Men Looking at Ruins, 1874

Reminiscent of one of those days when the momentum of a sweeping conversation with friends keeps you from returning to life as you'd planned. A pleasant way to pass the time, but ultimately insubstantial, you think afterward. But you keep going back, pondering certain moments, surprised at how much weight they have acquired.

Between their attention to detail, talent for translation, and unfaltering taste, every young pop star in the world should be doing all they can to get this pair (Eva Geist & Donato Dozzy) to produce their next album. An exceptional release in a year filled with great ones.

Captures the miraculous feeling of being seated near a window inside a warm house while the winter rages outside, and the melancholy that attends the backward glances that are inevitable on such evenings.

Jean Charles Cazin, October Day

Mary Oliver & Molly Malone Cook, Our World

“Things began to change after that. And we didn’t disdain restaurants, the exquisite and dainty and plentiful foods. But neither did we ever forget the pleasures of our simplicity, our so-called hard years. When work was play, and play so thoroughly entered our work. We did not forget the bread, the jam, the bayberry, the gull, whose injuries to wings and legs were not reversible, who spent his last two months with us, splashing in the bathtub each morning, preening himself in the sun, asking to be turned around so he could watch the sunset, then turned again, so he could gaze with us into the evening fire.”

On Saturday, October 10th, I gave a reading related to You’ve Never Heard at Nova Arts Block in Keene, NH. Below is what I presented:

The reports must be translated into a jargon so rigid and repetitive that, two years into this gig, I can compose almost the entire thing using automated scripts.

It is easy work. Mindless, really.

And yet by the end of each day my brain lands somewhere between a low-grade concussion and an exceptional hangover.

I can function well enough to get dinner on the table, talk through the day with my girlfriend. But I am sealed off from accessing the level I would like to be on, and need to be, if I’m going to think about facing the shallow, sketchy novel I’ve been pecking at for the last three years.

Each morning, the novel is part of my plan for the day. And, just about every evening, I beg off, telling myself I should wait until I can give it the energy and level of thought it deserves. That I should bide my time until I have a chance to make it undeniable, fashion it into something whose brilliance will instantly reflect back on me.

So, the novel waits until the weekend, when I can be confident in getting down something — a line, a graph, a metaphor — good enough to keep the dream alive for another week.

Behind my computer is a door that separates our apartment from the neighbor’s.

I did not see who lived there for months. I heard them. In the late afternoon or early evening they would announce their arrival with insipid rock, the combative chittering of news and sports channels. Each day, these came at me at maximum volume over a system requiring considerable knowledge and resources, and each day I would roll my eyes in disgust, slip on a pair of headphones, and continue constructing reports.

I envisioned a former frat brother who, unsure how to proceed when stripped of his vices and constant stimulation, used sound to divert him from getting close enough to see what may be behind this feeling.

Then, one winter afternoon, I caught him out on his steps.

If he’d been in a frat, it was decades ago. He looked like a father, estranged from his children after the divorce. A heavy black overcoat. A white shirt and a tie. Galoshes over his dress shoes.

Since that day, whenever his life comes blasting through the wall, I still roll my eyes, and slip on my headphones.

But there is also fear.

I know nothing of how this man ended up here. I don’t even know that he’s unhappy. But, all of a sudden, I can sense a limit approaching. I can sense that I will not get to wait for the planets to align, will never get the chance to do nothing other than work on a piece of writing until it is unimpeachable. And I do not know what I will do when the day I’ve burned through all my good fortune arrives, when I can no longer retreat to the image of my ideal life.

On this particular evening the news shouts his return and I slip the headphones on, prepared to go under until my girlfriend comes home and alerts me that it is time to stop and to start cooking.

When the pounding has gone on for half a minute or so I come to and realize that I know this song. I know that at any moment the familiar, avuncular voice of Bill Withers is going to come and start talking about life in Harlem.

And then it doesn’t. The snare and bass continue to pound down on me, and when it seems as though some release has to come it is not Bill that appears but the song’s strings, unfurled so so deftly, so tenderly that my eyes go skyward, my head back.

A simple rearrangement. Slightly sped up, the bass and snare shifted to transform the amble on the guitar into a bracing stomp.

But, sitting there, it felt anything but simple.

What it felt like, to paraphrase Theo Parrish, was my DNA changing.

Here was something carrying no greater ambition than to present the joy and power someone had felt in a song to others and see if it translates. Asking only that you get up and dance.

And yet—it was more alive, more powerful than anything in that collection of clever lines I referred to as my novel. This, despite being a straightforward edit of a 40-year-old song, could actually move someone, could inspire the kind of transformation I or any other person who sits down and writes hopes to bring about.

I felt, in that moment, the way someone would having a beloved dish of their youth interpreted by one of the world’s great chefs. It does not matter that it is not novel. It does not matter that it is not unique nor ambitious. What matters is that wakes you up, gets you to recognize that you have lost sight of what the world can be, forgotten its tremendous potential to foster delight.

In that moment, I relented.

I did not envision this book. I did not see that my novel would never resemble those works I’d loved, because there was no one on the other side of it. It was just me. Saying, with each ironic, pitiful, poetic phrase: Look at me, look at me.

All I knew was the simple charge I had been given: to pay attention to what was alive. To orient my life so that moments like this, songs like this, could arrive. I knew, in some fashion, that I had been called.

I still feel that way. It may not always be music. But I know that my job is to go down the path until I run up against something so staggering that I can do nothing other than surrender. And then, when I’ve recovered, try and communicate that same feeling, that same measure of awe, to someone else. Try and get them to believe that the world just may be rich enough to contain answers that are specific to them.

It is not the life I dreamed of.

But it is, blessedly, finally, a life.