The Crossing by Jason Mott

Author:Jason Mott [Mott, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Park Row Books
Published: 2018-04-03T18:39:16+00:00

To My Children,

Nothing was getting better and there was nothing anyone could do about it. So people took up art as a means of getting by. It was a strange and wonderful time. “Art stems the tide” someone famous said, and for the next few years you could almost believe it. Celebrities took up pottery. Construction workers took up painting. People wrote poetry on the walls of bathroom stalls. I once went into a gas station bathroom and found Robert Frost scrawled into the place usually reserved for racism and misogyny. It was beautiful and unexpected—to go in there that way and find those soft words in a rough place. Everyone was trying to take away the fear, all of us together, holding hands as we felt the earth falling away beneath us, trying to flap our arms and create wings from the beautiful things. What else was there to do?

Your mother and I took up knitting. Something about the tying together of the strings. A cliché and trite metaphor, but not the kind of thing you worry about in times like those. You exist to survive. You survive to exist.

So we knitted and we sewed and we made colors and, eventually, we put on an exhibit. You wouldn’t think people would come out to that type of thing, but they did. They came out in droves. Lining the streets and filling out the thoroughfares, all for the sake of knitting that was terrible and badly done. Everything, even the small things, could be handled if all we did was create enough art.

But there wasn’t enough art. Not really. Art only ever goes as far as we are willing to take it. And in spite of the fact that we were all loving and needing art, we weren’t doing anything with it. It was only another way to hide within ourselves, to tell ourselves we were safe, that we had built the levees high enough and locked all the doors tight enough as we watch through the windows of our lives and see the storm swirling.

So the world continued on the path it had chosen.

Your mother and I kept knitting, kept tying strings together, kept making small things into long, elaborate, large things, and the process kept working. We were happy.

I spent more time learning about the Europa mission that was being planned. It began to feel like another piece of art. Some interplanetary painting that was being thrown across the face of the sky, swelling up around us all like some voice in the early throes of an aria.

Debating on the existence of life beyond earth became the nation’s favorite pastime. The fundamentalists said that there would not be any sense of unity or family to come from the search for life. We would all only come to realize that we are less than singular, that we can be mass produced. The discovery of life is the end of life, some people said.

“We’ve got a whole planet full of people who think they’re alone in the universe, and all they can do is try to kill one another.

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