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Paper Concert

By Amy Wright
Paper Concert by Amy Wright digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

1. I Don’t Mean That Swans Are Humane

Outside the window by my writing desk grows a fringe tree. For years prior to acquiring this view I lived in apartments, my desk turned toward a wall, my ears plugged against the cries of sirens, so this fleecy white foliage often charms my gaze between taps on the keyboard. One day, in late summer, I noticed a strand of spiderweb blowing from a high branch. Sunlight snagged the silk just right, so it glistened like a silver hair before vanishing into the distance. It was caught on something, but there was nothing for it to reach in that direction except the roof of my house, over fifteen feet away. I stood to investigate and saw that the line connected to the eave over a chasm hundreds of times the length of a large spider. The silk was slack to accommodate wind, but, like Phillipe Petit’s tightrope between the Twin Towers, it spanned a space that was both terrifying and laughable. I imagined that the spider realized her folly after stringing the anchor line and gave up, exhausted, but I admired the ambition; a web that broad could have netted dragonflies from the Carboniferous period with their three-foot wingspans. I wondered if the spider embodied some ancient memory of that era, or just had a tremendous appetite. I returned to my desk to work.

Later that morning, I looked again and saw her, red-bodied and bulbous, sitting at the center of a web she had strung beneath that vast center line that shone like an eye. She had managed it! She was mad! I went outside and photographed her triumph.

I could not fathom the engineering. The distance between the tree and roof looked impossible to leap. Even if she had ballooned across the gulf, carried by wind, spinning midair, that thread would have had to bear her weight as she reinforced it. She could have made the pilgrimage on the ground and lifted the cable, but it would have stuck on a grass blade and torn. I puzzled over the logistics, then let it become a metaphor: an essayist in miniature, the spider had spun a line as tenuous as the one

that starts the fabric of an idea.

This essay began eleven years ago with a question. I was thirty-two. I had just moved to Tennessee from Colorado. I did not know how to ask the question yet, since it embarrassed me that I did not know the answer, but I was now editing a magazine that dared me to stage an attempt. The question was one I had spun for decades, sturdy enough that a web of other questions might be strung from it. It first formed in my mind on the oatmeal-colored carpet of my girlhood bedroom, but I had asked it so many times since then that I was no longer sure of the words I used, only of the sentiment: What am I?

“The self is a mirror facing a mirror in which clouds arise,” my friend Alan said years later, after he spent a month in the Himalayas watching Mount Everest and Annapurna pull clouds from the air like handkerchiefs. His definition explained why the question sustained my interest: it wasn’t a search for personal identity but for the origins of the conflict at the heart of being.

Even as a child, I was clear that there was no singular authority on anything. Your mother would tell you one thing, your grandfather another. Teachers, friends, and your great-aunt Edna from Pennsylvania all advised different things. The best a self-interested kid could do was lie, I determined, prepared to shape a thousand faces to meet the faces that I met—before I got caught and had to swear one hundred times in writing not to do that again. Afterward, I decided I needed a system. If I could rank and file information, I could apply it as befitted each situation to maximize rewards and reduce punishment. It would be a survival manual more valuable than instructions to escape quicksand, because it would include that guidance, too. It would note the world’s best ketchup (Annie’s), and include a chart of heaven, the highest goal I could imagine at the time thanks to Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Never Saw A Moor.” 

This essay is, as is this book, such a system, meaning a) a scheme, b) a comprehensive and methodically arranged survey of a subject, and c) a set of persons working together as parts of an interconnecting network. The methodology, as personal as a gambler’s system for placing bets, derives from fear. If as a child I feared being unloved, shunned, targeted, or ignored, as an adult I fear those things and more. I fear the environmental havoc we are wreaking on this planet with the profligate burning of fossil fuels. I fear the food crisis to come when the global population bulges to ten billion and collapses the Western agricultural model. I fear delusion. I fear readers too tired to protest class divides. I fear the mind that seeks authority, hunts for argument like fresh meat but swears it wants peace. I fear failing to ask the question able to dispel the illusion that I am somehow separate from the context I reflect.

The essaying goes on, but this essay anchors a central thread of dialogue over a dizzying divide. It weaves a decades-plus-worth of questions and answers from a range of discussions I’ve had with artists, activists, scientists, philosophers, physicians, priests, musicians, and other representatives of the human population. Some of them are famous, some will be, some should be—but all of them refract the light of the unknowable mystery of the self.

Although continuous within me, the questions were scattered across media, until one afternoon, energized by a yoga set, I copied some forty interviews into one document and reread them. I had put various experts, issues, and insights into conversation, but only with myself. The collective didn’t exist in that patchwork document but hung in the air over it, from which I began to pull a thread of whole cloth. I strung additional strands from that center line, which was wide enough, I hoped, to provision me for life: the latticework of an internal dialogue made external.

I was pretty free as a kid. My family lived on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains surrounded by creeks, woods, wildlife, abandoned sheds, and cattle trucks with the keys still in them. I did not have to direct myself toward anyone else’s expectations for hours at a time. Those hours, too, were an essay, a foray into life’s experiment, and they taught me that research always begins and ends in the field.

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About Amy Wright

Amy Wright has previously authored two poetry books, one collaboration, and six chapbooks. Her essays have won contests sponsored by London Magazine and Quarterly West. She has also received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to The Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her essays appear in Brevity, Fourth Genre, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

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