Dear brothers Vold/Lamken/Karamozov (maybe the allusion from Dostoevsky fits better than that of Keillor, as adumbrated below),
After a first reading, Jon, I spontaneously echoed what Josh and John Elstad often exclaim at the Blanchardville pool table: “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”
A second reading this morning affirmed that yours is not only a brilliant story, but a wonderful launch. I remotely recall Rod Broding but cannot place him as clearly as Milan Davig; I have a falling feeling that Dad was concerned with Rod’s egotism, if he was the pastor of a Pine River church. What is valuable about Rod’s postulate is the resonance of Romans 8:26: “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (NIV). Lev Tolstoy and Andrei Tarkovsky both have monumental works late in their careers entitled Resurrection; David Remnick, in his book Lenin’s Tomb credits Tarkovsky’s film as veritably one of the ten leading factors that brought the Soviet Union to closure. Your story is emulates the attributes of both, especially the tree image that Tarkovsky uses.
Staying with Russian philology for a moment, I couldn’t help but look up a ‘clinging-to-cliffside’ image, as suggested in The Snow Leopard, in the contemplations of Raskolnikov: “’where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet—and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him—and he had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity—it would be better to live so than to die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no mater how—only to live!... How true, Lord how true! Man is a scoundrel! And he’s a scoundrel who calls him a scoundrel for that,’ he added in a moment” (Crime and Punishment, tr. Revear and Volkonsky, p. 158). There is plenty in the Epilogue about resurrection, well worth the re-read. I also enjoyed scanning Dostoevsky’s late short story, “Bobek”, which has interred people talking candidly, in an almost folksy way, until a living eavesdropper sneezes, to instantly shut them up.
Keep the title “Resurrection”, then, though I love the phrase on page 3, “afterward serenity”… I think I’ve relayed the story of how Dad and I were playing Scrabble or something on a quiet evening, and probably the springer spaniel Homer was still alive and out ‘soft-mouthing’ the neighbor's chickens, and a muted crunch caused Dad to flinch for the worst (but city-slicker me to instantly dismiss as a truck trailer buckling on the county highway a quarter mile away). Indeed Dad’s instinct was correct: two cars collided at high speed around that bend, and a phone call some ten minutes later roused Dad and me from our oblivion. Before the ambulance arrived with the new and necessary “jaws of life” tool to pry out the paralyzed driver, there were a half dozen people talking the victims to cling on to life. The smell of blood was thick in the autumn air, but everyone, miraculously, survived.
Karamazov/Woebegone Publishers should include such literature, movie reviews (has JMO reviewed Tarkovsky’s film, btw?), exegeses, music, Scrabble tips, theory such as my formalistic ‘triangle of text’, relevant contributions from those who ‘friend’ us—no, we won’t have to cater to the nomenclature of Zuckerburg, who rolled the dice his own way.
Summer: Emma and I leave Prague July 6ish and hopefully I get a Wisconsin drivers license before Katerina and the boys fly in around July 24. That gives us just enough time to rent a car and head to Oregon. If I resign from department chair, I can ‘buy’ a couple of days and enjoy a more leisurely return via U.S. Highway 2. The boys don’t need to come back until late August, but we’re not sure how independent to have their itinerary.
If it seems like I’m putting lots on this trip, I guess I am: Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (which informs the ditch before ‘the family tree’) concludes “the work is play for mortal stakes […F]or Heaven and the future sakes.”
Love,
erstwhile Ivan
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