Steven Fraccaro

The Reappearance of Essence

The return is not what any of us thought it would be, it never is. Return to what, you may ask, the past, the future? No one can return to a former place, or to a former self. 
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The discovery of the disappearance is the essence of dissolution. To disappear is to disperse the specifics of meaning. The result is the requisite oblivion. At a certain point, too late, one realizes that living is more important than writing. The epiphany of the polygraph is thus multiplied by perplexity, epitope and episteme, a conflation of causes and effects. The repercussions of the dissonance are exaggerated. He died in police custody after demonstrating antiviral tendencies.

Shadow walls and shadow walks, fragments of desire. The disposition of the dimorphic principle is not unalloyed with the descension of its own negation.  Further research is required. 

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Nothing Like the Present

Not easy to live in the moment, this very moment, to define precisely what is in one’s mind. Regard the landscape, watch it minutely—try to enter the landscape, if only for a second.

“The mind is a monkey…”

Across the night, across the sky, there are things that cannot be said. Dead branches stretch above the lake. An imagination of essence that is never present, a prolonged elaboration of existence, what in the nineteenth century might been have termed desire but is something more, a reaching with the mind towards an equivalence, a placement within what you are observing. Mind? Body? Can you define the difference? Is there no distinction at all, or is it that the distinction is simplified, described inaccurately? What if you could project your consciousness into another physical object? Not for any useful purpose but simply as a meditation, a consideration of existence. 

Experiments of this sort lead to a different way of seeing. Not controlled experiments, you might reply. No, it makes no sense to say to oneself, “I am the lamp I am staring at.” If you close your eyes, can you become someone else, can you experience their emotions in full? Is this intense imagination, a form of presumption, or simply a fantasy?

Let the mind fade, if only for a short time. Then return to what you think is the present. 

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Drosselmeyer, 1830

The story is, he lost an eye in the wars. There are others who say it was in a duel, that a woman was involved. We note an older gentleman in a black cloak who wears an eyepatch; he’s spry, slightly disreputable, if only because his motives are unclear. When he lifts Marie’s arm to return the Nutcracker as she sleeps, he is careful not to wake her. And yet, it is he who summons the nightmares that afflict her, until she learns to overcome them.

One can devise a multitude of stories, stories to discredit one’s enemies, stories to enhance the reputations of one’s friends, stories to instruct, to entertain, to perplex. Narrative constitutes a function, a means for derailing reality, a way to disrupt the accustomed flow of events. Unlike a train, a narrative does not have a fixed destination. Even the most innocent story has the potential to offend, particularly those who have been erased from the narrative.

Drosselmeyer went on to have many adventures. As did Marie. In some, he appeared aged, in others younger. For some of us, rising in the morning and facing the day is an adventure. This is entirely appropriate, and to be expected.

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John Berryman

For those who remember, and for those who forget, it was a strange time. A revolution had exploded and shattered, wildness had been suppressed, there was a pretense of normalcy. No one talked about the war. The auditorium was situated in an enclave of what presumed to be civilization, and was filled with professors, graduate students, a scattering of younger students. The famous writer, a friend of the poet’s, arrived with his glamorous wife, a murmur as they took their seats in the front row. It was indeed December for the dean, even though it was February. A young man had brought a fellow student, a young woman from California who was less than interested in the young man.

The disheveled poet screamed from the podium, then whispered, waved his arms, then screamed again. None of it made sense. None of it was audible, just a stray word here and there, enunciated or declaimed in mock Shakespearean tones. He was very, very drunk.

Huffy Henry hid, hideously close to himself.

Afterwards, the young woman turned to her companion, “So that’s what poetry is.” She later became a philosophy professor. The next day, in the corridors of academe, you could hear the comments, ”It’s really an illness, you know.”

Berryman had his demons. Let us leave it to his biographers to catalog them. Precisely why he took his own life a year later is unknown. No doubt many reasons are available. I will offer only this: Perhaps he was tired of playing the clown to an audience of very proper people, the assembled professors and their wives. Perhaps the figure who waved his arms and ranted was the only honest person in the room that evening.  

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Steven Fraccaro is the author of two novels, Dark Angels and Gainsborough’s Revenge, as well as of a book of essays, The Recalcitrant Scrivener. His most recent book is Skeleton Keys, published by Chax Press in 2023, a hybrid work intended to inhabit the space between poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. His pieces on Hans Holbein and Gustav Courbet appeared in The Ekphrastic Review in 2019 and 2024, respectively.