... a few hundred of them, arranged in iambic pentameter, two and a half sonnets on wind, lost when the click of the “save” button failed to save.
It’s exactly like the Alexandria library burning. Exactly like that. Except much, much smaller.
So here are some different, older words. Stars in the city. Some stuff about wind too. I think, looking at it, that my writing has changed a bit for the better in the last eight years. I am fighting the temptation to edit overmuch.
I’m going to bed now. Stupid internets.
Tonight, the third of July 1999, Zeke was freaking out.
He panics at the sound of fireworks, gunshots, anything that sounds like explosions. Our neighbors here in Richmond have a pool table in their garage, and they play with the door open: the sharp crack of ball against ball sends Zeke under the workstation in the corner of my office, trembling.
At about nine o’clock tonight there was a prolonged series of large blasts, like mortars shelling Oakland. I had retreated to the couch, reading yet another book on the Sonoran Desert. (A problem with Fame and Writing: of the six billion people alive on the planet at the moment, some double-digit percentage have written a book on the natural history of the Sonoran Desert. It is hard to keep one’s head above water in this sea of desert ink. I suspect there is not an individual saguaro that lacks its own monograph.) As I read a paragraph about dying swallows, the far-off rumbles came and rattled the house. Zeke bravely poked his head out from around the corner of the kitchen door, mouth open and panting, looking for a comforting stroke, and reassurance that he was a good dog, that he was not crazy, and that he was accompanied on this yearly descent into the madness that only a dog on a fourth of July weekend can truly know.
I woke Becky from her well-deserved sleep to help me comfort him. We put antipasto on crackers, and ate, and the barrage continued, and I went outside to see if I could find the traces of burning powder across the sky whose sonic leavings were plaguing the enfeebled mind of my poor dog.
I saw nothing but the stars and the mercury vapor lights, and fast food paper wrappings propelled by the constant wind. Said wind pulled at my torn T-shirt, rippled the hairs on the tops of my bare feet. I walked to the corner, then into the corner, then placed myself precisely at the center of the intersection of fortieth street and Nevin Avenue, Richmond, California. A manhole marked the crux of the intersection. I planted a sole on the northeast and southwest margins of the metal and looked up.
There were fireworks to be seen, but they were the same old fusion-propelled fireworks visible in the sky on almost any night. One hydrogen atom pushes too hard against another; each loses its individuality in the struggle, with only an emitted photon to tell the tale. Photons propel hydrogen atoms into one another. The process enlarges, heating, speeding more hydrogen, freeing more photons. It’s a cycle of the kind usually described by the wholly inadequate, prosaically corporate term “positive feedback”: each iteration ratchets up the conditions in which the next iteration occurs. Process shapes context shapes process. Heat and pressure increase until, eventually, the universe explodes: a sustained relativistic reaction of matter split asunder and violent energy poured out into the void.
And what a void it is: capable of swallowing that raw chaotic scream of photons and muting it, muffling the unimaginable atomic violence using little but unimaginable distance, until the seething of protons leaves only the faintest trace on my retinas. Very few stars are visible, despite the cloudless sky. At last, I think, a sky in which the stars are few enough to be tallied. I realize that I’ve started to count them. Only the brightest stars shine enough to penetrate the murky haze of Richmond; even my own limited memory holds skies over drier, darker landscapes that hold ten thousand times more stars, and even in those remembered starscapes the glow is faint, insignificant except to those deliberately seeking significance.
I do count myself as one of those so seeking. What answer is there to such a colossal void but to find meaning in the insignificant? It seems a calculated act of defiance, of joyous rebellion, to count the stars that puncture the crushing dark. Isn’t it exactly that atomic violence that propels the wind now sensuously raking my hair, rippling the fabric of my shirt? Seeking constancy in the void is a risky proposition. Even the void itself may not be constant. And what is meaning if not constancy? The meaning itself may change, but those changes are the flickering of the pole star. The light and heat may waver, but the point of reference remains.
If it truly exists, that is. Any of these stars I see tonight may have winked out long ago, this light a stream of letters from a correspondent that has died. For all I know, Polaris itself, that stellar point of reference, may be no more. There are those who are expert enough in the light sent out by the stars that they could read the minor fluctuations in her light and say with a modicum of certainty whether she still exists. I suspect that if Polaris was a likely candidate for recent supernova, I’d have read of it. The papers would have picked it up, plastered it on the front page on a slow news day. But I don’t know for sure.
In any case, Polaris is a point of reference only because of our perspective, living on a spinning ball of rock whose axis nearly and coincidentally spears Polaris, for the moment. It is neither constant nor stationary: it is hurtling through a near-random cosmos at speeds unimaginable. A trillion accidents have brought us to this point. Still, Polaris — at least in the recorded lifetime of my species — brings meaning to the night sky. It is a beacon of place.
Headlight glare envelops me. My neighbor, coming home from the fireworks display in Berkeley. Suddenly embarrassed, I drop my eyes and head inside. At the porch, I hesitate and cast one last look back northward, thirty-some-odd degrees above the horizon, at the seemingly still center of the wheeling, murky sky.
Geez.
This slayed me this morning.
A beautiful essay, Chris, and it spoke brightly.
Thank you.
And re: the unsaved sonnets - they will be back in one form or another, and meanwhile, let me know if you’d like me to beat up your computer.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan . . .
or something like that.