A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, sliver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and all the dead.
—James Joyce, "The Dead"
Jeffrey Miller was a guy I knew, when I lived along the Russian River. This was more than 30 years ago. He was a poet. A good'un. The life force strong in this one. He saw, he was aware.
This untitled number will give you the right sense of the fellow:
were you ever driving at 3 in the morning down some 2 lane road in upstate new york & it was raining & the only thing you can get on the radio is some station out of memphis or someplace which comes in perfectly clear & plays great music like life is but a dream du wop du wop & you just turn it up & say to yourself “what the fuck, what the fuck?” well that’s how I feel walking to the post office.
Among the things Miller saw, was his own death. Here, in its entirety, is his poem, "Death."
here today
gone tomorrow
right around that corner
o yikes
o yikes
That's how it happened for him. Coming home in the hours after 2 a.m., in the afterwash of his 29th birthday party, a passenger in a topless VW bug piloted by a man named Demon, metal and flesh driven into one of the many stubborn redwood trees that line the Russian River's little two-lane roads.
Miller was from Michigan, where, as we know from Mitt Romney, "the trees are the right height." California's redwoods had always sort of intimidated Miller. He never really got used to them.
Fellow poet and erstwhile Russian River resident Andrei Codrescu, who has assembled two posthumous collections of Miller's work, The First One's Free, which was published and distributed, free, in 1978, and The Heart Is A Quarter Pounder, which emerged, requiring money, in 2005, has said that much of Miller's work was written as if he were already dead.
"After he died I was struck by this weird light," says Codrescu, "like a lot of his poems were written from the other side, and he was leaving them behind for others to read them."
That's right. At the end of his poem "Just Have One," Miller wrote what may be the wisest thing I've ever encountered, about life.
The first one's free.
You just get one.
Codrescu also says that, though Miller so often wrote as if he were already in death, in death Miller is so often still in life.
"Of all my dead friends, this one is the most alive," he says. "I sense the dead pretty well, and Jeffrey definitely has a presence that is very vivid."
Tim O'Brien is a guy I know through his stories. In his story "On The Rainy River," O'Brien writes of receiving his draft notice, on June 17, 1968, or nine years and a month before Jeffrey Miller winked out against a redwood tree.
O'Brien didn't want to go, and the choice was there not to. But, as he concludes this story, "I was a coward. I went to the war."
There, as he tells us in a later story, he becomes acquainted with "The Lives Of The Dead."
In the months after Ted Lavender died, there were many other bodies. I climbed a tree and threw down what was left of Curt Lemon. I watched my friend Kiowa sink into the muck along the Song Tra Bong. And in early July, after a battle in the mountains, I was assigned to a six-man detail to police up the enemy KIAs. There were twenty-seven bodies altogether, and parts of several others. The dead were everywhere. Some lay in piles. Some lay alone. One, I remember, seemed to kneel. Another was bent from the waist over a small boulder, the top of his head on the ground, his arms rigid, the eyes squinting in concentration as if he were about to perform a handstand or somersault. It was my worst day at the war. For three hours we carried the bodies down the mountain to a clearing alongside a narrow dirt road. We had lunch there, then a truck pulled up, and we worked in two-man teams to load the truck. I remember swinging the bodies up. Mitchell Sanders took a man's feet, I took the arms, and we counted to three, working up momentum, and then we tossed the body high and watched it bounce and come to rest among the other bodies. The dead had been dead for more than a day. They were all badly bloated. Their clothing was stretched tight like sausage skins, and when we picked them up, some made sharp burping sounds as the gases were released. They were heavy. Their feet were bluish green and cold. The smell was terrible. At one point Mitchell Sanders looked at me and said, "Hey, man, I just realized something."
"What?"
"Death sucks," he said.
"But," as O'Brien learns, "stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."
For, as O'Brien tells us, "[t]he thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in that way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head."
That's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk. They sometimes say things like, "Roger that." Or they say, "Timmy, stop crying," which is what Linda said to me after she was dead.
Linda was a girl O'Brien loved.
Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write about her now, three decades later, it's tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact that what we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get. It had all the shadows and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things.
It's now 1990. I'm forty-three years old, which would've seemed impossible to a fourth grader, and yet when I look at photographs of myself as I was in 1956, I realize that in the important ways I haven't changed at all. I was Timmy then; now I'm Tim. But the essence remains the same. I'm not fooled by the baggy pants or the crewcut or the happy smile—I know my own eyes—and there is no doubt that the Timmy smiling at the camera is the Tim I am now. Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging. The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.
And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body—her life.
She died, of course. Nine years old and she died. It was a brain tumor. She lived through the summer and into the first part of September, and then she was dead.
But in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story, miracles can happen. Linda can smile and sit up. She can reach out, touch my wrist, and say, "Timmy, stop crying."
So I followed her down to the frozen pond. It was late, and nobody else was there, and we held hands and skated almost all night under the yellow lights.
I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way. She's not the embodied Linda; she's mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name, like the man who never was. Her real name doesn't matter. She was nine years old. I loved her and then she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I'm gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all. I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
James Jones is another guy I know through stories. Like Tim O'Brien, he was a soldier who, after, wrote stories, to bring the dead to life.
While in the world of the dead, Jones came to understand this:
The dead, frozen like flies in plastic, realized—at the moment of death when of course they stopped—that humanity must grow to feeling, to empathy, or become extinct.
William Blake is a guy who used to go out into his garden, and there talk with angels.
Sometimes I go out into my garden, and there talk with William Blake.
This is what he tells me:
what is the price of experience
do men buy it for a song
or wisdom for a dance in the street
no it is bought with the price of all a man hath
his house his wife his children
wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
and in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain
it is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun
and in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn
it is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted
to speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer
to listen to the hungry ravens cry in wintry season
when the red blood is fill’d with wine and with the marrow of lambs
it is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements
to hear the dog howl at the wintry door
the ox in the slaughterhouse moan
to see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast
to hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm
that destroys our enemies house
to rejoice in the blight that covers his field
and the sickness that cuts off his children
while our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door
and our children bring fruits and flowers
then the groan and the dolor are quite forgotten
and the slave grinding at the mill
and the captive in chains and the poor in the prison
and the soldier in the field
when the shattered bone hath laid him groaning
among the happier dead
it is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity
thus could i sing and thus rejoice
but it is not so with me