and battlefields which have their heroes

Must brush away the layers of dust I've allowed to accumulate these past couple of months where I let this space sit idly while life continues to move ever faster and in more head-spinning ways. It has taken me over a year to get to this place in my head--back to reading, back to enjoying life and all its many surprises. So, I am glad to begin anew with some thoughts on my most beloved art form, in a newly discovered way. For myself, anyhow.

I've never been a fan of short stories, have always preferred to get myself lost in the long form of a novel. However, after having spent over a year without having dropped my eyes to the page of anything that had a spine, I have found myself recently looking to try to rejoin the world of the written word. The drought could only last so long. So, I scanned the shelves (now overloaded and disheveled), and came across Cathedral, by Raymond Carver. Carver is one of those authors I have never gotten around to reading, though he should be, by my own favor, someone whose work I devoured long ago. A good decision, as I was anticipating it would be, one should always start at the heights when one is looking to understand and embrace something new.

How I avoided Carver for this long, a man who wrote in the clipped prose style whose cadence my mind taps along to, is a testament to my intense avoidance of short story form. There's no news here, except, perhaps, to me, and I'm preaching to the converted, myself included. I'm simply the most recent convert, and I am slapping my wrist for not having joined in the chorus sooner.

Carver masters all of the elements I require in my scribes ... all of the reasons I am captured by language and how much more wonderful it is when it is manipulated simply without making the reader feel manipulated. His impeccable ear for dialogue and an equally impeccable hand at expressing the subtlety of, in particular, those two ever-so-tricky words attached to desperation and longing--whittling away all that is extraneous in those bloated emotions--and getting down to the basics of human communication in all its isolating imperfection.

So, it is also appropriate, perhaps, that my favorite in the collection, is not, the highly-accaimed story that takes its title from the book (deservedly so), but another, equally so-recognized one, "Where I'm Calling From," originally published in the New Yorker, on March 15, 1982, oddly enough. In the tradition of all that captures me when discussing the written word, the story is told by an unnamed narrator, who is vulnerable and uncomfortable in his own skin, struggling with his "self," an alcohol problem, in this case, and looking to reach out to those who are not readily available. Uncertain in his memory and his future, reliving his life and his relationships within himself. And, in what I can only see as a blissfully uncertain ending, we are only privy to the narrator's desire to reach out to his past ... despite never being sure whether he has fulfilled his need. It is that renewal of hope ... the compulsion to not give in to the endless emotional separation that remains.