The End of An Ending
Or, Why Anything?
I want to tell a story. No, I want to tell stories. Stories.
7 April 2023, 11 months and one day
On 7 April 2023 I stopped telling stories. On 8 March 2024, eleven months and one day later, I am firing up the ideas again. Inertia is real. First I have to get started. Starting can be messy. The stories come in fits and starts. They are dry whispers.
Some stories are secrets written in code. I do enjoy secret code stories, the kind that command a gaze. A secret story. An urgent dispatch from deep behind the lines. An Olympia or a Modern Olympia. Stories of brilliant victory. Stories of stunning disappointment. Stories about that one lazy summer afternoon outside a little cafe near Gare Du Nord watching an old shop keeper chasing pickpockets away from unsuspecting tourists.
True stories about everything, and nothing at all.
I started this blog to explore ideas and the entire time I was writing about the 21st Century fire department I was writing love letters to my future self. I was writing about what the fire department could be. It was exciting. I knew you were watching. I even addressed some of the letters to you. I never mailed those letters. Was that selfish?
…and out of nowhere the stories stopped…rats' feet over broken glass1
WHERE did I go for 11 months and one day?
I was in the shadows of Conrad’s flicker2 talking to Johnny Ryall. Uptown, downtown, crosstown. I was washing windows on the Bowery at a quarter to four. I was on Maggie’s farm.3 I was on a ship, tied to the mast, wax in my ears. I was at Tiffany’s having tea with Icarus. I was where the ducks go in winter. What was it like there, you ask? It was a “commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment.”4
I want to tell stories.
And for that reason alone I will tell stories again. The stories will be written in a code and you know why codes are necessary. You want me to send you the decoder ring? I can’t. You must be brave for yourself.
WHY did I go for 11 months and one day?
“…Why anything? Because this series of moments simply was.” 5
WHAT did I see for 11 months and one day?
What are you saying? I am not sure, I don’t have enough words and the ones that I do have are the wrong size… but I am saying important things, and to understand them you will need to stop reading and listen…
Dear observer I want you to know something…I want to tell you about something real…but I need you to lean in uncomfortably close, no, closer than that. Close enough to feel the moisture of my breathing. Close your eyes, hold your breath, focus. Real things happened while I was away. “I saw that a photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either.” 6
I want to tell stories.
Unending
For eleven months and one day, I was away. You now share a tiny fragment of what is available from that time, a flicker, a commingling of absurdity, surprise, a million stories, and an entire truth condensed in an acorn shell. On 7 April 2023 I stopped telling stories.
8 March 2024, eleven months and one day later: mark the end of that ending.
T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.” ~Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique-Johnny Ryall
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
John Berger, Understanding a Photograph
Habakkuk