Today was an important step in my political radicalization. No, comrades, I’m not wearing a beret; it’s far worse. I wrote a Letter to the Editor.
That bastion of fuming adulthood, that headache of reasonable citizens everywhere – today I ventured into that enclave of individuals who Have An Opinion. (They hand out the capital letters when you hit “submit.”)
Of course, it remains to be seen whether it will be published or even receive a polite email of acknowledged receipt.
If you agree with the title – or if you feel it is already too far outside your own political orbit – I humbly beg you, read no further. I do not wish to offend. My Opinions extend only to the Editor of The Atlantic, not to my blog readers.
If your sympathies are not already engaged towards the article’s author or a different candidate entirely, my letter may be viewed here in PDF format.
As always, I welcome comments – and I will try my best to do justice to each one. Of course, if you wish to influence public opinion directly, another option is to submit your very own letter to the editor.
A species can expect to live about one million years. This is not a span of time we understand; more than a one and six zeroes, it’s the opportunity for a lineage to rewrite Life’s odds against Death. When a species dies, it means one less card up Life’s sleeve.
On five separate occasions, Life has lost more than three quarters of the cards up its sleeve. (Yes, Life is an epic cheater.) Likely culprits include meteors, volcanoes, climate phenomena, and plants.
There’s a sixth occasion. Let’s call it “now,” or “soon.” Life’s cheating stash is again disappearing. Death is watching with interest, because Life never wins with fair play. The number of cards – pardon me, species – “…that have gone extinct in the last century would have otherwise taken between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear…” if the game was business as usual. In interest of fair play, one of the species is now evening the score of 3.5 billion years; in interest of fair play, one of the species is now playing on Death’s side.
In interest of fair play, that species should remember Life and Death play different games. Life will lose the cards to win the game, but Death keeps every card dealt, always.
And in interest of fair play, when the score gets so close that no one can tell the difference, Life and Death will always remain the best of friends. Together, they’ll pack up any remaining cards1 and go find some other game to while away the time between the stars. Sometimes, it’s just time for a new deck.
1 Between Life’s stash and Death’s hoard, there’s usually not that many left.
As they say: challenge accepted. Once a week, as intrepid writers and readers, we will test the limits of boredom and the meaning of dull. We will establish whether, indeed, there are No Dull Topics.
How? With your help! Each Monday, head over to the Skeleton At The Feast Facebook page to submit your dullest topic idea. What does dull mean? PG, and no more than three words including hyphens. The last comment as of 8 a.m. CT Tuesday morning is next week’s No Dull Topic! My role? To turn it into an entertainingly readable post.
Special thanks to Havoc Octavian Teslasmith for this week’s topic, “Watching Clouds.”
Watching clouds is not something easily pinned down; watching clouds, as a topic, is just as likely as the real thing to shift and coalesce, merge and disappear, leaving you frantically scribbling notes that make no sense to any future version of yourself. The longer you think, the more meanings emerge.
There is the simple childhood act of laying back and watching the sky change. There is the notion of “the cloud” – that Internet creature that gulps information and stores it indefinitely. Then there is Aristotle’s Meteorologica, the Bible’s many clouds of revelation and concealment; clouds as creatures and clouds as castles; clouds as one of the most obvious harbingers of change in our planet’s weather system. The sources agree: clouds carry meaning – of some sort.
It is easy to over-simplify water vapor in the sky. It is easy to over-complicate clouds. Today, it is the simplest image that transfixes my mind. The act of watching clouds is an anachronism. I say this not because I believe we are “too busy” or “too attached to our screens” or other easy excuses; as someone who spends most of my time either writing or reading on screens of varying sizes, that would be the height of hypocrisy. Rather, I refer to Merriam Webster’s second definition: “a person or thing that is chronologically out of place.” The act of watching clouds displaces one from time. It is that strange act of spending time with yourself. It is that strange phenomena of watching your own thoughts unfold: checking the weather of your own mind.
You learn things about yourself when you watch clouds. It isn’t something as diagnostic as a Rorschach test, or as flakey as a mood ring. It’s a simple question: are you there?
Are you there, and how do you see the world today? Have you dreamed recently? Have you thought of the thing you want most, have you put yesterday behind you, have you looked another human in the eyes? Do you remember what makes you smile? Do you remember anything, if you can help it?
Is that dog or a horse? Ah, too late, it’s turning into a duck.
Is that the person you want to be, or someone you never really liked? Ah, too late, you lost the way to tell them apart.
You lost your way, with only clouds to give guidance; spring and shower, storm and gold-gray sun. Clouds are not such a bad guide to this sort of thing. Each of these moments is part of your life, each moment a change.
There is no way to stop this change. There is no way to comprehend its entirety. But there are rare afternoons when you can lie back and watch it unfold, see some sort of balance or beauty between the blue and white. Some afternoons you are at peace with time; some afternoons are a beautiful day for cloud watching, whether cloudy or clear. And some afternoon – just perhaps – you’ll catch a glimpse of a cloud shaped like you, just for a moment, before that cloud also shifts and changes into something completely new.
Good morning, my friends! As of this week, there are over fifty of you who follow this strange Skeleton At The Feast. To each one of you: thank you. You brighten my day, give me hope and vision and courage. I sincerely hope my words do the same for you.
I admit to curiosity: what would you like to read? If you could read anything…what types of posts or subject matter would you grin in anticipation of?
“The idea of trying to create things that last – forever knowledge – has guided my work for a long time now.”
Edward Tufte
Creation is an odd sort of work. It demands that you pay attention. It expects you to be elbow-deep in questions.
Questions demand constant thought. There are many ways to approach this ongoing internal engagement, but I prefer the words of Edward Tufte: “The idea of trying to create things that last – forever knowledge – has guided my work for a long time now.”
Given infinite expressions of creativity, “forever knowledge” is the simplest way to describe the focus of creation. Parents and artists and scientists, cooks and mathematicians: each of them coaxes something they hold within towards becoming something separate from themselves. Each of them searches for and coaxes the qualities that will sustain the created to independence.
The goal, always, is that the created takes on a life of its own. That’s the spark of forever – the spark that breathes life, that says, “This thing deserves to be. The world will make room.”
I once wrote a menu for Black Cat Provisions Co., a brilliant little bakery which promptly vanished into another dimension. I guess that’s what happens when you name things after cats. In honor of #ThrowbackThursday, here’s the menu; grab a cup of coffee and enjoy.
This morning it’s no secret: Spring is here. Subtle hints are gone, the weather warm And green presses near In all its shades.
The birds in every nest Sing trees of life; Generation to next, traits and seed-shaped beaks, Perch to flight On instinct’s errand.
This morning it’s no secret Life is here. A sixth extinction may not tame Flame and feather, green and rain – But will you risk it?
Spring has swept over Texas. I sense it from the wood doves and the scent of mountain laurel, koolaid-sweet and honey-wild. In the midst of biology run rampant, I read grim books and odd theories and ask myself – What should we risk for Life? Or perhaps: do we risk Life for our lives?
The idea of mass extinction is nothing new. Humans have understood it through flood, flame, and ice, tales nearly as old as whichever Creation you please. Today it’s a tale told by science. The question is whether the tale is a truth for now, or later.
Both positions depend on how we understand what data we have about the deep past, in light of our current world. The point of agreement: catastrophes are normal, but human actions affect life on a scale unprecedented by any other species1.
When tomorrow depends on today – when do we act? What should we risk for Life?
1 Except, possibly, plants. But plants have been really well-behaved ever since – unless you want to blame them for the coal.
“…Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals. Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him. So I breathed in his mouth and, lo!, he sat up and talked and said, what?”
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
There are books that inform. There are books that entertain. There are books that motivate.
And there are books that catapult you from your perch1 to race in pursuit of passersby, tackling them to the ground to forcibly speed-read an entire chapter to their trembling ears.
In other words, these books are so powerful that they have a life of their own. This is obvious because they clearly have a reproductive cycle, as evidenced by them taking control of your frontal lobe to convey their literary DNA to other brains.
I mention this because I have recently come into possession of such a text2. I refer to Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing. It’s a collection of essays, or chapters, or meditations on the act of writing and the art of living.
In many ways it’s classic Bradbury. His allusions and metaphors are all over the place. References to comics and carny-creepiness, check and check. Bradbury is a strange creature called “human,” with a skeleton inside and an angel on one shoulder; Lord knows what that is whispering in his other ear.
But there’s a contagion, a madness, and a hope that spills through each page and sentence. He’s seen what happens when life slips away. It doesn’t look very different from the space left when art slips away. Art and Life, the two of them, are beasts of a feather. We wouldn’t stop to listen if their voices didn’t echo each other, as well as a quiet third called Death.
They form a writer’s menagerie. Bradbury introduces us to them one by one like goats at a petting zoo. He guides us through with twelve chapters of tips on caring for these rare creatures – what they eat (poetry), where they live (the top of the stairs), and their ideal habitat (whatever you do, pretend to ignore them).
“And what, you ask, does writing teach us?
First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Now, I’d stay to tell you more, but Buck Rogers just saw another passersby – so I have to get my running shoes.
1 Chair, tree, rooftop, etc.
2 Or, you know, it’s come into possession of me. We’re still working out the details of the relationship.
Works Consulted is a series in which I share writers and writing whose words change brains. Please share any suggestions! In the meantime, here’s Works Consulted, vol. I.
As they say: challenge accepted. Once a week, as intrepid writers and readers, we will test the limits of boredom and the meaning of dull. We will establish whether, indeed, there are No Dull Topics.
How? With your help! Each Sunday, head over to the Skeleton At The Feast Facebook page to submit your dullest topic idea. What does dull mean?PG, and no more than three words including hyphens. The last comment as of 8 a.m. CT Tuesday morning is next week’s No Dull Subject! My role? To turn it into an entertainingly readable post.
Special thanks to Kasey Ann Khaghany for this week’s topic, “Quiet Sunday Afternoons.”
“School night.” It’s that dreaded blight of childhood, death knell of the fun that is somehow always just getting started when the announcement is made. On the far side of a “school night” lurks a…School Day. (Please, imagine Cerberus.)
Children are smart, so it doesn’t take long for them to realize: when “tomorrow” is the place you want to avoid, “today” is the best place to stay. And of all the places or times to practice this slowing-down of time, this temporal clinginess, Sunday afternoon is the pinnacle.
Let us start by considering its features. It is its own unique creature within the week, at once both weekend and prelude to a “school night.” Sunday afternoon begins when lunch is finished and the adults look around for places to nap. Depending on the time of year and the century, this is the cue for children to a) escape outside or b) escape to their rooms. Once everyone under 18 (or still enrolled in an educational institution – whichever is still in effect) is safely in position, the Temporal Deceleration Campaign can begin.
Certain activities are more conducive towards slowing time. One of the great classics – The Cloud Watcher – requires little more than a comfortable outdoor spot devoid of fire ants. One sits; one leans back; one gazes skyward. Traditionally, practitioners begin by looking for shapes in the clouds, but the experienced Cloud Watcher can gain equal enlightenment from an empty blue sky. As one’s mind drifts upwards, away from Earth’s gravity, one begins to see the laws of time and nature as illusory. Mortality and eternity are both sides of the same coin. There is no “today;” there is no “tomorrow.” There is no “school” – for what can be taught that does not lead to greater truth than this?
The Cloud Watcher may eventually transition into The Napper. The Napper requires the same form as The Cloud Watcher, except the eyes are closed. If the gaze is instead transferred to contemplation of a book, the form becomes The Bookworm.
Another classic activity is The Hide & Seek. This performance-based form requires a minimum of two practitioners, but there is no upward limit on the number who may participate. One practitioner takes on the guise of Tomorrow (“It”). The other participants enact Today’s Fleeting Seconds. The contest depends on Tomorrow finding all remnants of Today. The allegorical nature of this form quickly becomes apparent to the perceptive observer.
The objective observer may wonder – what is the point of this struggle? What is the point of willfully slowing the transition of today into tomorrow, when tomorrow will always come?
It is true that tomorrow will always come. It is also true that children will go to school, a year here and a year there. One quiet Sunday afternoon, they will find themselves staying with the adults after lunch. They will say, “another quiet Sunday afternoon,” though it is just the first of many for them, and look for a place to take a nap.
All children know this. They understand the meaning of “a school night” is more than “tomorrow is a school day.” The point of slowing time is to make just a little space, a little extra time, to make peace with that destiny. By experiencing the slowness of time with determination and focus, one creates memories.
And memories, as the adults know, are the best part of a quiet Sunday afternoon.
Artist Glen Baxter clearly understood the allure of the quiet Sunday afternoon. I do not own this image, all credit belongs to the artist.
My child, nearest one to my heart; Beloved, the one I never knew. Your name is Nightingale – Your name is Dove.
I saw you in stillness. Your eyes were closed, bruises spread and spent You were tired, so tired, my love.
You were silent But you were still singing Where small feathers flutter, small beaks peck – Quick small movements amid small twig nests.
Today You ask for pieces I don’t have, In the rustling of bushes and the flowering of trees.
Today You ask for pieces I can’t give, In the pecking of crumbs and the storming rains.
In the city streets and gates, in the city walls and windows, I leave a trail, though it’s swept away. Breadcrumbs to birds, and wisdom of the broken for my Beloved.
Sometime between 2001 and 2008, the New York Times ran a story, and I acquired a ghost.
I don’t know if this ghost haunts anyone else. I don’t remember his name or his country. Here is what I remember.
He lived in an occupied city. He kept a small shop of nightingales, and spent all his time in his shop with his birds.
The neighbors said he was quiet, absent-minded, gentle. One girl remembered him caring for his nightingales each day. She said he talked to them as he cleaned and watered and fed them.
He happened to be on the wrong side of some line of rage, in a city full of pain and soldiers and more pain. Someone decided his life was worth more as a message. A group of people beat him to death.
I remember the small grey picture of his face. He didn’t look dead, exactly. He looked infinitely tired. His eyes were closed with the sad innocence you sometimes see on the faces of sleeping children.
My friends. What shall I say?
For some things words are useless. For some pain, there is no cure. But I can’t be silent. The wisdom of the weak is only news once they’re broken beyond repair. So here are the two things I say, though they may not be right.
First, everyone is called to be strong. Your strength may surprise you, if only for a second. Sometimes a second is enough.
Second, everyone is called to be weak, broken, tired, maimed. This isn’t the truth anyone wants to hear. But strength alone is an isolating experience. Weakness is a chance to learn others’ lives and needs. Weakness is a chance to learn wisdom, the kind that wells up and heals.
I have more experience in weakness than in strength. Life usually only needs strength once, but it always needs wisdom. I don’t yet have wisdom. But I have a ghost; I have a pocket full of crumbs for the daytime sparrows who flutter and beg; and somewhere in the night, nightingales are singing.
Skeleton At The Feast 
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