The Mountains of Instead

      AN IMAGINARY ENTITY OF ENORMOUS POWER       1. Panis Angelicus   I was about eleven years old when I made my First Communion in St. Joseph’s Church in Brattleboro Vermont.   Unlike Napoleon, who claimed that his First Communion was the happiest day of his life, for then he was brought nearest to God, I hadn’t yet felt close to God except when instructed to be by my teachers, who were nuns, as Napoleon’s may have been as well.   What I remember of the day was the marvelous white suit I had been provided, made from a cloth unknown to me then – it might have been satin or silk or some lesser material infused with those (shantung?), but it could have been seen, or sensed, to be a metaphor, or rather a metonymy ,   a thing that is “put for” another thing --   in this case, for the inner purity that I acknowledged but really could only give the credit to the suit for. I had also wished for another upgrade of my small sel...

From  A Year’sDreams  (2008):   August 9 I was a younger man – poor – single – in the city.  I needed a car, and found a large ancient rusted and battered van for sale very cheap.  It even had a toilet in the back.  I knew my parents would find this purchase odd but I thought it was a great deal (maybe it was free). A couple of young women near me were also enjoying it. Then, out with it on the streets of a big daytime sunlit city.  The van became a small bus, and I’d got a job as a sort of free-lance bus driver (my bus was the van, still shabby and rusted). I picked up people at corners, got stuck in various ways and places, people called out in annoyance or gave advice. I didn’t know the city, or at least this part of it.  At last stopped and let out my disgusted passengers.  One who’d been kind, a young tourist, stayed with me.  He and two friends (one in a black velvet cutaway coat) were out to see ...

  For Martin Crookall, An Apologia (2015) Martin --  Of course I can’t change your mind about things in the book you actively disliked, such as the transformation of Bruno or the character of Roo: these things will have to remain a matter of taste.   All I can do is describe how I intended it to work, and give some reasons why (therefore) it is what it is.  First of all, though the book may give to you an air of falling-off or failure of imagination, it is in fact the ending which in my own view was being prepared for throughout the book or at least throughout the third volume.   (I had actually planned an even shorter final volume than now exists, and perhaps if I had been braver it would have been very short, eliminating (for instance) the majority of Pierce’s travels in a non-magical Europe.)   Even Harold Bloom, a great champion of the book, felt on a first reading that something had gone very wrong and all the promises of the earlier parts hadn’t b...

    In front of   the concrete-block VFW lodge on the outskirts of town, across the highway where the line of old tall trees screened the dusty fields going away to the west, there stood or lay part of a Van Damme B-30 Pax bomber, one of the only twenty-three built at the plant that had lain just over the horizon and invisible from there.   The Pax was only a carcass C just the forward section, wingless and tail-less, like a great insect returning to its chrysalis stage from adulthood.   I mean to say it was a carcass then, in the time when (though signs warned us away) we used to play on it and in it:   examining the mysteries of its lock boxes and fixtures, taking the pilot = s seat and tapping the fogged dials, looking up to see sky through the Plexiglas windows.   Now all of it = s gone C plane, plant, fields, trees, and children.   There is a philosophical, or metaphysical, position that can be taken C maybe it = s a scientific hypothe...