PHILADELPHIA NOTEBOOK

by D. FREDERICK THOMAS

If you set enough tangents around a circle, you begin to recreate the shape of the circle itself.

Teju Cole

Years ago, she recalled, she’d read something by a writer she’d loved deeply at the time, a sort of compressed work of self-analysis that wasn’t quite memoir and also wasn’t quite essay, nor was it quite anything, or any one thing in particular. And though she’d loved it at the time, as she had then loved everything by this writer to one degree or another, only a year or so after having read it she realized she couldn’t recall anything specific from the work other than a single moment of fleeting observation in which the writer had observed that every time she went back to her parents’ home – in which she hadn’t lived for decades at that point, when writing – she felt as if the space was somehow diminished, literally reduced, a smaller space than it had been, as if her parents’ physical environment was shrinking with them, and she had noted how clumsy it made her feel, how big and incorrect for the space, for each room, in the same way that as a child and then an adolescent she had regarded the environment as fixed and her own physical self as the unstable thing – the dynamic was the same even if the emotional experience of it was profoundly changed. She became aware of her parents as almost mercurial, like bodies in the process of slowly metamorphosing into memories, and she unable to join them in that state, and even now, after it had been years since she’d read that passage and also years since she’d cared deeply for the work of that writer whom she’d held in such high esteem, still that one observation remained in her mind, periodically returning to her as if to make her aware of some not entirely noticed relation between her and the world, or her and herself, a wobbliness that was easy to mistake for lots of other things – grace, beauty, a sort of shimmer, euphoria, epiphany, but then that recalled passage would return to her and she would feel that once-loved writer’s bigness, her clumsiness, and feel it as her own, wobbling through her own existence as if she was an adult person returning to a childhood home, incapable of squaring the different layers of perception with one another, grating along a sort of uneven edge. She couldn’t even remember the name of the piece of writing anymore nor where she’d read it – it hadn’t been in a book but rather had appeared in a magazine or journal of some sort, she’d tracked it down specifically to read the new piece of writing by that writer, but she hadn’t held onto the publication, or if she had she no longer knew where it was, beneath something else, behind, tucked within. And so it was effectively gone, reduced only to the half-memorized passage, almost as if the writing itself had undergone the transformation it described.

—

Something so uncouth about a man with his toothbrush on his person.

Of course, the speaker is not the poem.

—

At my parents’ house, my children each try to photograph the back garden from the window of my childhood bedroom. First through the screen, so that when the instant exposure develops it’s a uniform color that is almost black but not quite, the flash hitting fine mesh and creating its opposite. Then I show them how to open the screen and they take turns leaning out the window and shooting at different angles. In one of the pictures it is so lush one might mistake it for a forest.

There are no ants here. In the yard, the kids see two rabbits. Their photographs convey a haste and almost fervent attentiveness. The camera eye barely sees the subject, or misunderstands the intention of the person seeing and trying in vain to make that seeing last forever. The yard is so big and in each photo the animal is little more than a small form. But later, when they talk to their mother on the phone – consulting the images as they speak – it is as if they are seeing a third thing, neither the thing sought nor the thing captured.

—

My brother talks about his children as if they are precocious almost beyond measure. Yet they are just children, flawed and unremarkable in their utter nascence. My own children were no different. Even now my own children are no different. I am no different.

To treat something unremarkable with language inordinately grand makes the thing, when encountered, seem pale and reduced. One sees not the thing but the gap between the thing and what one has been told the thing would be, or is being told – even in the moment – it is.

He is up there, moving about on the old floorboards with the baby crying in his arms. During the day, their two-year-old is strange and moves around the house like a camera that occasionally tries to break itself against the floor or the corner of a table; when he speaks, he speaks in a language only his parents can understand.

—

In the backseat of my parents’ car with my children, driving back to Philadelphia, M. is leaning on me, asleep; I’m holding her head up with one hand and reading Franz Wright with the other; when I need to turn the page, unable to do so one-handed, I pass the book to C., sitting by the other window and listening to music through her headphones; she turns the page and passes it back to me.

They need constant sound. Music loud. Talking all the time. As she drives, he keeps reaching for the iPad and absently reading the news. (Of course, when I was little, he would always have a newspaper. Maybe they have always been this way.) My children, too, though. Never not in motion. Never silent. The problem is when I am with them all. I can see the way in which the one kind of restlessness is almost the opposite of the other. A sort of turning away from life / a desire to consume it all as quickly as possible, to run directly at it.

—

I grew up in this house and so all I want to do is leave – I want to get out and walk as far as possible in any direction. Both to recall every night, to feel the delightful frisson of memory rubbing up against a reality it no longer matches, and to remind myself that I no longer live here, that it is as easy as stepping out the door. But my children are content to sit on the floor, sit at the table, play games, no rush to be elsewhere. Visiting here, far from home, they are elsewhere. And, having arrived, they can’t see any point in finding some other, less meaningful elsewhere.

To leave is to never be able to return again – those who remained make it impossible for one to experience the place to which one has returned in a way that at all resembles the way one experienced it before one left. One is conspicuous, made much of, and cannot simply move in the invisible way one once moved, seeing a space almost as if not within it, as if one was a part of it. Or those who remained have since departed as well – moved away, died – and the place returned to is no longer the place one remembers it being, resembling it only in part, no longer possessing life, or the life one once lived. The place is never the place one remembers it being. But one can almost get back there, if only for a moment.

—

“I can still remember the one and only time I was alone with my mother. She picked me up from Brownies and we walked the five blocks back to our house, just the two of us, me and my mom. She had brought a chocolate bar for me in the pocket of her dress and after we had walked a block she gave it to me. Then, as we passed a telephone pole and split apart to pass on either side of it, she said ‘Bread and butter.’ I was confused and asked what she’d said, why she’d said it. She explained that it was something people said when they passed a telephone pole that way, or anything that way, moving apart and coming back together again – ‘bread and butter.’ That was the only time I remember being alone with her – with my mother. And I still say ‘bread and butter’ whenever I’m walking with someone and that happens. Sometimes aloud, but usually just to myself.”

—

What it is is that by changing the title, you create a productive relationship between it and the final line of the poem. If there’s nothing for that last line to relate to, it falls short. But no other line could do more without drawing too much attention to itself. Sometimes the only way to a kind of mundane elegance – or elegance in the mundane – is through proximity.

This morning, in the cold, I listened to a man in a public park play ‘Purple Rain’ on a piano the way Prince played it on the demos from the vault, singing so that his voice echoed off the playground equipment across the sloping field. ¶ At the entrance to the park, two Jehovah’s Witnesses stood side-by-side, no one passing them in all the time I sat on the bench, reading and writing and listening to the way sound played with itself like something alive and uncertain of its own selfhood. ¶ I have been the person who was unsure of itself. Been the thing that fit only halfway into a form barely defined. The self is a context. But within that context are so many varied things that we reach for language and fail and return to where we were, content, or at least contained. ¶ Now, at a wedding, I sit in the middle of a crowd and listen to a live band moving through one song after another. I’m not sure what sound means, but goddamn if it’s not the thing that keeps meeting me like God – like encountering the self made manifest, but a self unburdened of almost everything one thought made the self self.

I am still the kid not dancing, sitting to the side and saying I would dance if they’d only play something I liked. ¶ I find the person on the dance floor who looks most bored and unengaged and I think, ‘That would be me.’ And so then: ‘What point is there?’ ¶ Where once there was pleasure in intentionally being this self, now the pleasure is in spotting this self in the crowd, like finding an old friend at a party – hello, I didn’t know I would miss you until you were gone. And now here we are, alive and just as ornery as ever.

—

Of course, he speaks of his babies the way he wishes his parents had spoken of him. His parenting is itself a kind of speech, articulating something he’s barely realized he’s trying to say in a language he’s either too scared to use or hasn’t even learned yet. Or the speaking is the learning; or there is no learning – only speaking.

—

Dear J.,

I remember going with you to see your father perform in the orchestra downtown and then waiting for him outside the performers’ entrance, the door to backstage after most of the audience had dispersed into the night. We stood there for a while in expectant silence and then he came out with the other performers, one by one, tired, some dressed now in their day clothes, some still dressed as they’d been on the stage, some greeting those who were waiting for them, others walking past alone and heading home for the night to do it again the next day and the day after that and beyond.

Now here I am, ten years later or so, pacing on a sidewalk outside the staff entrance to the hospital where you work and have worked for years. Above me, the emergency helicopter comes in to land. I’m recording this as a voice message to myself so I’m not writing in my notebook when you come out the door, and I worry that the sound of the helicopter above will make it impossible for me to understand my own words later, listening to this tonight or tomorrow, in the morning.

I just wanted to note the sense of a pattern repeated. Waiting beside you; waiting for you. And the ways in which we are all so unlike and so like our parents, all at once whether we know it or not. Maybe you’ll come out still in scrubs or dressed in your day clothes, alone or accompanied by others. But tonight I am the only one waiting, speaking poetry into the early autumn air.

—

Then I get off the train and look down the street to see an entire block’s worth of street lights rapidly flickering off and on without discernable pattern and none of the other lights behaving strangely, a surreal tableau through fine mist illuminated by headlights.

author pic here

D. Frederick Thomas is the author of the short novel Exhibition Text (Vagabond Press, 2024), with work having appeared in publications such as FENCE, Heavy Feather Review, Pictura, Locative Magazine and Meniscus. Originally from Philadelphia, Thomas lives in Brisbane/Magandjin, Australia.

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