You have here Ollie’s toybox and his toy box. Sometimes he sleeps in his toy box.
Summer’s a slippery bugger in northern Michigan, especially at the lake. You think warm, you think swimming, and then around mid-August, fall begins to edge in. Ferns turn brown and you start wanting a sweatshirt a lot of mornings. We have our fireplace going this morning in the little cottage where we stay.
I want to be sure to tell you what I have on Substack. A bunch of years ago I interviewed a number of homeless people (okay, if you insist, people experiencing homelessness) who were living temporarily at the Goodwill Inn. I wanted to make a book out of these interviews, but various editors said (1) there was no trajectory, just a series of essays; (2) I wasn’t qualified to write this book because I didn’t have credentials, a degree in sociology (!) or some such; (3) I needed to put myself in them more, make them show how I was changed by the stories, somehow.
I made a valiant attempt to rewrite, and then decided I had no story to tell other than theirs, and that’s what I wanted. So I let the essays sit for a long time. Years. When I discovered Substack, I thought this is where they belong. You can read them without buying a book, and probably more people will read them this way, anyway. Here’s the link: Substack link
The Goodwill Inn is a well-run alternative to the streets, but you’re only allowed to stay 30 days before you have to leave.
I’m sure I could interview a similar set of people today and get similar stories. Every time I pass by The Pines near us and see the tents of the homeless, I think of how entirely different yet entirely the same all the stories are. People bent and broken before they even get out of childhood. People who’ve tried and tried but have been knocked down by one difficulty after another.
In wild contrast, I’ve been reading a biography of Proust. I don’t know why. There’s Proust, growing up pampered and rich, so allergic he had his bedroom lined in cork, drapes pulled shut. That’s not the full story, of course. He did carouse in casinos, give star-studded dinner parties, knew princesses and socialites. But then he’d retreat home to recover.
I thought this was funny. A caricature of Proust holding Time, an hour glass.
Proust told his own story in all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. The nuances of his feelings, his desperate unrequited love affairs. He had the enormous power of the word. If nothing else in his life was under control, if his passions held him in thrall, he could arrange them, speak them, attempt to mirror the actual events.
What power, what sense of control there is amid misery and suffering, to be able to tell it, to arrange it on the page! This ability has saved me so many times. Life remains messy and out of control, but to be able to write it down, to write it down well enough so others will want to read it, is a gift from the gods.
To be able to go even farther, to create the moment, to touch the hem of the unknowable, say, in a poem or music or art is more than a gift from the gods: it’s assuming the role of a god.
No one’s really inarticulate. The homeless people I interviewed often had elegant stories to tell and told them unselfconsciously and well. Then there’s Proust, so conscious that language takes center stage. Events? Not half as important to him as what he thinks about them.
You know how much inarticulate anger Trump represents. That’s what can happen, it feels like, when you can’t seem to control what’s happening to you. If you feel helpless, you can either retreat (into drink and drugs, into passivity) or you can lash out. Being articulate is a steam vent as well as a shaping of the/your story.
Speaking of stories, it’s hard to do anything lately but watch the unfolding of national events. I appreciate your taking a few minutes out to read Wobbly.