For the past several weeks, Rothko, one of my two dogs, has been reluctant to venture outside when it comes time to do our late-night Final Pee, Sniff and Patrol Mission. This has been because of the explosions. Rothko was named after the abstract-expressionist painter who ended his own life in 1970, but his melancholy and existential despair are actually only projections of his owner's imagination. He's actually a pretty carefree dog...except when it comes to loud bangs. He does not so much care for the explosions. Unfortunately, Philadelphia has been riddled with them for at least the past month. Most of the explosions have been of the consumer-fireworks variety, but just before those started, we also had a rash of ATM bombings across the city, one of which happened right across the street from my apartment and was so loud and alarming that it may have scarred Rothko (by which I mean me) for life.
My other dog, Kaiya, doesn't mind the explosions so much. Or if she does, she doesn't show it. She is reactive only when it comes to crossing paths with other dogs, which pisses her off to no end. But loud bangs caused by things like gunpowder or the expansion of air surrounding a lightning bolt don't really faze her. They faze Rothko, though, quite a bit. All 70 pounds of him. In fact, I think he has started to equate nighttime with "loud bang" time, and as a result, he begins panting and drooling in fear when I start to put on his harness, before we've even left the apartment for a walk. When we step outside, he pees right at the front door to my building, something he didn't used to do, as if to say, okay we really don't need to go any further than this, Bald Man. But I make us walk at least across the street, and it's usually there in front of the tile store that we will hear the first firework, and even if it's just a faint pop in the distance, he'll drop close to the ground and start scrambling back in the direction of my apartment, claws scratching on concrete. I imagine he thinks the world is ending.
The world is ending. I mean, it feels that way, doesn't it? I have said this at least a dozen times to friends and family. And this is how I've always envisioned the world would end — with explosions. Or rather with one great explosion so impossibly large and loud we would never even hear it, because by the time we would recognize it as an explosion we'd be dead. And so the explosion would be more like silence than sound, just a split second of empty sky looking directly at darkness and stars, like what a dinosaur near the Gulf of Mexico may have seen if it happened to look up at the exact right moment 65 million years ago, right before that creature's 100-million year long reign on this planet came to an end. Explosions mark the ending of things. But they also mark the beginning of something else.
And that brings me to writing, because that's what this letter is supposed to be about, after all. For me, there are explosions that happen at the beginning of a writing project, and there are explosions that happen at the end of it. The explosions at the beginning are the scary explosions. They represent whatever scary thing it suddenly occurs to me to write about. An incident that happened in childhood, or the loss of someone I loved. The loss of love, itself. I recognize there's something loud and powerful there, but holy crap I don't know if I like it. I don't know where it will take me or how I'm going to make sense of it, and it really just seems like I should leave it the fuck alone. These are the explosions that make me want to claw my way back to my couch and my habits of avoidance, to maintain the status quo of a life without any goddamn explosions in it.
But then there are the explosions that happen at the end of a writing project, and these are the good explosions and make braving the scary explosions worth it. They happen at the moment when I finally figure out what the thing is I'm writing, when I figure out where it is going and what it means. Or that maybe it means nothing, and that's okay. Thank god for those explosions. Sometimes I worry they never will come, but they almost always do. And when they do, it is such a relief. They are the booming loud ones, the ones that appear as big flashes of light a second or two before I actually hear them, feel them in my chest. How satisfying they are. I long for them. I really do. For the bang that marks the leap to the other side of what felt like an impossible chasm of thought, of life, of experience.
The explosions are happening right now, as I write this. The literal explosions. The firework explosions, meant to celebrate the birth of a country. Rothko is panting, perhaps too present in some past trauma he'd like to forget. Kaiya is sleeping, blissfully and persistently disassociated from her past traumas, like America herself. And I'm here writing this and sipping tea and noting how the explosions feel less celebratory and more filled with dark portent than ever before in my lifetime.
Be safe. Wear a mask. I hope you experience some positive explosions in your writing this week. Please take a moment to enjoy the pieces below. Only two this time. Brief, but mighty.
Thanks for reading. We're glad you're here.
David Olimpio
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS REVIEW
FICTION
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
by DS Levy
"Wiping tears from her eyes, she drove on, not looking in her rearview mirror, never once noticing the horizon over her left shoulder where wads of bruised clouds rolled in over Lake Michigan."
"You hobble to the door
to hug my daughters. It’s a long drive from the hot south
to this windy, frost-heaved frontier, where we speak,
as always, our pidgin of nods and sighs, signifying nothing."
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