Adventure

March 7

Folk of the Air ends perfectly-- with adventures ahead for the characters. Not in a cheap setting-up-for-a-sequel sort of way, but in a better, more resonant fashion-- it's just that the characters are living, breathing, alive, you see, and so of course they'll have more adventures.

Almost anybody can have adventures, if they're brave enough, if that's what they want. You don't need goddesses or quests, even, though those can be nice.

There's been a lot of unhappy stuff going 'round about Harlan Ellison lately-- read Timprov's and Marissa's recent entries, or the Internet Piracy topic on the RumorMill, for details about all that, if you're interested. But, incoherently ranting would-be demagogue or not, Harlan is sometimes an incredibly fine writer. I think of one of his stories-- "Delusion for a Dragon Slayer," it might have been, though perhaps I'm misremembering-- when he writes something like "We can have our own wildest dreams-- if only we are worthy of them."

Yes.

Fear can be crippling-- I've been there, I know. Wanting something certain, something you can set your back against when everything starts to crumble, something soft to sink into at the end of the day. I can see the appeal of maintaining the status-quo, of moving gently along the course of least resistance, of fast-food-and-sitcoms-and-stock-options. Maybe it's not a bad life. Maybe the people who choose that life are really happy.

I don't choose that life. My life is an ongoing adventure.

The only book that compares to Folk of the Air, for me at least, is Clive Barker's Galilee-- that's a novel I can sink into, a novel where the characters seem to have more life than some real people I know. That novel also ends with a sense of things-yet-undone, of momentous happenings that will take place beyond the scope of the narrative. There's a bigness about both those books that I like very much.

The last line of Rick Moody's story "The James Dean Garage Band" reads: "If the life you lead is not the one you dreamed about, then flee."

Yes. Again, yes.

My old lover Blah lives that way. She reinvents her life continuously, from her wild affairs, her dancing-all-nights, her paintings, her stories, her camping trips, her passions, her backpacking-across-Europes, her working-at-ranches, her debutante balls, her hippie wanderings. She lives an ongoing adventure, but of a very different sort than mine. Her life suits her, and in some ways she is like a legend for me-- it is soothing for me to know she's out there, living, and when our lives intersect, I invariably come away changed. We loved fiercely and sometimes difficultly for two years, and now we love one another in a more relaxed and distant way-- it's better for her freedom, and it's easier on my heart, this way.

When I used to say I must seem boring, compared to her, she would look at me and say: "Oh, no. You have worlds inside your head."

And that is part of my ongoing adventure. The voices that come from within me-- that seem, sometimes, to pass through me. The characters that are for brief intervals realer than bread, realer than debt, realer than being too cold or too hot. The stories that I seem sometimes to orchestrate and sometimes to narrate and sometimes almost to live.

And yet, my adventures are not all vicariously experienced through characters. I follow whims. I listen to intuitions. I try not to say "No" all the time, to sometimes say "Yes" to the unexpected. I have had affairs, and heartbreaks, and travels. I've slept in a field and been woken by the red eye and screaming voice of a train. I've listened to music and danced until I lost my identity, and became part of that terrible/wonderful thing, the crowd. I've gotten in my car and gone driving, looking for something unknown and not understood, and usually I don't find it-- but I keep looking. I've seen dawn from the wrong side. I've shared secrets in the dark, looking up at a ceiling I couldn't see, listening to the voice talking low nearby. I've been terrified. I've been cowardly, and hated my cowardice, and turned around. I've smashed down dead trees in a fury, I've drank liquor in the woods with young friends, I've given names to places other people would have simply overlooked. I've swung out on a rope hanging from a tree limb in the dark, with a woman I loved unrequitedly laughing and clapping behind me. I've argued about the constellations and the direction of true north. I've talked about poetry in a burning low frustrated voice, because at least for that moment it mattered.

I've lived, and I've barely gotten started living.

There are books that have not yet been written that I will read, that will change my life. There are movies as yet undreamed of that will someday make me cry. There are gravesides, and weddings, and births innumerable, restaurants I'll discover, cities I'll see, stoops where I'll cry out my loss and frustration, songs unpenned that will someday make me raise my voice along.

Sometimes just breathing is enough to help me remember all of that, and become excited, lit-up-shining-through-my-skin excited. Sometimes it's harder, sometimes I forget, sometimes I need to be reminded.

A book can remind me. A line. Seeing a beautiful woman walking on the other side of the street. Hearing a song, talking to an old friend, having a meal. The triggers are strange, sometimes. The inroads to my sense of delight are many and crowded and sometimes hard to travel.

I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight. I might just sit in stunned joyousness, unwilling to risk forgetting again what I've so often forgotten in the past. But even the forgetting is good-- because then I get to remember it again. It's like finding a fifty-dollar bill tucked away in my wallet, when I don't remember putting it there, or realizing there's a bag of Starburst hidden deep in the cupboard against emergencies. Discovering the delight is as good as feeling it.

Everything's so damned big.