This is my first blog, occasioned by the publication of The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exile. The blog might be titled “Meditations on Kentuckians.” It will be ongoing for a while and mostly taken from a so-far unpublished, somewhat experimental novel, Sunday People. The segment below belongs to the character Melissa, granddaughter of Orson and Sarah Beth, who are the anchors of Sunday People. She is presently in graduate school in Chicago.
The tree of knowledge sprang from the seed of nostalgia when God cast Adam and Eve out of the garden. Life, which had been part of us, became an object to be desired, to be explored in all its labyrinthine lineaments. The garden had been the bright limbs of our original parents. Cast out of our childhoods, most of us retain the enchanted circle that time transcribes in our memory—what is it the poet Housman says? Those blue, remembered hills, those happy highways forever lost. When they were cast out, Adam and Eve, and their progeny, begat the world so that they might recreate Eden.
I write with my shoulders resting against pillows that in turn rest against the wall. It is night and the light on my bedside table creates a nest where my bent head nods to the notebook like a hungry bird. Outside the window, in the Chicago night, it is early September and the temperature is about 75o. The white dome of the Museum of Science and Industry floats suspended in the greater darkness. Beyond the museum is the moonstruck field of the lake, the city’s great enemy. As the million noises of the place create its mayhem, chunks of the day, the month, the years are rendered into music by the endless soughing, real and imagined, of the lake. All the city’s images are subsumed by this great metaphor. We stare at it out of bus windows, train windows, car windows and the city is erased. Our pasts arise from the lake to retenant our minds.