The Color of This Place
Same Walk, Different shoes
Dear Friends,
Something a little different today!
This posting is part of the “Same Walk, Different Shoes” project, organized by Ben Wakeman. For this experiment, 50 writers created story prompts from transformative moments in their lives. The prompts were then shuffled and offered back to the group, so that every writer wrote one prompt and randomly received another. We have all agreed to release our stories on the morning of December 29th.
Here’s my story, plus Ben’s introduction and links to all of the other stories in the project.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m offline this week for a silent retreat, so I won’t be able to respond to comments until the new year. Please do write in anyway — I’m eager to know what you think of this whole experiment.
— Sal
Same Walk Different Shoes
“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project that
organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.
The Color of This Place
Don’t tell me who I was, I wouldn’t understand it. Besides, any promise I make would be to the future not the past. Any question I asked would be about what has already happened to me. I was in England. I knew, at least, that one geographical fact, that one way of situating myself. Another person would say it’s almost like a dream, but that’s not how I would describe it. There is a beauty in repetition, in the cadences of life that come to seem like a song.
The island I live on has been cleft, it has become a pair of islands that no longer know each other. It was done with a wooden spoon, the kind that every kitchen has, a well-used spoon, softened by a thousand pots of spaghetti sauce, a spoon in the hand of a child. It was not one spoon, but two, and it was not one child, but twins. What does it mean that there is a constellation of twins in the sky? The myth is a clue left by the distant past—auger, portent, oracle—pregnant with meaning, but unreadable. To myself I say: I still can’t say your name. If I did speak your name I would be speaking of someone who looked just like you but was no longer you. This is the inverse of deja vu, where something novel seems to be already known, instead what is known has become unrecognizable.
One spoon hit the floor, the other hit an upturned pot. Bang! Ring! It was time to pick up the phone. It was time to hear. It was time to act. It was time to yell. But time itself was slipping. Yes, I did shout, I did funnel rage into the tiny transceiver of the mobile: it was the rage of history, the rage of centuries. It was the rage of the far future when humans are living in orbital colonies grieving for the lost earth. What is one person’s betrayal in all of that?
I have decided not to tell the story, not to tell what happened. Instead I’ll say that yesterday, I saw man from my neighborhood standing on the sidewalk in front of the church. He stood, completely still, in a wan patch of sunlight, his carefully packed bags at his feet. It had been cold overnight. Cold for the birds and the squirrels and all of the life in the city. Who are we to each other? I think as I pass him. I think of that voice on the phone and I say to myself: I wonder what the person with your name is doing right now, as if that had any bearing on what I am doing. The man who sleeps outside on my street, who I greet every day, is closer to me. I feel more worry for him and more curiosity. I wonder what it is that he has lost.
I’ve digressed, I’ve left something out. See it: I was an elegant bird in my suit, an egret. Inside I was a flock of raucous crows. Beside me was a solicitor, in front of me was a judge. I was winning my case against betrayal. I looked down to see my own formal shoes pressed neatly against the floor. Between each body in the room was a crystalline and frigid air. I don’t know whether to wish this had never happened. This is a story of becoming.
I touch my throat where the wolf’s teeth had missed me by a moment. Or had the wolf bitten in? Sometimes you cannot know how much damage has been done. It is easy to place blame, and I do blame. The blame itself is the damage. It can be worse to be right. A disaster suspends the future. Time is at once frozen and passionately accelerated. I can still feel the sensation of indrawn breath.
I have lived into the future of the disaster where what will (the future tense) hardens into will (determination). My life had almost been a good life. I had been writing a poem with my body in space. But instead see me now. I picture myself in a field at night. I picture myself in a small boat, making a crossing. I picture myself folding laundry in the afternoon light. You, you who are reading, picture me anywhere. By which I mean, please do not picture me sitting somewhere and writing this. When you close your eyes, what color do you see? Let that color become an atmosphere, and let that atmosphere become a place. I believe that you want to understand what happened and why we are here together in this place, why the sky and the ground and the buildings are all one color, the color of your imaginings, and I believe you want to know how your color, the one you saw when you closed your eyes a moment ago, could possibly also be my color, the color that suffuses my life right now, the color I have become.
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
This is quite unlike anything I've read. I felt like I was reading a painting. Guernica.
“What is one person’s betrayal in all of that?” -- This story is full of mystery and evasion, but there’s no escaping its pain. The strategy of not-telling is bold. The speaker can’t change what happened but tries to give it tolerable perspective; feels blame but doesn’t want to tell the story in a way that puts blame in the center. Inventive and artful. I hope you are having a generative retreat!