12. Close quietly.
Like the rustle of yellowing sycamore leaves; however, if you prefer, the shaking of spring lilies, too, will do. If you want to make a scene, know that your memory will forever be creating one for you. In any event, it will make for a better-written version—all the possibilities and outcomes still intact, with you forever thinking, Well, what if I had done this or that? You see, when a lover wants to leave, there is no other outcome. Only when you yourself have left someone will you know what this means—but for now, you are only you, and you are never the one who leaves. It is better to close the theme quietly, with an ever-evasive ending, on tiptoe with breath held, a noose, a sinking stone.
The Art of Fiction
PART 1
Chapter 1
When I first met Butch, he was counting spiders on his ceiling, which he said wasn’t the ceiling but rather a metaphor for sky, which itself wasn’t a sky at all either but rather a metaphor for something else, and so it happened that I fell quite madly in love with Butch; however, Butch never really happened either, or maybe he did, but his name was something other than Butch, and the manner in which we’d made the other’s acquaintance didn’t happen with such significance—but the way I am telling it makes it no different from the telling which occurs quite truthfully under the guise of fiction, which means, if it’s truly true fiction, which is to say, if it is true, then it really is fiction, and everything else is a failed mimicry. This takes me back to the ceiling and sky and metaphor and how the ceiling mimicked sky and how sky mimicked how I kept seeing the sacred or something like the sacred manifesting itself in various guises, and naturally, this led me to loving too completely all types of winged creatures, most specifically luna moths, because they were the most poetic, which derives from the Greek poiesis, meaning to make, meaning one ought to consult Aristotle’s Poetics right about now and review the relation of poetry to mimicry.
Chapter 2
When I first met Butch, I was in bed alone, staring at my ceiling, counting eyes, which weren’t eyes at all but someone who I felt was always with me, who wasn’t a person at all but rather a metaphor. Butch was standing in a doorway, talking about driving too quickly, driving his truck over a cliff in Paraguay; however, I understood that it wasn’t a truck or a cliff or Paraguay, and the doorway meant something I didn’t understand just yet.
What the great philosopher says in the span of two sentences, the maladroit novelist takes eight hundred pages to extrapolate. I’m not saying that certain novels are bad, I’m only saying that I don’t always orgasm, and by orgasm, I mean marginalia I couldn’t help but have. By marginalia, I mean the need to underline, to punctuate, to write notes, the characteristic mindful doodling that can only point to one conclusion: that I came across the one golden trail, the one passage in a book that is worth the pages and pages of perfunctory plot and narrative.
I’m not saying that my affair with Butch was bad; I’m just saying that I didn’t orgasm, and by orgasm, I mean orgasm. In bed, he was quick and shy, and eyeballs were eyeballs, and spiders were spiders, and the ceiling was a ceiling that never opened up to any heaven.
Chapter 3
When I first met Butch, I was not well-read, and therefore I confused my hermeneutics of suspicion with having brilliant thoughts.
Years later, I became better read: random affairs will do that to you. After a lonely while, I realized that reading smut novels just wasn’t my thing: those novels that litter airport terminals and vacation beaches, those novels that are easy to read and end up at some secondhand bookshop that sells nothing but bad sci-fi and horror and romance novels. They are easy; they make the time go by, and maybe you become a bit fond of certain reoccurring characters; however, you realize—after a lonely while—that you need a book that you want to spend the rest of your life with, a book that you can read and reread time and time again and love more and more each time and realize, as the book changes, as books will do, that you change too, and the book loves you back and is a winged thing.
PART 2
Chapter 1
When I first met the father of my daughter, he was not a book I wanted to read because the beginning was so slow and I think he thought I was a sloppy reader anyhow. I’d read a page and put the book away, read a page and put the book away again, each time reading a bit more until I realized that I was in love with the book and didn’t want to read it so completely because I didn’t want it to end.
What does it mean that the man I am currently in love with knows more about the literary device of recognition than anyone I know, and looking through my copy of the Poetics for a passage to quote here, I turn randomly to the section on recognition, which I didn’t even know was there?
[This was no accident: my copy of Aristotle on the Art of Poetry: With a Supplement on Music was owned by Nancy Thorp, who attended Hollins College and who died in an automobile accident; her parents set
