Hammer

by Jeff M

For as soon as your reasoning begins to proclaim the nature of things...away flee the mind's terrors, the walls of the world open out...

I'm reading Lucretius, specifically his work On the Nature of Things (cited above), and I can't get out of my head an image I just witnessed: that of a photograph taken of me when I was 20-years old, standing in a friend's apartment at Cedar Point Amusement Park where we worked.

I am quite thinner and my hair is as black and thick as a stallion. I can see my wrist bone plainly, my hand like a claw as it grasped the beer bottle. I'm not holding a cigarette because I didn't smoke back then. I'm standing with four other fellows whose names come easily --- Joe, Scott, Jim, and Paul. We all looked so happy, a happiness that is easily recognized when you stumble over old pictures. The happiness, as if it were a tangible thing, comes at you as if it were a bullet. You simply cannot deny it.

Then I stumble over an old notebook of mine. It's a small Mead notebook and the black words scribbled inside have bled with age, yellowed. This was a notebook that I bought and filled about 7 years following the photograph. I glimpse I've always followed the rules, even when I was breaking them and She says it's always about your writing with you always and I can't tell her but I do that it was there first that it was my first love and that such an alliance is not easily forgotten.

Then, unmistakably, clearly, a portent to the past, a past that is the now and the now that is most likely the future:

I couldn't tell you when I was happiest, and I suppose that's a betrayal: this miracle of wife and son is miraculous --- but when I was most happy...was when I wasn't sure what to be happy about, unlike now when I know I should be happy but feel somehow not here, as though some great piece of me has been marooned and left to wander for itself when it is here --- right here --- waiting for an explanation: when I was happiest was when I was young and writing.

I was writing when that photograph was taken. I wasn't writing anything particularly good or memorable, but I was writing. I was sitting down each day at a Smith Corona typewriter and putting words to thought and reasoning them out on paper. I don't remember any specific horrors in my life back then. I held the universe in my hand and made of it a hammer that I swung through nine to five.

We all get so far from where we once started, don't we? How do we get there? I suppose --- no, I know --- it's the way we reason, how we convert thought to action. As we age, matters become more complicated. Some entity --- usually ourselves --- throws a spoon in the garbage disposal; a tree gets in the way of our kite.

I still write, but maybe now it's better or worse than before. That remains unclear. I sometimes think that I put the tree in the way of the kite, that I've secretly sabotaged myself.

My reasoning is this, then, and it's a statement that is not new to me but is nevertheless surprising when I hear it reconfirmed: You have to find whatever it is in your life that makes you swing the hammer.