Jill Malone

I finally understand that my third novel is circular.  It’s an exploration of memory, and all the errors, and reconstructions such an exploration requires:  photographs, music, story, place, the pieces we use to build the incident over again.  And how reliable is our building, our storytelling?  I guess that depends, doesn’t it?

When I was a kid, the myths frustrated me.  This way in one version, that way in another.  Sometimes the hero changed, sometimes the trials, sometimes the punishments.  Now I understand how powerful the possibilities of another ending, a different outcome, an updated version.  The flux of the every-changing past.  The historical perspective maintains that the past will go on repeating itself.  Land wars over Alsace-Lorraine for centuries.  The story suggests all is relative.  The fallacy of the eyewitness.  The make believe of the writer.  The ambiguity of villainy and heroism.

I’ve been thinking about a poem by Olena Kalytiak Davis, from one of my favorite books: And Her Soul out of Nothing.

In Defense of Marriage

Marry the black horse stuck

Dumb in her humble corral.

Marry the white fences; marry the fenceless

Moon and the defenceless sky.

Marry the feedlot and the threshing

Floor.  Like the northern heaven to the southern

Stars, marry the kitchen table, its three strong

Legs.  Marry the gate and the small intricate

Cuts on the key and the view spreading

Outback.  The streetlamp

Weds the morning light, like that, take the

Nomad.  Promise to forsake.  Give in

To the cistern full of asters.

To the way the beloved

Story goes:  her body from a bone.

And her soul out of nothing.

In a slowly spoiling month find out

You have married the house worn

Blue on the yellowing hill: each of its

Slow budding bedrooms.  Marry one or two

Or three varieties of light, in three or four

Different lifetimes. I meant, windows.

Mate, be forsaken.

I married the way moths marry.

I married hard.

Gavin’s most recent obsession is with skin and bone and muscle.  Do tables have bones?  What holds your skin up?  What happened to Harry Potter’s bone?  What happens to our skin when we die?  Look, I’m lifting this with my muscles.

We’ve been talking about mammals and fish.  He keeps asking if sharks have bones, just to hear me say that they don’t.  It’s fascinating.  The questions, and the explaining.

“What color is your blood?” he asked me.

“Red,” I answered.

“Red.  Not green?”

“Red.”

“Me too,” he said.  And was quiet for a time.

I got to hear Dave Brubeck’s quartet last week, and then, the following night, The Lincoln Center Orchestra, featuring Wynton Marsalis, and the best players going. It was interesting to feel the difference—in performance, and song selection, and energy, and solos.  I admired the Lincoln Center musicians.  They were playing significantly more difficult pieces—including four Thelonious Monk songs—and the solos were freaking marvels—but a quartet, that’s the heart of jazz.  The place where each player shines on every song.  They’re all watching each other, and hollering yeah!, and though they’ve played together for decades, still, you feel the possibility, the variety, the improvisation.

It’s so right that jazz gets to be my autumn theme.  I’ll be thirty-five in January.  And I feel more energetic than I have in ages.  I shot hoops again tonight, and fell into a rhythm, remembering the mechanics of footwork, and sighting, and the satisfaction of a baseline jump shot.  I can hear it.  That old, familiar song.