Saturday 11/23/24
It's about half past five Saturday morning. I've been working for a few hours. This final version of "Dot" is done as of now.
This is a letter to a few people:
Hello. Here is something special: What ought to be the final version of “Dot.” Some of you have seen—well, at least two of you; rarely does anyone say anything to me, the reasons for which have been discussed on the blog—this story in other forms.
It was initially composed in 2021, if I recall correctly. It was changed quite a bit last year. It has changed again over the last week, though not as much, and besides the most imperceptible of pre-publication—whenever this story may appear—emendations, I can’t see what else could possibly change. This is a case of 5160 perfect, wonderful words, in a story I’ve probably read 300 times, which never ceases to delight me, to make me laugh, to make me cry. A story I want to pull close to me in an embrace, or be pulled close to in its embrace. As with “The Bird,” only an evil person, committed to acting out and upon that baseness, could fail to love this. But I don’t think that would be genuine, to be honest.
A few other details. “Dot” is the second story in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, which I think stands as what would be the most radical and politically radical act of our age: The best book about women and girls, with that book having been written by a man, with no one able to deny what that book is in terms of what it is—I mean, there it is, we have to contend with its existence and that this was possible—in its words, on those pages, in those insights, in those truths, in that art. And a book by this man specifically. This hated man. This man who knows all that he knows, looks how he looks. I believe, at present, that “Dot” is the only story in the book narrated by a man. (Anyone who reads the blog will have a sense of how hard and how long I’ve worked on this book, the changes to it, the paces it has been put through, the paces I’ve put myself through, the demands I’ve made of my ability, how deep I have dug—and, when it seemed like I could dig no deeper, dug some more.)
The main character, of course, is the title character, and really it’s a story about three women, but also a story about the narrator, after a fashion. For me, personally, I don’t believe in writing works of fiction in first person which don’t have significant stakes or consequence for that narrator. But Dot herself is the focus. And also the prism through which all else is seen.
This story is unusual for me in that I did have a great aunt Dot. I guess we could say that the story was inspired by certain events in life, and people, but that’s as far as it goes. The narrator is not I, Dot is not the Dot I knew, the mother is not my mother. But there are things—I needn’t go into them, and they changed so much from what they were in “real” life to what they are here in what I call “realer” life.
As I said, most people say nothing to me. But I would urge you to read this. I’m not yanking anyone’s chain about how special this story is, which is of a qualitative piece with everything in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. (“Go and Come Back” is from the book, and you will soon see a heavily changed “Dead Thomas,” which will make you, Norberg, having loved the earlier version—which was less than half the length—from two or three years ago—fall over; you’re not going to be able to handle how good it is.)
I don’t know why I’m singling out this point—I just like sharing this detail, I guess—but there is indeed a brook across which one walks across an old stone bridge in Milton. I do like that there’s a spot in the story—even though we pass over it quickly—that one could go to. Just as I like that someone could go up the Monument stairs and stand atop stair number 294 and look around that observatory chamber and know I was there thousands of times. Maybe they will turn and see me coming up behind them, having come into town from Rockport or Cape Cod.
You may have also noticed that this story has featured in a number of prose offs on the blog—thrashings.
Check it out. People say that people don’t read, whereas I’d say, they are now given no reason to. If you need further enticement, what follows are some words from the story. By the by: There’s a very moving/beautiful essay about Nick Drake, my time as a Nick Drake fraud, and the most misunderstood of all albums in Pink Moon, that will be coming out in the next day or so, which I think I may put into this book of mine of my writings on rock and roll/popular music. It’ll go up on the News section of the site—most of the other sections remain a mess and without the vast majority of the links they should contain. But it’ll all get there.
Without aunt Dot, I think I would have been without my mother. I’d have had a mother. Everyone has a mother. But that’s not always the same as having your mother. When the doctors told mine that she would never have a real child of her own, my mother corrected them by saying that yes, she would, and she’d love that child as much as a child could be loved.
How do those who love the best learn how to do it? We act like everything just happens, don’t we? Nothing just happens. The night sky doesn’t just happen. Nor a cloud. A baby’s smile. Never mind love and the decision to love, with creatures as meek as humans may well be, so often overwhelmed, beleaguered, scared. Love isn’t slipping on a banana peel and there you are.
The people who love the best find much within themselves, for they have much within themselves. But they don’t often know it without someone on the outside who helps them learn to look. That was aunt Dot. For my mother. And because my mother has helped me learn to look, for me, too. It’s extremely hard to give that which you don’t know you have. But when you know what you do? There are no limits, regardless of our own failings. If we’re talking love, that is. Which is why love is love, the same as the night’s sky has its reasons for being the night’s sky, the cloud the cloud, and the baby’s smile the baby’s smile.
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