but quickly grant me cold water from the lake of memory to drink.

The katydids are singing their love songs now. They can feel August, summer’s long sunset, just as you do, in the hot, slow days and the cooling night air, the grass shiny and damp in the morning. They too can see the orbweaver spiders getting plump after a summer spent blissfully gormandizing on anything unfortunate enough to fly too close to your porch light. The katydids don’t know this but some of the bigger spiders have been known to eat hummingbirds. The other day someone on Instagram posted a picture of one devouring a spotted lanternfly. It felt like watching your team win a rivalry game.

I used to think the song of the katydids was a mocking one, a deliberate reminder that life is about to get more stringent, colder in every sense, na na nana na. Now that I am older the song sounds more like a desperate cry: please, just a little more time, a few more weeks of nights exactly like this one, please Lord.

Like the katydids, female orbweavers here in Western Pennsylvania only live until the first frost when, after laying eggs that are sturdy and cellularly simple enough to withstand our winters, the adult spiders surrender their lives to the coming winter. By now the males are long dead, perished after mating, often eaten by their insatiably hungry lovers, each of the sexes living long enough to fulfill their purpose.

One late summer years ago, at our old house, I left a broom out on the front porch leaning against an iron railing. An ambitious orbweaver spun a gigantic web that connected to the broom handle, the railing, and the support beam that ran up to the roof of the covered porch; creating a huge paddle-shaped trap that stood vertically right in front of our living room window, where a light was always on. That spider, of the Araneus diadematus variety, ate like Amalasuntha, Queen of the Ostrogoths. I left the broom out on the porch for her until November, when her exultant, intricate webs disappeared forever.

---

---

Two albums that have been sounding particularly good as summer slides into its final stage have been The Last Remaining Light by Far Caspian and In The Air by Anna St. Louis. These songwriters have little in common but for both of their abilities to leave room in their songs for space, for air, and then countering that void with a density of sound. They go about it a bit differently, though.

I saw Anna St. Louis open for Waxahatchee one night at the Warhol museum here in Pittsburgh and was blown away by her spare, lonesome folk songs; her weaving of sounds into these percussive, hypnotic open-tuned riffs that sounded unlike any folk music I had heard. After her set, she played bass for Waxahatchee’s. Huh, I thought.

After her 2018 debut If Only There Was A River she went to work on the late David Berman’s Purple Mountains project, Berman’s first musical offering in ten years and ultimately his last, as he took his own life soon after the album was released. The desolation and sadness — and the beauty — of that particular project followed St. Louis to upstate New York, where she lived in the mountains and worked at a hotel as she put together the songs that would make up this new album. That country air filtered St. Louis’s experiences into a distillation of sounds that feel both rested and immediate, lonely yet ready to emerge. Most of the time, things are worth the wait.

---

I have nearly finished reading The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, my first encounter with the author, and I think it might be the strangest book I’ve ever read. I don’t even know if I liked it so much as it absolutely rearranged my brain.  

It would be disingenuous to call it a novel, despite it being categorized as such, because the narrator is clearly Sebald and there isn’t really much of a plot. I began reading this literary oddity on the beach, where it made geographical sense (for much of the book Sebald—er, the narrator—is walking through rusted-out coastal towns in the English countryside) but little else about it would classify it as a beach read. It is an Odyssey that catalogues, in Sebald’s own words, a “long account of calamities.”

Saturn’s rings, which are the most wide-ranging ring system of any planet in our solar system, are made up of innumerable tiny particles made almost entirely of ice, with some traces of rocky substances and dust. Scientists can’t really agree on their formation, on how or why they line up the way they do; but they do know that at least two of the gaps on the rings are caused by moons that are embedded in the rings.

Among the debris orbiting Sebald’s mind as he traverses the salty, desolate earth of a waning old empire are: Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, Nazi Germany’s use of silkworms, the manufacture of silk nets for the use of catching herring, weaving executioner’s ropes, blood sacrifices to the “Gods of Silk” in 19th Century China, and so on. At one point, the narrator is looking for a place to stay for a few nights when he is directed to the deteriorating estate of an old Irish nobleman whose family had escaped during the Troubles. Like any interesting family, this one is kind of a mess, with its matriarch, Catherine, explaining to Sebald that,

“Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantastists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”

In this home, where the family keeps retreating inward to available rooms which aren’t actively falling into disrepair, the narrator discovers a little corner where an ongoing project is taking place: the children (or adults; he doesn’t specify) spend the day sewing pieces of woven fabric that they find around the property, and then tear them apart later, undoing their own work, as if they never wanted to finish it. Some stories aren’t meant to end. These ghosts from the narrator’s little side-quests, which make up the entirety of this novel, are the real rings of his Saturn, the dust and decay and frozen matter suspended in all of the emptiness, forever spinning, beautiful and unknowable.

Sebald died in a car accident caused by a heart attack in 2001 at the height of his success. I didn’t know much about his work before this book and I don’t even remember how he came into my orbit, which is ironic considering that contemporary literary critics have anointed him the master of the concept of memory in fiction. And rightfully so; memory feels like the mycelium holding each of his words together, pushing the shapes of ideas out of the ground seemingly randomly but not without its own order and purpose.

It is fitting that memory is Sebald’s muse; for Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is the mother of the nine muses. In Ancient Greece, to harness Mnemosyne’s power was to command her daughters, the authority and the power that comes with unfettered creativity. She is invoked in both The Iliad and The Odyssey; Socrates calls upon her in Plato’s Euthydemus. The Orphics would bury their dead with golden tablets inscribed with specific instructions to, when in Hades, wait to quench their thirst until they find Mnemosyne, the “Lake of Memory,” to ensure that they would remember what they had learned about the secrets of life and death. To drink the wrong water, such as from the river of Lethe, meant to forget these mysteries and be stuck in a boundless cycle of reincarnation, forever spinning.