A Walk In The Park

With Autumn Leaves, A Mind Breathes

Welcome to an entry “From The Future”.

This is a riff-in-progress. This will not stay the same. It will feed something unexpected, like all experience. Everything’s a draft for the next thing.

Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, essays, stories or chapters.

This is a short piece. Most pieces are best read online, via the Substack App, when you have fifteen (or more) minutes.

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The other night, I finished a scene for a chapter rewrite, set in a cool late summer day on a world millions of miles and hundreds of years from where we are. My first character, post-inciting incident, gets a time out to breathe out so he can breathe in an epiphany.

We all need that from time to time, some space for mind and body to breathe.

I had not done for myself something I gave a central character in my novel, a moment to breathe, a long walk, and mind space for rediscovery. I needed fresh air, autumn leaves, and the light of the late sun.

I needed to see old things in new ways and new things in old ways - a walk.

I took Christopher Nolan along, that is a book about him, for a reread and relisten. It’s been ten years since the premiere of film “Interstellar” - I want to revisit the film and write something. But I needed time on Earth first.

On the backburner of my mind was John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Jevons Paradox, ala “A Jevons’ Progress” : Mankind on a journey to prosperity.

For the moment, I will share instead a riff from today’s walk through a park.

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My default tune for Autumn is Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. Please play and read.

Before I entered the park, front of mind was finishing an arc for a character. After, in front of me were trees, autumn-dappled with green, yellow, and red leaves. Crunchy grass underfoot. They were all around me, in fact, beautiful trees settling in for an annual reset. Bushels of dried leaves on the ground.

At the far end of the park, which hosts baseball, softball, and futbol games in summer, a young man was a dervish, spinning as his corgi on a leash ran circles around him, kicking up a torus of dust around his human. The sun was on a slow drift with less than a handful of hours left before sunset sleep.

I walked past the long dry field and turned at a small arc at the edge of the dividing median of a long strip of grass, which ran the length of a long elliptical loop, crispy dry after a record drought. I saw ahead of me a troop of scooters. A family, led by their smallest and youngest, a sprite on a scooter, came in from where I had walked in - on the long macadam circuit which skirted the park’s inner periphery behind wrought iron and steel fences. She led her family onward, and sped onto the dry grass median, kicking up a dusty contrail bigger than her, and corrected course back onto the loop. Brave one.

I gave them a wide berth, as they slow-whizzed by in single file formation, walking and listening to an anecdote about Nolan’s boyhood discovery of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner. Every few seconds, I wondered at the sunlight coming in from behind the trees lining the edge of the dry field.

I stopped every few dozen steps to marvel at the silhouettes of trees.

The family caught up with their brave sprite on a scooter. Mom. Dad. Older Sis. Middle Sis. Little big brother. They sped at a slow speed past my left.

The dry breeze was toasty with smoke from a brushfire from miles away. I made the full circuit and opted not to make another turn. I turned my head to look over my shoulder to marvel at the family as they sped into the interior.

I make a turn right, back from where I came, to take in the trees. My Nolan book talked to me about things to feed my trickle-thinking and mind-walking.

After Christopher Nolan filmed “Memento”, he couldn’t get distribution. Steven Soderbergh remarked that it was the end of independent filmmaking when something as good as Nolan’s first “Hollywood” movie was orphaned by distributors, temporarily. Thankfully, Soderbergh wanted to do something.

(Mind-walk note: Whenever they say “We love what you’ve done but this isn’t for us”, remember by the time same said party says “it is for them”, they’re late.)

I pause at the next loop-walk and look at the trees. The “fiery” reds give truth. Catching fire with what we’ve grown over a long summer of love can happen, despite a painful drought, when tender work has enough tinder to ignite. Love.

I walk down the path further, until I reach a near-45 degree descent, which must be the temptation of any thrasher with a deck, and the bane of anybody with road-weary joints determined to accumulate gravitational potential energy uphill in the other direction. A young father watched over his daughter as she ventured forward with her four-wheeled steed. Fearless.

In Nolan’s Inception and Interstellar, the matters of fathers and children, time and memory, and regret and hope make the stories more than special effects.

I made it to terra firma at the bottom of the long incline, and turned right towards the local waters of the park, past tennis retirees and tiny gymnasts.

The little girl begins her test of gravity at the bottom of the incline, with her father right behind to keep an eye. He smiles. She has plenty of time.

The walk around the artificial lake was dotted by people taking in the last light. It was a warmish windy dry November Saturday. It was placid and patrolled by a police auxiliary car and packs of Pops and Nans, Aunties and Uncles, and Moms and Dads. Eyes and hearts open.

Along the straightaway past the long-side of a long elliptical lake, a family resplendent in Sari and coats walked side by side. The family’s father pushed one daughter along in her wheelchair, as the low sun bathed them in the last gold. Much further on, a woman, who did not need her wheelchair, stood and fed a packet of geese. One daughter saved the moment on a smartphone, while another daughter, or granddaughter, stood watch behind the paterfamilias in his wheelchair watching his love stand. Beauty by the water.

Everything rolls along an invisible walk known as time.

Christopher Nolan’s early family life was divided between London, Chicago, and Ohio. He saw Star Wars in a little Ohio theater in 1977, while visiting his maternal American grandmother, months before his friends in England - an “inciting incident”, igniting a star inside young Christopher’s imagination.

Soon after Nolan saw Star Wars, his father Brendan took him to see a re-release of “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the Leicester Theater in London. In Nolan’s recollection, “In some ways, I think I understood it better then than I do now, because it’s an experience and I think kids can be more open to that.”¹

Brendan Nolan bought a Super 8 camera for Christopher’s eighth birthday, who went on to film “Space Wars” of course. I would have done likewise.

After reaching the end of the lake-side straightaway, I made a turn on a wider arc to the other side. There are geese and swan. I hear the seasonal honking of a flight of birds wheeling past above everyone in the sky. The sun was now in my face as I begin to walk the other side. The light is low and bright.

There’s a lone fisherman fully kitted with gear, people with coats - taken out of mothballs and from the back of closets - autumn-sun-bathing, and children jumping up and down with their dogs or on piles of leaves.

One handsome dog is perched on a bench - vigilant for threats behind his master’s back - on the alert for trouble from pigeons. Couples, young and old, are sitting side by side, are looking at islets of light on rippling waters.

The sun is lower now.

I begin to trickle-think my way through the next scene in another chapter. I feel enough to “know”. My breathing is as free as the space I’m walking through, my stride is as steady as my thoughts. I know what to do about who says what and why they will. Inspiration begins with a breath in every sense of the word.

On the walk out of the park, crossing the street, I study a series of new houses, replacing the old ones which stood across from the park. Several blocks have changed corners, in just the last few months. I’m not the only one in the middle of edits, revisions, and rewrites , the neighborhood was doing likewise. The houses that were there when I began what became the first scenes for the first chapters for first draft have been changed too.

In “Interstellar”, a father cannot return home to his children as promised, tested by gravity and bested by time, but does the next best thing, he helps them save humanity, and is granted permission to move on to start again.

I find out later on that Nolan’s original working title for “Interstellar” was “Flora’s Letter”, named after his daughter, in recognition of his desire to work and his guilt over abandoning his children during that work.

(“Interstellar”: Scene of Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper leaving his child Murphy before going on what becomes a one-way trip to save the world.)

In Nolan’s words, “As my kids were growing up, I had this desire to hang on to the past. You become quite melancholy about how fast it’s going. All parents talk about it, all parents experience it. So Interstellar came from a very personal place.”² All those wonderful families in the park know an eternal cosmic truth.

And what truth, which we already know, have I been reminded of after a walk?

One cannot cross a river in the same place twice, while a mind may not relive its memories in the same ways. These leaves turn again and again. Home.

1. Shone, Tom. The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan (p. 23). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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2. Shone, Tom. The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan (p. 259). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.