October: A Novel

By Lewis Ashman

October is a story of renewal and rebirth. An old man who has despaired of his life meets a woman and through his experiences with her he is inspired into a new life of strength, and hope, and creation, and even joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524576677

Lewis Ashman

Lewis Ashman is a graduate of Purdue University in philosophy. His novels Null And Void and October and his three poetry books Possible Worlds, Love And Other Wrongs, and April Fool, have been published by Xlibris.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by LEWIS ASHMAN.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017900624

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-7669-1

      Softcover      978-1-5245-7668-4

      eBook         978-1-5245-7667-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/16/2017

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

756044

Contents

Chapter One: How A Life Ends

Chapter Two: The Web Of Light

Chapter Three: Conceptual Investigations

Chapter Four: The Cause Of Human Sadness

Chapter Five: One’s Way Of Seeing

Chapter Six: The Generative Being

Chapter Seven: How A Life Begins

A MEMORY OF VARIOUS THINGS

However it happened we were spring

and flowers and eloquent vines

describing the side of a house in winter.

Many years passed and contained

many springs and many winters.

The order of the world is very old.

She was beautiful to me

like something new among

the broken shapes of the ruins

and I love her for the new life

she always was and continues to be.

CHAPTER ONE

How A Life Ends

It has been said that the purpose of life is to get ready to be dead for a long time. When he first read that he was sixteen and it didn’t have much meaning for him. From his perspective then, death was something that happened to very old people a long ways away, grandparents and great aunts and great uncles who were unbelievably shriveled up and lifeless anyway. He wasn’t especially cold-hearted, not for a sixteen year old, but it seemed to him that if a woman didn’t know who she was or where she was then death was more like an apostrophe than an event. At least to him. He knew that his mother grieved terribly over these infrequent deaths and even though he didn’t particularly feel anything himself, he felt bad for her. The idea that life is all about getting ready to be dead for a long time suggested to him that life was to be lived so completely and thoroughly that at the end one simply didn’t want it anymore. At the end of life one should be done with life forever. At sixteen that didn’t make much sense to him. He couldn’t see it.

It can happen though that looking back at the end of life one largely just sees a grim parade of terrible mistakes. That’s certainly how it was with him. Now at the edge of old age, with being sixteen only a dim and fuzzy memory, he could see nothing but blunders and wrong turns and choices that were deranged. He had embraced ambitions that couldn’t have come true no matter what he did, ambitions whose achievement was no more probable than finding a winning lottery ticket on a rainy dark street. He had been far too concerned for far too long about what other people, people he didn’t even know, thought of him. He hadn’t accepted his own strangeness and let himself be alone. By trying to be social he had only hurt other people and himself. He certainly never should have married anyone. Sex was for others and obviously for him whatever pleasure might have been in it was not worth the pain that came from the difficulty of trying to intimate with someone. His sons were too much like him to ever be happy in this world. He wished them the best and hoped for them, born as they were into a place of such frustration and misery. He hadn’t raised them right, he hadn’t raised them to be insulated and indifferent and cold and dull. Both his sons were far more successful than he had ever been, but he knew them and he knew they were hurt every day, sometimes deeply, and there was nothing he could do to help them. He was frightened for them; he was afraid they would grow old like him and wish they had never been.

And now, seeing all of this and finally reaching a true understanding of the small and limited person he was and should always have accepted himself as being, his life was essentially over. Even if he tried to now live the life he was really meant to live, an isolated life that was at least ethically sound, it didn’t matter. He had already lived his life and he had failed. He had not lived with detachment; he had not lived with the grace and gentleness that he knew was in the heart of his spirit. He had tried too hard to be someone else and he had failed everyone and he had failed himself.

Sometimes he tried to figure out where exactly he had gone wrong. The first most obvious place to land in these rather pointless reflections was high school graduation. If only he had shaved his head and joined the army instead of going to the university. That would have been different. At eighteen he already knew he was an alcoholic. He should have stopped drinking. He should have stopped smoking. He should have given up completely his insane and hopeless search for romantic love, something that was as impossible for him as time travel or spontaneous levitation is for everyone. If he had to go to the university, he should have given up his false pride and any notion of excelling at anything. He should have muddled through and managed a low B average in engineering or accounting and found an adequate low level job. He should have left other people alone.

And yet. If he examined the facts carefully and honestly he could see that at eighteen he had already gone off the rails and lost his way. By then there was already no hope for him. If he was going to have lived right, for himself as he was, he should have made different choices sooner. Perhaps when he was a Freshman in high school he could have made the right choices, different choices. That was before he ever drank or smoked; that was before he had developed his sadly inaccurate image of himself as an intellectual of extraordinary brilliance. But even then he had already taken the bait of wanting true love; even then he had deluded himself into thinking he could be socially popular and successful. He remembered with a twist of shame that one year he had actually run for class president. Of course he hadn’t won but that didn’t teach him anything. He had been lost in unreality. He didn’t know who he was or who he could be.

And so he must have gone wrong earlier. Like a pencil inching into his heart his contempt for himself drove deeper and deeper into his past. Maybe he went wrong in fifth grade when he first realized that his regular teacher and his art teacher and his Spanish teacher all hated him completely and without reservation. He could do nothing right for them and he spent altogether too much time standing in the hall alone in punishment. That was the year that his gym teacher actually kicked him. He had been standing there not paying attention, probably wondering how drunk his mother would be when he got home from school, and he was suddenly lifted from his feet by a hard kick to his butt that hurt like the dickens. His gym teacher then swore at him and called him a sissy and a flower, which was fine with him, but he didn’t like the pain at all and he felt a huge cloud of resentment engulf him that may have never gone away.

Or maybe it all went wrong earlier, in second grade when he was suddenly completely overwhelmed by the complicated concept of diphthongs and he slowly lowered his face to his desk and wept uncontrollably. His teacher, who was a sweet woman, rushed to console him, putting her arms around him and speaking gently to him. From the foreshortened perspective of his memory it seemed that she immediately died of breast cancer, but it must have been at least a few days before she was gone and replaced by some kind of Prussian drill master who was not merciful.

At that, maybe his fatal turn toward doom was going to school at all, though his wretched experience of Kindergarten was hardly a choice he made himself. It must have been earlier. And so he would land at two years old, a difficult year to remember with much clarity. Mostly he just remembered enjoying graham crackers. That seemed harmless enough, both to himself and the world. So maybe at three he went wrong. Maybe it had to do with some deeply repressed sense of failure at toilet training. He couldn’t remember but maybe he failed to poop properly and from then on everything, all of his life, was a train wreck.

And at that point his reflections on where it all went wrong would stop. If at two it was good and then at three he was already wrong then the whole thing was a hopeless disaster from the beginning. He never could have gotten it right. To think he might have gotten it right was more or less to say that everything would have been fine if he had been someone else. But he wasn’t someone else, he had lived as himself. And now, on the cusp of being elderly, he was ready to be dead forever. What the sixteen year old edition of himself couldn’t see he now embraced cheerfully enough as being reality. Life was almost done and he was ready to be dead for a long time.

Yes.

But he wasn’t dead yet. And there was no rush.

So.

What next.

CHAPTER TWO

The Web Of Light

He was glad to be back, though he had never been there before, not exactly, but the air had the feeling of memory and the leaves crinkling golden and dry on the stiff branches of fall were like something he had been before, existed as before, a landscape he had been absorbed into only to fall aside as another bit of nothing in the rich brilliance that was everything. He had always been there but he had never been there so it was a peculiar circumstance both familiar and unfamiliar, something to puzzle over and something to let go, walking on under what he at first thought were elms softly purple in the haze but turned out on a closer look to be soft maples and young oaks surrounded by milkweed and goldenrod and long stems of grass like wavering lines of ruin and success bleeding into and out of each other. There was no one to check with but it didn’t matter. Lackadaisical movements spoke of distant and silent despair, a light despair that could be weathered but not escaped, not entirely, though if it could be accessed laughter would have helped. There was no help, though he did laugh slightly at himself.

What goes on seems clear enough: theoretical extensions of mediocrity … there, we know what we’re up against but we still don’t know why. It is an extraordinary place where we have landed and even more amazing no one seems to remember getting here or where it is we came from. Equipment? None. Nothing but a feeling of being foreign and a certainty that nothing is working out the way it should, not for such beings as we are, spiritual beings having a physical experience. Life goes on, as it must, until it doesn’t; otherwise there isn’t much information here, though a sense can be gleaned from the silence of snow on a morning of remarkable cold, how subdued it all is, the quiet hush, and the moon tipped askew like the face of a crying child near the planet Venus.

We seem inclined to distinguish such things. Proportions are squinted at and found wanting but that’s merely a detail; you want to step back and get a feel for the whole scene without getting too caught up in minutia. Life is like that, and also football games. Life is always like something and football is a way to make huge sums of money off of the little people, tickets and promotions and tax breaks, so it’s a lot like life … football. I was in the game once but that was a long time ago; lately I’ve taken to watching the underside of the sky as it slides out of the eastern pines and drifts over toward the western enclosures, those mountains with their blue rock and icy silence and distance. I was never in the game, not really; I couldn’t believe what they told us counted and I couldn’t believe that any of it mattered, not like the dusky sparrows. All of it was presented as being essential life charted out according to definite rules but I knew there was something wrong in the works somewhere. For me it was both more simple and more complex: an apple on a tree, say. Then we apply our devices which are only shapes and methods of thought, though their inventors intended each of them to be as simple and direct as a mechanical process. Still they have their flexibility, somewhat resembling an avid yoga enthusiast lacking the true gift but supple enough to flow and change, orderly in response to intention. It is a singularity. If some of us don’t know what that is they’ll have to look it up, what it means in the finer sense of meaning anything. Move slightly right and there you are: two apples in two trees. Now nothing will be as easy as we hoped it would be. Apparently endless complications will unwind like the spool of time spitting out its thread of continuous minutes, those slight inadequate segments of our mere lives together. And no one will ever be sure, not actually, not really. Unless, somehow, they are.

He remembered with real fondness his visit to San Francisco. The city was beautiful of course, the bridges and buildings and the sea and bay; all of that was wonderful. Even the prison out on the island was something to study and visit and think about. It all seemed harmless enough now that it no longer held prisoners; a piece of history. And similarly the embankments above the Golden Gate where the Union soldiers placed cannons to defend the bay against the perfidious Confederates who might, you couldn’t tell, invade. Toy soldiers. But what he liked best was the way it seemed that everyone in San Francisco was gloriously happy to be there and wouldn’t dream of being somewhere else. Even the street people who had nothing seemed happy about the particular streets they were living on, the San Francisco streets. It was as if they were saying that they didn’t have anything, that was true, but look at the great place where they didn’t have anything. That kind of simple happiness was a blessing for him to experience.

Even identical twins are not the same person, the same selves. Separation begins at birth and goes on from perspective to perspective. For brothers who are not twins the gulf can be enormous, born perhaps decades apart, into essentially different families, even different worlds. Variety is essential to the experienced nature and whatever is provides endless harmony and disharmony, waiting for analysis. You have to get on it.

The male and female cardinals know all about this, to the extent they can be said to know anything. They play and frolic in the leaves, the green leaves even now in fall, chirping at each other, until suddenly a red male at the tip of a stem bursts into fabulous and excessive song. There are other males, perhaps brothers, other females, perhaps sisters; the males and the females equally devoted to riotous behavior, for birds.

Various descriptions are possible, but they are only descriptions after all. Isolated, the blank day became a blank wall separated from explanation by sense and nonsense, the equal sing-song rhyme of light and wealth, the curious flowing away, the distance drawing near. Lanky columns told themselves conditional truths of the actual and has been, the overall exhaustion of a world folded into blankets of concept and heart, winsome faculties at the icy point of perfectly formed intentional limbs, the branches of the will. To have understood is less than the life; to have believed is less even than lucky guesswork played out along the divining issues of shadow and waves, elastic clear folds of water becoming air becoming naked delight. They were handsome together and a structure of meaning in the insulated vectors of becoming. Kiss. Touch. Happiness and love.

The snow must have fallen dry and cold, it was Wisconsin after all, but I only remember playing in the snow when it was wet and weak and slush, turning to water in the gravel road, me only two, an early memory though not my first. As well the memory of the gas man fastening his hose from the truck to the tank, pumping it full, and how frightened I was, imagining him some creature other than human from somewhere completely beyond family. And then the table where my older brother and mother would set his toys which I was not to touch, me being too small and not to be trusted, though I could look and even then envy how everything was his and nothing was mine. There would be other brothers and even sisters later, younger than me, different, similar, what it was and would be.

Resemblance emphasizes variety, drawing it taut like a trip-wire threatening and deadly. In the restaurant skulls dangled from electric cords: it was nearly a holiday. The winter of earlier division was like a gulf of emptiness crossed by the silver blades of flying fish who sprang from the water as if chased by predator jaws only to fall back into the black and blue waves, which were nothingness. She only said to let them pray and leave it at that, but I had to look closer, feel the dimensions and their lies after all the plenty we had been promised. The skulls were white and marked by the black blisters of wounds. Each contained a tiny light bulb that vibrated like something alive, but it was dead. They served music in jars and plates of loneliness were handed around the empty tables. The air and time are unforgiving and the judgment of resemblance hangs like a street sign over the lost in their dismay. Lavender and gray, the thin clouds lie like a smear of guilt on the horizon, slipping quietly toward the growing darkness.

Next door the teenage girls are discussing, discussing; they are twins but not identical. It seems as if they are playing teacher and student but neither of them wants to be the student, they both want to be the teacher. Each takes her turn, speaking louder and slower in a voice with more and more authority, the rising ring of their competition which might end in screaming. But no. They are good girls; they would never scream over just that. Eventually they stop talking at all and I imagine each of them pouting in resentment at her sister’s unwillingness to follow, each irritated by her own just desire for command being rejected. Brothers and sisters. The world. And those beautiful cardinals in the snow, though there is no snow now, it is only early autumn.

Nothing was happening. The best of existence appeared to somehow be only a weak and dispirited imitation of itself, emptiness enfolding emptiness and displaying the stretch of nothing meeting nothing in a happy unawareness, the caress of an endless return to nothing. The leaves were still. His vocation for thinking led him quietly and harmlessly, running over a few same words in a regular pattern that resembled an explanation but was really more of a species of exhausted evasion, impenetrably vague even though moment by moment it seemed simple and resolutely clear. The actual would never offend him, not this actual in its disinterested emptiness, its assumptions of glamour in what was not and could not be. Possibility was there but he didn’t have to rise to it, he could ignore it and let it go in the same manner that the stones and small shapeless hills let the landscape go, to invent itself again or not as some unseen power behind it all might wish, or not.

He reassessed the situation, which was to summarize himself outside himself turned landscape and yet with the eye of a particular perspective and the sense to be this other called him or this one called I, me. Either would work or both at the same time. Reassessment finished, I drank orange juice and listened to the phone ring. I wouldn’t answer; it would only be politicians asking for money. He doesn’t have any money for them, or really much for himself, though his wife has plenty, part of which she grudgingly shares, but only a part, a slice, a meager sliver of white silver, something like the fat moon in fall shining over the Wabash River.

He thought the silence was absolute; he thought the silence was like the dome of a huge bell hanging over the world, brass hammered with a design of reeds on the outside, which he couldn’t see, being underneath. Here it was blue enamel, a pure clean blue enamel as level and even as a practiced lie. Here and there were yellow stars, very tiny, painted to resemble a cartoon of the night sky. It was quiet, it was silent, the dome was hard and cold and infinite.

He was distant. Distant and detached from himself and everyone else, but absorbed in everything as if he flavored exactly what he saw and turned it into a difference that others couldn’t see, a separation that was only there for himself. The glittering wrinkling leaves were like motions of his nerves; he could sense the trembling in his fingers. But it wasn’t real. Whatever that would be, the real, reality, would be some kind of genuine something not ultimately worth thinking about if you were only human, and he was human. And human, he could see the division between the assembly of the world perpetually displaying itself to him and his inner reconstruction of all of it into a resemblance to something quite other, tinged with emotions that weren’t there, the spiritual which might have been only the psychological, the matter of the soul which might have been only some insubstantial subconscious fear and desire.

The days were mine as much as anyone’s and there were many