Dam the Whisper
Oh Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun
All winter I rot. All spring I wait. All fall I recall. But not now. Now, I’m howling at the moon. Leeching on peaches. Wearing floor clothes again and again. I live for summer.
Turns out, being not cold, the loud bugs, the chronic sweat, the lenient timeframes, and the structural collapse as we know it is exactly how I was meant to live. I’m at my most creative. I’m actually happy.
I don’t need crutches to get me through summer. (Except for that time I shattered my talus and really did need some crutches to get me through summer.) I just simmer sun up till sundown. However, these are the works of art that have long seasoned it for me. They make living all the meatier.
Ray Bradbury needs no introduction, but many have overlooked this little book. I picked it up in third grade because it looked creepy. 1993 was the height of R.L. Stein fever, and I was into him, but this book looked different. A deeper creepy. A more real creepy. So I opened the cover and it changed my life.
I’d begun having existential awakenings that year, and I didn’t know what to call them, or what they meant. After all, I was 8. I would just stare in the mirror saying, “I’m me,” in wild bewilderment. In the first few moments of this book, the main character has a similar experience. His comes in the form of a sneaking feeling that pounces on him in the forest while berry picking. It blew my mind. I couldn’t believe that someone else had also felt this overwhelming sense of self, much less put it into words.
I didn’t reread the book for another 20 years, then fell in love with it all over again. As the title suggests, it bottles the all richness, beauty, terror, and nostalgia of summer. It also has one of the most stunning death scenes I’ve ever read, when the great-grandmother takes her final breath.
Turning our attention to form now.
Every summer we visit my in-laws in Wisconsin, and every summer I run along Lake Michigan to this sculpture, which I love, where I sit for a breather in the same position, and people walking by sometimes comment that I look like the sculpture, and instead of saying shut up, I just smile then gaze out at the water.
Next up, my all-time favorite painting. It’s not from my all-time favorite painter, but it strums an emotional chord for a reason I’ll lay out after you take a look…
Aside from its striking surrealism, this painting reminds me of an unlikely backdrop that was central to my childhood.
My best friend between preschool and third grade lived in the Phipps Mansion when it was still owned by the University of Denver. His dad was the caretaker, running weddings, events, and general maintenance, so their family got to live for free in the servants quarters of the mansion, which meant that I got to play there. All the time.
I grew up in a three-bed, two-bath ranch house. I had everything I needed, but not much more. I had never been in a mansion, much less shot Nerf darts in one, so this was an incredible stroke of luck for a middle-class kid like me. The property is a walled six acres, and John, his brother Daniel, and I got to tear through it at will.
There were gardens, fountains, a tennis house, and rooms galore. We played spies and detectives with our older sisters, and they never discovered our badass hideout under a sprawling bush. But my favorite feature was the back lawn. It’s my idea of heaven. Just a long stretch of green beneath the western horizon.
This is an eastward view of the mansion. You can see the terrace and just make out the balustrade on either side. For me, the Magritte painting is a reminder of how I felt standing on that terrace, watching the sun sink. I stumbled upon it while wandering Chicago’s Art Institute one afternoon. I just stood in front of the painting, staring into the sun for a long while. It was like someone had painted my memory, or the feeling of a memory. Being a kid is more sensation than agency. And being a kid at that mansion made me a tiny immortal in Arcadia for a time. The undying summer sun is the sigil of my psyche.
As for summer jams, here are some of my favorite to blast, windows-down, my kids shouting along in the back seat.
-"One More Night” by Michael Kiwanuka
-"Forbidden City” by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros
And the chill one that sends me into a Pavlovian trance every time…
-"Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” by Primitive Radio Gods
It certainly helps to have B.B. King howl your backup vocals, but this song is a poem in its own right and has always torn my heart out.
Am I alive or thoughts that drift away?
Does summer come for everyone?
Can humans do what prophets say?
If I die before I learn to speak
Can money pay for all the days I lived awake
But half asleep?
The dreamy musing and self-chiding in this passage holds a lot for me. The anxiously depressed inner monologue I face when summer passes into forlorn fall then bone-dry winter amasses in; I should be eating better. I should exercise more. I should save more money. I should be further along in my career. I should volunteer more. I should recycle more. I should listen better. I should clean more. I should write more. I should be more patient. I should know more languages. I should have done things different. I shouldn’t have so much stuff. I should have better stuff. I should stop thinking about stuff. I should live somewhere else. I should reduce microplastics. I should avoid forever chemicals. I should know every single ingredient in every single thing I eat, touch, or smell. I should mentor. I should apprentice. I should act. I should stop all the world’s wars. And on it goes into a swirling pyre of self-condemnation that would consume me until one morning I wake up and my dreams were soothing, and the light is just right, and my body feels renewed, and the house is warm, and the yard is humming with the life of 10,000 years, and the fear that I am not enough is gone the way a headache suddenly leaves, and I not only see clearly, but I love deeply, and I step lightly, and so the dam that held all the whispers has burst, carrying me back into Arcadia where I am allowed the freedom of sensation.
Summer.