Jonathan Aprea's "Dial"
Thoughts on stumbling toward art.
Dial
Most people make the same piece of art, over and over. They don't know about the dial that exists, where if you cover your eyes with a shirt and walk a mile and a half out of your old neighborhood in the rain, you will come upon a dial in an empty lot. It will feel like it should be there, you will be drawn to it like water is drawn through a funnel. Most dials appear to us as red outdoor faucet wheel handles. As you get close to it, as your hand gets close, you will wait for a hesitation to pass but it never does. Then you remember. You played here, as children. first published in Colorado Review (Spring 2025)
I have told this story before, in one of these weekly missives, but I will tell it again. Last summer, I found myself being driven through the desert by my friend and fellow writer Matthew Medendorp. I was covering Badwater 135, an ultramarathon straight through the heart of Death Valley, on assignment for Outside Magazine, taking notes and observing and joining some of the runners and doing all the various things that would eventually coalesce into this piece.
We had some time one day before the race began, and so, after hearing a few runners and locals mention the name of a certain town, Darwin, a few miles off the one road that goes through the one valley, we decided to go there. We heard that there was art there, just out in the open. Wild art. For everyone.
And the thing is: there was. Amidst a town of just a few dozen, there were sculptures catching sunlight out in the open. There were some that were a smooth, milky kind of porcelain, with wide curves and open spaces through which you could see the sky, the desert on fire beneath it. There was a post, a single post, covered in tea kettles of different shapes and colors; it felt almost alive, as if it had arms and legs and might have woken up, if I had just reached out to hold a handle or touch a yellow spout. There were these abstract bodies holding each other in the distance, standing on little pedestals, as if a couple had gotten married underneath a moon so large and so bright that it froze them forever in its light and in their love. There was a geodesic dome. There was a post office with six chairs arranged out front, all of them facing the entrance, almost like the post office might’ve doubled as a stage where, at some point on some day, a few people might’ve gathered to watch a few other people make some art in real time. And on that makeshift stage, there was a bookshelf, which—and I cannot believe this—held a dust-covered old printing of a book by John McPhee, whose name, only hours before, had just escaped my mouth. I had been singing his praises over french fries at a diner maybe fifty miles north. I took the book out of the shelf and turned it outward, so it was facing the chairs.
I thought of the town of Darwin when I read today’s poem, which is by a poet, Jonathan Aprea, who has smitten me with his grasp of both the real and the surreal, the way he surfaces the extraordinary undercurrent that exists beneath the ordinary everyday.
He does it in another one of his poems, “Nightlife,” in four lines that stunned me the first time I read them:
I know about the holiness of breathing air, how the snow of its stars makes patterns, how although all of it goes away, no it doesn’t.
There it is. The extraordinary (“holiness”) surfacing from underneath the ordinary (“breathing”), before dancing between the real (“all of it goes away”) and the surreal (“no it doesn’t”). I mean, come on. It’s beautiful.
Today’s poem does similar work. It begins with a declaration, one you could perhaps agree or disagree with:
Most people make the same piece of art, over and over.
And then it moves into the surreal (“the dial / that exists”!!!):
They don't know about the dial that exists, where if you cover your eyes with a shirt and walk a mile and a half out of your old neighborhood in the rain, you will come upon a dial in an empty lot.
And then it ends with the real:
Then you remember. You played here, as children.
To me, there is a real joy in all of this movement. I think, years and years ago, I might’ve found myself befuddled and confused by such movement, wondering how to make sense of this dial, and what it might mean. In such a moment, I might have resisted the urge (or opportunity, one could say) to find some kind of joy in such confusion. But now? I love a poem that takes every turn towards surprise, that covers its eyes with a shirt, and wanders itself toward revelation and through hesitation and backwards into the past and forwards into the poem.
I am reminded, writing these words, and reading today’s poem, of a poem by Thomas Lux that, I think, enacts this kind of stumbling-through-the-dark-towards-art:
Sixty miles from a lake, no river or pond within forty-eight, no ocean near, and this rowboat, crisply painted, oarlocks oiled, oars set and cocked, in a small--mossy, pine needles--clearing of sparse gray and yellow forest grass. The light here: like joy, pain, like glass. On its bow, in red paint, beside the anchor rope, its name: A Joy To Be Hidden But a Disaster Not To Be Found. An odd place, a long name, for a boat.
All that to say: I think I am thinking about stumbling and surprise and surrealism today. And I think I am thinking of it because of the first two lines of today’s poems:
Most people make the same piece of art, over and over.
These don’t, I think, seem like lines that might invite the opportunity to be surprised. The strangeness of it. The inherent permission needed. They certainly don’t seem like lines that might give one a kind of permission to stumble. No—rather, they seem like kind of limiting lines, don’t they? As if we just sit here, making the same exact piece of art each day, knowing the outcome each time. Our hammers over our heads, the rock in front of us. Each day: the Sisyphean, over and over again. Returning to the page like returning to the foot of the mountain.
But what I love about today’s poem is the way that, even if these first lines are true—and I think, to some extent, they are—the poem itself offers a roadmap of surprise that stands in stark contrast to the idea that making “the same piece of art” is inherently a kind of masochistic, uninspiring, unimaginative thing. What I mean is that I think the first lines of this poem are true. I think we do make, obsessively, over and over again, the same art. But I also think the rest of this poem is true, too. That, even in the midst of that sameness, we have the opportunity to approach and wander and stumble and move through the dark in order to revisit that sameness with a bit of difference. Notice how the poem ends: You played here, as children. Yes, we return again and again to the obsessions of our lives (or, as Galway Kinnell writes, “to the ground of [our] making”) But sometimes we do so playfully and sometimes we do so surreally and sometimes we do so with shirts covering our heads, our hands flaying around in the dark, trying to find the light.
And I think that’s why I’m thinking of Darwin—this place of 36 people living in a literal valley of death, the blacktop searing and scorching in 120 degree heat, where you might be forgiven for seeing a kind of sameness oscillating into the foreverness of the horizon. And yet, there, under a sky that would burn you alive: art.
Or, I’m thinking about how, years ago, I joined one of my best friends as he attempted to hike the entirety of the Appalachian Trail, from south to north. I met him in Harpers Ferry, where the rivers meet and where we set off under a sky so full of stars that it seemed to drop some of them into the water, where they shone from the peaks of each little lapping wave. We spent a week together, embroiled in the kind of sameness that ritual brings, each day waking at the same time and eating at the same time and leaving at the same time. We walked for hours and then stopped for moments and then walked for hours again. We talked and fell silent, talked again and fell silent again. It was a beautiful sameness, because things changed along the way: the gradient and the footfall, the vistas and the trees, the rattlesnakes and the thankful lack of them. But every once in awhile, like maybe four times over the course of that week, we’d stumble—literally stumble—onto a cooler placed right in the middle of the woods. Handwritten sign. Smiley faces. Help yourself. And there, in those coolers, absolute magic. A six pack of beers. A few frozen Snickers bars. We would help ourselves. And then we’d mosey on, back to the walking and the silence. My buddy called it trail magic. And isn’t that, maybe, what it’s like to throw a shirt on over your eyes and stumble towards meaning? Isn’t it the belief, maybe, in some kind of magic? That, if you give yourself over to living and making art and trying, you believe, inherently, that something might come out, something beautiful even, from all this sameness? That you might stumble into magic, even in the everydayness of your life?
Some might call it fool’s work, this art-making thing—returning, each day, over and over again, to the same page, expecting surprise to come out of mundanity of the ordinary. I don’t call it fool’s work. I call it life.
In my AP Literature class, we just finished sitting in a big circle and reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit aloud in its entirety, with students taking on the roles of the play. Toward the end of that short play, one of the characters, Inez, says:
You are—your life, and nothing else.
It’s one of my favorite moments in the whole play, this meditation on morality and justice and accountability and truth and so much else. But I think of it now as a kind of proof of the first lines of today’s poem—that, because we are each our lives, and nothing else, we cannot help but make the same kind of art over and over again. That, however, does not mean that the art we make is not different, too. Part of today’s poem feels, to me, like a blueprint for how to make the same art differently. Yes, we return, again and again, to our obsessions and our wonderings and our feelings and our lives, and we filter our attempt at creation through those lenses, which are the same lenses, but our lives are slightly different. And how we choose to listen is slightly different. And what we offer our attention to: slightly different, as well. And, finally, there is the fact of our surprise: that we cannot predict what will emerge out of the darkness, whether a memory or a fabulist construction or a feeling we once held but had then forgotten. Until now. We throw it into the same art we make. We see what changes.
I think, for a long time, that I thought of the surreal as something I was incapable of making. I thought of it as Dali’s melting clocks, as a kind of visionary landscape that did not resemble the real, where I felt inextricably bound. But no. Now, I think I realize that the surreal is what happens when you simply allow yourself to be open to the possibility that there is something beyond your certainty, that there is something at work, always, just outside of the fact of what you know. I think it is what happens when you keep a door or window open to that possibility. Sometimes that open door looks like throwing a shirt over your head and stumbling through the dark, just to remember what it feels like to stumble, and what it once felt like to not know, exactly, the contours of the room you are now in. And sometimes that open door looks like ritual, like process, a kind of sameness that leaves you able to be aware of what goes on in the borders of your mind. That open door looks like a lot of things. I think that’s the point.
I’d be remiss not to mention that this is political work, too. Keeping doors open. Allowing. Wondering. There is a violence of certainty that is at work in the most awful and evil actions of those with power: the refusal to admit unknowing, and the bold and brash desire to lie rather than to admit the limits of one’s knowledge. Fill a culture with enough of this, and it becomes a recipe for destruction rather than creation. It scares me to no end. And so I return, again and again, to the open door of the page. I want to practice what it feels like to stumble rather than to know, to remember rather than forget, to live rather than die.
A Note Before the Notes Below: Before I close, I’d like to mention a little something. I am in the middle of teaching a virtual class for the Adirondack Center for Writers. It’s called Rewriting Your Life, and it’s on giving yourself permission to write between and among and through genres, to feel more possibility than limitation when you consider the fact of genre.
I’ve asked my students to, in the week between classes, engage in reading and writing prompts that work toward that permissiveness. I’d like to offer the prompts here, each week, as well — in case you, reading this, are interested. I don’t want to gate-keep every aspect of that class. Here’s this week’s prompt:
As a guide, read a selection of Mary Ruefle's nonfiction (from Madness, Rack, and Honey) and poetry.
Then, write a series of short pieces modeled after Ruefle's "Twenty-Two Short Lectures." Throughout the week, consider what moves you and what you notice. Consider your ideas and your thoughts. Consider what you hold dear and what you find worth thinking about. Draft these pieces throughout the week. Make them however long or short you want. Make them paragraphs or poems or stories. Make them some of each or all of each. Write one, two, five, ten. Your call. Have fun.
Here are a selection of Ruefle’s lectures. And here are a selection of Ruefle’s poems.
Have fun. Throw a shirt over your eyes. Return to the place of your childhood. Find the dial. Whatever. But have fun. I think that’s part of the point, too.
A friend and fellow teacher from Minneapolis shared a couple links for mutual aid resources, in case you have the means to offer anything. Here they are:
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"I want to practice what it feels like to stumble rather than to know" yes yes yes, this, entirely.
"... Now, I think I realize that the surreal is what happens when you simply allow yourself to be open to the possibility that there is something beyond your certainty, that there is something at work, always, just outside of the fact of what you know ..."
Thank you!