Ponckhockie Union
Right now the air is fresh and bright, warming after a frost. I’m grateful to need neither sweater nor jacket as I sit here on my deck. Sunshine and breeze wrestle to decide which controls the temperature. The lawn glistens, striped by long afternoon shadows of tree trunks, and occasionally the forest shivers and twinkles and yellow leaves drift singly to the ground. All sounds are a distant hum and shush—a car on the road, an airplane, rustling treetops—but then a lone birdsong, from somewhere near to my right, dips and twirls above all the sounds, like a dragonfly over a pond.
I have a story to tell, but first, I will ground myself in my own internal world of perception. This is my way.
In my leg that rests across the opposite knee, I feel the pulse of my blood, a steady beat. I see the wrinkles in the skin of my hands. This aging hulk of flesh and blood and bone is my current manifestation of self, in this here and now. Sometimes I feel closely identified with it, sometimes not. Right now this body just seems like any other random event, an arising in the field of awareness, like the birdsong a moment ago.
It doesn’t feel like “me.” Whatever that is.
Random arisings... like the fly that just landed, touched my finger, and flew away. Or the shadow that just crossed my page and, when I looked up, became a perfect brown oak leaf dancing its way down the air to the ground.
Or like the thoughts, images, feelings that follow one after another through my mental space, some of them carrying the label of “memory” and others the label of “imagination.” Yet each is nothing more than a current circumstance, a little electrochemical flicker in the brain, happening nowhere and nowhen but here and now: Willow, New York. October 17th, 2015.
I meditate on these ideas while the story takes shape in the dark reservoir beneath.
It’s entirely possible that there is no such thing as linear time: past, present, future. Maybe the apparent timeline we call a life is just a creation of the human mind. Yet, along its illusory course, strands of linked events meander and fork and intertwine like rivers seen from an airliner window.
Yesterday and today, suddenly my past has invaded my present.
Yesterday afternoon, the 16th, while my wife was working, I sat at home looking through old videotapes from over twenty years ago. My ten-year-old daughter, Chandra, is into roller skating and I wanted to show her the skate-dancers in Central Park that I had shot on video in the early nineties. I dug out my ancient Sony 8mm Handycam and shuffled through a box of poorly-labeled tapes, viewing the footage on the camera’s little fold-out screen.
After several tries, I found a tape marked Aug ‘94 Park and fast-forwarded it until I saw skating footage. Tinny disco music blared out of the miniature speaker as I watched the graceful, funky dancers skating in circles. It's interesting what time will do. I had no memory of being the eye behind that camera, as if someone else had shot this scene. I watched as the camera panned across the crowd of tourists and gawkers.
Then a gesture caught my eye. The flutter of a hand. A left hand wiping sweat from a brow, a flick of wrist, an angle of elbow, a moment gone. It echoed a memory, long repressed, of an inexplicable disaster, a wrenching turn in my path.
I immediately stopped the playback and rewound the tape, back to where I’d seen the gesture. Yes. There he was. A man whose face was so bland it was easy to overlook, almost invisible. It was a face that had gradually dissolved into a blur in my memory, out of reach. But now here it was again. The face of a man I once called Double Naught, as in: no, none, a negation. A man like a black hole, who shed no light.
Two decades had passed since I saw that face. I had hoped to never see it again.
I spent the next hour looking with care through the rest of that tape and another one from the same summer. I kept my focus always on the background, the blur of passing strangers, that New York City human atmosphere that becomes almost invisible. I glimpsed him two more times, once at Bethesda Fountain and again on Central Park West.
Gradually the revelation dawned: he had been following me. Even then, a full year before we met, before the events tumbled down on my head like a building collapsing, he had been there. Watching me. Planning. The old familiar dread, gone for so long now, crept again up my spine. Is he still watching me, even now, waiting to swoop down and destroy?
That discovery itself was unsettling enough, but there was also the fact of today’s date, a date inextricably connected to the man on the tape. A truly odd coincidence, except that I don’t believe in mere coincidence. And then my questions were intensified even more by what happened this morning.
Around 10 a.m. my journalist friend Paul called and asked me to meet him at the mortuary in Woodstock, and to be prepared to view a corpse. He wouldn’t say more. I left immediately and drove the five miles into town, dreading what might be in store. Paul and I had met in the nineties during that same difficult period that was already nagging at my mind. Even though we still see each other occasionally, I had the inexplicable sense that his call was related to those long-gone times.
October 16th and 17th: the dates of the burning of Kingston and the surrender at Saratoga during the Revolutionary War, dates that once ruled all my thoughts, that summer twenty years ago when I was so irrationally immersed in that little slice of American history. The year of change, the year that marked the end of one self, the beginning of another.
In the chilly prep room of Lasher Funeral Home, the mortician pulled back a sheet and I saw an elderly man with long, tangled gray hair and beard. For a moment I was blank, then I recognized him: this was a man who wandered the streets of Woodstock, silent but often smiling. His sole occupation seemed to be painting graceful Sanskrit symbols—Om and Om Mani Padme Hum—on rocks, boards, driftwood, then giving the pieces away to whomever took his fancy. He had given more than one to my wife—they decorate our front porch and a couple of window sills—and she had told me he was very sweet to her. Among the several eccentric street folk of Woodstock, he was the most lovable. His death from a heart attack was a sad event for our town, yes... but I never knew his name or where he lived and had never had any direct contact with him. Why was Paul showing me his body?
I have an answer. But the answer requires a long, convoluted tale—especially in light of what I found yesterday afternoon. Synchronicity carries meaning. Yesterday the man on tape, today the dead man—the two of them forever connected in a long-past mystery, unsolved.
I’ll never know the whole truth. But now, I can’t help it, I have to look back. Two specters from my past suddenly here again, on these dates. I have to go over the story once more, once more, as if maybe this time it will make sense.
© Brent Robison 2019
This story is the first chapter of the novel Ponckhockie Union by Brent Robison, Recital Publishing 2019
Right now the air is fresh and bright, warming after a frost. I’m grateful to need neither sweater nor jacket as I sit here on my deck. Sunshine and breeze wrestle to decide which controls the temperature. The lawn glistens, striped by long afternoon shadows of tree trunks, and occasionally the forest shivers and twinkles and yellow leaves drift singly to the ground. All sounds are a distant hum and shush—a car on the road, an airplane, rustling treetops—but then a lone birdsong, from somewhere near to my right, dips and twirls above all the sounds, like a dragonfly over a pond.
I have a story to tell, but first, I will ground myself in my own internal world of perception. This is my way.
In my leg that rests across the opposite knee, I feel the pulse of my blood, a steady beat. I see the wrinkles in the skin of my hands. This aging hulk of flesh and blood and bone is my current manifestation of self, in this here and now. Sometimes I feel closely identified with it, sometimes not. Right now this body just seems like any other random event, an arising in the field of awareness, like the birdsong a moment ago.
It doesn’t feel like “me.” Whatever that is.
Random arisings... like the fly that just landed, touched my finger, and flew away. Or the shadow that just crossed my page and, when I looked up, became a perfect brown oak leaf dancing its way down the air to the ground.
Or like the thoughts, images, feelings that follow one after another through my mental space, some of them carrying the label of “memory” and others the label of “imagination.” Yet each is nothing more than a current circumstance, a little electrochemical flicker in the brain, happening nowhere and nowhen but here and now: Willow, New York. October 17th, 2015.
I meditate on these ideas while the story takes shape in the dark reservoir beneath.
It’s entirely possible that there is no such thing as linear time: past, present, future. Maybe the apparent timeline we call a life is just a creation of the human mind. Yet, along its illusory course, strands of linked events meander and fork and intertwine like rivers seen from an airliner window.
Yesterday and today, suddenly my past has invaded my present.
Yesterday afternoon, the 16th, while my wife was working, I sat at home looking through old videotapes from over twenty years ago. My ten-year-old daughter, Chandra, is into roller skating and I wanted to show her the skate-dancers in Central Park that I had shot on video in the early nineties. I dug out my ancient Sony 8mm Handycam and shuffled through a box of poorly-labeled tapes, viewing the footage on the camera’s little fold-out screen.
After several tries, I found a tape marked Aug ‘94 Park and fast-forwarded it until I saw skating footage. Tinny disco music blared out of the miniature speaker as I watched the graceful, funky dancers skating in circles. It's interesting what time will do. I had no memory of being the eye behind that camera, as if someone else had shot this scene. I watched as the camera panned across the crowd of tourists and gawkers.
Then a gesture caught my eye. The flutter of a hand. A left hand wiping sweat from a brow, a flick of wrist, an angle of elbow, a moment gone. It echoed a memory, long repressed, of an inexplicable disaster, a wrenching turn in my path.
I immediately stopped the playback and rewound the tape, back to where I’d seen the gesture. Yes. There he was. A man whose face was so bland it was easy to overlook, almost invisible. It was a face that had gradually dissolved into a blur in my memory, out of reach. But now here it was again. The face of a man I once called Double Naught, as in: no, none, a negation. A man like a black hole, who shed no light.
Two decades had passed since I saw that face. I had hoped to never see it again.
I spent the next hour looking with care through the rest of that tape and another one from the same summer. I kept my focus always on the background, the blur of passing strangers, that New York City human atmosphere that becomes almost invisible. I glimpsed him two more times, once at Bethesda Fountain and again on Central Park West.
Gradually the revelation dawned: he had been following me. Even then, a full year before we met, before the events tumbled down on my head like a building collapsing, he had been there. Watching me. Planning. The old familiar dread, gone for so long now, crept again up my spine. Is he still watching me, even now, waiting to swoop down and destroy?
That discovery itself was unsettling enough, but there was also the fact of today’s date, a date inextricably connected to the man on the tape. A truly odd coincidence, except that I don’t believe in mere coincidence. And then my questions were intensified even more by what happened this morning.
Around 10 a.m. my journalist friend Paul called and asked me to meet him at the mortuary in Woodstock, and to be prepared to view a corpse. He wouldn’t say more. I left immediately and drove the five miles into town, dreading what might be in store. Paul and I had met in the nineties during that same difficult period that was already nagging at my mind. Even though we still see each other occasionally, I had the inexplicable sense that his call was related to those long-gone times.
October 16th and 17th: the dates of the burning of Kingston and the surrender at Saratoga during the Revolutionary War, dates that once ruled all my thoughts, that summer twenty years ago when I was so irrationally immersed in that little slice of American history. The year of change, the year that marked the end of one self, the beginning of another.
In the chilly prep room of Lasher Funeral Home, the mortician pulled back a sheet and I saw an elderly man with long, tangled gray hair and beard. For a moment I was blank, then I recognized him: this was a man who wandered the streets of Woodstock, silent but often smiling. His sole occupation seemed to be painting graceful Sanskrit symbols—Om and Om Mani Padme Hum—on rocks, boards, driftwood, then giving the pieces away to whomever took his fancy. He had given more than one to my wife—they decorate our front porch and a couple of window sills—and she had told me he was very sweet to her. Among the several eccentric street folk of Woodstock, he was the most lovable. His death from a heart attack was a sad event for our town, yes... but I never knew his name or where he lived and had never had any direct contact with him. Why was Paul showing me his body?
I have an answer. But the answer requires a long, convoluted tale—especially in light of what I found yesterday afternoon. Synchronicity carries meaning. Yesterday the man on tape, today the dead man—the two of them forever connected in a long-past mystery, unsolved.
I’ll never know the whole truth. But now, I can’t help it, I have to look back. Two specters from my past suddenly here again, on these dates. I have to go over the story once more, once more, as if maybe this time it will make sense.
© Brent Robison 2019
This story is the first chapter of the novel Ponckhockie Union by Brent Robison, Recital Publishing 2019
Narrated by Brent Robison.
Narrated by Brent Robison.
POST RECITAL
TALK
TN: So Brent, I’ve read this book of yours a few times now, and I enjoy it each time.
BR: Good.
TN: Yeah... It kept me up through the night once. It seems to be a mystery story, but the mystery is as much in the mind of the protagonist as outside it. Was this something that just evolved while writing it, or was it a conscious intention?
BR: It was a very conscious intention. I didn't want to just write a whodunnit. I wanted it to be more like a 'who-am-I', as opposed to a whodunnit. And so the mystery in the mind of the protagonist is for me the most important part and in fact there was a goal of mine to be subtle and unclear about what is actually in the mind of the protagonist, and what isn't.
TN: Well yeah, you know I mean mysteries are entertaining. Readers want to find out what’s going on, so they keep turning pages. There’s a pleasure in that, but unlike most mystery stories, this one has no clear resolution. Is resolution too final for you? Are you frightened of it? Or maybe you just don’t want to be pinned down. I should say that I personally like that, and wouldn’t have it any other way.
BR: Well I'm glad you felt that way about it. Maybe that's why we've been collaborators for some years now.
TN: Yeah.
BR: I don't have either fear of resolution, or not wanting to be pinned down. It's really more an interest in getting at mystery with the capital 'M', not just the name of a genre, because the truth about mystery...
TN: … is that it's a mystery, right?
BR: Yeah right, exactly. In my view the truth about the Universe is primarily mystery, and so while there could be some threads that might get wrapped up—resolved, a bigger truth is to leave the mystery open. In fact I'm quite dissatisfied by many mysteries in the genre that wrap things up, because it feels essentially false to me when things are easily wrapped up.
TN: Now there’s a metaphor that runs underneath, or above this story—a metaphor of fire. There’s the burning of Kingston by the British army, the fiery car crash that sets your protagonist off on his peradventures... Did the English burning of Kingston... and they didn’t do such a good job—it’s still standing by the way—did that create the metaphor of fire I’m talking about? And then you followed it, letting it inform the story? Or was it a starting point, unconscious perhaps?
BR: Well that one is a little harder for me to answer, as to where it came from. As I began to concoct scenes in my head, there just seemed to be fire cropping up here and there, and then at some point I decided to develop that a little further. The fact that the burning of Kingston is a key element, really occurred I think later in the development of the story but it turned out to be useful.
TN: Now the story is full of coincidences—people from the protagonist’s past, addresses, street numbers, names, dates... Do they have meaning or are they just random? Is ‘coincidence’ a term to describe something that can’t be explained easily—something where agency is vague?
BR: Well I appreciate your questions because they go deeper than often I may have been thinking. Coincidence is something that we as humans are trained to recognize—we're great pattern recognizers, so coincidences can be seen as just the way numbers work, or the way events work. That by pure randomness things seem to line up with one another. On the other hand there is a deeper way of looking at it, and the word 'synchronicity' is attached to coincidences that actually not only have that line-up of events or things but that also have meaning, or meaning to whoever is perceiving it. So then it moves into a different realm. So this is a matter of protagonist, or you might say a reader's interpretation of how meaningful these coincidences are, and whether they are actually synchronicities, which in the mind of Ben Rose the protagonist, they are.
TN: Talking of coincidences... I see that your protagonist Ben Rose bears your initials: BR—does this mean that he is you, a projection of yourself into the imaginary realm of fiction? Of course, writers have to draw from themselves to some extent. No one can escape their own perceptions. What else have we got?
BR: Right. Well that's a gimmick that I'm using, you might say, but I'm doing it for a purpose. The purpose is that I like metafictional touches. I want to give hints to the reader that make them wonder how autobiographical this story actually is, and of course it's got autobiographical elements and it has strictly imaginary elements, and I enjoy the idea that readers might be wondering about the boundaries between those, even though they don't really matter. And I do want to mention that this is part of following the example of a writer that I feel is a mentor of mine, and that's Paul Auster, who...
TN: Who appears in the book.
BR: … who is a character in the book in a re-imagined version of himself, and this is something he has done occasionally, where he's put a character named Paul Auster in one of his novels, and he has also written mysteries that don't abide by genre conventions and are unresolved... and these are all things that I wanted to do and the book is partly homage to him.
TN: Now I've been wondering about this character who crops up throughout the story—an unknown quantity... and malign—a man, not a woman, if there’s any significance to that. He comes in different guises, and names, which all begin with the letter 'N'. He suggests nothingness or the negative. But why should nothingness be malignant? Is it that this character is some kind of allegorical representation of meaninglessness. Or perhaps of that entropic struggle—it takes more energy to hold a system together than to let it fall apart— the maintenance of civilization takes more effort than its dissolution. But this one seems to be conspiring. Why is he doing that, and who is this character?
BR: Well maybe my hints were too subtle but to answer who is this character—on the deepest level he is death—the fear of death. If that's a force that dissolves civilization... I didn't think of it on that level. I thought of it as a more personal, internal fear of ending. I don't think of nothingness necessarily as bad but I chose his name because I was able to find a lot of nice combinations that hint at negation with 'N' words and 'N' names and I liked that.
TN: Yeah 'nice' begins with 'N' too, doesn't it?
BR: Nice?
TN: Yeah, 'nice' begins with 'N'.
BR: It does. I should have named him Nice Nobody, or something.
TN: Well, thanks Brent for answering all my inane...
Phone rings
TN: Sorry. Just let me get this. Hello?
BR: (on phone): Hey, it's Brent.
TN: Brent? But you're here in the... Where did you go?
BR: I left, but there's something else I wanted to say. Our listeners may wonder what the title means.
TN: I think they may be wondering more than that.
BR: Ponckhockie is a Native American word meaning "land of ashes." It's the name of the neighborhood in Kingston NY where the British landed when they burned the city. And Union means a few things, of course. Partly it's the name of a church where something important happens to Ben Rose.
TN: How did you manage to slip out while we were talking?
BR: It's a mystery.
TN: … A mystery wrapped up in an enigma. Hmm... I thought Ponckhockie was a fileld sport, popular in the late 1970s...
TN: So Brent, I’ve read this book of yours a few times now, and I enjoy it each time.
BR: Good.
TN: Yeah... It kept me up through the night once. It seems to be a mystery story, but the mystery is as much in the mind of the protagonist as outside it. Was this something that just evolved while writing it, or was it a conscious intention?
BR: It was a very conscious intention. I didn't want to just write a whodunnit. I wanted it to be more like a 'who-am-I', as opposed to a whodunnit. And so the mystery in the mind of the protagonist is for me the most important part and in fact there was a goal of mine to be subtle and unclear about what is actually in the mind of the protagonist, and what isn't.
TN: Well yeah, you know I mean mysteries are entertaining. Readers want to find out what’s going on, so they keep turning pages. There’s a pleasure in that, but unlike most mystery stories, this one has no clear resolution. Is resolution too final for you? Are you frightened of it? Or maybe you just don’t want to be pinned down. I should say that I personally like that, and wouldn’t have it any other way.
BR: Well I'm glad you felt that way about it. Maybe that's why we've been collaborators for some years now.
TN: Yeah.
BR: I don't have either fear of resolution, or not wanting to be pinned down. It's really more an interest in getting at mystery with the capital 'M', not just the name of a genre, because the truth about mystery...
TN: … is that it's a mystery, right?
BR: Yeah right, exactly. In my view the truth about the Universe is primarily mystery, and so while there could be some threads that might get wrapped up—resolved, a bigger truth is to leave the mystery open. In fact I'm quite dissatisfied by many mysteries in the genre that wrap things up, because it feels essentially false to me when things are easily wrapped up.
TN: Now there’s a metaphor that runs underneath, or above this story—a metaphor of fire. There’s the burning of Kingston by the British army, the fiery car crash that sets your protagonist off on his peradventures... Did the English burning of Kingston... and they didn’t do such a good job—it’s still standing by the way—did that create the metaphor of fire I’m talking about? And then you followed it, letting it inform the story? Or was it a starting point, unconscious perhaps?
BR: Well that one is a little harder for me to answer, as to where it came from. As I began to concoct scenes in my head, there just seemed to be fire cropping up here and there, and then at some point I decided to develop that a little further. The fact that the burning of Kingston is a key element, really occurred I think later in the development of the story but it turned out to be useful.
TN: Now the story is full of coincidences—people from the protagonist’s past, addresses, street numbers, names, dates... Do they have meaning or are they just random? Is ‘coincidence’ a term to describe something that can’t be explained easily—something where agency is vague?
BR: Well I appreciate your questions because they go deeper than often I may have been thinking. Coincidence is something that we as humans are trained to recognize—we're great pattern recognizers, so coincidences can be seen as just the way numbers work, or the way events work. That by pure randomness things seem to line up with one another. On the other hand there is a deeper way of looking at it, and the word 'synchronicity' is attached to coincidences that actually not only have that line-up of events or things but that also have meaning, or meaning to whoever is perceiving it. So then it moves into a different realm. So this is a matter of protagonist, or you might say a reader's interpretation of how meaningful these coincidences are, and whether they are actually synchronicities, which in the mind of Ben Rose the protagonist, they are.
TN: Talking of coincidences... I see that your protagonist Ben Rose bears your initials: BR—does this mean that he is you, a projection of yourself into the imaginary realm of fiction? Of course, writers have to draw from themselves to some extent. No one can escape their own perceptions. What else have we got?
BR: Right. Well that's a gimmick that I'm using, you might say, but I'm doing it for a purpose. The purpose is that I like metafictional touches. I want to give hints to the reader that make them wonder how autobiographical this story actually is, and of course it's got autobiographical elements and it has strictly imaginary elements, and I enjoy the idea that readers might be wondering about the boundaries between those, even though they don't really matter. And I do want to mention that this is part of following the example of a writer that I feel is a mentor of mine, and that's Paul Auster, who...
TN: Who appears in the book.
BR: … who is a character in the book in a re-imagined version of himself, and this is something he has done occasionally, where he's put a character named Paul Auster in one of his novels, and he has also written mysteries that don't abide by genre conventions and are unresolved... and these are all things that I wanted to do and the book is partly homage to him.
TN: Now I've been wondering about this character who crops up throughout the story—an unknown quantity... and malign—a man, not a woman, if there’s any significance to that. He comes in different guises, and names, which all begin with the letter 'N'. He suggests nothingness or the negative. But why should nothingness be malignant? Is it that this character is some kind of allegorical representation of meaninglessness. Or perhaps of that entropic struggle—it takes more energy to hold a system together than to let it fall apart— the maintenance of civilization takes more effort than its dissolution. But this one seems to be conspiring. Why is he doing that, and who is this character?
BR: Well maybe my hints were too subtle but to answer who is this character—on the deepest level he is death—the fear of death. If that's a force that dissolves civilization... I didn't think of it on that level. I thought of it as a more personal, internal fear of ending. I don't think of nothingness necessarily as bad but I chose his name because I was able to find a lot of nice combinations that hint at negation with 'N' words and 'N' names and I liked that.
TN: Yeah 'nice' begins with 'N' too, doesn't it?
BR: Nice?
TN: Yeah, 'nice' begins with 'N'.
BR: It does. I should have named him Nice Nobody, or something.
TN: Well, thanks Brent for answering all my inane...
Phone rings
TN: Sorry. Just let me get this. Hello?
BR: (on phone): Hey, it's Brent.
TN: Brent? But you're here in the... Where did you go?
BR: I left, but there's something else I wanted to say. Our listeners may wonder what the title means.
TN: I think they may be wondering more than that.
BR: Ponckhockie is a Native American word meaning "land of ashes." It's the name of the neighborhood in Kingston NY where the British landed when they burned the city. And Union means a few things, of course. Partly it's the name of a church where something important happens to Ben Rose.
TN: How did you manage to slip out while we were talking?
BR: It's a mystery.
TN: … A mystery wrapped up in an enigma. Hmm... I thought Ponckhockie was a field sport, popular in the late 1970s...
Music on this episode:
Pulse Field by Peter Blum and David Budd
Used by permission of the artists
Thump by Audionautix.com
License CC BY 3.0
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand by Maurice Ravel
License CC BY 3.0
