Archive for the ‘memoir’ Category
River Run Requiem
Essay
by Brian Charles Clark
Since his death I’ve been trying to discover who killed my brother.
Is it a crime to kill a man who longs for death? If a man yearns for death so profoundly that he kills himself, has he committed a crime, broken the taboo? I still ask Chris these questions, although he’s been dead for nearly three years now.
Of his death, there is only one fact, and this fact contradicts itself. Christopher Michael Clark, aged 37 years, drowned in the Mojave Desert on August 15, 1997. An amazing feat in an accident-prone life, to drown in the middle of the desert. He found the thing he went to find. Death, I see, is as subjective and unknowable as any other experience. Time is relative, Einstein reminds me, and space is curved. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a Permeable Life
essay by Brian Charles Clark
Yucca Valley in the late 1960s
My interest in permeability formed a clot in my imagination the day I first flew solo. I was thirteen, and I was alone. I was sitting on top of the Knoll, for the first time surveying what would be my stomping grounds for the next fifteen years. My fear of moving away from Chula Vista, tucked away in the southwestern-most corner of California, fear of leaving friends behind, all sour was distilled by the calm sage and stoic Joshua trees. The dark chemistry of depression sank deep away into the vats of boulders beneath my feet.
I was leg dangling on an outcropping of rock about nine feet wide. The rock face dropped some ten feet beneath my seat, and then buried itself in the reddish desert dirt. The realtor who sold my parents the acreage, on which they had a house built, had dragged a magnet through the soil and pulled it up coated with iron filings. The eastern face of the Knoll sloped steeply away beneath me for several hundred feet. A cool breeze pushed with mild insistence at my back, and the future was luring me into the arms of the air. In a moment that is indelibly tattooed on my physiological memory—this is a moment that I can ever re-member—I lurched and then I flew. Out, over, in–now I can offer an explanation, but what was really happening, what did flying really feel like? Read the rest of this entry »
