who have died on the mountain. The mother looks after the house and watches over her son, the poet, though he doesn’t yet know he is a poet.
The poet lives on the mountain all his life but decides for his 18th year to live completely at sea, with just a few scattered days ashore for essentials. He vows this as a personal challenge despite his mother’s horror. She watches and waves from the dock as the small watercraft disappears from her.
Several times during the journey he considers abandoning it, returning to the mountain to forget the whole thing. Nausea, illness, cold, boredom—until he discovers he’s a poet.
He returns home forever changed. He carries a notebook and no longer wants to live on the mountain. He yearns to be close to the water. His mother watches and waves as her only child disappears from her again toward something unknown to her.
Apartments are expensive near the water. The poet quickly finds work but hates it, changes jobs, adds another. Soon another. It’s worth all the work to live here, he writes. He often falls asleep writing.
He refines the poems he’s written and sends them to an editor, who tells him to send them to an agent. Quickly and to the poet’s surprise a large collection is published (titled Announcement). It receives excellent reviews and three award nominations. The poet is suddenly attractive. He retreats to the water in a rented dinghy to disappear from himself, from the world. He writes his best work the further he travels from shore.
He works three jobs and scribbles in his notebook. The poems are as scattered as the poet himself, who is compelled, after an indiscriminate period of time, to take the poems in the notebook and unify them, liquefy them, position and reposition them into a complete manuscript that will ultimately be published into a collection (titled Ascension), earning him accolades and the much-coveted assurance that his craft can now financially support him. The poet publishes two more collections in the next 18 months (Atlantis, Carnival), vaulting him to literary fame and prestige. On a private jet one afternoon from Europe to Manhattan he meets a famous Canadian actress and the two connect immediately. She’s read his poems, she says. I’ve seen your movies, he tell her.
They marry within the year, an extravagant event in the Maldives in which global celebrities mingle with intellectuals and politicians. Everyone wants something from the poet.
His sudden rise to fame leads him inland to readings and signings and speaking engagements across the globe but he yearns to be close to the water, on the water. He sells his beach house for a houseboat, a vessel for he and his wife to live on.
She is gone after just six months at sea, having disembarked in haste at San Francisco and looking like a madwoman in her tattered dress and swollen luggage. The poet tends to the boat by moonlight, he prepares food beneath the relentless sun, he fills notebooks with ease—flooded with inspiration. He regrets the wife’s departure, their sudden inexplicable violence toward one another. She’s gone and he’s never felt more alive. He returns ashore once again a man forever changed.
The next day his doctor finds a troubling mass on the poet’s neck during a routine appointment. More tests reveal a cancerous growth. The poet is told he has one year to live, his final year on Earth, in which he will visit the mountain of his youth one final time to say goodbye before living the remainder of his days and nights writing poems on an ocean of oblivion.
Once there was a horse, and on the horse there was a rider. How handsome they looked in the autumn sunlight, approaching a strange city! People thronged the streets or called from the high windows. Old women sat among flowerpots. But when you looked about for another horse or another rider, you looked in vain. My friend, said the animal, why not abandon me? Alone, you can find your way here. But to abandon you, said the other, would be to leave a part of myself behind, and how can I do that when I do not know which part you are?
Glück, Louise. Faithful and Virtuous Night, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2014: 59.
Why are the votes of those who don’t have standards or education or culture worth the same as the votes of people who do have them? Why is a vote obtained with a revolver to the head or by brainwashing people with advertising or buying them off with fifty thousand pesos worth the same as a vote expressed freely? Ask the defenders of democracy. That’s the great perversity, but we’re not allowed to say that. If everybody had education and the variations between high and low, in terms of culture, democracy would be universal and we’d be in Sweden, but that’s not the way it is. In Africa people vote for those in their own tribe and that’s why the party of the biggest tribe always wins, and you know the only way a tribe has to reduce the number of voters for another tribe? The machete. In many countries in Africa, it isn’t dictatorship that’s led to civil war, but democracy. The small tribes hate the system that gives power to the biggest clan, and what is power? The right to take control of a country. Here, it’s different because there are no tribes, but there are clans, and lately, tyrants. […] The [candidate] who wins has the most money, or the one who has the most arms and is stronger. The alpha male wins, because democracy, in terms of sexuality, is a masochistic relationship: power is given to the strong man so that he can exercise it over the weak man, who adopts an attitude of submission that consists of turning his back, lifting his hip, and offering his anus in order to avoid confrontation.
Gamboa, Santiago. Night Prayers, a novel. Translated by Howard Curtis, Europa Editions, 2016: 222–223.
truthfront 