No One’s Sleep (The First Published Excerpt)

Baltimore, a bright Saturday morning in early August. All my nerve endings on fire, in pain that becomes more intense by the hour, sleepless for days, unwashed, sick from withdrawal, sick with worry, and sick in heart and body, I step out of my apartment building on North Eutaw Street, take a wistful look south at Camden Yards a few blocks away, and then walk the half block to East Fayette.

“Yo, Ed,” Outlaw says, standing down the street at the intersection with North Howard. The blue and white light rail train clatters by, maybe on its way south to the airport, I think.. “Hurry up. I told you I have to catch the bus.”

I give him a brief wave, more of an acknowledgment than amity (I‘ve paid him more than enough when we‘ve done business before that he doesn‘t have the right to tell me to hurry), and walk across the street toward the KFC and the pawn shop on the corner–the pawn shop which already holds my notebook computer, Citizen Eco-drive watch and lovely, beautifully-grained, hollow-body Epiphone guitar. I haven’t had so much as a dime in over a week. I’ve been drinking tap water just to stay alive.

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http://edlynch.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/no-ones-sleep-the-first-published-excerpt

lectio divina

The first time I saw a hummingbird, I was in church. Not in the sanctuary, actually, but upstairs in the annex at Sunday School. The morning was bright, lovely, and warm, and the hummingbird flitted just outside the open window. I was too young then to think of it as some kind of sign, but something stirred in my heart that I had never felt before. I learned something about beauty, then, and fragility, and the importance of keeping your eyes, mind, and heart open to all possibilities.

Those qualities are important, too, in the lifelong discipline of learning that we all share. I try very hard to keep my heart open whenever I learn by reading, which is why I’m not ashamed to admit that I often hurry to my computer, intent on notating a section of lovely prose or a lesson I’ve just learned. I’m not ashamed to admit that reading makes me feel excited and alive. Sometimes I read aloud just to hear the beauty of the words or to understand what I’ve just experienced; sometimes I laugh, and sometimes I even cry.

There’s a name for this sort of intense, fully immersed reading: lectio divina (spiritual reading). All reading is spiritual to me, because a book–if it’s any good–enters directly into the human heart. And there it remains, if you’re fortunate enough, to form the essence of the person you are continually becoming: the person you are destined to be.

Sometimes friends ask me how many books I’ve actually read. Truly, I’m not really sure: seven thousand? Ten thousand? I do know that at it’s peak, my library contained over 1,500 books. Many, far too many, are now gone in the chaos of the last two years. I probably have only a hundred or so with me now in Pennsylvania, but the good news is that I’m once again acquiring these treasures at a rate commensurate with my usual pace. Which means, of course, that I’m investing again: not only in books, but in my lifelong education. Little wonder, then, that I often refer to myself as an autodidact…self-taught. I’ve read less than some, more than some. But what I’ve read stays with me, affects me, shapes me. I feel every book I’ve ever read, no matter how long ago it was (some, of course, more than others). And these books, as Wendell Berry wrote, converse with each other as much as they converse with me. There’s an alchemy going on here inside my heart, filled with Robert Jordan and Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley and Daisy Buchanan and more characters than I possibly have space to name. They whisper to one another; they whisper to me. Soon others will join them, and the conversation will take on even more dimensions. In the meantime, I will keep reading. In the meantime, I will keep learning. I will never, ever, stop learning…

Cormac McCarthy’s “world entire”

What would you do  if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay. 

Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American writer been so visible on the big screen (I know…what about William Faulkner? Faulkner is different; he found lucrative work as a screenwriter).       

There’s something of an industry these days for making movies based on the novels of, arguably, the greatest living American novelist, Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men, All The Pretty Horses, and soon, The Road.

I first read The Road three years ago during a particularly difficult time: I was losing the closeness I had always enjoyed with my sons, and for the life of me I don’t know why (and I’m not sure that I ever will). The Road, with its description of a love between father and son so strong that each was the other’s “world entire” affected me to the depths of my soul; it was a love that I knew and lived for my entire adult life. That’s what made the tears flow so easily as I read: I know the sort of love where a parent feels that life has no meaning without children. I know: you can’t protect them forever. But still you feel the responsibility to prevent or bear any hurt. And so I wonder…will that feeling ever go away? I think not. Somehow, I think not.

So I bought a copy for my youngest son, the one who had seemingly withdrawn from me the most. I wanted him to read between the lines. I wanted him to know that as a father I wasn’t that much different from the man in the novel…that my love was deep enough to assume any sacrifice. I wanted him to know that, if I had to, I could learn to live without his love and respect. But I could not abide a world in which he no longer lived. The Road, as you may know, is a sort of “post-apocalyptic” novel in which the world has been burned over (apparently the result of nuclear war) and covered with ash that, years later, still swirls like snow. All food sources destroyed, the survivors are either scavengers or cannibals–good guys and bad guys, in the view of the boy, who struggles to understand why the pair can’t share their very limited supply of food with the few sympathetic people they encounter. They can’t, of course, because doing so means that they would die.

He looked at the boy but the boy had turned away and lay staring out at the river.
There’s nothing we could have done.
He didn’t answer.
He’s going to die. We can’t share what we have or we’ll die, too.
I know.
So when are you going to talk to me again?
I’m talking now.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.

So they constantly, and cautiously, search for food and supplies as they make their way south, toward the sea. They find a significant cache at one point in an underground shelter, but the man knows they can’t stay more than a night or two because others are looking as well–and for reasons both practical and sometimes sinister, aren’t willing to share either. After all, this is a world without life save for the nomads who wander the land. This is a world where some people have resorted to cannibalism, while others would kill for the sake of a few cans of food.

The Road, although filled with terror and tension, is at its core a love story: a love story of the best kind, that between a father and his son. And just like the man in the book, I’ll spend the rest of my life offering my love, whether it’s accepted or not. Just like him, I’ll spend the rest of my life “carrying the fire.”

a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song

“Time and distance are out of place here,” Michael Stipe sang on “Feeling Gravity’s Pull.” I thought of that lyric tonight as my son Aaron and I made the round of the bookstores in Lexington, because even though I don’t see him nearly as much as I like or need, we always talk as if we’ve never been apart (so time and distance are truly out of place here). Now that may be wishful thinking on my part, but that instinctive sort of communication never goes away: I feel it, it’s tangible, I know it’s there. Sure, I rub him the wrong way sometimes (well, maybe more often than that), as any parent does any teenager, but no matter what we understand each other without having to say anything at all.

We talked about this year’s track season, his training, the difficulty any athlete has of knowing how far he or she can push their body–and the euphoria which comes when you realize you can push harder than you ever thought imaginable. He’s strong and becoming stronger…and the main part is that he is simply becoming. Becoming the person, the intellectual, and the athlete he was born to be.

So, amped on Starbucks’ cappuccinos, we went bargain hunting first, with Aaron finding some study books on German and me reclaiming works by Jay McInerney and Rilke. Aaron’s already decided that he likes this Rilke poem best:

I live my life in widening rings
which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but that is what I will try.

I circle around God, the primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
and I still don’t know if I’m a falcon, a storm,
or an unfinished song.

 A falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song. I’ve always believed those lines came easily to Rilke, perhaps not as easily as Coleridge’s dream fragment of Xanadu, but somehow preordained nonetheless. Preordained in the same way that I feel ancient purpose in the simple fact of being Aaron’s father. I may not be there every day, but I think of him with great love and longing every waking moment of the day. If only he knew; but what child truly understands the depth of a love so strong that it must forever remain beyond all understanding?

So, together we face an uncertain future; full of endless possibility on his part, the promise of salvation, redemption, and reclamation on mine. I may have squandered an opportunity or two (or three, or four…whatever). Yet here I am, where I began, late at night at the keyboard and surrounded by books and candles and memories and insights and everything that makes me the writer I am and the artist I want to be. So goodnight, Aaron, and sleep with contentment, possibility, and endless potential. I will continue this attempt to write the story of my life, of which you and your brother are the most important part.