And I know what you’re thinking: Pony fur? But it was important for me to want something when all I did was needneedneed. Because what was money anymore, besides whatever someone else wanted it to be? Yes, even poison oak leaves could have been money. All to say: still a very, very expensive quality blanket. Maybe two ponies? Probably four? But who had four miniature ponies with which to make one quality blanket? Miniature used to mean cute and rare now it meant less getting lesser. They had one quality blanket left: pony fur. The women at the wall then made an announcement to those of us at the trade lot. Blemish sorter? Closed-cell wedge? I at least still knew the small difference between blanket and casket. Meanwhile, I could no longer distinguish between types of makeup applicators and farm machinery they all sounded frightening and the same. It once took me an entire day to remember the name for those deep openings in the earth-no, not valleys or volcanoes-that’s it, crevasse. Even before we burned all the dictionaries, words were disappearing. We all agreed on this as the fire died down and we crawled under current blankets. In our bivouac camp we’d already burned everything. It clouded? It devoured? It enshadowed without prejudice? It blurred, what, lines or nightmares or wants or cannibals? What I knew: the fog made day feel colder than all night combined. ![]() I couldn’t remember words to describe what the fog did, but what had fog ever really done? It blanketed, yes, but also, too obvious. Winter had come early with the stalling cold and with the fog nowhere near gone. And one of us now had a very nice snow leopard fur blanket, and most of us hadn’t even known of leopards’ existence in snowy climes or that their spotted fur looked like bread mold, felt like soft hope. And one of us now had a nice possum fur blanket with sleeves. And one of us now had a nice ermine fur blanket. One of us now had a nice wolverine fur blanket. Those earlybirds to the trade lot got to upgrade. As comfortable as pine needles and as warm as a dead dog. Bad wool, surprise, was badder than anyone realized. Yes, I really wanted a quality blanket over a current blanket. The last wave to wash upon the shore of opportunity, aka really, really late. They hadn’t vanished in some magical boom of smoke everyone from our camp simply reached the wall by sunrise, commenced their trading with the women there, and now look who’s appearing out of the noon-time fog: me. Instead, do as Lumans asks: feel for this person stumbling through fog and cold in search of beauty so that she might be warm again.Īll the quality blankets: gone. To say the world is ending doesn’t complete the picture. There is a kind of physicality to the language in this story, not merely its capacity for concrete description, but in a more sculptural way as some of the words seem to fade right out of the text. His narrator struggles with a kind of aphasia-words go missing on her, seeming to dissolve mid-thought-that is perhaps an effect of the fog, and this struggle results in sentences that veer into strange, unexpected directions. Lumans is a heady, philosophical writer of ropey, taut sentences. There is a plot, certainly, a simple, direct one, as direct as the route from the trading post to the museum can be in such dense conditions, but the engine of this story is language. ![]() It is a touching thought in a story that has heart but isn’t sentimental about itself. At the end of the world, art still has some value. What do the women at the trading post want in exchange for the blanket? Art, they say. Our narrator arrives at the trading post seeking a blanket. Which is to say, I’m hungry for fiction that gets in the weeds and gets personal, cheek to jowl, with our common fate.Īlexander Lumans has written such a story in “There and There and There and There.” In many ways, it is a simple story. But these days, the end of the world feels less like some hypothetical big-bang and more like an ever unfolding now: a series of small actions, the choices made in individual lives and by individual governments. There was a time when reading fiction set in a world torn apart by climate catastrophe and capitalism gave me an eerie feeling of near recognition-it’s the vertigo we feel when we encounter a fable, that weightless reorientation of the moral imagination. The World Didn’t End, Things Just Got Blurry
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |