“Pulse” by Cynan Jones, appears in the May 6, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. Here we present excerpts from Colin and Jennifer’s discussion about the story, edited for length and clarity.
▶ Initial thoughts on the story
Colin: This story is really engaging. It didn’t go where I necessarily thought it was going, and it had several threads to it. There were several remarkable things about the story, but I think the most remarkable thing was the way the author managed to build this tension, and continually raise tension, then lower, then raise it again. So it was like this tension just kept growing throughout the story, it was dissipated temporarily, but then it was back again. And it was very interesting how this tension with the electrical storm and whatnot changed gears a bit by the end of the story. Of course I thought the ending was absolutely shocking, and it was almost surreal.
Colin: But at the same time, like a Flannery O’Connor story, this [ending] was inevitable, wasn’t it? On the second reading I did see some nice foreshadowing, and so forth, that that came into it. But two things strike me most about the story. Number one was just this masterful building and sustaining of tension, alleviating it temporarily and growing the tension. [Number two was] just how the ending was just so unexpected and yet inevitable. Of course, I like the language, I like the dialogue, [and there are] interesting narration techniques we’ll talk about later.
Jennifer: Yeah, thanks for that, Colin. I agree with you. I felt a lot of anxiety reading this story. It was very pleasurable, but it was this What is going to happen? sense throughout the story. There’s this overwhelming sense of dread and fear [where] you just know something tragic is coming for this family. And I think, [the author] Cynan Jones did a great job of putting us into a specific place with his word choice, his sprinkling of putting Welsh phrases in there, telling us they are by the sea. It just really helped cement this in my mind [that] they were in the wilds, out, far removed from anyone else. There is this sense of this family out in the wilderness in their cabin trying to make the best of it. As you had mentioned, I really appreciated the section breaks in the story, and it felt [at times] we were weaving in and out of time. The story was not told in a completely linear fashion.
Jennifer: I definitely want to come back and talk about the ending, because on the second read for me, I was like, Wait a minute I need to figure out what actually happened here. I appreciate that you brought the reference back to Flannery O’Connor because there was something that we discussed in last week’s conversation [about a Joyce Carol Oates’s story] that I think is very relevant to this [story]. I’m looking forward to diving into that a little bit deeper. I completely loved this story and I am very much looking forward to seeing what else this author has in store for us.
Jennifer: The foreshadowing was so vivid and so visceral. He did a great job of just putting in the little bit about the changing climate. He’s not beating us over the head with it, but he has these subtle references to the climate crisis which is definitely something we cannot ignore in this story.
Colin: Yeah, no, exactly. Very good on that message. I don’t think he’s I don’t think he’s trying to deliver a message. I don’t think he’s making a moral statement or anything like that. I just think he’s saying that this like it. This the this why in my mind, it also justifies this weird, freakishly strong storm. I didn’t get a sense that he was moralizing or making a commentary on it other than the fact that it’s it exists. That was my sense.
Jennifer: Yeah, I agree with you. He’s acknowledging that this phenomenon is happening, and it’s happening with more regularity and with the strong storms. And for me, when he starts out this story by saying it’s foul out there, that’s not a phrase that I would use as an American to describe it. So it already took me to a place of like Oh, this a European person who is telling this story with his own particular language and I thought that was that was really great.
Colin: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You just reminded me something. There’s another story called “A Temporary Matter” by Jhumpa Lahiri. Have you read that famous story? It’s by a contemporary writer, who has won some significant prizes and I think this is probably her most well-known short story. “Pulse” reminded me in some respects of “A Temporary Matter”. But again, if you haven’t read it, it’s fine.
Jennifer: Yeah, I have not [read] “A Temporary Matter” but I look forward to exploring that a little bit further later.
Colin: It’s an extremely famous story. But I don’t want to spoil this story for you. I don’t really want to give away anything. Basically, there is a couple who are in a house, they are having some marital issues, and the power is shut off. The city had shut off the power intentionally and the couple had advertisements for in advance, so they knew it was coming. They were prepared for it, they had candles and so forth, and this was in the city, not in a cabin. But there’s something very similar about the context that you have this couple together in this power outage, in the midst of this of this thing and it also ends kind of unexpectedly. I don’t want to spoil it, but there are definitely some real parallels between these stories.
Jennifer: One last thing that struck me about the story is that the author did an amazing job of viscerally putting us in with the smell of the sea salt, the sound of the crashing, the popping logs, the wet toe from his boot, flicking it off, the sawdust being blown by the wind and changing direction. He grounded us in all of our senses and I think that that was for me one of the best parts of the story. I could feel the sticky resin on my fingers. For people who’ve never cut down a tree, he said it’s like a sticking plaster when you get the plastic left behind, so he’s bringing it in a very relatable way to people who may never have smelled the resin from a pine tree being cut.
Colin: Exactly. Just beautifully evocative This shows fiction embodies an experience. Right? We experience this story. It put me in the story. I felt, I smelled, [I experienced] these various stimuli. I thought it was brilliantly done, extremely evocative. A really great story on multiple levels.
▶ The impact of a changing climate
Jennifer: I have a couple of things to follow up on from what you initially said about [the climate]. I don’t think this person has a preaching tone about climate change. I think he’s just explaining that there are some consequences to the changing weather that they’ve experienced in this house that they have owned.
Jennifer: The narrator stated
It didn’t use to come in. It didn’t use to get through. There’s just so much force now, in the weather.
Jennifer: And the groundman, when he was onsite having tea with the couple noted
—New storms, see. Twenty-year storms all the time now. With the climate, said the groundman.
Jennifer: I really appreciated the acknowledgment that things are changing without any fault finding.
Colin: I didn’t read it like that, because in my mind there are two reasons why he brought it up. Number one: We’ve seen repeated weather, and we always say this about storms We’re never had storms like this. I’ve had this conversation so many times. It puts us in a very contemporary time set. It sets it in the basically the now, not 20 years ago. It very precisely sets us in the last couple of years kind of thing.
Colin: And secondly, you can identify with it because I’ve had the same conversations [with others]. We’ve had these kinds of storms here, where all these trees came down and we’ve had tornados destroying houses. We’ve had a number of tornado alerts right in the downtown. And this [was previously] pretty much unheard of. We’ve had these freak storms repeatedly, so I think it’s something a lot of people can identify with.
Jennifer: Well for me, I also read this story during a storm. I was watching the lightning flash over an old barn built in 1860s, that has lightning poles that catch the storm. So the storm experience described this story felt very real to me.
▶ An ominous, mysterious buzzing
Jennifer: And the other thing that was so contemporary for me, that took me into this time and place [was] when they talk about the electrical lines, and his wife can hear a buzzing.
Three high-voltage cables passed overhead, between the line of trees and the cabin. They’d had them assessed. A surveyor had come out and done checks, explained the readings, confirmed that there was less emittance from the lines than a microwave could give off. The surveyor said whatever hum she could hear, it wasn’t from the lines.
Jennifer: This gave me that sense of dread that there’s something out there. There’s this presence, there’s this energy. There’s something out in the woods that’s making them very uneasy in a way that they couldn’t really put their finger on.
Colin: Oh, exactly. We should talk about this buzzing, because this this comes up twice. Legitimately, it’s a mystery. The mother was obviously concerned, and they had somebody come in, but nobody found anything but it. It comes back at the end, right? This buzzing. When the storm has passed you can hear this buzzing. So the question is what exactly is this buzzing is this? I take it as a real phenomenon.
Colin: But in the story [its] just a real phenomenon, an actual buzzing, which again, I take it as real because it’s a third person narration. I take it that it exists. They’re not hallucinating it, but at the same time the professionals couldn’t diagnose it. But at the same time, why is it there if they couldn’t find anything? What exactly is it? So it does definitely add to. That’s it. This story is steeped in an ominous tone. It almost feels supernatural that there’s something supernatural, but it doesn’t quite hit the benchmark.
Jennifer: Yeah, I completely agree with you, because the other time that the buzzing comes up, in addition to when the electricity was arcing at the end is when he’s in the tree, and he has this visceral fear of being struck by lightning, and he says, there’s this hissing in his head, and it is just his body revolting, saying You are going to die. You need to take action. And although I don’t believe in a supernatural element, I do think he put human characteristics in the trees, he said, like the trees were reaching towards each other, and they were fighting with each other, and then one pushed one away, and that he could feel the heartbeat of the tree.
Jennifer: His survival instinct kicking in, with that reptilian hiss, straight from his lizard brain, his amygdala commanding him to Get down, take a step. A primal instinct alerting him to danger.
His stomach dropped. Seemed to spin out into the wind and he just hugged the mast of the tree as everything tossed and broke and waved, his sodden face pressed into the skin of the trunk, and his head filling with a reptilian hiss.
He felt a pure, infantile fear. The smell of pencils. The cold metal smell of the ladder. There was a static crackle above him. And it froze his blood. His body filled with a heavy ice.
A c-cr-crackle again. The pole of the saw like some clock weight, swinging.
It flashed into his mind to leap, to hurl himself into the swell of the cypress. But he could not move.
You’re on a metal ladder.
He stared out. Crackle. His eyes dropped to the field beyond, the molehills like compact heaps of ash.
Move.
He could not look up. Move. He could not look down. In the storm light the ladder glowed against the waterlogged pine. The air rasped.
Fall. Just get off the ladder.
Jennifer: He was frozen by fear and he and he felt this vibe, this wisdom from the tree that said You’ve got to go which spurred him in to action.
From deep inside the tree, he heard—he felt—a primitive, arrhythmic beat. A slow basal drumming.
Crackle.
Down. Get down.
He lowered a foot—gave up agency to the tree itself that coached him—another foot. By foot. Feet that fluttered in the chasmic moments of the depthless blank space between the rungs.
As he passed the rope he’d tied to bind the ladder to the tree, he smelled salt, the white stains of brine washed out around the trunk. A fizz to it. A tiny wildness. The sea of the storm. The crash of the wind. And above, in the dim light now, again the static crackle, like some failing radio device. A percussion of crisp sharp electrical clicks.
Down, a primal thump in the heart of the tree again, down, toward the swirling pit of the ground.
Jennifer: I just thought that was so beautifully rendered without being unrelatable. I have had moments of fear where something else takes control of your nervous system, and you just do the thing that saves you.
▶ The trees as characters / the wisdom of the trees
From deep inside the tree, he heard—he felt—a primitive, arrhythmic beat. A slow basal drumming.
In the crepuscular light, each tree trunk seemed to be growing from some breathing, harbored animal.
Colin: It’s funny you used the same word personification. Personification comes up repeatedly in this story. You’re right. The tree is striving, it’s grasping. Again, personification. It’s like an animal. The wind is circling the place, an uneasy beast personification.
The pine was leaning farther into the cypress. It looked now not as if it were grasping stupidly, furiously at the out-of-reach power lines with the fine-needled tips of its branches. It looked now to be reaching intently toward them, with one long curled stretch.
Colin: The pine is set up as almost an antagonist against the cypress, or vice versa, right? Like they’re fighting each other. Again it’s personification [and] more ominous words.
In the remaining trunk, the climbing spikes had made repeated, triangular cuts, like bite marks in an animal’s neck.
Colin: We’re constantly getting these images likening these inanimate objects to these animals, these beasts. And it’s not just an animal. It’s a kind of beast, right? It’s like a beast with sharp teeth, right? There’s a kind of underlying violence here. This repeated personification is one of the things that really creates the tension.
The wind was a low hiss. It gave the sense it was circling the place, an uneasy beast stalking a clearing, at the center of which was the pine. As if the pine were some quarry that it wanted to rush, and take down
Jennifer: So before [the pines] were sort of in concert, and now you are getting [the sense] of one of the trees has its own agency. He did a spectacular job of that, and that was very unexpected. We [generally] don’t think trees have their own motives or agendas, right?
Colin: You reminded me of one other thing: the undulating ground, the moving. Now I at first I took it as what do you mean? The ground is moving like, and but it but again this this idea seemed to me like almost going back to personification. Here we go again. The ground is taken to be almost alive. Right? It’s almost like it’s sentient, or it has agency. The ground itself. Now, at first I thought, well, come on the ground can’t be moving. But again, this a third person narrator, and we have it in dialogue that the tree climb or the tree experts themselves acknowledge that the ground is moving. So I take this to be swelling with water and undulating with water. But again, here we have this underlying kind of animal force, or something in all these inanimate objects.
—New storms, see. Twenty-year storms all the time now. With the climate, said the groundman.
Then the climber spoke.
—You’ll have to sort the others. Those other pines. They’ll all be over.
Her question came, a glance at him.
—Once you get one, like that, they’ll all go. If they’re planted together in a stand like that. If they’ve grown together for years, and one goes over.
He couldn’t help but think of his grandparents. How they’d died within weeks of each other.
The climber seemed momentarily distant again. He took another measured sip of the tea.
—It’s not the trees that go. It’s the ground.
Jennifer: This was very relatable to me, because I live in a house where there were 3 pine trees planted together back in the 1960s. And just as the man said, when one goes the other two within the year we’re down, and so there is something where the ground swells, and you just see the [tree] tip, and then it’s suddenly on the ground, and it is just such a violent force. And it did take down the others, even though not in the exact same moment, but they were coming down. So that just felt eminently relatable to me by watching the results of heavy storms, during a super rainy time in the last four years, that just took those trees right down. That supernatural or that animalistic wisdom of Mother Earth or however you want to personify that.
From deep inside the tree, he heard—he felt—a primitive, arrhythmic beat. A slow basal drumming.
Crackle.
Down. Get down.
He lowered a foot—gave up agency to the tree itself that coached him—another foot. By foot. Feet that fluttered in the chasmic moments of the depthless blank space between the rungs.
As he passed the rope he’d tied to bind the ladder to the tree, he smelled salt, the white stains of brine washed out around the trunk. A fizz to it. A tiny wildness. The sea of the storm. The crash of the wind. And above, in the dim light now, again the static crackle, like some failing radio device. A percussion of crisp sharp electrical clicks.
Down, a primal thump in the heart of the tree again, down, toward the swirling pit of the ground.
Jennifer: And I just loved that. We acknowledged that he sort of gave up his agency. He was frozen in fear, thinking he’s going to get electrocuted on this ladder, and he’s like the tree is going to save me and I think that it did. That was really very believable to me.
Colin: But one more thing I want to say first. When you talked [about climate change] I said I don’t think he was making a statement on climate change. I’m willing to reconsider that now that you read that, because here’s what I’m thinking. At first, I just thought he was placing us in time. I think I’m reconsidering this on the fly here, from what you just said. It seems to me like the earth is rebelling. It’s revolting, right? So we almost do have a personification of a kind of revolt. It’s almost like the earth has had enough. This might be going out on a limb. The earth has had enough. It’s had taken enough abuse, right? And I mean this in a way, this true, right?
Colin: The climate can only absorb so much damage. It’s a complex system. Complex systems can take a huge amount of abuse, but then they hit a tipping point and then they just collapse. So, going back, I definitely feel there is a statement here now. I’m contradicting myself, but that’s fine, right?
Jennifer: I’d like to take you there.
Colin: Well, I mean, I am reconsidering. And I think there is something we’ll get into this later.
Jennifer: The story brings itself there. If you, if you let me pivot on to where you’re going, I think.
Colin: So we do see a system. And again, this a relatable thing where we’re seeing more and more intense climate, right? But it I think it’s the personification angle here, which he’s imbuing it with, like you said, an agency. It’s not a rationality. We don’t believe trees are actually sentient, and the ground is sentient, but it gives a feeling of agency.
Jennifer: For me, I think he is making a very, very clear statement about what is happening in the environment. And the reason I will say this on this agency of the trees, the wisdom of the trees. After the storm is over he gets the woodchipper.
He angled the branch into the drum, thick end first, and the branch bucked and sprung as if consciously flinching from the spinning blades.
▶ A sense of the narrator
He angled the branch into the drum, thick end first, and the branch bucked and sprung as if consciously flinching from the spinning blades.
Jennifer: So we get this feeling that he’s trying to yank this tree branch into the chipper, and it is like resisting him. It does not want to go to slaughter, and as he’s describing why he didn’t call the Power Company right away, he said, because they’re going to butcher the lane. They are going to make a huge mess of that environment. He did not want those scars in his landscape, so he withheld action because he didn’t want that.
Jennifer: And several times there’s references to murder, to butchering, to this defacement of this beautiful place by manmade tracks. He needs to get the power fixed. That’s not up for debate. It has to happen. But there is an environmental cost, and there will be scars because of it. And I just thought that he was very deliberate in his word choice. I thought he was very clear.
If they send people out they’ll just butcher the ground, he thought. It’ll just be butchered. There’ll be Land Rovers and trucks. The lane will be ruined. For one branch. It’s just one branch.
There was a sense of murder, of an attack that had passed.
Colin: Oh, yeah, very good point. I noticed the exact same things. And I was going to raise [the point that] this guy’s an idiot. He’s actually an idiot. He really is a stupid guy. But at the same time, we have to ask what his motives are. You hit the nail on the head there, I think. This a conscientious person. He doesn’t want to wake the baby, even though he knows the sound of the logs is muffled by the wind but he is still cautious to be quiet. He also doesn’t want to spill wood chips. So several times he’s seen as a conscientious character who thinks about things of outside of himself. Colin: Oh, yeah, very good point. I noticed the exact same things. And I was going to raise [the point that] this guy’s an idiot. He’s actually an idiot. He really is a stupid guy. But at the same time, we have to ask what his motives are.
Jennifer: The narrator is careful, self critical.
He went into the middle room, knelt by the wood burner, and set the logs down, placing them loosely around the fireguard, trying not to knock them together loudly, even though that wouldn’t be heard above the weather.
He went into the little one’s bedroom, keeping the arm he’d used for the logs forearm-up so specks of wood and torn bark wouldn’t fall on the carpeted floor. There she was, asleep, despite the storm.
Tiny drops of wet mist silvered his jumper.
I should have put a coat on. The wool won’t dry properly.
Colin: You hit the nail on the head there, I think. This a conscientious person. He doesn’t want to wake the baby, even though he knows the sound of the logs is muffled by the wind but he is still cautious to be quiet. He also doesn’t want to spill wood chips. So several times he’s seen as a conscientious character who thinks about things of outside of himself. We get this idea of not murdering and butchering, not letting them [destroy the property]. He seems to care about the land. He feels bad even putting the [limbs] in the chipper right? I think the biggest question, early on, is about his motivations. Why on earth did he think he could do this himself? He didn’t want to trouble other people, and he didn’t want to damage the land. So we see a guy who’s sympathetically conscientious.
Jennifer: Yeah, I love that you said that, Colin, because I’m like this such a gentle man. But he felt so ineffectual, and that kind of comes out in the dynamics when the when the groundsmen come out.
He thought of the lane. The mash of it, with the fat tires of the heavy vehicles, the wet ground at the field gateway.
When the tree surgeons saw the ladder—as they came into the line of pines, with head torches and handheld floodlights, voices loud over the wind, swearing as they went into the bramble and the overgrowth—twice he heard the word. Twice he heard them say “hero.”
Jennifer: They weren’t praising him for being brave. He’s got a tiny ladder on a tree that is like 100 feet tall in a storm, like What was he thinking? And it gave me a lot of empathy for the gentleman, because I think he was a very conscientious husband, a very conscientious dad. I’ll just go out there and do something because my wife is worried, and it’s just one branch. How hard can it be to just handle one branch? I’m the man of this family. I’m going to take charge. I’m going to do it.
Jennifer: And you make this this comment about the pull saw getting stuck and then just swinging there impotently, just kind of blowing in the wind, and I was like, Oh, you poor guy!
Colin: Yeah, well, exactly. And this speaks to a few things, actually. Well, number one going back to that thing swinging in the tree. What else swings like that? A corpse on a noose right. That’s kind of a nice image there, right?
Jennifer: And then the climber comes. He’s got his saw. He’s got his helmet, looking like a medieval knight slaying the dragon of this big beast, you know, and its limbs fall off, and they have this kind of like this very to me. It felt very like an English fairy tale in his telling of that.
Jennifer: The [groundsman and climber] come in, and the wife is looking at the climber, in the soft light. She is definitely looking. The narrator points out the beauty and maleness of this particular guy, and I think in that moment he was feeling very threatened that this guy could do something he couldn’t, and his wife was giving the guy a look.
Colin: I think that’s exactly it. We have a guy trying his best. We see the juxtaposition between the climber and the and the protagonist, right? The climber is very methodical. He’s confident. He’s effective. He climbs that tree. He’s a professional. He’s like he is like the antithesis of the husband’s feckless, ridiculous, and ex incredibly reckless attempt to climb the tree and cut the branch right. We see this juxtaposition in the way he’s described.
There was not a fleck of fat on the climber. His hands, which were resting on the worktop, looked astonishingly strong but not thickened up like a farmer’s might be, or blistered and dirty; there was no visible middle age around his jaw, his cheeks.
His very pale blue eyes moved slowly around the cabin, as if he were waiting for something to pass, or to leave him.
He was looking at the construction. At how the logs fitted one onto the other.
Colin: He’s really a masculine type figure, right? And when the wife sees him, and again, here’s some questions. So when he walk, he’s brought in for tea, and again he seems extremely competent, right?
He saw his wife watch the climber take a measured mouthful of tea. Controlled.
She looked flushed. Her pupils widened in the candlelight.
Colin: This guy and the wife looks at [the climber], and her pupils dilate. So she’s infatuated with him. It’s clear that she’s infatuated, and [the husband] notices her infatuation. We’re seeing it through him. He’s relaying the infatuation, it builds us sympathy.
▶ Relationship dynamics
Colin: This raises a big question: What’s wrong with the relationship? This seems to be a kind of clinical style relationship. They didn’t want the child. It was an accident. Clearly it wasn’t planned. He does mention some distance [in this relationship]. They are not in love. Maybe it’s her. We see that she’s kind of distancing herself from him. We don’t know what’s going on but clearly there’s marital problems.
Jennifer: I have a lot of thoughts on that, Colin. They did state that the child was unexpected, but now she has become the center of their universe.
The little one whom they hadn’t expected to have—the child who was at once a present fundamental fact but, even though she was walking now, and talking, still bewildering.
They both feel safe when they are in touching distance of that child. The husband has been relegated to sleeping on the pull away couch because the child is in the bed with the mother.
He could tell before she answered. He understood, because he, too, felt that the little one had become, to each of them separately, their most safe point. That if they were within reach of her breath the rest of the world went away. Nothing more mattered, not even each other.
I miss you, he wanted to say. I miss you beyond any means I have of coping with the distance you have gone.
—I’ll go on the pullout. It’s fine, he’d said.
Jennifer: Again, this is one of those stories we’ve discussed a lot in the last few weeks: a fundamental longing for connection, the inability to articulate that to a partner and what drives distance [between them]. The child was life-changing and unexpected in the timing, perhaps like this storm? She is bewildering to both of the parents. And to me, she was a little mini tempest. She was a little storm that came into their relationship and turned everything on edge, right? They both want to do what’s right, but they’re both like What do we do with her, this little creature? So I just thought that was so relatable and so sad. He was longing for his wife in this fundamental way, and he just couldn’t bridge the gap. He just couldn’t. He is ineffectual.
—You tried to go up it?
The assessor’s question was accusatory.
Seeing the ladder against the trunk now, he recognized how big the tree really was. How short the ladder was against the thick pine.
The polesaw swung above them. Negligible.
Jennifer: There’s just this continuous repetition of the image of the polesaw.
Above them, the polesaw hung, still bitten into the tree, swinging in the wind, knocking against the trunk. Dull, redundant thuds, jeered by the bright metallic clinks of the climber’s gear.
Jennifer: Later, when he was cleaning up the branches, the polesaw was still stuck in that log that the climber had easily buzzed off with his chainsaw. And it just to me was that that reminder of the husband, the father, the provider, the protector, trying to do the right thing, but not having the right tools or the expertise to do it, and he failed.
When he got to the branch, the climber wrested the blade of the polesaw from it and let the saw drop. He secured himself, and began to rearrange his clips.
Jennifer: What was going on with the wife? I think she had a problem that needed to be resolved. She was super worried about the lines, right? She’s harping on her husband Why didn’t you do something? Did you call someone? She’s getting really anxious. And then this miracle climber guy swings in, cuts the branch down, fixes everything. He’s tall and hunky, and he’s sitting at your table, drinking a cup of tea. I think there was that relief for her of Oh, finally, somebody did something.
Colin: He’s the obvious foil. He’s the antithesis of the husband. He’s what the husband isn’t. He’s a man of competent action, whereas the husband is, in this case, a man of incompetent action. But maybe he’s not even a man of action. It’s the classical divide in modernist fiction between the intellect and action. [Between] the character [who] intellectualizes everything and the character of action. I think this narrator probably is the former who is trying to prove to himself and maybe his wife that dh’s a man of action. But he just almost gets himself electrocuted. So this is the obvious contrast between these two characters. They represent different things, and the wife, of course, is infatuated with the man of competent action, not the husband.
Colin: And I going back to the child, my guess is simply that it was an accident, and this why they remain together because they have a kid. And this is probably very common. They probably wouldn’t be together. I’m guessing, she probably would have left him if it weren’t for the child. This is my guess. A case like this, I think it’s not unheard of for a couples to accidentally have a kid and stay together for the kid. So this basically my reading of it. She would have been long gone but you know they both love the kid. They both have to be there for the kid. So it’s almost like a marriage of convenience for this for the sake of the kid at this point, or it’s probably one of just inertia, right? They’ve been going to this cabin for years, or if they live there, I don’t know. I’m questioning why they’re even there during this big tempest and ongoing power outage. If this a cabin that they go and visit once a year? Why are they even staying there? That’s another question. But again, what the role of the child is clearly, yeah, it’s the only remaining connection between them.
Jennifer: Yeah. And I was trying to find the quote about the child, because he definitely said they were bewildered by her. And I thought that was just really interesting, but as we started out this conversation, you mentioned how sensitive and caretaking and conscientious the father was to not wake up the child, even though there’s no way she’s going to wake up because of the storm. He didn’t want to get water in her room from his jacket, and he didn’t want to get the wood chips on her. So I very much idealized this husband from the standpoint of a very, very conscientious and caring person.
Jennifer: And when he realized right that visceral fear when the guy said, Do you know that electricity can spark 2 meters? Right? It can go 6 feet. Yeah. And he said he got sick to his stomach when he realized he was that close to electrocuting himself. You know, he did take action, but it was the wrong action, because he was not equipped to do that, and I just thought that was also very relatable.
Colin: Yeah, exactly. The thing is, we don’t know any history of their relationship. We don’t know how he’s acted. Maybe he’s trying to win back his wife. Maybe he was just this like negligent guy cause his. We do have some evidence. He never sealed the floors right. She bought the sealant. He never sealed it. So we do again. See a guy who’s maybe he’s we don’t know. I mean he’s definitely feckless. That much is clear, right? He’s feckless. He has his heart in the right spot. But I’m speculating, we don’t have any evidence, but we do have evidence that he didn’t tackle the sealing of the floorboards, and this has gone on for some time now, for years.
Colin: Now I’m completely speculating here, but here’s one possibility. They used to be in love. You would assume that they were once in love and then she drifted. Who knows? You know, she obviously drifted because he says so. She’s gone away from him. He says that near the end of the story, so she’s gone away from him. But I can think maybe this a guy who neglected his wife. He was lazy. I’ll do it later. And then, when it’s too late, this when he’s trying to fix his behavior. He’s trying to win her back by showing that he is a man of action. He does get stuff done. This is very plausible, isn’t it? Given the fact that we’re told he didn’t do anything about the [sealant]. So really, is this really a likable guy? And he seems like, well, now he’s trying to do something. But how often is it the case when you lose someone that’s when you start acting affectionately or start actually not ignoring them.
Jennifer: I love that you said that because it’s the acknowledgement of what could have been handled earlier, but it didn’t get handled until it was an emergency.
He saw the signs of water ingress in the planks below the cabin windows. A wet stain that caught the light. Every autumn. Every autumn, he thought, we say we’ll seal the planks. She’d put towels down where the rain had been driven in.
Jennifer: He said it happens every Fall. So they have a history of every Fall, they’re in this house, whether it’s their vacation home, or they live there permanently, this happens every fall and she puts the towels down. And so she’s still handling it, right? But now they have a 2- or 3-year-old child, so it’s a different aspect, because the wife says it’s getting in her room, and he’s like, I know, and there’s just this tension in their dialogue that she’s really annoyed.
In the main room, rainwater seeped between the joins below the window frame, gathered momentarily on the upper edges of the thick, angled planks, then ran down to the floor. The tea towel she’d set there was sopping.
—It’s coming into her bedroom, too.
—Yes.
—It’s wetted the carpet.
—I know.
Jennifer: When we look back to the beginning, he said he noticed he saw her looking out the window, and he could tell without her saying anything, the tension in her shoulders right? He knew she was distressed. So for me it was this interesting thing that they’ve obviously been together and married for some time. They do know each other very intimately, and he is observing her. He can feel her tension, and for me, you know, we haven’t talked yet about the title of the story pulse, but pulses through. Here is electricity, of vibrancy, of a you know, sexual interest, of longing like there’s all of this pulse, and it’s like. But also the pulse of her anger. You know I gave you the tools to fix the log cabin, and you chose not to. And now we’re in an emergency, and our daughter’s affected. The wife, she’s just mad, right? Justifiably so.
Colin: Yes, and there’s one more pulse. What is the most obvious pulse.
Jennifer: Yeah. The electricity.
Colin: Oh, like I mean in general, the heartbeat.
Jennifer: Yes, yes!
Colin: To me, their relationship’s dead. It’s flat lined, right? The kid is keeping it on life support. That’s it. So there’s another way we can look at pulse. There’s a lot of interesting ways we can interpret that word pulse.
Jennifer: Yeah, and I have hope. I always hope that they will [reunite], that this will bring them closer in the end by facing death. They’ll realize they really should be together.
Colin: I think this was a neglectful husband, and he’s trying to win her back. He’s like a night errant. He’s like Don Quixote hoping he’s taking on the windmill, but in this case it’s extremely dangerous. And another thing I notice he repeats is It’s just one branch. He keeps saying this, and you see he knows it’s stupid. He knows it could be dangerous. He’s trying to talk himself out of it. He’s trying to bolster his bravery, his courage, or whatever.
Colin: So I think we do have a good hypothesis that he’s basically a neglectful husband. Now it’s too late. He’s trying to win back her love, and he’s trying to do so by going out in the middle of a extremely dangerous storm. But what does it do? It backfires. He looks like an idiot, and more than that, he invites a heart throb into the house, so his wife is enamored with the heartthrob. He is kind of a Don Quixote. His attempt was entirely feckless, and it backfired by A: almost getting killed, and B: bringing in a heartthrob and just seeing almost like kind of emasculated his wife. You could just see the heart bubbles coming from her eyes as she’s looking at this guy. And I don’t think the kid or anybody is saving this marriage, realistically. Maybe in an old story, like a fairy tale, he fixes the branch and they live happily ever after. I think this [marriage] is frankly dead. It been gone too long, and he’s just proved himself [to be] entirely feckless. This definitely one of these modernist characters.
Jennifer: I took it in a slightly different direction
The electrical noise of the house. Quiet, persistent. Over-present.
After the tempest, it was unnerving.
Since the child had been born, sleep was like some sort of raft he just had to climb onto. But tonight it lapped away beyond reach on his ebbing adrenaline.
Jennifer: I think this author is also showing us the hardships of having a young child on a relationship. It’s kind of like that destructive storm. It’s unexpected, right? She kind of came out of nowhere. She could have been expected. They weren’t surprised about how babies come into the world. To me, this unexpected parent situation was a parallel of climate change. He didn’t take action to seal the logs until it personally affected him, when he could no longer ignore it. He didn’t do anything about trimming the trees until it was a hazard to his life. And for me, that’s a larger allegory. It’s very easy to ignore things until they’re soaking your toe, until you have the resin, the blood of trees, on your hands. The resin won’t wash off, right? So I think the author did a nod to the being aware of the environment and being one with nature.
▶ Who has agency?
Colin: This reminds me of the wasp. This was one of those things that I think we should talk about with a wasp.
Jennifer: I’m all ears for that, Colin because that was a big question mark for me.
Colin: Okay, yeah, me, too. This obviously seems important. This wasp comes up first here:
A small, compacted wasp clung to the fibres of the blue rope, drawn in on itself, in some suspended sleep. It was possible to believe only that some outside agency had stilled the wasp. It was not possible to believe that the thing had cast itself into that state.
A small, compacted wasp clung to the fibres of the blue rope, drawn in on itself, in some suspended sleep. It was possible to believe only that some outside agency had stilled the wasp. It was not possible to believe that the thing had cast itself into that state.
It seemed completely abstract with the storm raging all around.
He loosened the wasp, teased it out using the frayed end of the rope with a sort of care, and let it drop into a gap in the woodpile.
Colin: He thinks about the wasp later, so this wasp comes up twice in the story. Clearly, there’s something evocative about this, and it stands out. This is clearly an important symbol, so let’s see if we could deconstruct what this is.
He was thinking of the wasp. He could not move it from his mind. The strange astral sense that had emanated from it, motionless, in the lash of the storm.
Colin: Here we have it again, he thinks of the wasp. So what is it? So it talks about agency. So I think that’s the first thing this idea of agency has come up. Here’s a character who, I think, like if we read this more broadly, and we look at it into a context of, literature that’s come since modernism, this idea of agency is a very big concern in modernism. We have characters that completely lack agency, and they’re in their heads, right? And this this a very modernist theme. And this more than a modernist, I mean, this comes beyond post modernism. But at the same time this a modern sort of idea, right? A feckless character who lacks agency. Going back to our theory, the guy kind of lacked agency use just at the whim of everything, and his wife has got sick of him. She’s falling out of love with him, and it’s probably too late. So what does he try to do? Reclaim his agency, right?
Colin: But here we have this wasp sitting there that seems to have no agency. He’s thinking Why would this wasp submit to this state on its own?. It must have been put here by some outside force. We see people, animals, whatever at the whim of these outside immutable forces. Is that something to start.
Jennifer: I think that is definitely something, but I want to take us to the moment when he finds the wasp, the visual sense of the scene.
A small, compacted wasp clung to the fibres of the blue rope, drawn in on itself, in some suspended sleep. It was possible to believe only that some outside agency had stilled the wasp. It was not possible to believe that the thing had cast itself into that state.
Jennifer: If you’ve ever seen a husk of a wasp, it seems very fragile, very easy to destroy, because it’s so hollow and brittle. This wasp is still alive, but for me, it still has that connotation of being a husk.
He loosened the wasp, teased it out using the frayed end of the rope with a sort of care, and let it drop into a gap in the woodpile.
Jennifer: He takes the fraying end of the rope and kind of jiggles it. He doesn’t smash it. He doesn’t toss it. He doesn’t flick it with his finger. He’s very gentle to prod it, and then it falls down into the protective spot of the wood pile, right? He’s still very gentle. I have a lot of appreciation for this man’s gentleness and his not wanting to kill or destroy anything. I think that was something that was there. But I also [wondering] why was it a wasp? Why wasn’t it a bumblebee? Why wasn’t it a hummingbird, or all the things that could have been there. Why was it a wasp? When I think of a wasp, people I know get stung by a wasp, and it hurts. This a this an insect that exists to inflict pain. It has a stinger. It is difficult, and yet he doesn’t see it that way at all.
Colin: That is one reading. That is what a wasp definitely is. Once again, we see this guy is conscientious. He definitely cares about things, people, animals, nature, and so this makes him a sympathetic character in some lights, for sure, right? He’s trying to do things in the face of Mother Nature. But there’s another thing, too. He calls it this strange astral feeling. He references this later, and he himself is trying to make sense of the wasp. He himself can’t make sense of the wasp, but he uses that word astral. But again, going back to what this wasp is, I want to go back because agency comes up a lot. This character is trying to recover his own agency in the face of this massive climate upheaval where you’re basically nothing, like the climate is so huge, right?
Jennifer: Do you have a definition of that for us?
Colin: I looked it up. So you have a strange astral sense. So he was thinking of the wasp. You cannot move it from his mind. The strange astral sense that had emanated from motionless in the lash of the storm. So let’s think about this. So an astral is like an otherworldly kind of sense, right? So I’ll just to be clear, I will just look it up right now.
Jennifer: I hear the word astral plane, and I do think supernatural stuff.
Colin: Yeah, it’s strange, it’s definitely unique kind of word that you don’t hear. So over relating to coming from the stars. Okay, so that’s what it means. So astral influences. So coming from the stars. So we have again, we have this thing. It’s in this other worldly, larger sphere of existence. It’s like the sub lunar versus the lunar right? And we have almost like an elevated astral. We have this almost alien, you know, wasp or something, right. This astral sense of strangeness. And I think what it was astral about. And what’s weird is just everything’s being lashed. This huge storm is going on, and all this upheaval trees are literally falling over. Lightning is striking, I guess, or you know the rain is lashing the roof in the windows, and you have this wasp, which is like a Buddha or something in the middle of this storm. It is utterly serene. It’s more than serene. It’s actually like almost sleeping , like hibernating. So I that’s the thing is just this embodiment of May. Maybe I’m going to limb here, but it’s almost like a like a like, almost like a religious or spiritual embodiment of calm in the eye of the storm. He does say that motionless in the lash of the storm.
Jennifer: And, Colin, I love that. You said that because to me you unlock this story in a completely different way. That wasp is, you know, in this contemplative state it put itself kind of in this meditation, it’s in hibernation. And yet outside forces, which is this guy could flick it with the end of a rope and toss it into the woodpile, right? That that wasp was doing its own thing before the guy showed up. And just like this family before the wind came up, before these other supernatural forces, these external forces forced them from their home. Right? It was just an interesting for me. It just felt like a really interesting as you were discussing Why is this wasp here? What is it doing? And it to me represented the security of that little family that it’s being acted on by outside forces because, he said, when it was quiet, you know they were in the storm. All you could hear is the storm and the wood, you know, popping in the wood burner, and he’s like we’re just filled with this peace, he said. I found this oddly soothing.
Colin: Exactly.
Jennifer: And then it’s not, because the electricity spikes. The wife is freaking out because she’s afraid the house is going to get damaged. Yeah, I just see that wasp somehow tying into him or that family unit that can be tossed about at will, no matter what.
Colin: Yeah, and adding onto this, the wasp has made itself. I mean, he questions [it]. He can’t imagine it doing this to itself it has to be, it has to been done to. And again this comes back to the agency, being acted upon versus acting on of one’s own accord, of one’s own volition. These are definitely concepts that come up. But here’s this wasp which is, let’s just say it does this. It’s in the middle of this huge storm. What does it do? It makes itself vulnerable, but it also represents a kind of tranquility. It’s completely vulnerable. He could take it and just crush it in his fingers, it can’t defend itself. A wasp has a stinger, an active wasp can defend itself clearly, right? It has a potent weapon, whereas a wasp in this meditation, or whatever he calls it. This almost like a suspended animation state has no way to protect itself. And yet it puts itself in this state it. It’s allowing itself to be vulnerable. And I think it’s almost like it’s a certain acceptance, right? A kind of tranquility, almost when you think about the wasp a kind of tranquility that is says, so be it like it’s not, it can’t control these factors, or whatever. So what it does is it makes itself vulnerable.
Jennifer: Interesting. So, as you were describing that I’m like, who else was in this storm? His daughter. She was quiet. She had her little baby headphones on right. She sound asleep. The world is falling apart around her, and she’s sleeping, and what else could be crushed in an instant a child like it was just like that delicacy of that vulnerability and being in the storm and being sort of in the center of the storm. And I want I don’t want to say oblivious to it, but kind of oblivious like that child, she wasn’t worried with what was happening, right? She wasn’t concerned about her safety, and I think that’s kind of what the wasp was also doing. It’s like, I’ll get through this. This is just nature. I’ll be fine. I’ll wake up when it’s over.
Colin: Right? Yeah, very interesting. I think there’s lots to think about with this wasp. I mean, it’s obviously so important to the story. But I think we got some good analysis of it.
Jennifer: Some good speculation about that, right? As I’d be very curious what the author actually was, you know. Where was he leading us?
Colin: Yeah, I you know it might be something worthy of looking into .. . there’s so many other things going on. But it’s so obviously resonant, right? You can’t ignore the wasp. It’s probably the most resonant, actual thing. It’s the one that I read is most cryptic, right when I when I read the line, and I think that was the one thing that stood out to me was the wasp. I mean we I we have some grist at least.
Jennifer: When you took us to the actual definition. It’s of the stars, right? Just like atoms. When we think about Greek philosophy. We’re all made of atoms. We are neither destroyed or created. Our energy transforms.
Colin: Yes.
Jennifer: Think that’s sort of interesting, because, just like his daughter is, you know, we’re all part of this. We’re all integral to it because we’re all atoms. So it’s just an interesting word that he used astral, of all the words he could have picked.
Colin: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Jennifer: Like, what’s that about? And I think again, it’s that we’re all in it together, and we’re all screwed because we’ve made some choices as a society, that we may be at our tipping point. Just a question of what’s happening here.
Colin: Well, I mean, let let’s back up for a second, though, if we’re talking about astral, we’re talking about the universe. The earth is utterly irrelevant, given its size, and it’s in its time at epoch. On this, on the grand scheme of things. It’s almost like I would take the complete opposite view. I would say that you know what we do or don’t do doesn’t matter from an astral sense, right? It. The universe doesn’t care. The universe is so enormous and so ancient that the earth is frankly not even a visible speck, if you zoom out not too far.
Colin: So, it’s like, it’s almost like rather than placing us in the center of the universe. It shows us where we really are in the universe. So this says, and the other turn the other you know definition when we think of astral you do think of like this phrase, it’s in the stars. So that brings up this notion of fate, this this indelible, most notion motion of fate, like we are moving towards something, whether we like it or not. The forces are immutable, right? So it’s ineluctable, to use that word. So that’s another way of looking at this. But again, it that raises the question of agency versus passivity. And again, that’s a big question of modernism. I’m just saying that there is this idea of we are helpless in this grand scheme of this enormous universe, where we are just completely anonymous, or we have some sort of actual agency, or probably a combination of the two. But anyway, it goes back to that in my mind, this astral being otherworldly, kind of supernatural, or the cosmos itself, right.
He lowered a foot—gave up agency to the tree itself that coached him—another foot. By foot. Feet that fluttered in the chasmic moments of the depthless blank space between the rungs.
▶ Will the ground hold?
Jennifer: And just as you were talking about the stars in the larger context, we go back to the ground, right?
An unnerve welled in his stomach. A slow whelm like the ground moving, the slow rock of the trees.
It’s the ground. We just have to hope that the ground holds.
Jennifer: It’s not the trees that are failing, it’s the ground. And that took me into this mindset of the ground of their relationship, the ground of their love, the ground of their marriage is being uprooted by this little kid, this distance, whatever it is. Maybe it’s the husband’s inability to deal with reality and taking care of things and getting things done. Maybe it’s the kid. Maybe it’s something else, but it feels like, Will the ground hold? He says that several times I just hope the ground holds. And for me, it was also the ground of my life, of my marriage, of my relationship. I miss this woman so much, and I can’t tell her. It’s just very sad.
Colin: Oh, very sad. It’s clear that this relationship is on extremely shaky ground. That is very much clear. Again, this brings me back to A Temporary Matter, and I don’t want to spoil it. But this is what makes this story, this particular aspect of story, is what reminds me of A Temporary Matter. It’s very good story. It’s extremely vaunted and it’s highly anthologized. And having read that story, I have the same outcome in mind. That’s all I’m going to say, more or less. The thing is, I did think the same thing, the ground of the relationship. Absolutely. Where’s the foundation? You see the visible tree. But really, what’s keeping the tree up? It’s the ground. It’s the roots in the ground, of course. It’s the ground, right? Once again, very good intentional use of choice imagery and words here to look at the foundation. What are the foundations of this relationship? To me they’re obviously very shaky.
Colin: Going back to his agency, I called him feckless before. There it is. He can’t say it. He cannot say it. Here is a guy who’s stuck, and he wants to say it, but he can’t do it. So again, it calls his agency into question.
Jennifer: I am trying to find the actual quote, because I think, he said, the way he said it put me in a more sympathetic frame of mind that he couldn’t find the words, and for me it was like such a profound feeling that it was above what he could articulate, right? It was such a big thing that he couldn’t narrow it down to mere words. It was my feeling
Colin: I didn’t get the sense that he was at a loss of words, but a loss of nerve. He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t do. I love you. I mean that’s all it takes. If it’s said sincerely, that’s all it takes. But he can’t even say that right? He can’t say it, and he can’t say it because he lacks agency. That’s clear to me. What stops someone from saying what they want to say? That’s really the question.
Jennifer: So I have it. I have it right here, Colin.
He could tell before she answered. He understood, because he, too, felt that the little one had become, to each of them separately, their most safe point. That if they were within reach of her breath the rest of the world went away. Nothing more mattered, not even each other. I miss you, he wanted to say. I miss you beyond any means I have of coping with the distance you have gone. —I’ll go on the pullout. It’s fine, he’d said.
He shut his eyes. He expected to see again the bright, white wires of electricity playing through the dark. But all he saw was his child, asleep under her blankets, her eyes moving quickly below the thin lids, as if she looked out at some incoming weather front.
Jennifer: That just longing just ripped through that whole scene.
Colin: He can’t say it. And what’s the distance between them? Astral, isn’t it? It’s unrecoverable at this point. This is my conclusion. This my sense that it’s too little, too late. You risk your life being an idiot trying to climb the tree in a thunderstorm. But it’s too little and too late. And I think in my mind what cements that is simply the fact when the guy came in and she was enraptured by him, just looking at him. That sealed it, I think. That’s it. It’s done and it was done a long time ago, frankly. I see this as a marriage that exists only for the child, and I think that’s supported by the text, too. I don’t see this as a fairy tale. I think he wanted it to be a fairytale. Maybe that’s what he was thinking. If he goes out and does something deliberately dangerous, it shows his undying love for his wife, right? He literally risked his life for the sake of his family. Now, what does she do? She doesn’t thank him, nobody’s thanking [him]. They’re calling him a hero in the pejorative sense. They’re saying, this guy is an utter idiot, and he himself realizes it too. right? He’s an utter idiot. Nobody sees this thing as a heroic deed, or an admirable deed. It just seems like a person who’s utterly reckless and impulsive right.
Colin: And when she looks at the guy, the real hero, the professional, the guy who comes in [with] the right tools training. He doesn’t mess around. He knows what has to be done. He does it, and he does it perfectly. She looks at him and basically her pupils dilate. That is exactly it. This the guy that her husband never was, never could be, never will be. And when it comes to him saying, wanted to say, I miss you, he can’t even say that. So utterly, I think the relationship is done. There’s no salvaging this relationship, regardless of what the ending portends.
Jennifer: Oh, Colin, that’s brutal.
▶ The mysteries of the natural world
Jennifer: So I just want to bring you to one thing that goes back to pulsing and trees. And I put this in my notes as trust your instincts. So your instinct is that this relationship is irredeemably broken. It’s just toast. It’s not happening. So there are two quotes here that are related.
Again, the ground seemed to lose its certainty. An illusion—just the wind, pushing through the cluster of bramble at the foot of the trees—exaggerated as the fluid wake of adrenaline went through him.
Then he saw that the ground was actually moving. The earth around the pines lifting. It seemed to swell and exhale deep within the brier. To pulse as the wind swayed the high trees.
And then, from somewhere, the memory rose. The rabbit burrow they’d dug into last summer, while trenching the potatoes. The curved shallow run they’d found within the soil. The collapsed earth dropping and rising, seeming to lift with the rhythm of breathing. He’d felt a primeval disquiet, some anciently imprinted caution that he had to breach, and then a protean jolt when the thing moved, when he saw the black globular eye of the exposed kit, itself some hole, the entrance to some compact endless tunnel.
It’s the ground. We just have to hope that the ground holds.
An unnerve welled in his stomach. A slow whelm like the ground moving, the slow rock of the trees.
Jennifer: I love that image of the of the small animals buried underground, and he sees something he knows he’s not supposed to see, and just that very evocative, otherworldly, mysterious language that he chooses again to have this very primeval, literally earthy experience. And I was like you are masterfully pulling us, grounding us, into this story, for sure.
Colin: Oh, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, because that was the other really resonant and a little bit mysterious passage, the wasp, and that one. And again, that was another obviously important passage. And yeah, absolutely. And there it is again these things kind of reinforce each other right? And yeah, that was that was that was another great passage. Again, this quasi-supernatural feeling, right? We know we don’t take this just to be a supernatural story. We take this to be a realistic story. This is realistic, but he still imparts this quasi-supernatural feeling, right?
Jennifer: Or like the mysteries of the natural world, right? Things we can’t explain with our perspective, but we’re feeling it, nonetheless.
Colin: Right, call it spiritual or something. It’s absolutely steeped in this kind of spirituality, right? … It strikes me as like almost a deism where nature is embodied. It’s almost like there is a religious reverence in nature.
▶ The repetition of three
Jennifer: It’s funny that you’d say that, because the next words out of my mouth are, can we talk about the repetition of the threes? Threes are all over the place. And the only sort of religious word that was used in this story was ark.
He looked at the tide lines of bright clutter all about the place. Lines pushed by the waves of play—the disarrayed plastic farm animals, a black-and-white cow. Rain sprayed the windows. It was like being in an ark. —It’s like being in an ark, isn’t it? He raised his voice for the little one to hear through the sound of the television in her headphones. —What’s an ark? It won’t hit the wires. The lights in the cabin dimmed then, for a fraction of a second.
Jennifer: Isn’t that interesting? First he thinks it, and then he says it out loud. It’s like an ark, isn’t it? And the daughter playing with her farm set right. She’s got all these little animals around in the middle of the storm, and she asks What’s an ark? right before the lights flicker. That naivete of being a child, that was a big moment for me. What are you doing with us right now?
Colin: Exactly. We can’t ignore the obvious significance of Noah’s Ark, and that’s what he’s referring to, right? We’re not going to call this religious story, but if there is a religion, it seems like an ancient paganism that’s going on here. We can go back to the earth is kind of revolting. The ground is literally undulating, right? All of these things are happening, and it almost embodies the earth with a kind … it’s animate, right? It’s almost imbued with a spirit, or has a spirit, or whatever. So definitely this this idea of paganism, ancient kind of paganist or deism. Again, I’m not an expert on deism, but it’s this kind of thing right? It’s almost like you can picture the Druids, right?
Jennifer: And this is the part of the world where that religion started, very grounded in that UK feeling. He talks about medieval knights and the visor kind of looking like this ancient Knights of the Round Table kind of vibe.
The rain that blew from the branches caught the mesh of his visor, made the visor look like some medieval face guard.
Jennifer: I want to take you right back to one thing that you said when you told us that it might be fated in the stars right? This paganism, like it was just going to happen. It’s very naturally grounded. If they’re spiritual elements, what are those about? But I was really taken because the [the repetition] of three. Who are the three people in the story,: the husband, the wife, and the baby that we see first, right? That’s very grounded. He talks of three power lines. He talks of the three 3 sugars the guy asks for, [the climber] who doesn’t have an ounce of fat on his body. It’s creepy. It’s not unintentional that it’s a three. He doesn’t talk about any other number, in any other capacity, in this story.
Colin: And did we not see this in one of the previous stories we did?
Jennifer: We certainly did, and that’s why I think I’m on a theme. There are four instances of this.
Three high-voltage cables passed overhead, between the line of trees and the cabin. They’d had them assessed. A surveyor had come out and done checks, explained the readings, confirmed that there was less emittance from the lines than a microwave could give off. The surveyor said whatever hum she could hear, it wasn’t from the lines.
It was dark by the time the three trucks from the power company came up the lane, and from the cabin they saw the beams of the lights swirl and scan in the field beyond the line of pines.
She’d found candles, and everything was softly lit.
—Sugar?
—Three. Diolch. Thank you.
Three.
Jennifer: And the final thing that popped up here is.
It’s come down. It’s come down on the lines.
As he lifted the little one, the flash came again, and a searing crash. A haptic infrasound through their bodies. Zrum. Then again. Then again. Light. Three times, the snatched glimpse of them so forcefully burned into his eyes that he thought he’d been killed each time, that he had grabbed that look at them just before he burst into flame.
Jennifer: And that takes us right to the cows, Colin.
▶ The significance of the title
Jennifer: When we look back to the beginning, he said he noticed he saw her looking out the window, and he could tell without her saying anything, the tension in her shoulders right? He knew she was distressed. So for me it was this interesting thing that they’ve obviously been together and married for some time. They do know each other very intimately, and he is observing her. He can feel her tension, and for me, you know, we haven’t talked yet about the title of the story pulse, but pulses through. Here is electricity, of vibrancy, of a you know, sexual interest, of longing like there’s all of this pulse, and it’s like. But also the pulse of her anger. You know I gave you the tools to fix the log cabin, and you chose not to. And now we’re in an emergency, and our daughter’s affected. The wife, she’s just mad, right? Justifiably so.
Colin: Yes, and there’s one more pulse. What is the most obvious pulse.
Jennifer: Yeah. The electricity.
Colin: Oh, like I mean in general, the heartbeat.
Jennifer: Yes, yes!
Colin: To me, their relationship’s dead. It’s flat lined, right? The kid is keeping it on life support. That’s it. So there’s another way we can look at pulse. There’s a lot of interesting ways we can interpret that word pulse.
Jennifer: Yeah, and I have hope. I always hope that they will [reunite], that this will bring them closer in the end by facing death. They’ll realize they really should be together.
▶ The Purest Rage
Jennifer: One thing that really struck me when we were talking about the power of the trees, and they have these personalities, and they kind of are imbued with this malice, this this menacing presence
Her eyes were fixed on the high stand of pines at the edge of the lawn. They whipped and flailed. One of the heavier pines seemed to be leaning into the crown of the thick cypress in front of it, a few metres from the cabin. The thick, furred cypress seemed animate, wallowed in some conflict with the pine, as if it were trying to hold the other tree back.
I’m going to read to a quick segment of a poem from Charles Baxter called “The Purest Rage” from his collection Imaginary Paintings which embodies this same feeling.
But I think of the afternoon (you told me)
you saw the back yard’s maple in a storm
and whipped by winds that summer of bad weather.
You thought: I shouldn’t see this, I should be downstairs,
but as you watched you thought the tree
was in a rage because it looked like it,
and there were no words to make it less.
Whipped by the wind on its way somewhere,
and though, you knew, you said, it was a fallacy,
the tree was enraged because it stayed
right there, obedient, rooted, crazed
by simple loyalty to the ground it grew in.
Jennifer: To me, so many of those themes were evoked through this entire story, and it does not bode well for their marriage. Maybe loyalty will win the day. We’ll see.
Colin: Oh, she’ll probably be like What? You idiot, you are running outside with …
Jennifer: … my kid out into the storm!
Colin: Is this it for him? This [is] the final straw, right? This is it.
Jennifer: He is going to emulate. But he’s going to emulate himself, metaphorically.
▶ The end of the story
Colin: What an ominous ending. That ending, holy smokes! This is what made me think of The Misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find. The Misfit actually arrives. You’re like there’s no way, and then there he is. There’s no way but it, but it’s inevitable.
Colin: Again, let’s talk about it. I mean, this so crazy. So we have this electrical storm, and it seems to be escalating, and he’s going to go outside. He’s done, you know what I mean, but [he] can’t be done because it’s too early in the story, right? So we know that and plus, as George Saunders would say, that would be the easy answer, right? And this is, you know, a great author. He’s not going to take the easy way out, but he builds that tension.
Years back, on one of the local farms, a line had come down on a wet field full of cattle. The farmer had to watch, wait, for the electricity to be switched off. A worker from the power company had to get to the substation and shut it off by hand. Meanwhile the animals filled with electricity, some of them immolating, burning up then in the wet field.
Colin: Okay, so he remembers this. By the way, the author is amazing at modulating the tension, right? So this extremely ominous. Is this foreshadowing? It seems to be foreshadowing. But then the author, via the character, drops the tension. That was decades back. The system was different now. Centralized. It would cut out immediately.
Colin: He says so very, very confidently, and we can believe it. You don’t imagine something like this happening now, because the electric power stations they’ve been modernized, right? So we don’t expect something like this could happen. So we’re thinking, okay, this The Misfit, where they’re talking about The Misfit early on in the papers. This guy is out. He exists. He’s out there. But the chances are that this is impossible. They’re basically saying, modern substations can’t do this, they simply have too many safeguards.
Jennifer: And do you really trust his judgment? He went out in the storm on a metal ladder. Just because he believes it? I know it’s true that the systems are improved, but it gave me that one second of doubt. I don’t trust this guy.
Colin: I think, what the author is doing [is ] he’s playing with this tension here. It’s credible to believe that if something like that actually had happened there would be a major investigation, and it wouldn’t happen again.
Jennifer: It gets fixed.
Colin: In a developed country, like the in the UK, for example, if something like this had happened, a committee [would be] set up, the whole thing would have been looked at and resolved. This my assumption. I would assume that this was decades ago. So yes, he’s a feckless guy. Yes, we can’t necessarily trust that this guy knows anything because he has no common sense. But at the same time, it’s realistic to believe that had something like this happened decades before, it would not happen again, right? You know what I’m saying.
Jennifer: I totally agree with you.
Colin: This would have been a major investigation, and so forth. There’s a liability, there’s a very bad potential problem here, we got to fix that right? So my assumption is that since it had happened before decades past, it couldn’t [and] it shouldn’t happen again in the UK. So going forward, here’s where it actually gets ominous. So this is later. He’s looking back. He’s in the cabin.
He looked down. The floor was busy with farm toys, frozen mid-event.
—It will just knock the power off. If it hits the lines, the power will cut.
He looked out uncertainly at the soaking-wet lawn.
—Anyway, the pine won’t hit the lines. It can’t get through the cypress.
He looked at the tide lines of bright clutter all about the place. Lines pushed by the waves of play—the disarrayed plastic farm animals, a black-and-white cow.
Her scream smashed him from sleep. Her scream and a wakening to a flash so total there were no shadows, her skin and the little one’s skin bright electric white, her screaming his name, then a pitch blackness, a shotgun blast, and again the light, and her screaming, It’s down, there’s another one down, it’s down on the line.
Colin: So this mixing the tension again.
Colin: Okay, now, this not a coincidence. We have what looks like strewn dead animals about. And of course, the ending right? So we have him setting it up with this Misfit style. You know notion that this extremely improbable, probably impossible event had happened in the past. It won’t happen again, he is sure of it. But then we see this. You know this obvious foreshadowing with the imagery. And then we’re thinking, come on, this can’t be [happening]. Then what happens is the storm abates right, the professionals come in. They take it out. We seem to be in the good now, but that tension doesn’t quite dissipate, and then it starts raising again. The storm abates. We’re now weeks later, right? The immediate danger is gone but we still have these remaining trees that haven’t been taken care of. Then we get into the last shocking scene [22].
It’s come down. It’s come down on the lines.
As he lifted the little one, the flash came again, and a searing crash. A haptic infrasound through their bodies. Zrum. Then again. Then again. Light. Three times, the snatched glimpse of them so forcefully burned into his eyes that he thought he’d been killed each time, that he had grabbed that look at them just before he burst into flame.
Get out. It’s over the roof. Get out!
The air was like the sea. The storm alive. Stepping off the porch like leaving a boat, into the deep crashing water.
If the power’s in the ground. If the force is in the wet ground.
The cattle, catching fire. His tiny child in his arms.
Colin: Crazy. So, let’s talk about this. Let’s just deconstruct this. There are no cattle outside the house. So what actually is happening here. Is this going to happen? Are they going to get emulated, electrocuted? Is this in his mind? Is he panicking while he grabs the child, thinking this is it. What’s happening?
Jennifer: So, Colin, I love that. You say that because for me this flashed me right back to “Late Love” by Joyce Carol Oates. I think he is dreaming. He is woken up by a scream. The first thing he does is he puts together all of these little fragments of what he was afraid of, and this is totally a hallucination. I was questioning if this was happening. Because I’m like, Wait a minute, are we flitting back in time? Because we know a week or two weeks after the storm, he’s running the woodchipper. So [clearly] he didn’t die in that storm, because we have gone back and forth in time in the narrative. And for me, just because he said he was sleeping when he woke to the sound of the scream, and I think he’s having a classic nightmare. That’s why the whole idea of him being immolated, about seeing those cows, all of those fears manifested in that moment. That was my take on that. And I thought that if this is where the author took us that felt really brilliant. I am open, obviously, to another interpretation, but that just felt to me because “Late Love” was [so fully] in my consciousness right now that I don’t really trust that people always know the difference between a nightmare and their reality when they are emotionally upset, as this guy has been throughout this story.
Colin: Yeah. Now again, it’s a third person narrator, right? Keep that in mind. So we have to look at the exact phrasing of what’s happening here. What is it being filtered through his perception, or is it strictly being reported. We can look at the language of the narration, and some of it’s clearly his language.
If the power’s in the ground. If the force is in the wet ground.
Colin: This not the narrator speaking, this these are his thoughts. But again, we have a little bit of trouble with this story because of the way thoughts are demarcated or not demarcated. Thoughts and dialogue are not classically demarcated, and this a very nice stylistic point. You’ll notice there are no quotation marks to delineate speech, there are dashes. But even the dash will indicate actual dialog. But the problem is, like in Ulysses, even within the dialog you’ll have narration in with the dialogue. So we have to say, is this an actual dream he is having? We have to be a little bit skeptical to say that what exactly is being reported on and what is being filtered through the guy. I don’t have an actually definitive answer. You’re right, we do have scene 21. He falls asleep, he shut his eyes, and then he’s woken [with] a scream. Now I take this happening, that there is a storm, he does awake, and a thing does, in fact, crash on the lines.
Her scream smashed him from sleep. Her scream and a wakening to a flash so total there were no shadows, her skin and the little one’s skin bright electric white, her screaming his name, then a pitch blackness, a shotgun blast, and again the light, and her screaming, It’s down, there’s another one down, it’s down on the line.
Colin: This is the narrator speaking. Notice the diction here and how it differs from his internal thoughts. So this I’m taking as strict narration. This is a third person narrator. I take this as narration. He’s not dreaming this. He has woken up.
… and her screaming, It’s down, there’s another one down, it’s down on the line.
It’s come down. It’s come down on the lines.
Colin: This a repetition. So, I’m taking this not a dream. This actually happening. You know, it’s completely feasible because they didn’t cut the outer trees. We knew the trees could come down. They didn’t have time, because everybody and their dog was busy dealing with trees, so the professionals couldn’t come by. They’re still there. Again, this is reported as to the narration, so I take this as reliable.
Get out. It’s over the roof. Get out!
The air was like the sea. The storm alive. Stepping off the porch like leaving a boat, into the deep crashing water.
If the power’s in the ground. If the force is in the wet ground.
The cattle, catching fire. His tiny child in his arms.
Colin: Now in the last line I believe in his mind is pure panic. He’s rushing out. He’s remembering that the ground could be emulated. He’s panicking. He’s panicking. But we don’t know what actually happens here. We know that he’s thinking about the cattle catching fire. He’s panicking. He has his kid in his arms. We don’t think it’s going to happen, because while the substation should cut off right. The lines may crash down on the house, but the power should be inactivated if, in fact, the safeguards were put in place, and we assume they have.
It’s come down. It’s come down on the lines.
As he lifted the little one, the flash came again, and a searing crash. A haptic infrasound through their bodies. Zrum. Then again. Then again. Light. Three times, the snatched glimpse of them so forcefully burned into his eyes that he thought he’d been killed each time, that he had grabbed that look at them just before he burst into flame.
Get out. It’s over the roof. Get out!
The air was like the sea. The storm alive. Stepping off the porch like leaving a boat, into the deep crashing water.
If the power’s in the ground. If the force is in the wet ground.
The cattle, catching fire. His tiny child in his arms.
Jennifer: Why would he run out of the house?
Colin: Because he’s panicking.
Jennifer: Yeah. And it’s like he has his poor child is helpless in arms, as he is running out into the storm.
Colin: But remember, this isn’t the wisest guy right like this. This isn’t the smartest guy. Let’s face it right. He tried to climb a tree during a thunderstorm on a metal ladder. We’ve clearly established [he has extremely poor judgment, right. So again, my taking on the ending is simply this happening. The lines are coming down. He grabs the baby and runs out, and he’s just in a sheer state of terror.
Jennifer: I can go there. I feel he was living the nightmare, right? So maybe it wasn’t an actual nightmare, but he was definitely keying into all of that fear he had. And, as you said, in the section right above it, he said, he’s reflecting back to the night of the storm when he went in and looked at his daughter. So we do know that some time has passed between.
Colin: Yes.