Early Scenes from "Immortal For Quite Some Time"

March 1950, Farmington, New Mexico

In what eventually will become our hometown, for three days running, good citizens report seeing flying saucers. Between eleven and noon each day, hundreds of the alien craft thrill builders and teachers, cooks and civil servants, farmers and trading-post operators.

I was born seven months before the aliens were reported in Farmington. John was born fourteen months after their coming.

I have never seen a flying saucer. Nor, to my knowledge, did John.

September 1954, Paonia, Colorado

            The little engine keeps leaving the tracks to frolic in meadows. Flowers snagged in his wheels betray him. Pedagogical engineers hide in a meadow and jump up with red flags when he turns their way. He gives up frolicking, stays on the tracks, and grows into a good puller-of-trains.

            I put down my Golden Book to watch flatcars stacked with fruit boxes rattle past our log house. My mother leads me across the street to a warehouse. She knocks at a side door. It slides open. She passes her warm bread and a pot of steaming pinto beans through the opening to a dark-eyed woman holding a brown-skinned baby at her breast.

1956, Montpelier, Idaho

            My friend Bernie shows me the litter of birth-wet puppies under his front porch. Their father, he says . . . my dad said their father was a dead daddy horse.

1957, Montpelier, Lincoln Elementary School

            Pots, rings, or chase. We lay out our games of marbles on the playground. I drop my winnings into a blue-and-white-striped bag Mom made from a leg of a pair of overalls. It grows fat and heavy. I knot the drawstring carefully.

            When I’m not playing marbles, I watch a girl with patent-leather shoes swing so high the chains go slack. Her shoes flash in the sun. Her black hair flies in the wind. She knows I watch her.

1958, Montpelier

            Mrs. Sharp has enrolled us in a reading contest. We write titles and authors’ names on lined paper. I speed through dozens of little paperbacks. My list grows and grows. Mrs. Sharp awards me a round steel medal engraved with my name and the number of books I have read: 129.

           

1960, Farmington, New Mexico

            If it weren’t for our fierce soccer games on Ladera del Norte’s dirt field, I would gladly skip lunch to sit in class where our teacher reads another chapter of Little Britches. He’s tough. Determined. Good with horses. Ingenious. Saves his wages.

1964, Aztec, New Mexico

            Regional competition between junior-high bands. I carry my clarinet, she hers. We suck our reeds to keep them moist. We hold hands, speak in low tones, wish there were no end to the day.

1966, Farmington, New Mexico

            Late-afternoon light diffuse in the old Mormon chapel. The sacrament meeting is already an hour gone. The man standing at the pulpit intones the word of God. Sixteen-year-old boys and girls sit thigh to thigh in the back row, pass notes, play games on paper, brush hands.

July 1967, Farmington

            DR. GENE SMITH, ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON. I have swept his parking lot, watered his shrubs, cleaned his office, transcribed his tapes, and once almost fainted while I held a basin of warm water into which he squirted fatty yellow fluid drawn from deep inside a man’s knee through an enormous needle.

            Today, I’m working in the red glow of the darkroom, developing a set of x-rays. I pull the film from the chemical bath and hang the sheets to drip dry. I turn on the fluorescent screen behind them.

Gistening reproductions of Claudia Colter’s spine.

The bones curve ever so slightly from the delicate vertebrae of her neck down to the right and then back to the left before disappearing between the bright wings of her hips.

The bright wings of her hips.

            Again I trace the scoliostic curve, ghostly against the black film, deviating so beautifully from the strictly vertical. I study the dim arcs of ribs that frame her spine, the cunningly articulated vertebrae snaking down between the ribs. I picture Claudia in the next room, naked under the examination gown.

The thoughts arouse me, confuse me. I’m feeling what I’ve learned, in church, to distinguish as the fire of the Holy Ghost. I worship these pale images.

The door opens. It’s Dr. Smith: So what have we got? 

Immortal For Quite Some Time and A Reasonable Dictionary: Avoidance as Anti-Teleology?

A thoughtful email today from college roommate and friend Chuck Hamaker that points out a pattern in a couple of things I've written:

Scott

I just read your piece on your brother John from "Immortal For Quite Some Time," the one posted in BEPRESS as "Our Feet Are the Same"[http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/7/]. I was struck by how similar what you wrote then was to what you wrote when you reported on your and Zarko's trip with Peter Handke [http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2011/01/biography-celebrity-and-identity.html] -- the full account is here under the title "A Reasonable Dictionary": [http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/5/].

In both instances, though it seemed you started with a goal of uncovering something about your subject, you consistently chose not to pursue the person of interest, through declining to meet or even to talk with anyone who actually knew them. You were an accidental tourist in an intentional location.

The places you go give a structure but the content is hardly circumstantial and hardly even tangential to the ostensible subject. I don't know if that's truly what happened or what you invented, it doesn't matter.

I am struck by the similarity of the modus operandi and the extreme "staying away" from the supposed subjects of your attention.

You mention in the Handke piece that you're worried about being a sycophant. I think it's something else, but not that.

In the piece supposedly on John, but not about him in reality, you encounter and interact with people, seem to stumble through, stay out of the way or don't really look, i.e. do not intentionally interact with anyone who really might have had some history of him. Ditto for Handke.

Anyway, for what its worth.

Cheers
Chuck

It's worth a lot Chuck, especially now that you connect the two and give me a chance to think about the similarities and the reasons. Let me add a couple of lines from the opening section of Immortal For Quite Some Time that was published last week in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought:

I look back at “Autopsy,” at my first attempt to tell this story. When I described the visit to the T&A Café I said that “we” went in, that “we” spoke with the owner. But the truth is: I remained in the car while Christy and Mom went inside. I didn’t want to talk with anyone about John. I didn’t want to talk period. Still, I wrote “we” and reported what my mother and sister told me. Caveat lector.


And here are some of the lines I think you were referring to:

11 p.m. Sitting in my motel room, I decide not to call, not to try to talk with Van. It’s a feeling that grew in me while I ate dinner. It became a conscious thought just minutes ago.

Van’s accounts would divert me from the faint traces I’m following. Life moves on. The immutably described, the absolutely defined is fixed like the butterflies I pinned to felt in a cigar box, wrong even when it’s right.

As you suggest, my reason for writing has mostly to do with a wish to understand myself in order to figure out how to live a decent and productive life. While I would like to know my brother in ways his early death made impossible, and while traveling with Peter Handke was memorable in part because of who he is, I have been using those trips, those investigations as a kind of scaffolding for my own discoveries. I'm the kind of detective who will never solve the crime because the facts of the crime remind him of other things.


Which gets me to the anti-teleology of the title of this post. In my experience, it is the people who claim to know the most who know the least. And claiming to know the most often has to do with claiming to know the pattern of history, to know how things will end. As I see it, our understanding is so full of holes that our only hope for understanding is to have a sense for how little we understand. Thus my distaste for straightforward biography.


No new thought that. It's been around since the pre-Socratics in many forms, some of my favorites in the German Romantics' penchant for fragments in lieu of systematic thought, and more recently in the work of Brian Evenson (Evenson’s recent story “Knowledge,” by the way, is a description of “precisely why I have still not written my detective novel”: “attempts to substitute another way of thinking about knowledge always end up derailing the genre").  But it guides me in a lot of ways, at least one of which you've discovered here.


The sketch is one I made of the statue "Victoire de Samothrace" in the Louvre. Looking at the support structures that keep it standing despite its frailty, I was struck by how this perfect and powerful statue is subject to entropy like everything we create. Our thoughts and our works are contingent and ephemeral. And that's to be celebrated, not papered over with lies.


thanks, my friend.

Conflicting Thoughts/Feelings

It has been an almost unbearably beautiful evening.

The light, of course, has a lot to do with it. Coming now from well north of the desolate southern regress of the dark winter solstice, the sun's late-afternoon light on Loafer Mountain (see photo) reminded me that the sun had appeared from behind the mountain this morning at 8:30, rather than the 9:00 appearance of just a week ago.

More light! Goethe's last words. And my constant hope.

A thirty-minute bike ride this afternoon up Woodland Hills' steep geography landed me just in front of a snowboarder as he failed to land a jump he and his friends had created at the top of the highest road in the town. Nice jump, I told him as I rode past in my bike shorts.

Much of the day was spent productively. I'm working on a paper for the conference of the International Kleist Association called "Andere Umstaende: Erection as Self Assertion in Heinrich von Kleist's "Die Marquise von O. . ." The day's scholarly highlight came when I found this passage in Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation," published just a few years after Kleist's story of a woman raped while unconscious who finds her way to a decent new life when she decides to stand up (the metaphor abounds) and abandon the society and family constructed according to a system that has no room for her:


 "As an extensionless point," Schopenhauer argues, the present "cuts time which extends infinitely in both directions, and stands firm and immovable" (vol. 1, 280).  He identifies this standing present (a manifestation of the essential in things, of will) with the "nunc stans of the scholastics" (vol. 1, 279). A person who wills to live in that present, desirous of an eternal recurrence of both joy and sorrow, "would stand," Schopenhauer writes, quoting Goethe's "Grenzen der Menschheit," "with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth" (vol. 1, 284).    Schopenhauer says that such a standpoint (and he repeats the word "standpoint" [Standpunkt] four times), a living in the nunc stans, would arise if one were "clearly and distinctly oneself" (vol. 1, 285, 1818/19), that is, if one completely affirmed what he calls the "will-to-live."


Light is good. Scholarly productivity is good. Lyn's potato and leek soup is good for dinner. And then, reading Mathias Enard's novel Zone while listening to my son Tom's new recordings with his Big Bang Big Band (tight, swung, thoughtful, and surprising -- like the Strayhorn and Ellington models), I'm struck by the creative process as essentially human, as necessary for humanity, as secular salvation in the face of a chaotic and often dangerous world.


Enard's protagonist, a conflicted product and producer of espionage and torture and war, is on a train from Paris to Rome. He spends the night passage thinking about his brutal, alcoholic life, about the bitter knowledge he carries in his briefcase, about family and lovers and comrades in war. He's no sweetheart, for sure. He reminds me, tonight, of aspects of myself, of traits and habits I wish weren't there. And -- surprisingly -- he represents aspects to which I aspire. What attracts me to this man, I think, is his honesty, his admitted frailty, the depth of his self awareness. And the beautiful bleakness:


“. . . nothing returns from what has been destroyed, nothing is reborn, neither dead men, nor burned libraries, nor submerged lighthouses, nor extinct species, despite the museums commemorations statues books speeches good will, of things that have gone only a vague memory remains. . . .”


He quotes Ezra Pound, what feels like holy scripture from a poet who was no saint:


To confess wrong without losing rightness: Charity
   have I had sometimes, I cannot make it flow thru.
A little light, like a rushlight
To lead back to splendour.


Light. Even a little light. Exercise. Philosophy. Soup. Jazz. Introspection. Cynicism. The honesty to confess wrong without losing rightness.


Unbearably beautiful.

NOX / Immortal For Quite Some Time

I've just finishing reading/seeing Anne Carson's boxbook NOX.

"When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get," she notes on the back cover.

Nox. Night.

A poem by Catullus forms the backbone of the book -- Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus / advento has miseras, frater . . . -- each Latin word awarded, over the course of the book, a Latin/English dictionary entry so the reader can slowly translate the poem the way Carson translates the photos and remembered events and salvaged sentences of and from her brother. Almost every dictionary entry, a patient reader will discover, contains some reference to night:  multa -- multa nox: late in the night, perhaps too late; per -- per noctem in nihilo vehi: to vanish by night into nothing; etc. Do all words come back to nox? Is night the ground of our being? In an elegy, yes.

". . . what a distant mood of parents / handed down as the sad gift for burials -- / accept! soaked with tears of a brother / and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell."

New Directions has reproduced the handmade book beautifully, each page complete with almost real staples and indentations and all the things brought together or made by Anne Carson.

On the two pages pictured here she combines the entry for "belonging to a brother" and slices of her translation of the heartwrenching Catullus poem.

I too have been working on an epitaph for my brother John, an elegy worthy of his life. And I too am reduced to scraps, to things. Reduced? Rather confronted by the fact that that's all we ever have, that pretending to have the whole story is a lie. I'm grateful to have some of John's things, as I noted soon after his death:

1 August 1991, Orem

I still have John’s things, but what sense does it make to keep them? I make a list under the rubric "Personal Effects" that feels like a pre-cut dress for a paper doll until I look up the origin of "effect": ex + facere, to make. The things John accomplished. The things he made. His things, however ephemeral, however cheap, however predictable. 


John's Personal Effects

A large black plastic clock with red hands. The face displays a stylized eagle and the words Miller Genuine Draft Light, Cold Filtered. The second hand lurches in quartz-driven, one-second segments around a brass post.

Greasy running shoes, the soles cracked through.

A pair of stiff, resoled, black-leather lace-up shoes.

One small khaki-colored can: “Emergency Drinking Water.”

A black-painted cardboard African mask.

A life-sized bas-relief plaster bust of a Roman soldier. He wears a gold-plumed helmet and a black breastplate decorated with a lion’s head.

Ash trays: 1) stamped metal, round; 2) white-and-black porcelain shaped like the collar of a formal dress shirt with black tie; 3) heavy glass square with a line drawing of a grotesquely earnest smoker and the text: Smoking is Very Glamorous, Idaho Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health.

Two unwashed pots.

A frying pan.

Two forks.

Three spoons.

Three wooden-handled cooking knives.

A stainless-steel butter knife with a red-brown substance burnt onto both sides of the blade.

A metal box stuffed with yellowed recipe cards.

Kitchen Consultations, Favorite Recipes of the University of California Doctors’ Wives Association.

One set of car keys.

A heavy ten-speed bicycle, both tires flat.

An aluminum bicycle pump.

A dirty green backpack holding several bicycle parts.

A black-and-white TV, encased in white plastic, and a separate rabbit-ears antenna.

A small GE radio, missing its battery cover.

A Dylan Thomas poem, typed out and taped to a cupboard: Do not go gentle into that good night.

A framed quotation from Ayn Rand: If I had one desire in this world, it would be to desire something.

One condom, still sealed in plastic; PRIME, Lubricated with SK-70.

Handwritten IOU’s for the Cactus Bar. $5, $10, and $20 denominations.

1990 Pocket Pal – handwritten addresses and telephone numbers.

Newspaper and magazine clippings in an imitation leather briefcase.

A manila envelope containing legal papers.

PUPPIES, a 1990 Calendar marked with several hand-written notes.

3 ballpoint pens and a blue plastic pencil sharpener.

A black nylon wallet. Inside, a photo of a woman in her sixties, a water-damaged photo of a red-faced infant, a Social Security card (585-46-4127), a Boise Public Library Card, and $203 in bills.

$7.12 in coins.

             A blue sport bag.

Masking tape. Written on the fat roll with a black marker: J. Abbott 1132 S. 4th #3.

Liquid Ivory soap.

A small bottle of Wella Balsam Conditioning Shampoo for Dry Hair.

Suave Shampoo Plus Conditioner for Normal to Dry Hair.

A small bottle of Listerine Antiseptic.

2 bars of Lux, The Pure Beauty Soap.

A large-toothed red plastic comb with handle and a matching red-handled brush with black nylon bristles.

A bottle of aspirin.

MAX FOR MEN hair drier.

A yellow toothbrush.

Curity, wet-pruf adhesive tape.

Four TELFA sterile pads and one band-aid.

Plastic sunglasses.

A one-edged razor blade.

A 100-tablet bottle of Advanced Formula Centrum, High Potency Multivitamin-Multimineral Formula. From A to Zinc. Expiration Date Oct. 93. There are 115 tablets.

26 grey, green, red, or white matchbooks advertising The Interlude Bar & Grill in Boise. A stylized young woman kneels to consider her putt. Her left hand holds her putter, her right hand a martini.

A green matchbook advertises Free Cash Grants: Call 1-900-USA-RICH. Valuable Money Making Information and the ABC’s of Receiving FREE Money from the Government. Now the one dollar per minute two dollar first minute charge is the first step to RICHES.

Nine Kent III Ultra Light Cigarettes.

A burlap-covered corkboard. Glued to the top of the burlap is a black paper cross. A hand points upward toward the cross. A pair of lightning bolts. At the bottom bold letters spell ONE WAY. Four magazine photos have been thumbtacked over the Christian display. Two of them feature similarly posed electric-haired women, one white, one black, both coyly shirtless. The other two photos show the shaved, blindfolded heads of two black women against a chain-link fence.

Two posters from the Monterey Jazz Festival, 1982 and 1983: trumpets standing on chairs.

A poster of a fantasy landscape: castle and dragon and hero and princess.

A 10” x 14” pencil drawing of a hooked trout.

A framed magazine photo of camels dark against fire-lit clouds.

A magazine photo of an eagle perched in front of a brilliant sunset.

A framed painting of a demure little girl with long red hair.

A spool of navy-blue thread.

A needle with a loop of purple thread.

An old pair of Levis; five patches sewn with meticulous stitches.

A worn satin comforter, rust-colored on one side, tan on the other.

A blue quilt tied with red yarn. Splotches of white paint, cigarette burns, and grease spots.

Three pair of black-and-white-checked restaurant uniform pants.

Two heavily starched white chef’s hats.

Two collarless chef’s jackets. Starched, with tightly woven cloth buttons.

Eleven pastel-colored knit shirts advertising the 25th Interlude Open. A young woman kneels with putter and martini.

A pair of grey sweat pants and a grey sweat shirt.

T-shirt: FALLIN’ ANGELLS SPORTING CLUB, Angell’s Bar & Grill, Boise, Idaho.

T & A CAFÉ T-shirt – Where the “ELITE” meet to “EAT.”

A wheeled brown vinyl bag with strap handles.

Three sweaters, colors faded, one unraveling at the left cuff.

A worn leather-and-canvas coat.

Two limp bed sheets.

Cassette Tapes: The Best of Judas Priest; Guns and Roses – Appetite for Destruction; Anthrax – State of Euphoria; Foghat Live.

A plastic ruler with geometric formulas and the admonition: Stay in School, Upon Graduation . . . Join the Aerospace Team, U.S. Air Force.

Twenty-six paperback novels, most of them missing the front cover. Eric v. Lustbader dominates the pile, but there are others as well:

Neon Mirage, by Max Allan Collins: Mob Justice . . . Another shotgun blast ate into the side of Ragen’s once-proud Lincoln.

Vision of the Hunter, by John Tempest: In his hands, his people’s future. In her eyes, the promise of a love stronger than time.

Burt Hirshfeld's Moment of Power: The savage new shocker. . . .

Superconscious Meditation, by Panda Arya, Ph.D.

Self Hypnosis: The Creative Use of Your Mind for Successful Living, by Charles Tebbetts.

Louis L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man.

The Magnificent Century, by Thomas B. Costain.

Home as Found, by J. Fenimore Cooper.

Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness: Banned in the U.S. . . . Forward by Havelock Ellis.

Hoyle's Rules of Games, Second Revised Edition.

Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

Readers Digest: Secrets of Better Cooking.

Basic Documents Supplement to International Law: Cases and Materials.

ETCETERA: The Unpublished Poems of E.E. Cummings.

The dust jacket of a Modern Library edition: The Philosophy of Kant. The book itself is missing.

            Five spiral notebooks: two of them green-and-tan; one blue-and-tan; one yellow; one blue. Notes and drawings in John’s hand throughout.

Peace/War: Photo and Text by Zarko Radakovic

. . . And then something in this picture moved forcefully: The entry door, wrenched out of its frame, squealed. The weeds on the roof swayed gently. Footsteps (mine?) became audible. From above another tile slid down. From the only part of the ruin still standing the electrical wires announced themselves with a distant humming. But no one moved in the room that stood wide open to the sky, to the sated ground. No rat flitted across this trash heap. No person leapt over the broken moulding, over the shattered board, over the frayed wire, over the collapsed raingutter, not even over the fence (mentioned earlier) or the fallen chimney. Who destroyed this house? -- the severe question from afar. The answer, which could itself be a question, didn't come, lost itself not in the murmur of the day under the weight of the prehistoric being here, in the sudden forceful entry of summer and in the thundering extinguishing of memory. And I saw myself once again in the sweater of undyed wool (the one my mother knitted for me when I was growing out of childhood). I stood at the train station of the capitol city. (It was a time of peace.) . . .

text and photo: zarko radakovic, cologne

german translation: mirjana and klaus wittmann, bonn

Posing Roughnecks?

When the New York Times published this photo last November, I made a copy and have puzzled over it in the intervening weeks.

Yesterday the Deseret Snooze published the photo again, giving Ralph Wilson of the Associated Press photo credit. The caption to the photo read: "Workers move a well casing into place at a Chesapeake Energy natural gas well."

There are three roughnecks in the picture: a couple of floorhands and, perhaps, a motorman or derrick hand or even the driller.

There is no casing in sight.

The only moving going on has to do with the tongs the two floorhands are wrestling with. Tongs are useful if you're breaking apart a couple of drill pipes that have been screwed together tightly. Or if you're tightening them together after you've spun the one down over the other with the chain hanging in the left bottom foreground.

They're not much use if the only drill pipe is firmly anchored in the slips on the floor and there's no drill pipe above it to be attached or unattached.

So what are the roughnecks doing as they push and pull on their respective tongs?

It has been 35 years since I last worked on a rig as a roughneck, so maybe things have changed so drastically that I just can't make sense of the photo.

Or maybe the roughnecks are just posing for a photographer who doesn't have a clue that they're putting him on.

The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn: Permanent Magic

 My son Tom was in town last week, visiting from his home in Brooklyn.

Tom's a professional jazz musician. He makes a living playing with various groups, including the Drunkard's Wife, Lapis Luna, his own Big Bang Big Band, his wife's Kelsey Jillette Quintet, The Dreamland Orchestra (featured twice recently in the New Yorker) and The Blue Vipers -- check them all out in the internet.

Tom brought me the latest CD by The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn, a New Orleans-flavored group he has played with for several years -- in fact, when he drove from Utah to NYC a decade ago he made his rent money by busking in the subway, where he met Billy Nemec. Their recording, rough and early, called the "Henry Jones Swing Trio," is still one of my favorites.

After winning a street-musicians competition, what were now The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn used the prize to record a fine CD called "Forty Days and Forty Nights," the name from a Billy Nemec tune. Check it out at their website.

And now they've released (well, they'll release it in the next weeks -- the NY snowstorm kept the original release party from happening) Permanent Magic, a new album that carries on the band's eclectic and sometimes uneven but always gritty and creative and jazzy and lowdown tradition.

The album begins with a clarinet trill that announces a slow, easy, and haunting rendition of J. Myrow's Blue Drag. Nemec's New Orleans' flat, slack, and still forceful singing sets the tune off from other versions, including this one from the New Orleans Jazz Vipers [click here], which is a fine rendition, and this wonderful version by the Wiyos [click here], and the early version by the immortal Django [click here]. But the Brooklyn Vipers, for me at least, create a version of the tune beyond the others. It's partly because of Nemec's voice -- which I find off-putting and extremely attractive -- and partly because of the way the group works the tune, with voice and then a trademark double, entwined solo featuring Tom's lyrical clarinet and Sam Hoyt's intelligent and fanciful trumpet. Again and again on this and the earlier album, those two voices create a single/double voice I haven't heard anywhere else. The word "entwined" is an attempt to think the simultaneous solos that embrace each other sinuously, respectfully, delightfully. And then Nemec sings the slow drag, the blue drag, and I'm depressed in ways only the blues can accomplish, depressed and delighted at the same time.

Tom's composition, Viperation, is the ninth cut on the CD, a fast moving, intricate instrumental piece that makes good use of Tom's clarinet, Sam Hoyt's trumpet, David Langlois' washboard percussion, Chris Pistornino's bass, and Matt Musselman's guest trombone. In a clarinet solo, Tom effortlessly reaches notes higher than any I've heard on a clarinet, the highest of which he claims is still a note short of Benny Goodman's "B" on a recording of "Sing, Sing, Sing."

There are additional delights here, eclectic (as I've already noted) enough to reach from Willie Nelson's "Nightlife" to a crisp version of Hank Williams' "Hey Good Lookin'" (Tom's invocation of Boots Randolph here is enough to make me laugh out loud).

When the Vipers release the album, buy it.

You'll love it. And that's not just a proud papa speaking.