Light #3

The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment. It turned out to be not so much the anticipated bright and shining exit into fulfillment, but the entrance to a different kind of darkness. Not Milton’s “darkness made visible,” nothing as hellish as that. The grey let-down of a lesser enlightenment into the fact that the end of the tunnel that had been funneling him claustrophobically towards its glow in the distance just extended that same highway to a point where it disappeared around a bend and over a horizon. Out here was not “there,” not the destination, but a different milestone of a never-ending getting there. 

That was not why Eric had put so many years into perfecting himself, honing his technique, polishing his delivery. Shining his shoes. At least, it was not why he thought he had been doing it. He had just wanted to get finished with all that preparation for being a fully realized, participatory grown-up when he hit eighteen. But the nineteen-year-olds were still that tiny bit ahead of him they had been last year as eighteen-year-olds. And the twenty-eight-year-olds who had been eighteen when he was looking up to them when he was eight? Now solid. Respectable. Mortgaged. Parents. And none of them seemed very impressed by his arrival--not enough to look behind to see if he might be gaining on them, much less care.

Eighteen candles on the cake laughed up at him as they melted into the lemon peppermint icing that had been his favorite about one year too long. One by one they puddled and extinguished. "Happy fucking birthday to me," he grumbled. His first adult curse. 

He shrugged.

He stuffed in a couple of extra clips for his 9mm in his bookbag. 

"Not so much for them...." 

Light #2

“The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment.” What a line—the substance of how many biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Lifetime: a trip down a tunnel trying to reach the light one touchstone experience at a time. 

Can hardly wait to start school, and be one of the big kids.

Can hardly wait to be in Junior High, to be a teenager.

Can hardly wait to be in high school. Be through with high school.

To get my driver’s license.

To get my first kiss, feel, sex. Sex with a partner it really matters with. Sex with an appropriate partner. A partner worth building a life with.

To get my degree and get a job. To get a job somehow in line with my degree.

To get my first promotion. 

To be the boss.

To have my own business and be my own boss.

To be a Dad/Mom.

To see the kids in school and have some time back to myself.

To slow down a bit and find time to smell the flowers.

To retire and travel.

To . . . 

 

To see the full light at the end of the Tunnel of Sequential Dissatisfactions that we call Life: the light that in some narratives of near-death experiences takes us out of this dimly lit sequence of experiences that never seem to measure up to anticipation, and in some way or other never could. The full light that takes us into another tunnel that is the wherever and whatever is next, nourished by the hope it will be a distinct improvement. 

Light #1 Rathole

Here's the first:

The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment. A distinct and sunny glow was what he had been expecting—clearer, cleaner, more a final goodbye to the dim. This last gasp afterglow sort of fuzzed the transition from the tube of darkness into the not very light open spaces. 

Then Garth realized he had come through shortly after nightfall. Now that was a surprise. He’d entered that mouth in the mountain at highway speed. At noon. On the day of the summer solstice. And he would swear (if swearing weren’t a sin) that he had been inside the throat of that tunnel for only five minutes.

“Where does the time go?... he giggled nervously. There had to be a rational explanation, or even an irrational one, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear either.

“It was the time version of a wormhole,” explained a low voice from a back seat that had been empty when he’d entered that tunnel. “Sort of.”

Damn, thought Garth, in an unguarded moment that was a little more out loud than he’d have preferred or was aware of before he continued musing. If I had to cross the line into an alternate verisimilitude, why did it have to be into SciFi? I hate that stuff. I would much rather come out in a San Francisco alley in the Twenties, wearing a trench coat and a fedora. A broad-brimmed fedora. The coat not quite disguising the muscular breadth of my heavy shoulders.

“Don’t give up hope yet, sweetheart,” came the voice. 

"How does it do that?"

“It’s easy to read minds when you are in Urban Fantasy,” said the voice. “You’re just misreading the tropes. Or just learning them. This story is still waiting to land up somewhere and somewhen, and it could just as easily be San Fr….  Nope. Your wormhole was actually a memory of the Rathole--looks like you get Edmonton. In a blizzard. With a snowblower.”

“I haven’t a CLUE what he’s on about,” Garth mumbled, swinging into an uncharacteristic for him but strangely natural feeling illegal U-turn in a school zone. At lunch hour ("How does it keep doing that????"). In a crosswalk. "But I’ve got to stop …."

“Not here, not now,” insisted the voice. “We haven’t even got to the part where you get groped by the leggy red-headed hitchhiker, yet. And we would both hate for you to miss out on that bit of development.”

My own Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Garth imagined. 

“Not quite,” the voice sounded uncomfortably closer, just a breath past his neck. “We’ve got business, you and I. Take the next left and stop under the Mausoleum carpark. That’s where we’re partying.”

“The Mausoleum?” Garth checked to make sure he’d heard correctly. 

“Yeah, that big hockey arena looking thing in the heart of downtown. That's what my friends call it”

“But it isn’t finished yet. And it’s going to cost an arm and a leg to party there.”

A large, reddish-furred paw pressed on his shoulder. “Something along those lines, yeah.”

The last sound was a crunch, but Garth didn’t exactly hear it through his gurgled, choked-off scream.

A question came up Wednesday (Feb. 6) on the Narrative Magazine site: What's everybody's favorite writing instrument? Answers were anywhere from a favorite pencil to a favorite keyboard. A lot mentioned favorite fountain pens. Watermans came up many times. Nobody mentioned my favorite, a Visconti Van Gogh in the "Starry Night" color scheme. But I haven't been using it much lately. It or any other writing instrument except the computers on which I compose course notes, record marks and do committee stuff. That flu or whatever it was I had in late December took a lot of the will and all of the wish to write energy right out of me. I must have been sick.

One answer to the Narrative question struck me for its Puritanical snottiness: Somebody called Exploding Mary responded "If what you write with matters more, or as much, as how you write-- then what you write won't matter much." Nobody had asked whether the "what" matters as much as or more than the "what with." But the "what with" does matter. It's the source of the sheer aesthetic physical pleasure of pulling letters, words, phrases, sentences, metaphors, images, out of the not-yet into the here-it-is. And there is physical pleasure that is part of the writing process. Just ask Laraine Herring (Writing Begins with the Breath).

Later that night--this is still Wednesday we are talking about--about midnight I was lying in bed when I wasn't tossing in bed, and realized I just had to get up and put my pen to work across the patiently waiting pages of my new APICA CD15HN scribbler with the linen-finish covers in sage green. The scribbler with the silky-finished paper that welcomes fountain pen nibs and ink without the scratchy fibrous tendrils bleeding off in more random directions than the words themselves follow or take up. The scribbler that  I keep in a Conception Cuir leather folder my wife bought me three summers ago in Quebec City. The leather scribbler cover with the embossed red flower on it. The embossed red flower she selected instead of the geometric in black and white pattern she thought  I might find a bit more "masculine." Or at least less "feminine." I think she thought the flower was more feminine because she liked it better. And she is a woman. So . . .  Anyway, she expressed her doubts to the salesman. He asked the perfectly logical question to settle the issue: "Does your husband ever wear pink shirts or shirts with pink in them?"  She had to admit that, yes, I did. That's how I got the gorgeous embossed red flower patterned notebook cover. When she pointed out the geometric the next day as we passed the same shop, I shrugged at it. Boring. Maybe that's why she thought it was more masculine.

As very late Wednesday became very early Thursday, I took my favorite writing instrument in hand and spent a late hour filling page after page. It took a while to get fluid and fluent again, after doing nothing but practical writing for six weeks and then some. But eventually, after having to stop to refill the ink reservoir with Private Reserve Midnight Blues ink, I found the words began to get more lively. 

And a later eventually, I flagged a bit and headed back to bed. Then I got up and came back to the pen and notebook.

I had ended by putting down a sentence (or an interrogative clause) from Haraki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which my son, David, had left for me when he went back to Montreal after Christmas: "...how many times in the course of a lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?" It seemed a promising place to start one of the exercises Natalie Goldberg suggests in Writing Down the Bones, an exercise she learned from Russell Edson, who would sit down and write off ten short pieces in a session, always beginning with a teasing, often absurd, but strong first sentence. I wrote about that on November 14 last, enclosing some products of such outings. Some of them begun with a fountain pen in the predecessor of the CD15HR, a CD15NV. The HR and NV are color codes, evidently. NV was a darker teal blue. There is also a marvelous WN that is a creamy white.

What I realized when I got back to bed was that there was another sentence asking for the same opportunity, one I hadn't got from any source I was aware of but my own playing mind: "The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment."

My plan, being no Russell Edson, is to try a few extensions of that sentence over the next week or so--probably in narrative, but who knows. And maybe some from the Murakami clause.

If you are tuned, stay that way.

Oh, by the way--I've been filling pages ever since. Not always with my "Starry Night." It's my favorite, but I'm not, Exploding Mary, incapacitated without it.

One inspiration was going to a poetry reading by Richard Harrison after work on Friday. Among other things, Richard writes of hockey and of superheroes. Lately he has also been writing of his father, who died a year and a half ago, or about six months after mine. His father was also a World War II vet, who carried a lot of baggage from that experience.

One line from Richard about his father, referring to how his father had thought of the war, sticks with me. Richard writes of how his father found in his wartime duties "the last days in his life he knew exactly what to do." It has a ring to it when I think of my own father. It meant I got another several pages filled within hours. Some of that might make its way here one day soon, too.


P.S.: this was executed mainly on a Toshiba Protege Z830 Satellite Series Ultrabook laptop keyboard. Not my favorite writing instrument, Exploding Mary, but one of many different computer keyboards and configurations I have used since the late 1970's, one of many that has helped and continues to help get the job done.