Fragments Before the Fall

Fragments Before the Fall

The Literary Review (Summer, 1971)

Charles Deemer

I WALK a tightrope between two mountain tops over the Valley of the Waters of Fire. The waters are rising and all too soon the flames will disengage the embracing strands of fiber which hold me up, casting me to my fate below — incineration. I stand very still. To move would be to lose my balance and become cinder too soon.

I RECOGNIZE the voice: "Mummy, can I take this magazine to school? It has a story in it that is full of symbols, and Mr. Walker just loves symbols."

YOU, my friend, have not believed me from the beginning. But you say you do. And that makes you a phony.

Read it.

Back story. I was living in Multnomah Village after dropping out of a PhD program in American Lit at the Univ of Oregon. I was giving myself a year or two to "become a writer," which meant to publish short fiction in journals I admired, like The Literary Review and Prism International.

One day the mail brought three rejected stories. Three! I remember entering the house with the mail, throwing the manuscripts across the room, sitting down at my manual Remington, and writing this story almost in the time it took to type. It came without preface, from deep frustration. I immediately mailed it to The Literary Review. About six months later, they accepted it! A breakthrough. A story from my deep subconscious. 

The closest I ever came to writing an Aesthetic, a statement on my poetics. Lit as a cushion, cushioning the fall and pain of others. How idealistic! I was younger ha ha. (But even then, I sensed a certain phoniness in audiences. The tension between lit and pop cultures.)