HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG
                                   Things Coming Together?

By midnight my day of reading and writing, editing and internet publishing as well as what I have come to call my independent scholarship has come to an end.  Domestic tasks and community involvements of various kinds have also ended.  Whatever social activity and interaction with my wife in our empty nest and with others outside that nest that day have also ended.  My computer goes off at mid-night for it is pre-set to shut itself off at that time as an aid to get me to bed.  My word processing facility and my access to a library of billions of pages is gone for the next eight hours.  I tidy-up the papers, books and files in my study arranging them for the next morning of literary work.

I then prepare my third meal of the day, usually leftovers.  It’s a meal which follows the two previous meals I’ve had that day, the last one at about 6 p.m. and the first of the day at about noon.  I then sit down in front of the television to take in its late night offerings. The lighted box helps to increase the alpha waves going to my brain system, so recent studies inform us.  These electromagnetic waves or oscillations in the frequency range of 8–12 Hz arise from synchronous and coherent electrical activity of thalamic pacemaker cells in humans. They are commonly associated with relaxed meditative states.  They provide for me after midnight a useful soporific sleep-inducing effect.  Sometimes a good movie or doco is about to start or has started.  Last night was such an occasion.  This prose-poem closes with some comments on that movie entitled: House of Sand and Fog.-Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 15 August, 2010.

This drama-film has been out
for eight years—just about all
the movies come to TV if you
wait long enough, eh?  If you
go to Wikipedia you will find
a detailed summary of the plot
for both the movie and novel
from which it came, published
the year I retired from full-time
employment, 1999…and took a
sea-change in Tasmania by the
river and only five kms from
the Bass Strait, an extension of
the Great Southern Ocean at the
end of the Eurocentric world!!

We are all doomed, goes the theme
of this writer and this film…by our
tragic inability to understand each
other and our dreams so often…if
not mostly, go awry……...But this
writer1 found a gorgeous bolt of
fabric to enrich his many hours of
daydreaming, and rich scraps from
his childhood; he cut that fabric &
rearranged the pieces, sewed them
back together, again and again…..
looking for a pattern, as he puts it
so well analysing literary process.

Yes, Andre1, that puts it well…..Was it
all those odd jobs you had?……Was it
your father’s masterly capacity to write
short fiction? He died just weeks before
I left the classroom in ’99 and you were
born in ’59, the year I joined a new Faith.2

Things come together in life, eh Andre?
Perhaps it’s all that daydreaming and the
endless circulation of ideas, events & life.   

1 American writer Andre Dubus III(1959-) wrote the novel House of Sand and Fog during my last two years of full-time teaching, 1997-1999. Dubus was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1999 as I left Western Australia, the teaching profession and moved to Tasmania taking an early retirement after nearly 50 years in classrooms, 1949 to 1999, first as a student and then as a teacher.

2 The Baha’i Faith

Ron Price
17 August 2010