The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

by Denis Johnson

This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life—the distance I’ve traveled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms—that I almost crashed the car.

wonder if you’re like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the Mystery winks at you,

Before long we wandered into a discussion of the difference between repentance and regret. You repent the things you’ve done, and regret the chances you let get away.

“The only painter I admire is God. He’s my biggest influence.”

“We live in a catastrophic universe—not a universe of gradualism.”

note that I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn’t mind forgetting a lot more of it.

In group the other night a guy just like me said, “I Woke up in Vegas sticky, broke, and confused”—a perfect description of that place—I’ve never GONE there, just WOKE UP there.

That’s what we gotta do is get down to just one story, the true person we are, and live it all the way out.

While I was kept there I wondered if this place was some kind of intersection for souls. I don’t know what to make of the fact that I’ve seen those same men many times throughout my life, repeatedly in dreams and sometimes in actuality—turning a corner on the street, gazing out the window of a passing train, or leaving a café just at the moment I glance up and recognize them, then disappearing out the door—and it makes me feel each person’s universe is really very small, no bigger than a county jail, a collection of cells in which he encounters the same fellow prisoners over and over.

Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere.

Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.

Meanwhile, I observed that the Great Void of Extinction was swallowing the whole of reality at an impossible rate of speed, and yet nothing could overcome our continual birthing into the present.

The truth is I was afraid to go any farther—no word from the house’s occupant for many days, and now these circling creatures, taken everywhere as omens of death because they forage by smell, scouting the thermal drafts that carry them for any whiff of ethyl mercaptan, the first in the series of compounds propagated by carnal putrefaction and one recognizable to many of us, I’ve since learned, as the agent added to natural gas in order to make it stink.

Well, I could see that as one possibility. But not as a result of illness, only as the inevitable outworking of the days of D. Hale Miller, and it was a lot like the destiny I’d pictured for myself when I was a criminally silly youth: a washed-up writer with books and movies and affairs and divorces behind him and nothing to show for it now, eking out a few last years—drinking, sinking. Of course in my youth it had seemed romantic because it was just a picture. It didn’t have an odor. It didn’t smell like urine and alcoholic vomit. And the way I’d been rushing at it, if I’d continued toward that kind of end it would have come a lot sooner, in my twenties, if I had to guess, preceded by not much.

Gabe: “How old is that old guy?” Danny: “Something short of dead.”

It doesn’t matter. The world keeps turning. It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘twinless twin’? My brother was one of those, a twinless twin, with an identical twin brother born dead beside him.

Mark called his process “psychic improvisation” and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee’s. “You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long,” he told

All the same, his eyes held humor and fire. “I haven’t seen you since the death of the Twins.” “What twins? Oh, yes, oh—you mean the Twin Towers.” Twin Towers, twin Presleys, twin Ahearns. The pairings of these pairs must have beaten on his thoughts with considerable intensity. It hadn’t even occurred to me.

noticed many elements I’d never heard of—brand new elements, and I felt one myself, flashing forth from the quantum soup, sprung from uncertainty itself.