(Excerpts from a 12-page story, edited for years, unpublished.)

On the night of the accident, the couple next door was at it again. Jimmy pressed his face against the attic window, his nose smooshed up. He looked down over the row of azalea bushes in the grassy side-yard. He squinted at the couple’s house, on the other side. Nothing to see. The curtains were drawn tight and heavy, just like they always were. Jimmy was sitting up on his knees in the windowseat, and he could feel it in his knees, and his thighs were jittery and his hands were jittery. He framed his temples against the warm glass pane, as if he were blocking some glare to see better, only there was no glare to block. It was dark, inside and out. The two houses separated by the azaleas were set back from Grady. The streetlight was three houses down and its light was filtered by trees. The fireflies specked the shadow-bushes like the thumped ashes of invisible cigarettes.

They were really at it over there.

. . .

That afternoon, when he had climbed down the stairs they’d all been there, standing in the kitchen doorway whispering and hissing about the Lord and His comforting arms. Mary Sue blew her nose in one of Bobbie’s good dinner napkins and, in the midst of a chorus of bless yous, they all turned to stare at Jimmy, who still had pink sheet-marks stretching down the side of his face and sleepers in his eyes. Jimmy’s uncle Samuel, who was Mary Sue’s husband, and two cousins, also from their side, were with her. Jimmy had hardly seen the cousins since he was too young to remember, but they were standing there in their neckties, scowling at him like he had no right.

“Merciful heavens,” whimpered Mary Sue as she looked up from the linen at her wiry nephew in his striped pajama britches.

“Ain’t it gaining on two?” one of the cousins asked the other as he looked at his wristwatch.

“Awful late in the day,” said Uncle Samuel, “for folks to be walking around half-naked, unshaven, looking like a punk.”

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Paris and there are red flowers in the window and it’s raining. This hotel was recommended by the New York Times. It’s lovely, and Paris is lovely, but I’ve been so uncomfortable here. I’m terrified of French people. I’m living off some chocolates from Amsterdam which my boss was going to take to an ex-girlfriend he hasn’t seen 20 years until he replaced them with chocolates from Antwerp and gave me the rejects to take back to the lab. I’m living off the not-as-good-as-Leonidas chocolates because I’m too terrified of French people to get real food, as amazing as all the little cafes and bakeries look. Today I made myself do some tourist things. I felt alright in Notre Dame with my eyes closed. I prayed for the ability to pray.

Before I came to Paris, I saw the famous Van Eyck altarpiece in the cathedral in Ghent. It is really one of the most beautiful pieces of art I’ve ever seen, which I’ve been realizing more and more as time passes and it stays with me. I even went to the Musee d’Orsay today, full of amazing images, and my mind was still on the Ghent altarpiece. Looking at it, I had this feeling of fear that none of us will ever be able to make anything like that again. But at the same time, I was looking at it with Auriea, and something about the Lamb looked like her deer in the Endless Forest.

I find it so amazing that after spending just a short time with Auriea and Michael (who put me up Sunday night), I have so much more hope that it is actually possible to help people see, in today’s world, without so much reliance on religious frameworks. I’ve talked with Mitsu about art and spirituality for a long time, about the need for a “new” way to communicate these truths that are found in Zen koans and the writings of the Christian mystics and so-on, but sometimes it’s so hard to believe it’s really possible. There’s this problem you always run into trying to talk about these things.. you get to a certain point and finally admit, well, it’s not something that can be captured in words or ideas; it has to be experienced.

I think Auriea and Michael are making art that can really help people be more open to the experience, art that challenges the assumptions we have about time and space and causality and achievement that keep us from seeing the world as it really is. They’re doing it now and they’re doing it every day and they’re doing it in a thoroughly modern way.

Whoa! It happens. People are doing this. It’s possible. It’s ordinary and extraordinary.

I feel like I’ve woken up a little, remembered or discovered a little about what it means to be an artist, what sort of vocation that really is.