One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  I ask my sister questions:

  What did you do when you were silent?

  I listened, she says. I listened really hard.

  Did you make any noise at all?

  Sometimes I found myself humming, she says, but it wasn’t any music I’d known before. Which is pretty interesting. Where does music come from that you never heard before?

  Good question, I say.

  And I found, she says, that it is relatively easy not to talk to other people, but much harder not to talk to animals. Isn’t that odd? Why would that be?

  Another good question, I say.

  We had peacocks and guinea fowl at the monastery, she says, and I was sort of in charge of the birds, which we had for two reasons. The peacocks someone gave us, which we thought was a generous if unusual gift until we had them for a while, and we realized what loud vain foul mean evil creatures they are, at which point we all thought, What sort of sick human being would deliberately give a peacock to another human being? It’s a punishment to have peacocks around, they peck and screech at you and make your life miserable, but the guinea fowl, now, they’re not mean, no, that’s not their problem, their problem is that they are without doubt or debate the most unbelievably stupid creatures ever to walk the earth, so incredibly stupid that you wonder how in heaven’s name they ever managed to survive as a species, and the times I really really wanted to talk had to do with those guinea fowl, who were so mindbogglingly stupid I wanted to shriek. I mean, if they were three feet away from the henhouse, and somehow got turned around so they were facing away from the henhouse, well, rather than have the inclination or imagination to turn back around, they’d stand there sobbing and wailing, as if utterly lost in the wilderness. Ye gods. You’d have to physically pick them up and turn them around toward the henhouse. You could almost see the delight on their faces as the henhouse reappeared. There it is again! It’s a miracle! Ye gods.

  Let us consider silence as destination, ambition, maturity of mind, focusing device, filter, prism, compass point, necessary refuge, spiritual refreshment, touchstone, lodestar, home, natural and normal state in which let’s face it we began our existence in the warm seas of our mothers, all those months when we did not speak, and swam in salt, and dreamed oceanic dreams, and heard the throb and hum of mother, and the murmur and mutter of father, and the distant thrum of a million musics waiting patiently for you to be born.

  I rise early and apply myself to my daily reading. Herman Melville: All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and amended by Silence, and Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Thomas Merton: A man who loves God necessarily loves silence. Jorge Luis Borges: Absolute silence is the creative energy and intelligence of eternal being. Book of Job: I put my finger to my lips and I will not answer again. Melville once more, poetically pithy in the midst of the vast sea of his sentences: Silence is the only Voice of our God.

  To which I can only say (silently): amen.

  It’s harder to be silent in summer than in winter, says my sister. It’s harder to be silent in the afternoon than in the morning. It’s hardest to be silent when eating with others. It’s easy to be silent in the bath. It’s easy to be silent in the bed. It’s easiest to be silent near water, and easiest of all to be silent by the lips of rivers and seas.

  The silence of chapels and churches and confessionals and glades and gorges, places that wait for words to be spoken in the caves of their ribs. The split second of silence before two people simultaneously burst into laughter. The pregnant pause. The hot silence of lovemaking. The stifling stifled brooding silence just before a thunderstorm unleashes itself wild on the world. The silence of space, the vast of vista. The crucial silences between notes, without which there could be no music; no yes without no.

  I study the silence of my wife. Her silence when upset; a silence I hear all too well after twenty years of listening for it. Her riveted silence in chapel. Her silence rocking children all those thousands of hours in the dark, the curved maple chair murmuring, hum of the heater, rustle of fevered boy resting against the skin of the sea from which he came.

  My sister was loud as a teenager, cigarettes and music and shrieking at her brothers, but she gentled as the years went by, and much of my memory of her has to do with her sitting at the table with my mother, the two women talking quietly, the swirl of cigarette smoke circling, their voices quick and amused and circling, the mind of the mother circling the mind of the daughter and vice versa, a form of play, a form of love, a form of literature.

  I rise earlier and earlier in these years. I don’t know why. Age, sadness, a willingness to epiphany. Something is opening in me, some new eye. I talk less and listen more. Stories wash over me all day like tides. I walk through the bright wet streets and every moment a story comes to me, people hold them out to me like sweet children, and I hold them squirming and holy in my arms, and they enter my heart for a while, and season and salt sweeten that old halting engine and teach me humility and mercy, the only lessons that matter, the lessons of the language I most wish to learn; a tongue best spoken without a word, without a sound, hands clasped, heart naked as a baby.

  The Final Frontier

  It is the rare soul who remembers particular lines from Scripture for reasons other than professional advancement or private absorption. But I remember, even as a child, being totally riveted by certain odder blunter saltier lines that made me elbow my wry patient dad, like be kind to your father even when his mind goes, or the ones where the Christos isn’t so much godlike as he is a rattled guy, such as when he whirls and shouts who touched my clothes?!, after he felt the power leave him, what a phrase!

  One of those lines for me has always been blessed are the poor in spirit. I heard it for the first time as a child, of course, at Mass, late in the morning, drowsing between my alpine dad and willowy mother, in a pew filled with brothers seated with parental buffers so as to reduce fisticuffery, and like everyone else I was puzzled and nonplussed. Wasn’t the whole point to be rich in spirit? How could you be bereft spirit-wise but get a backstage pass to the Kingdom of Heaven? What was that about? Was it a major serious printer’s error no one had noticed all these years? Was it supposed to be pear in spirit, or something artsy like that?

  Diligent schoolteachers subsequently explained the phrase to me, and my gentle wise parents explained it, and learned university professors explained it, and able scholarly writers explained it, and I got the general idea, that the word poor there is better understood as humble, but humble never really registered for me because I was not humble, and had no real concept of humble, until my wife married me, which taught me a shocking amount about humility, and then we were graced by children, which taught me a stunning amount about humility, and then friends of mine began to wither and shrivel and die in all sorts of ways including being roasted to death on September 11th and I began, slowly and dimly, to realize that humble was the only finally truly honest way to be in this life. Anything else is ultimately cocky, which is either foolish or a deliberate disguise you refuse to remove, for complicated reasons perhaps not known even to you.

  Of course you do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and defiant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humor you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.

  But you cannot control anything. You cannot order or command everything. You cannot fix and repair everything. You cannot protect your children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane.

  All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference. Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude,
detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow. That trying to be an honest and tender parent will echo for centuries through your tribe. That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling. And you must do all of this with the certain knowledge that you will never get proper credit for it, and in fact the vast majority of things you do right will go utterly unremarked. Humility, the final frontier, as my brother Kevin used to say. When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or several at once, sometimes; when we are older we take on other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you and I both know men and women who become trapped in the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to escape who they no longer wish to be; but finally, I think, if we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief, that none among us is ultimately more valuable or rich or famous or beautiful than another; and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and true about humility.

  This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love. That could be. I wouldn’t know; I’m a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

  Jones Beach

  At the beach, many years ago with my family, bitten by the wind,

  Pebbled by whipping sand, my sister older and remote and fifteen,

  My mother leery of the water, my dad as usual calm and dignified

  Though hilariously and uncharacteristically wearing swimming trunks,

  The sandwiches gritty, the grapes sugared by sand, our cookie bits

  Drawing gangs of grim seagulls, the people of every color swirling

  Around us, their musical incomprehensible imprecations and radio

  Stations, a man drowns; there is a shrill and a blare and a lifeguard

  Brown as dusk sprints like a fullback through the whirling children

  Along the murmuring shore his brilliant float trailing him like a sin.

  A few moments later they hauled in the dead man mottled and blue

  And that was that. I remember there was a man selling beer and ice

  That day, walking through the crowd, wary of the beach patrol cop.

  I remember burly boys diving into the relentless surf after footballs.

  I remember terns whiter than white cut against blue sharp as knives.

  I remember my youngest brother weeping, his face masked by sand.

  Late in the afternoon it grew cold and we packed up and went home.

  I remember the sand in the car, the grizzled salt of my dad’s haircut.

  We regret what we forget but we remember far more than we forget:

  We forget that. Once a man sold beer and ice; another drank the sea.

  My mother wore a green suit. There were beautiful girls by the jetty.

  The Wonder of the Look on Her Face

  I was in an old wooden church recently, way up in the north country, and by chance I got to talking to a girl who told me she was almost nine years old. The way she said it, you could hear the opening capital letters on the words Almost and Nine. She had many questions for me. Did I know the end of my stories before I wrote them? Did my stories come to me in dreams? Her stories came to her in dreams. Did the talking crow in one of my books go to crow school? Where did crows have their schools? Did the crow’s friends talk, too? Did they have jokes that only crows know? Did I write with a typewriter like her grandfather? Did I use a computer? If you write on a computer, do the words have electricity in them? Is it too easy to write on a computer? Do you write better if you write slower? She wrote with a pencil. She was about to start writing her third book. Her first book was about bears, and her second book was about her grandfather’s fishing boat. Her grandfather still owned the boat even though he was too old to go fishing. He would go sit in the boat sometimes when it was at the dock, though. It took him a long time to get into and out of the boat, but he wouldn’t let anyone help him in and out of the boat because he was a Mule-Headed Man. He let a young man go fishing in the boat, though. The young man wanted to buy the boat, but her grandfather wouldn’t sell it no matter what. So the young man paid her grandfather in money and fish he caught when he used the boat. Her family ate an awful lot of fish sometimes. She thought her third book was going to be about a mink. She wasn’t sure yet. Could you write a book if you didn’t know what would happen in it? I said yes, you could. I said that, in fact, it seemed to me that the writing was a lot more fun if you were regularly surprised and startled and even stunned by what happened. I said that maybe one way to write a good book was to just show up ready to listen to the people and animals and trees in the book, and write down what they said and did. I said that I supposed you could know everything that was going to happen, and even draw yourself a map of what should happen, and then try hard to make that happen, but that didn’t seem as much fun as having a rough idea of what might happen and then being startled quite often by what did happen. I said that I rather enjoyed that the people and animals in my books didn’t listen too much to what I thought should happen, hard as it was sometimes for me to watch. I said that I wasn’t saying one way was better than another way, and that probably you could write good books in all sorts of ways, certainly I was not particularly wise about how to write good books, because I wrote only one book at a time, and very slowly, too, and whatever I learned while writing one book seemed to be utterly lost the next time I wrote a book, because the books were as different as people or animals or trees are, and whatever you think you know about a person or an animal or a tree because it is a certain species or color or nativity is probably egregiously wrong, because assumptions are foolish, as far as I could tell. She said that one of her ambitions was to someday write a book with a really good pen, and I said that, by happy chance, I had a terrific pen on my person, in the shirt pocket where I always carry pens with which to start books if book-starting seems necessary, and that one thing authors should be with each other is generous with good pens. So I gave her my pen, observing that it might have a very good book in it, especially if the book was about minks, or otters, which are fascinating animals, as everyone knows. She accepted the pen gingerly, with great care, with a look on her face that I wish I could express in words. But even excellent words like astonishment and joy and gravity and awe and reverence do not quite catch the wonder of the look on her face.

  The Old Typewriter in the Basement

  Once again a student asks me how I became a writer, and this time I say, Because of the staccato staggered music of my dad’s old typewriter in the basement. Because when he really got it going you could listen to it like a song. Because after a while you could tell if he was writing a book review or a letter just from the shift and drift of the thrum of the thing. Because it sounded cheerful and businesslike and efficient and workmanlike and true. Because a bell rang when he came to the end of a line, and you could hear him roll sheets of paper in and out of the carriage, and you could imagine him carefully lining up the carbon sheet to the face sheet, and he typed with two fingers faster than anyone we knew could type with ten, and he had the professional journalist’s firm confident knowledgeable hammer-stroke with those forefingers, as if those fingers knew perfectly well what they wanted to say and were going
about their business with a calm alacrity that you could listen to all day long. Because his typewriter had dozens of deft machined metal parts and they had cool names like spool and platen and ribbon. Because his typewriter was a tall old typewriter that he loved and kept using even when electric typewriters hove into view and tried to vibrate onto his desk. Because if you stared closely at the keys, as I did quite often, you could see which letters he used more than other letters. Because the typewriter was him and he was our hero and we loved him and we wanted to be like him which is why we all learned to type. Because you would daydream of writing a story on his typewriter but you would never actually do so because using his typewriter would be like driving God’s car. Because his typewriter stood proudly in the center of his desk and there were books and magazines and dictionaries and neat stacks of paper and manila folders and newspaper clippings and rulers and erasers and pencils and pens and a jar of rubber cement and not one but two X-acto knives sharper than a falcon’s talons, and above his desk was a shelf crowded with dictionaries and catechisms and manuals and other books of all sorts, many of them bristling with bookmarks and scraps of paper marking particular pages or passages of heft and verve and dash and wit. Because when he went downstairs to his desk you could be in any room upstairs even unto the attic and hear the first hesitant strokes as he began typing, and then the sprint and rattle and rollick as he hit his stride, and then an impossibly short pause between the end of one page and the start of another, a break so brief that you could not believe he could whip one sheet out and whirl another in so fast unless you saw it with your own eyes which we did sometimes peeking from the door of the study into which no child was allowed when Dad was typing for fear you would interrupt his thoughts which were no kidding Putting Food on the Table, you will not under any circumstances interrupt your father when he is in his study, if you are bleeding come upstairs and bleed, and inform me of the cause of bleeding, and if you cannot find me find your sister, and if you cannot find either of us stanch the bleeding with a hand-towel, not a bath-towel, and go next door and ask the neighbors for assistance if necessary. Because he had been typing since he was a boy, and because all the love letters he wrote to our mother when he was far away deep in the tropics in the war were meticulously typed, and the poems he sent were meticulously typed, and because he told me once that he had several times in his thirties tried to rise before dawn to type a novel, even as the house was filled with small children and he was due on the early train to his press job in the city, but he did not have the energy to invent and embroider, and he would fall asleep with his head in his arms on the typewriter, and startle awake after a while, and never finish his novels. But I have written novels, and there are times, many times, when I think that I have done so in large part because of him and his old typewriter and the sound of his cheerful efficient staccato typing in the basement. Because he is still our hero and we love him and we want to be like him more than ever. Because maybe my novels are somehow the novels he started to write and could not finish. Perhaps somehow I have finished them for him and he startles awake and grins ruefully at his old typewriter and pads upstairs to wake the kids and I am typing these last words with my forefingers and with tears sliding slowly into my beard.