Monsters and Dust
Some forty years ago, give or take, I was thinking about salt, Morton’s salt in particular. It occurred to me in a moment of dreadful inspiration that salt has a great deal to do with both literary and personal endings, specifically that there are a finite number of salt canisters I’ll bring home from the grocery store over the course of my life, just as there are a finite number of books and stories and essays that I’ll write before the writing or the writer runs out.
Because I’m slightly unnerved by the idea of an empty saltshaker, we keep a spare Morton’s canister unopened in the pantry–the cylindrical, blue cardboard box with the Morton’s Salt Girl perpetually walking in the rain beneath her umbrella, tipping out a slow stream of salt behind her, which, I imagine, disappears on the rainy sidewalk like sea foam in the wake of a ship. She’s been on her journey since 1911, but she hasn’t aged or run out of salt. We should all be so fortunate.
According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, in many cultures people throw salt onto coffins in an open grave because Satan hates salt, just as brewers historically tossed a handful of salt on top of the mash when it was brewing in order to keep the witches from it. I have it on good authority that people can thwart a pursuing ghost by pitching salt over their shoulders. Perhaps that’s why the Morton’s girl is spilling salt on the pavement, never looking back. My own notions about salt aren’t common-sensible. They have little to do with witches, devils, or beer. I’m pretty sure that G. K. Chesterton was correct when he wrote, “To draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.”
My salt ruminations can be traced back to the spice cupboard in the kitchen when I was growing up, where there was always a canister of Morton’s. There was also a big saltshaker on the stovetop alongside the ubiquitous can of bacon grease. On the side of the shaker was a painting of strawberries and strawberry leaves encircling the words, “Salt, thy food to please but not to spoil.” I’d argue with whoever put that comma after “salt,” but I’ve found out often enough that it’s easy to spoil your food (or your sentence) if you don’t watch out. Like all good spice cupboards, ours smelled of cinnamon and allspice and cloves and other wonderful things—always my favorite cupboard in the kitchen. I can’t remember how old I was when my mother told me about throwing spilled salt over my left shoulder to ward off bad luck, but I’ve never been able to shake that superstition. As for salting a bird’s tail, I only recently figured out that it might as well be pepper as salt, that I’d been taken in by a joke that was old when my mother was a girl.
There was an egg timer in that spice cupboard (as there is in our house today), a three-minute timer for boiling eggs. I assumed in my understandable ignorance that it was full of salt–or half-full, like the infamous cup. It sat next to the Morton’s, after all, and it contained white granules. I liked the idea of a three-minute hourglass, which reminded me of my father’s “four-foot yardstick,” that hung on the wall of the garage, perfect for drawing a straight line widthwise across a sheet of plywood. I wasted some time “experimenting” with the egg timer, timing it against the second hand on the kitchen clock, shaking the glass and knocking it with my fingernail in a vain effort to speed up the falling grains. (Not something I’d want to do today.)
I got pretty good at judging the very moment that a minute-and-a-half’s worth of salt had fallen making the two halves of the timer equally full. At that point, I imagined, time was at a standstill. In my first novel I turned the notion into a pocket-watch that stopped time, fortunately not knowing that other writers had already come up with that idea in variant forms. An hourglass would have been even more appropriate to a fantasy story, except that once the grains start falling, you can’t stop them except by knocking the thing over. I didn’t see the metaphor in that notion back when I was conducting my hourglass experiments, since I was seven or eight years old, an age when almost everything was flavored with timelessness. These days I’m attracted to the idea that the open salt canister should be buried with the purchaser rather than left half-empty on the cupboard shelf. If nothing else, the worms might enjoy the savor.
It was in a junior high school English class, when we were reading Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” that I stumbled over the poet’s often quoted reference to “Footprints on the sands of time.” I was familiar with the phrase because my mother had read poems to me from One Hundred and One Famous Poems, compiled by Roy J. Cook (who is alleged to have 12 aliases). The slim volume was once ubiquitous but has probably fallen out of fashion these days. I still have my mother’s copy. Her favorite poem was Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” which has to do with saltwater and death. I was young enough in those days to be tapping the hourglass to hurry it up, and so I didn’t entirely understand the poem’s seafaring imagery, but I loved the sound of it.
The “sands of time” in the Longfellow poem tripped me up. Being a fan of the beach and of so-called beach music in those days, especially the O’Jays’ “Lonely Drifter” (which perfectly defined my aspirations in life at that time) it seemed certain to me that Longfellow was referring to footprints on a sandy beach. That necessarily meant damp sand – neither too dry nor too wet. I pictured the sun going down, the solitary line of footprints along the shore, the sound of seagulls, and the inevitable tide sweeping the sand clean as darkness fell.
I piped up and said something along those lines in order to impress my teacher and do my part for the class discussion, but she pointed out that if the footprints washed away, the next lines of the poem made no sense, because they referred to a “forlorn and shipwrecked brother” who would come along later and see the footprints and “take heart again.” I was grappling with this senselessness when a smart aleck classmate (who also happened to be smart) pointed out that the poem didn’t make any sense anyway, because the “sands of time” had to refer to the sand in an hourglass, not a sandy beach, and that Longfellow was a nitwit.
The teacher stood there blinking, and in the silence I bravely asserted that hourglasses were full of salt and not sand, and so Longfellow wasn’t a nitwit, at least not in that regard. The teacher assured me that there was no salt in an hourglass, and that I was nitwittedly mistaking coral sand or ground marble for salt, and pretty much everyone in the class who hadn’t been put to sleep by “The Psalm of Life” had a good laugh at my expense. The poem had been killed dead by that time and was never revived, and we were put to work writing a paper about poetry, which meant I had an opportunity to secretly read the new issue of Mad magazine hidden in my Pee Chee folder.
There was plenty of good poetry in Mad in those days, including a spoof of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” that began with the line, “I have seen your painted women step into open manholes and disappear.” I unfortunately read that one while working the Pee Chee folder ruse and burst into laughter. My magazine was confiscated, and I remember my teacher saying that this was “no laughing matter” and was “a shameful display.” My shameful display didn’t actually occur on the same day that Longfellow took a beating, but the incidents have always been connected in my mind, both elements of the thoroughgoing poetry education that schools provided back in those days.
Museums are full of old paintings depicting Cronus the Titan holding a sickle and an hourglass, ready to lop off your head when your time came. (A Mad magazine Cronus would likely be holding a fork and a saltshaker, given that he devoured his own children.) The sickle and hourglass make perfect sense – time and death being the Great Literary Theme since time immemorial. Fifty years ago, one of my professors argued that Love was the Great Theme, and I half agreed, because the greatest love stories generally didn’t go so well, Romeo and Juliet being the obvious example. Macbeth is a love story if you want to read it that way, and, if we really push it, there’s a case to be made for Titus Andronicus. Lot and his wife come to mind. For my money there’s an untold love story there, having to do with salt. One can imagine Lot’s wife, alone on the side of the road, her features dissolving in the pouring rain, her family having gone on without her.
My writer friend Doug, who has an aversion to killing time that would better be used writing, told me that he always keeps thirteen ideas for new pieces going around in his head. On any given morning he might tackle one or another of them, looking for the inspiration to see a piece through to the end. If number five doesn’t do the trick, then he’ll try number six tomorrow morning. He’s always got a story going in one form or another.
I like the idea of thirteen of anything, a baker’s dozen doughnuts, for instance, and I’m pretty sure that the free doughnut in the ubiquitous pink Winchell’s box, whichever it might be, is the best of the lot. I wonder what constitutes the one hundred and first poem in the famous collection, and how and when it came into Roy J. Cook’s mind to add that extra poem (and why it didn’t occur to him to add one more alias to his list of names so that he had thirteen, which would have been prime). Enough isn’t always as good as a feast, especially when it comes to doughnuts and poetry.
As much as I like the idea of thirteen doughnuts, I’ve never been able to eat more than three in one sitting, and unlike my pal Doug, I’ve never had more than three writerly notions swimming around in my mind at the same time. Currently I have a half-finished novel waiting on the desktop, the characters frozen in time while I work on this essay. Another “idea” waiting in line has to do with a monstrously large begonia growing in a flowerpot in the portico of a hilltop church on Menorca that my wife Viki and I visited on our travels. Alexander Smith, in an essay appropriately titled “On the Writing of Essays,” refers to “the infinite suggestiveness of common things,” and he maintains that “The world is everywhere whispering essays.” Potted begonias in portico gardens are no exception, although I’m not certain yet what this one was whispering.
It seems acceptable to put a two-year novel on hold for the sake of a two-week essay, but not the other way around. Who knows what two years will bring, what with the evening news being full of alien spacecraft, pandemics, and, just yesterday, the sighting of what was pretty clearly Megalodon off the coast of New England. I bought a canister of Morton’s salt at Stater Bros supermarket last week, despite having a half-full canister sitting in the cupboard. I wonder if a person could cheat fate by buying a case of it.
These salt musings recall a framed drawing of Charles Dickens that I found in an antique store several years back. Dickens was asleep in a chair, dreaming of his own characters, a couple of dozens of them revolving around his head. The reproduction cost an even one hundred dollars, despite its being discolored, as if it had sat for some time beneath a leaky attic roof. I came to regret not buying it despite the stain. One day many years later I did an internet search and discovered that there were scores of such drawings and paintings of Dickens, one of the most famous titled “The Empty Chair.” It depicts a crowd of Dickens’s characters cavorting in his study, but no Dickens: his desk chair sits empty. The painting says something about literary immortality: Dickens gone out of the world along with Lot’s wife, but Mr. Pickwick and the Pickwickians, like the Morton’s salt girl, forever on the road to Dingley Dell, a road they’ll be traveling hundreds of years from now. Writers, even if they gain what’s commonly called immortality, will not be.
Oscar Wilde wrote that “The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust and with everything priced above its proper value.” I’m not as well-informed as I’d like to be, but I’m fond of the cheerful monsters that inhabit my own mind, even if, like that that signifying begonia, their meaning is hidden from me. And when you look at dust through a microscope, you discover more monsters. I’ll deny that I value them too highly. I like bric-a-brac shops, too, although I prefer the term “curiosity shops.” I’ve rooted around in them for years. Sometimes a piece of bric-a-brac leads to a poem or an essay or an imaginary world.
Imaginary worlds, strangely, are chiseled in stone. As long as the stone–or paper and ink–holds up to the weather, those worlds will go on about their business. Every few years I head back to Middle Earth or to the London of the Pickwick Club or to Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and I find them refreshingly familiar. Our favorite books continue to exist if they’re sitting on someone’s bookshelf, or in an old trunk or cupboard, or as a bundle of organized electrons in a far-flung corner of the world-wide web. Ironically, I can’t find a way to return to my own imaginary worlds. I’m not the same person I was at 30: looking back at a story that I wrote forty years ago can be as unsettling as looking into a mirror and seeing another man’s face.
If I were writing a story about salt, I’d be tempted to end it by having my character drop face-down into a plate of pasta as the last grains tumble out of the shaker. Later I’d probably falsify it by finding a more cheerful exit—a road sign pointing the way to Dingley Dell. But our own lives rarely have neat endings or metaphoric value. Too much is left unfinished and undone in the end–a story or a poem or an essay half-written, things left unsaid, and half a canister of Morton’s salt still sitting in the kitchen cupboard.
