Thomas Sullivan

K-Y, K-Y – not “KY,” as I wrote in September’s column, http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/09/16/thomas-sullivan-ky-jelly-the-headless-squirrel/. “KY” is what Rodan shrieks when it is lumbering out of the ocean or flapping through Tokyo popping tourists for fingersnacks. Titles aside, last month’s column introduced Cannibal Essays or How to Edit Life, my attempt to inspire writers and people in general to see the content of their lives and to put frames around it. Agent Bingo was supposed to be part of that ramble, but I ran out of space blathering about roaring down the expressway with my arm out the window until a bug flew up my cast. Cast, cast, I said a bug flew up my cast.

That essay was mostly lunacy, life in a funhouse mirror. I was going to balance it off with a switch in tones and some further comments on drawing stories out of events and relationships. That’s what I’m catching up to here.

Most of the time I like to go alone out in nature, but if I meet someone special who I think can get something out of it, I very much like to share it. And to be honest, about half the time that I go out, I wind up meeting someone and sharing it that way. You can make transcendent things happen in your life. In fact, if you’re sitting around waiting for them to happen, you are living in slow motion. As a writer, you must not only learn to recognize life, you have to go out and meet it. Here’s an example of something that had plenty of spontaneity, unknowns and wild cards, but it also arose because I knew it would happen sometime, somewhere and with someone.  

Anyone who has read even a little of my writing, knows that exquisite journeys into nature each day are prime resources for me. Whether I’m soaring along rivers of light cascading through autumn leaves in a pristine forest or gliding phantom-like through gluey green shallows in a canoe, I breathe ether outdoors. Naturally, I have special places and things to share, and they hold the potential for indelible memories. For me. And for someone I might invite to an inner sanctum.

Just such an epiphany of elements came together for a friend and me last winter. But part of the point here is that this occasion wasn’t left entirely to chance. It was different from just running into a friend or a stranger, as I seem to do every day on the trails or elsewhere. The latter are terrific but distinctly random: a gymnast rehabbing her knee, a recovering alcoholic who has discovered the runner within himself, a solitary cyclist who has grown away from her sedentary husband, the serious Olympic team contender who wants one more shot before her college career fades, a young architect who reads Ayn Rand while she walks until I show her the living cathedrals of light and motion all around her. Each of them offers me a glimpse of their life and I reciprocate, as if we share a yellow brick road and a Technicolor adventure in an Oz of our own design before returning to the black and white Kansas from which we entered these escapes. These are stolen hours, secret lives where the ordinal things of prescribed days are suspended. It’s very addictive and impossible to adequately describe. But a lot of it has to do with choice: what we talk about, knowing that it is said in a sanctuary that won’t carry over to the rest of our lives, what we see along the way, and how we interact with our surroundings and ourselves. It’s a full sensory press when you’re out in nature, when you’re using your body, mind and spirit to capacity. And there are settings that are just wrong for some, right for others. So I had this set of things I wanted to share, and it had to be with the right person.

Enter Agent Bingo, aka Katie Hilpisch, a young biomedical engineer, who has a literary side to her. We met at a hockey game, and she is one of my muses. I have a number of those, some who failure test my work, like Elizabeth Dyhouse (who always influences what I am working on), some who inspire thoughts and conversation, some who do not even know they are my muse. Agent Bingo is not my demographic of age or background. That’s a plus. She reads a ton of books. Another plus. She knows where I’m coming from. Not necessarily a plus, but inevitable if you are lucky enough to find a good muse or two that you can utilize close at hand. She is blunt and honest and has no need to prove her insights. Plus, plus, plus. If I dig for her thoughts, she provides them – thoughtfully – but is immune to any leading of the witness I may commit. I don’t remember why I call her Agent Bingo, but she calls me Snowman or Ninja or whatever names we have made up in our correspondence, which seems vaguely set in a pseudo world of espionage and missions. We keep the farce going and share occasional sojourns in the great outdoors, which we both love, or wander bookstores and chill out at coffee bars. At 29, she plays hockey, softball, blades, bikes, triathlons. Until last winter she had not skinny skied, but I guessed she would love it, and that she would feel the rhythm, get the poetry, and add to both.

So Agent Bingo was the right person to share some elements that were gathering that winter, if only she would accept my invitation, and her enthusiasm for the idea when she did accept seemed to confirm that. I knew it would be memorable and that sooner or later I would draw on it as part of my life and my work, if they are not the same thing. And they often are. I stress that this “making of memories” is anything but formal or even dramatic. On the contrary, it is subtle. One of the mistakes I think people make is believing that the high points of their lives center around some distant vacation or organized event. Not that those things aren’t highlights, just that if you need to be orchestrated full symphony like that, then you are missing a lot of duets, solos and combos in the interludes. Life happens. Be there. It is not necessarily over the horizon or glittering with planned perfection.

Planned perfection. There was some of that at the vast and varied Three Rivers nature preserve called Elm Creek the day Katie and I went out. Well, unplanned perfection anyway. It was the night before Valentine’s Day. A full moon. Air as thin as ether. Crystalline snow that makes a caressing sound as you carve through it on cc skis. Animated silhouettes slipping through the trees on wing or hoof or furry pads. Actually, Katie took off from work at noon, giving
us time for a little anticipation and spirited talk looking out my window at a frozen lake where eagles make daily visits. And Christmas visits. Because it was a holiday gift of Godiva chocolates and black cherries in brandy from Eagles’ music legend Glenn Frey and his talented wife Cindy that we stowed in my backpack. The plan was to reach a certain distant deer overlook I knew of where we could sit on a promontory, eat 78% of the world’s chocolate reserves while Willie Wonka lurked in the bushes, and gaze out at vistas of white diamonds and yellow reeds brushing a cobalt sky. But, of course, whatever you imagine, it will be different and better. A short drive and we were fitting rental skis on Agent Bingo, and then we were out on the trails.

She took to it like I knew she would, an athletic natural but heedless of a few soft falls and the breathless challenge. Check out some photos in my free newsletter (email mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send you one every month). We didn’t push it, just enjoyed the climbs and exhilarating downsweeps, pausing on stone or wooden bridges, finding stories in the tracks in the snow, playing an espionage game when I clued her to uncover an overgrown windmill almost invisible in a thick and towering woods. We put the hemorrhaging sun to bed on one horizon and birthed the full moon on another. The latter rose like a luminous pearl over the crest of the trail. Then down phantom blue lanes into near midnight where Agent Bingo discerned a deer I missed in a copse as thick as a pile of Pick-Up-Stix. And now the moon was louvered by cloudy fingers as we reached a high meadow, climbing, climbing, until that “ghostly galleon” sailed free on top of us (shades of Pirates of the Caribbean) and we were sitting on a stone bench.

We ate Godiva chocolates and sampled the cherries in brandy, and as if cued to perform, the most eerie chorus of coyotes erupted close by. They do this sometimes. A corybantic frenzy from somewhere just around sunset or moonrise. You never see them. But their discordant howling chimes in suddenly as if their territories have converged or they have found an atavistic trigger in the galvanizing moon. Blood-chilling and beautiful.

And then we were coming off the meadow in graceful sweeps, down into the woods and along a picturesque creek lined with sentinel pines and dotted with quaint wooden bridges. I showed Agent Bingo where beavers were building a dam, and we skied through silent moonlit awescapes you just can’t describe, because that would be only visual, and these are palpable to all senses.

Agent Bingo is a trooper. I should be shot for taking her on a two-hour first journey that lasted four. But she never complained, and she was exhilarated – is still exhilarated over the memory a year later. We came back in through a series of runs, knowing we owned the world and maybe the universe. Hard to think otherwise when you are standing steaming under the cosmos looking down an escarpment at an ephemeral white lake. And orange trail lamps beyond, like ordinal spotlights, lead you home, decompressing you back into the black and white world. Except you can never really go home again, as Thomas Wolfe said. My colleagues have been bandying that notion around of late, but in this case, once you’ve been to the White Room like that, a piece of you stays out there.

So that’s another life edit for me, a series of moments savored for themselves but which accumulate simultaneously in my artist’s soul. Like I said, my life and my work are the same thing. It is cannibalism, but it isn’t exploitation. A writer must do this. Though, of course, you don’t have to be a writer to let life penetrate you that deeply. Anyone who wants to live freely, fully, should surround themselves with inspiring places to be and people with light coming out of them to be with. Your companions are as important as your solitude. Ironically, while I was writing this, an email came in from another friend, Mystic Vixen (writer and Stumblebumstudios.com reviewer Jennifer Hairfield) whose connections with nature and poetry are equally eclectic. She writes: “Winter is already coming again. It seems like yesterday…I do tend to follow the fairy path, so when the moon is full and the flesh is willing I let them take over and play. It usually leads to a very interesting evening.” She has introduced me to the charmed backwaters of Oklahoma known as “fairy groves,” and I don’t believe I would have learned that had I not presented her with a Minnesota winter. Is she a Technicolor person or b/w? Do you think she gets it? The quid pro quo of life starts with you if you’re a writer. You’ve declared yourself a chronicler, a messenger, and you cannot be that without at least becoming an observer, and you cannot know the fuller meanings and insights without becoming a participant. “…when the moon is full and the flesh is willing I let them take over and play.” This person won’t miss the poetry if she gets close enough to it, and with a chosen name like Mystic Vixen you already know she will resonate it with words to match the deeds.

Confession. I am utterly bankrupt when I’m mired in formal situations or with individuals who are terminally narrow. They just leave me uninspired. That’s the flip side of finding those special people with whom to spend special times. Maybe that’s selfish of me, and if I were a better person I would be more tolerant, but I cannot stand to waste life. People who resist everything, including ideas, passions and communication are just down time for me. Especially communication, which can even include shared silence but never apathy. Fortunately the people who really don’t open up when you get them one on one are never writers and seldom readers. And if they are readers, then they have a closet wish to escape their narrowness. I try not to give up on people, because the most recalcitrant types have the most passion when they finally yield, but more often the bottom layer is just fear and inhibition – a selfishness as bad as my own.

Is this mercenary of me as a writer? I guess. But it isn’t just mercenary. Always nice when your work and your life are the same thing. I don’t think I’d be different in my life if I stopped writing. In fact, most of my writing is one on one – emails. Definitely not mercenary.

In both writing and li
fe, you have to give in order to get, though. Non-judgmental honesty and sincerity will take you further in understanding people and your own character inventions than will clinical observations you make from behind a wall of your own insecurities. Just a fact. If you can’t disarm fears, don’t expect to get past the foyers of other people’s lives. And you won’t disarm anyone if you aren’t “for real.” Being a writer – the best writer you can be – means living to the max. You just happen to be a mirror of words along the way.

Check out my just-released new novel, THE WATER WOLF, if you will. There’s a free chapter at www.thomassullivanauthor.com. Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com