DianeOutLoud

A quiet day. Some days it is good to travel alone in your own head. Today I went to Glasgow through Thomas Healy’s memoir, “I Have Heard You Calling In The Night.” Some of it was trite and insignificant to me, and I wondered how it got past an editor, exacerbating the contrast between the passages that hit well and hard. But Thomas Healy’s right to tell his own story in his own words of his own melancholia, with its eruptions in bender drinking and fistfights, has a steady dignity and drawing power. The title comes from the ordination, the first blessing of a new priest. “I am here Lord, it is I Lord, I have heard you calling in the night.” A book to read, in the silence of a day, to remember your own night, what voice, what call.

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I picked up Gordon Dahlquist’s “The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters” from the library a couple of weeks ago. I’m not going to forget it. For one thing, the hardcover is so heavy and unwieldy that I really wrecked my neck, propping it up at poor angles so that I could read it while eating, before falling asleep, and snatches of it in the middle of the night if I couldn’t sleep but was too tired really to be awake. I had ordered it into the bookstore when I was a book buyer simply because of the buzz around it. Random House had delivered a cool two million to playwright Gordon Dahlquist for this, his first novel. Judge it from the title that there is a fantastical premise to the book. I leave that to you to discover. What I absolutely loved was the trio of unlikely heroes whose paths converge to bring down a demonic cartel of very evil powerful madmen. At their head a bewitching madwoman. Set in an unknown place, in the Victorian era, the focus is on appearances that are deceiving. Who would have thought a young society girl, moneyed, beautiful, with position, would embody such spunk, courage and boldness in thinking to pursue her own path? And the doctor; moral, spiritually weary, timid and a secret tragic romanticist, would risk his life over and over, revolver in one hand, sabre in another, never wanting to use either, but resolutely determined to save lives. Then we have the mysterious, poetry reading anti-hero hero; the scarred, violent, ruthless, hired mercenary with a longing heart. There are enough secret passageways, flights, pursuits, and elaborately depicted sword fights to satisfy any precocious thirteen year old. It is obvious Dahlquist is in theatre as the fight scenes are practically staged, complete with taped marks on the floorboards. But it was worth wading through the blood. By the end of this epic you are pumped and swooning. I was a nervous wreck rooting for my heroes to the very last page. Erotic and passionate. Oh yeah.

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I do not rush to read every book of certain authors. Sometimes I have to hold back, especially when it’s become their last book. I still have a postcard of Kurt Vonnegut propped against some books on my kitchen table. I like to eat a meal with him, his particular hairy, unruly head, that crazy ‘do, eyebrows atwitter and a moustache, too. When a writer has a voice like Kurt Vonnegut’s, a voice of sanity, derision, and unfailing honesty and intelligence, I hear that voice as a conscience. And it comes in waves, I liken it to the ocean, that come in and come in and come in. And you know these waves, their constancy, you can believe in them, they are a force of nature, as his voice became a fact of what I have in my life. And I knew I was one of so many, and that gave me some hope. Kurt exists, and like-minded people like me exist. We are here, there, and everywhere.

But Kurt died. And the loss of him made me falter in my belief that his voice, like waves, would never end. Because I didn’t believe he or they are finite. I picked up “A Man Without A Country,” and there on the back cover was a photo of Kurt Vonnegut, standing on a beach. Hands shoved in his pants pockets, shoulders a little hunched, looking out to the ocean, the waves coming in and crashing only meters from where he stood in the sand. Message received and understood.

I keep looking at that picture of the back of Kurt Vonnegut staring out to sea. Looks like he was readying himself to leave, he’s had it, the title is clear enough. Kurt Vonnegut cannot live in America any more. The U.S. of A. with its illegally elected President Bush and cohorts, what Kurt calls the C minus upper-crust students, all psychopathic personalities. PPs = smart, personable people who have no consciences.

There is despair in this book. And anguish and outrage. Our societies have become pitiless in their cruelties and Kurt Vonnegut has decreed that he has no more hope for this planet. The bigger picture is shot. But he still took the time to describe moments when he picked peace, when we can pick peace. We too can move through our neighbourhoods and singly love our neighbours with a little bit of kindness, one word at a time. Kurt Vonnegut, the masterful satirist, the proponent of simple kindness. Exhorting us to create our own waves, one kindness at a time.

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“Out Stealing Horses,” by Per Petterson. How can I find the words? This book stops and silences me, but surfaces from inside of me when I think of it. Some books are like an injection. Not liking the imagery of a giant needle, but this story has been injected whole and complete under my skin and is circulating now in my being. It has surprised me. Somehow Norway, a cabin on a river, it is 1948 and the physicality of 15 year old Trond Sander, and it’s out of his mind that this story speaks. The charisma of his mysterious father. The shifts back and forth from their summer together and Trond’s own cabin now where he has retreated alone, in his older age. The intricacies of the title, masterful. Per Petterson has a visceral hold on the reins of his imagination and this story rises fully formed but at the same time has almost the ethereal quality of a dream; the brightness of the Norwegian sun, the heat, the tactile sensuality of the two, boy and man, as they work and play and live together with ease and intimacy that summer.

But there is a theme at the heart of this book that I cannot disclose as it would be an injustice to the author’s brilliance. It is summed up in one sentence, and when it first appeared out of the mouth of Trond’s father, the words lifted up off the page to stand alone, bigger, distinct, resounding in bold relief. Its myriad meanings and powerful impact for them, and us, haunts me still.