Status Updates From The Soul is Not a Smithy

Sadder still was trying to imagine what he thought about as he sat there, imagining him perhaps thinking about us, our faces when he got home or the way we smelled at night after baths when he came in to kiss us on the top of the head — but the truth is that I have no real idea at all what he thought about, what his internal life might have been like.

I did not know that our mother’s making his lunch was one of the keystones of their marriage contract, or that in mild weather he took his lunch down in the elevator and ate it sitting on a backless stone bench that faced a small square of grass with two trees and an abstract public sculpture, or that on many mornings he steered by these 30 minutes outside the way mariners out of sight of land use stars.

The nightmares were vivid and powerful, but they were not the kind from which you wake up crying out and then have to try to explain to your mother when she comes what the dream was about so that she could reassure you that there was nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world.

For my own part, I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven.

In testing, many schoolchildren labeled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are observed to be not so much unable to pay attention as to have difficulty exercising control or choice over what it is they pay attention to.

And yet the lone moment of (the movie) that has stayed so emphatically with me over the years consisted only of a few frames, and had precisely this rapid, peripheral quality, and has obtruded at odd moments into my mind’s eye ever since.

 — in retrospect, I believe that the atmosphere of the classroom may have subconsciously influenced the unhappy events of the period’s window’s mesh’s narrative fantasy, which was now more like a nightmare, and was now proceeding radially along several rows and diagonals of panels at once, which required tremendous energy and concentration to sustain.

The total number of words on the chalkboard after the erasures was either 104 or 121, depending on whether one counted Roman numerals as words or not.

Then, as soon as the administrative heat was off, she would once more revert to sitting staring at her desktop or biting dead skin off of the sides of her thumbnail very slowly for the whole class period. She had also been known to eat paste. Everyone was a little afraid of her.

Such is adult memory’s strangeness, though, that I can still recall in great detail the sight of Dr. Biron-Maint’s nostrils, which were of noticeably different shape and size, and can remember trying to imagine various things that might have happened to his nose in life or even in his mother’s stomach as a baby to produce such a marked anomaly.

The top row’s back-story of the window’s large, black and dun dog is somewhat vague, and consists of a few hastily sketched panels involving a low cement building filled with dogs keening in cages, and a back alley in a seedy district in which several garbage cans are overturned and a man in a stained apron is shaking his fist at something we cannot see.

(it doesn’t matter to blind people whether the lights in a room are on or not)

What teachers and the administration in that era never appeared to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue.

Barring some obvious problem or characteristic, most adults’ faces were not easy to attend to closely at that age — their very adultness obscured all other characteristics.

—the same general expression as on a human being’s face when he is doing something that he feels compulsively driven to do and yet does not understand just why he wants to do it.

It was not a pretty sight, but it was vivid and compelling.