My Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life

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September 2, 2007
7 Comment

This Saturday: a happiness quotation from Richard Brautigan.

BrautiganTuesday will be my wedding anniversary, so in honor of that day, I decided to post one of the readings we had at our wedding ceremony. It’s actually an entire short story, called “I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone,” by Richard Brautigan, from a wonderful collection of his very short stories, Revenge of the Lawn.

I have to say, if you’re looking for a selection to use during a wedding ceremony, I like this little story as much as any love poem, Shakespeare sonnet, Bible passage, or reading from Khalil Gibran that I’ve ever heard. (I do happen to have red hair, as in the story, but I don’t think that’s necessary.)

A friend who’d been a groomsman asked his sister, an artist, to make a piece of work incorporating the story to give us as a wedding gift. It’s one of our very favorite possessions and hangs where we see it all the time, so “I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone” makes the Big Man and me happy every day.

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen before.

I couldn’t say “Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she’s got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she’s not a movie star…”

I couldn’t say that because you don’t look like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.

It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930′s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio “… the President of the United States… “

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio….

And that’s how you look to me.

*
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  • http://www.executive-mentoring.com Steven Marks

    Two thoughts:
    1. Republishing copyright material does not increase the author’s happiness.
    2. Richard Bratigan (a writer I also admire) committed suicide.

  • Diana

    Three thoughts:
    1. That was beautiful.
    2. Life’s too short.
    3. Happy Anniversary :)

  • http://www.happiness-project.com Gretchen Rubin

    That’s an interesting comment about the copyrighted material. I thought hard about it. I decided to go ahead, for the following reasons that may or may not be legitimate.
    First — and this is the most dicey one, because it’s invoked as a reason to violate every copyright, which clearly isn’t right, so maybe I’m wrong — I thought that this story, in its entirety, would make it far more likely that someone would want to buy REVENGE OF THE LAWN than if I only published the 250 words of the 366 words in the story that are allowable by copyright (at least in books, which I assume is the rule that applies.) I thought: if I were Brautigan (or his estate, actually), that would be what I would want. But as I say, I realize that “we’re ripping you off, but don’t you realize, it’s an ad for you!” is a shaky argument. There’s a lot to it, but not everything. Also, legally, the fact that I wished RB well doesn’t matter. But on the internet, the law seems less of a restraint that the sense of what is right.
    Also, the story is easily available elsewhere on the Internet. On the one hand, two wrongs don’t make a right (but two Wrights make an airplane!). One the other hand, if the cow is already out of the barn, do we bother to shut the barn door?
    For books — I don’t have a view about music or TV or movies — at least at this point, I think that the availability of large amounts of text online doesn’t preclude people from buying a book. Just the opposite. But that may change, and then it will be too late, all the text will already be available.
    Well, I don’t know. This is why it’s nice to stick to Samuel Johnson. He’s so far out of copyright, no tricky questions.

  • http://7pproductions.com/blog Al

    To the first commenter – way to kill a good buzz. In light of the fact that Brautigan’s short story is readily available all over the internet and that this post actually helped to spread Brautigan as an author (I didn’t know about him until now), I can’t see anything bad, but only good.
    Gretchen Rubin – please keep up the great work!

  • http://www.davidgaffney.co.uk david gaffney

    Hi there , heres a story I thought you might like…its in my new book aromabingo
    david
    The happiness well
    O’Donnall took me to pontoon four where the accident happened. It was the first time I’d been to the well. The substance in the steel liner was exactly the colour I expected – luminous cornflower yellow – but the consistency was not the blobby, custard-like goo I’d imagined as a child. It was disappointingly thin, like a consommé.
    O’Donnall showed me where he’d slipped in, pointing to the loose perimeter rail, now cordoned off with danger tape. Finger scrapes in the slime on the edges of the tank indicated where his fingernail had been torn off in his panic to escape. I looked at his hand, the bandaged finger.
    The dark brown cloud O’Donnal caused to appear in the well was now a brooding presence in the middle of the yellow pond. Over on another pontoon, a group of men in suits and fluorescent waistcoats looked worried. Chins were stroked, heads were shook, curses muttered. One man was taking photographs. Another had a long pole which he prodded into the centre of the dark, misty shape as if it might change something.
    My job was to find out three things; how it had happened, why O’Donnall had been allowed to work at the well whilst he was unhappy, and how to put things right.
    I leaned on the rail and listened to O’Donnal as he explained. A slight Cumbrian accent flavoured his sentences, lending his conversation a jolly, rural feel. I could see how he had got away with it for so long.
    He’d been ashamed of how he felt and kept putting off telling his local area coordinator. One of the reasons he hadn’t told anyone was because he was three-fifths of the way through a community samba coaching course that he’d waited five years to join. Samba tutors were well respected in his local area forum and he had wanted to do this ever since he was a child. But he knew that the people at the local area activity hub wouldn’t wish to have a depressed man teaching samba drumming. Consequently, no one but O’Donnal himself knew how miserable he felt. And because his shift supervisor didn’t know, he had not been removed from his duties at the well. O’Donnal hadn’t realised how important it was that unhappy people didn’t contaminate the contents of the pond. He hadn’t, until now, comprehended the enormity of the predicament
    The brown stain seemed to grow darker as we stared at it. Newspapers had been saying it was expanding, and they appeared to be right. Light brown feelers crept out from its centre into the yellow liquor around it. Since its inception, near the edge where O’Donnal fell in, it had floated into the middle, but it was now moving towards the edge again, and getting close to a little scarf of bubbles which O’Donnal explained was the main outlet pipe. I looked at the structures around the pond. Dozens of tubes and pipes climbed over each other up and out through to the monitoring and distribution centres. Arrows indicated the direction of flow. Beneath us the main feed pipe throbbed as it topped up the pond from deep in the earth.
    I made some diagrams and asked a few questions of the other men. Then I asked O’Donnal to take me to the distribution room. Amidst control desks bristling with knobs, levers and slide controls, he explained how each monitor and distributor managed over a hundred individuals, and how sudden surges in demand such as a new born baby, new job, or new relationship, meant they constantly had to reduce the flow to other members of the community. The main job of the monitor and distributor was to maintain an equilibrium, wherever possible.
    ***
    Back home I sat in the kitchen tent and looked at the diagrams. I could hear my ex-wife reading stories to the foster children in the tent next door. My step mother-in-law was sat on the tent floor, playing with the new kittens – six of them, all waiting to be allocated homes. One of the kittens, a fat creature with a sneaky, sarcastic face, scampered over to me and nipped at my bare toes. I reached down and stroked its head whilst I thought about the well and the dark menacing shape waiting to engulf us, like the cold shadow of a continent.
    I decided to make a model. A washing up bowl represented the steel liner and plastic drinking straws stood in for pipes. Over the next few evenings I worked on the model, perfecting it and perfecting it. Every now and then I rang O’Donnal to clarify an aspect of its construction. It had to be right, because this was the most important job that I had ever undertaken. Soon I had a scale model of the plant. I filled it with yellow paint thinned with turpentine and allowed this to settle for a while. Then I spilled in a blob of treacle and watched its behaviour as it floated on the surface. It wasn’t long before the treacle insinuated itself into the yellow paint.
    I crossed the community garden and went to the phone tent where I rang and left a message for O’Donnal. He rang me an hour later.
    ‘Where have you been?’
    I’ve started a new samba group. One of my own.’
    ‘But you’ve only done three fifths of the training.’
    ‘It’s the important three fifths, Don t worry.’
    I hung up. O’Donnal was useless. He didn’t understand what he’d done.
    I returned to my tent to find my second cousin waiting outside for me with a letter from the well company.
    I read the letter slowly, on my own, with the television off, and the radio on low.
    After it sunk in I placed the letter on my lap and looked out of the open tent flap, over to the community bar. No music could be heard, no laughter, no shouting, no clack of pool balls, no din from the heavy metal band that sometimes rehearsed there. The well company had stopped everything in their efforts to head off a surge. I imagined that in every local area forum, in every tent, people were sitting alone, thinking about the well, and the creeping, spreading stain.
    I went into the kitchen tent. My step-mother-in-law was feeding the kittens with their special kitten food and I watched her for a time. I could hear my ex-wife in the next door tent reading stories to the foster children, the same stories she always read.
    I looked back at the model; the yellow water was completely black.
    I left the kitchen tent and went in to the tent next door. The foster children looked up at me. They were surprised to see me in their tent at this time of day. My ex-wife read stories, never me.
    ‘I want to read the stories tonight,’ I said and took the book from my ex-wife’s hand. ‘Please.’
    ‘Isn’t he rude girls?’ My ex-wife said –
    ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But tonight, I need to read.’
    ‘But you don’t know how to read, Mr Flash,’ one of the foster children piped up. ‘You can’t do the voices.’
    ‘I certainly can,’ I said in a low growly bears voice which made them laugh.
    My ex-wife raised her eyebrows, then laughed and left the room.
    I selected a pile of books from the floor and set them on my knee. ‘Tonight I am going to read to you every single storybook in the tent,’ I said.
    ‘Mr Flash! Mr Flash! Yes, yes, yes. Thank you Mr Flash. But don’t we have to go to sleep?’
    ‘You can go to sleep whenever you want to, but I will carry on reading the stories and you will still hear them, even while your asleep. So you’ll have nice dreams about stories and magic lands.’
    ‘I like those dreams.’
    ‘Okay, then.’
    I began to read. I read Postman Pat, Burglar Bill, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, everything. I read and read, doing all the voices and sound effects that I could manage. My pace grew faster and faster and the pages whipped through my fingers. Soon the foster children were fast sleep, but I carried on reading. I became happier and happier the more I read. I was dizzy, drunk with joy. I imagined the poor monitors and distributors back at the well trying to balance the supply, and the dark stain moving inexorably towards the scarf of bubbles around the outlet pipe.
    When I’d read every single book I returned to the kitchen tent and played with the kittens. I would play and play until the kittens and I were completely exhausted.
    END

  • Bruce Farr

    A Picture of Brautigan
    I once had a picture of Brautigan on my wall.
    It was torn from a Life magazine and tacked up hastily
    Above my grandmother’s old iron bed,
    In the room where I lived the winter my world fell apart.
    In the picture of Brautigan, he is peering at the camera from a crouch.
    His arms drape loosely over his knees, glasses on the bridge of his nose,
    And his long hair frames the many angles of his face.
    In the picture of Brautigan, he is in his thirties.
    He has written several books of poems and stories that fit the times,
    And people everywhere are praising him.
    Women love Brautigan with abandon,
    He lives in San Francisco, and has a daughter named Ianthe.
    The picture of Brautigan became a symbol of something.
    It seemed to offer me more hope than, say, a picture of Jesus or the president might.
    Every night, I could look at it before I turned off the lamp,
    And then lay awake and watch the shadows the moon threw against the window
    And how the silhouetted trees were bent low with the wind.
    Every night, if I have it right, I would gaze at the picture of Brautigan
    And feel my heart fill up with the longing and the mystery of it all,
    And the fathomless joy that there were people like Brautigan
    Living in the world that I lived in.
    Today I took down a box of old books and came upon my Brautigans:
    They were dog-eared and creased and musty,
    Some of the words were underlined for reasons that I can no longer recall.
    I searched the ones I had singled out, trying to remember why I felt they were important.
    Sitting down to read some of them again, I fell upon these,
    And lingered over them for a long time,
    Thinking about how they made me feel then and now:
    Discovery
    The petals of the vagina unfold,
    Like Christopher Columbus
    Taking off his shoes.
    Is there anything more beautiful
    Than the bow of a ship
    Touching a new world?

  • http://ohwellidontknow.blogspot.com/ henry

    I would like to live in Wyoming one day and have six-hundred lawn chairs on my yard, covering just about every inch. I do not want to own a lawnmower. The lawn chairs would keep the grass from growing. If I did have a lawnmower I would want it to be tiny and remote control operated so I could sit in one of my lawn chairs and mow the grass. I would not bring the lawn chairs in for the winter. The locals would say things like, “I suppose those lawn chairs won’t survive another winter,” but they always will.
    things that look like lawn furniture:
    http://everydayyeah.com/content/aphorism-day-twenty-four#comment-967

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