Things That Aren't There

A month or so ago, an idle query about the names of the weekdays led me to this little Wikipedia story about Tyr, Tuesday's namesake:

The gods decided to shackle Fenrir the wolf, but the beast broke every chain they put upon him. Eventually they had the dwarves make them a magical ribbon called Gleipnir. It appeared to be only silk, but was made of six wondrous ingredients: the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, bear's sinews (meaning nerves, sensibility), fish's breath, and bird's spittle. The creation of Gleipnir is said to be the reason why none of the above exist.

Fenrir sensed the gods' deceit and refused to be bound unless one of them put his hand in the wolf's mouth. Tyr, known for his great wisdom and courage, agreed, and the other gods tied up the wolf. Fenrir struggled to break free, but couldn't. When the gods saw that Fenrir was bound, they all rejoiced -- except Tyr, whose right hand had been bitten off by the wolf.

For some reason the part of the story that struck me most was not the snarling wolf or the severed hand, but the list of non-existent things: a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, and so on. Somehow the creation of Gleipnir seemed to go beyond your basic how-the-bird-lost-its-spittle kind of folktale. It's really about the power missing things hold – whether they are things that used to be there but got lost or destroyed, or things that never existed in the first place. I started a little list of non-existent yet possibly powerful items: a full night’s sleep, a vegetable Simon will eat, kitchen scissors that are always in the drawer when I need them. I liked the idea that dwarves had somehow spirited them away and woven them together to hold back the apocalypse.

Of course things that aren't there come in many shapes and sizes, I realized. A lot of my work consists of finding out what used to be here but isn't anymore, and trying to make it come alive again, in people’s minds, at least. Some of those things have left traces on the landscape, like this empty foundation behind the PCC:

Which, a morning at the archives revealed, was once a greenhouse:

The family in the house next door had a little retail nursery there, with a display area along Wilson Avenue. Who knew? Now you do.

It gets more complicated -- and more interesting, to me, anyway -- when the gone things have been so completely obliterated that it's hard to even imagine what they might have looked like. The seven houses that once stood on the Whitworth playfield have vanished without a trace:


It'll take a little more digging and and a giant leap of imagination to reincarnate those homes and the lives that were lived in them -- but I'd like to try it sometime.

Then there are the things that don't exist but should: decent school funding, for instance. World peace. Welcoming entrances at Whitworth. In many cases the absence is so palpable, it's totally, painfully obvious exactly what's needed to fill it -- it's just a matter of whether or not you have the energy, money, and authority to do anything about it. (It can work: I have helped call into being a playground at Lakewood Park, a middle school at Orca, and a tree house, among other things.)

Sometimes the thing that's missing is entirely unimaginable until it arrives: for two hundred years, Louis after pampered Louis wandered the halls of Versailles, haunted by a gnawing sense that something was missing, reaching ever more extreme heights of rococo extravagance in search of that ineffable object that would fill the void. How could they have known it was a ten-foot-tall purple balloon dog made of solid steel?

Ah yes, that's it. Finally.

Once in a while, like Dorothy, you discover the thing you thought you lacked, right in your own backyard. Or on your kitchen counter: after dinner last night I walked in on Simon hunched over the leftover peas, shoveling them into his mouth with the serving spoon. He tried to deny it, but the fix was in: there is a vegetable he will eat. (The kitchen scissors are still AWOL, though.)

The hardest gaps are the ones that open up when something or someone we love is gone. I remember once coming up from the lake at Bantam and finding Emmett and George sitting on the porch: two brothers in rocking chairs, reading the newspaper together. And next to them, an empty rocker, where Harper (the third brother) would surely have been sitting, if he hadn’t been killed in Vietnam in 1969.

I wasn't around when Hop died, didn't have a hole ripped out of the middle of my life like his brothers, his parents, his wife and children did. In forty years the raw edges of that hole have healed over, but it's still there, even for someone like me who never met him. That empty rocking chair made Harper's absence so real to me that day -- there he was, not sitting there in his 70s, reading the paper with his brothers -- but it was also beautiful, in a way. Clearly he still has a place in our lives, and always will.

I came across this snapshot once in a batch of someone else's family photos. I'm not sure what the photographer was after, exactly, but for me the image captures an idea I'd like to try to get at:


I know loss is enervating, and sometimes devastating. There are failures we never get over, tragedies that change us forever. But maybe we, like the dwarves, can harness the power of the things we're missing: our love for someone who's gone, or the maddening gap between what we see in front of us and what we know should be there -- even that restless discontent we can't quite pinpoint.

It's hard to hold that empty space open; we often rush to fill it up with something else or cover it over with distractions. But if we honor it, and let it stand, it can become a vessel for our sorrow and frustration, our hopes and inspirations, our despair, and our determination. It can motivate us and sustain us, allow us to build up the energy we need to fashion something new and powerful.

Our own Gleipnir may not be anything like the old one. It may not be what we expected, or what we thought was needed. It may not be enough to bind the wolf on its own; Tyr understood that. But it will draw upon the magic of all those things that aren't there, and have a silken beauty all its own.