VI

[[Four main characters, separated by time and geography, compose an inadvertent dialogue over the course of a novel. (I) The actuarial, as inspired by Wallace Stevens. (II) The housewife with the personality-typology scheme (III) The mathematician also a housewife, an army wife with three sons (IV) The portrait of the postmodern artist as a young fool. Klein bottle. Ouroboros. Cosmos. Entropy. ]

1. Glad tidings.
2. Ships adrift under capricious constellations, angry stars, azimuth circle rippped asunder
3. Calculable tides and unforeseeable storms
4. Ships run aground.
5. Safe ships, sleeping, berthed but still rocking from residual waves crashing past the breakwalls.
6. Back and fill, the Boatswain drunken, the Coxswain fevered and delirious.

Good morning, Mr Cantwell. This is the voice he hears every morning, like caffeine it shakes the last holdings of sleep, a sandy, persistent trail leading back to his bed. The voice that also buoys him at day's end, Good evening, Mr Cantwell. Just enough to keep his head above the choppy waves that fight him back on the five-thirty train. She's been his secretary for some fifteen years now and it was years ago that he ceased to see her as a woman with verifiable hair color, decidedly limp auburn hair, thin lips on a curt mouth, maybe a slight underbite, now just a daily indiscernible fixture, her image irretreivable in his minds eye, but funny that her voice still puts him in immediate working mode, like a morning alarm. Good Morning, Ms. Patterson.
[[God this is too fucken hard. I need a story. I got the character sketches sort of, but they don't want to do anything. How easy to go the route of A day in the life, the poetic and dramatic in the pedestrian and banal, think Cunningham's The Hours, maybe throw in some piquant flashbacks—he was always a very unemotional father, that scene where Jenny or Judith was eight years old and trying to fly a kite, nary a wind, and her father tells her it's all about force of will, gumption translating into drag, and something about Bernouli's principal—heard a phrase on the radio that sounds so good but not what sure it means: blue-eyed humanism, they were describing the piercing limpid stare of one J. Robert Oppenheimer. So what's the story, morning glory. For Steven Cantwell it's really just a character sketch, a slowly realized gap between his feelingful humanist imaginings—actuarial work being so dehumanizing—and his coldness to the people around him, his family and friends, and then the icing on the cake. his brand of humanism turns out to be rather elitist, not to mention racist, hates the jazz age, hates an excess of passion. His story will culminate in some kind of epiphany on the way home, he forgets to buy birthday present for daughter as requested by his wife. Cantwell's story will lead in to a story which will seem to be about his daughter, a housewife, but it's about someone entirely different. She is inventing a parlor game a prototype for a personality typology system, a la meyer's briggs, loosely based on Jungian personality archetypes, she starts imagining real people for these archetypes and these figure into her poly-perverse sexual fantasies, it will slowly be realized that she has always had misanthropic tendancies, making it apt that she would want to pull people apart and put them in boxes. Recently married. Just shy of thirty. Her husband a foil to her misanthropy, is the anti- Jackson Pollock, really nice guy but paints really bad kitsch. He tells her that maybe her typology system could be a good way to work through interpersonal barriers, a way for people to relate to each other, and she scoffs at this, if people knew each other's numbers they'd be even bigger assholes to each other. She first became interested in personality typology because the artist's community they live in is full of astrologers, so she thought what's more real than the stars, people and their quirks, their personalities, their own foibles tripping up their own lives. She used to be a humanist until she landed in this artist's commune, full of obscurantists, delusional egomaniacs. Her husband is too nice to speak ill of his comrades. She becomes obsessed with categorizing any person she meets or observes. One day she meets a new resident that she can't quite place—doesn't quite fit into her personality type scheme or maybe she can't quite read her, a woman also somewhat of a misanthrope. It seems like they could become very intimate. She tells her all about her theory. They end up running away together, both missing urban life, but end up getting ditched by her out in the middle of nowhere.

V

[[[[[[He is almost sixty. Married half his life. What is the half-life of a marriage. His daughter has been married and out of state for the last three years. Moved south, the husband an artist. A painter, a pauper, his daughter lost to Bohemia, maybe?Steven Cantwell is an actuarial. He is an obsessive maker of lists, not a poet, a listmaker. He of the boundless reserves of empathy is so removed emotionally from his immediate family, his only daughter, his wife. This is apparently common with people of boundless empathy, they have no patience for those closest to them, hence the ease of crusading for people in far away lands. Ideals work better as big pictures, rather than toiling through the barbarous details. Like a beautiful dream, a grand design, that becomes too familiar, mired in minor imperfections, the slip-start of everyday, it becomes grotesque. But then his life has become a dream, or if not a dream an endless, unthinking ritual, numbers. It is through his lists that he feels, that he ponders that he touches. His most meaningful relationship an old college friend, a poet and professor, he lunches with every month. He and his wife have lives in parallel, parallel only in space. He is emotionally estranged from his daughter, married and on another state. At what point did he slip away? Who slipped away? Is it a mutual slipping away. Love becomes a ritual, what's a thirtiest anniversary? Did she mention renewing vows. Things become unmoored. Things run adrift, if you don't watch them. Is modern life like a slow psychosis? You become so adept at the motions of a life, the work, the shallow, hollow commitments of family, and you stop living a meaningful life, hunger and apathy, delusion and fulfillment, these things walk hand in hand. Childhood memories of his daughter show how he was distant even then, when she was supposedly daddy's little girl. And with his wife those halcyon days of courting and love, a proper love, even in the throes of young passion, was this empty itself. his empathy lies these days with the subjects of his work, people in the face of fate, the tides of chance and injury. Maybe he cast a spell, put them in a bubble, timeless and unalterable, the heart tires. Love is holding the fragile glass heart beyond the railings above the dark abyss, this is where love thrives. All the safest houses, the fastest, surest cars.]