“Everyone is a part of a story. What they want is to be part of something worth recording. It’s that fear of mortality, ‘I Was Here and I Mattered’ mind-set.”
                -a character in Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea

                “And may you be in this house
                as the music is in the instrument.”
                -Ursula Le Guin, “For The New House”

                For the last month I’ve been living with a cat. Almond. He sits in a chair differently than I do, like the cushion’s grass and he’s the kind of dew a late sun leaves. The other night, when I was lying in bed and not yet falling asleep, he came and sat near my feet. For a moment I thought it would be the first time he curled up and slept there. Instead he sat, attentive. If my toes had turned into mice he would’ve been ready.
                I’m looking forward to and dreading Winter Break. Today I had my last scheduled classes, and soon my flatmate and Almond will be off to visit family. I’ll be here, these same two rooms. And then Le Guin starts me thinking of the different ways to be in these rooms. My shoes, by the door, are little drunks, scattered and happy to stay sprawled until someone nudges them along. Except when I set them up, toes to the door. Then they’re in the room more like a paddle’s in the raft when you’re setting up at the edge of the river, but haven’t pushed off yet from shore. And I have a basil plant in the window. Its quiet in the sunlight is totally different from Almond’s: it is, in this house, more of a kite lifting then a shadow draping itself across the cushions.
                Once I start thinking about it, I see examples in all the people I’ve met. I had a friend who, sitting in a room, drifted along like a branch in a river. I remember my grandpa, a taut, attentive string as the air filled up with opera. A professor who sat in her office like a razor blade, intent on what she was reading, then turning to me to cut through my mumblings toward what I meant. If I’m not careful, it’s easy to think that being the main character is the only way to imagine my story. That being here means I’m the one who was Here and Mattered. But that’s not the only way. It’s not even the one I usually prefer. I could be in this place as a drift of leaves in a creekbed. As light in a prism. As the side character, the one who bakes the pie the heroine eats on her way to the mountain. As the music is in the instrument, the basil in the ground, a cat in a smudge of the sun.

                “They can’t breathe on their own, so they absorb the essence of the world breathing around them.”
                “If you give them just a tiny bit of yourself…”
                -Raina Telgemeier, Ghosts

                In Telgemeiner’s book, Ghosts can’t breathe for themselves. But they remember, and she describes Dia de los Muertos when many of them visit. By giving just a tiny bit of themselves—a puff of breath, a blown kiss—the living share life so everyone together can share in the celebration.
                If you give them just a tiny bit of yourself…
                It’s a different “yourself” then I’ve usually heard described. The story trope I’ve heard more often might go like this: so-and-so lost a bit of himself somewhere. A curse, a deal he made, some magic accident. And the loss eats away at him, an empty splinter where a bit of his soul should be. Wherever he goes, however happy he seems, he’s always a little lost and a little hungry. Bit by bit he turns, his imperfection growing, until…
                Sheesh. I like Telgemeiner’s story more. I like her idea of “self.” It’s easy to hold onto things, to hopes and possibilities, to images of how I expected life to go, to my me-ness, as though there’s only so much (and barely enough) and I have to save it up. What if, instead, yourself is a little windstorm. A bit of breathing that will stop one day, sure, but along the way could lift up kites in blowing, could share songs in breaths that won’t come back and don’t need to. What if you give away a tiny bit of yourself and you’re still you, the loving, sharing you, in a world surrounded by Ghosts who felt the breath you shared. They’re dancing, and inviting you to join.

                “There was a moment there when we were all together in the same room.”
                -Richard McGuire, Here

                McGuire’s book unfolds my ideas of time and place in beautiful, provocative ways. I highly recommend it. I’m not going to try to explain that unfolding (it’s still happening in my head, and besides, he does it better), but my flatmate and I did spend most of the day making and delivering pies to friends in the area. Apple, pumpkin, and cherry. I left one on a porch bench swing and one on a chair and two on doormats. I handed others over, both of us smiling behind our masks. One friend laughed that she could tell I was smiling from my forehead. And I was.
                Like so many of us, I won’t be able to see my family this week. I won’t be able to see them over the winter holidays. Missing them is a breathless space on a cold day, but threaded through missing them is the realization that, in this moment, all of them are doing something. It’s like I can see my little brother smiling mischievously while he picks up his guitar, and my older brother holding one of his giggling daughters. Like I can see my dad, looking back over his shoulder at a sunset, and my mom, pausing to listen to the wind. And then I can see my niece as she was a year ago, while we walked across the street to look at the twinkly lights. I can see one of the pies I baked, sitting on a friend’s counter, and the cookies my friend had waiting for me. I can see the kitchen where she baked them, today, yesterday.
                Or not see, exactly. Our culture’s so focused on sight. Feel? Hear? When I touch the wall, smooth against my palm, the paint and the sheetrock and the space inside the boards starts to feel like here. The apartment next door feels here, and the neighbor I’ve only waved to, and the trees who’ve let go of their leaves for the winter. And the winter, and last summer, and the coming spring. My niece a year ago, leading me to look at those lights. My little brother and I years and years ago, sitting on the carpet playing, and my older brother helping me swim across a river. And you. 
                Maybe there’s a moment, here, when we’re all in the same room together.

                “Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.”
                -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

                A few of you reached out to say you liked last week’s “nonsense questions.” To be honest, I liked last week’s nonsense questions. So I’ve been thinking about them, and dreaming up some new ones. I wouldn’t usually ask if my words today were more a creek or a hillside, but if I did ask, I’d say I wanted them to be clean water, running somewhere, quick and clear, but they actually felt more like mud. And when I managed to dig down into the mud and start trying to polish an Uproar draft, my words were more like rock. My hands kept scraping against them.  Scraping and fumbling. I talked to a friend, and she suggested a rock might be something that roots could wrap around and hold onto as they grew.
                If you asked if resting was more a watch that had stopped ticking, or a book on a shelf, I’d say that sometimes I lie down on my bed and do something when I should do nothing. Nothing is so wonderfully much: the light on the wall, the pull of my breath, the patter of someone walking by—a squirrel, a friend. When I watch something or listen to something, I miss that. So it’s the metal in the watch, I guess, whether the watch is ticking or not.
                This week’s a little different. I’m asking you for a question. The rules are simple, and a bit wonky: it should be a nonsense question. It should blur edges, dapple light, mix water with mischief. You can Facebook it to me, text it to me, send it to Azlan.Uproar@gmail.com. If I get some questions I’ll post them here for all of us, and answer at least one in the following weeks.
                And here’s one more for you: what does planning taste like?

                “Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.” -Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

                A friend and I once designed a series of “nonsense questions” for students. I don’t remember most of them now—you and I could spend a few hours, sometime, coming up with new ones. Something like:
                “Is your thinking more sunlight, or moonlight?” 
                “Where would you look for last winter?”
                “Have you ever heard a quiet that was loud?”
                I’ve been remembering them, and thinking about thinking. I’ve been making up silly taxonomies about how my thoughts have learned to move. For instance, if the choices are earth, water, or air, I’d say my culture’s thinking is pretty earth—here, that’s the first step, and here, that’s the second. Solid and ‘real.’(Interesting that fire thinking didn’t make it onto my list). Or to come at things from another side, I think we’re a culture of seers—not that we see the future, but that seeing is believing. Not hearing. Not even touching. Where are the oracles who taste what might happen tomorrow?
                We’re earth thinkers, I would have said. Or maybe metal thinkers: an emphasis on precise, on clean, on strong. Or maybe ore thinkers, trying to refine what we have into something we can sell at a profit. (That’s how it looks to me, at least). And then Melville reminds me of water. I remember sitting by the sea, watching the swell roll in, watching it breath spray over the rocks. I remember college, when I would walk through the forest to the lake, and walk around its water, frozen or quiet dark. I remember just earlier today, the touch of the tap when I turned it on, and how for a moment I was outside the apartment—streams to rivers, rivers to oceans, oceans to skies, skies to rain, and which part of all that was for a moment tickling me? I’ve gone to earth, too, burying my fingers in it. I’ve gone to fire, staring into embers or licking flames. I’ve gone to sky, standing on a hill as the world rolled in. Though to be honest, that wide sky has always felt a little like another sea. Melville mutters to me, and I remember all that, and I wonder a little what I’m looking for at the edge of the water. More than that, though, I’m happy there’s water in these regions. And I want to go back. “Back,” which will of course be “here” once I’m a-going.

                “[My company’s $137 billion cash pile] isn’t all that huge when you think about worst-case possibilities.”
                -Warren Buffet in May, 2020

                When I was thirteen, I wanted happiness to be something I could hunt and catch and nail up on the wall. I wanted it to be achievable, to be permanent: aha, I have it now, and have it forever. Of course it doesn’t work that way, but sometimes I still want that kind of certainty. That kind of safety. I imagine a rock that’s huge enough to lift me above the rush and crash of changing waves. I imagine a castle with unbreakable walls. In the last months, I’ve sometimes felt the urge to stockpile food and lock my door and be safe, alone, behind it. I’ve imagined having. Then I look outside the window, I feel the door and realize it’s only a little piece of decaying wood. I started volunteering more.
                I wonder if Warren Buffet’s right, at least in a way. On the one hand, $137 billion is more than I can conceptualize. (I’ve been trying. I still can’t. It sounds a lot like $136 billion, except the difference between those two is more than all the wealth of all the people I’ve ever met who are “wealthy”). On the other hand, maybe $137 billion isn’t “all that huge when you think about the worse-case possibilities,”  at least not if you mean as a wall against a pandemic and global climate change and, let’s say, a revolution. It probably isn’t enough.
                I wonder if having is a madman’s game.
                The doors of power and privilege are stronger, but I don’t think they’re unbreakable. I don’t think anyone can lift themselves, forever and ‘safely,’ above their community. You can’t build that science fiction city above the clouds. Trying to collect that much works for a while, we’ve seen that, but perhaps we’ve also seen that it won’t work forever. And perhaps that way lies madness, and cruelty. If we give up the fantasy of having, of bulwarks big enough to “protect someone” from the worst-case scenarios of what might happen, then we’re back living in what happens. Back seeing everyone as touched and effected, hurt and healed, supported and unsupported and (when they choose to help) supporting. Instead of trying to stack apples back behind our walls, we’re back caring for trees. For each other. For ground, water, and what we all are together.

                “‘There’s a unicorn in the garden,’ he said. ‘Eating roses.’”
                -James Thurber, “The Unicorn in the Garden”

                Over the last few days, I’ve been helping set up my partner’s new apartment. On Saturday we came into empty rooms. Now there’s a bed, a table with the tools to make cookies. A chair there, she decides, and now it could be a reading nook. Empty rooms—the kind of empty when you’re just moving in, or leaving, vacuuming the floors to get back your security deposit—always surprise me a little. Their shape changes. Their space changes: it’s bigger, or smaller, somehow. Or maybe it’s me changing inside them.
                Last Friday we started driving from Illinois to Massachusetts. The space of the car changed: confining, constricting, but also opening. The space of the sky breathed, larger and quieter and more alive, and I watched a ‘window’ in the clouds. I wonder how long it was. Ten miles? Twenty? A hundred? The sun came up, burning on the edge of the clouds, and I shaded my hand trying to watch. On a long drive I feel like I’m moving so fast. On a long drive I feel like I’m not moving at all.
                I wonder how many of my thoughts are built on where I’m thinking. “Safety” means something, here, using this mattress as a desk while I sit on the floor. It means something else in a tent in the mountains. It means something else, floating on my back in the ocean, and something else in a classroom, and something else when a professor took my class outside and we sat on the steps, watching leaves fall. I lay down on the floor. I stand at the window. I wash dishes, and the water becomes a place, remembering the place it came from. I step outside, beneath branches and blowing leaves. There’s a whisper in the living room. There’s a rest on the front steps. There’s a unicorn in the garden, eating roses.

                “It’s not a piece about silence. It’s putting parentheses around all the sounds you hear in the world.”
                -Professor Jorge Lucero on John Cage’s composition, 4’33”, in which the musician does not play for four minutes and thirty three seconds.

                I used to wonder why doing things seemed so central to connecting. In college I learned to play pool because I was looking for friends, and “want to play pool?” seemed more socially acceptable than “want to get to know each other?” On breaks I’d come home, and it was often in going for a hike in the hills or a swim at the beach, or in cooking a meal together, that I’d really start reconnecting with my family.
                This semester I have a weekly game group that meets in the park, Saturdays from 12-2. We don’t always play our game: sometimes we make maple leaf roses, because one of us knew how to do that, and then there was the day we watched a hawk in the wind. We talk about history, or dance, and the way we put movements together. We sit in the grass. It’s lovely. And then last week it was less lovely, and for a really silly reason. I had my phone with me. Usually I put it away in my backpack. With it in my hand, I checked my work email. I opened Wizards Unite. I followed the conversation, mostly, but I didn’t watch people’s faces or run my fingers through the grass.
                Until then, twelve and two had been parentheses. They’d held open a space. You could call that space two hours, or you could call it walking ants and smiling friends and following someone through her wonders until they were our wonders.
                Sitting in the park my friend grinned at me. I guess you could say their grin, their attention to the moment, started playing 4’33”. I put my phone in my backpack, zipped the pocket closed, and they held up a leaf. Orange and yellow, blending between the two. They let it go and the wind carried it.

                “Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”
                -Mark Haddon

                Lately I’ve been reading and re-reading Ocean Vuong, and as I do, it occurs to me that my time away from the book is as much a part of reading as my time looking at the pages. Reading is when a line of his floats back to me, and I share it in conversation. Reading is when he mentions buffalo, and I remember my own camping trip with a buffalo, and I imagine, buffalo. Reading is Ocean Vuong, reaching into the world, participating, noticing and wondering and opening to how he’s being touched. It’s me reaching back. It’s more off the page then on it.
                I wonder if anything is really just one thing. One of my friends is planning a long trip that will take her away from her partner. When I mentioned that, she said, “Yeah, but that’s part of being together.” Missing each other. Being apart. Michael Chabon, in writing about being a father, says (I’m paraphrasing from memory) every minute of exhaustion and every wiped smear of poop is a kind of intimacy. It’s not that being a father isn’t shiny birthday moments: it’s just so many other things, too. My friend is “working on his book” when he’s at the page, writing. But if you want to understand “writing,” he says, then he’s also “writing” when he’s swimming through the same emotional turmoils as his characters. He’s writing when he’s sitting there, feeling stuck and not stopping. He’s writing when he’s resting. And if he just sat at the page putting words after each other, he wouldn’t get very far.
                I once helped someone build a human-powered vehicle for a festival in Santa Rosa. When humans powered it, we put so much torque on the central driveshaft that the three-quarter-inch metal sheared straight through. We stood around, impressed by how much power we were playing with. We ran our fingers over the break’s smooth fracture. The lead designer went back to his plans and started scribbling new ideas. We ate lunch. And all of that, all of that, was building the contraption that, the next day, could carry us.

                “Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good […] the end of medicine is health, that of shipbuilding, a ship, that of military science, victory, and that of domestic economy, wealth.” -Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

                Here’s something I said recently: “This summer was about revising my book.” It seemed to make sense when I was saying it. I mean, I did spend a lot of time writing. But the statement also reflects a way of looking at the world, a way I think I put together from the Nicomachean Ethics. And it’s not a way I like.
                The Ethics suggests that all actions aim at some “good,” some end that we want. I take medicine for good health. I go to the grocery store to get food. It suggests that lots of ends are steps along the way to something else: eating and medicine are both part of having a body that can wander around and explore and meet people in parks to talk. When I read the Ethics for the first time, I read it as constructing a pyramid: everything I was doing, all the lines I was drawing, led up to some point. Some peak. Some final good that is the measure of living well. The Ethics sets out to find that peak so we know what we’re aiming for.
                Here’s something else I could say about the summer: it was warm, and humid sometimes. I met people. Lost touch with others. I wrote toward a book, and visited muskrats, and read lots of graphic novels. I started volunteering online. I laid in the grass, too hot in the sun, and cooled by the breeze. I listened to music I’d never heard before, and after all my dance lessons last year, I felt that music moving. (That’s a surprise for me. Often I’ve just felt frozen). What if, instead of building toward the point of a pyramid, we scattered like the twigs and leaves of a tree? Instead of looking for the one task, one central Good, what if we each tried to be deeply, directly involved with as many of this fall’s falling leaves as we could? The Ethics is built on hierarchies: shopping for groceries, groceries for a meal, a meal for a nourished body, a nourished body for some other aim. But there’s something wonderful in shopping itself, in chatting with the checker and seeing all the onions. In cooking there’s the snap of the oil when I drop the onions in. In a step, the wave of a hand, there’s a fluid solidity that used to sometimes hold me with its symphony. Instead of this for this for this, I want to try this and this and this. I want to try to be involved with different moments. What if each moment, each on its own, is a breath to breathe deeply?