The Conversation Continues
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To return to my December 2002 Barbaric Yawp interview with John Berbrich, click here.
To read our original 2001 interview, click here.
William Michaelian: So. We were talking about Emerson and some of the major literary figures he influenced. Who, then, influenced Emerson?
John Berbrich: From what I’ve read, Emerson’s major influences were the Greeks, notably Plato, Shakespeare, and Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist turned theologian/mystic. Apparently this Swedenborg was a man of great intellectual power and versatility, making important contributions in physics, biology, mathematics, and chemistry. Late in life he experienced supernatural visions which led to his voluminous religious writings. I’ve always intended to read Swedenborg but haven’t yet made the effort. After his death in 1772, a religion was organized in England based upon his religious works. There are still thousands of Swedenborgians around today.
William Michaelian: According to this page, he was a regular Swedish Da Vinci. I thought I remembered his name in connection with Dostoevsky. Sure enough, he is listed as one of Dostoevsky’s influences, and one of William Blake’s as well, not to mention Goethe. Not only that, he was fluent in eleven languages. And here I can barely speak English. Disgusting. This whole subject of influences, though, is a fascinating one. If I were to ask you who your influences are, or if you were to ask me, the answer wouldn’t be simple even in the immediate, most obvious sense.
John Berbrich: True. I’d have to really think about that. Perhaps the highest compliment you can hear as a writer is that you’ve actually influenced someone. I know that I’ve had various writers in mind while I’ve written poems and stories. It’s hard to pin down. My Catholic Boy Stories has the shadow of James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man hanging over it. And I did dedicate the collection in part to Joyce, because I was quite conscious of my debt. I didn’t copy anything, of course, but my autobiographical stories were certainly steeped in that precise Joycean atmosphere.
William Michaelian: Yes, in that case I’d say the influence is clear. Or maybe we should use another word: inspiration. That, I think, would be the highest compliment a writer could hear — that he has inspired a reader or another writer, in the sense that inspiration means taking action. Once again, your Theory of Art. For who inspired Joyce? And who inspired Joyce’s influences? We can just about use the words interchangeably, as we travel back into our misty past. In a way, it’s like researching your family tree.
John Berbrich: Exactly. I have no idea who Joyce read, although I get the impression that he read and assimilated everyone. He seems to know everything about the universe he’s creating. Each observation is accurate. Yeah, the genealogy of literature — one big happy family. Imagine the family reunions in Heaven and Hell. A flaming barbecue on the outskirts of Hell, kegs of beer, dancers, wild music. I expect things will be more sedate in Heaven, with choral music and lots of clouds, clean water, and white bread.
William Michaelian: And nary an onion to be found. Torture, I tell you, pure torture! But of course influences go beyond who we read. Who we meet and listen to, especially as children, has a huge impact on our thinking, writing, and living later on. Twain’s exposure to the slave culture springs to mind, the music he heard, the storytelling he was exposed to. In my own experience, there are aunts and uncles who played a huge part in the way I now go about my work. In other words, you can blame my relatives, at least in part.
John Berbrich: Well, yeah — think about the staggering background behind each moment of your life. You were born with certain physical characteristics, DNA and all that other microscopic stuff (this is where you blame the relatives) — plus every experience ever (each sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, thought, and garbanzo) affects you physically, modifies your brain slightly, as you store these fleeting sensuous factoids deep in your cranial vaults where they immediately start making connections with their neighbors, hooking up new lines in the mind-web. And then, when you make a decision now, today, you draw from ALL of this information to determine if you will wear white socks today, or black. Yes, we have many influences, William — and we influence many people. Our responsibility is heavy, looked at in this way.
William Michaelian: “Yes, William,” he said with a glint of mad sarcasm in his eyes, “every garbanzo modifies your brain.” What you have uttered here in your fit of brilliance sounds like the manifesto for a new era, or at least the editorial mission of Burnt Elves — to live and work in a state of awareness, while never forgetting that you are the punch line of a cosmic joke. Burnt Elves — that experiment in publishing which is beyond publishing, that outrageous, fruitless magazine which exists only in the minds of its subscribers, who are acutely aware of their powerful, yet redundant influence in the world. Ah! Say, did you get the copy of Rain Taxi I sent you?
John Berbrich: Indeed! I forgot to mention it. Much thanks for sending it along. Well, I’m astonished that such a mostly professional publication can be purchased for only $3 per copy. The names are astounding: Blaise Cendrars, Georges Perec, Paul Auster, E.E. Cummings, Rene Daumal, Donald Justice, Anne Waldman. Can’t wait to dive into this issue. I’ll write it up in From the Marrow & send you and the good people at Rain Taxi a copy. Thanks again. So you’re thinking about Burnt Elves again, eh? You could splice bits of this conversation into the magazine, “The Best of the Forum.” Guaranteed to be a hit.
William Michaelian: Good idea. But I am not really thinking about Burnt Elves again. It’s thinking about me. Very strange. It writes little notes in the dust on my work table. I find them in the morning. What do you think about this? Or, Here’s an idea you haven’t considered. If I don’t answer within a day or two, there are other notes: Well? This gives new meaning to the term “Letters to the Editor.”
John Berbrich: You’d better listen, Willie. Those Elves may turn mean. The magazine wants to be born, it wants to live. Its spirit desires to breathe the (relatively) fresh air that we all enjoy. Hey, good idea for a story here. The Mischief of the Elves.
William Michaelian: Why fool around with a story? Why not a whole novel, or saga? The Dawn of the Elves. Elf Island. Elf Trilogy. Imagine an island where whispered thoughts are touched by sunlight fingers, and memories flow in waterfalls, and elf children sing in the mist. Ahooooooo . . .
John Berbrich: Yeah, but if you embark on a trilogy, you won’t have enough time to start the magazine. Perhaps that’s your game, to begin an enormous project so you’ll have a good excuse not to start on Burnt Elves. But, Willie, listen to those little elves singing.....they wanna be free.
William Michaelian: Come to think of it, it is rather small of me to keep them hanging. . . . But I swear to you, my trilogy idea was only meant to glorify the elves, not belittle them. Ouch! Something just bit me!
John Berbrich: Your elves are getting hungry!
William Michaelian: So much for my elf repellant. You know, elf swarms are unusual this time of year. Must have something to do with global warming. But let’s forge ahead, shall we? Are you familiar with Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters?
John Berbrich: Oh, yes — I have fond memories of that one. It’s a unique work, it seems to me. But I could not get into the sequel.
William Michaelian: I was reading about it last night. I like his idea of writing poetic “epitaphs” for the folks buried in a village cemetery. When the book came out back in 1915, I guess it raised quite a ruckus in local circles, since so many of his characterizations hit close to home, but this was outweighed by the warm reception elsewhere. Here’s one of the nearly 250 poems that make up the collection:
Mabel Osborne
Your red blossoms amid green leaves
Are drooping, beautiful geranium!
But you do not ask for water.
You cannot speak! You do not need to speak—
Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst,
Yet they do not bring water!
They pass on, saying:
“The geranium wants water.”
And I, who had happiness to share
And longed to share your happiness;
I who loved you, Spoon River,
And craved your love,
Withered before your eyes, Spoon River—
Thirsting, thirsting,
Voiceless from chasteness of soul to ask you for love,
You who knew and saw me perish before you,
Like this geranium which someone has planted over me,
And left to die.
Nice. The few I found online were similar, unrhymed, sort of miniature stories. There’s a short biography on this page. One thing I found interesting is that Masters also wrote biographies of Vachel Lindsay — another poet I haven’t read — as well as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Have you run across any of those, or read Lindsay?
John Berbrich: I haven’t read any of those biographies, but I have read a few poems by Lindsay; one was a sort of African-voodoo chanting thing that I found to be very effective — lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points! By the way, I was inspired by Masters’s Spoon River. A few years ago I started my own collection called Fork Lake, a town where the stories are told not by tombstones but rather by old buildings. They’ve seen a lot, those weary, leaning structures. I’ve written only a half-dozen so far, but a couple of those have been published in little magazines. The idea still floats in my mind.
William Michaelian: It’s a good one. Tombstones, old buildings, even old trees — all have stories to tell. Another writer in this vein who lived about the same time as Masters was Sherwood Anderson, also part of the Chicago scene that included Masters and Carl Sandburg. A great many years ago, I read some of his stories. Sad to say, I remember next to nothing about them.
John Berbrich: Never read Anderson. Have read Sandburg, but not a lot. I like his stuff, to a limited degree. But here’s something interesting — Yesterday I finished a short novel by Joyce Carol Oates called The Rise of Life on Earth. The book is pretty strong, the life story of a woman who grows up in a severely abusive home and turns into a secret and undetected murderer. Anyway, her name is Kathleen Hennessy, the same last name as the guy who wrote that Stevenson biography. Identical spelling too. Merely a coincidence?
William Michaelian: Possibly, but I doubt it. That’s the kind of thing she would weave into a book. I’m not a fan of Oates, capable writer that she is. But that’s based on reading stories only. I don’t know. They have all seemed cold to me, in the sense that I can’t work up any concern for her characters. They never seem quite real, and are more like strategic constructions. How did you like the novel? How do you like her stuff in general?
John Berbrich: I’d never read Oates until a couple of months ago when I came across a selection of hers in a collection of essays. I hadn’t realized that she grew up in upstate New York. Anyway, I liked the essay a lot; in it she is very effective at evoking a bleak rural landscape, as well as entering the world of children — just how they look at the world, the hugeness and mystery of it. The Rise of Life on Earth is pretty good, but as I say it’s short and would have grown intolerable had it been any longer. Includes a supremely disgusting home abortion scene at the end. Although the book presents some particularly gruesome abuse, I don’t think that Oates is merely male bashing — cruelty and pain seem to be woven directly into the fabric of life. The novel is written in a quasi-stream-of-consciousness style that almost lets you directly into the mind of this Kathleen Hennessy. Occasionally we read an italicized thought. I won’t forget the book too soon, due to the abortion image, and I’ll remember the main character Kathleen too, because she’s drawn simply but with powerful strokes, plus she’s really the only character. I liked the essay more than the novel.
William Michaelian: Well, she’s certainly been prolific. I think she’s written somewhere close to fifty novels, a bunch of story collections, essays, poetry, even a few plays. Started writing as a child and never stopped, was also molested somewhere along the line. Everything I’ve read by her has been on the dark side, as if she’s writing to cleanse herself of evil spirits. Or it might just be her way of having fun — come to think of it, it’s probably both.
John Berbrich: I don’t detect much joy in her writing. Listen, the other night I went to a coffeehouse for about an hour and got a good start on Rain Taxi, reading the articles on Cummings and Cendrars while skimming a few others. Very impressive. The writing is knowledgeable without relying on an academic fog-factor. And it is accessible without sounding condescending. I think I’ll subscribe to this literary marvel. Only $12 per year for four issues — how can you top that?
William Michaelian: The absence of that fog-factor, as you call it, is one big reason I recommend the magazine. Here and there, a reviewer will lean that way, or show signs that he would if he were allowed more space, but all in all that’s not a problem. There’s a nice spirit about the publication. I tend to read an issue over a long period of time, a review a day, or maybe one or two of the very short reviews. How many coffeehouses are there in Russell? For some reason, I don’t picture much of a night life there. Or did you travel up the road a piece?
John Berbrich: Russell has exactly zero coffeehouses. But I had to drive the wife and some of the kids to Potsdam for something, and Potsdam is a cool place to hang out. It’s about a 25-minute drive from here. So I drop them off and prowl the streets for an hour or two. Always something going on there, and I usually run into someone I know. If you look at a map of St. Lawrence County you’ll see that Potsdam is one of the biggest names. The population is around 7,000-8,000, but this swells to something like 14,000 when college is in session.
William Michaelian: Potsdam’s summer size is about the same as my old hometown back in the early Seventies. I once drove a tractor down Main Street with a piece of equipment attached to get to a welding shop for some sort of repair. There were no coffeehouses per se, but there was the venerable Dad’s Smokehouse, where my mother’s father would stop on his way home in the afternoons for a beer in the 1930s. I can’t imagine reading Rain Taxi there — you wouldn’t be able to see, because the smoke would be too thick. Tell me, have they outlawed smoking in all public places in your area, or can one still light up in bars?
John Berbrich: Far as I know, smoking is pretty much banned. I think that proprietors have the option to apply for an exemption if the regulations bite too deeply into their business; but I don’t know any who have done this, as I imagine if you do the State will find other ways to annoy you. I suppose it’s good for your health, but a strictly sensible approach always bothers me. I feel that something essential and perhaps ineffable is being overlooked. Perhaps it’s this: I don’t like the idea of absolute laws, but I do think that guidelines are important. In a world of humans, we need a little wiggle-room.
William Michaelian: Smoking is bad for one’s health. So is breathing polluted air, drinking contaminated water, and eating produce laced with chemicals. Yet these situations are not only permitted, they are promoted by the government and the corporate interests it has come to represent. Meanwhile, it is a crime to smoke in public or — heaven forbid! — to smell like onions or garlic. You’re right about the strictly sensible approach. It isn’t sensible. How old a town is Russell? What got it going in the first place?
John Berbrich: Russell was settled almost exactly 200 years ago by some adventurous souls who started out in Vermont or maybe Massachusetts. They started a mill on the Grass River, which runs right behind our house, and pretty soon a little plank town was born. Our house was built in the late 1880s, at least the brick portion of it. Located in the beautiful rolling foothills of the Adirondacks, Russell has a population of 1,700 and covers 99 square miles — that’s only 17 folks per square mile. The population hasn’t changed significantly in about 130 years, which is just the way I like it.
William Michaelian: Sounds like a great place. I think I’ll move there and build a high-rise apartment building and then advertise it in the elf trade magazines. As it happens, my wife’s mother’s father was a miller in the Basque country of France. My mother-in-law liked to recall her childhood there, the people who visited with their sacks of grain, and being free to roam the countryside in search of adventure, mushrooms, and wild strawberries. They lived in a stone house that had been in the family for generations. You’re lucky, I think, to live in an old house. I know sometimes extra work is required, but you make up for it in spirit and personality. Any ghosts?
John Berbrich: Funny you should ask. The place used to be a funeral parlor. One of the breakers down in the fuse box is labeled “Stiff Room.” But we’ve never detected any spirits, spooks, or other disembodied entities. However, my son’s new girlfriend is reputed to be a ghost hunter, & she’s anxious to come over & check out the old place. The only spirits I know of are quite comfortable in my closet.
William Michaelian: I might have known. Leave it to the publisher of Barbaric Yawp to set up his headquarters in a funeral parlor. Maybe the spirits have found the spirits in your closet and are content with the arrangement. So — a ghost hunter, eh? Are there any encounters on her resumé?
John Berbrich: I’ve met her only once, briefly. Apparently she’s taken some photos containing curious and mysterious figures that shouldn’t be there. Don’t worry, I’ll quiz her good when I get a chance. How old is your place?
William Michaelian: Well, the altar beneath what is now the kitchen floor dates back about 2,000 years. Tunnels under the basement reveal strange drawings of elves being led to what looks like a large brick fireplace. I am told that in fact this represents not a fireplace, but the gateway to some sort of stadium where long ago — perhaps thousands of years — elf games were held. But the house itself was built in 1978, as was the entire neighborhood we live in, which was formerly a holly grove — once again, elves, this time connected with a more recent legend, that of Christmas. I don’t know. It’s disturbing. The place is very dull at first glance, and at second and third glance as well. But at night there are faint, high voices, and heat radiates up through the floor. Some mornings the house faces north, sometimes south, sometimes it leans. Sometimes I lean — especially when the doctors tell me there are no such things as elves. As if doctors knew anything. You know what too many years of education can do to a person. Why, he’s apt to believe all sorts of ridiculous things!
John Berbrich: I didn’t realize you were so well educated, Willie. Your house sounds fascinating. It’s not a split-level, is it?
William Michaelian: To get to the living room, it’s necessary to ride in a dusty little coal car deep into a hillside. It’s a gradual drop-off of about 700 feet. So I guess you could say it’s a split-level. Say, how many degrees do you have, anyway? Sixth grade? Eighth? I’ll have you know, I even attended high school.
John Berbrich: Sounds like you got the shaft with that coal car. All kidding aside, I too attended high school, graduated as well. Attended community college for one year (& in those days a GPA of 1.9 meant something!) & that’s been it. So I really can’t blame the school system for my failings & inadequacies. I’ve worked hard at them on my own.
William Michaelian: And the dedication is paying off. Personally, the further I went in school, the more I felt it was an imposition. But I did survive high school, though I left early, as soon as all the graduation requirements were met. I spent an aimless, entertaining year in college — I’m impressed by your 1.9 GPA, by the way. That took some real work. I went to an actual university with 15,000 students — or maybe I should say the enrollment was 15,000 — and tuition was, if I remember correctly, $102 per semester, which left plenty of money for, uh, socializing. But the truth is, after the sixth grade, I knew I was wasting my time, though I got along with everyone and had a lot of fun. So I guess socially speaking, it wasn’t a waste of time. Besides, like you said, any mess we make, we make on our own. It’s easy to blame the school system for our troubles, or our parents, husbands, or wives, or our church, or whatever, and of course they can and do play a role, evil monsters that they all are, but ultimately one has to take responsibility for his own actions. We set things in motion, it’s only natural that we should have to ride them out.
John Berbrich: That sounds exactly like something I read a while ago by Jean-Paul Sartre. The responsibility part. Even if it isn’t strictly true, it is the best way to run your life. You are the captain of your ship — if you believe in Free Will, which I do. God save us from “Victims” & victimology.
William Michaelian: Absolutely. And that gives me an idea for another good story title — “Night of the Living Dead Victims.” The trick in this day and age is not to become a victim of the victims. Anyway, let’s change the subject. I came across a great website today and immediately added it to my Highly Recommended page. It has to do with something we’ve discussed, or at least I think we have — literature in public places. Have you heard of The Wall Poems of Leiden? Leiden is a city in the Netherlands, where there are, or will soon be, 101 poems painted on walls around town. The poems are by poets from around the world, anywhere from Langston Hughes to William Carlos Williams to Marina Tsevetayeva to Pablo Neruda and tons of others. Under the poems, they have a Dutch translation and an English translation. If you go to the site, you can take a “walking tour” of the city and read all the poems and see pictures of the walls they’re on. Plus there’s an explanation of the whole project. Pretty neat, eh?
John Berbrich: That is indeed a cool idea. I wonder who’s selecting the poems. I don’t see how an enterprise of that nature could cause any harm. I wonder if anything like that has ever been tried in the USA. The closest I’ve seen is the graffiti in New York City. It is colorful, entertaining, and refreshingly chaste. Normally you’ll see kids’ nicknames like “Kool” or “Spider Lady” or else slogans from a song, “Eat the rich” or something. Unfortunately, years ago the City Fathers painted all of the subway trains with this hideous gray paint, of a sort that no other paint can stick to. So all of the subways are this uniform, dull gray, instead of the lively colorful works of art of the past. This poetry idea might not work here.
William Michaelian: “The Gray Trains,” relentless and blind upon their tracks. Set in the future, what a dismal story that would make. Set in the present, well . . . The Wall Poems of Leiden website credits a foundation called TEGEN-BEELD with the idea, along with two individuals, Ben Walenkamp and Jan-Willem Bruins. Here’s what they have to say, among other things, on the main page:
“The initiators of this project hope that passers-by are stimulated by the poems as well as by the visual image of the letters against the background formed by the wall. The reader/viewer is confronted by various sorts of characters that refer to different cultures. The common thread throughout this project is that many of these poems reflect upon language, colour, or upon the life as a poet. Signatures indicate the painter as well as the person who proposed each poem for the project. It is the personal choice of the foundation ‘TEGEN-BEELD’ that decides which poems will appear on the walls.”
They also say that down through the ages, Leiden, a university town, has been home to “a remarkable number of writers.” So it must be a strange place.
John Berbrich: Must be. Right now I’m trying to organize local poets for some sort of club or group or something. There is talent up here, but it is diffuse — spread out all over the county. My daughter’s boyfriend is opening a café in downtown Canton, only 13 miles from here. He wants it to have a kind of bohemian atmosphere, so I decided to start this poetry club. We’ll have meetings there like one night each month and hold open-mike poetry nights. He’s only 22 years old. I’m not sure where this will lead, but I’m hoping to get some fun and poetry out of it. You’ve heard of poetry slams — well, I want to call our group SLAP — that’s an acronym: St. Lawrence Area Poets. We’ll have poetry slaps. What do you think?
William Michaelian: Well, why not? Coffee and poetry have always gone together. Of course, if you’d said your daughter’s boyfriend was opening a bar, I would have said booze and poetry. But really, I can see a colorful sign in the window of the café, “Home of St. Lawrence Area Poets.” There must be a local artist who could do that. And a little sign to hang out on event nights, “POETRY SLAP TONIGHT.” SLAP-Happy T-shirts are another possibility, and then eventually you’ll want to publish a SLAP chap. All in all, it sounds like a fun experience, a breath of fresh eccentric air blowing along the small town sidewalks. What’s the name of the café going to be? Any idea how many poets are likely to get involved? It seems that wherever you go nowadays, there are always poets in them thar hills.
John Berbrich: The place will be called the Partridge Café. It used to be called the Partridge Den because it was under a gift shop called the Pear Tree. Partridge in a pear tree. That’s another thing, the place is actually underground, now how cool is that? I’m expecting maybe a half-dozen poets to join as regulars with more showing up on open-mike night. Once the colleges start up again, I expect the place will be crawling with free-versifiers. I’ll let you know how it works out. I’ll plan a reading for when you get here in mid-September.
William Michaelian: Great! Sounds like the makings of a good group. And I’ve always wanted to go underground — it must be the samizdat in me. Actually, I think samizdat is a Russian word that means “self-publish,” but I always associate it with “underground.” Anyway, wait — I think there’s a problem. I thought you were coming here in September. Don’t tell me I’ve got my wires crossed again. I mean, I’m happy to change plans and all, but I do think we should try to be in the same place at the same time at least once in our lives. Or are we together now?
John Berbrich: As usual, yes and no. Yeah, I’m due in Oregon on that same date and you’ll be showing up here alone but quietly cuz Nancy will have a headache. You’ll have to find the Partridge on your own. Tell you what — I’ll stick directions on the refrigerator with a magnet — but you stay out of the fridge! This isn’t going to work, I know it. Bring your own garbanzos. What am I going to do in Oregon? Put out your magazine for you? Train your elves? Hey, don’t bring your elves here!
William Michaelian: Too bad, because we just had a fresh hatch. Okay, here’s what we’ll do. You come here and launch Burnt Elves. I’ll go there and put out an issue of Barbaric Yawp, and spend a few evenings slapping at the Partridge Café. When Nancy gets over her headache, I’ll drive her back here with a trunk-load of glistening newborn Yawps. Then we’ll all celebrate the fledgling Elves with a wild night in Salem. Or, if that sounds boring, you and Nancy both come to Oregon, and I’ll bring my loving bride to your place, and the four of us will swap identities and live each other’s lives until one of us cracks. Doesn’t that sound like fun?
John Berbrich: Willie, you’re sick. — I love it! But look, I gotta go. Someone or something is at the door. It’s dark and spooky. I’ll get back to you on this one.
William Michaelian: Uh-oh. Spirits?
John Berbrich: No, it was nothing. I think it was just me. I don’t mean me at the door, I mean me hearing things. Do you get me? That remark about the elves started it all; I imagine them creeping through the night in dark hordes, toppling garbage cans and freeing dogs from their chains. I keep getting these images, like from an elf-zombie movie: Night of the Living Elves. Are there elf-poets? I imagine them telling long sagas, weird narratives of spooky heroism and bizarre night creatures. Frantic battles with unnameable and unknowable things. Few entities are found in nature worse than evil elves. They have no sense of healthy lethargy; no, they are always busy doing something, building and destroying, building and destroying. Don’t they drive you crazy?
William Michaelian: Wow — it must really be dark at your place. You speak as if you know them. Elf poets, yes! — tiny blind troubadours who wander the land and never sleep, and whose lips never cease to move, telling, telling, telling, haunted by their visions like Coleridge’s ancient mariner. On the sea, elves in miniature wind-tossed vessels. Beneath the earth’s surface, magnificent elf libraries and universities. In the desert, the voices of elves emanating from hollow sun-bleached skulls. In cities, elves masquerading as chimney sweeps, grinning and covered with soot. Elf parties, with button-sized champagne glasses and weird condiments. Oh, yes — these are the elves, and yet there is so much more that we don’t know about them, that we are perhaps better off not knowing. So. What else do you hear late at night?
John Berbrich: A skunk getting into the cat food on the back porch. Our dog, barking at the skunk. A cat fight. A truck rumbling by every 15 minutes. Four-wheelers. The rustle of leaves in the dark wind. My work clothes, quietly wrinkling in the closet. The creak of the old building, a ghost turning over in its fitful slumber. The nearly inaudible whirr of molecules revolving. A tiny night whisper of dreams from all corners of the house. The faintest echo of the Big Bang billions of years ago. And always the murmuring of the river out back.
William Michaelian: Beautiful. And during the day?
John Berbrich: Hungry cats yowling cuz the skunk stole their food during the night. Electronics. A snippet of a radio voice. Sunbeams droning off the metal roof. Chirpy birds. An occasional car. On hot days, the neighbor’s air conditioner thrumming. The whining carcinogenic buzz of the microwave. Cicadas. A leaf nudged by a breeze. Far off, artillery at Fort Drum. And always, the gentle murmuring of the river.
William Michaelian: That wonderful river. I’ll bet the water is cold. Is it shallow? Deep? Rocky? Wide? Does it run wild in the spring and threaten the house? Does the water lap up on your back step?
John Berbrich: The Grass (or Grasse) River is friendly and scenic. It flows from the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, through tiny villages, and dumps into the mighty St. Lawrence River. It’s not wide back of our house, maybe thirty or forty yards across. It’s rocky and shallow, ranging in depth from three feet to around seven feet. Its current ripples around a few small islands. Brook trout dart in the shadows and beaver gnaw at birch trees along the bank. When we get a lot of snow in March, like three feet, the April thaw can be scary. The thick ice cracks and jams up at narrow channels, causing foot-thick sheets of ice to scrape the banks on both sides. Sometimes the ice creeps up twenty or thirty feet. But our house is farther back, and rests upon an elevation, so we’re not in danger. Some of the roads get flooded out in April, but not ours. It’s murmuring right now.
William Michaelian: Well. It sounds like you’ve found a good place to live, and to recharge your spirit. In sad contrast, at this very moment, there is a new shopping center being built about a quarter-mile northeast of us, where last year there was a beautiful cornfield and old houses with gardens and horses. The racket is awful, and clouds of smelly dust are drifting our way on the morning breeze. All so we can have easier access to imported sweatshop goods, and so a handful of people can cash in on the development deal. One homeowner is still holding out, like a little island in a raging sea. He filed a lawsuit against the city and refuses to budge. But it’s too late. His little island will be swallowed up. Even if he wins and stays, he loses.
John Berbrich: Sad. What’s the answer, Willie? What’s the question? I know that people need a place to live (and shop), but I find few things more repellant than neat extended suburbs with their shopping malls and clipped lawns. I’d rather live in an old grimy city. Or in the country. The population of St. Lawrence County hasn’t changed since around 1870. Someone builds a new house and an old one finally falls over or burns down. There aren’t many jobs up here, plus the winters are long and cold. You can still buy a decent house for $50,000. You can get one cheaper, if you don’t mind fixing it up a little. They’ve been trying to build a Wal-mart on the edge of Potsdam for years, but a large segment of the community has raised quite a legal ruckus. It’s only one more building — but then there’s another, and another, and another. Before you know it, you’re the last guy holding out against an enormous conglomeration, your “little island in a raging sea.” I have nothing against capitalism, but this is ridiculous. People need to read more Thoreau and Edward Abbey.
William Michaelian: Indeed, to a great extent these days, people are strangers to nature. We meet folks who have lived here all their lives, and who still don’t recognize the simple signs of the weather — they literally don’t know which way the wind is blowing, or what it means when it does. And this in an area that has a relatively low population, surrounded by gently rolling farmland. There is a sad correlation here: the less we know about the earth, the less we know about ourselves, and the more restless and unhappy we become. And yet, even in a grimy city, it is possible to be in tune with nature, and to watch nature as it slowly, but relentlessly reduces buildings and sidewalks to rubble. To me, a small weed blooming in a crack in the pavement is inspiring. Not only is it living in impossible conditions, it attracts other life, all of which seems to say, “Yes, let’s begin again.” And the sun comes streaming down through the smog — “More chlorophyll, damn you! That’s it!” Oh, well. You’re right. Better read some Thoreau.
John Berbrich: How about Edward Abbey? Are you familiar with him? You absolutely must read Desert Solitaire.
William Michaelian: I’ve been meaning to, but just haven’t gotten around to it. You know how it is: too busy shopping. I know a little about him. He sure saw it coming, didn’t he?
John Berbrich: Well, yeah. One thing I like about Abbey is that he is not merely a theorist — he actually commits small acts of protest, some of which are detailed in Desert Solitaire. Theory is useless without action somewhere, even if it’s only activating others. Not that I’m an activist. But I appreciate others doing the right thing.
William Michaelian: Not an activist? Well, you’re not exactly watching from the sidelines, either, Bub. What sort of small act of protest did Abbey commit?
John Berbrich: Oh, there’s some sort of a government ranger hammering stakes into the ground, preparatory to putting in a road, no doubt. Abbey watches the guy, pounding in his stakes one by one off into the distance. Abbey drifts off into this long rambling meditation regarding the disappearance of wild nature, and the encroachment of man and his filthy noisy machines into every natural pristine eco-system. At the end of his meditation, Abbey walks off into the desert and starts pulling out the stakes, one by one. It’s a small protest, but one must begin somewhere.
William Michaelian: True, besides the fact that if enough people followed his example, it would have an enormous effect. What kind of world did he envision? Did he think cities were hopeless, or a necessary evil that could be greatly improved upon?
John Berbrich: I don’t think that cities bothered him. I believe that he felt there should always be wild places, and that these wild places should be left wild, “unimproved.” He felt that the big national parks out west should not have any paved roads twisting through them, that if you want to go in, you rough it. That would keep most of the casual tourists out. Novelist William Eastlake writes on Edward Abbey: “I went on one expedition with Ed outside of Flagstaff while Ed was working at Sunset Crater, and we carved down a huge Las Vegas girlie sign that was hiding the West. I can’t say this is true, because that is illegal, but someone did it while we were in that area. Some bad people carved down all the expensive signs between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.”
William Michaelian: Why, the miserable vandal, taking down all those beautiful signs. Meanwhile, it seems William Eastlake must have been an interesting character. Here’s a page about a few of his books, including The Bamboo Bed, set during the war in Vietnam. One more writer I haven’t read. How about you?
John Berbrich: Nope, just that essay about Abbey. You can find it in a book called Resist Much, Obey Little, a collection of essays about Abbey by people like Gary Snyder, Diane Wakoski, Barry Lopez, & Wendell Berry. The title comes from a poem by our old friend Walt Whitman.
William Michaelian: Old friend and good buddy. Have you heard of the Swedish poet and philosopher, Lars Gustafsson? I came across a poem of his several days ago. Here it is, translated by Philip Martin:
The Stillness of the World Before Bach
There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor partita,
but what kind of a world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-Tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love twined round
the gentler movements of the flute,
broad soft landscapes
where nothing breaks the stillness
but old woodcutters’ axes
the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter
and, like a bell, skates biting into fresh ice;
the swallows whirring through summer air,
the shell resounding at the child’s ear
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
the world in a skater’s stillness before Bach.
Here’s something he wrote about himself on the website of the university in Texas where he teaches, or at least taught when this was written. I don’t remember if he’s still there or not.
“I do not know what is most important to me: my literary work (Death of a Beekeeper, Bernard Foy, The Afternoon of a Tiler, The Silence of the World before Bach) or my philosophical work. Sometimes I cannot see any sharp boundary between these fields and I tend to regard myself as a philosopher who has turned literature into one of his tools. Why write everything as papers, essays? Plato wrote dialogues and Lucretius wrote a poem.”
Interesting?
John Berbrich: Yes, interesting. Never heard of the fellow. I like the poem, so many silences in those lines. A true translation, I’m sure. This reminds me of something I’ve thought about lately: who was the first person ever to smile in a photograph? The 19th century looks so grim on film, filled with unsmiling faces, even the children, everyone worrying about their next meal or their starched collar or when someone would finally invent the car. One day, someone smiled, the shutter clicked, and modern times were born.
William Michaelian: Hold it. Don’t move. There! Perfect! Okay, now, I want another one of you standing on a rock in the middle of the Grass River. No, not that one. That one, over there. . . . Oops! I guess that wasn’t a rock after all. Hey, it looks like the top of a ’39 Plymouth. . . . Yeah, those old photos are something, all right. I love the ones of Lincoln. And speaking of grim, Arthur Rothstein’s Depression-era photos are good — of course, that’s the twentieth century. But wouldn’t it be funny if the first person who smiled in a picture was actually put in prison for doing so, because it was considered improper? And a situation like that would be easy to prove. My grandfather never smiled in pictures. He held his head high and his back straight and looked right at the camera. But in real life he was full of laughter, especially on his birthday, when my mother presented him with a chocolate cake with whipped cream between the layers. The Postmodern Photograph would be a good title for a book, or an essay, or something. What would be the distinguishing feature of a postmodern photograph?
John Berbrich: A colorized photo? Do I win?
William Michaelian: No, I’m sorry, you don’t. No one wins. Actually, I have no idea what the term “postmodern” means. In the realm of literature, I always associate it with being bored and unimpressed, as if one were getting all of his sensations and ideas third-hand. I’m not sure what I base this on — probably the short stories I’ve tried to read in the Atlantic over the years, as well as many of the so-called prestigious literary magazines. Do you know what it means?
John Berbrich: Well, I’m really stretching here, but I think that the Modern Period in literature occurred during the early decades of the 20th century when the civilized nations of the world were trying to come to grips with the clash that happened when technology and the new mobility crashed into traditional values and customs. People were still telling and writing fairly traditional stories in fairly recognizable styles. Post-modern is what happened after this period, and thus encompasses quite a variety of voices and techniques. You’re right, a lot of it sounds bored and cynical. To me, much of post-modernism is a written, sonic, or plastic manifestation of Existentialism, and everyone is creating his or her own bored meaningless universe. Sounds like fun. That’s my take on it anyway.
William Michaelian: Makes sense to me. So, what comes after postmodernism? Has a name been declared yet, or are we still waiting for a pronouncement from on high? Or is postmodernism still the thing? Man, you see how my lack of a masters degree is killin’ me here. Maybe I should attend a few workshops.
John Berbrich: I’m not up on my isms. I know that we have Magic Realism, which apparently developed in Spanish-speaking cultures primarily. There is Structuralism, a name I find scary. There is of course the view that the work is all, the supposed author being meaningless, his life and milieu having no bearing upon the writings. These and numerous other studies focus upon various aspects of literature, but each one misses the swing, life, and energy of good writing. It reminds me of something Jonathan Swift described somewhere: a group of scientists are examining an object minutely; with magnification techniques they record and describe an array of statistical observations, all the while missing the beauty and symmetry of the object they are examining, which turns out to be a woman’s shapely breast. They’ve missed the point.
William Michaelian: Good old Swift. Structuralism, eh? That is scary. I’m not even going to look it up. What would even be scarier is to wake up one morning and read in the newspaper that your writing fits perfectly into that mold, and that you had been proclaimed one of the world’s leading Structuralists. Imagine — Berbrich? Oh, he’s a Structuralist. He doesn’t write stories, he builds them out of wood and nails, then he climbs inside them and hides from the Magical Realists, who are being chased by the Surrealists. The whole thing makes me want my Dada.
John Berbrich: Willie, I’ve warned you about the dangers of reading Tristan Tzara, before or after breakfast. But it all makes sense, somehow, doesn’t it? — All the tremendous variety, all that energy swirled and twirled into shapes of words and pages and pages of lines and paragraphs, critics and authors trying to make sense of it all, naming, categorizing, classifying, making sense, making sense — and along come the dadaists, destroying, shattering sense — but even that destruction makes sense, doesn’t it? Am I making sense? We’ll discover something new, NEW, unknown at this point, but coming, coming, into being . . . something stretching beyond the planets and between the stars, something burrowing into the heart and soul of anyone who reads it. Get me?
William Michaelian: Well, sure, since you put it that way. And to reiterate, let me add to the record something Tzara said in 1922:
“Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
“Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
“Dada is without pretension, as life should be.
“Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.”
And now here’s another question. I read on the Internet that Tristan Tzara was born Samuel Rosenstock. Could he, as Samuel Rosenstock, have conceived of Dada, or was the name Tristan Tzara necessary to free him? Or was “Tristan Tzara” a natural outcome of the idea? Just how important is this business of names, of being Bob Dylan instead of Zimmerman, or Mark Twain instead of Sam Clemens, and so on?
John Berbrich: Well, in a way we all wear a mask, part of our public persona. A new and different name would help to solidify that alternate personality. Before she died, Raccoona Sheldon wrote science-fiction stories under the name of James Tiptree Jr. and she didn’t tell anyone. It was quite a controversy in science-fiction circles whether Tiptree was a man or a woman. The general consensus was that Tiptree was a man, due to the inherent masculinity of much of the writing. When Ms. Sheldon came out of the closet, so to speak, it was really quite a surprise. She went on to write under her own name but continued to write stories under the Tiptree pseudonym, saying that she felt different when she wrote under that name. Come to think of it, I think Raccoon Sheldon may have been a nom-de-plume too, but I’m not sure. I’ve been fiddling around with poems by Myrna, female protagonist for our bizarre story-in-progress. Certainly they’ll differ from poems written under my own name. I have to meditate to find the female portion of my brain.
William Michaelian: Ah, but that might drive her deeper into hiding. Myrna, come forth! Come to think of it, it’s your turn. Where’s your next installment?
John Berbrich: Oh, Sweet Jesus, why did I mention that story? You’re right, you’re right. I’ll add it to my list. I have absolutely no ideas, so that’s perfect — straight from the unconscious. Or subconscious, depending on whether you’re a Freudian or a Jungian. Maybe I should write under a pseudonym; perhaps my output would increase in a startling manner. Perhaps we should combine our names to invent an author, like Michael John Richwilliam, or something similar. How about Rich-Mike Johnian? Yes? No? I just experienced another wicked deja vu.
William Michaelian: Really? Tell me about it. But first, let me tell you why you mentioned that story: It wasn’t you, it was Myrna. I do like the name Michael John Richwilliam. Hearing the word “rich” in the same breath as “William” somehow gives me hope. But Rich-Mike sounds like the owner of an Alaskan fishing boat. Hey — what about Ian Mike Berbjohnbrich?
John Berbrich: Now you’re getting silly. I do like the Rich though. Ian is an intriguing first name. Ian Richiam. Hmmm. My objection is that there are six letters from your name and only four from mine. How about Ian Brichiam? I know — Jian Brichiam. That’s even, six and six. But it’s a weird name.
William Michaelian: Weird? It’s an excellent name. I can feel the creative juices flowing already. And I can see it on the big screen — “Based on the novel by Jian Brichiam.” I’m telling you, this is it. The name is magical, mysterious. Say it a few times. Let it roll off your tongue. Ah! Jian Brichiam could even be the founder of Mysterious Magicalism.
John Berbrich: You know, Willie, I hate to admit it but this time you’re right. It does sort of roll right off the tongue. Jian certainly evokes the mysteries of the Orient, maybe China or Singapore. And Brichiam, that’ll keep people guessing. We need to invent a remarkable and unverifiable biography. Something impossible to research and gainsay. We need family, environment, influences. Let’s simply make up this guy and then write his books for him. But I do think we need to establish a solid though spurious identity.
William Michaelian: Yes, of course you’re right. I like the way you think. How far back shall we go? How many generations? I sense that Brichiam’s background is a wonderful novel in itself, full of old trunks, fancy embroidered linen, tea, and the undiscovered masterpieces of famous artists.
John Berbrich: I am flipping out with excitement. We must go back several generations at least. Now, we could start in the dim past and work our way to the present, or we could decide just where our Jian is right now and work backwards. Perhaps we can find a clue in the intriguing name Brichiam.
William Michaelian: The time-altered name of a place, maybe? A tiny village surrounded by ancient mulberry trees? Jian remembers, or thinks a remembers — for it might also be a dream — a very old man wearing a gown of the finest silk, walking in hushed slippers along a garden path edged with smooth, moist stones.
John Berbrich: Yes, and in his young mind he confuses the memory of the very old man with local tales of night creatures — ghosts, vampires, wolfmen, et cetera. It seems that the world of the imagination was always impinging on Jian’s reality. He could be terrified or exalted at the simplest things.
William Michaelian: And in his childhood he spends a great deal of time wondering about the people who are buried in a small neglected cemetery, making small poems of their names, which he recites to imaginary friends before going to bed at night in his room as the curtain is lifted gently by the orange-scented breeze. The question is, who is buried there, and what is their connection to Jian? What secrets do those graves hold? He longs to ask his father, but there is an invisible barrier between them. His mother — well! Poor thing!
John Berbrich: Of course at the time Jian didn’t know that his father wasn’t his REAL father. This was a terrible secret his mother kept close to her breast for years, accounting for both the paternal barrier and for his mother’s numerous and dreary attempts at suicide. No reason to ask why young Jian was attracted to the graveyard — his youthful world was darkened by the scent and the aroma of death.
William Michaelian: Once he was grown, he thought of it as “death’s heady perfume.” Do you think his real father is in that graveyard, and that he is somehow guiding young Jian, trying to point him in the direction of the sad truth?
John Berbrich: I don’t know for sure, but Jian certainly thought so. The eerie cemetery atmosphere is redolent in his early poem “Dad in the Ground.” Jian was a genius of expression and passion, yet within him were empty spaces that couldn’t be filled even by the entire world. Indeed, “Dad in the Ground” is sort of a catalogue of everything in Jian’s daily existence, all altered forever by his newfound knowledge, when his father is finally mentioned in the poem’s last resounding line. One fact can change a universe.
William Michaelian: Or bring it tumbling down. Meanwhile, the women of the household were certainly strange. I am speaking of Jian’s two wealthy aunts, who posed as deaf servants, and who dressed the boy in white from head to toe, then followed him at a safe distance on his night wanderings, nodding and smiling at his little discoveries, filled with awe when he’d stop and reach tentatively with his hand into thin air, as if he were greeting spirits.
John Berbrich: Critics say that in his poem, “Ghost Pale,” Jian considers himself a spirit, all dressed in white. His hand reaches out to others, as they invite him over to the other side. And he of course invites them back into life. This is the meaning of the “reverse-suicide” mentioned in the poem’s penultimate line. As if by killing itself, a ghost could return to life. The aunts didn’t realize the contribution they were making to world literature.
William Michaelian: Well. This is interesting. It seems dear Jian was at home in both worlds, even more so than most children. But as he was exposed to the so-called adult world, its cruel logic made him question life’s validity. In light of his advanced sympathetic knowledge, he began to think life in its crude and tangible form was hardly necessary, and might even be thought of as a form of punishment. Then, on the very same day, his aunts mysteriously died.
John Berbrich: Or did they? Biographers have been notoriously hazy on that point. Pitman, in his magisterial work, The Uncommon Life of Brichiam, suggests that current research indicates that while one aunt did die, the other aunt merely moved out of the home. Apparently young Jian thought they were both dead, or wished they were, and the story spread from there. In either case, the important point to be made is that the disappearance of the aunts loomed large in Jian’s early life. Other biographers have noted that at this time he began to wear black as well as white. He also developed a tendency for impersonating a dead body, and household menials often found him lying face down in the yard, motionless, dressed all in black or white.
William Michaelian: The thing I don’t like about some of these biographers is that they choose to over-emphasize one point or other, in order to make Jian seem like a nut, or a mystic, or whatever. In other words, they are trying to sell some idea, when in fact they are jealous of Jian’s great abilities, jealous of the ease with which he wrote his novels, words flowing as if he were dreaming on paper, or as if he were a child coloring freely and happily, not obeying the lines, but using them as vistas and sunsets and doorways. But yes, the aunts’ disappearance had a major impact. Whether they died on the same day or not might be important, more important than some realize. He dressed in black, he dressed in white. Could it be that white was for the aunt who had died, and black for the one who was gone, but not dead, because he knew she was not dead?
John Berbrich: Good point, Willie, a possibility to mull over. Burkhardt makes a strong case for the claim that the black outfit symbolizes death, while the white represents rebirth, the new life to come, whether the individual is passing from an earthly state to a spiritual one or vice versa. If you recall Chapter Twelve from A Passing Jest, the merchant Bromwitz is dressed all in black as the storms hit Berlin and the black clouds are ripped asunder. Vicious sunlight floods the city as Bromwitz’s daughter Anna snaps a photograph. In the negative, Bromwitz is dressed all in white, perhaps justifying the theory of Burkhardt.
William Michaelian: Perhaps. Perhaps. Truly, Jian Brichiam is a master at creating such scenes. It is significant, too, I think, that Bromwitz is handsome in appearance, but grotesque at heart, and that Anna, after taking the photograph, is unable to walk until Chapter Eighteen. And yet how she loved her father! Has there been a greater, more poignant love in literature?
John Berbrich: Such relationships are fairly common in Brichiam’s work, although it’s hard to top the scene in Chapter Fourteen where Anna takes her father’s pants & lovingly restitches the fly with her teeth. I can’t think of a life more filled with wild contrast than Brichiam’s. The quiet deathly pieties, the bacchanalian revelries, the violence, the extended dream-like states, the wenching, the years of vagabondage, the poet hobo, the sea adventures, all make the worldly Blaise Cendrars look like a monk.
William Michaelian: That reminds me. Do you remember his long poem, Uncommon Prayer to a Common God, in which he recounts a monk’s each and every thought during the course of an entire day? I am still amazed by the part where the monk defrocks God and banishes him from the monastery for not helping to hoe the cucumbers. Critics have read all sorts of meaning into that scene, making it sound trivial in the process. They make everything sound so final, as if this were the monk’s last day on earth. Again, their attempts to tie Brichiam into a neat bundle fail miserably. Many of the monk’s thoughts read like wickedly condensed novels which, if exposed to sunlight, water, or air, might suddenly burst into flower or flame.
John Berbrich: Like all true art, it is never exhausted, always growing, endlessly instructive. I’ve often wondered myself if Brichiam ever lived in a monastery or considered the monastic life. His thoughts ring so true, so conclusively right, like a fat monk of the middle ages, pulling weeds under a gray sky and mumbling his matins before the community breakfast of bread and gruel. Brichiam seems to be able to imagine anything, and imagine it so minutely and exactly that he can fool you every time. He balances Plato and Aristotle perfectly, finding the universal essence of every object as well as describing each in meticulous and accurate detail, as though every object in the cosmos was sui generis, one of a kind. Amazing.
William Michaelian: Yes. And it would be easy to say he was simply born with this gift, but we both know that would be doing him a disservice. Even if he was, he learned to cultivate the world seen and unseen as if it were his own garden, and water it with experience. And much of the experience itself was created. Being with Brichiam was like being in a room full of people, or listening in on a council of elders — so diverse was his knowledge, so powerful his intuition, so profound his understanding. And let’s not forget that his ability to impersonate others was second to none. He literally became others. What was really shocking, though, was his ability to change the color of his eyes and skin. Maybe that was a gift, or maybe he just taught himself how to do it as a way to pass the time. Questions. So many questions.
John Berbrich: Yes, and as you mentioned earlier, critics and academics in general are always trying to fit him into a category, some kind of simple and easy classification. But Brichiam eludes the classifiers, tricking those who would bring sterile order to the mess of real life. His poems, his stories, his novels, his strange notebooks — all display the width and breadth of the whole of sprawling humanity. Let a student uncover a passage where the world is dismissed with an apathetic wave of the hand, and another will find a section where the world is treated as sacred and everything that exists is holy. He can bring tears to your eyes, this wizard with a pen; I know he has brought them to mine.
William Michaelian: You mentioned his notebooks. Confession, experimentation, discussion, drawings, passages of music. Observations of the natural world, conversations with the dead, and with what we normally think of as inanimate objects. Conversations between inanimate objects. A caterpillar listening to rocks talking about the meaning of time. The language spoken by the sun. Nowhere does there seem to be a barrier. By the way — how many children did he help bring into the world? I suppose there’s no way of knowing, really, considering the life he led, and his multitude of wives, who, bless their souls, rarely, if ever, learned his real name. It’s interesting, in a sense, that he would leave so many children without a father, since he grew up without his own. Then again, he viewed nothing in a standard, conventional sense. To him, we are all children, who simply arrive and depart at different times.
John Berbrich: You’re right, Willie. He acts like a higher life-form without a hint of condescension. It’s as though he were some sort of lesser god, a minor league Apollo with supernatural skills, sent to guide poor mortals. He knows more than he should. And he can express what he knows better than anyone. I wonder how much of his genius has been inherited by the many offspring?
William Michaelian: Interesting question. I think all of it has been inherited, but that it has been spread so thin among them as to be almost unrecognizable. Then again, isn’t that the way it is with genius?
John Berbrich: I suppose. Genius is a rare thing. I’ve never made a deep personal study of Brichiam, and I wonder who his influences were. Every writer is influenced by others, whether he knows it or not. I think we discussed this topic at some length not too long ago. Where do genius and inspiration come from? It’s easy to believe in something mystical and magical here. Genius and inspiration are each a synergy: the total is greater than the sum of the parts. No other adequate explanation is available. From what mysterious waters did Brichiam spring? Alas, another question without an answer.
William Michaelian: Or at least an answer that we can readily see, or recognize. The truth is, we could spend hours and pages trying to define and discuss genius. I don’t know. Maybe we should. I don’t mind making a complete and utter fool of myself. You said, “From what mysterious waters did Brichiam spring?” To that I am tempted to add, “In which mysterious waters did he bathe?” We can think of genius as a mighty river without a source, but that rankles against our scientific and supposedly logical view of the world. From our childhood, we are taught that there must be a source, a reason, an answer. Everything must be explained — reduced to our level of frightened understanding. Nothing can simply be. I’m not saying there is no source of life and genius, but isn’t it possible that our search for the source blinds us to the moment, and isn’t it possible that each moment is the source? A person of genius might be a person who is unafraid of genius, a person who doesn’t see genius as a miraculous, wonderous thing, but a common element readily available to all. Or he might see it as synonymous with life, with living.
John Berbrich: Again, Willie, you are right. The thing is, you couldn’t prove the source of genius anyway; you can only speculate on possible causes and list them. You never can be certain you are right. Years ago I read this line from composer Erik Satie, an associate of the Surrealists: “When will one lose the habit of explaining everything.” And really who cares about the cause, although it is fun to speculate. The point is the quality of genius itself, that remarkable oddity manifested periodically throughout human history. You might have a point there, about us sort of holding ourselves back by thinking we can’t do it, that we’re not geniuses, that we’re dull slobs like everyone else. You won’t do it if you think you can’t. Everything is impossible until someone does it.
William Michaelian: Well said. In fact, that was so well said that I think we should end the page here, and start a new one here.
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