Evenfall

Evenfall. Good lord what a beautiful word. I can feel it fall through my body like a soothing whisper of morphine mixed with unconditional love. Evenfall. So gentle. So good. If I could swallow it I’d swallow a dozen. You can’t drink words. Except through the eyes. Or ears. The last several days have been stressful. Four days ago our TV of 30 years died. Matthew McConaughey was about to go toe to toe with a man 50 lbs. heavier than his scrawny Texas ass when the screen went black and an ugly staticky electronic noise came crackling out of it like the death rattle of a thousand peacocks. I looked for a pulse. There was none. We let it lay in state for a couple of days, then took it to a recycling service south of the city where industry and grim realities lurk together. Sad event. That TV was amazing. We bought it in the 90s but it was able to handle all the new technology, including streaming services. And man it was heavy. My back still hurts. It stood like a monument to stamina in our living room, a defiant treasure of former technology, when the jingle of dial-up Internet stimulated anticipation, and Grunge was King.

So we bought our first flat screen. Which reminds of that scene in Fahrenheit 451, when Guy’s wife Linda (Julie Christie) participates in an interactive TV play, gazing at a flatscreen TV on the wall as if it were a supernatural force drawing her out of her life and body. A TV zombie.

But also, once it slowly rolled into life after R’s ministrations guided by a tech support lady in India with a masterful command of English and a lot of patience (I’m useless in these situations, the one piece of technology I can handle with some confidence is lighting a candle, or operating my suspenders), it seduced us with its charms, and gave us the Rockford Files to watch during dinner. It takes little time for a TV to become a member of the family. Just imagine what a robot could do. Enveloped in advanced polymers, hydrogels for multi-functional sensing, self-healing e-skins, and living tissue grown on robotic frames. I doubt we could ever afford such a thing. And how creepy that is. To think of owning a sentient being, albeit manufactured, rather than delivered from a womb.

Truth is, I’ve always liked TV. I’ve never seen it as a threat. Partly because, age 8, I sat next to a girl named Cathy in third grade, with whom I had a fanciful 3^rd grade crush, and fed her pictures of horses that I’d drawn myself, with the help of my father, a professional illustrator, how could I miss? It was my first yearning, and though I had only a dim understanding of that attraction, and no way of articulating my feelings, it was still a genuine yearning. So when, circa 1955, I saw Lawrence Olivier on TV one afternoon calling out for his love – Cathy! Cathy! - on the forlorn English heath, it got to me. This was the 1939 production of Wuthering Heights directed by William Wyler. The mood of unrequited passion played out on the desolate terrain of the Yorkshire moors appealed to a nascent romanticism. Though actually it wasn’t Yorkshire at all, the movie was filmed in southern California, somewhere near Thousand Oaks. My 8-year-old brain drank in the emotion of the film and rather than get me hooked on TV, it sparked an interest in books. It might’ve set me up for binge watching and booze-infused all-nighters in my sardonic Sturm und Drang adulthood (and sometimes did, thanks to cable, MTV and HBO and the rest) but instead I was drawn to the excesses of the literary life. What Virginia Woolf described as a “luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” I have Emily Brönte to thank for that. And Merle Oberon.

The literary life, in 2025, feels antiquated. I feel anachronistic. And not a little irrelevant. To keep on creating works of literary merit is a futile endeavor, but if the madness of its pursuit is rooted deeply enough, it ceases to matter whether it will result in awards and respectability. It’s like going on a long pilgrimage and mapping existence with arpeggios and enzymes. There are foreign worlds with which to engage. And not a few of them offer circumstances as yet to be catalogued in the human nervous system. Writing is more than words. It’s a way of life.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the years: collisions of ice and water in the atmosphere generate immense electrical charges. This results in lightning and thunder. The same principle applies to writing. Words collide with words, creating smells, libraries, indicatives, and swans and lobsters.

Repairing machinery takes a great deal of patience and concentration.

If you treat people openly and honestly and let a little of your empathy show, the reaction is always 100% unpredictable.

Addictions are easy to acquire, and a son of a bitch to get rid of.

Music offers solace. Sometimes redemption. Sometimes inspiration. But always heat and yearning and a quickened pulse.

That funny jingle of the tambourine in The Band’s rendition of “Tears of Rage,” featuring Richard Manuel’s heartbreaking falsetto run the spectrum from acceptance to the weird enchantments of despair in the exquisite pain of being alive. Which means, ultimately, being vulnerable. Being open. Open to circumstance. Open to spontaneity. To apathy and indifference. To ecstasy and rebellion. The whole damn gamut of human emotion.

Evenfall tonight arrived at 6:30 pm. Today was the first day since June that felt like autumn. The air felt cold, even though, truth be told, the temperature is mild. 57℉. The skin isn’t used to it, so it feels colder than it actually is. It was a gray day. Gray everywhere. Gunmetal gray. Slate gray. Charcoal. Pewter. Gainsboro. Gray is the overall disposition of this Cimmerian realm. The northwest is perpetually gray. People acquire its moods. They keep to themselves. They seem well-adapted to monotony. Monotony is easier than a full despair riddled with parking tickets and unpaid bills. Downtown Seattle always looks bleak this time of day. It’s a wistful scene of high-rise towers and the naked beams of partially built skyscrapers beaded with lights. Clouds drift overhead like a herd of pregnant ghosts. They’re headed east, over the Cascades. They’re moving unusually fast. A brisk wind must be pushing them. But there’s no apparent wind where I’m standing. Nor can I see the sun. I’m on a steep hill. I can’t see anything to the west except an e-scooter on the crest and a telephone pole teetering east. I’m guessing a big truck backed into it. The air is full of disasters this fall. Crises upon crises. And none of it gray. Gray feels like a luxury. Who can afford to wallow in its nuances except philosophers? Evenfall belongs to another time. People on a heath in the sfumato of time, and the even interlacing of quiet voices.