Hello. Miss me?
None of you really need to answer that. Looking back at my records, it has been close to a year since I've done one of these, which is really too long. I'll try not to let it happen again. It's funny to me how a year is by definition a fairly long time but everyone seems to feel it goes by so quickly. Not for me, time always seems to crawl, I'm too aware of every minute, even when I'm sleeping. Which I'm just fine with, I'm really not in any hurry to get any of this over with. Though this last year has been fraught with all sorts of changes, among them the company I work for filing for bankruptcy and collapsing (*gasp*), turning thirty quite recently (*double gasp*) and a multitude of others that amount to varying degrees to good and bad. The same as anyone else, and being that this isn't my diary, we're not really going to go into them.
What we are going to get into are stories and in particular, one story. You know, just like we used to. Remember those days? You and me, out on the swings and that lovely day in the park when the sunlight was just warm enough that the day could fade away into a timeless haze. We don't get days like that anymore, they're not quite the same shape, or hold up quite so dearly as memory allows. That's how stories start, isn't it? Assembled from little bits of memory and we try to arrange those bits into some kind of narrative to convince ourselves that it all makes sense, that we can write realistically about life and pretend that it falls into a sort of logical progression, that every instance is feeding into the grand scheme. That it will all lead into what we hope, as they say, is the grand finale, as opposed to the grand finally.
Which is perhaps the difference between life and stories. Your life is not the same as the person's next to you, it does not follow the same pattern or hold the same conglomeration of events. Your reactions to similar events is not the same as mine, and all of those tiny decisions lead down the rambling branches that are our lives. But that makes for terrible storytelling, so some kind of structure has to be imposed. Or else it's like trying to squeeze out toothpaste from a tube full of holes . . . instead of nice even gel, it's all over the place, and a mess. There's no definition to it at all.
The problem is, in imposing that definition, are we forming the structure and filling in the story or are we doing our best to shoehorn our pieces into a pre-existing shape? Snow falling on your backyard, the storm is never the same but the white blanket that forms holds the shape of everything you used to know. The next morning there's tracks marked all over the landscape and even if they're all going to the same place the cadences are different and maybe some paths are more winding than others. I'm mixing metaphors here, trying to define something by dancing around the outline of it and hoping that you'll be able to figure out the center, because I don't know quite how to say it. Maybe . . . wait.
Life is a series of tracks plodding relentlessly forward across a bank of snow. And you can write new paths on the canvas, or walk in someone else's footsteps and leave no impression of your own. I can't make my bizarre complicated metaphor any plainer.
Hm. This sounds like the end of a column, rather than the beginning. And I really shouldn't be coming to my conclusions before I even get into the story and give people a chance to draw their own opinions. So let's leave this aside then and discuss the marks we make on the snow, or lack thereof.
William Avett. "Knight Stand". I normally make one inappropriate joke during these things so I might as well get it out of the way now . . . every time I saw the name of the horse I kept hearing the Mountain Goats' song "Golden Boy" which I think is about a brand of peanuts. You know the one, where John Darnielle shouts with all his nasally passion "There are no Pan-Asian supermarkets down in hell, so you can't buy Golden Boy Peanuts!" It certainly isn't what you think someone would bother to write a song about, let alone play it as utterly serious. And yet it works, perhaps because you're not expecting it, or because Darnielle sounds like he believe every single word. Which just goes to show you, you don't have to always give people what they expect.
What do we expect here?
A knight. Hello, knight! Both the good and bad thing about genre conventions is that it gives us something of a shared language, you can pick up nearly any book with dragons on the cover and when somebody says "knight" you can be more or less assured that what you imagine is pretty close to what's actually inside. In fact, if you took the book to someone else and asked them to describe what a knight was, chances are they'll come close as well, even if they don't normally read fantasy. Part of it is probably due to cultural considerations as well, a knight may not mean the same thing to us Anglo-centric people raised on King Arthur legends and a pretty funny Monty Python movie as it might to someone from say, India or China. Do they even have knights in ancient Hawaiian legends? That may be an avenue worth exploring.
So, what do we have here? A knight. On a Quest . . . the capital letters aren't used in the story itself but it's basically implied. He's here on a mission and the mission itself isn't exactly specified but the important issue is that he's on one. He's alone and detached, sent away by a king who is so far away he only exists as a name. In some sense, he's us, right? He's all of us who try to write in our little genres, forging ahead on quests that seem endless and attempting to follow rules that were set down by people that we never met. Who says you have to go this way? The king, of course. Who says that knights have to wear armor and ride horses and go on quests? Fantasy, of course. Maybe I'm extending the metaphor too far but my question to throw out for now, and one we'll probably get into more later . . . why do knights have to be knights? Why do we fall back on the shorthand when you have a whole field of places to visit?
A whole field or an empty village. A knight wandering in through a literal jungle of Proper Names. King. Treasure. Royal Quest. None of these are really explained and they'll be joined by more Capitalized Words later, which again kind of gives us the shortcut of not having to explain. Edward seems quite content to ride off on a quest that may very well kill him, for a goal that is elusive. After all he's not going after Glory or Honor or Passion . . . but merely Treasure. Riches. Basically he's chosen to let someone else dictate the course of his life and . . . why? Because he believes in the king, or the rightness of the kingdom? Because he's grown up from birth hearing nothing but people telling him that a boy's fondest dream should be to become a knight and go on a grand quest for the king? Maybe Edward doesn't know anything else and thus this seems like a perfectly reasonable course of action to him.
Or maybe it's because he's a knight and this is the kind of thing that knights do. Walking in the footsteps of others across a well trodden field of freshly fallen snow. It's always interesting to me how fantasy characters seem blissfully unaware of their own perils, nobody ever stops before going alone into a deserted and vaguely creepy village to think "Gee, every time this happens in an old story, they run into something fairly terrible." Not that I'm saying fantasy should aspire to Scream levels of self-referential genre hipness, but it just would be nice if once in a while someone actually paid attention to all those old folk tales. In real life, if someone walks into a old and deserted building site and gets mugged, we don't say, "Gosh, what an unexpected plot twist." Instead, we say, "The fool, didn't he know what was going to happen?"
But, again, that's probably the difference between a story and a life. Stories need drama and tension . . . unless you're a teenager or into skydiving or otherwise courting death, you probably don't.
So we need some sense of drama here. Fine. I'm not looking for my knights to start emulating Sherwood Anderson stories. But we need to go further, because right now we're following in other footsteps and if one is merely placing one foot in front of the other and into depressions that were already made, then all we need to do is look ahead and see where this is going. Is there a way we can deviate? Are there other fields we can venture off into and perhaps find a different view, past the trees or over another hill that may be a little further than we expected but not quite impossibly far. We could reach it. He could reach it. He could go.
Instead Edward beds down for the night, refusing to go any further. That's the problem, right? We like our confines, we like our comfort. Edward has his horse and his armor and a nice fire going and this is all he needs. This Quest isn't so hard, what the heck were those little men with the hairy feet complaining about? We could run out into the night and try to find what new shapes the darkness makes or we could stay here and insulate ourselves from it, go no further. Nestle down among the familiar rocks and the familiar fire, a bit of roasted rabbit to make the morning come a little quicker. We do that, don't we, without even realizing it. Bunker on down without a second thought because This Is Just the Way Things Are Done. You're a knight, Edward. Knights go on quests and find villages and when they find the villages they stop for the night. You're just passing through. Pay no attention to all the foot prints on the ground. No one else has been this way before. Certainly not you. Not yet.
But it's you they come for in the end. In the night when you're not expecting it (but we are) they surround you and attack. We barely see them, just flashes in a hail of violence, a sword swept out and severing arm from torso, a bone cleaved, a scream truncated. Lashing out without knowing what one is hitting, racing to escape without knowing what he's really trying to escape from. But we see them, those fast glimpses of slavering lips and elongated howls. There's no time for talk, there's no need. That's not what anybody is here for. Whipping around in the dark trying to find a direction in a place where suddenly there are no concrete paths to take. Except for the people who keep trying to lead you down streets that you don't want to go. Down streets that came from, or came to, and hold no promises that seem worth keeping.
Don't look at me like that, I don't go searching for these metaphors, they somehow find me. It's not explicitly stated but the body language is all there, the cues we recognize. They shamble and they mill, they moan and cluster and never stop until they have you. Edward has taken a side detour into a George Romero movie and that's not necessarily a bad thing if the story decided to linger here, because here it taps at the microphone, sucking at the first intake of breath that suggests it may have something to say. Edward is a knight, we know this. We know there are seventeen knights that are also roaming around on the same quests. Knights that are just like him. What makes him different, what makes his story more interesting that we shouldn't follow one of those knights? Why follow any knights at all? They're just men in armor with swords who act chivalrous and slay anyone who gets in their way. Because the Quest is everything. And what if it isn't?
What if you came to a place that was full of people who were now all the same, who had stared into something worse than the feelings festering in their hearts, who discovered that a mirror isn't just a reflection but a window and if you stare into it long enough it will tear every quirk and wrinkle and fold, leaving nothing behind but eyes that are merely mirrors of the next face they see? People who set out wanting to be different but found that by staring into the vista, the vista changed them? What if you came to that place and all these people who used to be different as you and I but are now the same, what if they saw you and what they saw, they hated. Because you remind them of what was given up, and what they can never have back.
And what you have, they'll want to take it all away. Where am I going with this? Is it too honest to admit that I'm not entirely sure? What bothers me about fantasy sometimes is that it rarely speaks to me in places that I live. Not the whole knights and magic thing, I read science-fiction just fine and I'll probably never set foot inside a spaceship or meet an alien for as long as I live. But that broadness of good versus evil, with very little middle ground except for perhaps a rogue with questionable morals, the mercenary who has the change of heart, the witch who changes her alliances for love . . . I look out the window and these things don't exist in any place that I know. The nuances are too rampant and while I can revel in their triumphs, it's admiring the broad splashes of color that splatter across the page when I'd rather see the gradations and the shadings. I like the color red and I like the color blue and I want to see them mix. I don't want one to annihilate the other in a dramatic swordfight.
Here, though. Here. I can understand this. These people live in the places that I know, I see them every day when I go to work, when I walk down my street, when they pass me on the sidewalk and refuse to make eye contact. The people without original thoughts, the people who had the chance to be different but instead made the worst decision one can possibly make . . . to be like everyone else. To blend in and be no better nor worse than the next person who is shambling alongside of you. The ones who gave up creativity and awareness and spark for the dull comfort of residing in the familiar, among people who are just like them in every way.
Suddenly the story snaps into focus, even if Edward doesn't quite realize it. The city is disguised as a warning to him, suffused with cursed snarling shapes that aren't able to articulate what he's ultimately escaping from. I made the semi-joke earlier that he had stepped into a zombie movie but let's consider the point seriously for a second. What are zombies representative of, if not conformity? Faceless masses closing in on all sides, wanting nothing more than to make you just like them. Every person who ever questioned why you deviate, why you write what you like instead of trying to emulate "that woman who wrote Harry Potter", why you make a left turn instead of a right, why you're incapable of putting the puzzle pieces together properly because you keep seeing another picture lurking in the clutter, why you won't fall into step because it sure would help make the line shuffle by faster. All the people who want your life to be like theirs because they don't have the guts to take yours, or find their own.
Those people are everywhere and if you're not careful they can steer right down their streets, to the places that they live and you will never be able to find your way back. It's becoming a struggle that we can grasp. This is what Edward is running from, or fighting against. A whole genre that wants to shoehorn him into a life that he may not want, even as he can't imagine anything else. All those other knights riding around out there, thinking the same thoughts, forging ahead on the same quest . . . is that the best that he can aspire to? To be just another man in clunky armor who knows who to swing a sword? If so, then he's always going to be trapped inside the village and with good reason, for this is where he belongs. It's how they win, by making you think these are your only choices. The greatest evil that exists in the world is when they convince you that it's okay to stop at mediocrity, that there's no reason to go any further. That the best you can be is only a knight, in a sea of them. That the best your story can be is "only" a fantasy story, with all the trappings that suggests.
For me, the struggle here isn't good versus evil. For all we know Edward's king could be evil and because the story is told from Edward's perspective, we may not realize that until we've put him firmly into the "good guy" category, forcing us to reevaluate. Dichotomies of morality aren't really the case here, it goes deeper. It's the struggle between being who you are versus what the world wants you to be, a struggle that goes both inner and outer. Inner, as the world keeps trying to find excuses to pull him down and force him to conform, to drown him in the suffocating sense that this is the best he can do and it's crazy to want to be anything else. Outer, as the pressures from a genre that isn't all that amenable to change insist on trying to restrict him to a path that's well worn and well marked. And the struggle comes from proving that it doesn't have to necessarily have to be true, on any level.
A story that embroils itself in trying to sort out the knotted peculiarities of this conflict would be an interesting place to take this, a welcome respite from a legion of stories that want to do widescreen quest action. Taking the readers through a travelogue of places that you made up is entertaining in its own right, but any story that wants to be more than words on paper has to find some way to speak through more than its words. Merely saying "evil is bad" isn't enough, I can read the newspaper and decide that, I can read an entire section in the bookstore that wants to tell me that in multi-volume detail. The story could tell us that, but I don't think it wants to, it has further concerns that skitter just under the surface. Concerns that should be teased out and brought to light.
It all lies in the sideways places, no matter how much the story wants to convince us otherwise. And it tries so hard. It screams for a quest so loudly that the leaves overhead shiver. It bellows for us to accept that Edward is Someone Important, that the reason we're following his story above all the others is that because he is the great iconic coming, the lowly lad raised up to be a true hero. It stomps so hard in the footprints of those that have gone before that the mud is seeping from beneath the soil like greasy and tainted blood. It very much wants all of this to be quite true.
Yet the deeper pleasures lie in those quiet places. If you stop for a second and listen to the whispering, the soft crunch of new snow in the fields that are otherwise unmarred, the sound a shadow makes when it falls ahead of itself into an unknown darkness, if you stop to listen you will hear the real story underneath all of the genre fueled posturing. The frightening warning that comes in the hisses of people who have already given up. The avenues that have exits but not destinations. The moment when you realize that you've stopped hearing the shearing sound your sword makes when it's cutting off someone's limb, because it's just another noise. The cloying, disturbing comfort that comes from seeing ranks of knights and taking pride that when the visors are down, you can't tell who is who anymore.
A series of tiny revelations like this, all leading inevitably outward even as the story tries to press him inward, could frame the conflict in harsher, quietly clanging terms. The story is already most of the way there, gyrating in the giant shadow of a massive quest it makes its points with a trembling finger, showing him warnings first, and then possible futures.
Futures that lie in the potential arms of Mistress Delenor, who appears to both save and doom him. With her love and through her love, bringing him partway down a road that could promise him everything he ever wanted. And all he has to do is give up wanting to see what lies down any other road, until his days run out. She comes in without warning, as these women often do, placed in a position that defies logical sense initially because it is meant to be a thing that we are not supposed to comprehend at first. But we comprehend the sky easily enough, even if we don't understand quite how far it goes or what exactly constitutes it. We'll stare up at it for hours, just to give ourselves something else to look at. Edward has a chance to do that here, to tear his gaze away from the Quest that has had him staring at the snow for so long, that threatens to make every step more mundane than the last.
She's got him in, then. They exchange formalities, familiarities, leading their way toward intimacies. The old subtle and known dance, the interplay between exposition and emotion. She tells us what's going on, as she has to, but of course doesn't tell us the whole story, because she's not allowed to do that either. Everyone falls into the roles that the rules keep setting out for them. Are we trying to make the stories more like our lives or our lives more like stories? To turn the episodic and the rambling into the struggling and progressive? Nobody wants to think that their lives are meant to be a kind of checklist, school and college and love and marriage and children and retirement and old age, with room for vacations and setbacks and moves. Yet it's the kind of thing we expect in our stories, isn't it? Certain targets have to be hit before the story can move on to other places and no matter how far Edward tries to run he winds up going right toward where the story wants him to be.
And where he thinks he wants to be. The old legends and the myths, telling us of the knights who found love, epoch changing, fulfilling love. It's that simple, really, isn't it? A dinner and some pleasantries, the notion that you have something in common other than a pulse and suddenly you're in bed. And suddenly you're in love. Just like that. We've all been paying attention and it still comes out of nowhere. Yet we don't really question it, do we? Not at first. Because in a way we're conditioned to expect this kind of thing, right? The same way that we don't question when the two characters run into each other at the elevator in that cute movie billed as "fun for couples" how they're eventually going to wind up together by the time the credits roll. He is a knight and she is a lady. Passion is supposed to be pretty much a given.
But as much as Edward falls right down like an armored domino, sliding into semi-domestic bliss in an oasis of zombie snarling terror with the ease of a sword sliding into exposed flesh, it only highlights the mechanism behind the gears that are driving the story forward. Like when you wake up too early and you hear the street sweeper rolling down your block and it occurs to you for maybe the first time that the streets don't just clean themselves. A whole scaffolding exists around the world to make it work. He is a knight and she is a lady and thus they must fall in love. This is the way things are. The standard contract. What we all recognize.
But to just accept all this reduces love to nothing more than just another brand of conformity. Running away from the zombies into something else just as stifling. There's no excitement to their love because it's so expected, we're seeing people who don't realize they're going through the motions suddenly going through the motions. Or at least we don't think they know. The great failing of stories is that they tend to reuse the same templates, even if they try to dress it up in new ways. The words the stencils make always stay the same. Is that a true reflection, though? Think of your life and the lives you know, of the loves that you've witnessed and lost and experienced. It comes in as many varieties that there are people, from the quiet to the expansive. The ones who have known since that moment on the grade school playground when she kicked the ball at you and smiled when you had the audacity to look wounded, when you knew you were already wounded and gone. The one you run into on the airplane who keeps talking to you even though all the words you know are science and all the ones she knows are suffused with art. The one you got tired of waiting for and so walked but never really let go. The one you took the leap and told and found that you were right all along. The one you stay with because they keep every promise. The one you stay with because you have no promises between you, because none are necessary. What we know immediately and what we're never sure of.
All the facets that exist, you walk down the street and it's passing through shards of other stories. Holding hands, reflected in glass, watching from office buildings at the elegant randomness of motion, twin laughter and teasing out of sync. The first rush and the hints of forever. The ones who have no choice but to stop while the crowd surges in a bulge around them, because they can't fathom how any of this could be real. We've got all of that, nestled safely in these rambling lives. What does Edward have? The knight falls for the lady's beauty and the promise of forever. She's the first woman we've seen in the entire story and there's no hint he's even looking for a mate, but now he's found her and he's found a home. It's all terribly romantic and terribly formulaic. The story should be asking us why we insist on this, why when it resembles nothing at all that we recognize, do we insist it has to turn out this way every time. To be together just because. Turning the marvelous varieties of love into just another plot point, a box on the checklist that needs to be notched before we can go any further. Staring up at the sky so much that you don't realize until you happen to look down that there's no new footsteps in the snow, you've been following well trod paths all along. And where it goes is merely more of the same.
It's not the only story that has ever done this, of course, and it wouldn't be fair to disparage the tale because it feints like it's going this route. Everyone tries to go this route, there's a reason we have "storybook love" or "fairytale romance". Yet we allow it, in our books and in our movies, settling for the straightforward and rote when the real manifestations of it are so much more wonderful and complex. Is it because we want the easiest path to a happy ending, in order to convince ourselves that it could work this way in real life? Structured properly, a fantasy romance could be soaring and spacious, designed to make the hearts of those with even an ounce of romance in them flutter uncontrollably. But it wouldn't be real and I don't say that because it's fiction. There's no feeling present, it's just words. It's all just words, but it lacks the heft and the weight, the experience of old love or the elegant messy rush of new love. No matter how many times Edward and Delenor profess their love in the scant space of those few paragraphs, none of it holds even a fraction of the wordless way a girl will lay her head on her boyfriend's shoulder as if it helps her think, as if the knowledge of that support means everything. Or the silent frustrations of a husband pacing up and down a greeting card aisle, taking each card and discarding it, determined not to leave until he can find one that has the words he can't articulate.
Maybe because fiction is supposed to be an escape is why we allow this. Real life is a struggle of sorts and most people don't want to read a reflection of their own problems on the printed page. Having two people meet and instantly fall for each other, even when the steps of it are expected and predictable, is easier than watching two people fumble into knowing each other and all the uncertainties and mistakes that come with that. Easy and pat solutions are better than no solutions at all. But what they miss is when it does work, when the obstacles are overcome, what you are left with is earned.
If the story just left it at that, it would nothing more than a trifle. Quests and epic witch love. Yawn. But just as Edward doesn't actually vanquish the marauding zombies, we're treated to an exposure of the lie that has been informing the story up to this point. Namely, that the love isn't real. It was never real, just a witch's spell forcing upon us a facade that we eagerly bought into, that we followed right along with because we're trained not to expect anything else from a story like this. Of course they're in love, that's the way it has to be. But by giving us that love and then revealing it as a fraud, the author does something that comes close to a metaphorical checkmate, giving us a romance that resembles every other standard fantasy romance and then calling attention to the falsity of it. It shouldn't exist, the story is saying. It shouldn't work this way and every person out there who buys into it is guilty of what the zombies were trying to do, impose a notion of how the world should be, instead of merely accepting what it is. Or, even more daringly, wanting to make it different. Having grown so complacent, it takes a sort of shock to make us realize that what we've come to take as the new normality is nothing more than a systematic laziness. For this love to work, it can only happen through artificial means. Like a witch's spell. Or the straitjacketed strictures of a genre that keeps finding only one lens to view itself through.
Just in the nick of time Edward wriggles out from under the plot device that threatens to smother him. And we get a chance to question our reflexive acceptance of it. Indeed, the story itself seems to be asking that question too, with the Glowing Ball of Maybe Exposition basically saying to Lady Delenor, "Did you really think it would be this easy? Did you really think you wouldn't have to work for it?" Of course she does. We all do. The lady reveals herself to be a bit of a cheater in the ways of the heart, and for the sake of not starting trouble we won't read into that as a comment on the devious and magical ways of women. She'd like a man and this one seems nice enough, he'll do. And after all, Edward gets to spend the rest of his life being loved and being taken care of. It's a win-win. So what if it's not honest? Besides, how many of us would have liked to have done this ourselves, cast a spell and be sure. Be certain and never let ourselves wonder if it would have worked if we didn't have help.
The story does make an interesting assumption via the witch that love isn't something that can be formed through a mutual connection and shared affection, but merely can be turned on and off as if by a flick of the switch. As imposed as the love was, the witch still claims it was real, as opposed to him feeling like it was real. Although the story also implies toward the end that Edward would have fallen in love with her anyway, so perhaps her spell doesn't work as well as she seems to think it does. Time will tell. That's how it works in real life too. Love that is, not the spell part.
And then Edward leaves, off to whatever Quest he had initially undertaken when the story started. It's an interesting tactic the story takes, setting us up for standard fantasy tropes and then just as suddenly rejecting them, teasing us with the potential for things to get more complicated. That doesn't mean it will follow through, one reason that I do like why the story stops where it does is that it lets this questions linger, like icicles hanging off trees in the brisk morning air. It may keep going and become something utterly bog-standard, cheerfully hacking its way through every genre cliche it can find. Judging by the ending, I suspect that Delenor and Edward won't shake hands at the finale and decide to be just friends. But if it's earned honestly, then I won't care. Reasons, whether we're privy to them or not, are enough, even if they're terrible reasons. At least it implies some train of thought. I don't accept "just because" as an answer from my friends and I don't accept it from my fictional characters either. We can always strive to be more.
I don't know if the author can keep this up. I don't know if he even wants to. I have a tendency, if you haven't noticed, to take what would be perfectly normal stories and try to tease out other layers of meanings, whether the story really wants me to or not. I try to because, frankly, without some weight of meaning, it's just words and we're nothing more than narrators. Part of me can't let that be true. Make of it what you will.
Presuming there are going to be future chapters (if they don't already exist), it remains to be seen how this will all shake out. Maybe the author is perfectly content with going through the motions in later chapters, pulling back from the potentials and implications that are outlined here. Maybe he'll want to deviate further and write people instead of archetypes, with all the foibles and complications and wonders that come along with them. Maybe Edward will eternally seek a quest that can't be defined, one that he's also unable to quit. How many of us can claim we aren't doing otherwise, roaming through our rambling days?
If anyone takes anything from any of the last handful of pages, all the chatter about love and zombies and genre conventions, all the ridiculous claptrap that I tend to spout when I've decided I'm going to go on at length about something . . . if you are to walk out of here with something, let it be my insistence, my plea, my fervent reminder that a story does not have to be just a story. Not just a fantasy story or just a tale about some guy who fights zombies and falsely falls in love or just ten pages. None of that has to be true. We are given gifts and we are given this time to use them. Others have come before us and still others will come after us. You know, the way is already marked. Look, see, it's all up ahead. Sure, it's easier to walk here in the other depressions, with the snow being so thick and slippery. And just over that hill is a cabin, you can see the smoke rising whispery thin and promising into the crisp sky. Maybe you can hear people already in the cabin, laughter and conversation. Everyone has gone there. There's probably food and something strong to drink. Chances are they're waiting. People are always waiting for another to join the crowd. The more, the merrier, right?
And it's so cold out here, frankly. Your breath keeps making flailing furtive ghosts in the milk-gold light, someone must have slipped ice inside your boots and the wind is determined to take pieces of you with it, flake by flake. It'll chip you away, little by little if stay out here. That's the price. So, go inside. Just follow the footprints and you'll be with everyone else, you'll be fine.
But then you stop. It's bitter cold but you do it anyway. You stop and you think about how if you stay here long enough a person is going to come along behind you, following the same path. And maybe they'll ask why you, with wide eyes and shivering just a little, they'll ask why you went ahead to the cabin. Why is it so important that we follow and go there?
And you think about it, with the cold sapping and gnawing at you, and you realize that one day you will owe that person an answer. And the only one you can give right now isn't good enough anymore.
Still, the familiar and marked path ahead beckons. And the snow around is so thick, it's going to be a hell of a struggle to leave the path. Is it really worth bothering?
And yet, that copse of trees is looking interesting and what could possibly be on the other side of that hill over there? And where are those birds going, in pinwheel spirals overhead? Maybe . . .
We've been marching in the cold long enough, following the lead of others. So. You there. Go on, take the first step. Get off the path. Go.
It's when you hear the crunch of the first footfall on freshly fallen snow and feel the snap of frigid air in your lungs that you think, beautifully and simply: yes.
Do not let anyone tell you there is a definite way to do anything. Including me. Do not forget that.
New vistas are always ahead. Look around. Please.
And go.
- MB
9.2.09
"There is a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline and sometimes when I'm falling, flying or tumbling in turmoil I say, oh this is what she means . . ." – Paul Simon, "Graceland"
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