Topical Guide 199
Mark Dorset
Silence: As Sadness
Silence: As a Vacuum to be Filled
Sawdust: As Filler
GREAT-GRANDMOTHER LEROY was ill for months, but I didn’t realize how seriously ill she was until Grandfather moved her downstairs from her rooms in the attic. She moved into the room across the hall from what had been my father’s bedroom when he was a boy and was now the bedroom I used when I visited. She never left the bed. For several weeks before she died, she didn’t speak. Sometimes when I visited, I sat beside her bed for an hour or so and talked without even pausing for a response. I knew that she wasn’t going to say anything, so I just talked on and on, quicker and quicker, to keep the silence from settling over her like a shroud. … Throughout all my chatter, Great-grandmother never said a thing.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name; the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
Michel Foucault, “The Repressive Hypothesis” in The Will to Knowledge
I employed a narrative analogue to a widely used technique for keeping afloat a clamboat with a soft bottom, a boat that leaks more or less all the time. One takes the boat out to the clam flats and there crawls under the hull and pokes sawdust into any visible gaps and, for good measure, gives the whole bottom a good coating. Then one drinks a few beers or digs a few clams while the sawdust floats into the cracks and swells with water, stopping, or at least slowing, the leaks. This is not a permanent solution, of course, merely a stop-gap measure, but some boats have been kept afloat this way for years. The hull provides the form, the sawdust the substance, and the result is an artful deception: the illusion of a solid hull, an illusion so substantial that the boat floats.
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?”
Death: As an Absence
I went upstairs and opened the door to her rooms. Something strange had happened to these rooms while she had been out of them. Left alone, the things there had begun to claim ownership. The chair where Great-grandmother used to sit and carve coconuts to represent Leroys had become the strongest personality in the room now, and it sat in command, dark and heavy, in front of the windows, silhouetted against the curtained light.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Lorna stayed on in Punta Cachazuda for a couple of lonely years, but then the house where she and Herb had lived together in Babbington came back on the market, and Lorna bought it, for cash, and returned to Babbington. Everything that she and Herb had had in the house had been lost in the warehouse fire, so Lorna lived with secondhand furniture that she and Ella picked up in a week of rapid shopping. … Lorna had wanted to duplicate as closely as she could the feeling the house had had when she and Herb had lived there, when it had been furnished with things that Herb had made and things they’d picked up here and there over the years. ... The house was furnished, and looked cozily cluttered, but there was a hollow in it, a rarefied pocket where Herb should have been.
Herb ’n’ Lorna
Traits, of Character, of Personality
Great-grandmother’s coconut heads looked so like one another, and I was so completely prepared to find one carved in Great-grandmother’s likeness and to feel grief at the sight of it, that for a moment or two I didn’t recognize that the coconut represented me. Not only had Great-grandmother carved the coconut in my likeness, but she had carved me laughing, though the faces of the other Leroys were tight-lipped and stern.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Rowboat: Man in a
THAT NIGHT I lay in bed, wakeful and anxious and hurt. Everything seemed wrong. Everything seemed confused. My thoughts were turbid, roiling, like wrack stirred up by a storm. I couldn’t make sense of them, and I couldn’t drive them away. Then, at last, I saw through the murk a heartening yellow light, and after a while I could see that it was coming from the windows of the Peterses’ living room, where everyone was gathered to trade wisecracks after dinner, where no one good was going to die, where things were as they ought to be, and since there was a rowboat handy, I stepped into it, shoved off, and began rowing. With each stroke, my mad and disappointing world receded, and from Kittiwake Island I could hear Lucinda calling me, calling me to come in now, to come in off Murky Bay and join them in the living room, and she was calling me Larry.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
See also: Death TG 48
Successful replacement of clogged and leaking drainpipe below bathroom sink:
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