The Page Less Traveled

During my previous life as a turn-of-the-century seller of used and rare books, I witnessed internet technology transform the business, as search engines and auction sites and networks of shared bookseller databases made acquiring elusive treasures as easy as reaching for a keyboard. Our physical store (not to mention our labyrinth annex) was perpetually double-stacked with hauls taken in from estate auctions, from trolling through Goodwill stores and garage sales, from cobweb-glazed cartons brought in by customers looking to free up attic space (there was absolutely no end to people looking to shed books). Because our sources were random, so was our inventory, arranged in overlapping unlabeled clusters whose thematic focus was never better than abstract. Happy hunting.

A common type of secondhand customer, of course, comes questing after something particular, and not even the most maliciously disarranged shelving system can present a daunting obstacle. Somewhere in his home, on a high shelf of his own, is an empty spot of distinct width and depth. Only one book will fit there, so whenever said customer finds himself in strange neighborhoods, he is inevitably drawn hunching into bookstores and curio shops in the hope of locating the damn thing. Perhaps something known in childhood or college but long since lost, victim of toxic neglect or casual misplacement or fatal dog-chewing. Perhaps to complete a gap (or two) in a series collection, an ongoing endeavor. Perhaps known by reputation only, a notorious rarity, a variant. A first edition, first state. Signed.

My usual offer of We Don't Have It, But I Bet My Internet Knows Where It Is would only be taken about half the time. The other half would counter with a dismissive wave; not so much No Thanks as Get Outta Here With That Crap. You want some common reading copy of an obscure favorite for a gift or for a whim, that's one thing. But when the search is half the pleasure? That vacant spot on the bookshelf back home isn't crying to be filled so much as it is a license to darken the doors of every shabby-looking bookmonger along the way, every antiques emporium that might have a shelf or two of vintage pulps teetering in the back, to sniff the shadows in every dust-gilded corner, glide fingers across embossed spines of cloth and leather until some design pattern, some title, some name rises up to the light in your eyes. There's warm grace in finding a book by just such serendipity, so that it feels less like merely finding a book, more a nudge from the Universe into a set of coordinates no search engine is equipped to find, steady as she goes -- and secure in the knowledge that even as one distinctly-sized bookshelf gap is filled, another will fall open ...

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
  -- Carl Sagan

The Endless River (2014)

Pink Floyd's final studio offering is a resurrection of ideas abandoned in 1994, when The Division Bell was cut down to a single album from earlier plans for a double: lyrical songs on one disc, instrumentals on the other. Traditional songs won out, the ambient scraps went to the archive, a casualty of band apathy, yet soon to spawn Internet rumors such as the April Fool's joke of 1997: a surprise release entitled Liquid. Which, dated jibe against Roger Waters aside, still wouldn't be a bad title for what eventually trickled down as The Endless River. (Equally, this could have been called Son of "Marooned," an instrumental from Division Bell, which a fair share of this record resembles, production-wise when not also musically.)

Divided into four musical suites (designated as untitled "sides," moot on any format other than vinyl), River is a mercurial, career-spanning showcase of Floydian techniques, gimmicks, signatures, and moods. Richard Wright's previously recorded keyboards are augmented by new guitars from David Gilmour and drums from Nick Mason with an eye towards arranging all the like pieces together. The soundscapes are languid and droning, here and there working up to a dark, sultry pulse, occasionally even a burst of actual, driving rock, all rich with Floydian callbacks (though with fewer-than-usual sound effects, more stretches of ambient weirdness). It doesn't take a careful listener to hear a luxurious mashup of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Welcome to the Machine" in the album-opening "It's What We Do." Both "Allons-y" and "Surfacing" sound like they were developed from musical sketches cut from The Wall. In fact, much of the album seems to have been scrambled in a time machine: witness a 1968-era Wright on the Royal Albert Hall's pipe organ, a whirling, majestic ghost playing an overture for the Afterlife. Meanwhile, the percussive "Sum/Skins" is Nick Mason getting his joyous drummer freak on for the first time since Ummagumma. And "Eyes to Pearls" finds Gilmour teasing up a suitably murky surf music riff (the man has locked within him the Greatest Surf Rock Album Yet Made, and the 1970 Casino Montreux performance of "Atom Heart Mother" provides the better evidence). Point is, you're looking for a hit or two of Floyd, you've come to the right place.

While far from the first time the hands controlling Pink Floyd have cobbled dusty material into fresher shape, call it inherent vice, this time around not everything works. "Anisina" is a corny, misguided foray into late-1970s Yacht Rock. "The Lost Art of Conversation/On Noodle Street" will appeal most to those who have been waiting for the Floyd to retro-score a Film Noir. There are dead spots, places that don't quite seem to have thawed after two decades on ice (in the name of being Ambient Music, one must suppose). Gilmour's stinging Ebow guitar effects can be more annoying than evocative, an alien bee piercing the sonic siesta. And let's remain silent about the lyrics to "Louder than Words."

One thing bound to be endless about this album: arguments among certain sections of the Floydian fan base regarding whether or not it constitutes a suitable Final Statement from a brand name known for Making Statements. (Not to mention legitimate, that's a whole other can of worms you have to wait for.) Gilmour has made clear, the album is a tribute to Wright, a reminder of his foundational role in the band's sound. Beyond that, expectations for a profound (or even coherent) message will lead only to disappointment; by design, the music is too adrift for that. But as an hour-long bonus track, some lagniappe, a simple coda to a long and ridiculously varied rock career, it absolutely has moments that serve well enough. The curtain went down (and some time back, if you didn't notice), the lights are up, here's a mixtape to play you out the door.

When lyricist/bassist Waters left the band in 1984 to pursue a solo career, a fair number of people, myself included, assumed that was the moment the curtain fell on Pink Floyd. It was too bad, but the angry, articulate The Final Cut made an admirable headstone. Which, three years later, made A Momentary Lapse of Reason the abomination that crawled out from under that headstone. Prank Floyd to some, Pink Fraud to others, David Gilmour and all his hired hands had no business hijacking the prior artistic achievements of Roger Waters, fooling everyone into thinking they were the same band that released Dark Side of the Moon, dammit. Especially not when Waters had apparently asked them nicely please not to do so, right before broadcasting Radio KAOS to an uncaring world.

Thanks to natural sentimentality for a more youthful time, I'll always have a soft spot for KAOS, a sore spot for Lapse, though both are profoundly flawed (experiments in "modernizing" the classic sound now provide hard evidence that all parties forfeited the title deed to Pink Floyd during that long, chilly season of Reagan/Thatcher). As the 1990s dawned and lawsuits settled, both camps returned to proper sonic form, Waters with Amused to Death, Gilmour's Floyd with Division Bell. Waters' album is a sprawling complaint about War as Television Programming, released shortly after the first Gulf War; by turns vicious and tight, then baggy and incoherent, but always mesmerizing and challenging, it is essentially his solo follow-up to The Wall. A loose meditation on miscommunication, The Division Bell is a more relaxed and genuine release than its predecessor, serving to remind listeners (far better than Lapse ever could) Gilmour/Wright/Mason were more than mere sidemen to Waters and his concepts; he was undoubtedly the Direction, but they were equally undoubtedly the Vehicle.

When finally computer-capable of such trickery, I forged a mix CD from both efforts. With Roger Waters ranting and David Gilmour wailing and the filler jettisoned: Behold! a lost Pink Floyd album! (albeit one without a pop-up theme, more like one of Floyd's early soundtracks, perhaps). Death By Division stayed in prolonged heavy rotation -- long enough to refreshingly exhaust my long-time listener's interest in the Waters/Gilmour feud. Direction and Vehicle might no longer be in tandem, but, never mind, I'm just a guy with a pair of headphones, no dog anywhere near the actual fight, able to read the album credits and appreciate what I'm listening to accordingly. As I am one of those fools (numbering in the millions) who will tell you how Pink Floyd has been a steady soundtrack to his hilarious life, it was a revelation: my love of the musical structures assembled by these former architecture students didn't have to be attached to their stupid personal problems. (Besides: didn't I already have enough stupid personal problems of my own?)

I turned with renewed interest to the younger incarnation of the band, which I'd never given more than academic attention, sticking more to the refined, anxiety-charged Waters-led Floyd (read: from Meddle to The Final Cut). The band's over-romanticized Big Bang, the short, sweet, psychedelic Syd Phase, quickly gives way to the wandering Prog Phase: transformative late-60s experiments which the band had wholly disowned (at least until the release of the Early Years box material). Darker and heavier cosmic dust-ups prevailing, personified in official releases chiefly by Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, fulfilled by the nebulous warmth of "Echoes," this era is arguably best experienced via scattered media of vintage live performances of Floyd as a living band: engrossing sets of existing but expanded material arranged as new conceptual narratives, The Man and The Journey, not to mention the smooth, surf/acid rock band-only versions of the "Atom Heart Mother" suite (which trump the recorded Ron Geesin version, overstuffed as it is with harsh, brassy horns and silly, gulping choirs). The Live at Pompeii film captures the band in a moment of literal transition, performing material from Meddle and prior while also recording Dark Side of the Moon. The well-known Classic Floyd Phase begins with the shamefully under-appreciated Obscured by Clouds (which could serve as an album-length B-Side to Dark Side) and ends with the infamous Montreal spitting incident during the 'In the Flesh' tour supporting Animals. The 1978 release of David Gilmour begins the prevailing Solo Phase, wherein certain individuals are more obviously in control of whatever Floydian Project is in question than are certain other individuals, and in which (most) solo albums and touring projects can be considered canonical.

With everything in that kind of relief over such a diverse body of work, worrying about who likes to work with whom, who has the more obnoxious ego, and therefore whether or not some albums/tours are more legit than others, just takes time and energy away from actually loving the music -- and I had discovered I loved all those early moods and wild band explorations just as much as I loved the later, more deliberate, more focused song cycles. Because, ultimately, far as I'm concerned, they are all part of the same weird body of work from the same weird musicians. Imagine those Alien Anthropologists exploring a post-human Earth at the end of "Amused to Death" -- without a troubling context of band drama, just the catalog of work itself to experience, could they somehow conclude Waters parted amiably for his preferred solo career, perhaps even blessing Gilmour & Company on their intention to continue, best they could, as Pink Floyd? That, subsequently, everyone made a couple-three missteps but eventually found even keel, peace with their choices, satisfaction with their careers? How different would that music sound to those ears, as opposed to ears that have also heard all the ego-driven bickering? According to the resounding successes, in both artistic and commercial terms, of the recent legacy-claiming tours of both Gilmour and Waters, "Pink Floyd" persists, just in its component parts rather than completely assembled. (In 2007, I watched Roger Waters and his crack surrogate band burn through an amazing performance of The Dark Side of the Moon. A year later, I sat stunned by the Gilmour/Wright-led "Echoes" performance on Live in Gdansk, the final haunting six minutes of which is quintessentially, beautifully, inevitably Floydian. Once all the chatter is shut out, best as I can tell, wherever those guys go, whatever they call it, Pink Floyd follows.)

Beats, bars, rhythms, movements, moods -- music is a form of mass communication more flexible than language in that it transcends all culture, appealing to sheer, universal emotion more readily than to rational, organized thought. We feel connected to it; it is part of us, sacred, the joyous noise of the cosmos we are luckily attuned to hear. As younger people, we identify ourselves to others by our musical tastes, finding the beat of our true tribe. Or, by chance two separate glances meet, and I am you and what I see is me, as Roger Waters once put it.

Even before the release of The Endless River, it was prejudged in some corners for not including a Waters-penned lyric. Responding to such confusion with "Get a grip," Waters, sounding more characteristic of his old Wall self than his new Wall self, pointedly reminded everyone that Gilmour and Mason constituted the band, and were free to do whatever they wanted. Coming from a man just off a three-year long, record setting, award winning, career culminating tour of an updated Wall show, it was an unnecessary statement, and therefore sounded bluntly conclusive -- even more so than his recent admission of having been wrong in obstructing Gilmour/Mason/Wright in the first place.

If Gilmour's primary heresy in continuing Floyd can be said to be based on the attempt to maintain the conceptual, lyric-driven Floyd perfected by Waters rather than focusing on his and Wright's and Mason's instrumental strengths, their trademarked sound as a trio of musicians (Gilmour had admittedly been playing bass on Floyd albums for years), then with the majority of The Endless River he has at last genuinely steered the Floyd brand according to his own abilities. As was the case with The Final Cut, too bad it'll be the last. (Dot, dot, dot.)

Well, thank you, for now, Mr. Floyd. Whoever you are.

Some Assembly Required

This is a 1932 Chrysler Roadster. Or rather, a model of one.

The kit was purchased by my father some time in 1997, just before his long illness entered its home stretch. He picked up this one and one other, a 1964 1/2 Mustang, at the second-hand shop where my mother volunteered a couple days a week.

I'd never seen my father build a model. It had been a passionate hobby during his younger years, but by the time I came around he was chiefly preoccupied with programming computer systems for International Paper Company -- intricate detailing of a more intense nature, undoubtedly leaving him little headspace for hobbies. He'd put just one final kit together, right before or around the time I was born: an aircraft carrier. I recall it perched on a shelf near the kitchen and to me, at that age, it seemed credible the long plastic hull might be only slightly smaller than actual size. I used to poke the tiny planes, all glued down in a perfect line along the forward deck, to see if I could make them wobble. I never could.

Growing up in sun-bleached 1970s suburbia, I assembled my fair share of glow-in-the-dark monsters, giant insects, dinosaurs, superheroes, and space ships -- though never with much finesse. Of course I was just a kid, more interested in playing with the finished models than in building them. The build was a hurdle to be cleared before the real fun could begin. Which meant a cursing of sloppy paint jobs, clumsily fused joints, misaligned seams. Nothing like the precision decal work on the biplanes and X-Wing fighters hanging in suspended battle from the ceilings of my friends. And certainly nothing like Daddy's aircraft carrier, by then long disappeared in the shuffle of our semi-regular company-mandated moves across the Southeast.

By contrast, from 1998 onward the Roadster and Mustang model kits moved with me as though duty-bound, apartment to apartment, city to city, for fifteen years. I was waiting for, I don't know, the day I'd wake up with Master Model Builder Skills, by way of osmosis or alien intervention, whichever. To honor Daddy, I would do the job right: the contents of those boxes would suffer no wonky wheels, no thumbprints in the paint. None of the planes would wobble. So they waited in storage closets or on high shelves, blending into the shadows, seen often but noticed rarely, like most good intentions ultimately nothing more than the space they took up. Then one day last summer following the kind of run-of-the-mill health scare that comes as no exceptional surprise after a certain number of decades yet still inspires no quantum amount of mortal contemplation, I was puttering in the office -- shredding old bills, rearranging books, talking nonsense to myself, the usual -- when a shaft of magic afternoon sunlight struck those faded boxes out of their shadows, lifted the dust right off them.

My relationship with Daddy was something of a 50/50 split. As a child, I was too intimidated by the man to know how to love him: he seemed too distant, too stern, too heavily possessed of a clenched brow after a day's work at his keypunch machines. My inabilities at higher math seemed to greatly disappoint him, as did (so I supposed) my tendencies towards books and television rather than the woods and sports (passions of my older brother, as if he and I were expected be the same child). Eventually I assumed an unspoken truce had developed between us -- he would abide my whimsies so long as I stayed out of his way, so I did.

I was, as it turned out, wrong about all this, but remained clueless until my my teen years, a Saturday afternoon that found us staring together at a college basketball game, a moment he chose to tell me how much he had loved watching Pistol Pete play ball at LSU. Lo and behold, I learned my father was a connoisseur of the game, partook of his office bracket pool every spring when the tournament rolled around, had even played in high school. It was as simple as having a few conversations, next thing I knew, we were buddies. Had more in common than I had ever guessed. Stayed that way, until the end. (And damn if we never did discuss model building....)

Putting that Roadster together, so many years later, I found an obvious ghost at my shoulder. Wasn't he just out of sight, judging my work, giving me that cryptic line about how there are many ways to get a job done ... but only one right way? And then chuckling, like some wicked Zen master. And from there, of course, less superficial judging, because a child never runs out of questions for a departed parent. The last time Daddy saw me, I was a back-room bookstore clerk. How would he view my subsequent adventures, my trophies, my wrong turns, my happy landings?

My mother tells me Daddy bought these models for the same reason Mallory gave about climbing Everest. Makes sense; he never seemed particularly enamored of cars, looking mostly for value, not badassery, whenever the family needed a new sedan. (Excepting his mid-life crisis car, a Ford Maverick Grabber, which despite the orange color turned out to be a special kind of lemon.) What the model kits would add up to, whether a Roadster or a Mustang, didn't matter to him: he was interested in the process, in the doing. He just never got the time.

So, on his behalf, I took my time. And in so doing, in the meditative joy of whittling away imperfections in the plastic molding, of filling in cracks between pieces, of meticulously layering paint to various textures, I believe I glimpsed some reflection of a private joy my father might have taken in his work, programming computers in a time when information was shuffled among punched index cards. Patience. Attention to detail. More patience. Checking your work. And only then the satisfaction of watching a long string of processes come to a result, whether executed or printed out. Really, it's just a guess -- I was too inexperienced to have ever formulated any meaningful questions about work and what it can, should, and shouldn't mean to us, what it might have meant at least to Daddy -- but I knew him pretty well, and I can recall what sort of puzzles and challenges he liked to solve and how. This model building thing, this makes a certain sense.

Maybe the Roadster could have turned out better ... but for a second-hand kit -- missing parts, pieces warped, looked like some kid incorrectly fused some of the wheel parts and then gave up, same as I'd have done, maybe -- it turned out pretty well. I was too timid about my hand painting abilities, so other than tiny details everything is spray painted. But in the year since, I've completed several other kits (including a reissued creature-feature tableau I screwed up royally, back in the summer of '76), each time to no surprise growing a bit more fleet with the brush, more accurate with the glue, more tolerant of tacky paint (because model building is one part model building, eight parts watching paint dry). A lesson passed down, dusty boxes be damned: Turns out all you need to dissolve botched paint jobs and crooked joints and wonky wheels is just a little bit of ordinary time.

Aside from that poor old Forgotten Prisoner, I've built only cars. Maybe when I'm finished with that Mustang, I'll build an aircraft carrier. Or rather, a model of one.

Postscript, August 8 2014:

Commonplace Book: The Vortex Report

Underneath the tinsel and fabric is real tinsel and fabric.
   -- Davy Jones

They were rolling in wealth, sir. You've no idea. None of us has any idea. For years they had preyed on the Saracens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious metals, silks, ivories -- the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.
   -- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

Chandler or Hammett or one of those guys said the point of a plot in a detective movie is to get your hero to the next girl to flirt with. When's the next girl or funny bit going to happen. North by Northwest? Tell me again how he gets to the middle of the field with a plane after him? I can't. How does he get to Mount Rushmore? I don't know, but it's great.
   -- Paul Thomas Anderson, on adapting Inherent Vice for film

These urban myths can be attractors, they pick up little fragments of strangeness from everywhere, after a while nobody can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it's too unstructured. But somehow we'll still cherry-pick for the intriguing pieces, God forbid we should be taken in of course, we're too hip for that, and yet there's no final proof that some of it isn't true ...
   -- Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

History becomes what never happened. People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction.
   -- Daniel Wallace, Big Fish

It is a myth, not a mandate -- a fable, not a logic -- by which people are moved.
      -- Irwin Edman

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
   -- John F. Kennedy

There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths and there are made-up truths.
   -- Marion Barry

You don't tell us how to stage the news, and we don't tell you how to report it.
-- Larry Speakes, Press Secretary for George Bush, 1982

If we maintain our faith in God, our love of freedom, and superior global air power, I think we can look to the future with confidence.
   -- General Curtis LeMay

I keep thinking: now that every single human being on Earth has a camera phone, where are all those UFO pictures? Remember how you used to see those pictures? Some guy just happened to have a Polaroid when the UFOs appeared? Either it was all B.S., or my theory is that the Martians have decided, "Don't go down there, man. All those fuckers have cameras now."
   -- George Clooney

From their earliest years, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of children's everyday lives, and it is through fantasy that they achieve carthasis.
   -- Jonathan Cott, in a 1976 Rolling Stone profile of Maurice Sendak

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that a tomato doesn't belong in a fruit salad.
   -- Miles Beresford Kington

Ripping Yarns

I used to tear books in half for a living. Managing inventory for an indie bookstore during the 1990s, one of my tasks was "stripping" the mass market paperbacks. This entails, for those not in the trade, ripping the front cover off to return to the publisher in exchange for credit, then tearing the book in half (or into thirds or quarters, depending on the thickness of the tome) and trashing/recycling the remaining paper. I was often asked, Aren't you disturbed on some level, destroying all those books? Answer: Yes, I am disturbed on some level, but it's not from destroying all those books.

You might try and excuse this blasphemy by saying, well, they weren't sacred texts. It was a lot of unsold Danielle Steele and Zane Grey and Margaret Truman and Allan Folsom and Robert James Waller. But I'd rip up classics as well as over-ordered bestsellers -- not all those high school kids pick up what they need for Required Reading, after all, and there was no reason to keep stock of an extra 200 copies of The Awakening until the next fall, not when we needed credit for twelve cases of the new John Grisham novel, due to land come springtime.

That's how the book business works: We got only so much room for only so many books.

As of this writing, my library is comprised of just over 500 titles. (I know that number because, being disturbed on some level, I grabbed a cup of coffee and spent a couple-three minutes doing an inventory count, just like in the old days.) This is as small as my collection has been in many years. I reduced it significantly prior to our move to Birmingham, by somewhere in the neighborhood of forty percent, weeding out books I'd read decades prior, or might not read until decades hence, or might not read ever. It wasn't an entirely painless process, I will admit. Then again, neither was moving. We're talking four flights of stairs, here. Halfway through the day, I found myself wishing: If I knew which boxes my Really Treasured Books were in, I'd set the rest on fire, right down there in the street in full view of God and everybody, and only call the firemen to hose the ashes into the sewer.

My library has routinely expanded and contracted by way of constant acquisitions and occasional purges. I've tried to keep my collection bound by available shelf space, but this hasn't always worked; books tend to end up here and there, in decorative piles. But the purges accomplish more than clearing floor-space: as a dedicated apartment dweller, I never assumed permanence. Meaning, at some point, all that stuff has to be picked up and moved again, so why have more than I'm willing to carry? It's not so much about shelf space as it is about life space.

My sister Dena taught me to read when I was four, using Heckle & Jeckle comic books. (I disliked being read to, wanting instead to read for myself -- a characteristic I still have, pretty funny from a guy who came up with Southern Writers Reading as the eponymous title for an onstage literary event.) I was the unofficial class librarian throughout fourth grade, each week quickly raising my hand to volunteer for the task of dusting and tidying the industrial metal bookshelves that lined one wall of our classroom. I majored in English for five years, then found work in bookstores for the next thirteen -- and frankly got a much better education, taking home books about social and scientific theories, religion, histories, biographies, even a bit of literature now and then. I am, in short, no stranger to the joys that books provide.

I used to assume that a healthy personal library had to be a steadily growing thing -- it was a physical manifestation of the owner's mind, or at least a window into it. Books in that sense were trophies of achievement, each shelf the equivalent of a sheepskin certificate, even if it was only from the School of Nurse Romances. A library was evidence of the worthwhile shape of your life, and the more you had, the better, the faster, the smarter. But as somebody who hasn't lived in one particular place for more than a handful of years, my practical need to purge physical objects outweighs any urge to showcase what I've read in the past in order to perhaps prove to visitors that I can carry on an interesting conversation (because I often can't, anyway).

Buddhist monks spend hours, days, weeks creating those intricate mandalas out of colored sand, only to brush them away (ceremoniously, but still) after they finish. So, I wonder: What is this library but a multicolored mandala, a dreamcatcher, a skein of flexible ideas grouped here only temporarily, in this form, before again taking to the wind? Why hang onto books? Why even try? When Sonny Brewer and I were chasing dollars with used and rare tomes at Over the Transom, we'd occasionally receive a beloved copy of something, like that first state edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, or that full collection of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost stories -- and as tempting as it was to keep such things for ourselves, we had a great notion: we were only a temporary transit lounge. We were just keeping those books until their rightful owners came to collect them. We loved them, but we also loved seeing them go. (That is, after all, another way in which the book business works.)

At the end of Fahrenheit 451, there are almost no books left in the world, only people who remember those books. But it is more than memory, it is life itself. I am Plato's Republic, says one character, introducing others: I want you to meet Jonathan Swift [...] and this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr Albert Schweitzer. And so do we all become Spartacus, one book at a time.

I suppose it all boils down to a rephrasing of an old cliche: When I croak, I won't take any of these books with me. I'll only take what I've read. And what a gift that will be.

[This was a response to The Wily Blogger who will, I hope, one day reinstate her wily blogging.]

Commonplace Book: purevineland

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
     -- Alan Watts

The map is not the territory.
     -- Alfred Korzbyski

Eternity is not a length; it is a depth of time. We enter and meet there through the sacrament of love.
     -- Forrest Church

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

-- Henry David Thoreau

The purpose of the universe of the flowering of consciousness.
     -- Eckhart Tolle

You are an aperture through which the Universe is looking at and exploring itself.
     -- Alan Watts

Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
     -- Eckhart Tolle.

God chooses one man with a shout, another with a song, another with a whisper.
     -- Rabbi Nahman of Bratislava

To try to be better is to be better.
     -- Charlotte Cushman

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.
     --Thomas Jefferson

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.
     -- Anne Lamott

Worry is a form of prayer for something you don't want.
     -- Bhagavan Das

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
     -- Carl Jung

People tend to become like that which they love, with its name written on their brows.
     -- Huston Smith

The Astrolabe of the Mysteries of God is Love.
     -- Rumi

God is being, awareness, and bliss. God lies on the further side of being as we understand it, not nothingness; beyond minds as we know them, not mindless clay; beyond ecstasy, not agony. Understand with Shankara that "the sun shines even without objects to shine upon."
     -- Huston Smith, The World's Religions

My doctrine is not a doctrine but just a vision. I have not given you any set rules, I have not given you a system.
     -- The Buddha

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
     -- Leonard Cohen

Projectile Motion

Sometime around 6:45 p.m. that Wednesday evening, I received a single-word text message: Homeless.

My fiancée Jaime had, for the better part of an hour, been picking her way south through Tuscaloosa toward the Charleston Square apartment complex, her home for the previous two years while attending the University of Alabama School of Law. I was in Montgomery awaiting word, barely breathing. For those of us uninterested in listening to the "fast busy signal," the cell networks were useless; only intermittent texts were getting through.

She had taken shelter from the afternoon storm at the law office where she was clerking. It was a last-minute decision to stay there rather than return home -- a place of at least familiar comfort if not actual security. It was not a decision she’d made easily: Her nine-year-old polydactyl calico, Audrey, was waiting back home -- a cat she and I both referred to as our "daughter" (especially when she was getting into trouble, climbing into kitchen cabinets and knocking spice bottles and coffee mugs to the floor. "Look what your daughter is doing," we would say). Jaime's apartment complex was large, squat, and made predominantly of brick. It had been there for a generation if the Swinging Sixties-era light fixtures in the hallway and bathroom were any indication. Probably very safe.

After hearing James Spann report that the tornado was "downtown," Jaime and her co-workers locked themselves in a basement stairwell to wait it out. Long minutes passed silently -- no muffled howling, no creaking foundations. Turned out the law offices were well out of harm's way; it was the busy mall district just south of the University of Alabama campus that had been erroneously referred to as "downtown." When Jaime reached an upper-story window and looked out, she glimpsed the grinding, dirty edge of the funnel cloud, a wicked superimposition over a regular afternoon.

So, she had forewarning. The only question remaining was where, exactly, the damage would be -- how close to home. Answer: Very. More than a mile from her front door, blocked roadways forced Jaime to abandon her car and hike in work shoes down 10th Avenue, every step bringing her deeper into nightmare: a small grocery store with its front knocked off revealing unharmed stocked shelves; a muttering neighbor who could not be consoled; the National Guard armory on the corner of her street appeared to have been bombed, the Humvees and canopied trucks tossed like sandbox toys. Several blocks of the Rosedale Court neighborhood were simply gone.

Satellite photos now show the path of the storm -- nearly a mile wide -- crossing directly over Charleston Square, smearing the bold outline the buildings made around the lush four-acre courtyard -- a courtyard where Jaime and I had spent much of the previous Easter weekend, soaking up the sunshine while our laundry tumbled dry, watching mockingbird chicks flit from oak tree to pine tree and back again, their new wings lightly snapping in the air, wishing management would open the pool, already.

It was Saturday, three days after the tornado, before I saw the aftermath for myself. Carrying bins of empty duffel bags, our plan was to pick through the rubble to salvage what we could. Jaime had assembled a rough list of specific clothes and mementos; larger items and furniture were either buried or otherwise obstructed by fallen brick, a truth we had to reluctantly tell friends offering to drive up from as far as the Gulf Coast to help us. But the main concern was finding Audrey. We were armed with a stack of flyers, good shoes, and ready voices; I was prepared to upturn stones and call that cat's name for hours, didn't care how goofy I would look, how hoarse I would get, didn't care who I annoyed.

Jaime, of course, had already looked. She looked that Wednesday night, arriving ninety or so minutes after the horror struck, so shell shocked she couldn't see that the roof had been ripped from the entire building, not just above her own unit, where the living room yawned into the sky. She looked again on Thursday morning as Sealy maintenance persons shouted at her to get out of the wreckage, consoling herself by collecting as much fiberglass-infused clothing as she could before surrendering to the long car ride south to Montgomery, to me. "I managed to get a bunch of stuff," she said over the phone. My heart didn't break so much as collapse when I opened the hatch of her Focus to see only one small suitcase, one half-empty basket of dirty clothes, and some random waterlogged cardboard sheets from photo albums obviously blown apart, collected by the co-worker who had accompanied her that morning, who had known better than Jaime, in that moment, what might later be more important than some few handfuls of clothes. Because Jaime had nothing to unpack, we sat down on my living room floor and began peeling the photo-album pages apart, futilely trying to wipe the pictures clean of tornado grime. Because there was nothing to say, we said nothing.

Audrey was an inside cat, venturing out only on a harness, and even then usually just to hide in a nearby bush and thump her tail at birds. But she and I had begun making a morning ritual of "going for a sniff." I'd scoop her up against my shoulder, open the front door, and step out. Audrey would crane her neck, rotate her head this way and that, sniffing so hard it was more like snorting. Until some motion or noise would spook her, that is. Then she'd twist, piston her back feet off my chest, and project herself several feet into the living room.

It was exactly this survival instinct, based in happy cowardice, that gave me faith Audrey had ridden the storm out safely. How many times, on clear quiet days, had she gotten low and scooted down the hall to cover? She quite possibly heard the tornado form, miles away, sharp as her ears were; by the time it finished chewing Rosedale, she was probably not just under the bed, but inside. (Literally. Thanks to a convenient rip in the bottom fabric, Audrey had begun making the box spring her private clubhouse -- particularly when she sensed it was time to travel in her loathed pet carrier.) She would wait out the storm there, terrified but safe, hearing the wind test, then peel back, then eventually take the roof to scattered points to the north-northeast; the exterior brick wall collapsing into the living room, crushing all the furniture; the refrigerator banging from one side of the kitchen to the other while the windows exploded, while the trees were mangled bare, while mud flew like shrapnel, while cars were pummeled with heavy debris until the parking lot became a junkyard, while one section of an adjoining building collapsed into splinters, while the neighborhoods to all sides were blown, shrieking, into elemental pieces.

Audrey probably waited until all of this was over, until it was relatively quiet. Perhaps as long as an hour. Then, she went for a sniff. I imagined her, confused but alert, picking her way over the bricks, those extra toes splayed for traction, nose lifting as she embarked on an adventurous, unlimited sniff. I repeated this, as time crawled past, like a Zen mantra to myself and to Jaime: Audrey is fine. She's on a walk. We'll find her. At times, I could believe -- particularly when I knew Jaime, more than anything, needed to believe. At other times, usually while sleeplessly beached on the edge of the bed, it was a wish made on someone else's birthday cake.

Saturday we rose early, eager for the quest. We'd spent the previous day trying to relax, regroup -- venturing to the dry cleaners, to Saigon Deli for lunch, to the grocery store -- but it didn't work. We obsessed over news tidbits as they rolled in; Jaime found a terrifying account from her now-former next-door neighbors, who described the sound of the tornado as "nails on a chalkboard" and afterwards discovered a young woman dying outside the building. If I'd been there, Jaime would start, and never finish. We held each other, talked each other up, talked each other down, best we could. Jaime rationalized losing ninety-nine percent of everything she owned by calling it all "stuff we don't have to worry about moving out of Tuscaloosa, now." Because we couldn't process everything that had happened, and was still happening to so many people, we worried and grieved over the one small thing we could: our cat. By 5 p.m. on Friday, we'd tag-team called every vet office and shelter in northwest Alabama, leaving messages describing Audrey. Polydactyl calico, mostly black with gold flecks, yellow-green eyes, big white spot on her chest, little white toes, we love her very much.

By Saturday morning I was desperate and wired as Yosemite Sam, ready to hit the road at the first hint of light. The Jeep was packed with Hefty bags of my old clothes for donation; we had a long list of what to salvage and a rough plan for Audrey’s search-and-rescue operation, our ultimate purpose. But a renegade tree root beneath the foundations of my Montgomery apartment had other ideas. I had the car keys in my hand when the bathtub began to gurgle, gallon after gallon of dirty water belching upwards into the tub. (Had I been in possession of a Yosemite Sam mustache, the curled ends would surely have steamed themselves straight.) Our departure was delayed for nearly an hour while the superintendent was called, plumbers summoned, the bathtub bleached clean -- Mother Nature conspiring against us at every turn, or so it felt.

I've prepared for, witnessed, lived through, and cleaned up after hurricanes of Category 3 and Category 4 strength -- forces of nature large enough to shift coastlines. I've never seen anything like the destruction brought by the tornado that hit Tuscaloosa three days after Easter Sunday in 2011. You could say the devastation was wall-to-wall, but there were few walls left by which to judge. Words fail in the same way as when trying to describe the Grand Canyon to someone who has never seen a single square inch of the American West. Resorting to clichés like "war zone" or "movie set" only underlines the surreality of how quickly a familiar landscape can be turned inside out to reveal a kind of Shadow Hell you never knew was ever there.

Hurricane damage, by measure of contrast, is spread out -- diffused, if you like. Tornado damage is condensed, alarmingly specific, almost personal. In Tuscaloosa, I experienced it like a jump cut in a film: One moment I was walking up 10th Avenue, toward 27th; the next, I was surrounded by relentless destruction, a transition as sudden and heartless as if I'd dropped down a sixty-foot hole. Familiar landmarks had disappeared. I stopped short for a moment, transformed into a common rubbernecker, while Jaime took several strides ahead of me, handing flyers to volunteers stationed to pass out water and food to those who needed it. "Have you seen a cat? Has anyone seen a cat?"

"Yeah, I saw a cat over there," said a young boy, pointing to some half-gone house with rubble piled at all sides. What a fool's errand we had embarked upon: one skittish cat in a tornado. Three days had passed. We might as well have been wading a river in search of one particular fish.

We continued up to Charleston Square, passing the wrecked armory next door. Jaime's complex looked indistinguishable from it, or from any other debris pile in the vicinity. We stepped across the girded iron fencing, flattened as if by bulldozer, which had surrounded the grounds. My first impression was that fire, not wind, had been the factor of destruction, so thick were the building's outer walls coated with black dust and tornado filth. A car in the parking lot had been lifted up, then slammed back down atop a footlocker-sized beer cooler. A roofing beam jutted from the windshield of a nearby truck as though someone had used it in an attempt to pole-vault away from the damage. A quarter of the front building on the far right side had collapsed completely, granting a previously unavailable view of the courtyard and the interior side of Jaime's building, or what was left of it. All the second-story apartments were as roofless as ancient ruins, fronted by redbrick rubble, a drywall version of Jericho.

Jaime approached a cluster of Sealy personnel, flyers outstretched. We'd been in Tuscaloosa all of fifteen minutes. "They just found a cat, go look over there," a maintenance worker pointed toward a second group of Sealy personnel stationed at tables arranged near what was left of the gated entrance, now an impromptu check-in point for residents coming to scavenge their former homes. On a table off to one side, sheltered by a particolored beach umbrella, sat a small laundry basket covered with a sheet.

Audrey.

A half-hour earlier, maintenance had conducted a sweep of the buildings, still looking for people. They found Audrey under a bed in unit #95, downstairs and across from Jaime's apartment, #122. Nervous, understandably thirsty, a little grumpy about being cramped down in the bottom of the basket (she's a large cat), but otherwise not a scratch on her -- just some nugget of paste stuck to her fur, easily snipped away later on. They had situated her beneath the umbrella just moments prior, not long after we parked and started walking up 10th Avenue. Meaning: The root-clogged plumbing lines of my own apartment had not delayed us at all. We were right on time.

Forty-eight hours prior to finding Audrey, as we sorted through what few clothes Jaime had salvaged, she extracted a foreign torn scrap of paper from within one of her blouses. It is a printed fragment, crumpled and flyspecked with mud, from someone's science-class Powerpoint presentation. It is headed PROJECTILE MOTION. Below that are two lines: An object may move in both the X and Y directions simultaneously. The form of two-dimensional motion we will deal with is called projectile motion. In other words, what goes up will come back down. What leaves you will find its way home.

The scary mystery of what Audrey must have seen and heard just after the tornado and in the long days and nights that followed only deepens for Jaime and me as we learn more about what happened to others. It does not escape us that, compared to many, Jaime (like Audrey) emerged visibly unscathed. It is an inconvenience, and a massive one, to lose everything but what's on your back -- including much that will not have a replacement awaiting purchase on some store shelf and cannot be covered by any amount of insurance. But, in the end, even these are only things. Many in Tuscaloosa and across the South lost far more than some physical objects, however treasured. Treasures can be fondly remembered as we work to forget the trauma; the long road towards healing begins with the rubble around us.

Though she can't voice her adventures, it's clear Audrey can show us the way. Jaime's mother works at a veterinarian's office near Huntsville and cautioned us to watch our daughter, monitor her behavior; she was certain to be affected by her experiences. But soon after arriving back in Montgomery, after eating her fill and submitting to as many bellyrubs as Jaime and I could dish out, Audrey was back to her usual cat business, jumping onto the refrigerator and getting inside the kitchen cabinets. Let her break all the mugs she wants, I told Jaime. We'll buy more. Because the important thing is: We're home.

On April 23 2012, the Oxford American republished "Projectile Motion" as an online original.