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When a story is told to another person it takes on a life of its own; it spreads, contagion-like. The more times a story is shared the more powerful it becomes.
They want the language to do the opposite of what language should do, which is leave a mark. They want the language to be forgettable, familiar, digestible. To enter into the reader and disappear without a trace.
around this time that I started to wonder if the wilderness is not something a person can choose to leave. Rather it is a place that lives inside us. A landscape with its own intelligence and design.
Sometimes our collective familial memory is like a field riddled with deep holes. You never know when you are going to slip and fall into one.
So far this year has felt like living under a giant blanket, out of view of the wider world, but underneath that blanket exists a whole universe of memory and association and experience. I am never alone. Under the blanket I have, to my absolute horror, all my former selves for company.
The human mind is a great thicket of mystery. So much remains unknown. And yet we are expected—in fact, required—to live our lives alongside this inscrutable entity that might, at any moment, turn on us.
The problem, I have decided, with people who never leave home is that they are never forced to become someone else.
mind’s eye is all about memory, in other words. It is about how we construct our lives inside ourselves. That most private of architectures.
Sometimes we are called back to the things we most want to flee, perhaps because they left such a mark that we don’t know how to leave them behind.
Sometimes I wonder what we are supposed to do with our memories. Sometimes I wonder what our memories are for. A latch slips and the past floods in, knocking us flat. We leave places and we don’t leave places. Sometimes I imagine different versions of myself in all the different places I have ever lived, inching through time in parallel.
Pilgrims were people wondering, wondering. Pilgrims were people who loved a good riddle. Pilgrims were people who carried knives but who rarely found use for them. When we are denied a story, a light goes off.
“What did you see inside the orange?” I asked my mother a few days after this incident. “A reflection,” my mother replied. I asked her how that was possible—did the giant orange have mirrors inside?—but she refused to elaborate.
Each dead face is huge and twinkling.
The famous author lives in a neoclassical mansion on Ocean Boulevard; we were able to find photos online, courtesy of a gossip magazine.
HONK IF YOU THINK PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM. From what I can observe, Jesus fared much better.
When I came back from the Institute, I announced to my family that I wanted to be a writer. No one had any idea what I was talking about.
