Prolifically Raw: Book Talk: The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

Friday, December 24, 2010

Book Talk: The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard in a remarkable writer, spare and clean. I had a chance to do a salon style conversation with her in New York and she is, in person, as she is in the page. Edgy and reserved as well.

Her entire collection, The Boys of My Youth is remarkable but for this posting, I'd like to focus on the essay titled The Fourth State of Matter which is about a dying dog, a dying marriage and in the end, a terrorist shooting spree that leaves several people dead.

To me the story reads like a mix between parable and fable. A parable is defined as a short simple story intended to illustrate a moral. A fable is: 1) a short story about supernatural, mythological or legendary characters and events and 2) an improbable account.

In my view, the fable-like quality of this story comes from her reference to the stars and the mysteries of the universe. She works with physicists who study outer space, thus the title, which is a reference to her friend and employer’s study of the plasma filled dust contained in the rings around Saturn. She writes: Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You've got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer space there's the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. I avoid the math when I can and put a layperson's spin on these things.

Beard takes us to the stars at the beginning of the story too. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor's house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io.

And then there is the improbable part of the story that fits the fable definition—which isn’t to say she isn’t telling the truth but more refers to my response to the violent shooting. The plot twist got me right between the eyes, since at first the story appeared to be just a well told but monotonous story of a dying dog and a dying marriage. Beard cultivated this perception by loading up so much detail about the suffering of the dog, herself caring for the dog, the anguished husband and then she even tossed in a great amount of detail about a squirrel infestation in a back bedroom of her home. All of this information serves like a kind of backfill and occupies my attention to the point of distraction.

Examples: The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She's on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She's staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love.

She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator -careful almost went down - then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard

What I can't take is the squirrels. They come alive at night, throwing terrific parties in the spare bedroom, making thumps and crashes. Occasionally a high-pitched squeal is heard amid bumps and the sound of scrabbling toenails.

I have an ex-beauty queen coming over to get rid of the squirrels for me. She has long red hair and a smile that can stop trucks. I've seen her wrestle goats, scare off a giant snake, and express a dog's anal glands, all in one afternoon. I told her on the phone that a family of squirrels is living in the upstairs of my house.

All this detail, all this drama and then, pop, right between the eyes, the story makes a sharp left turn and we are at a shooting spree. The story created in me this response: “impossible. No WAY! That did not happen.”

Beard did, in fact, go through this shooting and she has done an impressive amount of journalistic work here. In an interview she says the following to Michael Gardner:

JB: … I was writing this piece about that and the dog's death, which was just a few weeks after the events at Iowa. Writing about the dog I realized I had to write about the divorce because it all happened at the same time. Suddenly in the midst of the essay, I found myself writing about work, which was an important part of how I survived my divorce. I had to realize at some point that I was making my way toward November 1. Even realizing that, I kept thinking it was still a piece about my dog. Then I got to November 1 and it was the same way in the essay that it was in real life, which is that suddenly an explosion occurs and nothing is the same. I had to accept the fact that the essay wasn't going to be about the history of dogs. It was going to be about the other thing. I had backed into it because I didn't want to write about that, for a variety of reasons. Not just that I wasn't ready, but there are ethical issues involved when you write about an event like that.

And now back to the parable aspect of this story—or the moral. The tale and the way it’s told— meandering, slow and distracting via the landslide of details around the dog/marriage/squirrels—parallels life as a series of events and distractions. We plod along in our predicable and tired patterns diagnosing ourselves (and each other) as depressed and apathetic, while not seeing the vast system of the universe. Death is the inevitable outcome of states such as plodding along and diagnosis’s of depression. One might say these are warning signs and precursors. I recall, more than a year before my own marriage died a surprising and violent death, I felt stunning, debilitating and complete depression. An advisor told me, “depression isn’t a destination, Jennifer, but a sign that something is about to change.”

In the wisdom that comes the oldest and some say the wisest book of all time, the Dao De Jing, it is stated clearly that to know what is going to happen—look at what is. This means, see the system we live, love, fight and die in and how it is, at its essence a system of polarity. Then look at what is happening around you and become the fortuneteller of what is to come by merely following the science of opposites.