What Melanie Rae Thon Found in John Berger’s Pocket

In This Light takes some of the best short stories from Melanie Rae Thon’s first two collections, then adds three previously uncollected pieces—stories where plot, while not completely abandoned, matters less than a totality of experience. The narrators may not be literally unstuck in time, as Billy Pilgrim was in Slaughterhouse-Five, but their narration shifts between past and present without warning, taking on others’ perspectives without hesitation, as the telling of traumatic moments spirals out to encompass entire lives. I’d asked if Thon would be willing to contribute a guest essay to the “Selling Shorts” series, as I do with other short story writers, but instead she’s revealed how an essay by John Berger has changed the way she sees the world—and, I sense, the way she describes the world in her fiction.

There is no happiness like mine. I am reading John Berger’s The Shape of a Pocket, opening a gate, entering the interstices between my own sensory experience and other possible visible orders, perhaps ones “destined for night-birds, reindeer, ferrets, eels, whales… ”

In the fast flicker of daily perception, we sometimes sense the space between two frames, see or hear or smell in ways that give us a glimpse of life beyond our human limitations. Dogs, he says, are the “natural frontier experts of these interstices.” And no wonder! The average dog has over 200 million scent receptors in its nasal folds, compared to a human being’s 5 million. With mobile ears capturing and funneling sound, a dog can locate and identify the source in six-hundredths of a second. They have co-evolved with humans, learned to communicate with us, to seek our companionship and approval, while staying attuned to a river of sensory stimuli we can only begin to imagine. We train them as rescuers and guides; we trust they will save us.

Berger’s elegant essay gives me new appreciation and wonder as I walk along the river with my own beautiful Talia. She bounds ahead of me, a narrow slash of animal. All these years she’s been trying to teach me what she knows about the world. She senses the white hare sitting still in snow, ears twitching. The great horned owl watches us. He’ll kill a dog, a cat, a skunk, a porcupine—rip the hide off a fallen cow, snatch a coyote. Nothing is beyond his grasp: only the whirling hawk or a congregation of crows makes him flee in frenzy.

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16 May 2011 | guest authors |

Marge Piercy, “Collectors”

Some people collect grudges
like stamps or rare coins.
They take out their prize holdings
to polish till they glow.

But after a while, it doesn’t work
any longer, so they need fresh
ones to cherish the way another
will groom a champion setter.

Friendships are expendable
as last decade’s palazzo pants.
Rejecting is more fun than
holding close. So on they go

their paths littered with torn
and discarded friendships,
like bones outside the den
of a fairy tale giant.

“Collectors” is one of the previously uncollected poems in The Hunger Moon, a selected retrospective of Marge Piercy‘s poems from 1980 to 2010. Other new Piercy poems in the collection include “The low road,” “The curse of Wonder Woman” (published in Blue Fifth), “Football for dummies,” and “End of days” (published in Rattle).

12 May 2011 | poetry |