BOTTOM DRAWER

David Rothgery
July 4, 2016

BOTTOM DRAWER [a newsletter]

Professor Watts entered the classroom. Saying nothing, he set a book on the lectern, opened it, and began reading . . . aloud. “’The Slaying of the Dragon’ by Dino Buzzati.” He looked up—but more beyond us than at us. Then down again. “In May 1902 a peasant of . . . .” For 30 minutes he read through the story, after which he closed the book. We waited for the discussion to follow and its connection to our aesthetics reading assignment. It never came. His head down, he walked out. That was the class for the day.

Buzzati’s story was about a group of people— a Count, a Governor, the Governor’s wife, two naturalists and eight hunters–who set out from the fictional village of Palissano to investigate wild reports by peasants of a “dragon” in a desolate mountain valley. Their two carriages carry them higher and higher into barren, crumbling, sinister peaks. Using a dead goat as bait, they lure the “dragon” out of its cave. It is ugly, only two meters long, with a head like a crocodile and a long lizard neck. “It looks like a ceratosaurus!” says the naturalist. They hurl rocks at it. They shoot at it with carbines. Again and again the reptile is hit, but it doesn’t die. Nor does it retreat back into its cave. Frustrated by the failure of their efforts, the hunters turn to using a small explosive. It rips open the monster’s belly. Bloody and in great pain, it still doesn’t die. It does not even call out in anguish. Suddenly “two little creatures issue from the cave—two little dragons.” The huntsmen understand now: the mother has not sought refuge for fear her attackers would follow her into the cave. Has not called out in pain for fear her offspring would hear and come out. But now they have. The huntsmen leave, saying they do not “like this business.” The Count shouts “Are you cowards?” and, advancing on them with rocks, kills off the two little monsters. Only now, having failed to save its offspring, does the mother give up. It drags herself over and licks its dead young, then sinks down and collects its last force. “Lifting its head vertically to the sky . . . [it] lets forth with an indescribable cry, a voice never yet heard in the world.” The Count begins coughing uncontrollably.

I never forgot the story. In fact, I later retrieved the text from the library and inserted it into the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. That was years ago.

Since then I have put a great many items into that bottom drawer.
It would be difficult for me to describe precisely what sort of items. Perhaps they are best defined as: “Do not fit.” That is, do not fit into the other three drawers which contain the neat files of World One—the stable world of moral precepts, bureaucratic policies laws, professional expectations, protocol, certainties, the mundane. World One provides answers: It erects gods, recites scriptures, submits to dogma, bows to authority, so it’s much easier to categorize them in an orderly fashion. Here are two items, for example, that did not fit World One:

A brief news account from 1998 of three unnamed Mexican girls—age
9, 12, and 15–raped and killed as they crossed a very hot
unspecified desert to search for work to help provide for their
family.

A few lines from Annie Dillard’s chapter “Fecundity” in her
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: [We] live in “a monstrous world
[which] running on chance and death, careening blindly from
nowhere to nowhere, somehow produced wonderful us. I came from
the world, I crawled out of a sea of amino acids, and now I must
whirl around and shake my fist at that sea and cry Shame!”

The items in that bottom drawer, being of World Two, are too elusive to definitively characterize because they require some altered perception of the universe from what World One offers. They disrupt our conventional thinking because it cannot account for them. That disruption may suddenly overwhelm us—a shock, a jolt to our psyche—or almost imperceptibly take hold of our conscience—a disquieting or disturbing awareness. These items come from a little further in, a little deeper down and are therefore more easily (sometimes intentionally) missed. If you stop along the path of World One—the everyday path—to ponder these glimpses of World Two, and you do so too long, they become troubling. So, for the sake of your sanity, your stable adherence to your everyday life, you usually move on.

But I—many of us–-tuck them away in some bottom drawer. Even if it’s the bottom drawer of our minds. Not to get rid of them but to save them for a deeper comprehension. We know they will get out of that “drawer” on their own. Because they disrupt the peace of our soul. Cause us a gnawing dissatisfaction with how we live our lives. The result: a deeper understanding, a greater compassion, and, perhaps, a meaningful response.

Ultimately, in that way, they often become the stuff of creative thinking and epiphanies.

This concept of a “bottom drawer” idea came from a novel I wrote—Silkie: World One, World Two. In it, the narrator, Stephen—a “seeker” of sorts too aware of a World Two pressing up against his everyday life–recalling a childhood experience when he’d been traveling out West with his family, asks: Why is it a magnificent eagle can be caged for years in a box for tourists in a roadside carnival? He calls it his “eagle in a box” memory and inserts it into the bottom drawer of an old wooden file cabinet his father left him. Over the years, he adds many more, including an account he photocopied from a book on the Jim Crow era:

“In it were ghastly photos of lynchings from the early part of
the century. For one such account there was no photo. A woman
named Mary Turner. 1918. Georgia. She’d protested the lynching of
her husband. A white mob decided to lynch her too. She was
pregnant at the time. They hung her upside down, doused her with
gasoline, lit her, then cut open her abdomen so her unborn child
fell to the ground.”

Years later this one:

“Freak” and prostitute Saartjie Baartman’s remains were honored
in a solemn ceremony in Capetown, South Africa, yesterday.  She
had been displayed like a freak in Europe two centuries ago and
died a penniless prostitute in 1816. Poets, musicians,
politicians–altogether some one thousand people–paid tribute. Did
she come? [August 9, 2002] 

In a way that Stephen cannot pinpoint, the 74 accounts, passages, personal experiences contained in his “Drawer 4” (the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet) connect him to something larger, something more meaningful than his drive to work, his lunchtime sandwich, and his time marking student papers. He is certain that there is the need to pursue a World Two. For moving, on occasion, beyond the petty concerns, superficiality, and insensibility that World One mandates.

In his search, he is transformed by a 23-year-old homeless, schizophrenic student who seems to inhabit both World One (for raising her little girl) and World Two (distant times and places she writes of in her journal). By way of her bifurcated vision of the universe, Stephen discovers within himself an urgent need for an alternative truth outside the boundaries of normal life. An altered perception.

When I first began writing stories and novels years ago, even before I started Silkie, I told myself I just wanted to write “something beautiful.” Share it with 100 readers. Even better, a 1000. A writer wants to communicate, be appreciated by others of like mind anyway. He thinks of how it happens. It used to be a teacher or a friend or a parent suggested he or she read this novel, this collection of essays, this book of poetry, or perhaps it was a blurb on the book’s back cover that enticed. It still happens that way. But now there is the Internet–websites, blogs. And the world of putting ideas out there has a decidedly more cynical, commercial, often shallow, cast to it.

Still, words are at the heart of it. The thoughts readers are asked to share come in the form of words. Whether they are on a page or on a screen . . . you must read the words. Why would you choose to read this book, these words? Any book. Any words. Even words on websites.

This newsletter—The Bottom Drawer—contains words: of dissatisfaction, with the hope good will come from that expression.

A profound dissatisfaction with living entirely in World One has a long history as the driving force behind the creative process for artists and thinkers. For writers, words become stories in the form of character, scene, metaphor and symbol. The result: haunting World Two images—Buzzati’s “dragon” silent in pain, but crying out to the universe in despair; Dostoyevsky’s Christ sitting silently in the Grand Inquisitor’s cell; LeGuin’s “Omelas” citizens–learning their happiness is founded in the unspeakable suffering of one child— “walk[ing] into the darkness”; Morrison’s “Beloved”—inhabiting two worlds–emerging ghost-like from the forest.

Even for scientists, precise description becomes compelling World Two image. Loren Eiseley, the natural science writer, marvels at the “star thrower” flinging starfish beyond the surf to save them while all around lap “the insatiable waters of death.” Carl Sagan reminds us that our earth is but a “pale blue dot . . . in a vast cosmic arena . . . .” and that our “posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light . . . millions of light years away from the nearest galaxy[of] billions of galaxies, and the universe is still expanding, and we humans have been on this earth less than one percent of its existence, and each of us is only one of billions still alive, and are we so important then?”

[If life has no meaning, why do so many existentialists—-writers and scientists alike–-work so hard to artistically express its meaninglessness?]

Recent news images haunt me: starving children fleeing Syria; an impoverished mother nursing her infant while pounding rocks in a sandstone quarry in 100-degree desert in India; the stoning death of a young Afghan woman (accused of but innocent of burning a Qur’an). Such events of metaphysical madness are reported and forgotten. We cannot dwell on them too long at our peril. We are appalled, we decry, we mourn, but we must get on with our life. Leave the bigger questions to the seekers: the Buddhas, the Jesuses, the semi-mystics. Or perhaps the journalists like Fred de Sam Lazaro, Nicholas Kristof, and Shane Smith who go in search of what others miss–World Two images and stories that point to the need for an altered perception of how to live; that may provoke response, action.

All of this is to inaugurate a newsletter I’m calling the Bottom Drawer and asking anyone who wishes to contribute to it anything of World Two that he or she thinks might fit there to do so. What might that contribution be?

Here are some examples:

An under-reported story worthy of more attention.

15-year-old Masud had escaped the Taliban, made it to Europe, lost his parents, and was about to reach refuge with his sister in Britain. Instead, he was blocked entry and suffocated in the back of a truck, alone and terrified. . . . If the UK had followed the law and allowed Masud in, this tragedy would never have happened. And, there are at least 7,000 more unaccompanied children like him fleeing conflict right now in Europe! Without support they are forced to jump on trucks, scale barbed wire fences, or fall in with dangerous traffickers. [AVAAZ report]
………………………..
The killings [lynchings in Mexico] raise difficult questions for Mexico, highlighting an alarming development: By some accounts, there were more public lynchings this past year than at any other time in more than a quarter-century. There were at least 78 lynchings last year in Mexico, more than double the number the previous year, according to data collected by Raúl Rodríguez Guillén, a professor and an author of the book “Mexico Lynchings, 1988-2014.” . . . The mob actions were born of a sense of hopelessness and impotence shared by many in Mexico, where 98 percent of murders go unsolved and the state is virtually absent in some areas. By some estimates, just 12 percent of crimes are even reported in Mexico, largely because of a lack of faith that justice will ever be serve.

A literary passage [fiction, poetry, philosophy, essay] remarkable not only for its beautiful expression and profound perception but, perhaps, for its obscurity (whether its author is well-known or not).

Each new way of knowing heralds a new window on the universe—a new detector to add to our growing list of non-biological senses. Whenever this happens, we achieve a new level of cosmic enlightenment. . . . What we have discovered the poets have known all along. [Neil De Grasse Tyson, Origins]

`This could be a Mozart. A little Mozart. But the Mozart in him will be stamped out.’ [Antoine de St. Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars. ( Exupery, author of The Little Prince, gazing into the eyes of an especially ragged, malnourished child on a third-class sleeping car amidst the poor crowded together with all their tattered old bags and belongings tied together, and wondering what could have been– what genius would never be awakened because of the poverty)]

News of an unusual, remarkable (unheralded) person or group.

The killing of the journalist, Naji Jerf, in Gaziantep,Turkey, happened Sunday, one day before he and his family were scheduled to fly to France, where they were seeking asylum. Unconfirmed news reports from Gaziantep said he had been shot to death. . . .Mr. Jerf recently posted on YouTube a documentary on the killing of Syrian activists during the Islamic State’s occupation of the Syrian city Aleppo in 2013 and 2014. It was recently broadcast by the television network Al Arabiya. . . .His death is the latest in a string of killings of activists and observers who have drawn attention to human rights abuses during the nearly five-year civil war in Syria.
In October, Ibrahim Abdel Qader, a co-founder of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, an acclaimed effort by citizen journalists to document Syrian human rights abuses, and an activist, Fares Hammadi, were killed in southeastern Turkey. [Jan. 22, 2016 report online]

News of an unknown or relatively unknown documentary film or book or art or photography exhibit which highlights one of the above [I’m thinking particularly, though not exclusively, of indie film-makers and writers and independent bookstores who wish to put a name or title out there].

What is the good of such a newsletter? Of this Bottom Drawer? What of value will it produce? Where will it go? Tangible results? Connections that lead to real good (i.e., money for causes)? Surely that would make this effort worth it. Or just a deeper sense of the need to reach beyond our everyday lives to the murkier, more disturbing aspects our existence? That which propels us toward a cosmic silence.

There is too much noise in our world. Too much clutter. In our stores. On our computer screens. In our media.

I mean this newsletter the Bottom Drawer to be a statement of dissatisfaction with living entirely in World One.

So . . . this is an invitation. I’m turning Stephen’s “Drawer 4” (his bottom drawer) into a newsletter: a digital bottom drawer. I turn to how it’s done today. The Internet. And hope for the best. That I connect. That I get someone to share my thoughts–the themes inherent in Silkie: World one, World Two. [Incidentally, if you are interested in reading it, I’ll send it free to you. Just let me know.]

As a start, I am sending this invitation out to only a few—maybe 50 or so. Because they are among those that strike me as individuals who might want to contribute to this newsletter. Yes, it’s only attachment to my website, but I can’t afford anything else. I’m not making any money with this newsletter. Just trying to “connect.”

I don’t know what will come of it . . . where it will go, only what I’m hoping to explore.

I repeat. I don’t want money. If in some future edition of the newsletter, a link causes you to want to help some organization, that’s fine. I’ll provide the necessary information.

Here’s the link to the website:

http://www.davidrothgery.com [click on “Bottom Drawer” at the bottom or top of the page.]

If you wish to contribute anything to it, either email me at
davidrothgeryauthor@gmail.com
or log onto my Facebook page at
http://www.facebook.com/DavidRothgeryAuthor/

David Rothgery

“When World One is no longer enough, and glimpses of World Two make you call World One into question, something like a disruption happens.” [Silkie: World One, World Two reviewer]