The Third Bank of the River

I've loved this story since I first read it. Actually, loved is the wrong word. The story moves and hurts me. The feeling of being so well understood by a story--and of understanding the unspoken mood captured in it--is a sublime feeling. But it is not an easy story to read.

I looked up some analyses of it recently, and I didn't feel that they interpreted the story the way I understood it. They are probably more researched and correct interpretations, but I'm not sure.

Most articles that I read accept the idea that the father in the story is dead--that the small boat and the river symbolized his movement from life to death. In the imagery, I can certainly see familiar motifs of the journey between life and death.

But when I read it, it seemed more human and more mystical at the same time; it was the narrator's guilt and desire for his father to be relieved of his burden that spoke to me. In fact, the whole story, to me, is about the weight of burdens. What makes the father, silently and without question, leave his family and live alone in pain and hardship? What burden did he feel weighing on him so much that he could not be with his children, yet he could never travel far enough to be out of sight? To me, it read more like a story about a child trying to understand his parent's mental suffering.

I saw the story expressing two parallel possibilities: the attempt to understand depression, mental pain, and that slow withdrawal from the world; and on a higher plane, the idea of being called to some spiritual journey that requires the sacrifice of comfort and love. It even calls you to forsake those to whom you have responsibility.

The son feels it is his fault. Perhaps his father is dead. But what makes this story so much more poignant, to me, is the idea that the father is there still, in body, and the son cannot save him. This failure, the son's great impotence, causes his guilt.

Anyone whose parent has lived a painful life, an unrealized life, a life of depression, or of some other great loss, can probably relate to the guilt that shadows everything he does in life. He feels guilty for trying to live, for his own comfort and happiness, etc.

When the narrator attempts to take his father's place, I don't see it as following the father in suicide or death. I see it as trying one last time to take the father's burden off his shoulders. The terror, though, of being swallowed by such a fate overwhelms him, and he retreats. I can relate to this, too.

This story is one that you could probably read and interpret over and over in many ways; that's part of its beauty.

But when I read it, everytime I feel the weight of those unspeakable burdens that we all carry, that some of us grow more and more aware of until that awareness blots out all other purposes in life. Whether those burdens are divine or human doesn't really matter. None of us can save another person, but we can all feel the grief of trying, and failing.

Of all the stories I've read, this one has stayed with me longest and most sharply. I wish I could speak to the author and ask him a few questions. But maybe it's better this way. It articulates something I need articulated. It makes me feel heavier and lighter at the same time.

At the Window

by Helena Krobath

The window here is a little grubby, and outside stands a thin row of trees, right now thin and breathless and motionless as carbon sketches. The wind, that rogue, slips in like a serpent and excites my skin. The cars hum. The neighbour smokes. I sit. I imagine.

I am not old, but I can see the way time works, a trickster making us believe in lines. It fools me into thinking my skin is a little looser under the eyes today instead of fixed like a carbon sketch. I go through bodies like kleenex. I’m on my fifth one.

I had a thought . . . I can’t remember. It's in the eyes of everyone I see, wistful, bemused, uncertain. The forgotten thought.

Then it comes to me. You are in a deep black ocean. You're surfacing and diving and surfacing. When you surface, you remember. You see the breadth of the ocean and all across it the faces of other people surfacing.

Some of them are people you know very well, your souls, who, when you were under last, seemed distorted and foreign like your own face in a mirror when you've lost your mind.

And surfacing, you have a good laugh about how, back underneath, where memory doesn’t exist, you were enemies, with uneasy feelings of not knowing something that should be known.

And so you killed their children. Blind deaf impotent like a lion in a cage or a shark on the sand, you lashed out. It was all wrong and unfair. Everywhere the same guarded looks, the same hooded eyes. Night music and cries of rage.

Until you break the surface and the cold thick ink of the void surrounds you and you feel safer floating in that endless sea than you ever felt on earth traveling the paths of men. All around you, faces are coming up and eyes opening.

Oh, it’s you, you say. I thought you were just a stranger at the airport! That was you! I thought you were just a face in a window.

And then you hold them all, wet with the dark water, and laugh, laugh, laugh. Should we go under again? See if we can get ourselves born somewhere really grand? And this time we won't forget each other. We'll know ourselves and the mystery we come from.

What the hell, they say, and you dive under, find yourselves born on opposite ends of an alien planet, them with grey skin and you with blue, both miserable in your adventure because you think it’s real, the end, the fullness of time, your identity. Who am I? you ask yourself. Why am I here?

Needs (aphorisms)

1. Spring rains need to stop. We need cold blue skies and turbulent white clouds, and most of all, we need wind.

2. We need 15 seconds of deep breathing with our eyes closed.

3. We need #2 in hammocks.

4. Coffee is good, but sometimes we need decaf.

5. Someone driving by with his window open should play heartbreaking music we'll never hear again. We need that.

6. We need to stop watching our thoughts dart around like tireless dragonflies.

7. We need to stop shaking like puppies in the pound whenever someone lays a hand on us gently. We can't stop that until we leave the pound. How do we leave the pound?

8. The night should be black and silent. We need to sit beneath the weight of silence and empty space.

9. If a solitary car growls, it should echo like a tiger in the trees, and then fade to silence again.

10. We need to shiver.

11. When we undress for bed, we should examine our own nipples until they stretch out like flower pollen waiting for the bees.

12. We need to unlock the memories of our monkey ancestors. Then we'll remember what we forgot, and cry.

13. We need to feel fireworks in our wrists and knees, until everything becomes like melting gold and love.

14. When we swim in the lake, we need to feel intense gratitude to the cool pebbles under our toes and the lip of water around our necks and the strings of wet hair falling over our eyes and the beads on our cheeks and the sun.

15. We should feel intense gratitude to the warmth of the water when we shower. We need scratchier towels.

16. Books need to be kissed and fondled.

17. We need to find the speakers and flip the output/input switch. Somewhere in the rainforests of South America or the ice sheets of Antarctica is a shortwave radio from the farthest point in the cosmos. We need to listen.

18. When the air is mild, we must open the windows and make love. When the air is hot or cold, we must fuck.

19. The moon is a woman who was turned to stone. She can't be reanimated and she can't even crumble away. When we see her, we need to remember.

20. We need to smile sadly when we see people walking earnestly towards their futures with hope and pain on their faces, and we should cry privately when they are too old to walk anymore.

21. If we don't make babies, we need to take the world as our baby. If we do make babies, we need to take the world as our baby's brother.

22. When people are foolish, evil, disgusting, rude, cynical, filthy, obstinate, greedy, and selfish, we need to study the grass.

23. There are too many suffering creatures to imagine all the time. The weight of them would break our backs. But we should never turn away from what we see.

24. We need to be harmless.

25. We need to learn astral projection.

26. We need to sift warm sand through our fingers until the only thing we can think is warm sand, fingers.

27. Bodies are galaxies. Orgasm is the big bang.

28. If possible, we should discover how to make love to spirits and gods.

29. Sleeping people need to be kissed without ever knowing it.

30. We need to hold on gently and we need to let go.