I'm going to read one story tonight.
It's a longish story.
Rachel, thanks, Rachel, and David,
and everybody for helping set stuff up.
Rachel said, we've got to keep the lights on,
or people go to sleep. (PANICKED) Naw,
you got to turn the damn lights off.
She said, we have to keep the lights on or people go to sleep.
Will you please turn them off?
I don't want to see them yawning.
I mean, I really--
off, yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, so yeah, I'll just zone in on this 8 and 1/2
by 11 page, and I'll imagine everybody
out there just smiling.
And--
[LAUGHING]
I won't pick on Bob too much.
But since this is my last chance, when I was in his class
in '83 in Vermont, he came to class that first day,
and he said, writing is very simple.
A man or woman wants something, and they go after it.
And they either win, lose, or draw--
end of story.
That's all you need to know about writing, basically.
All the other stuff is just kind of technique,
and refinement, and stuff.
And you know, it really makes teaching positions,
and administration, and such useless.
I mean, it's just a scam and a rip-off,
and so I thought I'll let y'all know that's what he said.
Oh, what was it?
He said something tonight at supper--
another thing about all you need to know about writing
was tell the story.
That's what it was.
Everything else is just wasted, just-- we're just--
I wanted to read a short story tonight, fiction.
It's really fun being--
I haven't been on a university campus in a long time.
And it's really nice being around one and around
y'all, and seeing the, or feeling the excitement,
the energy for art, and poetry, and fiction,
and creative nonfiction, and stuff,
which is what I love to do.
And I really hate doing the activism.
It really, I really resent, I'm getting
kind of an attitude about it.
I'm really getting bitter and resentful
that I feel it's necessary of my time to engage in it,
when I could be playing with art or with short stories, which
is what I considered it-- as being, as a form of play
and recreation.
So I wanted to read a short story
tonight because art and short stories
are so important to university campuses.
I mean, you come here as a student.
You're young and all fired up about art.
You don't want some old fart coming and saying
the world's burning.
Do this.
Do that.
I mean, you want to be idealistic,
and pure, and artistic, and that's
what you came here for is to learn that stuff.
And I really wanted to chu-chu-chu- chu
participate in that wonderful, enthusiastic, positive emotion.
But I've got to thinking that it would
give the wrong message that what's
going on where I live is--
I don't feel like I have the luxury of being able to take
a step away from it yet.
Maybe when those wilderness areas are protected
or those road-less areas are protected as wilderness,
then I really do imagine, envision someday
being able to just step back into that wallowing,
of just pure art, just pure beauty without a message,
without a moral, without a theme,
without asking the audience for something.
But I'm not there right now or yet, so my apologies,
somewhat in advance, for petitioning y'all for something
in this story.
It is kind of a story.
It's not quite an essay, but it's not quite a story either.
It's called Fiber, and it's written in four parts.
Part one-- "When we came into this country, runaways,
renegades, we were like birds that had to sing.
It was only 10 years ago, but it feels like 100 or maybe 1,000.
No person can know what 1,000 years
feels like, though in the first part of my life,
I was a geologist and was comfortable
holding a foot-long core of Earth and examining such time,
1,000 years per inch.
In the section of my life after that one,
I was an artist, a writer of brief stories
in which I was comfortable holding
a sheaf of 10 or 12 papers, in which a lifetime, even
several lifetimes passed.
A few thousand people would read my slim books.
They would write letters to me then
and talk about the characters in those stories
as if they were real people, which strangely saddened me.
Then came the third life.
I became an activist.
It was as if some wall or dam burst within me,
so that everything I wrote had to be asking for something--
petition signatures, letters to Congress,
et cetera, instead of giving something.
But any landscape of significance,
of power, whether dramatic or understated,
will alter us if we will let it, and I
am being bent yet again, though not without some fracturing.
Now, I am into my fourth life, one
which is built around things more immediate
than the fairy wing days of art.
Even this narrative, this story is fiction,
but each story I tell feels like the last one I'll do,
as if I've become like some insect or reptile, trying
to shed the husk of its old skin.
And even now, as I struggle toward the perceived freedom
of the next phase of my life, the light ahead,
neither you nor I can really be sure of how much of any story
is fiction or art and how much of it is activism.
I'm trying hard to move ahead cleanly into the next territory,
but still, things slip and fall back.
The old, even when it is buried beneath the new,
sometimes rises and surges, pierces through, and reappears.
Sometimes, it feels as if I'm running toward the future,
with a hunger for it, but other times,
as if I am simply fleeing the past and those old skins.
It's so hard not to look back.
I cut sawlogs to sell to the mill.
Prices are high on the back end of an election
year, low interest rates, new housing starts, as the economies
of man heat to incandescence, fueled by China's child labor,
Mexico's slave labor, fueled by the $5 an hour
slave labor, slave labor even in our own country.
And in sawing those logs, the first thing I notice
is whether the log I cut is an old tree or a young tree.
I don't mean whether it's a big one or not.
All the logs I cut are roughly the same size--
big enough so that I can almost get my arms around them.
They are each 100 inches long, a figure
I can measure off in my sleep or can pace blindfolded.
I've cut so many hundred-inch logs
that I tend to see the world now in hundred-inch increments.
That's the size log the LP mill over in Idaho needs
for its laser mill, which makes short, eight foot, two by fours.
There's not a lot of waste.
Those fucking lasers don't leave much curf.
So the logs I cut are all about the same size,
but each one is a different weight and density, based mostly
on age and based also on whether the tree got
to be that big by growing quickly or slowly.
The first cut you make into the log will show you this,
will tell you just about all you'd ever
want to know about that tree's history.
I can handle larger, individual logs,
and sometimes, I'll hump some big-ass honker, tight, green,
old-growth spruce or fir, 400 fucking pounds packed
into that hundred-inch length.
But mostly, I try to carry out only
the medium sized ones, which fill up the back of the truck
quickly enough.
Some of them will be 80 or 90 years old
if they grew slowly, in a shadowy, light starved place,
the kind of woods where I best like to work in summer.
And others the same size will be only 20 or 30 years old,
with their growth rings spaced a 1/4 inch wide apart or wider--
trees that are seemingly comprised
of liquid sunlight, trees like pipe straw,
sucking up water and sucking down sunlight,
trees of no real integrity or use,
weakened from having grown too fast
and without ever having been tested.
But I get paid for volume, not quality,
and I load them into the truck, too, 100 inches at a time,
though they feel light as balsa wood,
after having just handled an 80 or 90-year-old log before that
one, and I feel guilty thinking of some carpenter 3,000 miles
away, Florida perhaps, building some flimsy-shit house with
those studs--
the wood splitting like parchment
at the first tap of a nail, and the carpenter
cursing some unknowable thing, groping with his curse
to reach all the way back to the point of origin, which is what?
The mill?
Me?
The sunlight?
The brutality of supply and demand,
and the omnipresent hypercapitalism
here at post-consumer century's end?
Finish the house, stucco over the mistakes,
paint it bright red and blue, sell the son of a bitch,
and move on.
What are they trying to do-- dissect the--
were they going to do-- dissect the house to cross-examine
each strut, each stud?
Who knows what's inside anything?
More and more, I'm trying not to look back at who I was,
or even who I am, but at the land itself.
I'm trying to let the land tell me who and what I am,
trying to let it pace and direct me,
until it is as if I have become part of it.
This country, the Yaak Valley, way up
in the northwest tip of Montana, burns and rots both.
The shape of the land beneath the forest
is like the sluggish waves in an ancient,
nearly petrified ocean--
the waves of the northern Rockies
sliding into the waves of the Pacific Northwest,
so that it is like being lost or like having
found the rich, dense place you were always looking for.
You can walk around any given corner,
and in less than 100 paces, go from fire-dependent ponderosa
pine and grassland into the shadowy, dripping, mossy cedar
and hemlock forests, rich with the almost sexual smell of rot.
Tree frogs, electric-red salamanders, wood thrushes,
ferns--
climb a little farther, past the trickling waterfall,
past the mossy green skull of a woodland caribou,
and you come to a small glacier, across which
are sculpted the transient, sun-melting tracks of where
a wolverine passed by the day before.
The tracks and scourings of the glacier itself,
across the stone mountain, beneath all that ice,
are only slightly less transient.
Down the sunny backside of the mountain,
you can pass through one of the old 1910 burns,
where there are still giant larch snags from that fire,
each one a hollowed-out home to woodpeckers,
and martens, bear cubs, and flying squirrels.
This old burned-out forest still has its own peculiar vital force
and energy, and seems to almost seethe, drunk or intoxicated
on the health of so much available sunlight,
and drunk on the health of the fire,
the rich fire-blackened soil, the nutritiousness of ashes.
Then farther down the mountain, you'll
be back into damp creekside, silent old growth, more moss
and that dark Northwest forest, spruce and fir.
Back home in your cabin, your dreams
swirled as if you were still traveling, still walking, even
in your sleep, across this blessed landscape,
with all its incredible diversity,
and the strength that brings.
In the first life, back in Louisiana, I took things--
just the oil, at first, from so deep, beneath the ground,
and from such a distant past, that at first it
did not seem like a taking, but then, gradually and increasingly
from the surface.
I took boats, big boats from their moorings
at the Marina at night, sailed them all night long--
sometimes, alone, other times with my wife Hope.
Before dawn, we would sail back towards shore,
then open the boat's drain to try
to sink it, or sometimes, would even torch the boat
and swim back in that last distance to shore,
and then watch for a while, in the darkness,
the beautiful, flaming spectacle of waste.
I would take everything, anything,
the manhole covers to flood sewers
in the street, license plates, once,
a sewing machine, from a backyard in suburban Lafayette,
a picnic table.
It was as if I was trying to eat the world or that part of it.
The newspapers began reporting the strange disappearances.
They couldn't make rhyme or reason of it.
There seemed no logic to it.
I went in through windows and from dresser tops,
took jewelry and other riches.
I didn't ever sell anything.
I just took it.
It pleased me.
I would place the objects elsewhere.
There are diamond necklaces hung in the bowels of cypress trees
in Louisiana, pearl earrings in bird nests in the Atchafalaya.
I took cars, got in them, and drove a short distance,
then hid them, or sank them.
It filled a need in me.
I would look at my two hands and think, what are these
made for if not to take.