WRITING ON THE INSIDE OF MY EYELIDS
LETTERS TO DEB
Patrick left behind a legacy of his passion for Deborah in this collection of letters. They are an imaginary tour de force about life after death and how he would continue to relate to her. As his imagination soared he played with cosmology and with historical and literary figures and then created a story within a story.
Dear Deb,
Beginnings are such fragile things. Before them, a nothing so profound it beggars conception or description. After them, anything of whatever form or substance. Between the two, the beginning, that most tenuous of transitions. How to describe such an instant? It is so sudden and fleeting there is scarce space enough for thought. But after that moment, oh, such an expanse for words! The tabula rasa rolls out to the infinite and just lies there, ready for our reality to be inscribed upon it. The promise of creation is all there in creation's absence and possibility. But as soon as the first mark is made and the first character completed, parameters are constructed and boundaries set. The vagaries of past chance and circumstance are molded into experience and sifted through practicality's skein. Grammar and reference and meaning intertwine and what was the stuff of the infinite becomes more akin to a complex minuet. How could writing be anything but reality's pale shadow? How else could the opportunity afforded by nothing be seen as anything but a most profound beauty?
No wonder my writing always sucks. There's no way I'm up to the task. Fortunately, it's not my fault. It's obviously the process that's flawed.
I've no way of knowing if this message will ever reach you. If not, smile and throw it on the pile of vain and squandered efforts, humanity’s attempts to figure out the purpose of the universe. Fear not, the pile is big - it'll support the weight.
Like everything else, this message is the product of a process and, in this case, the process began with genesis itself. For me, the great leap beyond acquiescent acceptance into consciousness was the spark called imagination. It must be so for every conscious being - otherwise why else the impetus to move beyond what is to what could be? Imagination was the first building block and gave me the next great leap forward. I had thought and, therefore, I was. Having discovered I could creep, the gambit made, I strove to crawl. Consciousness told me that there was a present, imagination informed me of the possibility of a future. So, I wrapped my consciousness in my imagination and asked myself if I was a past. With that, I reconstructed memory and reclaimed my person and was myself.
Perhaps it is in the nature of the human beast. Perhaps it is a consequence bred of past practice and long familiarity. While we can live in isolation, perhaps it is that we have little experience with and would never choose a universe of ever only alone. I needed desperately something, or anything, beyond my thoughts and beyond myself. I needed something of the familiar, something of my past, something of sensation, for there was nothing. There was neither sight nor touch nor taste nor sound. I existed in a place of memory and thought and self and it was not enough and could not be enough, and it left me uncreated because I was so alone. Would that be the limits of existence forever? Had some inadequacy condemned me to this? Unable to move, unable to see, unable to feel, unable to hear. I was only abject terror and I reached out with my desperation and I did the only thing I could think to do.
I turned on the lights.
It really is a very, very Big Bang.
Why would anyone dare undertake anything? There are so many pitfalls and barriers to our actions. Worse still, why would anyone compound such feeble efforts with vain attempts to represent them in words? When Pandora's box loosed all troubles on the world, do you remember the last thing to flutter tremulously into the air?
It was hope.
Good night. I love you.
Pat
Dear Deb,
I think I can be excused a little arrogance. When I try to remember the details, I realize my first memory was a glimpse of wave and submicroscopic particle, the laws of quantum mechanics holding court. Gravity and wave physics conspired to create the first partnership ever, constructing particles that boiled about each other, collapsing under their own mass or, in their glee over existence, tearing each other apart. Some particles were so bizarre they fled from my perception at speeds greater than that of their later cousin, light. Perhaps they are out there still, racing like terrified sentinels warning darkness of the ravenous illumination to come. Others couldn’t compete with the temporal nature of this reality and left for timeless greener pastures, elsewhere. Things also came into being for which humans have coined no terms, things as yet undiscovered.
Until then, I had known what I had known without vision, for there had been no light. But now, cause began to follow effect and the Big Bang begat time, and time and gravity begat light. Then, like the sorcerer's wayward apprentice, light stole the master's tools and set the limits of time and space, taking to itself their magic, and the universe was made anew.
I can hear you ask, where was I? While the stars burst into the heavens and the galaxies began to whirl? Where was I as gas clouds took strange shapes and planets began their parabolic strolls? With light to see by, and time enough to look, where was I?
I opened my eyes and found myself rotating slowly in space, naked, above a small blue-green marble speckled with swirling white clouds. We circled together around an insignificant star in an unimpressive part of an unimpressive galaxy. With such a fabulous display around me, and such tremendous beauty at my feet, I did what any marginally sane entity would do.
I curled into the fetal position and bawled like a baby.
I love you.
Pat
Dear Deb,
Well, this is annoying. Spinoza just read my first two letters and now he's laughing so hard, he's almost pissed himself. Nope, I'm wrong. He has.
He said I could never get these letters to you and, even if I did, that there's no way you’d get the point. Didn't I realize it was a futile endeavor?
I told him he's underestimating us both and, anyway, maybe they're not really for you. Maybe they're to help me cope with people like him.
He hates losing arguments.
As to delivery, for the first letter, the system that seemed most appropriate was a paper airplane. Since I wasn't content with the ordinary, I didn't go with the dark paper airplane configuration. Instead I used a model designed by a NASA flight engineer, with both forward and tail wings and a terrific leading edge. I released it gently and watched it descend downward, performing graceful loop-de-loops as it went. I thought: if it doesn't reach her, it’s not because it wasn't beautiful enough.
I love you.
Pat
Dear Deb,
Spinoza may prove right about one thing. I am beginning to understand the size of the project I've undertaken.
When I was about thirteen, my mother purchased a set of the World Book Encyclopedia. I can still see the white cover with its black stripe and the gold edging on the pages. I think she thought that with six growing children and a deceased husband, she would ensure a comfortable retirement by investing in our education. I don't know if it helped, but I can trace my understanding of things like the internal anatomy of human beings to the World Book's transparent diagrams of leopard frog guts. I was even more captivated by drawings that detailed the operation of mechanical objects and certain industrial processes.
When I thought of writing these letters, I decided to start from the basics and work my way up. Constituent parts. Hence the start of the universe.
I love you.
Pat
PS.: Some might call me just plain lazy, but my grasp of the accurate has always been weaker than my grasp of the inane. Which gives you some idea of how to treat these letters.
Dear Deb,
How did you like the spider's web? Wasn't it beautiful? I didn't even arrange for the glistening dewdrops and the shaft of light. It was just happenstance. But it took forever teaching that stupid bug how to write. Don't worry if that sounds a little strange. Einstein was right. Temporality is an incredibly relative concept.
Sorry if the writing is a little wobbly. I'm writing on this rough wooden plank. Where did I get the wood? Remember the tree? I sent some of it over to the sawmill.
An uncle of mine cut the planks for me. He really knew what he was doing. He spent forty years of his life doing very dangerous work in lumber camps and sawmills, so I guess our little chore suffered by comparison. He kept watching what I was doing to help and laughing. He kept saying, "Sweat, you bugger. Your mother always told you to stay in school." You should have seen him call up that sawmill, though. He did it just like it was nothing at all. But then he told me he hated planing wood and he thought that I'd be able to do that job myself. Unfortunately, he was wrong. I got frustrated and decided instead to concentrate on training the spider. Now, for my efforts, I have a bunch of rough wooden planks and the painful lesson that spiders are really, really, dumb.
I'm willing to bet that the sawmill and the spider was some sort of experiential lesson. Unfortunately for them, I think I'm too dumb to get it. Maybe some things are ground into our eternal cores. Or else I'm their spider.
I had this strange conversation with one of my guys once. It explains a lot. He was arguing that no one had bodies in the here'n'now because they weren't needed anymore. He told me, "You don't understand nothin.' Its gonna be different. There's gonna be beautiful music playin' all the time. Its gonna be special." So I asked how he was going to hear the music if he didn't have ears? He got a disgusted look on his face and told me I was hopeless. (I had a lot of fun, but I was such a shit.)
So I have to admit to being a little stuck. I really don't want to blow this. But I feel like the physicist who disturbs the conditions of his experiment as a result of his observations. How do I write something that I won't distort and lose in the shuffle? Maybe that's why Spinoza and everyone else is being so patronizing. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not the idiot child.
Spinoza wanted to make me feel better so he has just told me the following story.
There was this guy named T'narcinimpay who lived in the City-state of Atilia about sixteen hundred years ago. Most of Atilia was located in what is now the southwestern area of Sudan. The Atilians had perfected an astonishingly beautiful form of art. Small brown eggs were collected from the pens of birds kept for this purpose. The most perfectly shaped of these eggs were selected and hollowed out. Cracks and imperfections in the eggs were repaired with a mixture consisting of starch from a cassava root and saliva from a spittlebug. The eggs were then given to the Carvers who scratched tiny, detailed drawings onto the eggshells. Portions of the shell not drawn upon were then treated with a rudimentary form of solvent. This solvent had two effects. First, by etching into the eggshell, the solvent produced a subtle layering. Secondly, the color of the treated area changed from brown to copper. With repeated applications of the solvent, the copper color became brighter and brighter still.
Although fragile, these eggshells were strikingly beautiful and were prized throughout northern Africa. As a commercial activity the eggs were, for Atilia, the source of tremendous wealth. The production of a single eggshell could take several months and the highest social stratum of Atilian society was reserved for the finest Eggshell Carvers. Within that elite, T'narcinimpay was the greatest carver of all.
The Atilians followed the practice of adding on an additional syllable to people’s names to signify their rank and the social class achieved. T'nar had begun life as a member of the lowest class of artisan but by the time he had been accorded the name T'narcinimpay, he was both friend and confidante of the Godking. As center of the City-state and as the very purpose of life itself, only the Godking was beyond a complex name. It was a tribute to the centrality of the Godking's existence within Atilian society that his name consisted of a single syllable. That syllable was O.
One day, commercial travelers presented the Godking with a treasure never before seen in the kingdom. It was an unfertilized ostrich egg. The Godking ordered T'narcinimpay to cover its surface with depictions of a historic triumph won by O’s ancestors, - the Battle of Rolling Heads. It was this battle, supposedly, that had made possible the founding of Atilia. In T'narcinimpay's drawings, this battle was to serve as the central focus from which all of the City-state's well-being flowed, past and present.
T'narcinimpay looked upon the honor bestowed by his young Godking with both elation and dismay. The ostrich egg was the canvas of which he had always dreamed. However, he knew that he was a man of advancing years. He doubted that he had time enough to complete such an extraordinary undertaking. As well, he was frustrated with the limitations of the difficult skill he had mastered. He felt intuitively that there must be some means of expression beyond the forms that he knew but he lacked any grasp of what those were. Nevertheless, he also knew that an instruction from the Godking was worth as much as, or more than, life itself and so he set to work - but with a quiet air.
The Godking O and the court of Atilia were astounded, therefore, when T'narcinimpay emerged from his studios and requested a public viewing of the eggshell on the very first anniversary of his seclusion. The silence of the unveiling was only broken by the Godking's whispers, "It cannot yet be done; it cannot yet be done." How much more amazed were they, then, by the first sight of abstract art in all of Atilian history!
The eggshell was covered with swirls and shapes reminiscent of the Atilian landscape, of sunsets and trees. Dyes created by T'narcinimpay had stained the entire eggshell's surface with colors and hues of every description. The carved portions were rough and mottled, reminiscent of Atilian architecture and of its desert and rock. Flecks of gold were embedded in the egg, as were varied items of green and orange and red. It was a masterwork of heart-rending beauty that would set the standard for Atilian art from that day forward.
The Godking was dumbfounded. The eggshell was completely outside his comprehension and beyond the comprehension – it was obvious to him - of anyone in the court. But he could not deny its powerful effect nor, as Godking, could he be seen to falter.
"Exactly as directed," he said. "It shall be called the Battle of Rolling Heads."
"What was that all supposed to mean?" I said. Spinoza’s story didn't much help and I guess I sounded vexed.
"I dunno," he said. "Maybe it's hard to put the whole world onto an eggshell, even if you're a genius. I didn't make the story up. It really happened. Look it up in the Memoirs."
Maybe I will. But let’s leave that for a letter for tomorrow.
Good night, I love you,
Pat
Dear Deb,
I’m getting more than a sneaking suspicion that things up here may be a little more complicated than they first appear. Before I go into that, I've got other news. Spinoza took pity on me and arranged a few lessons on the environmental controls. I would have figured them out myself eventually.
I get the impression he thinks my activities a little arcane but was prepared to tolerate them if they helped me become acclimatized. According to him, though, my interest in letter writing is slowing my progress in other areas. Funny, I'd have thought it would’ve been just the opposite. Few individuals here-and-now undertake concrete projects providing exercises in varied manipulative activity.
Sorry about that, I lapsed into turgidspeak. It's a logical outgrowth of turgidthought, which gets used sometimes here-and-now. It's inevitable. Prior linguistic associations unduly complicate communication with unintended imputations necessitating terminological precision. If you see what I mean.
One of the tutors Spinoza managed to wrangle into helping me turned out to be our old pal T'narcinimpay. I should have known. There had to be more to Spinoza's telling me that story than met the eye. Layers within layers, I guess. I'm going to begin not trusting anybody soon.
T'narcinimpay turned out to be a very gracious and patient individual. He was a short muscular balding man with iron gray hair and wore a thigh length toga. I got the impression that he thought my activities a little arcane but was prepared to tolerate them if they helped me become acclimatized. We spend a fair bit of time discussing technical tricks like "thought to action" and "choice and control" and he told me that his experience as an Eggshell Carver had taught him volumes about patience and restraint. I think he may have been practicing those qualities, when I commented wryly, "I'll bet."
Eventually, I worked up the nerve to ask him about the accuracy of Spinoza's story. He looked at me cautiously and then asked me to repeat what I’d been told. He waited quietly until I was completely finished. "It was somewhat more complex than that," he said. "Some things happened after I presented my masta to the King which have some bearing on events." I asked him if he would correct the things I had been told and continue the story.
"You must understand," he said," that I have been asked about this story many, many times. Atilians argued about it for more than two hundred years. When I first arrived, Atilians lined up to hear it from me personally or would stand before me in a crowd and request that I tell it. I didn’t mind. But, by now, I have seen so many other things and I think there are much better stories to tell. When I look back at my masta, I know that there are better works of art to create. There are so many other painters and sculptors. The Europeans had the Renaissance and the Impressionists and Picasso. I had nothing. I carved eggshells. It is impossible to compare.
"Spinoza did not tell you enough. The Godking added to my name. He took from his own name and gave a little bit to me. For that afternoon, they called me T'narcinimpayo. No Godking had ever done that before. There was a ceremony and my masta was placed in the Royal Treasury – we guarded that Treasury even closer than we guarded the King himself. After the ceremony I was dismissed and went outside, into the courtyard, to breathe some air. One of my students called to me. I looked over at him and, in that moment, the guard behind me bonked me on the head."
I must have looked shocked. He just grinned. "You are surprised. But no one can blame C'in," said T'narcinimpayo. "He was just a guard doing as he was told. It was an Atilian thing. And, anyway, what could I have done after my masta? It sounds stupid now, but it was a kindness then. It all evens out."
I told him I thought he was taking a very generous view of things. He laughed again.
"Not so much. The story of my masta spread all over the City-state. People came to see it and they argued about it as if it were a thing of good or evil. Many people never even saw it - and they argued about it the most. Two hundred years later and they were still arguing about the masta - so much so that word of this carving spread far beyond Atilia itself. No good could come of that. A big tribe from the south of us became envious and they raided Atilia, robbed the Treasury and stole the egg.
"And so that is the end of the story?" I asked.
"Oh, no," he said. "An even a bigger joke was yet to come. Halfway home they took my masta out of its wrappings to look at it. It slipped from the hands of the man who held it and the dromedary that had carried it forty miles stepped on it. Goodbye, masta."
"But weren't you saddened," I continued foolishly, "by this pointless destruction of your contribution to history?"
"Oh, no," he said. "It was a fitting end. The supposed hero of the Battle of Rolling Heads was the great, great, great grandfather of the Godking O. I found out later that his name – which no one had ever recorded - was B'is. It means ‘sandy loincloth’. He was a little smarter than the other people of our tribe, but not by much. He spent the battle hiding under a dead camel. When it was over, he climbed out and found everyone wounded or dying. So he told everyone that he was the hero and they were all too tired to argue. That was the founding act of the Atilian dynasty. That was the beginning of my egg. Has anyone ever told you, that you’re overly attached to traditional forms of artistic representation?"
It was my turn to laugh. "You think I have problems?" I said. "You should read about Francis Cornish in this book by Robertson Davis, What’s Bred in the Bone."
His face went from surprised to quizzical and then showed a sudden comprehension. "Oh," he said, grinning, "That is very funny. Goodbye."
Oh, and I think he's just being condescending, but Spinoza told me I should say hello.
I love you.
Pat
Dear Deb,
I would appreciate it if you would read these letters aloud. I always enjoyed the sound of your voice and especially your cadence when reading. Who knows, I may even be listening.
I’ve been thinking about the phrase ‘Hi, there’… I often said that to open our evening conversations. Usually, I knew what your response would be before I said it. It was a way of asking you how you felt about your day and how you were feeling generally. But I knew the answer before saying the words. You never hid your emotions from me.
It took me a while to realize that intimacy is just a shorter way of saying ‘sharing emotions’. I was lucky to be married to someone who shared so easily.
I love you.
Pat
Dear Deb,
St.Valentine's Day… Up here, the calendar date is a matter of personal preference. I let Spinoza pick today's date and I suspect I’ll rue the day. He wants me to go on a double date, tonight, with him and Ezra Pound. My date is to be Lizzie Borden. It's a blind date and I really don't think I'm up to it. Former ax murders and all that... Maybe come Halloween… There are lots of people to choose from - but it's not them, it's me.
It has me thinking about the social construction of love. A group of university students once created a formula for finding ‘true love.’ They worked out that universities offered the greatest possibilities... I remember reading the formula in a newspaper, after my first stint at university and still unattached. I was so depressed. I figured I’d definitely blown my best chance. I figured I was doomed to become a monk.
Thanks for helping me avoid the monk thing.
Good night. It’s you I love.
Pat.
Dear Deb,
I suggest that you repeat these phrases aloud as often as necessary in order to keep your memory of me in perspective:
My partner was vain.
My partner thought he was God's gift to women.
My partner was sexist.
My partner was really, really lazy.
My partner left me with all the goddamn responsibility and work.
I am so mad at him!
Please repeat these words whenever you feel the need.
Good night, I love you.
Pat
Dear Deb,
So last night we went to the Ides of March dinner theater. At first, it was pretty much what you'd expect - Caesar in bloody rent robes, Brutus being honorable and acting really guilty, Mark Anthony striding around, imperious - and horny for Cleopatra. A regular told me it was being acted by the individuals themselves. Then they all started doing campy send-ups of various literary-historical versions of the events in question. I didn't get all the references but the ones about Shakespeare were pretty brutal. Caesar was parading about, imitating Mussolini. Brutus was Genghis Khan – and, for some reason, Mark Anthony was Napoleon Bonaparte. Suddenly, the real Alexander the Great and the real Napoleon Bonaparte showed up and I thought things might get ugly.
There’s long been a feud up here about who was the greatest military conqueror of all time. It's a Brownie points sort of thing. Not in bad taste - it's their way of saying, "I was worse than you but, now it's all over, I'm sorry." Though it’s not all forgive and forget. Some people up here are paying some pretty heavy dues. I think the dinner theater might have been some kind of penance thing – I’m guessing that a lot more was going on than I understood. Anyway, in the end all the actors started throwing plates and the whole thing degenerated into a food fight.
I had a good time but Lizzie Borden didn't like it. It turns out she's not a ‘happy ending’ kind of gal. I should’ve guessed. It's funny about social occasions like dinner theater and life. I was so nervous before going out but everything turned out all right in the end. Strange, eh?
Good night, I love you.
Pat
Dear Deb,
Let's discuss where I am and am not and what I can and cannot do. Sort of a job description… I am not looking over your shoulder second-guessing your decisions, mostly because I know you don't want or need me there. I am not hovering over Becca and Cailum shooing away pesky germs like some cross between a guardian angel and a demented can of Lysol. I am not available, sadly and unfortunately, to bail you and the children out of hot spots, financial ruin or life's assorted miseries. Happily, however, I am always available for discussion and consultation. My advice and suggestions will be bad, as usual. Be assured that they can be ignored without reproach. Please note: Conversations may be monitored or recorded for training purposes.
As to exactly where I am and what I can do, that's more complicated. Think of me as in the space between the words or the lulls in conversations. Remember that I will be thinking really, really big. Should the Hubble Space Telescope discover that some stars have been rearranged to spell certain names, don't be too surprised if yours is among them. Alternatively, I am interested in figuring out exactly what is beyond light. So much to learn, and so much time to do it in. All of which is a complicated way of saying don't worry about me - I've got lots to do. Take care of yourselves. I’ll see what I can do about the big stuff.
As to my job description, the most important part will be the provision of moral support. When you need some, just think of me. That's always good for a laugh.
Good night. I love you.
Pat
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