Readers,
Have you ever tried playing bocce in a leaf pile? Gather up a few trees’ worth of golds and browns, plus one to three of your friends, and toss that little ball. See where it lands? You have no idea—it’s in the leaves. It’s disappeared. Does it exist? It’s fallen down a hole, got itself trapped in an ether. The leaves have enveloped that little yellow dude, that flightless bird of Golden Snitches. It’s caught not by a wimpy little boy but by the ground, by the leaves, by the spirit of autumn itself. Or something like that.
Now it’s your turn. Take your heavy striped softball-sized spheres and chuck ‘em into the pile. Chase the little guy—or get as close as you can. You can’t nail it except by blind luck. You know only the rough outlines what’s real here—the sketchy outlines of truth blink across your retinas, your memory. Your friend chucks their first ball, too. Down it goes, off to the left. Way off, skirts out of the leaves. That’s certainty, but everyone’s disappointed. You want it in the leaves; you want your truths just sketches. Another friend makes a toss—right where yours went. Are they friends down there, did it bump yours? There’s no way to know, not unless you took a machine and blew all the leaves away. No one’s going to do that, though. Another certainty. You hold your next ball, and you toss it into the leaves, aiming around where you tossed the last one.
A shot in the dark, as they say.
Try it. Take that shot, that leap of faith, that stab at something new. That’s what our writers have done this week—Emma Singer took part in her first theatre production, Marseille, and was astonished by its magic; Diego Del Aguila wandered into screenings of Breathless and Nouvelle Vague and found himself tossed back in some awe; Clark Noble witnessed a man in his seminar talk to a chair; and both Irene Kim and Asa Xiao have thoughts on the film Sentimental Value—because, frankly, that’s all writers ever do. That’s what artists do. We lob our ideas into a pile of words, trying to get close to something meaningful. Some shadowy, sketchy outline of truth.
See the sketch for its potential, and read on.
Most daringly,
Will and Oscar
