That Was the Year

That was the winter I went around making false graves. I would tie sticks together into crosses with twine and plant them in the earth in the middle of a forest where few would pass. I was often on all fours clearing snow and leaves with my hands, which were like paws in my big gloves. The gloves were ancient. They were so ancient, they remembered you.  Or I would erect little cairns with white stones. Once, I made a memorial cross using an old bear trap I had found. Such a horrible mouth to think of there in the darkness. In the night. Often, I wrote first names on these monuments, Christian names mostly, but sometimes I chose names that used symbols from other alphabets or languages that are ideograms. Google would help me make the graves. Sometimes I used the names of characters from novels who had meant something to me. I laid these beloved characters in the earth, on which they had never truly lived. For instance, I made a grave for Bartleby. Sometimes I would want the people who would stumble upon one of these hallucinations to think it was an animal's grave rather than a human's. Or I would want them not to be sure. Many names have this ambiguity. The important thing is the feeling the person would have and how the grave might change the person for an instant or longer. I don't think these made people afraid, although it probably did make them wonder. And fear is leaven, anyway. This had nothing to do with art and everything to do with being a person. This is, I suppose, a failing. The thing I didn't want to tell you is that you have to actually dig a grave for this to be convincing. Even if there is no one, no animal, no human within it. But this is good exercise. My blood pressure came down that year.


--after a photograph by Walter Stoltz