Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

I broke my brain. I’m not shitting you. It was joggled around in some giant, anonymous pair of hands and tossed end-over-end, without hope or desperation, down a scarred velvet table in a dark and nearly empty casino.

Have you ever felt like a moth that has been pinned to a post and is being swarmed by thousands of vague and terrifying lights? Has it ever seemed like you’ve been locked inside an old bank safe that has a rusty and long forgotten combination and has been flung into the Mississippi River on a moonless night?

For many days now I have had a lost thought rolling around like a marble greased with gore in the back of my skull.

You realize, of course, that I’m not kidding. I’m one of those guys who doesn’t tell the jokes unless I mean them.

It’s not sleep that I occasionally, and increasingly rarely, find in the long hours after midnight, but something more…I don’t know, really, sleepish, is I guess the best I can do in describing it. Utter sleeplessness that lapses from time to time into weird, yet oddly merciful little spells of sleepishness.

This is what I am.

And I have decided that I want to take the idea of talking birds much further than anyone has ever taken it before, to explore the language of birds in the history of literature, music, and art, to get to the bottom of this queer and preoccupying business once and for all.

I realize that I have, from time to time, gotten carried away with similar such quixotic pursuits. There was the time, for instance, when I was determined to make this…blog a portal for all manner of exhaustive scholarship regarding Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth President of the United States. I honestly thought that I could –that I would– become the world’s preeminent Coolidge scholar.

Little did I realize at the time, however, that Coolidge was such a thoroughly boring character.

I have some reason to feel optimistic that my parrot project will be much more fruitful. No particular reason, really, but some reason, and that, at this point, is something.

I have spent the last week or so assembling some preliminary notes on my exhaustive cultural study of parrotology, and will in all likelihood continue to work away at this long and ongoing project in this space. At the moment, at least, I am taking as my models for this compendium Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature.

For now I would ask your patience and beg your pardon for the disorderly nature of these notes and ruminations. What you have here is a both a crude document and a portrait of one man alone in the wee hours, fumbling his way into a vast and, in all likelihood, inexhaustible project. I would welcome any assistance or suggestions that might point me in potentially fruitful new directions.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and err greatly. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complicated than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

— Henry Beston, The Outermost House. 1928

Psittalinguistics: the science of context speaking parrots.

A parrot, it has been alleged, was responsible for planting many of the more heinous perversions in the head of one of the most depraved of the Caesars, Tiberius, this after the bird had had read aloud to him (by a sociopathic dwarf tutor in the Caesar’s employ) from an early and particularly pernicious primer in lechery. (See: A. Towson Dandridge, The Psychology of the Tyrants of Antiquity, Stanhope and Adelman, Manchester. 1949.)

We also learn, in Dr. Renata Steenblom’s Unnatural Nature (University of Winnipeg, 1963), of a parrot which was allegedly capable of divining –and divulging at inopportune moments– the innermost secrets of its mistress, including sexual fantasies of a shockingly explicit nature. The bird was notorious for regaling unsuspecting visitors with a tortuous impression of the poor woman’s whinnying orgasm.

According to Fr. Xavier Empson’s Curiosities of Catholicism and Marvels of Mariolotry (Eternal Image Press, Skokie, Illinois. 1957), there was, once upon a time, a parrot belonging to a tavern owner in a small village in Italy, and this bird was renowned for its ability to recite the Rosary (in Latin) in its entirety. One day, Empson recounts, the bird solemnly proclaimed, “It is the will of God, and I am but His humble servant,” and promptly fell over dead.

From the pages of the children’s magazine, Highlights, we learn of an unassuming insurance adjustor and confirmed bachelor in Dallas, Texas who purchased a blue-fronted parrot which, upon being installed in the man’s home, was discovered to have committed a number of Johnny Cash songs to memory. The bird was capable of singing these songs in their entirety, and in a passable impersonation of the country legend’s voice.

The annals of parrotology are full of similar wonders, from the ancient world to the modern. In a little known short story by the Russian writer, Gogol, a bird is called upon to testify in a court of law as a material witness to its master’s infidelity.

There is an obscure novel, Lucifer’s Bird, by a Depression-era Georgia writer by the name of Ernest Winter, which featured a talking parrot that was believed to be possessed by Satan. The bird’s sinister commands and insinuations lead a God-fearing local deacon to engage in acts of depravity that shake a small southern town to its core. William Faulkner reportedly attempted a screenplay of this novel for Charles Laughton, but there is apparently no surviving evidence of this aborted project.

In the days before teleprompters one often heard stories of Catskill comedians in their dottage who resorted to being fed their lines by parrots, which were perched on stage in full view of the audience. One such bird was said to be such a quick-witted master of improvisation that in time it became an actual and valued partner to the comedian. Before it eventually passed away from advanced years (the bird survived the old comedian by more than a decade), the parrot had established itself as a successful solo act –if something of a novelty– in its own right.

The legendary blues musician Skip James is another performer who was alleged to have used a parrot as a prompt, often, some accounts allege, after James had become so inebriated that he could no longer remember the words to his songs.

There was a minor dust-up in academia in the 1950s when a man named J. Richard Stevens published portions of his doctoral dissertation in a then reputable scholarly journal. Stevens’ thesis, which was immediately and loudly discredited, was that a number of Emily Dickinson’s poems had been almost literal transcriptions of the utterances of her beloved parrot, Desdemona.

In the early days of television, talking birds were often used to provide voiceover narration for advertisements, largely in an attempt to cut costs and circumvent union restrictions. The practice apparently continues –albeit somewhat clandestinely– to this day, most prominently in the dubbing of low-budget films from Asia.

The debate over animal cognition: Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s famous gray parrot, Alex. Dr Pepperberg’s pioneering studies with Alex proved conclusively that the prevailing and disparaging notion of a “bird brain,” is grounded in ignorance. Many birds –parrots most particularly– have very large brains indeed, and possess a cognitive sophistication that is as wondrous as it is little understood. Dr. Pepperberg’s work with Alex is almost as important and influential as the better known work on animal communication and referential speech that has been conducted on the great apes.

The Yellow Naped parrot, the most virtuosic and versatile of the Amazonian talking parrots, can often master an impressive vocabulary of upwards of eight hundred words, and is also capable of singing, dancing, whistling, and doing uncanny impersonations of animals and household appliances.

Double Yellow Head parrots have long been recognized as accomplished opera singers, with extraordinary range. They are among the more excitable and motor-mouthed of talking birds. (See: Robert T. Nicolai, Caruso in a Cage: The Incredible True Story of Sergei, the World’s Most Famous Singing Parrot, Bristol House, 1983.)

Budgerigars have been known to have vocabularies in excess of one thousand words. One such parrot, Victor, purportedly demonstrated that birds are capable of engaging in actual conversation, and was alleged to be an influential teacher and mentor to many other birds. Victor, according to its owner, presided over a de facto academy for talking birds, and a lexicon of the parrot’s impressive vocabulary, along with an archive of its recordings, can be found here.

N’Kisi, a New York parrot with an almost 600-word vocabulary and psychic abilities, is purportedly capable of reading the thoughts of visitors.

See also: Bruce Thomas Boehner’s Parrot Culture: Our 2500 Year Fascination With The World’s Most Talkative Bird.

More audio recordings of talking birds.

There have been innumerable documented cases of talking parrots thwarting robberies.

Other literary examples:

Eudora Welty’s The Shoe Bird

Flaubert’s “Un Coeur Simple.” (See also: Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot)

Somewhere in the works of Balzac (and I have thus far been unable to find the source of this story, although I maintain a clear memory of it nonetheless) there is a parrot that recites “The Lord’s Prayer.”

There is also, of course, the foul-mouthed parrot in Errol Stanley Garner’s, The Case of the Perjured Parrot.

More recently: Joe Coomer’s The Loop, which features a home invasion by an elderly parrot given to cryptic utterances.

In the seventh century, Shui Shi Tu Jing published the Book of Hydraulic Elegancies. Indeed, one continually finds descriptions of such technological wonders as mechanical flying doves, dancing apes, and talking parrots in the literatures of Islamic nations, India, China, and Greece. In fourteenth century Florence, it was none other than Filippo Brunelleschi who designed a mechanical stage to bring Paradise to life.

–Oliver Grau, “History of Telepresence: Automata, Illusion, and Rejecting the Body.”

This defect or imperfection that stands in the way of man’s communicating with animals, why isn’t it as much our fault as theirs? For we don’t understand them any more than they understand us.

—Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond”

Yet the animals are not incapable of being taught also in our way. Blackbirds, ravens, magpies, and parrots we teach to speak; and that facility with which we see them rendering their voice and breath so supple and manageable for us, to form and constrain it to a certain number of letters and syllables, testifies that they have an inward power of reason which makes them so teachable and determined to learn.

—Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond”

This story of the magpie, for which we have Plutarch himself as sponsor, is strange. She was in a barber’s shop in Rome, and did wonders in imitating with her voice all that she heard. One day it happened that certain trumpeters stopped and blew a long time in front of this shop. After that and all the next day here was this magpie pensive, mute, and melancholy, at which everyone marveled, and thought that the sound of the trumpets had stunned and deafened her, and that her voice had been snuffed out together with her hearing. But they found in the end that it was a profound study and a withdrawal within herself, while her mind was practicing and preparing her voice to represent the sound of these trumpets; so that the first voice she used was that one, expressing perfectly their runs, pitches, and variations; and for this new acquirement she abandoned and scorned all she had learned to say before.

—Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond”

An old Danish shipowner sat and thought of his young days and of how he had, when he was sixteen years old, spent a night in a brothel in Singapore. He had come in there with the sailors of his father’s ship, and he had sat and talked with an old Chinese woman. When she heard that he was a native of a distant country she brought out an old parrot, that belonged to her. Long, long ago, she told him, the parrot had been given to her by a high-born English lover of her youth. The boy thought that the bird must then be a hundred years old. It could say various sentences in the languages of the world, picked up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the house. But one phrase the old China-woman’s lover had taught it before he sent it to her, and that she did not understand, neither had any visitor ever been able to tell her what it meant. So now for many years she had given up asking. But if the boy came from far away perhaps it was his language, and he could interpret the phrase to her.

The boy had been deeply, strangely moved at the suggestion. When he looked at the parrot, and thought that he might hear Danish from that terrible beak, he very nearly ran out of the house. He stayed on only to do the old Chinese woman a service. But when she made the parrot speak its sentence, it turned out to be classic Greek. The bird spoke its words very slowly, and the boy knew enough Greek to recognize it; it was a verse from Sappho:

The moon has sunk and the Pleiads,

And midnight is gone,

And the hours are passing, passing,

And I lie alone.

The old woman, when he translated the lines to her, smacked her lips and rolled her small slanting eyes. She asked him to say it again, and nodded her head.

—Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

Parrot Science.

AND THIS NEW addition, courtesy of reader J. Nathan Matias: John Kinsella, “Parrotology: On the Necessity of Parrots in Poetry.”

The clock is ticking.

The clock is always ticking, always tick-tick-ticking.

The sun is burning, burning, burning. The moon is rising. The moon is rising. The moon is rising.

The world is turning. This world is turning, turning, turning.

Our hearts are yearning. Our hearts, our hearts, our hearts are yearning.

The days get away from us. The days roll right out from under our feet and leave us reeling, leave us tottering, wobbling, unsteady, old.

We get broken.

That puppy that used to strain at his leash and lunge his way through every day, where has he gone? And how did he go so quickly?

The dog that could never get enough of life, who wore out hours and whose heart blazed like a great, burning thing, that dog who lorded over an entire island every summer and who was ever ready to go wherever there was to go, our bright and raging boy, paragon of ‘good dog’ if ever there was one, how could he have grown old already?

How is that possible? How could any just and loving god allow such a thing to happen?

It hurts. It aches in a million ways. It shakes my faith to the core.

Yet at the end of another hot, rough day I nonetheless find myself begging for grace, for mercy, for patience, for time. More time.

Please.

More time.

Good lord, the stars, the dusty, glimmering sprawl above some dark, quiet place in America, the stardust, star-scatter, the worlds stretched up there above this one.

Remember? Remember standing on a gravel road in Vermont –along a big river in a Montana valley, on a dock jutting out into a lake in the Adirondacks, at the edge of the ocean in Oregon– watching stars shake loose and heave themselves down the sky? Remember standing in the damp country in Michigan, in Minnesota, in Iowa, in Illinois, watching fireflies wheel and tumble above the black fields?

I remember.

I also remember –where the hell was it?– the old man wobbling aboard a bicycle who emerged like a vision through the ground fog, paused to wish us a good evening, and quoted Thucydides: “They have the numbers; we the heights.”

I remember the wind whistling through open car windows and the hum-thumpa-hum of tires on the pavement of dark highways and music carrying in the darkness and the bright lights of carnival rides whirling on the horizon and days and nights so permeated with wonder that they leeched the words right out of me and left every letter of the alphabet in fuzzed and uselessly abstract isolation fluttering from a clothesline stretched across the roof of my skull while backyard sprinklers shook their maracas up and down the block of my old neighborhood and I drifted all night at the margins of sleep.

What explanation is given for the phosphorous light

That you, as boy, went out to catch

When summer dusk turned to night.

You caught the fire-flies, put them in a jar,

Careful to let in the air,

Then you fed them dandelions, unsure

Of what such small and fleeting things

Need, and when

Their light grew dim, you

Let them go.

There is no explanation for the fire

That burns in our bodies

Or the desire that grows, again and again,

So that we must move toward each other

In the dark.

We have no wings.

We are ordinary people, doing ordinary things.

The story can be told on rice paper.

There is a lantern, a mountain, whatever

We can remember.

Hiroshige’s landscape is so soft.

What child, woman, would not want to go out

Into that dark, and be caught,

And caught again, by you?

Let these pictures of the floating world go on

Forever, but when

This light must flicker out, catch me,

Give me whatever a child imagines

To keep me aglow, then

Let me go.

—Siv Cedering, “Ukiyo-E”

Source materials for the project at hand, whatever it is, and whatever it might yet be: Grimm’s Fairy Tales; Hans Christian Andersen; William Graham Sumner’s Folkways; Frazer’s The Golden Bough; Mythology (Graves, Bulfinch, Hamilton, etc.); the Icelandic Sagas and Norse myths; The Odyssey and The Iliad; The Aeneid; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; The Divine Comedy; James Brown; Little Nemo in Slumberland; Goethe’s Faust; Skip James; Shakespeare; the fables of La Fontaine; Tacitus; the stories of Chekhov; George Herriman’s Krazy Kat; The Koran; The Bible; Jay Robert Nash’s Bloodletters and Badmen; Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; Hank Williams; Butler’s Lives of the Saints; Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars; August Sander’s People of the 20th Century; Cellarius’ Atlas of the Heavens; Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; Dale Pendell’s Pharmako/Poeia; Louis Charbonneau-Lassay’s The Bestiary of Christ; Frans Masereel, Passionate Journey; Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary; Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; The Oxford Unabridged Dictionary; Aristotle; Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine; Alan Lomax’s The Folk Songs of North America; The Book of Fabulous Beasts; Mad magazine; The Thousand and One Nights; Flann O’Brien; Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook; Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project; Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music; Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language; Plutarch’s Lives; Jay’s Journal of Anomalies; Robert Frank’s The Americans; Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvelous; Kafka’s Complete Stories and Parables; Paracelsus; Paradise Lost; William Blake; Alberto Manguel’s Dict
ionary of Imaginary Places; Eudora Welty; In the Night Kitchen; Tex Avery; Goodbye Babylon; The Elements of Style; William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience; Aesop’s Fables; Sun Ra; Borges; Hesiod’s The Works and Days; St. Clair McKelney, True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality; Carl Jung; King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; E…T…C….

Because you ask things like what the hell? and why?

Because I guess you want to know.

Because I joined up with the Amish after my dad decided it would make a man of me and it was either that or go to work at my grandfather’s automobile dealership and I knew damn well that I couldn’t sell cars if my soul depended on it, and I didn’t want to believe that it did.

Because I got kicked out of the Amish after just eight months, ostensibly for dropping one too many F-bombs and being royally pissed about the no television rule.

Because I have to admit that my beard was pretty shitty and they were some serious customers and I was in way over my head right from the start and didn’t have the slightest idea they were going to make me read the Bible all the time and work like a mule –the whack costumes, yes, I knew about those, but you don’t know how ridiculous and uncomfortable that shit is until you actually have to wear it– and let’s just say I wasn’t the happiest camper and so wasn’t inclined to be terribly cooperative.

Because when they realized how essentially worthless I was when it came to stumbling around behind horses in fields and trying to build stuff without any power tools, etc. they made me go out to sell quilts and honey by the side of the road with the women, all of whom, I’m pretty sure, were forbidden to speak to me.

Because they didn’t speak to me at any rate.

Because at that point, snubbed by a bunch of girls in widow-granny dresses and bonnets, I said, Fuck this noise, apparently a bit too forcefully, or apparently once too often.

Because getting kicked out of the Amish was the best thing that ever happened to me, although I still hold out hope that something even better than that will eventually happen to me.

Because I’m starting to read philosophy.

And because, really, what choice do I have?

That’s why.

I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what to say. I have absolutely no idea. I can’t even begin to imagine. I’m speechless.

Seriously, words fail me.

The cat’s got my tongue. I’m tongue-tied. There is nothing on the tip of my tongue. I can’t explain. I have no comment. I’m at a complete loss for words. There is apparently no ax to break up the frozen sea within me, assuming there even is a frozen sea within me, and I honestly have no reason to believe this to be the case.

It’s like this, do you understand? Do you understand what ‘like this’ means? Can you even imagine what ‘this’ means in the present context?

I can’t. I guess I can tell you that much.

So, listen to me: I’ve got nothing for you. The English language has become a puzzle to me. I can’t seem to find the right word, never mind the right words.

I do know that when I say ‘like this,’ or even just ‘this,’ I’m referring to a crisis. I don’t, unfortunately, (as I’m trying to explain) have any words to explain this crisis.

It strikes me as some kind of miracle that I have been able to dredge up from someplace a word like ‘crisis,’ or a word like ‘miracle’ or, holy shit, ‘dredge.’

At this point such words represent major discoveries. Seeing them mysteriously appear on the page beneath my pen is like watching an entirely new continent surface in the middle of the ocean.

As such, I must say (and I must say, I must say, I must, helplessly, say), they leave me dazzled. Wholly dazzled, and delighted, which is more, so much more, than I have any right to expect given my present frame of mind.

Disappointed in love and broken

at forty she married a small town

in Ohio

it made no brash promises whispered nothing

sweeter in her ear than good morning

good afternoon good evening good night

my dear

good night my darling

good night my dear

in the morning

I’ll still be here

Burch woke up one morning in a ditch in some low-lying country. He had no idea where he was and no recollection of how he might have arrived there. Whatever possessions he might once have owned –and he had a vague recollection of a backpack full of belongings– were nowhere to be seen.

He was thirsty as the devil himself for a can of Coca-Cola.

Alongside the damp ditch in which he found himself there was a poorly-maintained dirt road, its surface pocked and worn with deep ruts. In the distance Burch could see smoke rising from the chimneys of a little town, and he set out along the road in the direction of this unfamiliar village.

As he walked it became apparent to him that somehow, and somewhere in the lost stretch behind him, he had acquired a rather pronounced limp. Burch felt a dull ache extending from his left buttock all the way down to the area behind his knee. The pain became more acute as he hobbled along the road.

An angel appeared to him just as he was approaching the outskirts of the village. Burch watched as the angel glided down from the bare branches of a tree.

You are to undertake a quest, the angel told Burch. An old horse will be provided for your journey, and you are to learn that the heart can be killed anywhere on earth.

That, Burch said to the angel, does not sound like a quest. It sounds like a sentence.

To which the angel replied, That is only because you fail to understand the full meaning of the phrase.

Burch considered the angel as it fluttered there above him on gray and dusty wings. This, he thought, was a most unwelcome and untimely visitation.

It seems to me that the phrase could not possibly be plainer, he said.

Only because you cannot yet see clearly, the angel said.

Burch was in no mood or condition to argue with an angel. For his part, the angel felt obligated to remind his charge of the seriousness of his mission.

You will understand, I’m sure, at what grave peril to his soul a man refuses to carry out the orders of an angel, he said.

I understand no such thing, Burch said. And surely you understand that you are looking at a man whose soul is already in considerable peril, if, in fact, it has not already been entirely lost to him.

What I am telling you, the angel said, is that there is yet hope for you. You are being given a rare opportunity.

I can barely walk, Burch said.

That is why you are being provided with a horse, the angel told him.

From the village Burch heard the ringing of church bells.

I suppose, he said, that I am to regard that as a sign.

The angel cocked his head and listened to the sound. The bells? he said. That is nothing more than a custom of the village.

Burch spit into the road and pawed at the dirt with his boot.

Let’s have a look at that horse, he said.

Slayed.

Slaughtered.

Shattered.

Crushed.

Obliterated.

Burst.

Busted.

Broken.

Destroyed.

Rubbed out.

Squashed.

Flayed.

Annihilated.

Massacred.

Snuffed.

Shredded.

Spent.

Jolted.

Struck.

Moved.

Electrified.

Blown wide open.

Stunned.

Tickled.

Elated.

Overjoyed.

Lit up like a jack-o-lantern.

Delighted out of all proportion.

Rocked.

Resurrected.

Reborn.

Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, and dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men.

—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

All he could do was transcribe the interminable babbling voice of the night, the insinuating perverse voice of the demons.

—Pietro Citati, Kafka

What if an individual is perceiving a daydream and a series of external sensory inputs at precisely the same time, and has lost the capacity to distinguish one from the other? What happens to his perceptual world? Clearly he will be peopling his universe of awareness with elements that are altogether private, presences generated from within which for him will be a genuine part of the real world; these are what he sees, or hears, or is otherwise sensing. And should he then be unable to differentiate these from his everyday perceptions, then indeed he may move into a haunted, nightmarish world, and be a very troubled human being.

—Joseph D. Noshpitz, “Reality Testing: A Neuropsychological Fantasy,” in Comprehensive Psychology

A common notion about the relationship of sleep to mental health is that total sleep loss…deranges the mind and may result in some kind of breakdown….When serious sleep disturbances are present, as they almost always are in the mentally ill, the patient’s history often indicates that the sleep disturbance preceeded the actual break from reality.

—William C. Dement, Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep –Exploring the World of Sleep

On particularly dark nights the seven black rabbits that live somewhere in the bushes in my backyard emerge from their burrow or bunker (or whatever it is that rabbits live in) and move about upright, staggering and lurching around on their back legs.

It seems to me that they’re uncommonly large for rabbits. Some of them probably stand at least four feet high. There’s nothing even remotely human about their movements.

They were particularly active in the winter months, and I spent a good deal of time watching them closely from the darkness of my room. One night, quite inexplicably, I saw them hang a puppet from a tree by its neck. I eventually concluded that they were members of some kind of rabbit version of a religious order. I’d see them coming and going from my garage at all hours. I gathered they were building tiny coffins.

I surmised this last bit of information from the fact that I had seen what were unmistakably funeral processions and burials. I’d watched as the rabbits shouldered caskets through the snow in the moonlight, and dug holes with their long legs. It was clear that my backyard was becoming a rather crowded burial ground.

What exactly the rabbits were burying remained a mystery for a number of months, until the night I saw several of them drag a baby across the yard and disappear into the garage.

They’ve been a bit scarce of late, now that the snow’s gone, but I have occasionally seen them out there milling around the garage or skulking furtively up and down the alley. The last time I saw them I could have sworn they were smoking cigarettes.

I’m not sure how exactly one would go about negotiating with rabbits, but I would very much like to strike some sort of deal that would involve these creatures delivering to me a living infant. I’ve wanted a little bitty baby of my own for quite some time now, ever since I lost contact with so many children of my acquaintance.

Should I somehow manage to procure a child from these animals, I shall name it either Ezra or Ezrena (or perhaps Theodore), and I will love the child and it shall be the King of Nothing Never, and a keeper of beasts, and full of joy.

The victim of insomnia, having seen the slowness of the dawn, arises with every nerve tattered and the capacity for happiness ruined. His morning is a desolation.

—Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me. Third Series. 1926

Melancholics are not so sleepless as maniacs, yet the want of sleep is often an early and prominent symptom. They do not readily sleep, and if they do, they awake soon to be tormented by the vilest misery that it is possible for human creatures to endure.

—A.W, MacFarlane, M.D., Insomnia and its Therapeutics. 1891.

Under [insomnia’s] influence injurious changes are permitted by the patient to be made in his daily habits; pursuits which formerly engaged his attention no longer interest him; even important business concerns are sacrificed; and against such tendencies no pre-existing vigour of intellect will afford any defence; the strongest minds (intellectually considered) may sink into apathy and feebleness.

—James Russell, M.D., “On Sleeplessness.” British Medical Journal, November 16, 1861.

After dinner, my friend drove me, in a carriage, some five miles back into the country –the greater part of the way, along the margin of Migunticook Lake, and under a terrific precipice, whose boulders every moment threaten destruction. In fact, the whole of a bright sunny day, cooled with healthful zephyrs, was spent in pleasurable excitement. Interesting conversation beguiled the evening; and, after family worship, I sunk to rest in a luxurious curtained bed. Ere long, I slept; and, about five o’clock next morning, was awakened by the crowing of the cock. This was the only night’s sleep I have had these last six years and seven months; so help me God. Since then, my nights have been tedious, as usual, without sleep, and some of them distressing.

—“An Example of Protracted Wakefulness,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. July 31, 1845.

Experience in private practice, and extended observation in the wards of general and lunatic hospitals, have taught me that the ordinary hypnotics are frequently unreliable, and that in some instances their use is attended by results as bad as, if not of more serious consequence than, the conditions they were intended to remove. I do not wish by this somewhat sweeping assertion to be understood to condemn the ordinary hypnotics, or to doubt their efficacy in suitable cases; but it seems to me that we run great danger of becoming routinists in the matter of sleeping-draughts….Like most of my fellow practitioners, I constantly meet patients who have run through the whole gamut of sleep-producing drugs, and find their last condition, in many instances, worse than their first.

—Edward N. Brush, M.D., “Some Clinical Experiences With Insomnia,” The Practitioner, January 1889.

The little house with its peeling paint and mossy shingles was set well back from the street and appeared to be floating in a sea of saffron grass bleached by the sun and burnished by the fleeting sweep of twilight.

It was hot. There wasn’t a shadow left in which to take refuge, and there wasn’t a single thing moving in any direction.

If you stood in the middle of the street you would hear the unreal, thrumming silence of dusk in a dead-end place and you’d smell the rain that would creep in after darkness fell. If you stood still and listened hard you could probably hear the surf of truck traffic on the highway at the edge of town. And if you stood there long enough you might eventually see a child aboard a bicycle glide silently like a dream fragment through the intersection at the end of the block.

You might.

But you might not. There weren’t a lot of children around anymore.

If you took a few steps up the front sidewalk you’d smell the cigarette smoke that was drifting in almost rhythmic waves through the window screen. And if you were bored or curious enough to press your face to the screen you’d see an unfinished jigsaw puzzle spread out on a card table, a windmill and a field of red tulips shot full of jagged holes. You’d see an orange plastic ashtray with a burning cigarette wedged in one of the badly-stained slots, and an abandoned game of Solitaire lined up on a coffee table. An old woman would be sitting there in a faded sun dress imprinted with a pattern of what might have been sunflowers. Across the room from her, sitting utterly still in a recliner, his bare feet just jutting into the left side of the frame (you’d have to move or crane your neck to take him all in), would be a shirtless man wearing nothing but boxer shorts and holding a pistol in his lap.

From another room in the house you’d hear the disconsolate burst of a television laugh track.

You wouldn’t necessarily know this, though, so I’ll tell you: I’ve fired that gun before, but I’ve been waiting my whole life to really shoot something.