Sometimes a book is worth only a passage. I'd buy again Dubliners for one story. Raymond Carver's Fires, for one story, one essay—and a single poem. Weed to the sun, mouth to the surface, we find our favorite passages—gasping after even the faintest pinhole of opportunity. These are, of course, the portals worth the price of solicitation, temptation, and the obligation—no, responsibility—to carry the little harvest until it is time to set it down.
I was leaving Ireland recently, enchanted—yet just as concerned as before with the news and the existence of everything disturbing the natural growth of pure joy—when I gravitated to Penguin's current dental office colored pocket books ("sea foam" I think the paint stores would call it, a restful hue). Gone are the blaring (signaling!) cadmium orange covers from Penguin's first 1951 series, like a caution light (although some used book stores certainly collect them and they'd be still hard to miss). We are about calming, in many distracted and intentional ways, now—for obvious reasons associated with the peculiarly volatile time in which we participate. In from the rain in Bantry, I selected John Berger's The Red Tenda of Bologna and Italo Calvino's The Distance of the Moon.
"Tenda" is a piece of stretched cloth (awning, shade) and it may also be read as a metaphor. You can feel it, it's a safe screen, and it comes and goes; less shroud than shelter, more veil than blindfold. (And, like a chess piece, we may use it to our advantage.)
We're living in a time of allegory, of course, even as the reality of our lack of control is far from an acceptable logic of human progress. Berger recounts an uncle figure: "Time will tell, he used to say, and he said this in such a way that I assumed time would tell what we'd both be finally glad to hear."
Time itself is a tenda?
I don't believe I give anything away when I tell you that early in the story, on page six, Berger admits to loving his uncle perhaps only as an artist or teacher or social worker can: "I also loved him for his imperturbability. He believed in general and in principle that the best was to come."
Waiting room green holds this tender, held in my hands: me, holding this waiting room, tented from the storm, the words—footprints from the rain.
Within here, uncle lived simply and was (selectively) elated when he chanced upon something unique or special. In this way, I found Berger’s story instructive, almost coaxing me. Take this passage, describing a fabric shop:
"There are two women before me. One is touching the velvet, over which she's hesitating, as if it were her daughter's just washed hair."
I can tell you I leaned into this short book as I would opening a box formerly packed by a family member to find contents I couldn't imagine: things long lost by one generation, not until now imagined by the present generation. (And, there the confluence: the sea, the foam, the tented reading….)
John Berger's Tenda reminded me so much of Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar (if written in a younger voice). Calvino's The Distance of the Moon, however, is "younger" (or from a mind that has begun to wander): almost fable, almost sci-fi, almost riddle, certainly probably almost allegory. It is a love story to a planet that grows distant, a kind of "fight song" to collective problem-solving, coming to the rescue, and to the weary, working, persistent; and, it's a love story about longing, false hope, Hope, human connection, and a sort of ode to solitude also—to our determination and acceptance.
"[W]e contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet...." / "I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone [we are] rather than someone else...."
"The Distance of the Moon" is the first of four stories in the collection also called The Distance of the Moon...and it's the one that bought me passage (remember, it doesn’t take much to be transported).
Simple, short tales are helpful in adjusting our eyes and conserving our energy once we step towards the darker days past the autumnal equinox, and we near that veil time, the tenda between "living" and "dying" seasons (allegorical and actual). The distance between our own origins and the living passed, spirits, saints, all feels like a hand to velvet, a hand to recently washed hair.
And, I gasp as the leaves drop in waves. There will be no permanent curtain.
Peter Money is a poet, playwright, and author of the novel Oh When the Saints (Dublin) whose mentor was the Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, The Sun, American Poetry Review, on The Writer's Almanac and RTE Radio 1 Ireland ("Loves: Silence and the Music of JS Bach"). Peter tours with the band Los Lorcas (their latest album Wild Island streams online) and his memoir Leaving Dreamland: A Note to the Human Being Pursuing a Creative Life becomes available by December.
