Figurines

photo by brettanicus.

Once in a grand ol’ while, I see flowers burst from the carpet, blue skies wash across the ceiling, birds alight on the stems of reading lamps. Grasses, fields, clover, goldfish swimming in the candle pillars. Light the candle. The goldfish flicker and flutter. Dream of angels, devils, the wash of sacred water between my toes. I grew jungles out of potted palms, bayous in the turtle tank. The turtle spoke to me, “Mr. Wood, you’ve neglected me for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I can live off of two meals a week, but look at my paltry legs. Look at the thin reed of my neck. Where once there was strength, now there is decrepitude. The Barrister is coming today to have a word with you. I’ve asked him to be kind, as you have been to me over these last dozen years or so. But today is a day of reckoning, and the balance of owner vs. tenant, pet vs. man, slave vs. master will be pitched on its head. So I leave you with that forewarning, and for now, good bye.” The turtle withdrew his head into his shell, tucked in his legs so that only the tips of his claws peaked out, and curled his tail against is hind leg. How I wished I could have a shell.

So now I must wait for my visit from the Barrister; how shall I waste my time? Books wait on the shelves; Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s Prince, Winnie the Pooh, but instead I reached for the etch-a-sketch. Such confines of control, only left or right, up or down, and the illusion of a curved line which is really only miniscule right angles traded off, one for the other. I drew a mountain, a palm tree, and a little house in the foothills. Then I turned it upside down, gave it a good shake, and it was all gone, mostly, swept by a sand storm.

How many figurines do I have in my room? Not pictures, but actual shapes? They come out of the woodwork, stretch their heads, blaze their colors and shake free their loose feathers to drift upon the floor. The parrot of the golden breast and fiery wings. I’ve waited a year for him to utter a word, but he only sits deep in thought. Across the way from him, the sullen Eeyore with droopy ears and eyes, a little tuft of black hair perched on the peak of his head like a bird’s nest, though surely not the parrot’s; he would require a more noble homestead to prop up those heavy thoughts that plague him. Then across the way, a naked man sitting on a rock, pitch black skin, great strength of limbs but weak of mind. We move on to the upper bookshelf, with no books displayed but only the artifacts I’ve gathered over the years, like my Grandmother’s English tea pot, two Japanese tea cups, a pipe that was a gift when I turned thirty—but back now to figurines; floating above these artifacts is a porcelain fairy with delicate lace wings, a halo of golden curls, with delicate and breakable features still intact.

There are more figures coming out of the fog. Three Grecian women with clasped hands encircle a pot, with no plants inside, only empty space. The bronzed faces of a man and woman, pitted at opposite sides of the room. And lastly, a rubber iguana perched on the window sill; I stare at him for hours to catch him moving, but he doesn’t even blink. Until I look away, at which time he scurries across the room into the palm fronds.

There's a knock at the door, and the turtle comes out of his shell. It must be the Barrister.

"Postcards" by E. Annie Proulx

Just finished the novel “Postcards,” by E. Annie Proulx, author of “Shipping News.” From the back cover: “…the tale of the Blood family, New England farmers who must confront the twentieth century – and their own extinction. As the family slowly disintegrates, its members struggle valiantly against the powerful forces of loneliness and necessity, seeking a sense of home and place forever lost.”

It fell short of “Shipping News,” and was her first novel, I believe. It’s one of those storylines that traces the slow depressing decline of its characters. She has the same powerful sense of character dialect like she had in “Shipping News,” authentic but at times distracting. I like the way her stories operate on two levels, one very grounded in reality that leaves dirt under your nails, and another in a grand sweeping mythology, with names like Loyal Blood, Mink, Mrs. Nipple, Starr, and a hitchhiking Indian that leaves with the main character a journal that he will carry along with him for the rest of his life, jotting down the fragments of his years on the road.

Here is one of the pages that I dogeared, where she writes in bold type, a kind of prose poetry that channels all of the senses: “He passed old trucks humping along on bald treads. He is worried about his own tires. He turns off onto a gravel road but the stones fly up, dust chokes him. Grit in his mouth. When he rubs his fingers against the ball of his thumb he feels hard grit. And turns back onto the concrete. Miles of snow fence. A peregrine falcon balances on a forgotten hay bale. The flatness changes, the earth’s color changes, darker, darker. Prayers and long silences out of the dusty radio. In the autumn rain the houses become trailers among the trees. Oaks come at him, flash, burst into thickets, into woods. H&C Café, EATS, Amoco, GAS 3 MI. AHEAD. Fog. A little night fog. The soil in Indiana a deep brown-black. The cattle sink into its blackness. Southering geese spring up from the sloughs and ponds, scissor over him in the hundreds. The water is streaked with the lines of their angular necks, fractioned by dipping heads and beaks. In the diner hunched over the cup of coffee he wonders how far he is going.”

Anguish and Reward

photo by Monalisa Adjami.

He comes home in the evening after a long day at the office, settles into his den, turns on his laptop, and in the cool glow of the screen he starts to make-believe. Interesting phrase: he makes believe. His fingers lightly tap on the keys, and a world begins to appear. He smiles, at times chuckles, at other times frowns and drags his fingers across his scalp. Creating worlds—bringing people out of the mortal soup into living breathing flesh—takes a lot of effort, mixed with pleasure, thrill, anguish, uncertainty. With the effort comes reward; these characters start to speak, at first only with hollow words that are obviously coming from himself, but within moments, their words start to stray from what he intended. Soon, they are jabbering away in their own tone of voice about their own cares. They say things he wasn’t expecting, and he doesn’t quite know how to reply to them, so then invents another character, and soon that character is refuting the first, and now the writer feels like he is just watching from a corner while these two people play out the scene. This is when he starts to smile, when his eyes catch fire with interest and wonder. What is going on here? He feels a little guilty for eavesdropping, but not enough to make him stop, for it is the guilty pleasure of the voyeur.

Mantra of Leaves

photo by cfbenson.

She moves behind the counter, shaking tea leaves out of ceramic containers onto metal scales, weighing out the orders, pouring the dried leaves into shiny gold tinfoil bags, nose tickled by tea dust. Her hair is pulled back into a pony tail, lifted off of that long slim neck. She has a profile with the curve of forehead and cheekbone that begs to be captured in oils on canvas and aged for three hundred years in a clandestine gallery. There’s something solemn about her bearing, until a customer steps to the counter and her smile lights up, but when they leave the flame just as quickly smolders out. Back to the rhythm of pouring out the leaves, balancing the scales, pressing closed the bags, a mantra that clears the mind.

Get It In Writing

photo by Lazzuri.

Writing creates a world totally within my control. There is something comforting in that, even though I never considered myself a control freak. As I write, the pace of life slows down and falls into a rhythm, each word moving in concert with that which it describes. Sometimes I think I am more wholly in the world of my imagination than in the world around us. If I was not describing it with these words, how much would I have noticed the sound of the wind outside, the smell of mellon coming from the kitchen, or the stillness of all the objects in my den except for the movement of my fingers and my thoughts? Get it in writing, they say. How true.