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“I was recently denied a writing prize because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: I would not write out in full the words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.“
Now, my reaction, and possibly anyone’s, would be, “Silly, would never happen, .” But, she’s famous, I’ll keep on. What are the possibilities? Well, she could be having fun, just writing nonsense to amuse herself and her readers. Or, stretching a bit, it could have been a dream. Maybe a nightmarish, anxiety dream she’d had recently, shaken by it. More plausibly, she could be exposing the prize committee, mocking them for their inane and ignorant judgements. After all, they’d rejected her submission. Or, perhaps a poor deluded soul, desperate for reassurance.
And the excuse, lazy. Relating that to using contractions is the most outlandish notion of all. Beyond comment.
But, what does cry out, what sticks, are those two glorious words, can’t and won’t ! How often do these ring in my ears, unspoken, yes, but deliciously defiant. Whatever story is being told, for me, the power of this piece is in the title.
“Odon Von Horvath Out Walking“
I wanted to write about this one because I was curious about the name – Odon von Horvath. It gets interesting when she lists the items left behind by the skeleton: the knapsack, “almost as good as new,” conjuring up in the hiker some excitement as he prepared for his next trip; a “sweater” for the mountain’s cold evenings, “other clothing,” he’ll be gone a few days; a “small” bag of stale food, why “small” ? a “diary,” perhaps a writer? a geologist? a record keeper?; and finally the post card,” ready to send,” on the brink of his adventure, with the bitterly ironic message, “Having a wonderful time.”
But how did the poor fellow die? Murder or foul play ? Had he been lured “a distance” from the path by an evildoer? No signs of a hungry animal or an injurious fall. Probably overcome by a heart attack, staggered into the woods.
More intriguing is what happened at home, to his friends and loved ones (assuming he had some). He’d just vanished. No word from him. Had he run off? Been killed? Imprisoned somewhere? Did they look for him? Maybe not much, since he’s not that far from the path. At least, we readers know that he was once there, alive and happy.
Browsing “Odon von Horvath” on line, looking for a copy of the poem to print, I was astonished to see the name– Odon von Horvath -in bold on Wikipedia. He was real! There followed many more items about him, a novelist, playwright, Hungarian-Austrian, b.1901, d.1938, quite successful, well-respected. But here’s the best part: he told a story to his friends that “once he was out walking in the Bavarian Alps when he discovered a skeleton of a long-dead man with his knapsack still intact. He opened it up and found a post card reading “Having a wonderful time.” Asked by his friends what he did, he replied, “I posted it.”
What fun to see how Lydia Davis took this little anecdote about a dead man and made a human being of him. And the real skeleton, whose card was posted, was probably found by someone, sometime, a missing person identified, while Lydia’s poetic one, his card unposted to our knowledge, will remain unknown, a mystery, forever enclosed in a book of Flash Fiction.
“Lost Things” is Lydia Davis in a serious mood. It is more poetry than prose and, in fact, included in “The Best Poetry of the Year” anthology in 2008. If you read it aloud, you can hear the cadence in the phrasing, each one a carefully chosen group of words, separated by commas (18) and occasionally a period (6). You can also hear the musical repetition of words and sounds, echoing each other, then echoing again and again.
She begins, somewhat philosophically, by considering the word, “lost,” as true but also not true because what is lost is, actually, “somewhere in the world.” Though she keeps her tone detached, two specific things are named, a coat and a dog, and we understand that she’s referring to her own possessions. She then narrows her subject and names two items that are not only lost, but “valuable,” important to her, but “not gone.” Then the loss becomes more personal, “they are lost from me,” not somewhere in the world, not gone, but they are there, more closely perhaps, “to someone else.” If not that, the ring is still “not lost to itself.” Its identity remains, it exists without a context at all and the button, “too, there, still” exists. But now emotion intrudes gently into her reasoning: the objects exist, “only not where I am,” and then, repeated again a few words later, “only not where I am.”
I find this poem sad. Sad, because of the restraint she maintains throughout, until the end, when her deliberations about the possibilities of “lost” give way to acceptance, to the simply-expressed loneliness she feels, “only not where I am.” The loss could be a ring, a button, or a person, to her, to any of us. The process and the ending are the same.
Poems that Shine 