Or Die of Namelessness

 

I'm pleased to have another story out, to start the year—my third published by the excellent Wild Roof Journal, which over the past several years has, it says, "built a community of emerging & established writers, visual artists, teachers, grad students, mental health professionals, travelers, hermits, vagabonds, ragamuffins, etc. etc.," (that sounds like me!); whose name comes from a line in William Blake's The Book of Urizen.

 

My story, "Or Die of Namelessness," can be found in Gallery 1, Knocking on wood: on glass.

 

Its name comes from another poet, Wendell Berry, and these lines of his—

“we must call all things by name out of the silence 

again to be with us, or die of namelessness”

 

The names are of particular interest, for it is the names the forlorn hero of the story is losing, to nominal aphasia, to the lonely, silent void.  Along with all the rest, the names of the fossil shells he had made his career, and the shared language between him and his true love—"Cephalopods, ammonites, opalised pippi shells, spotted Babylon snails, cowries, dolphin gastropods, miters, moon shells, turbans and vases and urchins, whelks; Venus comb murex, hundred-eyed cowrie, rainbow abalone, sheep’s ear abalone, pontifical mitre, orange-mouth olive and lettered olive, colorful coquina clams, chambered nautilus, tusk."

 

A cousin of mine died from aphasia last year, and by coincidence we saw a fine play in the fall about a woman suffering and finally perishing from word loss too—Nick Payne's Constellations.

 

images:  generated in WordItOut

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Tassajara collage

Balconies

 

“Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.”

—Ernie Pyle

 

“The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows.”

—Donald G. Mitchell

 

(above,) This lovely balcony in Palma de Mallorca, bringing memories of peace and hope and other worlds.

And this, (below,) in San Juan Bautista, holding a small flight of angels—if fewer than on that famous pin.

And whimsey in Paris one year, a flight of chefs.

 

And this, and this.  Verona and a very famous balcony.  Flights of fancy.

 

"She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."

—J.D. Salinger

images:  Christie B. Cochrell

Deus ex machina

 

Flames of Hope

 

I’m thinking of the powers of light, which include Sarastro, child spirits and flutes, the wonderful animal puppets of Julie Taymor!  Mozart, behind and inside all of that. 

 

And caravans, in their historical meaning—pilgrims and camels and banners of faith and fellowship.  "Allowing for the exchange of goods [salt and textiles; stone, spices, copper, gold] and ideas [in words] across long distances."  A group of people journeying together, most often through desert or hostile regions.

  

All carrying shimmering flames of hope.

 

images:  The Catalan Atlas; Shutterstock:  Camel caravan in Souq Okaz Festival

Italian Hand Gestures

 

Originally published by Dime Show Review (now defunct) in early 2017, my whimsical and wistful story "Italian Hand Gestures" has been reprinted now by Doubleback Review (Issue 7:2 - October 2025).

 

The story is (first) about a self-conscious stutterer's discovery of the liberating world of hand gestures to express everything he couldn't convey otherwise.

 

"He especially liked the gesture where the hand moved level over the top of the head, meaning drily, 'go jump in a lake.'  He learned to tilt his hand slightly to specify which lake he had in mind—the lazy length of Lake Como, smoky and blue with late summer bonfires burning tendrils of old grape vine; the gusty German holiday-making shores of Lake Garda with garish bursts of sails; the chilly mirror of a snow-fed lake in the Alps down from the St. Bernard Pass, where the great dogs are raised and archaeologists scour the bedrock for traces of a Roman temple to Jupiter.

         Within just a few weeks, freed as he was from the impediments and hesitations of regular speech, Sam got into the more difficult signs.  The one that cries out with daring insouciance 'bring me some octopus!'  The one that asks 'is the blue of your eyes what the Renaissance artists made from lapis lazuli and called azzuro oltramarino?'  And that gentle flutter of the left-hand fingers against the palm of the other, half-reaching hand, that recalls in a quiet singsong how the sun brushed the pink-throated yellow roses on the morning of your great-grandparents' wedding day before the vows, I, Albert, take you, Nora."

 

 

Image:  Photo by Nahid Hatami on Unsplash

 

The Great Beyond

An appropriate story for this time of the year, Halloween Eve—a story of a ghostly haunting in northern New Mexico, was published earlier this month in Grande Dame Literary Journal.

A spiteful poltergeist, the family matriarch as it happens, is troubling the chapel she loved to retreat to in life—the now ruinous chapel next to the magical Tower of the Riddles, an adobe observatory and place of riddling the skies, initially intended as a belltower for the religious structure just below it on the hill, though the cast iron mission bell purchased in Mexico by one of the daughters had been lost in transit and never replaced.

 

When a frequent visitor to the Las Trampas ranch "asked Reuben [once her science teacher] to explain about the riddles in the tower's name, one summer night when they were studying the rings of Saturn, spectral bands of ice and rock and dust, he'd looked up from the eyepiece of the telescope and after thinking for a moment quoted the Neruda lines which he'd been taken with.  (Neruda's love of the natural world matching his own).

'the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.'"

 

 

image:  New Mexico, photographer unknown