by TJ Price
It’s been one year since I’ve been writing this monthly column here at 3 Quarks Daily. I think the temptation on such an occasion is to look backward—for evidence to support this, we have phenomena like the “clip show,” the “greatest hits,” the summation at the end of the textbook’s chapter. Further—the milestone and the benchmark; the rest area; the place where one sits down for a moment to catch one’s breath on the hike. Where there is usually a vista over which one may see the distance traveled, but from a new perspective—altered not only by altitude but also by time. That moment on the trail when the sun is going down and one makes camp to take stock of the road behind; the leagues between “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” and “Our Princess is in another castle!” Odysseus; the Lotus-Eaters.
On and on and on.
One does this not only to reminisce, but also to pass the time as one’s body catches up with one’s soul, which has long-since struck out ahead of the body; a fleet-footed Ariel, scouting, doing reconnaissance, it has waited impatiently at this station for the body to catch up. It lazes in the tree branches, chews thoughtfully on long blades of grass. From time to time, it soars heavenward and looks down on the body as it, too, looks out on the past. The body is patient, but plagued by reminders of its fallibility, of its inherent weakness. (This type of pain—fatigue, discomfort—is something the body eventually only vaguely remembers; but the type of pain that the soul feels, neither can ever forget.)
And so we enter the way station, manned by they who rebel from Beckett’s old pronouncement; they who can’t go on but also who do not go on, those condemned to the moment between Just Having Arrived and Ready to Go. Sad-faced and shuffling, they hand out the tickets at the counter for those departing, but never depart themselves (for though purgatory is empty, it must never be empty).
—{ In my childhood, I once wrote a poem about barbershops called “way station.” I will not include it here, suffice to say it included a simile regarding the sweetly silver shearing of the scissors like birds so close to my ear; snipping and singing, snipping and singing. I remember it was a poem about contentment, involving some imagery about the other men waiting, leafing through magazines. A reference to Ol’ Blue Eyes playing on the speakers, a vocal blooming of regret; the astringent tang of witch hazel in the air. The stinging sensation on the nape of my neck and the first cool spring zephyr over my scalp, a strap of bells still chiming behind me on the exit. }—
And so, the look back (Orpheus craning his neck around again; Lot’s wife tasting the tang of a sharply brackish breeze); the publishing of the yearbook; the commemoration and anniversary. A line, bent by the pressure of time, becomes a circle, joining itself again to repeat the same track. It is either this, or, bent by an entirely different force—the quickening dread one feels upon seeing one’s beginnings on the horizon—a line becomes a spiral.
———————{
When I have watched sitcoms—now all at once, digesting 22 minutes’ worth of viewing in a linked chain—I always skip the “clip show.” They feel vestigial, irrelevant, in an age of streaming, once used to not only show the viewer how far the show had come (complete with aww-inducing flashbacks of chubby toddler actors before cutting back to their svelte teenage selves) but also, sometimes, to serve as lure for new viewership with a compact, Readers’ Digest version of what had gone before.
—{ As a teenager, I remember being very excited about a certain miniseries that was due to be broadcast on television. It was Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, and it would air in three discrete two-hour segments—a brand-new King story and the author himself had written the screenplay! I even had a copy of the paperback book from Borders, which had been released in advance of the show’s airing, a strange decision (I’d vowed not to “read ahead,” and after each installment of the series, I would only read up to the end of that “PART” in the book.) Having read most everything else King had written at the time (thanks to Mom’s top shelf—yes, even Gerald’s Game) I was so excited to see it, and sat down in front of the television from the first minute until the last. At one point during the last third, my stepfather had joined me in the living room, despite not having seen either of the first two, and I remember him commenting, “I don’t even need to see the first episode, because they tell me all about what happened in it during the third one.” I remember feeling a particular itch of loathing for that mentality—this easy-breezy model of consumption, understanding only the sketched outlines of a thing and relying on someone else (myself, in this instance, having seen the prior installments) to fill in the narrative gaps when and if the time came. I remember my discovery of “abridgment,” too, around the same time, and feeling a particular sense of violation. I was astounded—how was it possible that a book could exist in two forms—one, in its fullness, the way an author intended, and also in another; grossly pollarded by someone else entirely! }—
These days, streaming allows for a constant flow of consumption—sitcoms, usually little morsels to be shown once a week, are now “binged,” consumed all at once—sometimes for hours on end, for sheer gluttony of entertainment. This is a gluttony which triggers no satiety reflex, however—even though the eyes of both the sated and unsated look alike—glazed, rolling, distant.
—{ If my husband and I happen to visit the in-laws—especially in the off-season—and we go for a walk on the beach late in the evening, it is always shocking to wander off the sands, the primordial churn and hush and roar of the ocean at our backs—only to see the windows of houses otherwise dark flickering and rolling with the anodyne glow of big-screen televisions. Even the eyeholes of our domiciles have been glazed over by this beaming, flaying light. }—
There is a particular term used to describe the time when the fate of a television show has become uncertain: “on the bubble.” This is when the ratings for the program in question are low, but there’s signs it’s doing well with certain targeted groups, or if it’s still doing better than the program it has replaced. Typically, this is when the network executives haven’t quite made up their mind yet whether or not the show will be green-lit for another season. Will they be canceled? Will they be renewed? Who can say? Tune in next Thursday to find out if your nightly source of dopamine will be cut off abruptly!
I still remember my confusion and anger when VR.5 (an hour-long sci-fi drama airing just prior to The X-Files) was canceled. The show’s glitchy, seemingly-discontinuous narrative about virtual reality was a mise en abyme too far for the American public in the 1990s. VR.5 had been cast into what was being called—at the time—the Bermuda Triangle of time slots, 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM (Eastern), also known as the dreaded “Friday Night Death Slot.”
The bubble popped, and the protagonist of the show was left marooned, forever trapped—perhaps fittingly—in a limbo-like virtual world.
}———————
If a line becomes inevitably either a circle or a spiral, what about that aggregate of points which do not collect themselves neatly and smartly, to be led into the mouth of the hungry abbatoir? What about the non-linear? What about the seemingly disparate points of light which are only in hindsight (and by the story-telling eye of the observer) drawn into constellation? They connect the stars by drawing lines where none exist, then letting pareidolia do the rest—they construct narrative and pattern and superimpose it on chaos. (A butterfly in Tokyo falls in love with a hurricane in Topeka, is thenceforth dissatisfied by any wind below gale-force.)
Some of my entries here have indeed felt windy—not just in the Aeolian sense—I mean long-winded, which is never my intention when I set out, but by the time I’ve concluded, I have been swept all over the map. (As I often must remind myself, the map is not the territory, and thus, way stations are never quite where I expect them to be.) In the very beginning, I was hammered in by an absolute belief that my columns must have a certain weight; must be solid in the face of so much melting. I’m absolutely terrible at writing so-called “reviews” for things, yet I loathe attempts to give them any other name, especially if nothing but the name is changing. (Influencers have tried: instead of calling their responses to reading material “reviews,” they have taken to calling them “reactions,” which has accompanied an alarming increase in the proliferation of vapid online content, and the most banal—not to mention most linear—constellation of all, the ★★★★☆.)
—{ In college, I used to watch television shows and then go online to find the “recap” that someone had written on that episode. But I was also the kid who had “novelizations” of his favorite movies, and which I read over and over again, able to simply superimpose the cinematic version while reading the words someone else had chosen to represent those scenes. The novelization of The Rocketeer was the first time I understood German printed on the page. (“Mach schnell mitte Rocket!” cried the evil Nazi spy, sending his goons after the hero and his technologically-advanced jetpack. At the time, I put the phrase “Mach 3” together with this to understand it meant “faster,” but it wasn’t until later I learned that “mach” conjugated the infinitive of “make/do” and “schnell” meant quick. I also didn’t know at the time that said rating of supersonic speed was named after a man: Ernst Mach, so my initial conclusions—despite being largely correct—were also incorrect.) For what it’s worth, I also have the subtitles permanently on-screen for any television or film I watch. Everything I see, I read; everything I read, I see. Then there are those who can read who have trouble seeing… }—
Recapping, though, is not a skill of mine. I’ve been told that my digressive style of narration often involves the most ersatz of details, seemingly trivial and inessential to the story. Many a time has my husband’s expression glazed over slightly when I relate a story from my day job, and I’ve seen the same look in the eyes of good friends when I attempt to summarize the plot of a work in progress, and in the eyes of a stranger who might politely ask me what my book is about. It seems to me that before I even get to the exciting bit of a story—or what might excite a potential reader—I have to sketch out the lineage of the idea and how it all coalesced. To me, each point of light is important, even the dimmer ones, otherwise the constellation might be telling an entirely different story.
Sometimes it all unravels, though, despite my best intentions. Sometimes the path I take away from the straight and narrow leads to extinguishment; a slow fizzling fade. The darkness of ages intercedes; stars go out. (★★★☆☆)
Sometimes, it’s all just stylish gloom.
It is at these times I turn to a friend, out of need, and I ask them: “What’s the point? What am I trying to say? Don’t I need to know who I am before I can decide what voice I have? What if I’m not a soloist, but more like a chorus?”
My friend is an erratic sage; he teems with anxiety like a fractal foaming, the scurf of countless internal wars of possibility versus repercussion. “Lose the need for points. It’s like music, you just sing. And also, if I may,” he adds, cheekily, “I don’t think you have the authority to decide the point—that’s why it’s always so beautiful. An author haunts their work, as you always say.”
—{ They say at the moment of death, your life flashes before your eyes. Television usually renders this phenomenon as a montage, because of course it does. Instead of it being a hurtling, disordered tornado of feeling, an illegible mess, we have brief, lens-flare eroded images that meld and scurry into one another under the harsh, probing light of the next world—an impatient light that burns at the thin scrim of our memory; all that tethers us to this world. Is it any wonder that ghosts are always depicted as such thin entities? A filmy, translucent sheet; gauze, gossamer, breath on the wind, no body there at all. }—
}———————{
And so, the way station. The train has yet to arrive, and the ticket-man behind the counter looks shifty, a little sweaty, kind of agitated, like maybe he’s finally bought his own ticket out of here, but he doesn’t want anyone to know. I feel the cold breath of indecision prickle like dew on my own skin. If he leaves, someone will have to take his place. Inertia will decide, or perhaps fate. My mouth is dry. I fumble in my pockets for a mint, a lozenge, and then someone nearby clears their throat and speaks.
“Do you have the time?”
I recognize the voice: it’s the desultory, queerly agitated timbre of the ticket-seller.
I also recognize that I am not wearing a watch, nor do I see a clock anywhere on any of the walls.
“I don’t know,” I say, and though it is true, I know that speaking it has damned me.
The ticket-seller leans over, elongating impossibly, like a figure in a Modigliani painting, and his shadow mimics him—both he and his wavy, writhing limbs are grotesquely magnified when he hisses “you can only see the clocks from behind the counter” and the translation is that I have seceded from “we” and “us,” that I have become “me,” “myself,” “only,” and the whistle of the train is busying its way down the tracks from BEFORE as it pulls into NOW, and SOON is piling up all around us like gray, gray ash falling from the sky.
I am watching, now, as the train pulls out of the way station. In the last car, already becoming smaller as it chugs toward the future, is the face of the former ticket-seller, smushed up against the window. How childlike he seems, I think to myself, marveling from my post as sentinel, or custodian—it doesn’t matter which, or both, or either.
I tidy up my shirtfront, brushing off a few errant flakes of yesterday, and slip into my fated berth, behind the counter. There is a mask hanging from a peg on the wall, a face that looks familiar but unfamiliar simultaneously. It both attracts and repels. In a nook underneath the broad top of the counter, I find an old looseleaf notebook, but the pages are gridded in quadrille. On every page, someone—perhaps the old ticket-seller—has deliberately inked in lines to form a geometric maze, one which never seems to end, but rather continues from one side of the page to the obverse, and then over to the next page, and so on, and on and on.
In a way, though I have come to this place in the middle of everything—this hesitation, this lacuna, this pause between breaths, I am afraid of completing the circle. I do not relish the idea of coming back to a beginning, even if it is just to lay new tracks over the old.
So then, is it that a line becomes a spiral?
—{ Or is it that there never was a line to begin with? }—
From my viewpoint here behind the counter at this way station, I have only just begun to hear the sound of ticking.
I have not yet dared to look up to the wall to see what might now be affixed, where before there was nothing.
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