Neat Trick

Booby traps, treats, and what’s happening in the wings

It’s all in your head. . . you just have no idea how big your head is.

Lon Milo Duquette

The blending of the realms! It becomes more and more evident as autumn swirls along. The liminal, dovetailed nature of actually everything, the smudging of the boundaries between this version of things and the next. . . it’s a great time for mixing up creative boundaries, too. Between the actual and the fantastic, the imagination and the intellect, between expectations and outcomes. The light and the matching shadows cast by its shining.

This week, I wanted to share a treasure from Richard Brautigan’s single, knockout collection of short fiction, Revenge of the Lawn (1971).

WRITERS GO ROGUE

Like many other scrappy-hearted writers, I love Richard Brautigan’s work for the way he offhandedly blurs the lines between the real and the imagined, the bleak and the comical, the beautiful and the profane, and the way he plays with EVERYTHING, winking at the reader from the wings: perspective and structure, imagery and language, and with the way, how, and where things land. Or linger. Or swing off into the netherrealms, unlandingly. He was a true creative renegade.

And in the true spirit of Creative Reading, Richard’s style has been inspiring me from my first encounter with it as a teenager—and has especially influenced the freewheeling Goonies-spirited writer/reader dynamic I’ve come to assert in much of my own work. We’re friends, okay? Let’s be weird friends. Let’s run away together! I’m going to tell you this story and it might go off the rails and then it will go back on. Probably. Either way, you’re in for a treat (because I brought treats for us), and everything might be booby-trapped but you’re going to have to trust me. Come on!

This morning, in Michelle Tea’s Modern Magic, I starred the margin at “the Universe is vastly beyond the comprehension of the tools we were given to understand it.” So what can we do to make sense of what we feel, wonder, and experience—and to share those incomprehensible feelings, wonders, and experiences with one another? We can challenge the customary places. Slide right up to the edge then nudge over. Report from that charged space where we straddle a boundary.

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AND ANOTHER THING

I was recently downright dazzled by this passage in (another favorite writer) Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope:

Light not only warms, of course, but illuminates both things we want to see and don’t want to see. Like the North African light, our inner incandescence reveals the hallucinatory and the ordinary, the magic and the grim. Light is energy you can’t touch or corral, which is also the nature of spirit. They are both slippery, and slide around in every direction, and they are not always warm and fuzzy, which is so awful. I have felt ectoplasmic flickers of my father and best friends, life forces that have been snuffed out in the human realm but exist, like candles in another room. . . Light is drawn to light, like heliotropic flowers, poppies, marigolds—paperwhites. And us. Light, candles, full moons magnify spirit that is in the wings. That is a neat trick, to magnify the invisible, and it raises the question: Is there another room, stage left, one we cannot see? Doesn’t something happening in the wings argue a wider net of reality? If there are wings off to the side or behind us, where stuff is unfolding, then reality is more than we can see and measure. It means there are concentric circles rippling out beyond the life we see being acted out on the stage.

‘Tis the season, friends. Time to embrace stage left. In honor of liminals and lights, shadows and shining, here’s one of my very favorite stories, “Hallowe’en in Denver” by Richard Brautigan.

Waiting for the light! To change. Goonies never say die. Shine in the darkness necessarily, fellow flickers.

Love & light from the margins,

ali✨

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