Lana and the Bear

Image © Michael O'Toole"I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb." — Oscar Wilde

He comes out of the mouth in the rock, underneath dripping, towering cedars, and stands swaying in the chill March air. More brown than black, his damp fur is matted as fever. Alone on a gravel curve, he hears the rage of dogs behind him, ahead of him, in all the directions, and knows he has to pick some astonishment of a path, some unlikelihood, even as his head still throbs from a season of sleep. 

Steaming in the late afternoon, he shows the wet earth to the pale ghost of a day moon, scuffs the moist dirt into sculptures.

The world is not the same. Will never be again. 

Bare and rude, a strip of blond ground, boxy green buildings, a place without complexion, long abandoned. The planes and shadows and golden light of a full day move across this vista, and nothing, absolutely nothing, changes.

A child emerges from nothing. She sits by a mildewed wall and with wordless sounds she confers with the waning day and she waits. Coyotes answer but she sits stoic and unresponsive; her parley is not with them, those subtle dilettantes.

Loneliness threads this land. Eyes appraise it: the black terror of a doe's wet stare, the eagle's stern glare. In time, resignation afflicts even the artful coyotes. There will never be another train.

She sits and waits and she calls out like a lost bird. Her name is Lana, but she has forgotten this. She almost remembers flutes and honeycomb, dreams of primrose paths arrayed with bees.

The great silence is the largest voice now.

Feral dogs and the liquid throats of ravens gulping high up in the conifers are no match.

A sound in the undergrowth, at the edge of the forest, and Lana clambers to her feet. And then he is there, lumbering perplexed from the leaking shadows, and he hasn't yet seen the little girl, Lana, whose name means "wool" in Spanish, and who dances a sudden dance at the first happy thing she has ever known, the first good answer to her silent query of a quiet land veiled in rain.

"You came back," she says.

The bear startles, his fur like acres of dark wheat in a prairie gale, undulating, fluctuate. Then he crosses the span between them in seconds and stands like a steaming boulder before her. She touches his cold nose and grabs his fur and climbs on his back and laughs, ignoring his savage reek, which is like memory. She digs in her pack for the dead things she's saved and dangles them over his snout and he feeds and is glad.

"Of course I came back," he says between bites, his voice abrasive from neglect. "It's winter I don't love. Not you."

Mutiny

"Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask." — Oscar Wilde

She smiled at him in the evening. She wanted to cry, but she laughed. Gators slipped off the banks, dropped like sudden drab stones into the depths.

Don't drag me. I smell the bright smell of brass in the runnels of your fingertips. Make me your instrument.

"Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share."

Each time you want to say "I'm sorry," say "I love you" instead. It's only a tiny thing, really. Summon the guts to say as much.

I'm taking a guess. He might have been somewhere. Aces wild. A cascade. His dissident prayer was splashed from above, skittering over rock, shining with the refracted sun, shot with the sorrowing incandescence of sundown as it begins its lament for the day.

"Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."

A secular psalm. A spasm of glory. We are all mutineers; never apologists. 

Somewhere outside Salzburg, a dove flies in the dimming valley, beneath the alpenglow, above the russet rooftops. A train attempts to follow, mostly fails. Barn doors creak. Hooves on straw like the ghosts of ancient tantrums. Darkness comes in fast, hurt and hushed, and no one is awake. 

O love. You cannot even speak. The shush of a song, the breath of a woman, follicle-fragile voice carried to your quivering ear on the gossamer wing of a damselfly, right behind you, from over your hunched shoulders while you cry into the silence, wishing to puncture a vacuum, yearning for the eternal indignant, the coal-black haven unspoken.

"You will never rue those times you watched the wide sargasso mouth from some imaginary bridge as it opened to swallow the world, one blighted fly-blown dream at a time."

"Why say any of this?" 

"I must speak these things for you, so you are not left anguished."

"But where I walk there are thorns."

"Then learn to avoid their points."

Reptiles in water. Gulf weed. Moccasins. Choked and blinked. Vertiginous. 

He smiled at her at daybreak, wanted her to cry, but she laughed. 

Kettering

"Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole." — Oscar Wilde

***

O England. We lived and loved in a caravan in Somerset. On holiday with my mad friend and his half-mad family, I would steal across dim eventides to you, in your own small caravan where you stayed and helped your mum. Her problems were like prisms floating off in someone else's periphery. Her heart was good but her mind was shattered, weary of shadows, trying to reassemble on the abandoned half of the moon. She even liked me. Mothers always did, though. We were fourteen or fifteen, then. Sixteen at a pinch. The tender shimmer of our confidence barely burgeoning, yet reciprocal. Our summer days were wrung dishrags with pendent cloud and a fine mist that felt like tidal spray on our upturned faces yet tasted of nothing much. Like sweat without salt. We treated the sun like an interloper. 

Teens have a homing call, and we were no different. Scrawny pigeon things, we were, skewed preemptive magnets in our brains. In a village hall, someone half-arsed a disco, strung some weak synaptic lights, set up a turntable and blared Anita Ward and Tubeway Army 45s most of the night while locals and tourists partway mingled, got heartily, lustily sick on Southern Comfort, gorged on faded plastic bowls of salted peanuts, and largely failed at sex. 

Avid, irreverent, spectacular, reticent. Are frenemies electric? 

Does aristocrat rhyme with wrong side of the tracks?

Partially. I'll come in, but I stutter on the high notes.

Prince and pauper, some bright daughter. See those eyes.

Those Tesla eyes. Scattering. Dost thou know who made thee?

Your music the gauze of summer draped, festooned across this eternal valley.

Silver jubilee? Impromptu street party? Nah, mate. That was then. Now lifelong enemies. 

Edison. Faraday. Tell me when it's time to jettison.

Right. Are you at last the axe for the frozen sea within? 

Will you let us in? Kettering. The unbearable lightness of Kettering.

The unpaved road to whose damn heart, my loves?

Yes, we pause on the stinking asphalt of a busy road, Abington Street, that dumb weekend, dripping blood from our off-kilter mouths, our sliced-up knuckles and forearms torrenting, a-stagger in some pointless random place reeking of stale beer and layers of old oil, broken glass embedded in our wounds and spitting out the bloody fragments of our teeth, now serrated like steak knives by steel-toed boots, our bells truly rung, ding-dong, ding-dong, while anxious drivers honk their horns and the restless weekend lopes along, regardless of, indifferent toward, our savage choreography, our unsolicited valium nightfall… but have you once spared a single thought for Kafka or Kundera, let alone fucking Kettering? 

It sounds like some cold North Atlantic breakfast, made with rice and fish, eaten by men in thick woollen sweaters listening to wheezing organs and melancholy strings while robustly stabbing the hope out of an assortment of sea life. I'm outside the hut and utterly lost. Antichrist, domesticate, concussed, you appalling fuck, come love me. I have barely anything left to give. 

What is left?

The song of a bird that has come to love its cage.

O England.

From Minds Profound

"Innocent of what?" © Unforgiven (1992)Previous articles on Indies Unlimited have established that writing rules are far from absolute, that they are best interpreted more as guides than anything binding. But far more effective than a plainly stated rule is the aphorism, that memorable quote that both entertains and teaches… something. I keep a running list of quotes in general, but those pertaining to writing have pride of place, and they can alternately act as impetus or inspiration when you’re flagging, as an alarm bell when you’re off track, as a way to stay humble when you become overinflated, or simply as a way to laugh at yourself when you happen to forget how absurd you are. I present to you my Top Twenty Awesome Writing Quotes, mostly written by other writers, but remember: whatever germ of a lesson they contain, it’s not a rule, okay?

20. “I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid the best.  He said, ‘Ransom notes.’” Get Shorty (1995) – Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman)

Money? I vaguely remember that stuff. It’s green, I think. I swear, incidentally, that Gene Hackman gets some of the most gleefully brilliant lines in Hollywood. As Sheriff Daggett in Unforgiven, after being told he’d just beat the daylights out of an innocent man, he got to say this: “Innocent? Innocent of what?” To which there is quite simply no conceivable answer.

19. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach

He wrote about a seagull. He said this. Succinct is this guy’s middle name. Or wait, isn’t it “Livingston”? No. No, that was the seagull.

18. “It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.” – Sinclair Lewis

It’s not a job, it’s a calling. Like the urge to use the bathroom. If you feel that, Lewis is talking about you. The writing thing, not the bathroom thing.

17. “If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.” – Louis L’Amour

What might have been a fairly ordinary, common sense platitude is rescued—like when the guy with the poncho and the sandblown crowsfeet rides into town—by a startlingly apt metaphor.

16. “I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.” – Anton Chekhov

Um, only take the bad reviews to heart? No, that’s not what Chekhov’s saying here at all. I’m not really sure what he’s saying, but it made me laugh anyway. Odd. I don’t remember him being this funny in Star Trek.

15. “You must write your first draft with your heart.  You rewrite with your head.  The first key to writing is to write, not to think!” Finding Forrester (2000) – William Forrester (Sean Connery)

You won’t go too far wrong if you remember this, while simultaneously forgetting Sean Connery ever starred in this clunky embarrassment of a movie.

14. “I’m all in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

Okay, it’s dated, but it’s too good to exclude on that basis. If you must, substitute “laptops” for the last word.

13. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov

He means it, too. You can just tell.

12. “There’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.” – Margaret Atwood

Well, that told us. Wait, I didn’t know that about the pension plan…

10. “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.” – Truman Capote

Included here because I agree one hundred per cent. You don’t have to, but it’s my list.

9. “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.” – Kingsley Amis

Put more strongly than I’d put it, but then again, Amis was by all accounts a class one melonfarmer. I’ve always said, however, that you sure can’t worry about offending people when you write. Unless you’re aiming for anodyne, that is.

8. “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back in.” – Oscar Wilde

The sad part is, I get this. I know this. And I’ll bet you do too. I’ll also bet Wilde was tempted to remove that damn comma again by nightfall.

7. “What creates a writer is huge, psychological dysfunction.” – Kathy Lette

Well, we’ve hinted at it here, before. Kathy Lette, however, just comes right out and says it. And it’s kind of a horrible relief. Like when Asimov’s doctor up there delivers the bad news.

6. “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” – Gene Fowler

Easy, you say? Anyone else detect the sarcasm here?

5. “Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.” – Robert Frost

Worth remembering. An antidote to “write what you know”. There’s a reason we have an imagination. But it takes a poet to say it so memorably and so well.

4. “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett

And you thought Richard Bach was succinct? Also, why isn’t the word “succinct” only one syllable?

3. “The King died and then the Queen died. That is a story. The King died and then the Queen died of grief. That is a plot.” – E M Forster

Brilliant. Since I like this kind of thing so much, I will throw in a bonus 3.b.: “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.” – John le Carré

2. “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.” – Cicero, circa 43 BC

All I know from this is that things don’t change all that much and that Cicero would probably have a catastrophic mental breakdown if he lived today.

1. “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor

Ha ha. That one’s a stand alone. Flannery sure doesn’t need me to expand on it. Not that any of them do, really. But I had to write a blog post, so I have. Enjoy.

Or, as Dorothy Parker (who clearly didn’t have Text Edit handy) once said: “I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.”

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on May 18, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.