Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Nabokov’s protagonists live in claustrophobic, cell-like rooms; and Humbert, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), and Krug in Bend Sinister (1947) are all indeed imprisoned. The struggle to escape from this spherical prison (Krug is Russian for “circle”) assumes many forms throughout Nabokov; and his own desperate and sometimes ludicrous attempts, as described in Speak, Memory , are variously parodied in the poltergeist machinations of The Eye , in Hazel Shade’s involvement with “a domestic ghost” and her spirit-writing in the haunted barn in Pale Fire , and in “The Vane Sisters” (in Tyrants Destroyed [1975]), where an acrostic in the final paragraph reveals that two vivid images from the story’s opening paragraphs were dictated by the dead Vane sisters. Although Speak, Memory clearly illuminates the self-parodic content of Nabokov’s fiction, no one has fully recognized the aesthetic implications of these transmutations or the extent to which Nabokov consciously projected his own life in his fiction. To be sure, this is dangerous talk, easily misunderstood. Of course Nabokov did not write the kind of thinly disguised transcription of personal experience which too often passes for fiction. But it is crucial to an understanding of his art to realize how often his novels are improvisations on an autobiographic theme, and in Speak, Memory Nabokov good-naturedly anticipates his critics: “The future specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel The Gift with the original event.” Further on he comments on his habit of bestowing “treasured items” from his past on his characters. But it is more than mere “items” that Nabokov has transmogrified in the “artificial world” of his novels, as a dull specialist discovers by comparing Chapters Eleven and Thirteen of Speak, Memory with The Gift , or, since it is Nabokov’s overriding subject, by comparing the attitudes toward exile expressed in Speak, Memory with the treatment it is given in his fiction. The reader of his memoir learns that Nabokov’s great-grandfather explored and mapped Nova Zembla (where Nabokov’s River is named after him), and in Pale Fire Kinbote believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. His is both a fantastic vision of Nabokov’s opulent past as entertained by a madman and the vision of a poet’s irreparable loss, expressed otherwise by Nabokov in 1945: “Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre, / I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns” (“An Evening of Russian Poetry”). Nabokov’s avatars do not grieve for “lost banknotes.” Their circumstances, though exacerbated by adversity, are not exclusive to the émigré.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  In 1951, Emmett Gossett suffocated when a mound of sand collapsed on him. Gossett was nine years old. He had gone with a friend to play near the equipment that pulverized river gravel into the sand used for the stucco walls of the new houses the three developers were putting up. The boys began playing at the base of a hopper, where a partial load of sand had been taken away. The remaining sand, slightly damp, formed a wall higher than a grown man. Gossett dug into its base and the wall of unstable sand collapsed. The efforts of the other boy to free Gossett caused even more sand to cover him. Workmen at the cement plant, and county fire fighters when they arrived, failed to resuscitate the boy. He was buried at All Souls Cemetery. 249 The cities Billy C and I built in my mother’s garden all ended in the same way. We took my father’s garden hose and laid it some feet away from the rows of houses and garages. One of us turned the water on so that it barely flowed. In a few minutes, the water would pool at one end of the main street in our dirt city. A little later, water would pour through the doorways and fill up the rooms. The mud walls melted. 250 My city is concerned about disaster. County and state agencies evaluated their response to the Northridge earthquake and warned city officials that communities like mine will be on their own for three days following a major earthquake. Police and fire departments will be overwhelmed. The Red Cross and National Guard will concentrate in urban areas, not in these neighborhoods of small houses. In preparation, the city is trying to get residents to change their habits. I’ve written articles for the Chamber of Commerce newspaper urging residents to keep a three-day supply of food and water at home and to carry clothing and simple camping equipment in their car.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  When I was 50-60 pages into my book, I tried to describe its structure for my publisher. I described three significant sections in the book. The Present: The 6 weeks from Rosalie’s death in November 2011 to January 1, 2012. The Past: New York to Gainesville: the story of our move from New York City to Gainesville, Florida, from January 2009 to September 2011. Though we planned for more than 2 years to move, Rosalie lived only 10 weeks there, and seemed enormously happy. Essays, diversions, and poetics: These sections examine metaphor, imagery, and ideas and grapple with events and contextualize them—trying to understand the impossible to understand. The division between these categories is somewhat fluid. Two of them are timelines containing the main story. The third contains poetic, philosophical, spiritual, and formal inquiries. The above is an accurate description of the book. Categories 2 and 3 begin the book, interweaving semi-equally with occasional intrusions from The Present (Category 1). After chapter 5 , the book becomes mostly about (1), The Present, with the “essays, diversions, and poetics” (3) weaving in and out, mostly through the caption boxes. THE STORY ARC Agents, publishers and producers always want to know the story arc. And most readers will respond to it, too. Earlier in this chapter I said “learning is the key.” The story arc is about this learning. What do the characters learn? How do they change? If they are one way in the beginning, how are they different in the end? To help myself find that arc, I asked what the characters (my wife and I) wanted. I answered with the following: What the characters want: • Messages from Rosalie • To see her, to sense her still there • To find her and raise her • To turn back the clock, to go into the past • To not hate seeing the moon, and the stars, and the other beautiful things she loved and they shared. These questions became guides to making sure that the “present” sections had a unified focus. A lot of events were dropped from the original outline because they didn’t contribute significantly to the characters’ wants and needs as stated above. And then I asked: How must they (meaning us, in real life) change? • They must come to a new relationship with Rosalie. • They must become free of denial. • They must work with Rosalie’s power to help them look forward. In the pitch for my book, I supplied 40+ pages of the beginning, but also 4-5 later pages, so that readers could get a sense of the arc and how the characters change. Envisioning the arc and the change was a good exercise to help me stay focused. The images at left are initial designs from the original final section, which were somewhat changed for the final book. Early drafts trying to figure out the emotional ending.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  INTRODUCTION In 2010, I was an award-nominated, acclaimed cartoonist and teacher with no interest in creating autobiography. My work and life led me to find creative fufillment in fiction—usually blends of serious and silly fables. That is, until 2011, when my daughter died suddenly just shy of her second birthday. The shock of this caused me to bury myself in the actions I knew best: writing and drawing. I wrote about what I was going through, and soon realized I needed to wrestle with it in drawing, too. Thus, I began my first autobiographical comic, a graphic memoir, Rosalie Lightning (2016, St. Martin’s Press). I’ve always been an artist to look to the great work before me for inspiration and guidance. And so in creating my story, I turned to lots of master examples of the genre. In this book I want to share with you everything that I learned in looking at these master examples, as well as how I tried to transmute their wisdom as I worked on Rosalie Lightning. In the “My Story” sections, I’ll show detailed notes, sketches, and drafts that relate to the topics I’ve brought up. This book is designed to get you, too, from initial thoughts, ideas, and memories to a finished graphic memoir, so in addition to my own notes and experiences, I’ll also review those master examples and complete exercises to get you better and deeper into your own story. We’ll go step by step from idea to completion and you will gather lots of tools and inspirations on the way. Our path is divided into nine sections, and in each section and step we’ll take a quick look at a few great graphic memoirs and then we’ll complete one exercise and look to at least three optional exercises to get us further along. I run a comics school in Gainesville, Florida—The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW). I’ve had the privilege of guiding many students through the telling of their own stories. This book is a product of their energy and strength as much as mine. Whether you’re eager to share stories you’ve had inside you for a long time, or want to draw stories that you’ve previously told some other way, this book is designed to inspire and get you there. Ultimately, telling our stories strengthens us, deepens us, and makes us more alive, compassionate, and empathetic, as it connects our lives to history and to the world around us. It helps us connect broadly across time and across peoples. It changes us; it changes the world.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it. At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through the doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor. “Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as totally strange, and new, and cheerful, and old, and sad, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing. Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin. We shook hands. Discreet Bill, who evidently took pride in working wonders with one hand, brought in the beer cans he had opened. Wanted to withdraw. The exquisite courtesy of simple folks. Was made to stay. A beer ad. In point of fact, I preferred it that way, and so did the Schillers. I switched to the jittery rocker. Avidly munching, Dolly plied me with marshmallows and potato chips. The men looked at her fragile, frileux , diminutive, old-world, youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige vest, maybe a viscount. They were under the impression I had come to stay, and Dick with a great wrinkling of brows that denoted difficult thought, suggested Dolly and he might sleep in the kitchen on a spare mattress. I waved a light hand and told Dolly who transmitted it by means of a special shout to Dick that I had merely dropped in on my way to Readsburg where I was to be entertained by some friends and admirers. It was then noticed that one of the few thumbs remaining to Bill was bleeding (not such a wonder-worker after all). How womanish and somehow never seen that way before was the shadowy divison between her pale breasts when she bent down over the man’s hand! She took him for repairs to the kitchen. For a few minutes, three or four little eternities which positively welled with artificial warmth, Dick and I remained alone. He sat on a hard chair rubbing his forelimbs and frowning. I had an idle urge to squeeze out the blackheads on the wings of his perspiring nose with my long agate claws. He had nice sad eyes with beautiful lashes, and very white teeth. His Adam’s apple was large and hairy. Why don’t they shave better, those young brawny chaps? He and his Dolly had had unrestrained intercourse on that couch there, at least a hundred and eighty times, probably much more; and before that—how long had she known him? No grudge. Funny—no grudge at all, nothing except grief and nausea. He was now rubbing his nose. I was sure that when finally he would open his mouth, he would say (slightly shaking his head): “Aw, she’s a swell kid, Mr. Haze. She sure is.

• From Querelle (1953)

  173 I QUERELLE now?" He was on the verge of grief, not despair, but the grief of a child, abandoned, if only for an instant, when night is coming on. Strength and conviction were ebbing away. He was not a true murderer. He was afraid. "You think it's all over for me, if they catch me?" " \Vho knows. It's a lottery. But don't start worrying now. They won't get you." .. You're a real buddy. What's your first nan1e?" "] o." ••You're a buddy, J o. I'll never forget it." At last his soul was filled with joy at the encounter with Qu erelle who was on his way out and back to normal life, and who was strong, with the strength of a hundred million people. Sheltering behind the old prison walls, Gil was unable to watch the scenes at dusk and daw n"' that went on outside, but the sounds of banging, the shouts from the naval shipyards came filtering through the stones and conjured up some pleas ant images in Gil's mind. Within the young man imprisoned by those walls, by his guilt, and by his adolescence, almost stifled by anguish and by the all-pervasive smell of tar, the powers of imagination began to unfold with extraordinary vigor. They struggled bravely with all the aforementioned obstacles, and in that battle they grew strong. Listening, Gil could pick out the particular squeak and grind of cranes and pulley blocks. His wo rk gang had not been stationed in Brest for very long, and thus he had not yet become impervious to the vivid scenery of the naval shipyards. He had taken in those clear, incisive noises th at corresponded to a sunbeam striking a brass rail, a splinter of glass, to a decorated launch flashing by with its load of very upright, gilded officers, to a sail out in the Roads, t o the slow maneuvering of a cruiser, to the naval cadets' businesslike yet puerile rigging drill. In the prisoner, each one of these noises released an image a thousand times more exciting than their

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The death of his father, even more than the death of his mother three years before, could free him from an obligation. His father’s goodness was part of that obligation. His father’s refusals were a part of it, too. His father died on Sunday night, the 15th of August and the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 56 I waited on the edge of my bed in the middle bedroom, in a room that had been mine only since I started college. Rooms are small in houses that have less than eleven hundred square feet of living area. The room I slept in was ten feet by ten feet. All the bedrooms in my house open on a hallway barely thirteen feet long. My father’s bedroom and the back bedroom are both ten feet by thirteen feet. I heard my father pass down the hall by the closed door of my room as I waited. It was late Sunday night. My father passed by on his way to the bathroom to take a shower. He showered at night. I showered in the morning. We had not agreed on this arrangement. I waited for my father to take his shower so I could use the bathroom and get ready for bed. While I waited, I thought of his death. Later, I heard a groan. It was not remarkable. I heard the shower door slam. I waited for the sound of water running. Some time later, I looked for a narrow-blade screwdriver. I tried to force the bathroom door with my shoulder. Later still, I saw his corpse. 57 In my city, a fire engine arrives before the paramedic unit. The fire fighters and the city’s three fire stations are part of a regional fire protection district covering nearly the entire county. All fire fighters are trained as Emergency Medical Technicians, a level of medical training just below that of a paramedic. The fire department’s plan to train fire fighters to respond to medical emergencies was tested in this suburb, as were other innovations in public safety. Also, there are hardly any fires. 58 In forty-one years, fewer than a dozen houses have burned to the ground here. Fire damage rarely totals more than three or four hundred thousand dollars a year. The successful fires are sometimes deliberate. A woman nine blocks west of my street woke up early one morning and went to the garage. She took a gallon of gasoline, fuel for her husband’s lawn mower, and poured the gasoline around the foundation of the house. She set the gasoline on fire and waited quietly in the dawn for the flames to build. A newspaper carrier on his bike saw the fire next, about a half-hour later. By then, the eaves of the roof had caught. When the fire engines arrived, the trees in the front yard had turned black, and the woman had already been taken away.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But a few incidents pertaining to those four or five days after Charlotte’s simple death, have to be noted. My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as the child who had slept in that bed. Next morning I hastened to inspect the fragments of letters in my pocket. They had got too thoroughly mixed up to be sorted into three complete sets. I assumed that “… and you had better find it because I cannot buy …” came from a letter to Lo; and other fragments seemed to point to Charlotte’s intention of fleeing with Lo to Parkington, or even back to Pisky, lest the vulture snatch her precious lamb. Other tatters and shreds (never had I thought I had such strong talons) obviously referred to an application not to St. A. but to another boarding school which was said to be so harsh and gray and gaunt in its methods (although supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the nickname of “Reformatory for Young Ladies.” Finally, the third epistle was obviously addressed to me. I made out such items as “… after a year of separation we may …” “… oh, my dearest, oh my …” “… worse than if it had been a woman you kept …” “… or, maybe, I shall die …” But on the whole my gleanings made little sense; the various fragments of those three hasty missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as their elements had been in poor Charlotte’s head. That day John had to see a customer, and Jean had to feed her dogs, and so I was to be deprived temporarily of my friends’ company. The dear people were afraid I might commit suicide if left alone, and since no other friends were available (Miss Opposite was incommunicado, the McCoos were busy building a new house miles away, and the Chatfields had been recently called to Maine by some family trouble of their own), Leslie and Louise were commissioned to keep me company under the pretense of helping me to sort out and pack a multitude of orphaned things. In a moment of superb inspiration I showed the kind and credulous Farlows (we were waiting for Leslie to come for his paid tryst with Louise) a little photograph of Charlotte I had found among her affairs. From a boulder she smiled through blown hair. It had been taken in April 1934, a memorable spring. While on a business visit to the States, I had had occasion to spend several months in Pisky. We met—and had a mad love affair.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author. And yet one of my very few intimate friends, after reading Lolita , was sincerely worried that I (I!) should be living “among such depressing people”—when the only discomfort I really experienced was to live in my workshop among discarded limbs and unfinished torsos. After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way. November 12, 1956 Notes In this eBook edition of The Annotated Lolita , you will find two types of hyperlinks. The first type is embedded into the number at the beginning of each chapter: these links allow you to move back and forth between the text and the notes. Notes specifically about a part of the text are linked to that part of the text. The second type of link, indicated by a “see” reference, allows you to move from one note to a related note. All page references to other Nabokov books are to the Vintage paperback editions.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He had to talk so as not to be silent, and he did not know what to say, especially as his brother made no reply, and simply stared without dropping his eyes, and evidently penetrated to the inner meaning of each word. Levin told his brother that his wife had come with him. Nikolay expressed pleasure, but said he was afraid of frightening her by his condition. A silence followed. Suddenly Nikolay stirred, and began to say something. Levin expected something of peculiar gravity and importance from the expression of his face, but Nikolay began speaking of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw that he still hoped. Seizing the first moment of silence, Levin got up, anxious to escape, if only for an instant, from his agonizing emotion, and said that he would go and fetch his wife. “Very well, and I’ll tell her to tidy up here. It’s dirty and stinking here, I expect. Marya! clear up the room,” the sick man said with effort. “Oh, and when you’ve cleared up, go away yourself,” he added, looking inquiringly at his brother. Levin made no answer. Going out into the corridor, he stopped short. He had said he would fetch his wife, but now, taking stock of the emotion he was feeling, he decided that he would try on the contrary to persuade her not to go in to the sick man. “Why should she suffer as I am suffering?” he thought. “Well, how is he?” Kitty asked with a frightened face. “Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful! What did you come for?” said Levin. Kitty was silent for a few seconds, looking timidly and ruefully at her husband; then she went up and took him by the elbow with both hands. “Kostya! take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!” she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it. Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna by now, he went again in to his brother with Kitty. Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty went into the sick-room, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that he had not to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh young hand the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to women.

• From Querelle (1953)

  He did not want to become one of them. His joining the Navy had undoubtedly been due to that recruitment poster, but only because it had suddenly revealed to him the possibility of an easy life. We shaH have more to say about posters. Just as he was about to get on the train to Nantes, from the track side, the detectives grabbed Gil Turko. They had been tipped off by a phone call from one of the pay telephones in 239 I QUERELLE the station : an individual resembling the murderer of the sailor and the mason, though in disguise, would try to get on that train. It was Dede who made the call. The detectives found only a minimal amount of money on Gil's person. They took the young man down to the station, where they interrogated him on his doings during the time elapsed between the second murder and the moment of his arrest. Gil claimed to have been sleeping here and there, in the dockyards, out by the ramparts. Quereiie experienced a feeling of pain when the papers informed him of Gil's arrest and subsequent transfer to the prison in Rennes. The movement of this book has to be speeded up. It will be necessary to pare down the narrative to its bare bones. However, mere noteS won't be sufficient. Let us give some explanations : if the reader feels surprised ( we say surprised rather than moved or indignant, in order to stress the fact that this novel deals with exhibits ) by the pain Quereiie felt upon learning of Gil's arrest which he himself had engineered the day before, we would like him to review the development of Quereiie's career. Quereiie is a kiiier for gain. Once the murder has been committed, the theft does not become justified by the murder (in tenns of justification, it would rather be the other way round : the theft justifying the blood ) , but sanctified by it. It appears that it was a mere accident which made Quereiie aware of the moral strength to be gained from a theft or robbery when it was dignified (and thus obliterated ) by murder. While the act of stealing, when enhanced and magnified by blood, seems to lose its importance to the point of sometimes being completely obscured by the pomp and glory of murder ( yet not withering away altogether but by its nauseating exhalations corroding the purity of the kiiiing) , it strengthens the wiiipower of the criminal, when the victim is a friend. The danger he exposes himself to (his own head at stake ) is in itself enough to establish a sense 240 I JEAN GENET of fittingness in him against which few arguments remain.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  CHAPTER 9 FINISHING Finishing is harder than starting. Lots of projects get started. But I want you to finish your project, which means getting back to your chair or easel or whatever, day after day and telling your story. If there’s one thing I want to emphasize, it’s that the making of the book, this memoir in whatever form, is an experience just as the story you are telling is. This experience needs to be something that you want or are prepared to go through. The process can be as vivid and complete a journey as the ones our stories depict: full of ups and downs, twists and turns and unexpected events, and new insights and weird coincidences, and maybe profound revelations. It may be hard to do this. If you’re telling a difficult or tragic story, let the process of working on it be a healing process. If your story is an ultimately positive story, then let your work be a celebration of it. Let’s look at three examples. THE PHOTOGRAPHER by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier THE EXPERIENCE AND THE STORYTELLER Didier by Emmanuel There’s a separation that sometimes has to happen to get that book done.You need to believe that this story is worth telling and then you need to “devote to it all the time and concentration it will require” as comics artist Emmanuel Guibert says about The Photographer (2009, First Second), a book born from this divide. When Guibert saw his friend Didier Lefèvre’s contact sheets of 4000 photographs from a trip to Afghanistan, he knew it had to be a book. He listened to Lefèvre recount an incredible story of hardship, war, medicine, art, and near-death travels with a caravan of Doctors Without Borders doctors and nurses deep in rural Afghanistan in 1986. “I wanted … to put the reader in my situation,” Guibert says of hearing his friend’s story. Guibert’s skill was drawing and storytelling, and so he tasked himself to share Lefèvre’s story in the way he was best equipped. (Frédéric Lemercier designed the layout and colored the drawings.) Guibert claims it is more “a testimony … a documentary than a narrative.” This testimony, which is in fact also a harrowing narrative, starts simply. On page 37 as they climb the rocky pass into Afghanistan, Guibert draws Lefèvre saying “I wonder what I’m doing here?” And then, “I answer it by taking photos.” But by page 219, Lefèvre is abandoned, alone in dangerous terrain, trying to get home, frozen and broken on an immense rocky summit. In this crisis he writes through Guibert. “I take out one of my cameras. I choose a 20mm lens, a very wide angle, and shoot from the ground. To let people know where I died.” And then page 224, “I rummage for my notebook, a pencil, and my forehead lamp… . I can’t see how I’m going to make it out of here… .

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A very black cross indicated the spot where the trim little outline figure had at last come to rest on the sidewalk. I looked for some similar mark to denote the place on the embankment where my visitor’s huge wax father had reclined, but there was none. That gentleman, however, had signed the document as a witness underneath the name of Leslie Tomson, Miss Opposite and a few other people. With his hummingbird pencil deftly and delicately flying from one point to another, Frederick demonstrated his absolute innocence and the recklessness of my wife: while he was in the act of avoiding the dog, she had slipped on the freshly watered asphalt and plunged forward whereas she should have flung herself not forward but backward (Fred showed how by a jerk of his padded shoulder). I said it was certainly not his fault, and the inquest upheld my view. Breathing violently through jet-black tense nostrils, he shook his head and my hand; then, with an air of perfect savoir vivre and gentlemanly generosity, he offered to pay the funeral-home expenses. He expected me to refuse his offer. With a drunken sob of gratitude I accepted it. This took him aback. Slowly, incredulously, he repeated what he had said. I thanked him again, even more profusely than before. In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul was for a moment resolved. And no wonder! I had actually seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate—and its padded shoulder. A brilliant and monstrous mutation had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument. Within the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying housewife, slippery pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its wheel), I could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution. Had I not been such a fool—or such an intuitive genius—to preserve that journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate’s formal handshake (as reproduced by Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury—I wept. 24 The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale’s white church tower when I looked around me for the last time. For unknown adventures I was leaving the livid house where I had rented a room only ten weeks before. The shades—thrifty, practical bamboo shades—were already down. On porches or in the house their rich textures lend modern drama. The house of heaven must seem pretty bare after that. A raindrop fell on my knuckles.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  59 The ambulance—a contract service of the County of Los Angeles—arrived at my father’s death about half an hour after the county fire engine. By then, the fire fighters had delivered my father from the bathroom and had laid him out on the living room carpet. I continued to sit on the edge of my bed in the middle room as they tried to restore the rhythm of my father’s heart. The fire fighters were dressed in the stiff canvas jackets that protect them from the flames they rarely have to put out. The men bent over my father awkwardly, adjusting the electrocardiograph and receiving radioed instructions from the hospital emergency room. My father’s heart was unruly. The beats only flickered through the monitor. The defibrillator the fire fighters used only gave his heart another spasm, a shudder he did not feel. When the fire fighters were done, I rode with the body in the ambulance, its siren shouting. My brother brought me back from the hospital. I spent that night in the empty house, as I continue to spend each night at home. 60 He could not choose to deny his father, even less his father’s beliefs. These have become as material to him as the stucco-over-chicken-wire from which these houses are made. It is not a question of denying the city in which he lives, though he doubts his father cared much for living in it. He doubts if his father cared for much of anything you would find familiar at all. “I am still here,” he often tells himself. This is how he has resurrected his father’s obligations, which he sometimes mistakes for his father’s faith. “I will never go away,” he once told the girl he loved, because it suited her desperation and his notion of the absurd. Loving Christ badly was finally the best he could do. 61 There are ugly deaths. And then, there are the dead. You and I, who grew up in the years after the Second World War, saw enough reasons for dying. We saw the movie versions of storm troopers, kamikaze pilots, quislings, and the cowards who would not face them. Our parents’ war lapped over us in gray shadows from television sets in darkened living rooms. That lunar blue-gray was the emotional color of violence and the dead it produced. When images of real war appeared, in programs like Victory at Sea , the ashen dead were never less than themselves. When I was called to the hospital table on which my father was laid, after his dying had moved throughout his body, he was the color of television’s black-and-white dead. 62 My father died of tachycardia. My mother had died of congestive heart failure. It seems that my father’s heart finally raced ahead of him, while my mother’s had lagged behind. 63 After forty years of development, there are 26,766 places to live in this suburb. On any day, about 2 percent are vacant.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  Another metaphor that found me, and is a form of the random image exercise, is one of the photographs in hands of lost children. As the book itself explains, this image was something that had been in my notebook for a number of weeks. When I rediscovered it after my daughter’s death, it became a central image for the entire book. I used it over and over again, even tying into the nine-panel structure of the book, specifically as it related to the number of other stories of lost children that I found: eight, plus one in the center: Rosalie. This page even seems a small manifestion of the web of life and death I was engaging with in writing this story. The book comes to a close after a ninth story of a lost child. A ninth card being pulled, the final in a deck. This random image from a manga hiding in my sketchbook became a central image and repeating motif for my entire book. Above my drawing desk I kept a note during this project: It should express something, it has to be something, and it has to mean something. Each drawing has to convey something, an action or subject. It has to add an emotional quality to that subject, but it also has to be a unique experience to itself. It was a hard prescription that I failed at fulfilling more than I succeeded, but the ideal kept me going. Visual Language DO THIS This is the section where we look for more powerful imagery. Visual metaphors and similes, ways of moving through the story visually. We do this not to bore ourselves or the reader with our visuals, but, more important, to give our readers new passageways for the story to drive down. And also to find a way to make the process of writing and drawing compelling to us. VISUAL SYMBOLS Like Carol Tyler’s red threads and ribbons, find a visual motif that can work its way throughout your book, tying it together and unifying the story. Let’s note that a symbol need not be literal, and need not refer to anything outside of the story itself. Tyler’s threads and ribbons are motifs that exist in the story and keep the story consistent. Ribbon, tires, eyes, rabbits, anything works. As these images reappear, our engagement in the story deepens. VISUALIZE AN ABSTRACT ANTAGONIST Here we can be more literal. David B. drew his brother’s disease as a dragon in Epileptic, and Ken Dahl let his herpes become a vile little roommate. I drew New York City like a giant rat. Find a substantial abstract antagonist in your story and depict it in a concrete visual way. Find an abstract antagonist—not a man, woman, or animal, but a disease, a misconception, a power dynamic. Find a way to depict that force. Sometimes the best way to do this is to not worry too much about it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Come in!” he said aloud, collecting his papers, and putting them in the blotting-paper. “There, you see, you’re talking nonsense, and he’s at home!” responded Stepan Arkadyevitch’s voice, addressing the servant, who had refused to let him in, and taking off his coat as he went, Oblonsky walked into the room. “Well, I’m awfully glad I’ve found you! So I hope....” Stepan Arkadyevitch began cheerfully. “I cannot come,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said coldly, standing and not asking his visitor to sit down. Alexey Alexandrovitch had thought to pass at once into those frigid relations in which he ought to stand with the brother of a wife against whom he was beginning a suit for divorce. But he had not taken into account the ocean of kindliness brimming over in the heart of Stepan Arkadyevitch. Stepan Arkadyevitch opened wide his clear, shining eyes. “Why can’t you? What do you mean?” he asked in perplexity, speaking in French. “Oh, but it’s a promise. And we’re all counting on you.” “I want to tell you that I can’t dine at your house, because the terms of relationship which have existed between us must cease.” “How? How do you mean? What for?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a smile. “Because I am beginning an action for divorce against your sister, my wife. I ought to have....” But, before Alexey Alexandrovitch had time to finish his sentence, Stepan Arkadyevitch was behaving not at all as he had expected. He groaned and sank into an armchair. “No, Alexey Alexandrovitch! What are you saying?” cried Oblonsky, and his suffering was apparent in his face. “It is so.” “Excuse me, I can’t, I can’t believe it!” Alexey Alexandrovitch sat down, feeling that his words had not had the effect he anticipated, and that it would be unavoidable for him to explain his position, and that, whatever explanations he might make, his relations with his brother-in-law would remain unchanged. “Yes, I am brought to the painful necessity of seeking a divorce,” he said. “I will say one thing, Alexey Alexandrovitch. I know you for an excellent, upright man; I know Anna—excuse me, I can’t change my opinion of her—for a good, an excellent woman; and so, excuse me, I cannot believe it. There is some misunderstanding,” said he. “Oh, if it were merely a misunderstanding!...” “Pardon, I understand,” interposed Stepan Arkadyevitch. “But of course.... One thing: you must not act in haste. You must not, you must not act in haste!” “I am not acting in haste,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said coldly, “but one cannot ask advice of anyone in such a matter. I have quite made up my mind.”

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  Even after the preliminary research and structuring of the book has begun, Bechdel shows herself on the phone with her mother, writing the book we are reading. She goads her mom, asking about sensitive topics that might open more meaningful apertures. Ultimately, although Bechdel’s book is about the psychological concepts of compromise formations, reaction formations, and transition objects, she weaves in other personalities from the past and even the present, allowing her to create a web of thought and symbols and interpretations that enliven the whole project, the project of understanding her own being. Alison in the present is digging for good material to add to her book. Change Your Life MY STORY NAVIGATING TO A NEW FUTURE My book Rosalie Lightning was a quest to find meaning, or at least, as in Why I Killed Peter, an attempt to move beyond a certain point in my own story. A point of trauma and grief that I had to move through. When I began, I wrote what I could about my present condition and my immediate past. I didn’t know how the story would end. But I knew I had to get to a place where I could tolerate the new situation I was in. I had a mantra from a John Frusciante song that I would sing to the spirit of Rosalie when I was working: “There’s only one way for things to be between you and me.” I knew that that “one way” was something she needed me to find. It was a new way that I wasn’t used to; one of her choosing, one where she was no longer here, and I was no longer the authority. Heavily influenced by Alison Bechdel, I looked for reflections of my own story everywhere. And like Bechdel, it wasn’t hard to find symbols and images in history, art, and my own life that seemed to open a rift through which I could see more clearly. Working on my book came in two parts: one of note-taking and trying to understand where I was, and then a period of drawing and integrating. During the rawest, preliminary times, I tried to keep myself open to these images and symbols that presented themselves. I had to keep my eyes and my heart open. And so I saw my story in random places, the strangest perhaps being an Akira Kurosawa samurai movie. But in this odd story of moving from one land to another, hiding the personality under rags and pretending to be stoic, I saw my own story, and so I drew it into the larger fabric, that multivalent fabric of my story. Similarly, a painting of St. Christopher and the baby Jesus by the Renaissance painter Titian seems to be about my situation: a baby whose presence is both heavy and light. How have these stories always existed? It seems they’ve been waiting all along for me to come to them in this state.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  One false move—and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man—free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother. 23 A thousand-mile stretch of silk-smooth road separated Kasbeam, where, to the best of my belief, the red fiend had been scheduled to appear for the first time, and fateful Elphinstone which we had reached about a week before Independence Day. The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom made more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day, spending the rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at various stopping places, all of them also prearranged, no doubt. It was that stretch, then, along which the fiend’s spoor should be sought; and to this I devoted myself, after several unmentionable days of dashing up and down the relentlessly radiating roads in the vicinity of Elphinstone. Imagine me, reader, with my shyness, my distaste for any ostentation, my inherent sense of the comme il faut , imagine me masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile while devising some casual pretext to flip through the hotel register: “Oh,” I would say, “I am almost positive that I stayed here once—let me look up the entries for mid-June—no, I see I’m wrong after all—what a very quaint name for a home town, Kawtagain. Thanks very much.” Or: “I had a customer staying her—I mislaid his address—may I …?” And every once in a while, especially if the operator of the place happened to be a certain type of gloomy male, personal inspection of the books was denied me. I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations between Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend ( “N.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  He slid down the sloping levee wall to the floor of the river, which is nearly always dry. [image "Image" file=Image00015.jpg] 212 My mother died in 1979. Before she died, she lived through five years of increasing disability from heart disease. By the time she died, everything that might have been taken from her had been, even her fear. 213 Both my parents died before they were seventy, as did my mother’s sister and my uncles Jack, Frank, and Ken. I am forty-six. Given the odds, I am two-thirds through my life. The first third I spent daydreaming. The second third, I spent waiting. The last third begins with these stories. It is a proportion I can bear. 214 After his mother died, he chose to live here with his father. After his father died, he chose to stay here. He stayed partly because he said he would to the girl he had loved. She is married now. She and her husband have two daughters. They rent a house he owns. It’s one of the first houses the three developers built in 1950. He has dinner there occasionally, and makes jokes about being the landlord. [image "Image" file=Image00016.jpg] 215 The grid limited our choices, exactly as urban planners said it would. But the limits weren’t paralyzing. The design of this suburb compelled a conviviality that people got used to and made into a substitute for choices, including not choosing at all. There are an indefinite number of beginnings and endings on the grid, but you are always somewhere. 216 From 1st Street, opposite Los Angeles City Hall, numbered streets descend south across the nearly level plain formed by the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers. The numbered streets as far as 33rd Street in Los Angeles are aligned with the plaza Colonel de Neve laid out in 1781. These streets are oriented at a 45-degree angle from the cardinal compass points. These streets run southeast to northwest, not east and west. Colonel de Neve recognized a line of authority that extended back three thousand miles to the Spanish viceroy in the City of Mexico, and five thousand miles further to a book in an archive in Seville. The book was the Laws of the Indies . It was a collection of royal ordinances assembled two hundred years earlier, for Philip II in 1573. That book was based on another book on town planning, written in 25 B.C.E. by the Roman architect Vitruvius. As he was ordered to, Colonel de Neve laid out the streets of an abstract city. It was a city where winds blow only from the north, and where the sun each day must light the sides of a small, square house equally. 217 For about three miles—and more than a hundred years—the streets of Los Angeles preserved the bias of Colonel de Neve’s drawing. Then Los Angeles boomed as a destination for tourists and immigrants.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  The process should be a way of processing or internalizing, or completing or comprehending the experience you’re talking about. Telling the experience should be an experience, too. The process isn’t merely artistic, it’s transformative. Finishing MY STORY For me, I took 3 years to process five weeks of experience. EXPERIENCING, WRITING, INTERNALIZING Every day I worked on the book, I was reliving an experience that was intense, but also sudden and shocking. I think I needed to re-experience it slowly or experience it from further away to really let it change me for the better. Drawing certain events brought me back to them, and deepened them for me. Trying to manifest things I saw or felt with ink on paper was a separate battle for understanding and consolation. Art is a safe area to take risks. There were times that I couldn’t draw what I believed to be the right image, and I either had to return to the battle another day, or give in and let the image be what came out. I had to create relationships with failed drawings just as I had to create a new relationship with my dead daughter. For me, this mimicking is healthy. I know a lot of people who are perfectionists and would never settle on a drawing that didn’t work like they wanted, but they are better artists than I am. I had to settle now and then, and say this is the experience, and this is the story of the experience, and neither is what I expected. Such is life. In the end, the thing that nags me the most is the stuff that didn’t make it into the book. There was probably enough material for another two books, but this is the material that asserted itself. The other stuff is stored away and might come out in other stories—who knows? I don’t pretend to know the future anymore. I restaged and documented nearly every physical experience, even simple ones like walking, so I could relive and internalize the experience. I worked three years telling a story that took place mostly within five weeks. This was a slow, healing, processing experience. I think the messages that the world sent me it sent me quickly. But for me to understand them—to integrate those messages into my larger being—I had to work with them for those years. I drew my little daughter alive and running around, curious and expressive. I drew my wife and me in shock. I drew us broken, confused, angry, and sad. I drew us connected with other people. I drew us trying to process. I drew cartoon versions of us. I drew stand-ins for us. I drew abstractions of all of us. I drew symbols—acorns, boats, and trees. I drew other people’s drawings. I illustrated songs. Some of it was hard; most of it was a wrestling match. All of it was an endeavor to process my experience.