micro essays

upon the occasion of moving

2009-11-30T16:05:03Z

Some animal crying in the dark.
Those tiny Christmas lights, three stories high.
One last hurrah, one last drink to the moon, which is rising.
You don’t know there’s even a moon, because you’re moving under a heavy bridge.
Life packed away, labeled and awaiting careful delivery to its new fate.
I’m not sure what ride I’ve gotten onto, but I like it when I’m on it.
There are strange dark forests to drive by at night, over that bridge, beside a dark forest, miles away.
Where the moon lolls over, hiding something in its pockets or its cheeks.
I can only assume (and thus do) what is in me.
What else can I not take for granted?
This soft evening, my animal’s face turning gray, a few stars that won’t take no for an answer.
What would not be here, but for you, a few miles away, wandering around an altered life, touching everything without her, that other life, one last time?

How It Happens

2009-05-17T00:30:58Z

Sometimes a new world appears, dimly at first in the telescope you are using to watch your life. It is some kind of burned up star, it is a spaceship or a blimp, it is a dream or a ghost, it is anything but your life. You put the telescope down, go back to whatever it is you were doing. Your life does not change, but this thing is there, whether you look at it – fiery and new and old and scary and awful and awesome – or not.

The next time you look, you think it seems closer. You can make out people, little meaningless ants scurrying about…Is that one waving? Another, that one is running, for sure, but from what? What are they doing, these people in your life? It is too hard to tell, there is so much to do, so much you just don’t have an answer for, and you get tired. So you take a nap.

Then one day, you don’t need the telescope. Before you know what is happening, this life – your life – has invaded your window at night, a small burning planet or maybe a star, something that is so bright and so…undeniable, that you have no choice but to put down the book you were pretending to be interested in, turn off the bedside lamp, and just lie there, bathing in the glow of what you know is yours, what you know is finally here, finally yourself, finally your life.

Have you packed? Are you ready? It seems to be waiting for you, so many nights in a row it has appeared, insistent, lonely but beautiful, at your window. You do know it’s right, this lit-from-within thing from the future that’s come in search of you, and so you get up, put on your most comfortable jeans, throw a book in a bag, blow out the candles, tell him you love him, and – believing in something you have never seen before, not really, not up close, not for real, really – you go anyway.

Bits & Pieces

2009-04-07T16:30:25Z

Writing small things is about to get big, says A.O. Scott. Obsessed of late with tiny things, including little essays, I like what he’s saying here. And I love Barthelme and O’Connor. But I have a bone to pick: Referring to blogs and Tweets, Scott says that “the new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity” and adds that “the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith.” Why narrative? I can understand pith and its connection to brevity. But narrative?

The new media of Web 2.0 likes bits and pieces. The bits don’t even have to be connected to other pieces. What else is Twitter but a stream of tiny consciousness? Stories, narratives don’t seem to be valued in this realm. Meaning might be, but Scott surely knows better than to collapse those two things?

I am heartened by our distance from narrative. I think narrative constricts things, forces them into a linear rank and file that more often than not reinforces the status quo and basically allows us to be lazy readers and thinkers. I’m working on something that challenges this. But it’s too long to post here.