Daniel Uncapher
Euclideans
Dad always told me to draw the bigger circle.
It was like a way of saying be the better man. He wasn’t a mathematician but he thought highly of geometry. The triangle was favored for its stability, the square for its obstinate disinterest; but the real work of art was the circle.
Circles aren’t Dad’s idea specifically. It turns out a lot of people have thought about circles before in this ethical way. In school there’s the idea of a circular logic, which is bad, but then you learn that a linear logic is nonsense and all logic is circular, unless it’s more like a raft, which has enough connections that it somehow floats.
I guess I argued a lot as a kid. A lot of people actually said I was an argumentative kid, which never felt fair to me; it takes two people to argue, after all, so I never felt I deserved all the blame. So Dad appealed to my logic. These people see the world one way, he said, they have a certain worldview, a circle they draw around themselves that conflicts with the boundaries of your circles. But if you draw a big enough circle you’ll see the bigger picture entirely and see nothing to argue with, if anything you’ll feel a little bad for the people who can’t see the full picture. Do you see what I’m saying, said Dad, do you get what I mean?
One day Llorona and I got in an argument that turned into whether the week started on Sunday or Monday but began because she interrupted me while I was reading. She said I interrupt her all the time, which is true, but it’s because she doesn’t mind it, and I like to interrupt. It’s not hypocritical, I explained, it’s just an alignment of interests. I don’t remember how we got into the Gregorian, but she figured the whole thing out and realized that I was actually anxious because I was unemployed and the weekend never started or ended at all for me, and the workweek thing was basically a totally stupid symptom of that. It was a good insight and I complimented the size of her circle. She said: what??
It’s like you have a really broad perspective on things, I said. Broader than I do a lot of times. Llorona cracked up when I told her about the theory. Where did you get this idea? From my Dad, I said. Oh, she said, and went back to her book. The next time I talked to Dad I asked him if he maybe put it better he didn’t remember it at all. I admitted that I wasn’t being super articulate with the idea, but insisted that it was real, and simple, and for whatever it’s worth I’d really internalized it. I guess I’m a pretty smart guy after all, said Dad.
Later, when we started arguing about Black Lives Matter, I drew the bigger circle and hung up.
Presskid Confessional
As a kid I ran a printing press in North Mississippi. I hate reading and I hate the south. Between you and me (if I can afford to be personal here) southerners actually do believe a lot of stupid things, and I’m not saying that makes them stupid but you have to admit that it sounds pretty close.
And don’t think that makes me unlikable. People like me. I’m not your so-called unsympathetic narrator. You’re supposed to be sympathetic towards me. I’m a likable person who lives in the south and you have to believe me when I tell you that it’s true that most southerners are not very likable people, and that they have a lot of stupid beliefs.
Nice people like me can sometimes get away with not being nice because we’re so nice and all. For example, I like books but I don’t like reading. Growing up I spent my meager allowance on exlibrary books at two for a quarter. I treated them as disposable objects, reading them once and then leaving them in public places, like on sidewalks or windowsills. So sue me.
People with good intentions would tell me not to litter, and I told them it wasn’t trash, it was literature. To make the point I’d kick the book as far as possible and then make a run for it. To be frank the world was pretty convenient for me. A kid back then could do whatever they wanted, cause any manner of ruckus, so long as they could dream it up.
That was good stuff. I mean, we used to have sex in tall grass—what kind of disaster is that? And that was all me. I mean that was me then. I take the people in my life very seriously. I take personal possessions very seriously. I have respect for what people do with their lives, and I try not to litter. As a matter of fact I don’t litter at all.
My printing press was broken growing up so I had to manually engage and disengage it between every impression. Keeping the flywheel spinning was itself an ongoing maneuver that I was barely able to achieve, understanding nothing about printing nor general mechanics. I pulled knobs and levers at random until I was able to draw a perfect impression, but once the process had begun I became quite capable.
Wrestling turned into a kind of rough sex play and then a slow dance, walking through the motions in my dreams: the rubber rolling over the ink, the ink spreading thin and sticky over the rumbling steel barrels, transferred to the faces of the cold lead type and then buried into sheets of thick cotton paper, like teeth into skin—dried, cut, wrapped, delivered.
And you must understand that I hated the stuff, but it paid for my life in the meantime. I went to Europe. For some time I failed to develop as a person. I wasn’t quite proud of my station, and when I visited the religious centers of my city it was with no small sense of skepticism. I am a cynic, but that doesn’t make me unlikable. I learned how to keep those kinds of thoughts to myself. If you asked me, I would even love you.
There were intrusions, of course.
I didn’t like language but I found a few uses and abused them, just like I found out that southerners, being the absolute cretins they are, pay actual money for printing. What I couldn’t use I left for the landfill. I liked the things that I knew even if I hated how I learned them. I had moments of specific pleasure. I moved dirt with my hands. I slid a splinter under my toenail and squeezed a pimple on the inside of my nose. I took advantage of the natural world for my singular purposes. I waded into the river until I sank in the mud past my knees. I let the worms wrap themselves around my feet and felt the eels eat the scabs from my legs. When the sun set I lost sight of my limbs, and in the cold I lost the feel of my feet. In fact, I was having a breakdown. My old trick was to focus my attention on simple things that I could be certain of, features of a coherent world. “My name is not made-up,” I would repeat. “My name is not made-up, it really is my name.”
But that was a lie that I told myself, because somebody made up my name.
Daniel Uncapher (@ds_chapman) is a Sparks Fellow at Notre Dame, where he received his MFA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Penn Review, Baltimore Review, Tin House Online, and others.