This is how I would describe the darkness to you.

What you see is in front of you, filled with hues of light and shadow. I see out the back of my skull through pinholes. Nothing moves.

If you ask me how I feel, I will want to tell you that I am suspended in the air above a black void. I don’t know what is holding me up but I know what it will feel like to be dropped. I don’t feel frightened anymore. Now all I can hear is a muted roar that startles me with the sound of my own voice.

You want to talk about despair? That is something that you feel in the absence of hope. I want to talk about blankness, about the maddening rhythm of the roaring, because it doesn’t change, because I can’t see through the bleak light that filters in the pinholes, because I know that I am going to get dropped and vanish and that the only change will be the absence of pain, and that, that absence, that thing, the thing that makes you start crying in anticipation, makes me feel like feeling nothing won’t be as bad as the nothing that I feel now.

Sinister Night Sky by rakkasan60 on Flickr

When I was young, I was in the habit of lying in bed in the falling night. I was waiting.

When I would rise from the bed, my body stayed behind.

This room of my childhood was no different from any other room, in any other house, in any other place. My bed rested below a long window that looked out on a pine grove. To the right, the grove opened onto the empty yard. When the wind blew, the dark and light night shades flickered riotously through the room.

I could feel the sound.

If I sat up in my bed, the pillow scrunched against the pine headboard, I could see the small barn. You could touch the stillness on a night like that, the hens clucking softly, the goat curled in warm hay, her ears cocking at the sound of rustling leaves. Our garden, row after row of vegetables, promised an abundance at the summer’s end. The swamps lay beyond, a maze of knotty root clumps and brackish, snake-infested water, where the wiry mosquitos that chased us from dawn to dusk bred.

One sister sleeps in another bed against the wall. She’s still, her eyelids fluttering as if invisible wood sprites danced on them.

I move out through the door, rough floorboards scraping my feet. My father and I have just finished laying down new boards pilfered from the big house in town they had razed. The boards are irregular, lined up in that half-way that we did so many things.

I slip into the next room and feel my way to the back. Another sister is on the top bunk, her head rolled off her pillow. She seems barely asleep. How can she rest? She catalogs everything that should be done, but isn’t, and her dreams race to fill the vacuum.

Another sister lies on the bunk below, frozen like a fossil from Pompeii. She has only just learned to walk, to improve on the crippled lurch that propelled her with uncertain purpose throughout the house.

The baby is in the crib. Every breath is a punch at the night. She wheezes.

There is nothing here. I can leave this room.

The fragrance of the house lingers on the landing: yeast and oil, soapy bathwater, the rich oils of drying paints; the crisp shock of turpentine; the pine of the forest; the dank wet of the swamps.

In my bed, my body stirs.

I step across into the big room. The carpet is like packed dirt. The bed is a swooping shadow. I rise over it, suspended by a thread of starlight.

My father is by the window, on his side, slight and deflated in sleep, a look of surprise fixed on his face. His beard is limp. My mother rests tiny, her back to his, her forehead raised up as if attracted to a sudden warmth, her lips caught between a grimace and grin. Their bodies do not touch. She is almost not there.

Out the window, I see the passion rush of night spirits circling the house. I take the starlight and weave a giant web. The strands come alive and encircle the roof in a silvery mesh. It is safe. The house is still. We can all sleep. Whatever will happen next, whatever crisis of heart will come — and it will — can wait. We’re all in our own dreams and in our dreams, it’s our own sorrows that we can manage.

When I was a little boy I would sit at the counter in my grandfather’s diner and spin around on a stool top. I would drink a glass of ice-cold white milk. The cold would punish my teeth and I would swell with joy.

Our six-year old son did that yesterday when we went for breakfast and he didn’t even know what it meant.

When the world gives us glimpses into who we once were, what does it mean? I am always caught unawares. It’s a nice symmetry, to see echoes of yourself, and it’s a second chance, knowing that your blood is mixed in with another’s and rushing off innocent into the world.

When I grew up there were no straight lines.

My mother is an artist.  She taught me every line has life.  A drawing doesn’t represent, it breathes.

When I was a teenager my mother went through a creative transition.  She didn’t paint as much.  She learned printmaking and produced a series of aquatints and etchings.  This was a period of transition and turmoil in our family life — although none of us realized that this turmoil was just the harbinger of days of destruction.

This is one of the most vivid memories of my adolescence and I don’t know whether its an accurate remembrance:

I was at the kitchen table.  It was a Spring evening.  All of us kids were scattered around the house.  My father was probably at the table or sitting by the fireplace reading a book. My mother came hurrying down the stairs with a handful of sheets of  heavy watercolor paper.

Each sheet was filled with a few broad strokes in red and blue.  Some  framed a triangle over a square.  Others two parallel lines with one horizontal crossing crossing, like the rung of a ladder.

She showed me the sheets.

Her excitement was contagious.  The images resonated.  In their spare elegance, they were filled with energy and passion.

The next few years she painted into those themes as if they were a formal structure, and the paintings teased out something that hadn’t been in her work before.

The power was palpable.

Sometimes when I look at one of her paintings, I see her that night at our kitchen table, showing her teenage son something she couldn’t explain, that he didn’t know quite what to say, because she needed to show somebody, smile her giddy smile, and confirm that she’d found a path that she couldn’t wait to explore.

The man who built the house was killed in the bent south bedroom by a woman who was not his wife, but who moved in with the widow to console her. A dark chasm stretched beyond the window. Generations later Tim put his red soldiers in a line at the horizon’s fold and dreamed of a firefight. The soldiers wreaked chaos in his crowded neighborhood. He climbed out of the dream in fear to find a man standing beside his bed with blood running from an empty eye. He thought, “I have to be brave.”

Lines Depicting Simple Happiness

The shine on her buckle took precedence in sun
Her shine, I should say, could take me anywhere
It feels right to be up this close in tight wind
It feels right to notice all the shiny things about you
About you there is nothing I wouldn’t want to know
With you nothing is simple yet nothing is simpler
About you many good things come into relation
I think of proofs and grammar, vowel sounds, like
A is for knee socks, E for panties
I is for buttondown, O the blouse you wear
U is for hair clip, and Y your tight skirt
The music picks up again, I am the man I hope to be
The bright air hangs freely near your newly cut hair
It is so easy now to see gravity at work in your face
Easy to understand time, that dark process
To accept it as a beautiful process, your face

-–Peter Gizzi

You protest when I take a photo of you but you don’t understand where I go when the editing program opens and I tweak the light and push the contrast and smooth out the grains.  You think I’m touching up, erasing the imperfections.  That’s not what I’m doing.  The photograph isn’t you until I find you inside it, and every picture I have of you is the start of an exploration.  It is a beautiful process, and you are the only one in the world who gives me that gift.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

We like to put the little guy to bed together. He tilts his Tiger pillow pet against the pillows. I lie down on the left side of the bed, T. on the right, and the little guy squares off his sturdy shoulders and flops his legs from one of our thighs to the other, whispering quiet somethings that only T. can hear. We all lie together until he’s still, almost asleep, when I swing my feet to the floor and lean over in the dark to kiss his cheek. “I love you, little guy,” I say. Then I walk around to the other side, kiss T. in the dark, and leave the room. I don’t know what they say after.

His room has the essential talismans of a lively mind, a cheerful soul and an eager child. He keeps a picture of the Virgin Mary under his pillow to ward off nightmares. If the nightmares still come, he talks about them in dismay the next day. He can’t believe they are so scary. He has a little round plush Angry Bird that he hugs while he sleeps. He keeps his castle and knights on his train table. He has books stacked on both night tables. Some nights he points up to the bookshelf across the room and asks me to read him Parsley by Ludwig Bemmelmans. This was one of my favorite books when I was a little boy, and he claims it as one of his favorites now too.

Sometimes we read Tintin and he laughs even though he doesn’t know exactly what’s funny. “Is it supposed to be funny?” he asked once. “You’re laughing,” I said. “Right, it’s funny,” he chortled, and then returned to his breathless, unfettered laugh.

I’ve got video on my phone of him break dancing all around the room. He has a huge brown teddy bear named Rodney in the corner. Against the wall is the first piece of furniture his mother and I bought together, a long couch with tapered arms that was reupholstered with light blue fabric when the little guy was born.

One night I came into the room after T. and the little guy were in bed. The light was off. T. called me over.

“Tell Daddy what you told me,” she said to the little guy.

His voice was earnest and soft. He spoke as if he were reciting a pledge.

“I was born to love you, heart to heart,” he said.

T. was glittering. “Isn’t that beautiful?” she said.

“Where did you hear that,” I asked.

“I didn’t hear it,” the little guy said. “I thought it and I said it to Mommy because it is true. And I’m saying it to you because it’s true to you too.”

When I knew that I was in love with his mother, and that it is was different from the other loves that I had thought were true, I said to her that we would go into life “shoulder to shoulder.” The phrase was significant because of everything shared and equal it signified, the trust and confidence that come with facing battle together, knowing that no matter what, we were protecting each other’s flank.

Our son shared with us his spontaneous image of true love: two hearts blended into one, destined to be together, made free by their union, distinct by their sharing, beating in an intimate harmony that echoes and swells until it drowns out all other sound.

“That’s cool,” I said. “I was born to love you too, heart to heart. Your mommy too.”

It is true.

The three of us hugged and the little guy went to sleep.

I read a book the other day that is very popular with people who are looking for answers to universal questions. The writing was concise and clear, and the imagery was accessible, despite striking me as overly simple.

Most striking was the style. Every chapter was short, every paragraph was short, every sentence was short.

The book didn’t engage my curiosity, but I understood how the direct language and simple images would provide a roadmap for someone who was looking to understand a mystery of human nature, who didn’t want science, and who resisted nuance.

It must be hard to write like that. Why not try and find out?

* * *

ONE: The List of Love

This is meant to be a list of things about Love.

Love is something that people talk about a lot.

It’s something that is supposed to be necessary. We need to be loved.

It’s something that we are supposed to be good at. We are supposed to love.

It is something that we are supposed to enjoy. It is pleasant to be in love.

Love is something that we are supposed to be able to recognize in a second, give on demand, and enjoy when we have it.

Why is it that most of what we talk about when we talk about Love is how hard it is, how much it hurts and how we want to get away from it?

TWO: The Eskimo Word For Snow

How is Love like the Eskimo word for snow?

That’s a trick question.

The Eskimos don’t have one word for snow. They don’t have just two. They have dozens. More than a hundred. All to describe snow.

A man named Franz Boas was the first person to try to describe how Eskimos talk about snow.

The Eskimo starts off with a couple of simple ideas about snow.

There’s aput. That means snow on the ground. And gana. That means falling snow. Piqsirpoq means drifting snow. Qimuuqsuq means snow drift.

That’s not enough to describe all the ways that snow affects the Eskimo’s life. Those are just the starting points.

There’s snow-that-hurts-my-eyes-because-the-wind-blows-when-it’s-falling snow.

There’s crunchy-under-my-boot-because-the-sun-melted-it-and-the-cold-night-air-froze-it snow.

There’s packed-thigh-high-and-weighing-down-thin-ice snow.

So an Eskimo has a word to describe every one of those kinds of snow.

They have to.

Understanding the snow is the difference between life and death for an Eskimo.

Does it make any sense that we have one word for Love?

It seems to me that it would be better to have hundreds of words that describe every kind of love that a person can experience in a precise detail as possible. That would be a sensible way for us to understand this mysterious thing.

THREE: How Many Words Should We Have For Love?

It might seem simple to have one word to talk about a big thing…Peace, Earth, the Universe, Life.

Love doesn’t benefit from a definite approach.

You see, Love isn’t anything without having reciprocal parties, and it is only what those reciprocal parties make of it.

The Love we have for God? And that God has for us? I’ll talk about that later. The thing about the Love you experience for and from God is that there isn’t going to be any confusion. God won’t turn around in the middle of folding the laundry and say, “I don’t love you anymore.”

Your wife might. Or your husband. Or your mother. Or your boyfriend. Or your oldest child. Or your sister.

The problem with having one word for Love is that it makes us think that there is one way to think about Love.

It’s made every one of us think that if we can figure out what the word means and how to feel it, we’re home free.

How can one word cover how I feel about my wife, my dog, my children, Granny Smith apples, almonds and the New York Football Giants?

Doesn’t it seem that we are asking too much from the word Love?

* * *

By the time I got to the end of section three my mind was mush and I was bored silly. How does someone write a book like this?

Then I thought that if you wanted to write a book like this, you needed structure. So I laid out the chapters.

FOUR: Love Taxonomy for the New Age

FIVE: Boxing Gloves Keep You From Hurting Your Hands

SIX: Smile Break

SEVEN: : Easy to Love The Big Things

EIGHT: Why Does Everyone Keep Singing About Love?

NINE: I’m in Love

TEN: Love Bum

ELEVEN: Spy In the House of Love

TWELVE: That Was Love & I Didn’t Know It

THIRTEEN: The Story I Tell About Love

FOURTEEN: The 10 Clues That Will Help You Find Love

15–25

TWENTY-SIX: The 5 Principals That Will Help You Stay in Love

27–32

THIRTY-THREE: The One Rule

THIRTY-FOUR: Love is an Action

I had the outline.

And I had my answer.

I’d rather tell a story about Love. I wasn’t going to cut it writing a self-help book. I’ve got a lot of respect for the writers who can make it simple, interesting and universal.

This is part of how it works when you write: the ideas come in fragments, start to form into people, places, stories. You take notes on your imagination and then start writing it out. Sometimes the story flows and stops and sometimes you feel your way into it.

I was cleaning up my hard drive and came across these notes. They are from six months ago. I can’t start anything new until I finish the book I am working on, but I can’t get this guy out of my mind.

You’ll see.

* * *

Dave Anderson. 53 years old. Newspaper reporter and editor. Working on a small weekly newspaper. Community newspaper. In a New England town? Or put him in California, like the original model.

Regardless, he’s morbidly obese. He drives a little car. He’s been unsuccessful in love. Kids like him, especially teenage girls. He took working on a newspaper seriously.

Lives in a garage apartment. On a private piece of property? Or what about the little hunting cabin I almost rented off the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club?

(talked him thru with T. at dinner — he doesn’t sound like he would in Greenwich. Obesity would keep him out of the social flow. Newport is a better place for them to be.

The problem with Newport is you don’t get the same intense social imprinting that happens in Greenwich. He could be out in the Hamptons. Both places have seasons and don’t have youth that are in one class and encounter problems that have them slipping down to another. Which is better?)

Yes, the cabin comes with the job. He’s been hired to start up a new weekly just focused on Greenwich. A hedge fund manager who has had some investment in media companies and made a bunch of money playing the distressed debt of newspaper companies. He’s seen how the local paper has cut way back, because it’s part of the old Tribune chain. The daily has virtually no character but has increased advertising rates significantly. The Greenwich Weekly is designed to take advantage of that.

Anderson has come back from the coast. He had a long stretch in Eureka working on the paper there. He worked all the local beats — crime, politics, business — and did a stint in Sacramento as the state political correspondent for the three papers that were jointly owned up the coast.

He had a chance to join the Times-Mirror chain, and they talked about sending to Washington if a key CA political figure won a national election, but he’d met the woman that he was going to marry, and they had put a deposit down on a space in Eureka where she was going to start a yoga studio.

The marriage lasted for four year — the middle of his 50s. She was 12 years younger than him. She lost interest when the health kick and spiritual awareness that he’d gone on during their courtship had fallen ton pieces, and when they discovered that his sperm didn’t have sufficient motility to make a baby.

Dave had always been heavy and the passage into obese was easy enough to bear. He wasn’t part of the generation of news guys who were going to make it in electronic media. He was the sweaty, sloppy big guy who could crunch a lede and craft a hed without thinking twice about it, who could get in, get the facts, write pretty much any story you needed so you’d feel good reading it, never feel very confused or inspired or in awe of the work. Just solidly informed.

The motility was a problem because he didn’t want to stop smoking dope. He always had.

When he got laid off from the paper, he didn’t have anywhere to go. It had never been a union shop, he didn’t have much stashed away to retire, he couldn’t see himself setting up a shop on eBay, or blogging for companies, or doing pr work, or much of anything that you could do around Eureka. So he cleared out the apartment, loaded up the miniCooper and headed back to (Newport/Southampton/WestHampton Beach?) to visit his mom. It was the first time he had been back since 1984.

That absence hadn’t been intentional. His father had died when he was in college, his sister lived close to their mother, and he’d grown up in a time when flying across the country wasn’t something that you just did, and his job didn’t give him an opportunity to run up frequent flyer miles, and when you got down to it he didn’t have a lot of desire to go back anyway. He had moved away. It was that way for a lot of newspapermen that he knew — you went to where the job was, immersed yourself in a place and maintained a professional skepticism about the people you met and the things you learned. Look at the world that way and it’s hard to make the trek back to the cradle of your consciousness.

There might have been other issues too, but Dave wasn’t given to introspection. He’d been trained to observe, question, take information in and then represent it in a way that was clear, conscise and easy to understand. He was good at his job in a professional, matter-of-fact way and he didn’t need to think much about himself in the middle of it all. And when he was idle, he was getting high and mellowing out, or watching movies and listening to music he’d found on bit-torrent streams. Sometimes he would read, especially if one if the news hounds he’d crossed paths with over the years had a new one come out. He watched a lot of public television. He didn’t keep up with the current news dialogue like he had used to. Once he thought he would always have the latest scoop and all the angles on what was going down in Washington, where the hot political races were, what the DNC or RNC was doing that was strategic and what they were doing that was underhanded. Now he didn’t care much. He had a paper to get out, a locality to cover, some political news to chase, and no one was trying to get his job, no one knew just how much he had mastered his craft, and no one was going to be putting his work up for awards. There wasn’t anyone to show his craft off too.

Southampton.

Concept: modern life hasn’t equipped us with the stamina to stick with the hard choices that we have to make between what is right and what is wrong.

Theme: too much easy access to the things that are distraction — drugs, porn, entertainment, travel — and too little value placed in doing the right thing by other people.

Story: Dave Anderson is a smart man who’s lived a low-key cynic’s life, stayed on the outside, created a bunch of rationalizations and excuses that keep him feeling ok about the choices that he’s made. The center of his life is vacant, doesn’t have much energy.

He moves to Southampton to from the west coast. Prompted to come back because of a health scare? Visits his mother in Greenwich and then goes to Southampton, where he’s offered a job to resuscitate a new local paper. (office at the zabriskie air field?)

Why put him in the center of wealth? Because he’s really in the center of the people who are the foundation in a resort/ summer community.

What is the catalyst that makes him confront the hard choice and then live with it?

The fight between the town and the Jews over the enclosed space.

Anderson writes about it. Is supportive of the Jews. But then he comes across a young girl — 9 or 10 years old — who’s been aggressively accosted by one of the leaders of the Jewish community for something that she did unwittingly but that was imagined to be desecrating. She’s the daughter of the girl Dave scores his weed from.

He stands up for the girl and finds himself in the middle of a big cause, where he’s become the firebrand for sensible people who can’t stand what is going on.

There’s another character in this, someone who appears to be taking the easy choice, but who is really doing something very hard and private. Imagine that the woman who runs the WHB Performing Arts Center, and that she was having an affair and then left her husband and got pregnant and make her life over.

When Anderson comes to town, she’s just left her husband. Her story is a counterpoint to his,because she appears to have no problem navigating through her challenges, even though she’s deep in the center of the town.

The story takes place over two years: begins in the early winter, just after the New Year, and then cycles through to Christmas of the following year…that’s where it ends?

A gentle slope drops from the back of our house to an old stone wall, and beyond, a pond surrounded by high trees.  The pond was a limestone pit once; the still surface mirrors the darkness below.  An oak tree fell into the shallow south end and in the warm months a slender grey heron spends his days on the branches that stick up from the water.

I look for the heron when I walk down to the pond.  This is not as frequently as I would like.  I’ll stand at the north edge and wait for my eyes to adjust to the shadows.  The heron’s shape is like an inadvertent ink stroke on a busy page.

When I look at the heron I want to feel its stillness, but even as I wait for my eyes to focus, I fight the impulse to move on, to walk up the hill, into the woods, to keep the images dancing, to make my heart pump.  I disappoint myself.

*

One day I discovered the photos of a man called Ichiro Kishimi.

When he walks the world stills.

I can not know the noise that his mind makes, but imagine it is steady and muted.  My mind is like the roaring rapids.

He studied Greek philosophy and taught in a language that I can not understand. He is a student of the school of Alfred Adler, who believed that we reward our nature by growth and inflict pain by seeking perfection. He has written books on the principal of happiness and has focused energy on the education of children.

This may be a wise man that divined from his own desires the dark tentacle of disappointment that drowns a man in feelings of discontent.

But I can not know anything of that man, who has lived beyond my reach in place, thought, sentiment and time.

*

I know the man who walks along the river and through fields in a perpetual spring.

I met him first when he was walking to the hospital where his father lay in decay, his mind untethered and eroded. I wondered at the love this son felt for his father, the sorrow that lay in the uncoupling of their intellects, the worrisome reminder that mortality is a word that signals the final succumbing to the constant hazard of life, not an emphatic end point like the iron trestle marking the terminus of rail line.

He took photographs when he walked of simple and delicate things. A thrush; a heron; a petal; a flower; a cluster of grass.

*

This is what each photograph did:

Because I think I know him, I discover something of myself.

Take the heron. It is still, captured in profile, the white of its coat outlined with the precise bands of ink-black that only nature can achieve.

I don’t look at the heron with a critical eye, however. I am arrested by it. I experience it with the intense energy of my shadow neurons.

I can not see a heron this way.

Kishimi helps me see something that I don’t see.

*

What I see invades me and in an instant I am given a fleeting glimpse of another me, and I know what it is to still myself, to be present and bear witness to a thing with insistent focus, calm and uncritical, free from interpretation. I know what it is to suspend the narrative, to arrest the impulse to fill in the missing pieces, to relinquish the what-was and what-will-be.

I can feel what I felt when I saw the heron. I can embrace its essence unironically. As the heron balanced its weight effortlessly, the wind fell away, the heat, worry, the city, the refuse tangled in the water weeds at the muddy shore.

How can I accept that I did not see the heron? What do I make of the truth that even though I see this way, I can not see this way? So I ruminate about Kishimi, this philosopher-saint from Kyoto; I reflect on his serenity. I admire his hopefulness, his completeness, his ability to connect with all of the beauty that is around him.

But I am avoiding my Self by making believe.

*

I don’t know this man. I can’t know this man.

Whatever I know of this man is a gift he has given me of discovering something new in myself.

If I am able to see the heron in the photo, I must be able to see the heron in life. The clues are in those qualities that I attribute to Kishimi, those attributes that I experience in me through his photo.

I can see because I believe I know a man I don’t know, so I must be knowing a man I can be.

I can only hope that the man who took this photo, and all the hundreds others I have looked at, feels contentment and happiness. That is why I go to read Adler, to look at pictures of Kyoto…to discover what he might have learned.

The photos are a signal that Kishimi might understand what makes our experience in the world complete.

A man who wrote a book on happiness must either feel peace or despair. I hope that life has given him the gift of peace.

I suspect that he would want me to feel the same thing, and to return to my pond to see my heron with the gift of my own eyes.