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Envoy This is the way to begin: know that you will be sick – that you are sick already, scurrying down Mt. Auburn Street in halfhearted late-spring sunlight. Others have begun differently — Beethoven did it in his Fifth Symphony with eight notes: AAAE, FFFD – fate, knocking at the door. Dickens achieved something similar with his 85-word opening declaration to A Tale of Two Cities, in a volume entitled, “Recalled to Life”: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way.” Even your roommate has her own ritual in this ushering-in season — and when she talks about it, she closes her eyes, a gesture that savors even as it shuts out. You can almost see, etched on the interior of her eyelids, the blue intensity of the Midwestern sky she sees from her backyard, nine hundred miles away in Illinois. Outside, Cambridge dribbles and sleets November’s leftover dolor, but for her, the beginning is here in the telling, summer stirred up by the shutter of lashes as she tells you about a book, her book – her yearly rite, her rain dance. But this is the way you will begin, charging down Mt. Auburn Street at the speed of light: tell yourself that you are dying – that your head today, wrapped in a spring kerchief, is the head of a cancer patient, and that the mistake is in the black hair trailing you – dogging you – as you hightail it to the cemetery. Chant under your breath the dark and beautiful names of the fates that could befall you: Creutzfeldt-Jakobs, black plague, dengue, melanoma, kuru, syphilis, a broken heart, prosaic ignorance, willful blindness. Call out the names of those who will usher you through those iron gates; and call them your friends. (E. coli always looked so elegant on the page – the name of a poet, you guessed – a great one, perhaps, waiting to take the public by storm, waiting for ravenous appetites, for reckless consumption.) Upon entering the cemetery gates (it’s free), look both ways for cars. Irony is not the way to go. Enter with reverence. Here among the headstones the dead suffer you to write. Your pencil scratchings are the gradual erasure of their granite-etched memory, each crayon rubbing a scouring; and yet they are generous hosts, supplying silence and a kind of hodgepodge society. Here you can assemble around you a glittering salon of past personalities: Longfellow, Mother Goose, Buckminster Fuller. Old families with old names in this great sanctuary of trees. Room to dance, or to pray, to profanely picnic. Summer starts here, in the first bite of watermelon between the stone markers – when you spit out the seeds you are actually singing benedictus, and the beetles below sway in time to your stamping feet. Write well. Write everything: problem sets, postcards, checks, love letters, yearbook autographs, bad poetry, thank-you notes, the Great American Novel, scathing letters to the editor. Write about fruit salad and filial piety, about the summers you spent hopped up on pixie sticks and pulpy orange juice (summers that seemed to stretch the length of Texas, all afternoon shadow and empty desert highway), about the time at the supermarket when you saw your best friend’s philandering father next to the charcoal and lighter fluid, his guilt a gurgling shock of black hair in his arms. She was beautiful, swathed in a spring kerchief, and you didn’t understand at the time why he started when he saw you wandering toward him in aisle six – or why, when you told the story to your friend, he socked you in the mouth. Were your words inadequate, somehow? Had they, too, the effect of erasure, the symptoms of sickness carried on the breath? You may write your memoirs, but never publish; sneak the best parts – the mythical, the pathetic, and the terrifying – into your last will and testament. You will not regret the writing. Because of course you begin everything this way, with words breathed on sick sweet breath and words etched on stone (recall the epithet chosen by T.S. Eliot, who had once too stormed down Mt. Auburn Street: “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.”). You begin by picking a point on the page, putting your pen down. You begin by saying hello. You put your foot out the door, and your dendrites – those great trees – scream, Home!
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