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From the Editor
She tells me I
only have a few months to live, perhaps a few days.
I've only had a few years for some time anyhow, only a few left to live
since
the day I was born. The shortened crack line in the left palm, and an
island in
the smack dab center of the lifeline, says Lady Harriet [Beecham] (my
palm reader out
here on 102 on the way to points down east past the nowhere town of
Calico) indicates that my
future is not as endless as I had hoped. My doctor says otherwise, but
who are
you going to believe nowadays? The power of a narrative has its own
peculiar seductions.Unlike the life of the postmodern time traveler Billy Pilgrim or Tristram Shandy, the wise-guy in the womb, there is indeed the end-stopped line, the end-stopped life, which makes words seems so vain-superfluous, amounting to an ephemeral so-what? Moreover, there is a very definite number of breaths and days and words we will ever utter and that we'll never come to know – particularly, on that day when there's no time left for counting. So in lieu of the moot point folks, I just want to say for the record that human beings devote an amazing amount of energy to making sense of their own days, their own breaths, their own words, in their own pew kind of hoping or denying.
In other words, they spend an inordinate amount of imaginative time keeping track of their own narrative, asking themselves questions of revision: What kind of life story am I living? What am I going to do tomorrow? The next day? Does it have anything to do with what I dream?
That's
why I can't, for the life of me, (ha!) there it is again,
that's why for the life of me, I can't understand the surrender to the
popular claim
that language and literature programs are on the brink of demise,
banished to
borders of the trivial, vanquished to the realm of the unimportant. Oh,
of all
the fates to be afraid of – that's not one of them. Whether we like it
or not,
the investigations of language and literature are matters of life and
death.The lawyer, the laundress, the restaurant server, or the microbiologist, whatever their philosophical/political dispensation, are at this very moment imagining a wide range of comedic and tragic endings of their everyday. Their personal lives yearn to be understood by the ones they lead on the job – anxiously sorting through fragmented cardboard boxes of weekends and Mondays or Tuesdays, personal belief systems stored in separate files, sexual orientations and habits, like satellites and moons, orbiting the self, and a biographical memory that is undergoing constant revision. What of their multitudinous dreams and desires? There are no libraries that can hold them all. Not yet.
The form of the novel, in particular, has a better claim to ordering the past, ordering the past of a specific character, and in effect and by extension our past as well. It is also the novel's limitation to be so preoccupied with the past in how a dream or desire can lead to a single moment centered in the present, calling out some faint hope for the future. By the art of its
abstraction, the novel has a pretense to
the beautiful,
something like a
wave that begins as a swell then curls before it falls and is then
transformed
into yet another part of the sea. Yet the
form, though our most sophisticated literary expression, is still a
tinker toy
to the imaginative machinations going on around us in every reader, in
every
one concerned with their own story. What if I do have just a few days left to live like Lady Harriet tells me, like my palm says? How will that change my living, my dreaming, the reading of my life? How shall my past be ordered? What new order, what meaning, will come from the few words I have left to speak? What does it mean to hang ten? Or is it merely -- so what!?
Editor: Tom Douglass
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