For Mashkinonge

My friend Richard Rose has just launched a new collaborative website, intended for the exchange of ideas about things that matter to us. To find out what that means exactly—and perhaps to contribute to that exchange of ideas, please visit it, at unsettled-things.com. ("Mashkinonge" is the name of the fish in whose alter ego form Richard engages himself in meditative conversation.)

Here's the text of a piece I sent him a few weeks back, and which he posted recently on his site. (Answers to its questions are beginning to come him, and he will, he says, be posting them shortly. I'll even be submitting some of my own responses. Be on the look -out!)

My friend Adam Turck was murdered just a few weeks ago. We weren’t close friends—we acted in a show together, once—but when we ran into other on the street we were happy to do so, and would fall into conversation. He bought one of my books. I might make a point of seeing a play he was in. He was one of the warmest people I’ve ever met.

He was out walking his dog when he encountered a man and a woman, strangers to him, engaged in a sidewalk argument that was threatening to turn violent. He stepped in, trying to defuse it. The man pulled a firearm out of a bag he was carrying, shot Adam dead, then shot himself dead. The general consensus among those who witnessed the incident was that Adam’s intervention saved the woman’s life. Possibly; probably, even; it’s comforting, in a small way, to hope so.

After Adam died, I couldn’t shake the memory of a conversation we shared, about the respective merits of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and its spinoff show “Angel.” (Adam was both a low and a high culture nerd, and he was a fan of multiple superhero franchises.) There was a quote from “Angel” which he professed to live by, taken from a scene where the characters are wrestling with the futility of fighting the forces of evil, given evil’s implacable persistence, and vowing to keep doing so anyway, simply because it’s the right thing to do: “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”

Of course Adam Turck died still walking that talk. No one who knew him would expect any less of him. And of course I wish I could lay claim to such a simple, and profound, and fully lived philosophy myself. But the woods I travel, like Robert Frost’s, and his neighbor’s, and I suspect most people’s—even, if I had been able to ask him, Adam’s—are lovely, dark, and deeper than that. And my little horse and I are often lost in them.

The MS I’m currently circulating is called The Language of Belief. In a patchy, pontificating fashion, it’s an exploration of systems of belief, both in the abstract and in our lived lives, and of the language we use, in writing, or in more interior self-examination, to frame those systems of belief. And of how we are swayed, or not, by the belief systems of those around us, and of the time and place we were born into; and of how our actions reflect or fail to reflect whatever codification of them we claim allegiance to, and aspire to live by. It’s mostly couched as prose poetry, or as meditative and narrative vignettes aspiring to the name, though it also features a bunch of more conventional verse poems. The manuscript I’m currently working on, an armchair theater anthology titled The Forest at the Gates of the Garden, ventures into darker corners of similar territory: the garden is in most cases a version of Eden, and the forest is the Grimm’s folk tale world we’ve been cast out into. Or there’s a line from Ursula K. LeGuin which I cite to further identify it: “We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.”

Does our exploration of them have to stay that alone, though? Do we have to feel that lost there?

Far more, lately, than politics—nowadays so carnival an affair that we have at our differences full tilt, like bumper cars—systems of belief are not the subject of casual polite conversation. Because they matter too deeply, or because they are as nuanced as they are contentious, or because there is just no way, other than to submit to authorities of codified belief as absolute, to settle their arguments? All the above, possibly.

I wish this were not so. I wish I could ask others the questions I ask myself in these two latest manuscripts of mine, and travel the weighing of them together.

For example:

~ Does nothing we do matter, in the way that “Angel” and Adam understand to be the nature of this world we live in?

~ And if so, what are we to do? Without hope of reward, as sheer altruistic heroism, does doing (what we, as corrupted souls, imagine to be) the right thing anyway even matter?

~ Or is there an afterlife, and can we earn, maybe even bribe our way into it?

~ If so, who is the us, stripped of the carnal, purified of base acts and impulses, who will dwell there—and how can that person be truly us?

~ Could we even stand to be that person? Over time, especially! Could Adam and Eve stand it?

~ Design your own afterlife: what kind of heaven could you conceive of that might be eternally worthy of the name? Are we—so flawed, so mortal—capable of even picturing such a place?

I like Richard’s idea of a shared site, for unsettled and unsettling conversation. Might it invite as much talking back to each other as talking to ourselves; as mere polite listening?

So here I’ve framed a batch of questions I’ve been struggling with lately; I’d love to know where you stand. Of course, I do have my own tentative answers—they’re what my two newest manuscripts have been wrestling with—and I’d be happy to share a sample piece of writing, and hope for responses to it. I’d also be interested in hearing your own batch of troubled questions; and in trying to wrestle with them myself.

(Fortunately for Mashkinonge, he is not a James River channel catfish)