Invocation

Dear Eugene,

November 23, 2000, that was the day I picked up Russell Banks' ''Continental Drift.''  Last night I gave away a short story collection of Banks, trusting his words will shake up the world of other(s) and for good I hope.  The historic internal movements of tectonic plates beneath our feet make the Earth, our home, singularly strange.  We are all drifting on shaky ground.

I was 25 then.  Looking back 19 years, I suppose I could have done it without Banks and his words.  What difference does it make, life goes on, words are words?  I can say the same thing about the very words I am writing you now.  Do I truly believe my life today would have been lived any differently by sunset if these words, my words, are not spoken?

God speaks creation into existence; Banks begins "Continental Drift" with an invocation: "This is an American story of the late 20th century, and you don’t need a muse to tell it, you need something more like a Loa, or a mouth-man, a voice that makes speech stand in front of you and not behind, for there's nothing here that depends on memory for the telling. With a story like this, you want an accounting to occur, not a recounting, and a presentation, not a representation, which is why it’s told the way it’s told..."

Giving witness makes a difference.  If our life is to make no difference to the shifting that directs our drifting, words are going to give witness to that indifference too.  Nineteen years ago I told you that's how it's gonna be, your life, the way it will play out.  And look at you now...

The man who took the book I gave out last night can't be older than 15.  I don't know.  Even after raising two children, I am very bad at guessing age (which might have to do with my distrusting it as a signpost to a person's self witness).  I am not quite sure if the young man will read it yet.  I hope one day he will.  If he is to not read it but pass it on to someone else he will have done his share of witnessing.

The ground is always shaking below our feet, a low-grade rumble not discernible to our day-to-day sensitivity.  Not disruptive either.  The day we wake up to a seismic shock we will say we weren't not being told and bad dreams we did have but at the time of invocation we thought we hoped we misrepresented it was for someone else.

Yours, Alex