Archive for October 18th, 2022

Literary conferences are not a place I usually associate with excitement – given the number of them, the world would not be able to bear so much stimulation. Nevertheless, you should always be ready for surprises. For example, earlier this month, I attended a University of Dallas literary conference (I gave a talk on Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz, another on French theorist René Girard, and a non-fiction workshop) and among the many readings of poetry and prose, certainly one of the most memorable was Glenn Arbery reading the epilogue of his Boundaries of Eden, the story of a boy who doesn’t know his name when he appears near an abandoned country home. The novel was published by Wiseblood in 2020. It was a tense moment at the conference: the power had just gone out, and everyone was leaning forward expectantly as Arbery read the epilogue, which takes place during a visit to Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser. Here’s an excerpt:

Along the Firehole River and over Craig Pass, he remembered a dream of a melting road and wheels full of eyes. He had dreamed it in the time when he forgot who he was, the time of the Name. Whenever he thought of the Name, inner peace and outer disconnection came over him, as though everything he saw with his eyes were a great illusion. He watched the cars ahead of them, not knowing what to expect.

They turned off the Grand Loop Road toward the Old Faithful Visitors’ Center. Traffic was heavy, and the parking lot at Old Faithful, big enough for a football stadium, set his father on edge—huge tour buses, swarms of people from everywhere. They went slowly up and down the lot, row by row, and they were starting their second run through it, his father growing increasingly critical of the human race, when finally, a car full of Japanese tourists pulled out in the row nearest the geyser. Everyone in their car was holding up a cell phone, and a girl leaned far out of the front passenger window with a selfie stick.

“The real world now exists as material for smartphones,” said his father. “Look at it—the reduction of
reality itself to a set of images you can put in your pocket. Seized and possessed. The final conquest of the
modern project.”

“Dad! Geez. Give it up!” cried Magdalena. “We’re in Yellowstone.”

“Really, Walter. It’s a just way of seeing things,” his mother said.

“It destroys memory,” said his father.

“So you remember everything without it?”

They had their usual argument as they all got out of the car, but they were unusually playful about it.
The bleachers for watching the geyser were empty. They had missed the last eruption by fifteen minutes,
and the next one wasn’t for another ninety minutes or so. His father wanted to go for a jog, which was a new
habit, and he quickly disappeared up the asphalt walkway.

“We’ll be in the visitor’s center,” his mother said. “Are you okay poking around by yourself, Jacob?”

“Sure.” It was the first time she had remembered to call him that. As Magdalena walked with her, he
could follow the ripple of male attention that surged after her like the wave at a football game.

There were signs everywhere warning visitors not to stray from the trail. The appearance of solid ground
could be deceiving; the lava crust could give way, and you could be plunged into boiling water or mud. He
loved reading about it, even though it was sometimes gruesome. He had read about some young employees at
the Park who had gone out one night to drink beer or whatever teenagers do and had ended up falling through.
He imagined the sudden scalding drop. He didn’t even want to picture them. They came from somewhere; they
had names.

He wandered up the shorter way, thinking about his new name. Jacob, who wrestled with God. Who changed his name, too, not to Jacob but from Jacob to Israel.

Crossing the bridge over the Firehole River, he stopped and looked at the water weirdly flowing over white encrustations. He imagined the magma hunched far down under them like a trapped giant waiting to stand up, hundreds of cubic miles of rock liquified by heat. This whole place was an inevitable disaster—and the crowds swarmed over it happily, sure it wouldn’t be today. Not today, not today with its ice cream and pretty girls and new baseball caps.

He moved on from the bridge up the trail. Everything looked like it was going to stay, but everything was really going away, even what you thought was still. Even these mountains were going in God’s time. Maybe the faith that moved mountains was a way of talking about God’s time. The time of the Name. In God’s time, mountains rose stretching upward and turned over and shook themselves out and got old and lay down like dogs too tired to stir, and then other ones sprang up, and the seas silted down, and rocks rose and the daylight was full of what the old seas had let drift down for millions of years. Everything was going. Life rose and ages passed and you were born and like the flicker of an eyelash you were gone and the going kept going right past you.

A big family came by, talking and pointing, and he stepped off the path to let them pass. A double stroller, two fat little babies whose parents spoke French.

Babies came into the going. He remembered when his father had told him that he couldn’t be alive now if he had ever been dead. But the going you came into wasn’t you when you were born, not the you you were conscious of. It was the going that would eventually be you. Meanwhile it ate and made a mess in its diapers and cried and slept until finally you started to show up at three or four. You grew and then you were convinced you were the going, because you had a name, you were Buford or Jacob, but you were never the going itself.

You couldn’t even explain your own body’s going. You rode in it and thought I think therefore I am but that was crazy because the going was more the am than you were. You fell into the going without any say-so, and when it stopped, the going didn’t stop, it was just you that stopped and maybe not even you. You died, and another kind of going took over what had been you, and you became another kind of going. …

It all came clear to him for a moment and he stopped. You could say I but God was the I AM in the going of everything, including you. And everything was going, not just things that were alive. Rocks, trees, mountains, clouds. Everything was going.

Read more about the book here.