Fortuituous Return - An Overture

So this is the opening to OCCAM'S RAZOR, a short story collective I'm developing with my friend Xiaochang. It's rare that I share my writing publicly over the internet, so savor the occassion....

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Fortuitous Return

An Overture

You’re not supposed to believe it could happen like this.

Time has crept behind you like a pantomime. There’s no use speaking back. There’s an enormity in your walk these days that leaves a loitered specter on every street you walked before. Your hands and feet are on loan, shaking frantic with a lack of recognition. Gone are the days when you used them as your vehicle for expression, an exit from the caged, hissing enmity of your bones. Gone are the days where you lay on the beach with your arms cast up, reaching out into that bedlam of distant stars and jets, receiving a strange transmission that coils through the maze of your fingerprints and shoots straight into your heart, whipping you into a monster, chiseling you into a man.

You hear them coming from more than five blocks away. One ambulance, then another. You back up into a dilapidated brick wall you didn’t see coming, your shoulders crashing in perfect alignment with a pair of electric pink graffiti wings. You find yourself face-to-face with the traffic of this three-point intersection on the Chicago Northside. The “six corners”, as it’s referred to in this particular neighborhood.

Like so many of the intersections in this city, there’s a fatalistic perplexity to them; an intergalactic convergence of past, present, future. A danger from below. They are places that bring the entire world down to a single tether. Places with a perennial, almost menacing déjà vu. Places where people have been known to have strokes from simply waiting at the corner. Places where people plan to meet, then never find one another. Places where people clear out during storms, for fear of an increased probability of getting struck by lightning. Places where people are afraid of looking up; where tourists forget their maps; where senses merge and explode—where accidents wait.

The traffic shifts out onto the sidewalk. They come now in spectacular blur. (One ambulance, then another.) You study the unfazed pedestrian jowls, the willfully deaf marching up the train platforms in the same narcoleptic cadences, the eight foot transvestite in the bright red fright wig spitting into her paper bag, tossing it over her shoulder and crossing the street with a lax neglect. She misses the ambulance by a mere gasp of a second, then proceeds to strut into the revolving doors of the Wells Fargo, her ass jouncing like a hopped up mare, before and after everyone. She is spitting into the face of death, you decide. She has become supernatural without knowing. She is dancing with dinosaurs, reborn to herself. She can see the future in a way that you can’t.

You close your eyes and slam your wrists against the wall, hanging there like a decrepit crucifix ornament. You stretch your arms out to the of your graffiti wings, pleading them to take you up and dissolve you into a gas. But when you open your eyes again, you are back; back into barbaric concert of the streets, where the pneumatic bodies have filled them up, where they spin and shake around like sand, swayed by the sounds of domestic belligerence and nervous jazz. Back into the hypocrisy of the living, who forgot they weren’t dreaming, too stranded in the tremors of solitude to walk in accord. You swing your hands back into your pockets and watch the sirens shrink into the avenue and get swallowed up by the evening before you can insist that it take you along with it. You wonder where it must be going and force a scenario under pressure.



They’re headed west down Fullerton. Toward Logan Square. The building is above a liquor store and ear, nose and throat clinic. Typical story, really. A Puerto Rican landlady eaten alive by her canaries. The granddaughter has climbed halfway up a fire escape and is spitting out the gnawed off ear of her stuffed polar bear. She screams holy murder as the paramedics take her by the arms and pull her into a police van. (This is how her father was taken from her back in December.) They’ll assure her that she’s not in any trouble and unsuccessfully attempt to reach her Aunt Lucia, who is supposed to be working at the CTA booth at LeSalle and Van Buren, but fell asleep in the furniture department at Sears during her lunch break. Turkey and red onion. She should have known better. She will curse herself for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” as so many others do. She will resolve to stop attending Sunday mass, tell her priest that: “Destiny is a starvation for coincidence.” She is probably right. No one is ever where they should be. Everything is just barely being held together.




Do these stories seal a space between you and the anonymous world? Do they recover a link to the unexceptional? Do they unbolt the corkscrewed lampoons crammed into each shrill, narcoleptic corner of this city? Do they confirm all those feverishly real, giddily debilitating blue strokes of recognition you experience upon meeting a face (or even the suggestion of a face) with a sort of inexplicable familiarity about it? The sort with an unrequited history that you’re incapable of tracing back, but are almost certain – no – unquestionably certain exists?

Or is really much simpler than all of that?

Because it’s like this: it is 1983 and you are thirty-three years old. You’ve shaved your head into a Mohawk like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. You are thirty-three years old, terrified you may never really finish “coming of age.” Thirty three years old, and standing before a crosswalk, waiting for someone to take your hand. Thirty three years old, and still no closer to knowing anything at all.

*


No, you’re not supposed to believe it could happen like this.

The nostalgic chime from an ice cream van is drawing upon you. Sounds of Latin children follow them as they breaking hands with their mothers, running out into the street like jackals. You’ve heard this melody before, though you can’t seem to locate when and where. Someone is singing along now. A hostage voice. A child’s voice. Near, then from faraway. Soft and sweet and sinister.


Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John,
Went to bed,
With his trousers on,
One shoe off,
And one shoe on!
Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John.


The crowds irrigate. The voice crescendoes. The streetlights strobe. The billboards go blank. You look around you to see if you’re alone. You are not. There is a girl, a girl of seventeen in her underwear, standing just a kitty-corner away. Her back is turned away from you. Her arms are clasped upon her shoulders. Her arms are crossed upon her chest. Her gallant red hair is floating up like a cobweb. She is turning around now with her head down at the gutter. You can’t make her out in these shaking lights. She looks up at you, slow and afraid. The light above her thunders out and freezes there in a cryogenic blue. Her arms slide away from her bare breasts like an emaciated Venus. It’s her, you’re thinking. Your schoolboy infatuation. Your beacon saint of past, present and future. A girl whom you left by the riverbank sixteen years ago.

Yes, it’s her. It’s B.

She points out at the remaining four corners. It’s them, you say aloud. The boys in flapping collars. The boys in turquoise ties. The boys of Belvedere Academy. The boys whom shared that same beach, years ago, swapping your dreams with their arms cast up. Edward. Geoffery. Ralph. The Doom Troopers. The only faces you will ever know.

Yes, it’s them. And they want you back.

They leave their corners to congregate at the one left empty. B is standing there watching you, seeing the future in a way that the four of you can’t. Four, you think. The number of wings beneath a tabletop of chair. Four. The number of wings on a dragonfly. Four. The number of strings on a viola. Four. The number of seconds it will take to run across this junction to meet them in embrace, then start your entire life over again.

You dip one foot into the asphalt. The song recapitulates:


Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John,
Went to bed
With his trousers on,
One shoe off,
And one shoe on!
Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son—

BOOM! The traffic whineys to a halt. The force comes crashing into your side like the foot of a giant. The impact bolts you into the air, turning you upside-down into a curling flail of limbs. The man in the ice cream truck springs out as you collapse onto his windshield. The van whittles back-and-forth before falling to its side. Your bones smash onto the asphalt then out it comes, a spattering rainbow of ice cream bars shooting from the rear-view window, landing around you in a lathering, sticky carnage. Your spine is ticking. Your canines quake. And the children have broken hands with their mothers, running out into the street like jackals. They’re seizing up the carnage by the fistful, cramming their mouths with your evidence. They’re biting at the cops who have stocked up at the curb to pull them back to the sidewalk. He’s still alive, says one cop to the other. They can hear them coming from more than five blocks away. One ambulance, then another.

The song is playing still.

Bloody Motherfucking Asshole

Poetry is no place for a heart that's a whore

And I'm young & I'm strong

But I feel old & tired

Overfired



And I've been poked & stoked

It's all smoke, there's no more fire

Only desire

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are



You say my time here has been some sort of joke

That I've been messing around

Some sort of incubating period

For when I really come around

I'm cracking up

And you have no idea



No idea how it feels to be on your own

In your own home

with the fucking phone

And the mother of gloom

In your bedroom

Standing over your head

With her hand in your head

With her hand in your head



I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

When all I wanted was to be good

To do everything in truth

To do everything in truth



Oh I wish I wish I wish I was born a man

So I could learn how to stand up for myself

Like those guys with guitars

I've been watching in bars

Who've been stamping their feet to a different beat

To a different beat

To a different beat



I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

When all I wanted was to be good

To do everything in truth

To do everything in truth



You bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody...



I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are

Reverse Chronologies

Backs to the Future
Source: University of California, San Diego
http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html

Tell an old Aymara speaker to "face the past!" and you just might get a blank stare in return because he or she already does.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the study is coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser, by Rafael Nunez, associate professor of cognitive science and director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.



"Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model," said Nunez.

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the "language of Adam." More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called "Andean logic" which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no to computer applications.

Yet, Nunez said, no one had previously detailed the Aymara's "radically different metaphoric mapping of time" a super-fundamental concept, which, unlike the idea of "democracy," say, does not rely on formal schooling and isn't an obvious product of culture.

Nunez had his first inkling of differences between "thinking in" Aymara and Spanish, when he went hitchhiking in the Andes as undergraduate in the early 1980s. More than a decade later, he returned to gather data.

For the study, Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30 ethnic Aymara adults from Northern Chile. The volunteer subjects ranged from a monolingual speaker of Aymara to monolingual speakers of Spanish, with a majority (like the population at large) being bilinguals whose skills covered a range of proficiencies and included the Spanish/Aymara creole called Castellano Andino.

The videotaped interviews were designed to include natural discussions of past and future events. These discussions, it was hoped, would elicit both the linguistic expressions for "past" and "future" and the subconscious gesturing that accompanies much of human speech and often acts out the metaphors being used.

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits "nayra," the basic word for "eye," "front" or "sight," to mean "past" and recruits "qhipa," the basic word for "back" or "behind," to mean "future." So, for example, the expression "nayra mara" which translates in meaning to "last year" can be literally glossed as "front year."

But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the whole story.

Take an "exotic" language like English: You can use the word "ahead" to signify an earlier point in time, saying "We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m." to mean "It's now 12:40 p.m." Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the past in front.

There are also in English ambiguous expressions like "Wednesday's meeting was moved forward two days." Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will pick the former and the other half the latter. And that depends, it turns out, on whether they're picturing themselves as being in motion relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by "We're coming to the end of the year" vs. "The end of the year is approaching."

Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future by thumbing or waving over their shoulders and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones only exactly in reverse.

"These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon," Nunez said. "That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn't have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

"But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all here we have a basic concept that is utterly different," he said.

Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.

A "simple" unqualified statement like "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is not possible in Aymara the sentence would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay.

In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen and known/unknown to such an extent as to weave "evidential" requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back.

Though that may be an initial explanation and in line with the observation, the researchers write, that "often elderly Aymara speakers simply refused to talk about the future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be said about it" it is not sufficient, because other cultures also make use of similar evidential systems and yet still have a future ahead.

The consequences, on the other hand, may have been profound. This cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed, Nunez said, to the conquistadors' disdain of the Aymara as shiftless uninterested in progress or going "forward."

Now, while the future of the Aymara language itself is not in jeopardy it numbers some two to three million contemporary speakers its particular way of thinking about time seems, at least in Northern Chile, to be on the way out.

The study's younger subjects, Aymara fluent in Spanish, tended to gesture in the common fashion. It appears they have reoriented their thinking. Now along with the rest of the globe, their backs are to the past, and they are facing the future.

The Please Catalogue, July 2006

BOOKS The Waves by Virginia Woolf / The Diviners by Rick Moody / Gaudi: The Man and His Work by Joan Bergós and Marc Llimargas








MUSIC Gabriel Yared - Self-Titled / Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope / Various Artists - The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered







ENTERTAINMENT Cache / Dave Chapelle's Block Party / Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List

Color & Light

BOYS by Rick Moody

BOYS ENTER THE HOUSE, boys enter the house. Boys, and with them the ideas of boys (ideas leaden, reductive, inflexible), enter the house. Boys, two of them, wound into hospital packaging, boys with infant-pattern baldness, slung in the arms of parents, boys dreaming of breasts, enter the house. Twin boys, kettles on the boil, boys in hideous vinyl knapsacks that young couples from Edison, NJ., wear on their shirt fronts, knapsacks coated with baby saliva and staphylococcus and milk vomit, enter the house. Two boys, one striking the other with a rubberized hot dog, enter the house. Two boys, one of them striking the other with a willow switch about the head and shoulders, the other crying, enter the house. Boys enter the house speaking nonsense. Boys enter the house calling for mother. On a Sunday, in May, a day one might nearly describe as perfect, an ice cream truck comes slowly down the lane, chimes inducing salivation, and children run after it, not long after which boys dig a hole in the back yard and bury their younger sister’s dolls two feet down, so that she will never find these dolls and these dolls will rot in hell, after which boys enter the house. Boys, trailing after their father like he is the Second Goddamned Coming of Christ Goddamned Almighty, enter the house, repair to the basement to watch baseball. Boys enter the house, site of devastation, and repair immediately to the kitchen, where they mix lighter fluid, vanilla pudding, drainopening lye, balsamic vinegar, blue food coloring, calamine lotion, cottage cheese, ants, a plastic lizard one of them received in his Christmas stocking, tacks, leftover mashed potatoes, Spam, frozen lima beans, and chocolate syrup in a medium-sized saucepan and heat over a low flame until thick, afterward transferring the contents of this saucepan into a Pyrex lasagna dish, baking the Pyrex lasagna dish in the oven for nineteen minutes before attempting to persuade their sister that she should eat the mixture; later they smash three family heirlooms (the last, a glass egg, intentionally) in a two-and-a-half-hour stretch, whereupon they are sent to their bedroom until freed, in each case thirteen minutes after. Boys enter the house, starchy in pressed shirts and flannel pants that itch so bad, fresh from Sunday school instruction, blond and brown locks (respectively) plastered down but even so with a number of cowlicks protruding at odd angles, disconsolate and humbled, uncertain if boyish things — such as shooting at the neighbor’s dog with a pump-action BB gun and gagging the fat boy up the street with a bandanna and showing their shriveled boy-penises to their younger sister — are exempted from the commandment to Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. Boys enter the house in baseball gear (only one of the boys can hit): in their spikes, in mismatched tube socks that smell like Stilton cheese. Boys enter the house in soccer gear. Boys enter the house carrying skates. Boys enter the house with lacrosse sticks, and soon after, tossing a lacrosse ball lightly in the living room, they destroy a lamp. One boy enters the house sporting basketball clothes, the other wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. One boy enters the house bleeding profusely and is taken out to get stitches, the other watches. Boys enter the house at the end of term carrying report cards, sneak around the house like spies of foreign nationality, looking for a place to hide the report cards for the time being (under a toaster? in a medicine cabinet?). One boy with a black eye enters the house, one boy without. Boys with acne enter the house and squeeze and prod large skin blemishes in front of their sister. Boys with acne-treatment products hidden about their persons enter the house. Boys, standing just up the street, sneak cigarettes behind a willow in the Elys’ yard, wave smoke away from their natural fibers, hack terribly, experience nausea, then enter the house. Boys call each other Retard, Homo, Geek, and, later, Neckless Thug, Theater Fag, and enter the house exchanging further epithets. Boys enter house with nose-hair clippers, chase sister around house threatening to depilate her eyebrows. She cries. Boys attempt to induce girls to whom they would not have spoken only six or eight months prior to enter the house with them. Boys enter the house with girls efflorescent and homely and attempt to induce girls to sneak into their bedroom, as they still share a single bedroom; girls refuse. Boys enter the house, go to separate bedrooms. Boys, with their father (an arm around each of them), enter the house, but of the monologue preceding and succeeding this entrance, not a syllable is preserved. Boys enter the house having masturbated in a variety of locales. Boys enter the house having masturbated in trainstation bathrooms, in forests, in beach houses, in football bleachers at night under the stars, in cars (under a blanket), in the shower, backstage, on a plane, the boys masturbate constantly, identically, three times a day in some cases, desire like a madness upon them, at the mere sound of certain words, words that sound like other words, interrogative reminding them of intercourse, beast reminding them of breast, sects reminding them of sex, and so forth, the boys are not very smart yet, and as they enter the house they feel, as always, immense shame at the scale of this self-abusive cogitation, seeing a classmate, seeing a billboard, seeing a fire hydrant, seeing things that should not induce thoughts of masturbation (their sister, e.g.) and then thinking of masturbation anyway. Boys enter the house, go to their rooms, remove sexually explicit magazines from hidden stashes, put on loud music, feel despair. Boys enter the house worried; they argue. The boys are ugly, they are failures, they will never be loved, they enter the house. Boys enter the house and kiss their mother, who feels differently now they have outgrown her. Boys enter the house, kiss their mother, she explains the seriousness of their sister’s difficulty, her diagnosis. Boys enter the house, having attempted to locate the spot in their yard where the dolls were buried, eight or nine years prior, without success; they go to their sister’s room, sit by her bed. Boys enter the house and tell their completely bald sister jokes about baldness. Boys hold either hand of their sister, laying aside differences, having trudged grimly into the house. Boys skip school, enter house, hold vigil. Boys enter the house after their parents have both gone off to work, sit with their sister and with their sister’s nurse. Boys enter the house carrying cases of beer. Boys enter the house, very worried now, didn’t know more worry was possible. Boys enter the house carrying controlled substances, neither having told the other that he is carrying a controlled substance, though an intoxicated posture seems appropriate under the circumstances. Boys enter the house weeping and hear weeping around them. Boys enter the house embarrassed, silent, anguished, keening, afflicted, angry, woeful, grief-stricken. Boys enter the house on vacation, each clasps the hand of the other with genuine warmth, the one wearing dark colors and having shaved a portion of his head, the other having grown his hair out longish and wearing, uncharacteristically, a de-dyed shirt. Boys enter the house on vacation and argue bitterly about politics (other subjects are no longer discussed), one boy supporting the Maoist insurgency in a certain Southeast Asian country, one believing that to change the system you need to work inside it; one boy threatens to beat the living shit out of the other, refuses creme brulee, though it is created by his mother in order to keep the peace. One boy writes home and thereby enters the house only through a mail slot: he argues that the other boy is cryptofascist, believing that the market can seek its own level on questions of ethics and morals; boys enter the house on vacation and announce future professions; boys enter the house on vacation and change their minds about professions; boys enter the house on vacation, and one boy brings home a sweetheart but throws a tantrum when it is suggested that the sweetheart will have to retire on the folding bed in the basement; the other boy, having no sweetheart, is distant and withdrawn, preferring to talk late into the night about family members gone from this world. Boys enter the house several weeks apart. Boys enter the house on days of heavy rain. Boys enter the house, in different calendar years, and upon entering, the boys seem to do nothing but compose manifestos, for the benefit of parents; they follow their mother around the place, having fashioned these manifestos in celebration of brand-new independence: Mom, I like to lie in bed late into the morning watching game shows, or, I’m never going to date anyone but artists from now on, mad girls, dreamers, practicers of black magic, or, A man should eat bologna, sliced meats are important, or, An American should bowl at least once a year, but these manifestos apply only for brief spells, after which they are reversed or discarded. Boys don’t enter the house at all, except as ghostly afterimages of younger selves, fleeting images of sneakers dashing up a staircase; soggy towels on the floor of the bathroom; blue jeans coiled like asps in the basin of the washing machine; boys as an absence of boys; blissful at first, you put a thing down on a spot, put this book down, come back later, it’s still there; you buy a box of cookies, eat three, later three are missing. Nevertheless, when boys next enter the house, which they ultimately must do, it’s a relief, even if it’s only in preparation for weddings of acquaintances from boyhood, one boy has a beard, neatly trimmed, the other has rakish sideburns, one boy wears a hat, the other boy thinks hats are ridiculous, one boy wears khakis pleated at the waist, the other wears denim, but each changes into his suit (one suit fits well, one is a little tight), as though suits are the liminary marker of adulthood. Boys enter the house after the wedding and they are slapping each other on the back and yelling at anyone who will listen. It’s a party! One boy enters the house, carried by friends, having been arrested (after the wedding) for driving while intoxicated, complexion ashen; the other boy tries to keep his mouth shut: the car is on its side in a ditch, the car has the top half of a tree broken over its bonnet, the car has struck another car, which has in turn struck a third, Everyone will have seen. One boy misses his brother horribly, misses the past, misses a time worth being nostalgic over, a time that never existed, back when they set their sister’s playhouse on fire; the other boy avoids all mention of that time; each of them is once the boy who enters the house alone, missing the other, each is devoted and each callous, and each plays his part on the telephone, over the course of months. Boys enter the house with fishing gear, according to prearranged date and time, arguing about whether to use lures or live bait, in order to meet their father for the fishing adventure, after which boys enter the house again, almost immediately, with live bait, having settled the question; boys boast of having caught fish in the past, though no fish has ever been caught: Remember when the blues were biting? Boys enter the house carrying their father, slumped. Happens so fast. Boys rush into the house leading EMTs to the couch in the living room where the body lies, boys enter the house, boys enter the house, boys enter the house. Boys hold open the threshold, awesome threshold that has welcomed them when they haven’t even been able to welcome themselves, that threshold which welcomed them when they had to be taken in, here is its tarnished knocker, here is its euphonious bell, here’s where die boys had to sand die door down because it never would hang right in the frame, here are the scuff marks from when boys were on the wrong side of the door demanding, here’s where there were once milk bottles for the milkman, here’s where the newspaper always landed, here’s the mail slot, here’s the light on the front step, illuminated, here’s where the boys are standing, as that beloved man is carried out. Boys, no longer boys, exit.

Verse 21:11 from the Gospel of St. Trystan

INSTRUCTIONS FOR WRITING SONGS THAT SAVE THE WORLD
Sit up from your bed each morning and press your left palm firmly to your ribcage. Count back from your lucky number and rise out from your spine as it grows into a fist. Take a walk around the same block twice and say "Good morning" to your neighbors. (Even if you send them turning on their sprinklers and sprinting inside terrified.) Return to your kitchen table and replace yesterday’s carnations with souvenir straws from places you've never been. Take another bite from your apple as you recite the obituaries in the paper to your goldfish. Write down five things you did yesterday that you’ll never do again. Tap your foot against the floor as if it’s the world’s one and only rhythm. Send off your memory to somewhere tropical and dust off your 400 watt crystal ball. Read the opening to Mrs. Dalloway in your spinning chair till gravity breeds a giant in you. Stand at your window to imagine the sounds of trains and hunger and disappearing oceans. Whistle "Amazing Grace" in a paraplegic’s praise of undiscovered planets. Switch to the classical FM station and summon up landscapes from the dead. Dance improbably to Mahler’s 5th and stop to watch the ceiling swell. Say: "This life is just a replay of all the things you forgot the first time." Then make a song that defies continents; that drives dormant souls out of silence; that redeems love to the disappointed; that swings open every front door to a prehistoric chorus measured by panasonic waves of souls unanimous. And when you play it for your mother over the phone, don't poison it telling her it’s "all in progress." Color over the words that crave flesh and history--and never deem the lesson done.