A few days ago, Laurie sent me a piece I’d posted on Facebook three years ago. I was writing about Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road and the memories it stirred of the years I’d spent in Bury, Lancashire as a child in the 1950s. This is the post:Ordinary

I have finished reading The Famished Road (1991), Ben Okri’s extraordinary novel about a child growing up in Nigeria, as the country becomes an independent, modern state—yet one still suffused with Yoruban magical thinking. In the child’s way of seeing, the imagined world and the real world are not distinguishable. Life is experienced as a form of magical realism you don’t wake up from until adulthood.

I have no direct connection to this world, and yet through my memories of childhood in Bury, Lancashire, I feel a common sense of the phantasmagoric. In 1955, when I was five, I caught a virulent form of chicken-pox and fell into a delirium. The delirium produced synesthesia and intense hallucinations. I could smell words and hear shadows.

It occurs to me now that our move from Leicester, in the midlands of England, to a working-class, northern town was a form of time travel to me that was disorienting. Leicester was a town on the way up. Our new, semi-detached house was in a suburb. Under the Labour government, a visiting nurse pulled up to see us in her Morris Minor, dispensing rose-hip syrup and orange juice. My siblings and I went to the state-financed nursery school from the age of three. All that came with being “Bevin’s Babies.”

Then we moved to Bury. Owing to tradition and neglect, this town was still largely a relic of the 19th Century. The dark satanic mills still produced cotton, leather, and steel. The streets were cobbled, as were the school playgrounds. The streets were lit by gas lamps. Brewer’s dray horses delivered beer to my grandfather’s pub. Mill workers wore wooden clogs. Men wore flat caps and the women wore knitted shawls. I was taught to write at All Saint’s infant school, using a metal stylus and scratching on a wood-framed piece of slate.

The adjustment to this reversal of time was probably more disturbing than I realized back then. Adults spoke a language (actually, they just used an accent) I could hardly understand, and the local kids thought of us children from the south as having “had it soft.” It was also a place of happy memories and love, the sound of singing from men in the bar and women in the snug, wafting up the stairs as I lay in my bed. I have a vivid memory of first seeing the cobbled school playground that sloped down to the canal, green with slime, and thinking this is no place to play.

Reading Okri, I rediscovered the meaning of magical thinking in my own life as I was discovering it in his. I keep finding connections to the ways the real and the magical were fused in my experience. My dad, a most reasonable and rational person, comes from the place of stability. With his background in Leicester, he radiates post-war optimism. My mother, born in the Bury she returned to less than a decade after leaving it, is the one who told me fairy-stories and stories of ghosts she’d seen, especially the ghosts of friends who’d died in childhood of diphtheria and scarlet-fever.

Both these forces were inside me. No wonder then that in the delirium I experienced in the upstairs bedroom at 22 Tottington Road, I saw ghosts from the 19th Century emerge from the walls on both sides of the bed, the women wearing long black skirts, the men in long black coats. In a continuous procession, these figures walked solemnly toward me, dived into my chest, and stayed there.

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As chance would have it, when Laurie sent me the piece above, I was reading Culture and Society: 1780-1950, written by the great theorist of the English class system, Raymond Williams, and first published in 1958, around the time I was living in Bury. I was at the point where he was writing about D. H. Lawrence and the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where Lawrence grew up. Williams writes: “Lawrence was so involved with the business of getting free of the industrial system that he never came seriously to the business of changing it.” Nevertheless, Lawrence always condemned industrialism and much of the way of life forced on those who lived in its wake. Williams further says of Lawrence: “ . . . the industrial system was so strong, and he had been so fiercely exposed to it, that at times there was little that he or any man could do but run.”

Lawrence was running away, not just from industrialism, but also from the British class system. Williams was, of course, also writing about his own life, growing up as the son of a railway worker in a Welsh village, who escaped to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge. For Williams (and me, too) escape is not a clear-cut rejection. There’s sentiment and longing in all sorts of forms of the life left behind. Williams writes of Lawrence’s upbringing: “. . . in such a life, the suffering and the giving of comfort, the common want and the common remedy, the open row and the open making up, are all part of a continuous life which, in good and bad, makes for a whole attachment.”

Yes! All this is recognizable to me. During my few years in Bury, from age five until about age seven or eight, mainly I was sheltered from the privations of working-class life, being too young to register them. I was left with love for the communal warmth of working-class culture and haunted by the ghosts of its passing. Maybe I have always run toward it and away from it at the same time. I think Lawrence did as well.

Last weekend, I’m still reading Williams and still thinking about Lawrence and my time in Bury, when Laurie and I host a writing workshop, and this is what I produce from the prompt: “A phone call you had with someone who is dead.”

Sun and Cloud

Dad called my cell phone. He died a week later. I think he called to say goodbye, a forever kind of goodbye. I was in Scottsdale, at the restaurant Laurie and I went to most Fridays. The manager knew which drinks and hors d’oeuvres to send to our table. We’d finished and were leaving the darkness of the bar and the A/C and stepping into the harsh light and heat outside, when the phone rang.

We’d only been back a few days, after seeing Dad in England. When I’d asked his doctor how long he’d got, the doctor said, “How long is a piece of string?” I hated him for saying that. In the carpark of the restaurant, it was over a hundred degrees. Laurie hated Arizona. She said it was always over a hundred degrees and too hot to make friends. I said, “Sit in the car. Turn on the a/c on. I won’t be long.”

I stood in the shade of a line of orange trees. I remember the smell of the oranges, my linen shirt sticking to my skin, hummingbirds buzzing, darting, and hovering, from blossom to blossom. I hated them for acting like rush hour traffic on the 101.

Dad said, “How are you in yourself, son?” That question would always be his opening line, just six syllables, an existential question with no answer. He was a patient man, asking the question, but never insisting on an answer. He was dying and knowing he was dying, still asking me how I was doing.

A key was in the words “in yourself.” I didn’t know where that was. He said, “Your mother doesn’t know what’s happening.” He hadn’t told her for over a year that he had fourth-stage cancer, with a tumor in his stomach the size of a grapefruit. He hadn’t told his doctor either, until it was too late. Mum was in the same nursing home as him now, and as far as anyone could tell, she was happy in her dementia.

I didn’t ask the obvious question, like how long did he think his piece of string was now. We both knew the answer was not long, not long at all. I think we were both aware that this was our last conversation, and thinking of it now, it all comes back, not just the orange blossoms and the hummingbirds, not just Dad close to death, all of it comes back, Dad at every age and the attachment I felt when he was alive and still do. He sounded frail. He said my brother and sisters came by regularly. We didn’t talk for long at all. He rang off in the usual way, “Cheerio, son, cheerio.”

I looked up at the deep blue, cloudless sky. The sun showed no pity. I thought of Dad back in England, under clouds. In his bed, in the hospice wing of the old country house. Outside it was probably raining.

When he last visited Arizona, each day he’d look out of our kitchen window and say, “Another lovely day.” In Arizona that made sense to my Dad, heat or not.

When my sister emailed to tell me he’d died, I didn’t cry, I never cried. The humming birds got on with their work liked nothing happened. And the day repeated itself like nothing happened, and the sun beat down like nothing happened, except it felt a little hotter.

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEMORY AND STORY. The next Zoom conversation on Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

Here’s a little teaser for the conversation by Laurie:

Most of the time we store MEMORIES, even memories of pain—and maybe especially memories of pain and loss—for consolation. And the memory, if you tell it to yourself, comes out often (if not always) with a cast of heroes and victims--the hero who was a victim is perhaps the most common template. That is what memory is. A STORY, even if it’s based on a memory or what you think is a memory, has to be a different sort of animal to seduce readers.

Richard and I will offer you our understanding of the difference between a STORY and a MEMORY. We will do this step by step, no secrets withheld and all tricks of the trade revealed at our next ZOOM CONVERSATION ON WRITING CRAFT ON SATURDAY MAY 30 from 3 to 4 EST. Your questions about your own projects are welcome.

To RSVP, email: lauriestone@substack.com. The ZOOM conversations are free to paid subscribers, and hercurrent e is a link with a discount to become a paid subscriber to this stack. All Paid Subscribers are welcome to sign up for the Zoom for FREE, and huge continuing thanks for your very cheering support.

_____________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers

UPCOMING GUEST ARTISTS on ZOOM, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between Memory and Story, May 30.

To RSVP to these events, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following Marga’s Zoom is on SUNDAY, APRIL 26 from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

There will also be a BREAKOUT SESSION on June 1, following the Zoom conversation on the difference between “memory” and “story.”

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, and with Michael Klein, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

_____________________________

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Davos, Switzerland, 1964

I was a school-boy of fourteen, in what would turn out to be the last summer of my childhood. A year later I’d be out of school, heading for dead-end work.

I don’t know how my parents paid for the trip. They didn’t have much money at the time, but they did cough up the necessary amount, somehow. I didn’t think about how they did it. My friends were going, and so I had to go, too. I filled out the form for a passport, had my dad sign it, and had my picture taken at Mr. Peabody’s photograph shop. I waited impatiently for the middle of June, when I was finally off with my mates: Johnny Frear, Barry Welch, Johnny Folkes, and others whose fresh faces I can still see but whose names I have lost.

We met early one morning at the train station in Leicester and took an express to London. The journey unfolded in increasingly exciting stages: the tube to Waterloo, the train to Dover, the cross-channel ferry boat to Calais, the Orient-express to Basle, the rattling little Swiss train to Davos. And as I looked out the window on each leg of the journey, more and more I entered a world stripped of familiar sites, signs, and understandings. I loved it. Something entered me in the journey. My first trip abroad. Or I entered something I will call the world. By the time we stepped down from the carriage onto the gravel by the side of the track in Davos, and as we joked around and pushed each other as boys do, I knew I never ever wanted to go back to the life I’d lived up til now, and most of me didn’t go back.

Bruce Peninsula, Canada, 1995

At the information center, a sign says that 12,000 years ago the spot I am standing on was buried by the last ice age. It scraped right across here, hundreds of feet thick. I suppose, in a way, it’s a form of disaster tourism, where you imagine yourself watching an ice age advance. Two pairs of long underwear? Three pairs of socks? I noticed how notched and carved all the rocks around me were. According to a leaflet at the center, if a child from 40,000 years ago was transported to now and was brought up in a contemporary family, you couldn’t tell the difference between that child and today’s kids. I think the point they were stressing was we humans hadn’t changed but the weather had. I think we were supposed to imagine ourselves 40,000 years ago. We’d be looking at the same rocks.

It took a long time to get food at the Grand View restaurant on my first night in the area. While we were waiting, it was suggested, again, in the menu, we think about geological time. Does that slow down hunger? It does not. If you are not waiting to eat, you might be interested to know, it took it took four-hundred million years form the view from Tobermory Bay. You might also be interested to know there was more time between the Silurian and the Jurassic eras than between the Jurassic period and now. According to the menu, the Silurian age was so long ago that north was in the east and the table I was sitting at was 10 degrees south of the equator. In that case, I wouldn’t actually be sitting here. I’d be swimming off a vast coral reef, where maybe I would hear about the specials.

San Miguel de Alllende, Mexico, 2001

There is a secret garden where I’m staying, vibrating beyond human perception. It’s a realm of ultrasounds, ultraviolet light, high radio waves, and low radio waves. It sends out sights, smells, and sounds our sense organs are too dim to detect. Is it beautiful? We can imagine it is.

My host tells a story of the gauchos who come to town to drink themselves sick on bad tequila in the tavern a few doors down. Can there be bad tequila, or only too much? Each day, we walk by the swinging doors of this dark tavern, on our way to the town square. The smell is sometimes beer, sometimes disinfectant, sometimes unfamiliar and unpleasant.

One night, or maybe more than one night, the last gaucho to leave the tavern could not find his horse. He was asleep across the narrow cobbled street, his body in the road and his head on a cold hard pillow of cobbled stone. Later that night, a taxi driver could not get by the gaucho’s inert body. He halted the cab, got out, moved the gaucho’s legs close to the gutter, returned to his cab, and slowly drove around him. Then he stopped the cab again and gently returned the gaucho to his original position. I thought there was a little of me in the gaucho. I hoped there was a little of me in the the cab driver, too.

England, 2007

Laurie and I are sitting with my parents over another cup of tea when she suggests I read a passage from my notebook to them, and then she will do the same. You may think this is funny. It is, if you think a horror movie is funny.

My parents go to the kitchen for more biscuits and tea. I tell Laurie that in my entire life of doing whatever I’ve done, Mum and Dad have never expressed interest in hearing a single story, article, book chapter, or poem I’ve written. They’ve never asked to listen to a single piece of music I’ve been involved in. They’ve never asked me what my master’s thesis was about or, fifteen years later, the subject of my Ph.D. research. They know it had something to do with museum studies, whatever that is to them. I became interested in museums, I think, because, starting from the time I was a baby, my parents took me to museums, really hundreds of them, we were right there, the whole family. Never once have they asked what I think about them. We are a talky family, but this not the sort of talking we do. I tell Laurie this is not going to happen. There will be no sharing, no guerrilla theater. Perhaps, I’m thinking now, I was a bit overly sensitive. Perhap, I’m thinking now, my parents felt insecure about the ways my life had traveled away from theirs.

We escape from family for a few days. We’re in an internet café in Bowness-on-Windermere with hippy décor that could place it anywhere from san Francisco to New Dehli. Whatever happened to internet cafés? I didn’t notice when they disappeared. We visit Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth lived, near Grasmere. The tourists here are more middle class, educated, and continental European than the crowds around Bowness. I buy the CD of Ian McKellen reciting “The Prelude.” We listen to it in the car. It’s beautiful, including Ian’s affected Cumbrian accent mixed with his RADA voice, in which every word and syllable are enunciated clearly, even peppered with regionalisms.

We’re on the way to Keswick, an odd choice given that I went there with my second and third wives on consecutive honeymoons. I don’t think that’s symbolic. I say to Laurie, “It’s just an interesting town.” It has a great neolithic stone circle up on the hillside, a short drive from our hotel. It has Ruskin Point, that most Ruskinesque view of Lake Derwent. We visit all the places I have visited before.

I have a cold. It’s a spell I fall under whenever I visit England. Laurie thinks it points to what she calls my compromised immune system. I prefer to see it as my attempt to allow everything to enter me while I’m here. I do allow it all. Also, I can’t wait to go home.

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEMORY AND STORY. The next Zoom conversation on Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

Here’s a little teaser for the conversation by Laurie:

“Here is a trick. If you want to create the illusion of intimacy between you and the reader, write like you’re talking to someone right in front of you. You were walking, and there they were, on the street, and you grabbed them up and said, “Let’s have coffee,” and while they were sitting across from you, you told them about something you were in love with telling them, that’s why you wanted to spend this time with them, to show them something you love.

The trick I’m talking about concerns syntax and vocabulary. Dickens, when he wrote dialogue, he would say it out loud. He would write the way someone would speak. I’m saying do this with everything you write. Turn it all into dialogue, or a monologue.

Scan your writing for words no one would use in speech and find other words that someone would use in speech, and as far as syntax goes, break every rule of grammar if the rule of grammar applies only to written language. Forget that. The reader will hear you and understand you, because they are sitting right in front of you.”

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You can ask questions in real time about your projects. They may include ways to consider stuff that happened to you and that you are still carrying around and think might qualify as a subject. Will it? How to transforms things that happen to you into material for dramatic narrative and still keep the reader interested. We have suggestions.

The MONTHLY ZOOM CONVERSATIONS are a benefit to PAID SUBSCRIBERS. You can start for as little as $2.50 a month. I know for a lot of people money is tight, and if this is the case for you and you want to contribute, please let me know and we will figure something out.

There are lots of benefits for paid subscribers including a free 15-minute conversation with me about your writing goals, free invitations to monthly Zoom conversations with guest artists, free access to the entire archive of 307 pieces, and more.

_____________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers

UPCOMING GUEST ARTISTS on ZOOM, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between Memory and Story, May 30.

To RSVP to these events, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following Marga’s Zoom is on SUNDAY, APRIL 26 from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

There will also be a BREAKOUT SESSION on June 1, following the Zoom conversation on the difference between “memory” and “story.”

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, and with Michael Klein, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

_____________________________

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

February 9 2007

When I was first diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, I used a large glass syringe and a long steel needle to inject myself with insulin. Between uses, I sterilized it on the stove in a pan of boiling water. I have injected myself ever since with a variety of needles, thousands of times. Before the diagnosis, I had only seen syringes in films when a villain approaches its prey (usually female), and the camera goes out of focus as the drug takes effect. Each change in needle technology has its own erotics. Each change is a new relationship to work on.

February 6, 2022

Much of what I know about my parents’ childhoods, I learned from the other parent. The buried time capsule was an invention of the 18th century, which has gone out of fashion, since we no longer believe in the future. Forty years after I’d left the first house I’d lived in in Leicestershire, my father told me he’d been born there. I’d be lost without the person I live with, just as I am lost with her, but I prefer that. The only time I like going out in the cold is when a new winter coat arrives. Wikipedia has a list of about 1000 US places named after places in other countries. When I was nine, our family moved back to the village of Syston. I had never lived there before, but I always thought of it as going back. The word Zettel means strips in German and is the title of Wittgenstein’s posthumous book of things he wrote down and then cut into short strips of paper. Laurie only eats standing up. In my dreams, my hair is brown. How do I know this, since I don’t look in mirrors in my dreams? When I do repetitive tasks, such as raking leaves, I do repetitive thinking. When I was a kid, I loved the fake money printed with “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of 10,000 laughs.” I’m working on it.

February 19, 2022

In Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary, W. V. Quine includes a section on etymology and writes, “Word origins are delicately laced with poetry here and there.” Among my favorite examples on his list are: “A scruple is an uncomfortable pebble in the shoe; To impede was to put one’s foot in someone’s way; To escape is to slip out of one’s cape, leaving it perhaps in a captor’s clutch.”

One day, Jane, my business partner, and I had to fly to Salt Lake City and change planes in Madison, Wisconsin. She needed to smoke, so we went outside the terminal. On our way back, as we approached the automatic doors, she said, “We can’t enter here.” I asked why and she pointed to a small sign on the closing glass door that said: “Seeing-eye dogs only.”

One time, my new office at the university was on the ninth floor of a building. There was a glass door, opening onto a large balcony, from which you could see the mountain range just north of Phoenix. On the door was a sign above the handle that said: “Do not enter.” Below that sign was another sign that said: “Push to open.” I often stepped out on the balcony to take a break from work, but I never felt good about it.

June 19, 2022

On page 317 of Zettel, Wittgenstein writes: “We might imagine a negative portrait, that is one that is supposed to represent how Herr N does not look (and so is a bad portrait if it looks like N).” I don’t agree. I am thinking of a negative portrait of my equivalent of Herr N, and although it does look like him I still think it is a good portrait for other reasons. I’m saying the intention of the painter does not determine whether it is a bad portrait or not. Discuss.

July 28, 2022

Here’s a quote from Graham Greene’s book The Quiet American: “Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.” The metaphor of the “dumb leper who has lost his bell” evokes a figure both harmless and pitiable, yet one whose very helplessness, according to Greene, makes them a target — a warning that protecting the innocent can be as dangerous as acting on their behalf.

Greene, a troubled Catholic, liked writing about “the problem of innocence.” In the title story of his collection, May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967), an unreliable narrator recounts the seduction, by a male gay couple, of a man on his honeymoon. The reader can’t help but wonder: How come the young female bride didn’t see what was going on? Can anyone be that naive? Greene’s point is that the innocent, by being innocent, seem always to produce danger and anguish for those around them. I would call this victim blaming. Greene subtitled the collection “ . . . comedies of the sexual life,” by which he meant the opposite.

August 3, 2022

Wittgenstein wrote, ”At present we are combating a trend. But this trend will die out, superseded by others, and then the way we are arguing against it will no longer be understood; people will not see why all this needed saying.” The trick is to have lived long enough to see this. Of course, for anyone old enough to agree with this, this does not need saying.

August 19, 2022

About ten years ago I took a group of students from Arizona State University to the British Museum as part of a study abroad program. I was teaching them about what are sometimes called encyclopedic museums and asked them to go find themselves in this one, in the same way they might look up their cultural background in Wikipedia and report back.

A fair number of them had Mexican family backgrounds, so it was no surprise that they spent much time in the Mexican room. They reported that they didn’t find themselves at all and wondered why they were missing. The gallery hasn’t changed in the intervening years, according to the museum’s current website [in 2022]: “This room is organized to represent the distinctive regional cultures that flourished in what is now Mexico from around 2000 BC until the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Spain in 1521. Among the many cultures represented are the Olmec, Maya, Aztec and Mixtec.”

The students wondered why the gallery was named Mexico if it only contained pre-Spanish cultures. Wasn’t there anything from the last five hundred years worth collecting or exhibiting? The holdings of the Mexican room of the British Museum, based on collections only of pre-Columbian cultures, produced the odd effect of denying these students a location in either time or space. I think for white British curators, this effect didn’t occur to them.

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEMORY AND STORY. The next Zoom conversation on Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

Here’s a little teaser for this conversation.

If you come to the desk thinking you have a story to tell, that it’s already in you, that it’s your story or some story you think you already know, and you think the writing process is getting the story down, then what happens will not produce writing. It may produce writing, of course. I’m saying to me it won’t produce writing. It will produce an account. Either an account of something you lived or an account of something a fictional character lived. How, then, do you create a story when you come to the desk? Well, to me, you start with a dramatic sentence, or any sentence with an action, such as “I tripped over a dead person,” or “I ate a herring on the street in Amsterdam.” You look at the properties of this action and the words that arrived from god know where, and each of these becomes a prompt for where the writing will go next. It is not in your head ahead of time. It can’t be. You are taking your cues from language, not from a reel of tape in your mind you think of as a memory. We’ll discuss how to do this in more detail.

__________________________________

Year number two with you!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in and help celebrate YEAR NUMBER TWO! There’s a discount for new subscribers and a pl__ace for you at all at the Zoom conversations with guest artists I host with .

You are the only funding source for this work. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

________________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers

UPCOMING GUEST ARTISTS on ZOOM, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between Memory and Story, May 30.

To RSVP to these events, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following Marga’s Zoom is on SUNDAY, APRIL 26 from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

There will also be a BREAKOUT SESSION on June 1, following the Zoom conversation on the difference between “memory” and “story.”

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, and with Michael Klein, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

_____________________________

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

December 27, 2007

It is our last day in the city, in a café in Tribeca, before I fly back to Arizona. Our waiter is an aging hippy from Berlin who has washed up here to serve us. I’m sure the café will be thronged later, but it is early afternoon and we are the only customers. It is freezing cold. He wants to talk.

Laurie asks about his background, intrigued by his accent, deeply lined face, and wispy white hair kept in place with a headband. Born in 1941, he lived his early childhood in Nazi central (Berlin) and then, he tells us, in the Russian, the British, and finally US sectors of the city. Years later, the barriers are removed and, like a Paul Bowles character, he gives up on the west and moves to Casablanca and Marrakesh, learns to speak Arabic, and waits tables.

As he brings our drinks, then some small plates of olives, bread, and oil, he summarizes his philosophy of life, a few sentences each time he arrives. He believes you should drift, mainly drift, but whatever you do wherever you go, do it as well as possible. He clears our table with a practiced ease and insists we stay as long as we need to. We never learn what brought him here.

The sound system is playing and the Beatles sing the song that begins, “For the benefit of Mr. Kite” and ends with “In this way Mr. K will challenge the world.”

December 25, 2018

My niece had a baby today. I’m thousands of miles away and missing decades of connections. I miss all that I missed with them. I miss all those that missed me, if they did. Me as the child in the family photos. I miss those who aren’t around to grow old with, my sister Lynn is still a phantom limb that aches. And I miss those that are not here to grow old with.

March 6, 2019

My sister’s Facebook picture hovers next to mine whenever I open the app, although she died a few years ago. Today I clicked on the link and Facebook told me, “Lynn hasn’t added to her timeline lately” and I thought this was maybe the saddest message I have ever received.

May 21, 2019

Tomorrow I leave Arizona and drive, with Laurie, back to New York City. It’s about 3,000 miles, given the route we’ve chosen, zigzagging across the country, stopping off to see friends along the way. My leaving has involved the handing over of a number of keys: the house I’ve lived in for the last nine years, my office at Arizona State from which I retire, and various keys that opened the exhibit spaces I had responsibilities for. I miss colleagues and students already. Laurie asks how am I feeling and I am unable to answer. My new car, appropriately, has no key. It detects me as I approach with just the fob in hand. I feel oddly empty-handed.

June 15, 2019

Amsterdam. We are at the top of the house we are staying in. I am lying on my back and look through the window at the misty rain. The white of the hook at the end of the roof beam gleams in contrast to the gray sky. Every house has such a hook, used to haul up items, by block and tackle, unable to be maneuvered up the steep and narrow stairs. For no reason I can identify, I imagine hanging myself by the neck on the hook. There are flashes of the skylight in the Anne Frank house, and I am weighing my options. My stomach feels a little queasy. I imagine the rope breaks, and I am hurtling to the pavement below with enough time to panic and change my mind, and my stomach churns again. Laurie asks what I am thinking about, and when I tell her, she laughs.

Oct 18, 2019

I remember 1969. Ian gave me my first tab of acid. As it began to take effect, he said, “It’s a debriefing from all you’ve thought real until now.” We were in the middle of Victoria Park in Leicester, UK, and the grass ran away from us in every direction, edged by rows of trees. The metal railings of the old park were removed during World War II to make bullets.

The sun was shining, people were lying down, soaking in the warmth of summer. Someone walked over to us from a far-off group and offered us a joint and said, simply, “Enjoy,” and left. The debriefing began. I’d been listening to the Grateful Dead’s “Working Man’s Dead” and was impressed that, despite the advance publicity that this was the band of the acid test, the Ken Kesey bus, the Haight-Ashbury love-in, the album never deviated from offering a clear articulation of reasoned sound. The reassurance that no matter how stoned you were, it wasn’t. “All I want to know,” the song “Uncle John’s Band” asked is, “Are you kind?”

August 25, 2020

Last night. 2:35 am, and I’m awakened by a car alarm and a voice saying, “Fire, fire.” I jump out of bed and stagger downstairs. “Fire, fire,” the voice keeps shouting from the downstairs hallway. I grab a chair from the front room and climb up to press a button on the front of the alarm. It stay off for 10 seconds. Insects stream out of it. I think I’m dreaming. Moths are walking upside down on the ceiling and then fly away.

“Fire, fire,” the alarm screams, loud enough to wake the neighbors. I don’t want to be caught in the nude on a chair pressing a button over and over on the ceiling. Laurie comes down and says, “Turn off your pump.” I tell her it’s not my insulin pump. I pull down the alarm that dangles from a wire. Laurie is shouting, “Turn it off, turn it off,” and the alarm is shouting, “Fire, fire.” I pull it down further, and the wire disconnects. Suddenly it’s silent.

We go back to bed. Laurie says, “Promise it won’t happen again.” I say, “Nothing can be known for certain.” I tell her about the insects streaming out and wonder if they were the cause. She dismisses the suggestion. I can’t get back to sleep. I hear thuds downstairs. I think that perhaps someone triggered the alarm on purpose and came back to rob us. This is the logic of waking at 4 am.

In the morning, I observe insect remains through the alarm’s grill and read the manual that advises, “Upon hearing the alarm, don’t get dressed, don’t look for valuable items, and don’t try to turn it off.” It never occurred to me there might also have been a fire.

March 11, 2021?

In a book I was reading today I came across the following sentence, “We are accustomed to enclosing empiricism within the ‘analysis’ of Russell’s logic, and opposing to it the historicism or metaphysics of the Continent, perhaps counting the holism of Quine as a correction of its ‘protocol’ in Viennese philosophy.” And I thought, “We?”

May 12, 2021

When I was twelve, I was convinced, for a good six months, that my mother had been replaced by a duplicate. Recently, I learned this is a well-documented psychological condition called Capgras syndrome. I could hardly bring myself to look at her. I didn’t believe a single word she said. I stayed away from the house as much as possible. When I couldn’t do that, I stayed in my bedroom. No one in the family noticed anything different about me. I didn’t discuss the issue with my siblings. I didn’t think about where my real mother had gone, but now that she is dead, I miss her.

Feb 21, 2022

From things happening in the wrong order department: In 2006, a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, tripped on a flight of stairs when a lace on his shoe came undone. He fell and smashed three Qing Dynasty vases into pieces. The vases had sat unprotected at the bottom of the staircase, largely ignored and unmolested, for over 40 years. I wrote about it at the time, because a careful reconstruction and more prominent redisplay later attracted record crowds to the museum. I saw this at the time as part of a trend to bring museum work out of the backroom and make it the focus of attention.

Fourteen years earlier, Derek Walcott, in his Nobel Prize speech said, “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”

_______________________________

Year number two with you!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in and help celebrate YEAR NUMBER TWO! There’s a discount for new subscribers and a place for you at all at the Zoom conversations with guest artists I host with Laurie Stone.

You are the only funding source for this work. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

__________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers

UPCOMING GUEST ARTISTS on ZOOM, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

TODAY ON ZOOM: MARGA GOMEZ, utterly original actor, standup, and writer, April 25 from 3 to 4 EST. For a link email: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between Memory and Story, May 30.

To RSVP to these events, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following Marga’s Zoom is on SUNDAY, APRIL 26 from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

There will also be a BREAKOUT SESSION on June 1, following the Zoom conversation on the difference between “memory” and “story.”

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, and with Michael Klein, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

_____________________________

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

I’m walking to the-D train at Grand Army Plaza, headed to Manhattan to pick up papers for work. It’s 7:30 on Saturday, too early for shoppers, and I’m approaching the Montague Club along Prospect Park, before you turn left and reach the subway. An arm comes from behind and fastens around my neck, a grip that makes me stagger back, and a voice close to my ear says quietly, “Don’t move. Please, don’t struggle. Stay calm and it will all be over soon. Give me your money.” I say, “What are you doing?”

The voice says, “I’m robbing you. If you don’t do what I ask, I’ll be forced to hurt you.” He’s polite. His demand is mild. The threat is almost reluctant. If I were going to mug someone, this is how I would go about it.

I say, “Okay, okay. Let me see what I’ve got.”

He says, “That’s better,” and he eases his grip. As I reach into my pocket, I see the tip of a knife sticking into my waist, a long chef’s knife, wickedly sharp, the kind my friend Judith uses to julienne vegetables with fast flicks of her wrist. Where did he get the knife? His hands are white, his nails cracked and dirty. A junkie, I guess.

I pull out a bill, hoping it’s a twenty. It’s a fiver. I say, “This is what I have.” I’m determined to keep the wallet. My voice sounds wobbly and belongs to someone else.

He says, “It’s not enough.”

I say, “It’s what I have.”

The knife flashes toward my hand. He doesn’t cut me. He grabs the note. He says, “Walk forward three paces. Count it out and do not look back.” His grip tightens again, and then suddenly I’m released. He says, “I’m sorry.” He’s a few steps behind me. The voice is young, no more than mid-twenties, educated.

I step forward: one, two, three, and I don’t look around. Not immediately, but I have to see him. When I do turn, the street is empty. I search up and down, stepping into the road to see if he’s crouching by a parked car. A breeze rustles the green canopy of gingko trees. A squirrel lopes along the low wall by the Montague Club. I cannot allow myself to be swallowed by the dark subway, and so I walk home, the long way around on Seventh Avenue, past strollers out for newspapers and milk.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Another time, I’m on a bench in Central Park, just inside the entrance on west 88th street. I have an hour before I’ll walk to the East side for a medical exam. The sun is clear and bright, and I’m settled under an elm tree, reading a book.

Someone speaks. I look up to see I’m flanked by two young men. The one on my left wears a baggy blue t-shirt. The hem is frayed. The man on my right wears a white t-shirt, snug around his muscular frame. The man on my left says, “What’s the time, man?” He leans in.

I look at my watch and say, “9:45.”

He moves closer to me and says, “I have a gun. Give me your wallet or I’m going to blow your fucking head off.”

Joggers lope by in front of us. Bikers flash on the road ahead. Children are playing on the grass twenty feet away. I hear parents call their names. A walker passes with six dogs, sniffing out in all directions as he tries to keep the leashes from tangling. He’s disappearing down a winding path.

The man on my right says, “Better do it, fucker.”

The man on my left keeps his hand under his shirt, and something points at me beneath the material. My heart pounds. Adrenalin pumps, and I decide it’s not a gun, only a finger. I say, “What did you say?”

He says, “Give me your wallet. Do it.” His gun or finger jerks forward. “Do it.”

I says, “No.” I stand up and snap shut the book. I say, “I don’t think so.” I walk away.

The man in the white t-shirt calls out, “Are you crazy? He’s gonna kill you, motherfucka.”

As I walk away, part of me is saying, Hand over the wallet! Another part refuses to be interpreted as the sitting duck they have sized up, and that part is forming my words and working my legs. I walk straight toward the gap in the stone wall I’ve come through, and as I turn, I see the men still sitting on the bench, looking surprised. I’m surprised, although I can’t say by what in the past, and I can’t say now, looking back. Across 88th Street, a cop is eating a hotdog wrapped in paper. I approach him, then stop, thinking, Forget it. These guys make their way through the park every day. This is how they make their living. I tell myself, You are fine. You will be just fine.

I will turn out to be wrong. I’m not fine. And in all the years that have passed, I have forgotten nothing.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

In 1984, Lily and I were invited to a New Year’s Eve party near the top of the Paramount Building on Times Square. Lily and I were married. Her friend Alex had his entertainment law office near the top of the building. The windows were thrown open, and we looked down on a million people below, corralled in the freezing weather for hours and for as far as you could see. We had been given special passes to cut through the crowd, escorted by a policeman who moved us past the barriers.

The reggae music suited me. The food and booze were good and kept flowing. Looking down, I caught an image of myself as Harry Lyme, the black market profiteer, played by Orson Wells in The Third Man. In a famous scene with Joseph Cotton, the men are on a ferris wheel, and Orson says, “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” What makes a person have thoughts like this? What makes me compare myself to such a scoundrel? I blame the movies.

It’s really Alex, I think, I’m comparing to Harry Lyme, and I am Joseph Cotton, along for the ride—maybe any ride in America, where I have only just moved and isn’t my country. I don’t feel American, yet. I feel like a visitor who will always be dumb enough in regard to the social and political cues around me not to see them as clearly, as say, I see everything of class and society with a razor’s edge in England. Alex is generous, competitive, friendly, pushy. The party is in full swing when he says to a small group I’m part of, “Come on. Let’s go up into the clock.” And we do, taking the elevator up a few floors and then climbing the access stairway into the clock’s tower. Alex leads the way, egging us on and looking back over his shoulder with a smile. We walk along a mesh gang-way behind the giant face of the clock, which from our position looks to be a few minutes after midnight, rather than before it. It’s dark, and we hear the roar of the crowd below tossed up on a blast of freezing wind. It sounds like the ocean. I feel dizzy and elated. I feel trapped and invincible. Unresolved as always, inside my feelings and yet looking at them from the outside.

Looking back now at the man who was looking down then, I think I’m not Joseph Cotton. I’m Orson in the scene, saying, “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” I can think any thought I want. A thought is not a gun, in the same way a knife is not a gun, and in the same way a finger is not a gun.

______________________________

Year number two begins today!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in and help celebrate THE ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY! There’s a discount for new subscribers and a place for you at all at the Zoom conversations with guest artists I host with .

You are the only funding source for this work. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

____________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers

UPCOMING GUEST ARTISTS on ZOOM, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

MARGA GOMEZ, utterly original actor, standup, and writer, April 25.

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between Memory and Story, May 30.

To RSVP to these events, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following Marga’s Zoom is on SUNDAY, APRIL 26 from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

There will also be a BREAKOUT SESSION on June 1, following the Zoom conversation on the difference between “memory” and “story.”

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, and with Michael Klein, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

_____________________________

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

IN THE 1970s, AT LEEDS UNIVERSITY, I WAS A RESEARCH FELLOW on the topic of “common religion.” What is that? Bob Towler, a faculty member in the Sociology Department, had coined the term a year or so earlier to mean things people believed in that could be thought of as in some sense religious such as a belief in luck, fate, ghosts, even flying saucers, and any number of other “non-mainstream beliefs” people had. My job was to survey its forms and popularity among adults in the city. I needed the job to continue my PhD. Other money was gone as well as my will to complete the degree. I ran a series of focus groups to explore the topics people came up with. Next, I created a questionnaire from this information and hired staff to interview about a thousand people in their homes. It took months. The findings are possibly in a vault somewhere in Leeds. The concept of common religion didn’t catch on. No-one believed in it.

Several people in the focus groups said they believed in flying saucers. When I asked them why, they said, “How else can you explain the Nazca Lines?” The Nazca lines are a group of pre-Columbian markings carved into the desert sands of Peru that are said to have been created between 500 BC and 500 AD. The lines cover hundreds of square miles and are impossible to make out unless you’re in a plane or looking down from the surrounding hillsides. I doubt people who believe in UFOs or space aliens today would mention those lines, but they did then because of the best-seller Chariots of the Gods, published in 1968 and written by Erik Von Däniken. Däniken popularized the concept of “paleo-contact” in a series of books, and he theorized that ancient alien astronauts had left grooves in the desert plain when their spaceships had touched down.

Scientists at the time said—I don’t think so. Carl Sagan, a hugely popular science writer, planetary scientist, and advisor to NASA, wrote that Däniken’s “ . . . principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, . . . I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of Däniken.” Well, maybe. But what about Arthur C. Clarke and 2001: a Space Odyssey, and especially what about Stanley Kubrick’s film version, released in 1968, that grabbed the zeitgeist into its sleepwalking trance after stoners made the film a giant commercial success. In the film’s opening sequence, Kubrick dramatizes “paleo-contact” when a a mysterious monolith suddenly jumpstarts violence and human nature in early hominids. Lots of people in Leeds were doing LSD in those days, I gave up a few years earlier. I wasn’t surprised that many of my fellow citizens took these ideas seriously.

There was already a term for most of the reportedly strange happenings and beliefs I was studying. The term is Forteana, named after Charles Fort (1874 – 1932), an American writer who collected “anomalous phenomena” that he researched in the 1920s and 1930s, some based on reports he found in the British Museum and the New York Public Library. He published articles and books, full of accounts of occurrences such as teleportation (a term he coined), spontaneous human combustion (as befalls Mr. Krook in Dickens’ Bleak House), poltergeist (reported first in Medieval Europe), levitation (referred to in Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian texts), unidentified flying objects (first sightings reported in the USA and still going strong), alien abductions (first reported in 1851, in the The Cleveland Daily Plain-dealer), and much other phenomena, including uncanny noises and explosions.

Not that I believed any of this. I was struck, however, by the mental gymnastics it take to believe in the unbelievable combined with the unprovable. I mean, in particular, conspiracy theories. I mean the way it takes hold of certain minds that feel a deep pleasure in the deep bite of conspiracies. I mean, that the government knew 9/11 was about to happen and did nothing so that they could invade Iraq. That Sandy Hook was a “false flag,” played by child actors.

The oddness of a lot of this thinking is the explanation used to “prove” the conspiracy is more complicated and outlandish than the “conspiracy” itself. Take crop circles—explained as the work of playful aliens. The Wikipedia page on crop circles concludes: “While they have inspired UFO theories, all documented crop circles are consistent with human or natural explanations.”

Take another example, the Yeti, also known as the Abominable Snowman, a legendary ape‑like creature said to inhabit the snowy regions of the Himalayas. This creature is often portrayed as an otherworldly being—sometimes even a “space‑man” or alien from another dimension—blending myth with science‑fiction tropes. What begins as the siting of large footprints in the snow, soon morphs into a mysterious being, and ends up as a creature from outer space. It’s actually a bear print, of course. There are bears in the Himalayas, but the chain of explanation becomes (at least to me) more unbelievable as time goes on.

Why don’t people apply Occam’s Razor to such admittedly strange or unlikely happenings? That is, that the simplest explanation is usually the right one? I blame St., Anselm. A year or so before I worked on the survey, I was an undergraduate and took a course on religious philosophy. The lecturer introduced students to the maxim of St. Anselm of Canterbury: Credo ut intelligam, Latin for “I believe so that I may understand.”

I didn’t buy it then, I don’t buy it now. I think it’s dangerous to believe first and understand second—or not understand at all. You are caught in the belief. This way lies astrology, clairvoyance, and belief that Tylenol causes autism, that “pizza-gate” was a Democratic Party child sex-trafficking ring, that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Those numbers on your arm—you had them tattooed yourself.

This kind of thinking is exactly what grips so many people today, over a thousand years after Anselm. Believing first, and then looking for reasons to do so, leads too easily to false conclusions that become dangerous when applied to medical science or political thought. The belief that some conspiracy must be true leads to searching around for reasons to believe, which are then added to and elaborated as needed to maintain the belief.

I’m not saying every conspiracy is false by definition, maybe the CIA did have a hand in JFK’s assassination, but don’t start by believing it. I vote for team Karl Popper, the philosopher who argued for the “falsification approach.” He said that for a theory or belief to be valid, it must be falsifiable—meaning there must be a conceivable observation or experiment that could prove it false. If nothing could do so, then it’s no better than a hunch or superstition and too often only that. As the well-known phrase goes, “No amount of belief can make It true,” falsely attributed to Mark Twain. In fact, we don’t know who first said this. I’m definitely saying it.

The classic example of Popper’s view is the belief that all swans are white. To verify this, we might be tempted to see a white swan and believe they are all white, which we all know would be a mistake. To be sure, we would need to record the color of every swan, which is practically impossible. To falsify it, we need only observe one black swan or a swan of any other color. Here are two (image of 2 black swans):

Philosophers like to object to each other. That’s what they do for a living. I don’t care. I’m with Popper. Once we have a belief, we find it difficult, sometimes impossible, to move away from it. Perhaps you don’t agree.

After I completed the study of “common religion” and submitted my report, I was interviewed live on the local BBC radio station. A “friend” said he’d record it and play it for me later. When I went to his place, the recording he played to me and a bunch of friends was cut and spliced so that my answers to the reporter’s questions came off as incoherent nonsense. Maybe he was saying it’s impossible to sound sensible about the nonsensical. I believed I would never forgive him, and so far, I haven’t.

_____________________________

One year anniversary!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in and help celebrate THE ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY! There’s a discount for new subscribers and a place for you at all at the Zoom conversations with guest artists I host with Laurie Stone.

You are the only funding source for this work. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

______________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers

UPCOMING GUEST ARTISTS on ZOOM, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

MARGA GOMEZ, utterly original actor, standup, and writer, April 25.

Marga from an interview with me in 2015: “About a year ago, I was in New York performing Love Birds, and I went out for drinks with Ellie Covan (the founder and director of Dixon Place). She asked what I was working on, and I told her I was acting out scenes from lesbian movies in my club act and commenting on them. For example I was in favor of Sharon Stone being a lesbian ice-pick murderer in Basic Instinct because I want people to be afraid of lesbians, so they won’t fuck with us. Ellie said, ‘Why don’t you develop it, and we’ll commission it for Hotfest’. My negative tape goes, that’s not going to happen. But then last November I started getting emails asking me to describe the show, and I thought, Shit, she is serious. So I booked some storytelling nights and started working.”

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between Memory and Story, May 30.

To RSVP to these events, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following Marga’s Zoom is on SUNDAY, APRIL 26 from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

There will also be a BREAKOUT SESSION on June 1, following the Zoom conversation on the difference between “memory” and “story.”

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, and with Michael Klein, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

_____________________________

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

BORGES HAD A THEORY ABOUT CERTAIN KINDS OF WRITERS. Kafka was one of them. He thought certain these writers were so powerful, their work created their own “precursors,” so we read the past as if it is tending somewhere that of course, in reality, it could not be heading. It was heading somewhere the zeitgeist was expressing without knowing it was expressing it. In the case of Kafka, it was heading to a sense of absurdity in ordinary life and of entrapment in that absurdity that functioned both at the level of individual psychology and social control.

All this has prompted me to think about what might be “precursors” of AI, and what comes to mind are the exhibitions of PT Barnum. The great fear AI is stirring up is that it sabotages our faith in what we see, hear, and read, eroding trust in all information. This sense of things, these feelings have a history and a lineage that may or may not bear on what is happening to society now, but I think they might, and I find it interesting to think about the road maps events may have traveled to arrive where they are. It’s also the case that new things erupt into societies that may be unprecedented. I don’t think there are. I think this is a fashion of the mind, to think the new has never happened before, and that the present rewrites the mistakes of the past, but I’m keeping an open mind to consider some things maybe utterly original.

The US, during the 19th century, saw an era of similar disturbing change ushered in by new technologies, among them: railroads, steamboats, and the telegraph that changed life for people in fundamental ways. Cheap printing and newspaper distribution revolutionized how information could be shared. All classes of people read newspapers printed in the thousands and sold for only a cent or two. The writers used simple language and covered stories that appealed to these new readers. These papers democratized news content while also influencing popular opinion. Industrialization, and an emerging free-labor market, made social life more tenuous and fluid. Over time, wealth became increasingly consolidated by the “robber barons” of the Gilded Age such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vandebuilt, and Morgan. You can think of their modern equivalents as Gates, Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg.

Here’s how Joyce Hinnefeld, author of The Dime Museum, describes the dislocation that ordinary citizens felt in the 19th century: “What could individuals believe? How could they understand the workings of the new technology? Whom could they trust? How could one distinguish truth from outright lies? Finding answers to such questions was even more difficult because of the expanding numbers of people who engaged in trickery, wearing disguises to fell innocent citizens and mastering the art of the swindle.” Sounds like now, right?

I offer Barnum as a prophet of our current situation with the opening, in 1842, of his American Museum in New York City. As visitors looked at the displays, Barnum asked them to decide if what they were looking at was “real” or “humbug.” Translating to the “humbug” of now, how about the terms: misinformation, disinformation, digital gaslighting, post truth, deep fake, conspiracy theory, truth gap, truth decay, context collapse, and artificial hallucination.

Some people, such as 45, use the word “fake” to describe something they don’t like and wish did not exist—therefore, poof, I will make it not exist by saying it’s fake. People use the term “hyperreality,” to mean the virtual is more real than the real. In my sense of reality, there is language for many things that do not exist, such as “the soul” or “God.” The concept of “data voids” refers to a situation in which valid and verifiable information is replaced by a conspiracy theory. A “cheap fake” is when you slow down a video to simulate, for example, drunkenness. Where did I collect all these terms? From an AI query, of course. Sometimes AI isn’t dumb. Sometimes it hallucinates. As Barnum would ask you: “Is it ‘real’ or ‘humbug’?”

Even though Barnum made a fortune by playing with deception in his exhibits, he was also trying to smarten up the population who visited his museum, factory workers newly arrived in cities from other countries who had to learn, in effect, how to tell a real Gucci bag from a fake Gucci bag on the great world-sized version of Canal Street. Barnum was always coaching his visitors to decide for themselves, rather than to take things on faith and through received wisdom. In his way, he was teaching them critical reasoning and to question things rationally. By the way, Barnum was a teetotaler and purposely created a space in his museum for working women to visit without being hassled.

Barnum’s popular American Museum featured as many as thirty thousand exhibits including wax works, displays of armor and weapons, and live animals—including tigers, giraffes, crocodiles, and a hippopotamus. He added an aquarium in 1857 that displayed whales. In the 1860s, Barnum toured a circus across America, a feat enabled by the railroads and publicized by newspapers and the telegraph system. He called his circus a touring museum, which it was. This story is missing from most accounts of the history of museums in America, mainly because popular culture isn’t thought of as “cultural” and thus “worthy” of inclusion.

How do we evaluate what to believe? Is it different now than in Barnum’s day, or do we have different Gucci bags coming at us? We have more than AI to confound us. We have all forms of media, government, and science. If every form of truth is subject to doubt, then we live inside a much older paradox. That is, the paradoxical loop of Epimenides of Crete, who lived in the 6th-century BC. He said, that Cretans always lie. If true, then Epimenides (a Cretan) is lying. If true, then some Cretans tell the truth, which makes the statement that “all Cretans are liars” false. The simplified form of this is: “This sentence is false, discuss,” which appeared on my final exam paper as an undergraduate philosophy student in 1973. A twist here is that according to Wikipedia, Epimenides is “a semi-mythical figure.” I don’t know whether to believe this or even if it matters he’s an invention. I do know that Bertrand Russell used the paradox as the basis of his thinking about categories, particularly those that could or could not include themselves.

___________________________

Marga Gomez, the brilliant writer, solo performer, and standup, will be our next guest artist Saturday April 25 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

Laurie and I have been thrilling to the brilliant work of Marga Gomez in theater and comedy for a long time, and it gets better, layering memory, fake memory, social commentary, and doors into Latino culture and queer culture and girls loving girls. She is always working, always producing new shows. She’s from New York and has been based in San Francisco for a many years. Some of you may know her from that performance scene. Here a tiny bit of text from her show, Memory Tricks:

“My mother complained whenever she made a deal with me so I wouldn’t know that she got the better end. Like on the night of my seventh birthday. We were living on 169th Street in Manhattan. You could call that Harlem. We called it Washington Heights. We had the only house in the neighborhood. It was squiched in by three big apartment buildings. And some of our neighbors would occasionally throw beer bottles and bags of trash into our yard. But my parents acted like we lived on a country estate and they would throw these high-class patio parties for their friends in Spanish show business and never invite those neighbors.”

____________________________

Biz

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population of readers I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in. There is a discount for new subscribers and a place at all the Zoom conversations with guest artists I host with .

You are the only funding source for this work. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

HENRI-LOUIS BERGSON, THE FRENCH PHILOSPHER, who lived from 1859 to 1951, said time as we experience it is not a set of separated intervals but a tune where the notes that have already played continue into now. They create the expectation of what’s to come. Bergson married a cousin of Marcel Proust, and Proust was best man at his wedding. You can see how the time thing worked for Proust. Nabokov, too. He loved Bergson’s idea of “pure duration,” and Bergson wrote that time: “. . . might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines.” Nabokov met Bergson and considered him one of his favorite writers. In Speak Memory, Nabokov wrote: “ . . . I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.” By “visitors,” he means readers.

It’s some time in the 1950s, I’m not sure of the year. Dad is driving the family to our usual Sunday afternoon outing. We are always going to one or other of Dad’s friends from his time in the war. Each family is just like ours. We could be on our way to Jack and Bernie’s or Ray and Gwen’s. I’ve forgotten the names of their children. Just like us, each family has three kids. All the fathers are de-mobbed RAF Artillery mates. In all the homes is furniture identical to our furniture, affordable owing to the National Utility Furniture Scheme for newlyweds and anyone who was bombed. The scheme continues until 1949. The couples were all newlyweds. I thought they were grownups, if I thought of them at all. The government continued to ration goods well into the 1950s. I remember seeing my first orange and a little later my first banana in a shop. Mum explained how to peel and eat them. I remember these exotic fruits displayed in a supermarket, but there weren’t any supermarkets then. The magic carpet of memory produces its patterns.

The men reminisce about their part in the Battle of the Bulge. Jack saved his chocolate ration for weeks. Then he found himself cut off behind German lines with Dad and the others, in the snowy forest of the Ardennes. They were starving, so Jack finally opened his bar of chocolate only to find it had gone rancid and was inedible. The men would laugh with each retelling. What was the moral of the story? Eat your chocolate when you can? Don’t save up pleasure because you never know when you’ll cross out of safety? I lived that way. Children live that way. I think I still do, except for new clothes. It takes me a bit of time to wear them.

After the chocolate story, the men would laugh about how the American soldiers had swapped their warm sleeping bags for their thin British blankets, because a rumor had circulated that Germans were bayoneting GIs struggling to undo their zippers. Ray said, “Which choice was better, frozen or dead? During that winter, the answer wasn’t obvious.” And what of the women, the wives, as they were called? I remember them serving us kids McVities’s digestive biscuits arrayed on a cake stand.

As a kid, I found these stories funny because it felt like sharing the world of adults and especially the world of my father, always a mystery, the inside of him, always I was happy to peek into anything that gave him pleasure. Dad’s smile at the time looked happy, spending time with friends. Now, I think he was just happy to be alive. Perhaps it was both feelings. I can do anything with yesterday, according to the whims of today. The folding curtain of time can always predict a new past.

I was reading “Other Minds,” an essay by the philosopher J L Austin. I was attracted to the title, maybe, because earlier that day I’d said to Laurie, “It’s difficult to know what anyone is thinking because you don’t have access to their minds. We have to guess what is going on, and very often we get it wrong.” This is a principle that Laurie and I agree on, especially not knowing what the other one is thinking. Austin’s essay turns out not to be about other minds in any direct sense, but the general issue of claiming “to know” anything. Austin argued that we might not know what anyone is thinking, but we can’t doubt that they have minds, for it’s an essential part of our experience of life.

What I like about this essay is the way Austin makes you think about how philosophers ask questions in a way no-one else would, because there’s not really a question to answer. If life requires us to know other people have minds, there’s really nothing to question. He suggests, in a footnote, it’s like a magician asking a volunteer to inspect a hat and affirm, “Whether it’s a perfectly ordinary hat.” The volunteer has to say, “Yes, it’s a perfectly ordinary hat” because there aren’t un-ordinary hats.

Among the stories my mother told about herself is the one where she’s recruited by a scout to be a dancer at London’s Windmill Theatre. This theater was famous for variety shows and tableaux of nude women in motionless poses. When I was a kid, I thought, sure, Mum, no chance. Now, I’m thinking maybe she was telling the truth, but a different kind of truth.

Back then, there was an official censor in theaters, and it was decreed that “If you move, it’s rude.” This was based on the theory that while the city was full of nude statues of women that didn’t move and they weren’t rude, “Living statues,” couldn’t be banned either. The curtain would rise on naked women frozen as mermaids, American Indians, and Britannias. Pause, pause, then curtain down. Also on the bill were normal moving comedians and dancing girls. My mother said she’d auditioned to be a dancer, but who can tell what lurks in the mind of a Mum, or anyway my Mum?

My father didn’t dispute this story, which he sometimes did with mother’s farfetched tales. What makes it more probable is the fact that Mum lived in Blackpool during WW2. During the blitz, with theaters closed in London, many companies decamped to Blackpool. The government considered it unlikely that Germans would bomb it, and as a holiday resort, there were plenty of places to stay. Holiday-makers kept going there during the war, and the government backed it to boost morale. The town received 4,000 relocated civil servants from London, 38,000 evacuees, and 45,000 airmen, including my dad who was sent there to learn to drive. He met my mother, Sylvia Brooks, in the Tower Ballroom, and he proposed to her shortly after. The town was bursting with entertainers, singers, dancers, bands, and leading British stars of the time, including Noel Coward, Robert Donet, John Mills, Flora Robson, and so on.

It’s not surprising then that my mother, who was a keen amateur dancer, might have been recruited, except The Windmill didn’t move from London, nor did it close during the Blitz. In fact it famously claimed “We never close” and was reputedly the only London theatre not to do so. Maybe a scout was in Blackpool, looking for talent? I think my mother had that. Good for you, mum. I hope the story is true.

You certainly wanted more from life than the life you lived. Maybe you were recruited and for one reason or another, you never made it to the audition. Maybe the trains stopped running during an air-raid. Maybe your parents stopped you or—I hope this isn’t true—your soon-to-be-husband disapproved. Maybe you couldn’t get permission to leave your office job at the Ministry of Trade. I have decided you did go and you did dance on stage for a while before returning to Blackpool. I have decided you had that adventure and the adventure stayed inside you as a piece of “pure duration.” There’s no one left alive to say it didn’t happen other than me and I believe that, yes, it’s a perfectly normal hat.

_______________________________

Michael Klein, our next guest artist Saturday March 28 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

The other day, Laurie and I were speaking with Michael about things we might want to talk about, and it was so much fun, we wound up having a mini-hangout together. Here are some elements of craft and form Michael will talk about:

The difference between poet brain and the prose brain.

Writing when he’s happy and writing when he’s unhappy.

The pleasure of writing about figures in his life who have given him joy and showed him how to have a life, among them Adrienne Rich and Jean Valentine—“Adrienne made me want to be a poet.”

How teaching writing makes you a better writer.

Being an addict. Some things he’s learned, among them the “unseen” parts of life Rilke talks about, a key to the sense that reality is not the only reality, there’s something more in our existence.

“Art is where you learn how to live.”

Why his latest book of essays Happiness Ruined Everything is organized as “devotions,” and not with a table of contents.

Different ways of to publish work outside the traditional big-five publishing houses.

______________________________________

Thanks for your support. We’ve now been together nearly a year!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population of readers I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in. There is a discount for new subscribers and a place at all the Zoom conversations with guest artists I host with Laurie Stone.

You are the only funding source for this work. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

Times

I fell from an upstairs window

I left my wallet in a cab

I joined a group and didn’t attend a single meeting

I read a book more than once and still didn’t understand what it was about

I thoroughly enjoyed having a low blood sugar

I nearly fell for an online scam

I did fall for an online scam

I found myself in a closet not knowing why I was there

I fell down a flight of stairs and momentarily thought I was flying

I woke up ecstatic from a dream without remembering what had happened in it

I moved from where I lived without any regret

I thought I was about to die

I lost a boarding pass

I avoided asking for directions when lost

I gave a talk as an invited speaker and changed my mind as I was talking

I remembered family members who are dead and thought I am the only person who remembers them

I wondered where I left my shoes

I cried

I walked in my sleep

I didn’t return clothing that didn’t fit

I have fallen in love forever

Gurgle

Gurgling noises were coming from the basement. It was our sump-pump working, but not turning off properly. Tim, our local handyman, came over and made it worse. I tried to fix it myself. The noise was disturbing and immediately below my office chair. I was trying to write something for my next Substack post. I couldn’t concentrate. It’s possible what I was writing was sad, and the possibility of hope was being sucked away. The sound would stop, only to gasp and gurgle again. I found myself waiting for the pause. I associated the pause with the state of the world and my aging. I went down to the basement, pulled on a random pipe, and the sump-pump stopped complaining.

People

My speculation about why person A did action B is almost always wrong. And even when it’s right, it’s likely because, randomly, I will be correct some of the time. The fact that my guesses are usually wrong doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm for speculation. Are there other causes for my judgments?

Maybe, it simply feels better not to remain confused or uncertain. Behavioral psychologists suggest this might be correct. They say that when people change their mind and believe something new, they also believe they have thought this way all along. The mind is in a Beckett play. We don’t remember learning. We go on.

Radio

In 1984, when I emigrated to the US, some friends of my wife at the time bought me a Sony, short-wave radio. The gift was thoughtful, if not especially practical. The idea was I’d be able to hear radio shows in England, but because of fancy-talk facts about frequencies and signals, you couldn’t get much reception during the day and I was sleeping at night. I used the radio to listen to NPR. Occasionally, I’d catch a snatch of BBC World Service on a short-wave signal, but it would fade in and out. This was before the Internet.

I listened to NPR on this radio every day, until it was stolen from my house in Scottsdale in 2009. It was my fault. I was there on my my own. Laurie was in New York. And one night I forgot to close the garage door as well as the door leading from the garage to the kitchen. I woke up in the middle of the night, hearing sounds coming from the kitchen. By the time I put on some clothes and went to check on things, the intruders were gone. I clicked shut the garage door, locked the kitchen door, and went back to bed.

The next morning, I called Laurie to tell her what had happened and only then realized my shoulder bag and the Sony radio were missing. I felt a pang about the radio. It was one of those floor swimming moments, like an elevator dropping. She said, “Call the police.” Two cops arrived midmorning. They said teenagers probably had noticed the garage was open, and they took the first things they saw. They said I wouldn’t see the radio again and I was lucky more wasn’t stolen. “Close your doors,” they said. I said, “Thanks.”

I didn’t care about the bag. The radio was like losing an old friend, my link to back home, even though I didn’t use the shortwave band. I had to have a replacement. It cost $200, and I used it the way I had the old one.

In 2019, when we moved to Hudson, of course I packed the radio. Long before that, I was able to hear any radio station in the world online. The radio lives in the basement. I don’t use it. I will never sell it or give it away. It’s one of those objects life gathers that tell a story about who you are. One day at a yard sale in Scottsdale, Laurie bought an identical Sony radio for $4. She used it in New York.

Now we have two radios in the basement we don’t use. It’s pointless to have two radios we don’t use. It’s not pointless.

___________________________________

From his brilliant book, Happiness Ruined Everything, about how poetry gets discovered in the cavity walls and dead letter boxes of life. Michael will be the next guest artist in our Zoom series on Saturday MARCH 28 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP” lauriestone@substack.com

“As a kid, I read a lot of poetry because it was short. And there was a lot of it, right down the street from where I lived, at the Jefferson Market Library on Sixth Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets. In its previous life as a building, the library was the Women’s House of Detention. The cacophony made by the incarcerated women yelling down to their friends and lovers on the street below, filled the air of my childhood in the afternoons when school let out.”

Laurie Stone writes:

OMG. This moment swept into memory the way the Village in those days just lived side by side with the women in the prison, shouting down to the street, to you, you were the street and you were the women in the way your curiosity is always about other people. Why were they there? What had happened to them? You didn’t think there was anything weird about the jumble of things side by side when you were the age when everything was fresh and inexplicable.

_______________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population of readers I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in. There is a discount for new subscribers and a place at all the Zoom conversations with guest artists I host with .

You are the only funding source for this work. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

A year ago, I wrote this in my notebook: “This morning, I dug a path through the snow from our front door, across the deck, down the steps, and onward down the drive to the road, about 50 yards or so.” During that freeze, I read The Driver’s Seat (1970), a novella by Muriel Spark I found in the basement. It was thin as a collection of poetry, around 100 pages. Short read. Big snow. I could have written this exact entry a few days ago, before the sudden thaw, while snow was still piled up from the latest blizzard. All those years living in Arizona had erased my memory of the different forms snow can deliver.

Laurie had probably bought the Spark book in England, when she was traveling there in the 1970s. The paperback I found in the basement has a picture of Elizabeth Taylor on the cover, because in 1974 she starred in a movie based on the book. She’s wearing a lot of makeup. She looks stern. The caption on the cover says, “A metaphysical shocker.” What is that? If I’m honest, it was the caption that drew me in.

The snow I shoveled a year ago—as well as the snow I shoveled a week ago—was heavy and wet. It had a frosting of ice that sparkled in the sunlight following the storm. I thought there was probably a word for snow like this that I didn’t know. Then I remembered the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that the world is what our language formulations make of it. The Inuit were reported to have many words for snow. In 1940, Whorf wrote, “We [English speakers] have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow hard packed like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven snow—whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo [Inuit], this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable… .” This understanding of the power of language to make reality would be snowed on by much cold criticism in the years to come, but I have always had a soft spot for it.

Last year, when I finished digging through the snow, I settled into The Driver’s Seat. It’s about a woman named Lise who hates her life, travels abroad for adventure, and wants to find someone to murder her. This seems a harsh view of falling in love, but maybe that’s the way Spark saw it. Lise wants to make it happen but also wants to be in the driver’s seat when it does. Everyone wants to be in the driver’s seat of their life.

The fact that the main character will be murdered is revealed in chapter three, with plenty of pages to go. Maybe this is what makes it a metaphysical shocker. Spark knew what she was doing. She didn’t say it was a “whodunnit” but a “whydunnit.” That is the challenge she gives the reader to work out. You can watch the movie if you want to. It’s on several streaming platforms. This is Tubi’s description: “A mentally-disturbed spinster experiences a series of bizarre encounters in Rome as she searches for a familiar person she doesn’t yet know.” Spinster! The 1950s called and they want their sexist vocabulary back. A publicity summary of the book puts it this way: “Lise, driven to distraction by an office job, leaves everything and flies south on holiday—in search of passionate adventure, the obsessional experience and sex. Infinity and eternity attend Lise’s last terrible day in the unnamed southern city.” Several years ago, Laurie and I had a peaceful visit to Rome, but at that time we weren’t trying to murder each other.

A biographical note inside the Spark book informs the reader she was born and educated in Edinburgh, a city that Laurie and I have contemplated moving to when it’s time to take the leap from here. I worry we’re simmering in the apologue of the frogs not knowing when to jump out of water before it boils. I think this is unfair to frogs. It’s humans who are too slow.

During WW2, Spark worked for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. Was she a spy? Wasn’t every UK writer at some time a spy? After the war, she edited two poetry magazines and wrote several biographies, among them books about Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and John Masefield. Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957 and by the time The Driver’s Seat appeared, she’d written 18 other books, including, in 1961, what is probably her most famous and brilliant novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Last year, when I came in from digging the snow, I listened to a discussion on BBC Radio-4 about a new book, published in the UK, on the 188 words in English for various forms of rain. This would come in handy, I thought, during the rains of the coming spring—a concept it’s hard to imagine in the dead of winter. It’s a metaphysical shocker when spring arrives, because In the dead of winter the green things predicted to shoot up as soon as the coast is clear seem as far-fetched as finding a stranger to kill you in just the right way.

One of the phrases for rain in England is, “It’s coming down like stair rods.” This is a term I’d forgotten until I heard it in the first Paddington Bear film. Paddington uses it when he encounters his soon-to-be adoptive family in London. They all looked non-plussed by the image, as indeed they might, because I very much doubt people over there use stair rods to keep their carpeted runners in place anymore. In my childhood, there were shiny brass rods on every staircase. Rain showers, combined with shafts of sunlight, indeed made the slanting rain gleam like stair rods.

A few days ago, like a forgotten promise buried in snow, the temperature here rose into the high sixties and all the snow disappeared. It’s as if it never happened and yet it does it, again and again.

_________________________________

UPCOMING GUEST ARTISTS on ZOOM, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

MICHAEL KLEIN, brilliant and beloved poet, prose writer, performer, and teacher on MARCH 28. His new book is Happiness Ruined Everything.

Here’s a bit from a piece he wrote about the actor Michael Jeter: “We had dinner somewhere, and on the way back to his apartment afterwards we were talking about someone we both knew who wasn’t very bright, and Michael said, ‘He’s dumber than a box of hair’, which was very close to the funniest thing I ever heard anybody say. It was so funny that I fell in a heap at a crosswalk on Riverside Drive. God, he was funny, which also made him angelic.”

________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population of readers I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in.

You are the only funding source for this work, and there’s a discount for new subscribers and gift subscriptions. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

Eyes

Yesterday, at an eye exam, I learned I would need an operation to correct my vision, which has been deteriorating over the past year. I thought the problem was my glasses. It turns out the problem is me. An operation on my eye feels pretty close to home, that is, it feels much more an entrance into me than say an operation on my hand or foot. I was also given drops to treat the unrelated issue of dry eyes. The dry eye thing strikes me merely as a consequence of aging, which doesn’t trouble me.

It’s the cutting into my eye, I’m thinking about. I looked up the procedure. It involves three tiny incisions and a scraping procedure that’s 98% effective. It’s that 2 percent I’m worried about. I could be sensible, but I don’t want to be. It’s a bit like the weather forecast, where the percentage of amounts of snow predicted suddenly changes in mid-blizzard. You start out in the 98 percent group, only to find yourself buried in an avalanche. I didn’t mean to write any of this. When I sat down to write, I intended to mention how much happier I am being older than I was being young. This is a thought I’ve only had recently. It’s as if I was thrown into life’s washing machine, and it went through its cycles without me having any idea of what would happen next and when the turbulence would end. It only did recently, now with Laurie here. That’s what I wanted to write about, and I will, once I settle this eye issue.

Ending again

Recently, in the London Review of Books, I read an account by Iain Sinclair of “last Londons.” It’s the idea that London has many times come close to an end: plague London, the Great Fire of London, the London Blitz, and more recently the London of Brexit and fear of its collapse as a financial capitol. The piece is a melancholic crawl, the spidering of a blind man’s fingers across inscriptions on the tomb where he lives.

Along his wandering, Sinclair visits post-modernist Frederick Jameson, writing about the hysterical sublime, a sort of gothic rapture in contemplations of lastness where technology (AI?) finally puts an end to us. This bleak nostalgia for earlier times, each of which wasn’t great but is seen as better than each now, is so English. Sinclair, although Welsh, has lived in London for over 50 years, which is enough to turn you English.

Sinclair is melancholy, too, about impermanence itself and the impossibility of holding time still. London won’t end. It will change again and again. Sinclair’s thinking is what Frank Kermode described as “sophisticated apocalypticism,” where fear of the end, although continually disconfirmed is never discredited. Maybe we’ve arrived at a state of permanent end times. Or it just feels that way.

Class acts

The English class system, like bacteria and fear of death, is mysterious and everywhere. For kids like me, education was the way through it—or the door out of it. I was part of the Labour Party’s postwar generation, when social change was in the air, where for a few years offspring of the under classes could go to university for free. That is, if we qualified. It was a Snakes-and-Ladders game where a role of the dice could catapult you up the social ladder. The dice were your A-level results. I scrapped together enough decent scores to apply to university when I was 23.

I’d left school at fifteen and had spent eight years working full time in this depressing job or that one. Eventually, my qualifications were good enough for the government to pay my expenses. This had almost no bearing on the slippery sense I still had of my place in the class system. I’m not sure I can describe how it operated and made me feel. It was, of course, discriminatory and prejudiced. There are so many words for this phenomenon of placement, a machine that presupposes inborn differences and operates capriciously, depending on where you are, or think you are, along the food chain. Where do you come from? What is your accent? Your skin color? You navigate class the way Alice does Wonderland. In one context taking up all the space in a room, in another becoming the ball in a croquet match.

Alice in Wonderland is a brilliant meditation on the ways we can variously feel small or large. It’s a parable about how children experience their place among adults and then in the wider world. You spend so much time trying to figure out the rules of the game, you forget you are always playing it and that the rules are always changing.

Wonderland describes the feelings I had living in a class-bound culture and the feelings I’ve had as well living in a body with an incurable illness—for new readers, I’m talking about type 1 diabetes. Class, education, and diabetes swirled around inside me, moving me up or down the board of opportunity. In my first week at the University of Leeds, I learned I was diabetic and that my lifespan—it was assumed, although repeatedly disconfirmed—would be chopped off by a fair number of years. I then missed the whole of my first term. This is not a complaint. I loved everything that happened to me.

Looking back, when I lived in England, I didn’t exactly know I was swimming in the pool of class, but as Laurie often says, quoting Spalding Gray: “Does a fish know it’s swimming in water”? The answer is yes, eventually it does know. In time, you read your life backwards with all the new knowledge you keep uncovering.

This is me, too. I can feel him inside, the same as then. We met after school, Katie and me. We rented a punt and the attendant pushed us off down the river. We drifted beneath the willows dipping over the riverbank and we laughed as we found ourselves under a canopy of shimmering golden light. We lay together, arms around each other. Do you remember? We were both just fourteen years old and that was the last day I ever saw you. There’s something of me there, wondering who I am and not needing an answer.

_________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population of readers I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in.

You are the only funding source for this work, and there’s a discount for new subscribers and gift subscriptions. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

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Graham Greene

I was reading “Under the Garden,” a story by Graham Greene published in 1963. It opens in a doctor’s office. The narrator is looking at X-rays of his lungs and is reminded of grainy photographic maps he’d studied during the war, searching for caches of weapons. Often in Greene’s stories, we’re in a world of stringent necessity that makes it seem as if World War II hasn’t ended and will never end. Office workers in Greeneland still use manual typewriters. Railways stations are drafty, and men in tweed jackets drink gin and tonic and chat up blousey barmaids in shabby pubs. Greeneland can materialize in Mexico, Cuba, or Africa—anywhere ex-colonials live in uncomfortable outposts with broken plumbing, where people ache for the love of an absent God, and where Catholic “grace” arrives via double agents. The seediness, the agony of the soul, and the small solace of faith, glinting through a cracked window, all this reflects its actual origin: the newspaper office in Nottingham where Greene worked before the war, lodging with stingy landladies and feeling the loneliness of dead-end work.

Laurie and I have just visited a patch of Greeneland in southern Scottsdale, Arizona, at the oxymoronically named British Gourmet where a sour-faced Brit of about my age displays depressing looking groceries to recent American tourists and marooned citizens of the UK. On the shelves are McVitties Digestive Biscuits, Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate bars, Gayle’s Lemon Curd, Hartley’s jam, and cartons of Wheatabix cereal. Not too much of the stuff, of course. It could be an art installation called “Postwar austerity.” I half expect the sour-faced shopkeeper to ask for my ration book. The brands are nostalgic props in the back parlor of Little England. No multicultural UK here, no taste of the West Indies or the Indian subcontinent, not even Common Market Euro-food. It’s a theme park celebration of British grimness, intolerance, and bad service—as familiar as the back of my hand.

As a customer in Greeneland, you begin each exchange with, “Would it be too much trouble to ask where the Typhoo tea is located?” Sour face directs you inaccurately with booming annoyance. You find your item with its grossly inflated price and bring out your credit card. “Oh,” he says, the corners of his mouth turning down, “you don’t have cash?” You finish your transaction with a bright chorus of “cheerio, cheerio,” to punctuate the mutual loathing.

Snow

Every year at Humphrey Perkins School, we would look out our classroom windows in late October to see the first layers of white snow across the rugby pitch. By lunch, the storm would pick up, and when the snow reached half an inch the headmaster would announce the school’s closing at 2:00 p.m. and direct those traveling by train to leave for the station by 1:30. At half past the hour, we would trudge off in a bedraggled line to meet the train to Leicester.

No sooner would we arrive at the platform of Barrow-upon-Soar than the station master would shout across to where we were huddled that the train would be delayed an hour. Jeers would rise up. Someone would hurl a snowball at the station master’s cap as he retreated to his little office to warm himself by a coal fire. Then we’d start a snowball fight in earnest that wouldn’t end until everyone’s hands were so frozen and their necks so drenched from dribbled ice we could hardly move. The wind would howl, and we’d be trapped there in shorts, barred from entering the waiting room by the watchdog sixth form, who’d commandeered it for themselves, our knees knocking until the train pulled in.

Back then, an inch of snow, arriving like clockwork every autumn, would cripple British Rail because it was the custom in Greeneland. It was the place where you were brought up to expect the worst, refuse to prepare for it, and refrain from grumbling when it arrived. When we kids objected, we were told we had it soft and that in the winter of 1947 the trains stopped for months, roads became impassible, villages were cut off, and people ate each other, or so I believed. There was great Dunkirk pride in the catastrophe. Trying to avert it would have been unsporting. Monty Python humor of extreme forbearance in the face of, let’s say having your arm hacked off, is closer to documentary than parody. I still miss it.

_________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population of readers I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in.

You are the only funding source for this work, and there’s a discount for new subscribers and gift subscriptions. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

When Laurie and I watch a film together on my computer, sitting side by side on the couch, I count my fingers—1 through 5 on each hand, starting with the thumb. This is the way the piano keys are numbered on the software I am using to learn chords. Playing the piano and counting my fingers are unrelated in terms of cause and effect. I just started the piano. The counting thing is old. When I mentioned it to Laurie, she gave me a “so what?” look. Then I said, “I also count the bones in my hands.” She said, “That’s something to write about.” She said, “That’s weird and even weirder I’m only just learning this.”

I count the phalanges and metacarpals, and just one of the carpals (the trapezium, if you must know). I do this while we are watching whatever’s on the screen. I count the four bones in the fingers and say to myself “Four time four is 16, and two hands, so that’s 32.” Then I count the three bones of the thumb and add the trapezium making another 4, or another 8 in total with both hands, and I say to myself “That makes 40.” It’s a nice round number. I have no idea why I do this, but I do it pretty much every day, and I like it.

A few minutes before writing this, I learned (because I looked it up) that such behavior is often diagnosed as a feature of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Maybe it is, but I have no desire to stop doing it. This kind of counting is also known as arithmomania, which sounds like a dance move you are likely to be treated for if a forensic psychologist spots you doing it. Don’t you love the way medical terms disguise their judgment, “arithmo-“ from counting and “mania” from madness. If I’d been born later, I’m sure I’d have been diagnosed with all kinds of mental abnormalities. Fortunately I missed the era of such labelling and simply had to get on in a life where nobody cared or noticed I counted.

Our house is full of small rugs I walk on daily. I often walk across them by placing one foot in front of the other, and I count how many feet this is in total. I just measured my foot, and it’s ten inches long, so it’s easy to add up the total inches. Most of our rugs are four or five feet long, by which I mean my feet and therefore 40 or 50 inches—not the official foot-length of twelve inches. After I measured my foot, I measured my walking boots. They are twelve inches long—a proper foot. The twelve-inch foot measure we use today goes back to the Romans and their duodecimal system where lengths and time intervals were divisible by twelve. But I digress.

I have another counting habit. I only crops up when I’m waiting for an appointment. Maybe I’m anxious. If so, it may be OCD. Maybe, I’m bored. In which case it isn’t OCD. In 1970, I applied to go to university and was invited to an interview at the University of Leeds. I was nervous, waiting in the lounge of the Philosophy Department. I was waiting to speak with Dr. Hugo Meynell. The departmental secretary handed me a copy of their undergraduate brochure, outlining the range of subjects they taught and the names of the faculty.

The words swam across the pages. I started counting things in the room: three sofas, five chairs, four bookcases, four windows. Instead of reading the brochure, I counted the number of questions there were in the text.

Dr. Meynell proved to be warm and friendly. He told me he taught the philosophy of religion course and, if I got in, he would be teaching me in the coming term. We discussed my train journey from Leicester to Leeds, and he was concerned I not miss the return train. To end our conversation, he asked what I had made of the departmental brochure, and I said, “It contains thirty-two questions.” He said, “That’s great. Really, thirty-two? I had no idea.” He added, “I think we can offer you a place.” That moment changed the course of my life.

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Story

I have come up with a new thought about writing when you use your own material as a source. Laurie posted this on her recent stack because I didn’t feel like it until now.

In a notebook, I wrote:

I recently wrote a story about a time in my twenties when I lived in a crummy flat in Birmingham. It was about the odd Irish couple I rented from. I posted it on Substack and a few days later I got an email from my ex-wife (of that period), asking why she’d been written out of the story.

In the story I was telling, there wasn’t a significant role for her. In fact, I wrote it as if I was a single person, intently watching my eccentric landlords. The email made me think about the process of writing. My ex-wife was assuming I was telling a story about my life as it had been, with some sort of factual base. To me, I was writing, not reliving my life.

I didn’t write her out. I had never written her in. For my ex-wife, the story had already happened, and I was recording it. For me, the story was something I was inventing in the moment of stringing sentences together. This difference in understanding is probably at the tangled root of many hurt feelings, pointless conversations, and wasted shrink sessions. Stories can’t write someone out, but if you write them in, you should be very careful about what you say.

Laurie is taken by the concept: You can’t write anyone out of a story because they only get to be there if you write them in.

____________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks so much to the subscribers who are paying for this publication. It’s true, you don’t have to pay to read it because I want to attract the largest and most varied population of readers I can. You don’t have to pay to read the stack, but if you enjoy it, value it, and have not yet taken a turn at support, please consider making today the day you jump in.

You are the only funding source for this work, and there’s a discount for new subscribers and gift subscriptions. Make sure to use a browser on your phone or computer, and not the Substack app.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

The latest edition of the London Review of Books (February 5th, 2026) arrived this morning, and I noticed an add for the Derby Museum of Art in England. The title of their current exhibit is, “There’s no Wright without Derby,” celebrating the town’s most famous painter, Joseph Wright—always referred to as “Joseph Wright of Derby” because another, now-forgotten artist of his time had the same name. I will be delighted to be known as as Richard Toon of Hudson as soon as another Richard Toon crops up.

I’ve long been attracted to a particular work Wright painted in 1768. It shows a darkened room, in which a single candle illuminates nine figures gathered round a table. A child glances up in apprehension, another hides her face in her father’s coat. A couple flirts in the corner. At the center, a wild-haired experimentalist works his apparatus—his hand raised above a glass globe in which a white cockatoo flutters weakly. It’s called “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.”

When I was a kid, my mother took me to the Derby museum to see Wright’s paintings. The town was only 30 miles from where we lived. I don’t remember what I saw then, but much later, some time in the late 1990’s, I wrote an article about this painting for the Association of Science and Technology Centers, using the painting to illustrate how varied reactions can be to demonstrations of scientific facts.

At the time, I was director of the education department at the Arizona Science Center and also writing my PhD dissertation about science centers. There’s a long history of witnessing the truths of science through demonstrations. I connected this history to the daily demonstrations of science given to small audiences at the center in Phoenix. When I was there we performed demonstrations about the optics of the eye, lasers, liquid nitrogen, space exploration, mineral identification, radio communications, static electricity, and many other topics I can’t remember.

Wright’s painting shows the demonstration of a scientific truth—that of the vacuum tube. It was a truth first demonstrated a century earlier, when, in 1659, Robert Boyle showed the properties of vacuums, using an air-pump, to a gathering of invited guests, who later would become the Royal Society. The public witnessing of controlled demonstrations became an essential part of the creation of “scientific facts” of the time. Gradually, such gatherings made their way more generally into culture as “rational recreations,” as in the wealthy family depicted in Wright’s painting.

By the mid- to late-18th-century, it became a fad in England for rich people to invite into their homes characters called “natural philosophers,” who were often itinerant, to stage entertaining demonstrations of the laws of nature to the household. I have to say, when I learned about these performing smart people, it sounded like an excellent description of a job I have been looking for all my life: Itinerant philosopher! It was pretty much what I did at the science center, supervising a group of young science educators, while, behind everyone’s back in my dissertation, I was questioning the legitimacy of museums to claim they produced knowledge.

When Thomas Hobbes learned about the air pump, he objected to it, believing that experiments didn’t produce truth—deductive reasoning did. You may recall Hobbes’ famous summary of life: “nasty, brutish, and short.” Boyle relied on experimental, probabilistic, matters of fact. Hobbes denied that a vacuum (an empty space) could actually be created, but of more significance, he believed the experimental method threatened social order by creating a private, social space for dissent. He feared a “priest-like” class of scientists, who claimed exclusive access to truth, much like the clerics he blamed for inciting civil unrest. Instead, he argued that, for peace, you needed an absolute authority—that is, a king. He advocated despotism, no qualifications.

When I first read Hobbes’ Leviathan—in England in the early 1970s—I saw his argument as best left in the past. England was a place with a constitutional monarchy that was exclusively ceremonial. Nevertheless, I never approved of any aspect of the Royals or interest in them. I think they’re irrelevant. Governmental power was distributed among political parties, the legislature, and the judiciary. I never liked Winston Churchill’s politics, but what he said in 1947 still rings true, “‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”

In the early 1970s, there were still a few dictators around in Europe, like in Spain and Portugal, but most of the world, it seemed to me then, was democratic or moving in that direction. Was I that naive? I think so. Depending on how you define a dictator, there are now over fifty countries ruled by them. Many more if you include “hard man” politicians like the leader of our current regime. I’ve read a lot of political theory over the years, but I think I come back to what was on our lips at the time as I was reading Hobbes. That is, “All you need is love” and “Give peace a chance.” Happy Valentine’s day.

________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks to everyone who’s supporting the stack. When I started this project, more than six months ago, I thought my focus would be on the many selves I have been as a person with a chronic illness, that is, type-1 diabetes. As I continue, the stack has a mind of its own about what it wants to talk to you about. And who am I to stand in its way? Your interest in my writing is hugely heartening. I am now certain I will continue this project, and I want to offer new subscribers a seasonal discount for joining as a paid subscriber.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

I was happy not knowing.

In 1973, when I was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, no one mentioned my life expectancy had just lost twelve years. A nurse said I would have it for the rest of my life. The focus was on management in the moment. I learned to inject myself twice a day with insulin. Each morning, as instructed, I peed on a test-strip and recorded whether my sugar level was high, medium, or low. Once a week, I sterilized my glass syringe in boiling water on the stove top. I learned what foods to eat and what foods to avoid. I knew nothing about the long-term complications. Would you want to know them back when I was 23 and my life expectancy was 60?

I enjoyed adjusting to the new routines of being a diabetic. When I think about it, I’m sort of an enjoyment machine overlaid with a thick blanket of English pessimism that somehow doesn’t touch the diabetes. I enjoy what life brings. Life brought diabetes.

Here’s the weird thing. I wasn’t gloomy even when I learned the full range of complications of type-1 diabetes, among them: kidney disease, heart disease, strokes, neuropathy, and retinopathy. And don’t forget the stress, anxiety, and depression ushered in by managing the disease. This part isn’t weird: I didn’t think any of this applied to me. I am good at magical thinking. All human beings are. It’s the enchantment of language and the creation of myth to interrupt our contemplation of extinction. Who wants to think about that all the time? When I was young, I was happily ignorant, at least for a while. Now that I’ve lived to be 75, and without complications, I’m probably going to have to die of something else. Why have I skirted complications? A combination of luck, a thin body that’s healthy (except for a nonworking pancreas), and controlling my blood sugars. Also luck, a lot of luck. Laurie has helped, as have my other partners, who many times brought be back from sugars so low, I lost language.

I like gizmos.

Fortunately, because the history of type-1 diabetes is a history of devices that beep. I’m only using the term gizmos, which I don’t like, because that’s what Laurie calls the gear I insert into my body and monitor, as it monitors me. Gizmo is an American word, coined by the US Marine Corps before World War II for any object or gadget that couldn’t be named. My gizmos can be named. Over the years, they have included: glass syringes and steel needles; then microfine needles and plastic syringes; and later blood glucose monitors, insulin pumps, sensors, and continuous glucose monitoring systems (CGMs).

These are among the fortunate circumstance of my life, even though I’ve had this chronic, autoimmune condition for 52 years. Every few years, advances in medical technology have made better and better devices and treatments available to everyone with the health insurance to cover costs. Luckily, I’ve always had the insurance. In 1984, when I moved to New York City, I was also lucky enough to be randomized into the “intensive treatment” group of a study of type 1 diabetes called the Diabetic Control and Complications Study, which ran until 1993.

For over 40 years, I’ve been a guinea pig in a series of studies. The other day, I received the latest news about how it’s all going: “ . . . people with type 1 diabetes now face a much brighter future than at any time since the introduction of insulin therapy more than a hundred years ago. For the first time in history, people with type 1 diabetes can look forward to ‘old age.’”

Old age! Wow, what a concept. Wait a minute, who you calling old? I know they mean well. The weirdness of me again—or maybe not so weird: I never thought I wouldn’t make it to old age. The study proved that intensive treatment worked. Being as nerdy as I am, I really like my CGM system. It’s wearable technology that continually tracks my glucose levels. It makes adjustments to my insulin needs and sends me messages if I have to do something, but it mainly gets on with it. To simplify a bit, my system—through bluetooth signals—connects my pump (loaded with a vial of insulin) and the sensor in my arm (that tracks my glucose levels), to my smart phone and smart watch, that alert me to any changes and things I need to adjust on my own.

In case you don’t know this—and I really resent not being special—athletes and other people who aren’t diabetic have started using CGM systems to track their blood sugar levels. When Serena Williams isn’t injecting herself with weight reducing drugs, she’s wearing a CGM system, minus the insulin pump. What the hell.

Mentals.

I took my last LSD trip around the time I was first diagnosed as diabetic. I saw the universe pulsing into existence and pulsing out of existence, and I realized the pulsing could end only when I was willing to die. Gradually, I did cease to exist. I mean I believe I did die for a while. After I came to, many hours after beginning the trip, I knew I had to quit acid and with it all metaphysical beliefs. Also, very low sugars aren’t that different from taking acid. Also, the ups and downs of glucose levels have a significant impact on cognition.

I wonder how many of us have jettisoned the notion of duality in our lives, as in “body and soul,” or its more recent label “body and mind.” I have because, in a sense, I am more aware than most people are how much the me of me changes, and my ability to think changes, and the nature of the thoughts change, depending on my blood sugar levels. As an undergraduate, with relatively poor medical treatment, I spent much of my time in seminars and tutorials in a fog of non-understanding without knowing the cause or even realizing I was in the fog. It’s only possible to register this now.

I had a weekly tutorial with a group of students and the philosopher U T Place, well known for what was called “Mind-Brain identity theory.” Philosophers since the time of Descartes have wondered how a physical entity like the brain could produce and communicate with a non-physical entity like the mind. Place argued that higher-level mental states are made up of lower-level physical states and would eventually be reduced to them. Place died over 25 years ago. He would have welcomed developments in brain-computer interfaces that, according to an NIH report from 2023, can translate brain signals into words. They are called “brain decoders.”

I live with the fact that my blood sugar constantly affects my ability to think, and I’m happy with that state of being. I know it’s not kosher in the medical world to say this, but I’ve enjoyed the experience of very low sugars. I could die, yes, but leave that aside for a moment. I’ve had low blood sugars where time ran backwards, where stupid films seemed profound, where coming to consciousness in an ambulance felt enjoyable, and I could go on. What I have never felt is fear of having a low blood sugar. This is a thing, according to the diabetic literature, and because of it, people often allow their blood sugars to run too high. That’s a serious error. For me, being afraid of any part of diabetes would be like being afraid of myself.

___________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks to everyone who’s supporting the stack. When I started this project, more than six months ago, I thought my focus would be on the many selves I have been as a person with a chronic illness, that is, type-1 diabetes. As I continue, the stack has a mind of its own about what it wants to talk to you about. And who am I to stand in its way? Your interest in my writing is hugely heartening. I am now certain I will continue this project, and I want to offer new subscribers a seasonal discount for joining as a paid subscriber.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

I LEFT ENGLAND IN 1984I, and so far I have not moved back. Over the years of visits home, as soon as I’m through the door, someone gets out an album of photographs. When I first took Laurie to meet my parents, my father showed her his favorite photo of me.

I’m six years old, standing on a wooden trestle bridge, spanning a small stream. I’m half turned, in shorts and a light shirt, looking uncertainly back to my dad, holding his camera. As we’re looking at the snapshot, my mother asks if I remember when it was taken. I’m not sure, but I recall the family outing to the hillside above Bury in Lancashire. We were visiting the local beauty spot of Holcombe Hill above the cotton mill town of Ramsbottom. I remember the emerald moss and rotting planks of the rickety bridge. My father says I mustn’t go near it, it might collapse or I might slip in. And I remember the feeling—the risk of possibly falling or possibly not—being too tempting to pass up. The look on my face says—Approve of me, even when I disobey you, keep me with you, no matter what. My father says to Laurie and me, “Just look at him. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be there. Just look at that expression on his face.” My father loves my independence, something I suspect I gained from how much he cared for me.

Honestly, on every visit back, my sisters and my brother Roy, would ferret out their photo albums and invite me to thumb through the pages. In addition to images of us all together, younger, the albums were also filled with events I’d missed! They were saying, in effect, this is who we are. This is what we we’ve become without you. Catch up, check us out. They were trying to include me in their lives, during the moments I was looking. Or something like that. I would feel the presence of my absence. It was like being a ghost they couldn’t see, living in their houses with them. Or maybe they were the ghosts living inside me, no matter how far apart I was from them geographically.

In On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag views the family album as a powerful yet deceptive device for constructing a shared history. Deceptive because, she says, ”A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.” Sontag was young when she wrote this. When you’re young, you’re trying to leave the past as quickly as possible through what you think is a one-way door. When I looked at the family outings I’d missed (my family is big on group visits to stately homes, river trips on canal barges, and weddings), I did feel left out. I also felt they were filling me in, as a way to include Laurie and me in the extended family. She felt this strongly and liked it. Over time, she began to think of my sisters as kind of sisters to her because they treated her that way, and she loves the concept of “sisters”—her own sister Ellen died in 2017. The albums were a time machine I could travel back in.

A few months ago, my sister Val and her husband Adil visited us in Hudson and brought a photo album, bound as a book with hard covers. Adil had put it together. It said on the cover Toon Family Album, 2025, and inside is this dedication: “We have compiled this book from a vast collection of photographs across the ages.” I’m reminded of something else Sontag wrote: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” I can see your point, Susan, but ease up a little.

Adil’s album is a series of family photographs laid out in roughly chronological order. Most of the people in the first few pages are now dead, so yes, Susan, there is that. I could commune with the dead, as if attending funerals I’d missed. I didn’t go to the actual funerals of my brother Roy, my sister Lynn, my mother, my father, and my maternal grandmother. Adil had arranged facsimile images of original, grainy black-and-white photos with versions of them colored and in other ways changed through an AI technology. Details in the color images are more sharply defined, particularly around faces.

Who are the people in these transformed images, and where are they set in time? The experience of looking at them is very strange. The changes somehow unfreeze the images. I don’t know if you’ve seen colorized versions of early black-and-white street scene films, but they seem to me to reanimate the bustle in some uncanny way. I felt something similar looking at two images of my mother when she was young and very beautiful, a few years before her children were born. The color version is closer to the mother I remember when I was crossing the forbidden bridge than is the original print Adil had doctored.

This new family album has the same effect on me that family photo albums always had. I wonder who certain people are in some of the early photos and I guess. I compare the image of those I knew with the picture of them I’ve carried around in my head all these years. In the snapshots I’m included in, I wonder who I was and what that self is to me now. I could write a story about each one, imagining what the boy or man felt in the past, when he heard the click of the camera, and what I feel now, looking back at the image and my invented story about it.

Reading Susan Sontag stirs my thoughts about images and the freezing of time—a two-dimensional version of taxidermy, perhaps. I also want to tell her to lighten up and take a deep breath, for example here, when she writes, “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”

Yes, Susan, and guess what, in real life, too, we have no idea what people are making of us when they just see us with their eyeballs. We are always being “violated” by someone else’s understanding they will never share, because people are secretive and sometimes they just don’t want to break your heart.

I love having these photographs. Take the one of my dad in his workroom, with the patterns he’s created for someone’s suit, that is hanging behind him. There he is with scissors in hand, about to cut along the chalk marks he’s made on a length of cloth. His tape measure is draped around his collar, as it always was in life and remains, just like that, in my memories of him—memories, of course, stamped with these living photos. In the photo, he’s taken a little by surprise and he’s smiling. He looks happy. He looks happy he’s being photographed. Whether he was or not doesn’t matter. What you can see is a man always happy to see you went you enter a room.

________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks to everyone who’s supporting the stack. When I started this project, more than six months ago, I thought my focus would be on the many selves I have been as a person with a chronic illness, that is, type-1 diabetes. As I continue, the stack has a mind of its own about what it wants to talk to you about. And who am I to stand in its way? Your interest in my writing is hugely heartening. I am now certain I will continue this project, and I want to offer new subscribers a seasonal discount for joining as a paid subscriber.

This week, we canceled our trip to New York City because of snow. It was time for my annual check-up as part of a study I’m in for type-1 diabetes. Wave after wave of snow fell, too much to dig out and drive down to the city. Laurie and I were happy. Two extra days to do nothing in particular. I started in the research study in 1985. This was the first time I had to postpone an appointment.

When we canceled the visit, the study coordinator mentioned that shoveling snow did something weird to type-1 diabetics. The low sugar that such exercise can prompt may have a delayed effect and days later show up in lower blood sugars. Really? I looked it up. It was news to AI, in that AI knew nothing about it. AI often doesn’t know things and guesses. The other day, I asked AI about a job I’d had in Albany, in the 1980s, and this is what AI wrote back: “The head of the New York State Criminal Justice Agency who sold newspapers outside his agency once he was fired is Bernard Lawrence ‘Bernie’ Madoff. He was known for his Ponzi scheme and was sentenced to 150 years in prison for his crimes.” This response, which it’s fair to call “mental,” is something AI knows about itself. It’s called “an AI hallucination.” Dear AI, Bernie was, indeed, a criminal but not head of a criminal justice agency.

I asked AI what AI hallucinations were. This is what I got back: “AI hallucination refers to a phenomenon where an artificial intelligence system generates outputs that are nonsensical or inaccurate, often perceiving patterns or objects that do not exist. . . AI hallucinations can arise when these systems attempt to bridge gaps in their training data, leading to fabrications and non sequiturs.” Way to go, AI! In this sense, you are just like regular intelligence.

Recently, Laurie asked me if I thought my memory was slipping. How would I know something like that? I could make up an answer, like AI. She said I was forgetting what film we’d streamed the night before, people’s names, and when we needed to leave the house for an appointment. She said I’d started asking her this several times before we set off. Then I started learning to play piano. I find this very difficult and also exciting because it reminds me of a streak of tenancy in my nature.

There is learning to read music, figuring out the relationship of the notes to the keys, and also coordinating the right hand and the left hand. In my cognitive wiring, my right hand and my left hand are sort of one hand, in that I am deeply ambidextrous, and when I am driving, Laurie has to say, “turn toward the barn” or “turn toward the horse,” rather than turn right or turn left. There would be too long a delay for me to figure that out. So, learning piano is super challenging for a person like me who is also 75.

After a few weeks of working on this—every day in several spurts of attention—Laurie said my cognitive abilities had improved. She wasn’t noticing the lapses. She may be right. How does this work? Does the brain become fitter through exercise? Aren’t I exercising my mind all the time? Yes, but not in this special way of trying to coordinate the playing to the notes on the score.

The aim of this learning is to build up what’s called “muscle memory.’’ What is “muscle memory?” It’s teaching your body to forget what you have just taugh it, so it performs as if it’s always known its tasks. As a kid, this was relatively easy for me. Now, it’s exhausting, and I have to take breaks after a few minutes. I don’t know the word for this effort. Is concentration enough? No. It doesn’t sound appreciative enough.

We are currently in the embrace of an Arctic Vortex. It’s so cold, we sometimes use our oil heat instead of just our minisplits. As soon as it snows, I clear if off Solly, our giant solar panel, so he can continue to produce power. The power Solly generates feeds into the National Grid and reduces the amount of electricity we need and have to pay for. Solly absorbs light and transforms it into kilowatts without having to think about it. He is a giant slab of muscle memory. I’m sure if he were upstairs with me at the piano, he’d be able to play a Chopin nocturne.

For me, this remains a distant aspiration. In school, I had to choose a hand to write with, although I could write with both—as well as write from left to right across the page—“mirror writing,” it’s called. I chose to be left handed because my older brother was. Just now, I asked AI for a list of left-handed composers and it came back with Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, and Carlos Santana. AI decided to ignore all classical composers. I probably should have made that clearer for its over-stuffed brain. What is AI reading these days, anyway?

The other day, when I was speaking on the phone to the coordinator of the diabetic study, she told me the next check up will include cognitive tests. Go, piano! She told me that last year I’d excelled on my Cardiopulmonary Exercise Test. My peak oxygen uptake (VO2) was apparently very good for a man my age and I was unlikely to die from “the complications of diabetes.” The phrase “death from the complications of diabetes” has been haunting me since I was twenty-three. You seldom hear it these days in the news. The last time I remember was in 2015 when BB King died. Sorry, BB. I love your music. You should be in AI’s list of composers.

A blizzard is forecast for the weekend—billed, as always, “the storm of the century du jour.” According to AI, some weather models are predicting a foot or more of snow for us. Other models say three inches. Laurie and I use different apps to predict the weather. She calls her app, which is free, “the people’s weather.” I have an annual subscription to what she calls “super weather.” I have also installed a property-specific weather system behind the house Laurie calls “Twirly.” It has one of those small propellers you see on beanies that spins in the wind and sniffs our exact air.

These systems rarely agree. They are engaged more than we know in “weather hallucinations.” My app is the most alarmist. It has learned to tell me what I want to hear. It predicts lower temperatures and more extreme conditions that could kill you or wipe out the house than Laurie’s app. Laurie’s app is optimistic, like her. I like my app for sending out warnings of disasters that weather could stir up. I am certain that Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninov, and Paganini were left-handed. I think one of the Bach children was too.

_________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks to everyone who’s supporting the stack. When I started this project, more than six months ago, I thought my focus would be on the many selves I have been as a person with a chronic illness, that is, type-1 diabetes. As I continue, the stack has a mind of its own about what it wants to talk to you about. And who am I to stand in its way? Your interest in my writing is hugely heartening. I am now certain I will continue this project, and I want to offer new subscribers a seasonal discount for joining as a paid subscriber.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

Chinese Dream

I was just reading “The Wall and the Books,” the first essay in Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 by Jorge Luis Borges. It was originally published in 1950, and it’s three pages long. In it, Borges speculates on why the First Emperor of China, Shih Huang Ti (now, written as Qin Shi Huang) ordered the Great Wall to be built and all the books written before his time—he reigned from 221 to 210 BCE—to be burned. Borges says he wanted to “ward off Barbarians” and at the same time “abolish history.” Gee, he wrote the playbook for all dictators who would follow.

Borges is intrigued by how these acts flowed from the Emperor’s character and offers several suggestions as to why and how. Perhaps, he suggests, they were “magic barriers to halt death” or perhaps the Emperor wanted to “re-create the beginning of time.”

In 2023, I was reminded of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, who has massively expanded China’s economic power and ordered elaborate systems of censorship and surveillance. Now, reading what I wrote three years ago, anyone would be struck by the similarity in thinking to the current US political regime. In all these instances, a tyrant wants to control time and geography, setting the clock of history back to zero and imagining some kind of separation from the rest of the world—fantasies that doom these very projects because they reinforce every one else’s sense of their own territory and biography. What a long, sad dream.

America of the Soul

I was reading In the Land of the Cyclops, a collection of essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I told Laurie that, in it, Knausgaard reveres his fellow Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. She said, “If we stopped reading Nazis, the herd would be a lot thinner.”

Do you remember the stink raised, a few years ago, by Knausgaard’s six-volume, 3,500 page autobiographical novels, My Struggle? The title in Norwegian is Min Kamp, the same as Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The book was also much discussed because Knausgaard included details of the private lives of his family members and friends, using their real names. They weren’t consulted, and many raised loud and public objections.

The first essay in Cyclops, “America of the Soul,” begins with several pages of quotations from Knut Hamsun. In 1920, Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature and then went on to champion Hitler’s national-socialism and support the German invasion of Norway in 1940. In 1943, he sent his Noble Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels, as a gift. Maybe that’s what it cost to secure a private meeting with Hitler. After the war, Hamsun wrote an obituary for Hitler, describing him as a “fighter for humanity and for the rights of all nations.” Later, for reasons you don’t need me to conjure for you, the Norwegian government cleared Hamsun of being a Nazi, although they weren’t sure what to do with the facts he was a Nazis sympathizer and a long-term racist, antisemite, and misogynist. Where do you store these things? It turns out—look around—you don’t need to hide them in the attic or basement. They can sit right out there with you in the living room.

Knausgaard mentions none of this in his essays. What he does point out is why Hamsun is the major influence on his writing. Hamsun, with his use of interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness, influenced almost all modernist writers of the twentieth century, including Proust, Wolff, and Joyce. I suppose you could say, in his way, he’s influenced my writing and Laurie’s too. Isaac Bashevis Singer said of Hamsun: ”[He was] the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.”

Why the title “America of the Soul”? In 1889, Hamsun wrote a book called The Cultural Life of Modern America, an account of his experiences in the US over several years. He hated the US for its advancement of women, its lack (in his mind) of artistic and intellectual talent, its materialism, its mixing of races and cultures, and so on.

Hamsun’s hatred of America notwithstanding, as far as Knausgaard is concerned, Hamsun’s subject matter and literary inventiveness attach him to what America stands for in Knausgaard’s mind. He writes, “If on the outside he regarded America with ambivalence [that’s putting it mildly!], that ambivalence is nothing compared with what must have churned in his inner being . . . . for while the thought perhaps never became explicit to him, it must nonetheless have been present within him: his soul belonged to America.”

What does he mean? He means the characters Hamsun wrote about, based on his own experiences, “the figure of the tramp, created by Charles Chaplin, another uneducated, self taught artist who emerged out of miserable conditions, would seem a natural parallel.” Well, maybe, if you ignore most of what Hamsun wrote and the causes he believed in.

Should we go on reading people whose beliefs we oppose? Of course. But in discussing them, we can’t leave out the parts we don’t like or that rile up people hurt by these views. You can’t mask an artist’s politics in order to save their reputation. Everything in the picture has to stay in the picture because everything in life is a ball of contradictions that can’t be resolved. Modernist styles allow, formally, for the expression of this complexity without editing out what, to one mind or another mind, is inconvenient. Weirdly, in wanting to raise up Hamsun, Knausgaard suppresses all the kinds of nasty bits he freely exposes in the members of his own family. Sometimes a censor, sometimes a tattle tale. Also, there is no soul of America. Souls don’t exist, and if they did America wouldn’t have just one.

Amnesia

While I was making coffee this morning, it occurred to me my favorite theories of how social systems work and how they work in combination with personal psychology all involve forms of amnesia. To move along to path A, you have to forget you were ever on path B. Another way to talk about amnesia is to think about the model of conversion. In other words, I used to be and now I’m not. Only with amnesia, the past is erased. We’re returning to the first Emperor of China, the clock of history is set back to zero. Among my favorite theorists of amnesia are Bourdieu and his notions of “cultural capital,” Foucault and his concept of epistemes, Kahneman and his work in behavioral psychology, and Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind. There are plenty of others I couldn’t think of as the kettle boiled.

I wondered if all these forms of amnesia might be connected. Could there be some über-theory to explain how knowing something and then unknowing it serves us, while at the same time it makes us forget? I don’t mean evolutionary theory. I don’t like evolutionary theory. You want to know why? Because evolutionary theory is always trying to prove a reason for an outcome, rather than to accept we can’t definitively know why an outcome has arisen. Evolutionary theory uses the narrative model of the bible, where ends are predicted in their origins.

During my childhood, in the late 1950s and 60s, I walked to school in the magic of winter fogs as a natural form of life. Later, in the late 1970s and early ’80’s I would wait for the early morning bus from Old Pool Bank to Leeds, and I would look down into the valley where the river Wharf snaked towards Otley, and I would notice the sun rising over the moor and see the golden light dissolve the pink mist hovering over the water. I remember thinking that I hadn’t noticed they’d cleaned the coal dust from the air. There were no more winter fogs. That’s the thing with amnesia, we don’t notice the fog or that’s it’s sometimes cleared.

This is how a train of thought begins, it’s hazy at first and gets clearer by thinking about it. Many of these theories contain a slight-of-hand. Foucault’s notion of epistemes tells us there are sometimes radical changes in what counts as truth, but the theory doesn’t easily show us how that equates with power. It’s our inability to stay unaware that keeps power in operation. Similarly, in Bourdieu, to exercise your superior taste requires that you forget you somehow had to learn what taste is. It was never a natural condition.

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman says basically the same thing from the perspective of psychology rather than the angle of social systems. In order to form a new belief, we have to feel we’ve always had it. The entire process of learning is erased. Because it creates an anxiety state? Is this truer of males than females? Laurie thinks it is. She thinks males are trained to believe they have come fully loaded with their competencies—that’s what makes them feel they are males. She may be onto something. Still, all human beings like to misplace inconvenient facts, the way Knausgaard does in his praise of Hamsun. Forgetting we have forgotten something may be the best definition I can think of in the moment for knowledge.

_____________________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks to everyone who’s supporting the stack. When I started this project, more than six months ago, I thought my focus would be on the many selves I have been as a person with a chronic illness, that is, type-1 diabetes. As I continue, the stack has a mind of its own about what it wants to talk to you about. And who am I to stand in its way? Your interest in my writing is hugely heartening. I am now certain I will continue this project, and I want to offer new subscribers a seasonal discount for joining as a paid subscriber.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

I blame Laurie. It’s comforting. We’re on our daily walk on Warren Street in Hudson, and she says, as usual, “Name three things in the moment you love.” Mine are: her smile, the fact that our side of the street is sunny, and that the flowers in our garden at home are really blooming well this summer. It must be the compost.

We’re sitting on our favorite bench, the green one opposite the Spotty Dog bar and bookstore. That’s when Laurie spots the canvas tote-bag sitting near the curb a few feet away from us. She points and says, “Go over and see what’s inside.”

She’s curious about things left on the street. She found many of the treasures in her apartment that way, when she lived in the city, including a David Hockney print. Also finds people. She talks to strangers. I don’t see the point of strangers. She spots quarters on the sidewalk and keeps them for parking meters. She picks up discarded soda cans left in plant pots along our daily route. I think of her as the self-appointed warden of Warren Street. She deposits the cans and other untidy items in the trash bins we pass on our way down to the river and back.

I go over to the canvas bag. It’s filled with 100 dollar bills, secured by rubber bands. Yikes! I’m no mathematician. You don’t need to be one to calculate there are thousands of dollars just sitting there. How is this possible? I feel like Roger Thornhill, the part played by Cary Grant in North by Northwest, who is shocked and surprised to find himself mistaken for George Kaplan, a man accused of murder who doesn’t actually exist. It’s easy for me to look casual and unassuming. Most of the time I play by the rules, a long practice of being English, wishing not to get deported.

People are strolling up and down the street. It’s a Tuesday morning, so not many are out. Most shops aren’t open yet. I carry the bag back to the bench. Laurie looks inside, then looks at me, and then smiles. She doesn’t say anything. She looks at me again the way she looked at the money. I feel pleased, as if I have brought her a gift. I don’t speak. Finally, Laurie whispers, “It looks like we’ve hit the jackpot.” I say, “What should we do?” She says, “Wait for someone to come by and claim it.”

We wait. We see our friend Sal open his book store, down the street from the Spotty Dog. Laurie once found an ounce of high-end dope on the sidewalk near the dispensary on third street and offered it to Sal. We prefer alcohol. The one time Laurie ate a gummy—granted, we were too ignorant to know it was twice the amount that’s advised—she lay on the bed saying for the entire time she was stoned (she said later it felt like a week), “I hate this. When will it be over?”

An hour passes on the bench. By the time we leave, the sun is starting to beat down on us with accusatory heat. I’m getting nervous. My blood sugar is dropping. We have to come up with a plan. Of course, we shouldn’t keep the money. What kind of a person am I? I seldom ask myself this, although this time I do. No-one has come by to claim the bag. We can’t very well abandon it. We stand up and walk away with it. No one watches us. No one approaches us. No one says a word.

We walk back up the hill to our car. We hardly speak on the drive home. It takes about ten minutes. We decide to hold onto the money for what we tell ourselves is “safe keeping.” I put the bag in my closet, next to the row of shoes I never wear.

The bag begins to take on an ominous presence. Every morning, I check to see if it’s still there. I think about it often. I don’t sleep well at night. I wonder if the bag is thinking about me. Along these lines, I suggest to Laurie she not count it without wearing gloves, lest we leave finger prints on the bills. She says she can’t count money with gloves and doesn’t count it. I think whoever left it on Warren Street must have reported it to the police. I think someone must know the serial numbers. We can’t spend it in stores. We can’t put it in a bank. We can’t give it away.

Looking back, I can see that every anxious thought and every nervous moment have been formed by crime films I’ve watched over the years and the stories of sudden windfalls—and the misfortunes of accidental fortunes. Suddenly, this feels like nothing new. I’m always in a Hitchcock movie. Always on the run.

I become convinced the only good option is to burn the money. If the authorities come, I’ll be able to say, “This is a case of mistaken identity. You’ve mixed me up with someone else, someone who looks like me. I’m just the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” Light filters through the windows, as I wait for Laurie to wake up. When she opens her eyes and gives me her smile, she says, “I know what to do,” and she does know. She says, “Let’s start with three things in the moment we love.”

_____________________________

Thanks for your support!

Thanks to everyone who’s supporting the stack. When I started this project, more than six months ago, I thought my focus would be on the many selves I have been as a person with a chronic illness, that is, type-1 diabetes. As I continue, the stack has a mind of its own about what it wants to talk to you about. And who am I to stand in its way? Your interest in my writing is hugely heartening. I am now certain I will continue this project, and I want to offer new subscribers a seasonal discount for joining as a paid subscriber.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!

As I learn to play the piano, I remember my life. Maybe memory isn’t the right word. It’s more a sense of associations across time. Thirty-five years ago, I bought an electric keyboard and have lugged it around ever since. I bought it on Canal Street in a crowded store owned by Hassidim. You know the place. At that time, I had every intention of learning to play it, based on the belief it would be intuitive and obvious. My grandfather played piano by ear. Most evenings, in the pubs he managed in Bury and Blackpool, he would lead the customers in tunes of the day, especially when they were drunk enough to sing.

This approach to learning did not work for me. I’m using a software program now, and I’m wondering if I will get to playing scales. Maybe my hands need to become more coordinated first. I picked up a book and started reading about scales.

According to the book, scales are eight notes—side by side or very close—on the keyboard. Each scale has a pattern of seven steps, each a half step or a whole step away from the next, and in imagining my fingers doing this, I suddenly thought of the poem, “Sunday Morning” by Louis MacNeice, which begins:

Down the road someone is practicing scales,

The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails.

I’m back in Syston. It’s a poem I have to know for my upcoming English O’level exam. My teacher, Mr. Roper, has guided us through the assigned book of Contemporary English Poetry, and he’s suggesting that next Sunday morning we read this poem. The poem continues:

Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car,

For this is Sunday morning,

Fate’s great bazaar;

Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music . . .

Every Sunday on Sandford Road, the cul-de-sac where we live, the few men who have cars are peering into the raised bonnets on their Ford Cortinas and Minis. They are fiddling with the engines or polishing the chrome. Up the street sit two, three-wheeled “invalid carriage” cars, one yellow one blue. They are for our neighbors, who were injured during the war. My dad says the government gives war veterans these cars for free. They turn out to be death traps that need constant attention and are eventually banned some time in the 1970s.

The poem continues:

That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

Yes, this is Sunday morning. The peals of bells echo from our parish church, Saint Peter and Saint Paul’s, across time as I read the poem now. The ringing comes to me from the brass bells in the clock tower, I think there are only four bells. From Upper Church Street, down past the old junior school, across the recreation park, with its tennis court and bowling greens, then along Melton Road. I hadn’t thought about any of this or reread the poem until today. Not since I read it at Roper’s suggestion one summer Sunday morning when I was a kid.

I would guess it was 1962 or 1963. It just struck me that everyone in our family then—my mother, father, sister, and brother, are now dead except for me and my sister Val, who was born a few years later. We are the only ones left. Today, I look forward to playing the piano and at some point in the future practicing scales. After brother Roy died last month, I decided to do this.

According to Wittgenstein, “the right hand can’t give the left hand a gift.” His brother was a pianist. His brother was a famous pianist with one hand. I am ambidextrous. My right hand and my left hand can’t tell the difference between each other. As a child, I could write with either hand but was encouraged to choose one. I chose to be left-handed, like my brother, although I played darts right-handed, kicked a ball with either foot, and caught a ball left-handed. I’m hoping this will get sorted out as I continue learning to play. At the moment, fingers shoot out randomly from either hand and hit the wrong notes.

We think we learn from people. We learn from things, maybe more. Take learning to ride a bike. The real teacher isn’t the person holding the bike and telling you what to do. The teacher you learn from about balance and speed is the bike itself, with its handlebars, pedals, and brakes.

I went to nursery school at three. It was where I learned to tie my shoelaces and write my name. I remember the effort of concentration. I remember almost giving up on tying my laces and then, miraculously, one day my fingers knew what to do. I did it again and again. At this time, all shoes had laces. Tying them myself was independence.

The thing about learning is we forget the process of learning as soon as we’ve mastered something. Accomplishment comes with a kind of built-in amnesia—knowing is forgetting. The brain actually works this way.

The software I’m using and books such as Piano for Dummies (of course I bought it) talk about building up “muscle memory.” It’s not what it sounds like. The “memory” isn’t in the muscles. Muscle memory is the brain and nervous system making bodily movements automatic through repetition. There’s an “encoding stage,” involving increased activity in the motor and somatosensory cortices. Once you’ve repeated a task enough times, these areas of the brain decrease in activity. The prefrontal and frontal cortices are also active during this kind of learning because of increased attention on the task being learned. Once it’s encoded, we can forget about it. We can simply do it. When you learn something for the first time again—especially at a later stage of life—you also remember the process of learning.

Every promise invites a change of heart. I didn’t make a promise to learn piano. Maybe I did. Many times a day, I just find myself at the keyboard.

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Errollyn Wallen

Brilliant, adorable, warm, like no one else, and you can spend time with her at our next Zoom Conversation on SATURDAY JANUARY 17 from 3 to 4 EST. To RESVP, please email: lauriestone@substack.com

Errollyn is one of the most performed living composers, she holds an MBE and a CBE, she was appointed Master of the King’s Music in 2024, two albums of her acclaimed orchestral works released this year. She also sings jazz. This excerpt is from her book, Becoming a Composer:

“When I was nine, I was walking along the road with my uncle Arthur – we were on our way to Ridley Road market to buy fruit and vegetables for the week. I told uncle Arthur that I could hear “all the sounds in my head“ but I didn’t know what to do with them. Uncle Arthur suggested that perhaps I was a composer.

I am a composer. A composer of classical music. As I read that sentence again, I am not completely sure how this happened to a girl born in Belize and brought up in Tottenham. My life has often felt as if I’ve been walking backwards and forwards through a maze of 1000 reflecting glass doors with no handles. Nevertheless, here I am. Composing found me. It crept up on me, tapped me on the shoulder, tackled me to the ground, and wouldn’t let me out of its grasp. . . .

I tell my students that they can focus on a single leaf, or the movement of a clump of leaves, a branch, the whole tree or the entire line of trees. I say, “Write down the rhythm of the movement that you see. You can collect these over several sessions. Come back next week with bars, containing only rhythmic patterns; forget about pitches. This is a looking exercise.”

___________________________________

Thanks for your support and Happy New Year!

Thanks to everyone who’s supporting the stack. When I started this project, more than six months ago, I thought my focus would be on the many selves I have been as a person with a chronic illness, that is, type-1 diabetes. As I continue, the stack has a mind of its own about what it wants to talk to you about. And who am I to stand in its way? Your interest in my writing is hugely heartening. I am now certain I will continue this project, and I want to offer new subscribers a seasonal discount for joining as a paid subscriber.

Please “like,” “comment,” and “share” this post. It helps the algorithm recognize me and connects me where I need to be!