re-{memory, finding, discovering} and Bullet in the Brain

October 28, 2025

There was a piece by Edward Hirsch in the NYT today that immediately took me back to Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”¹. Hirsch’s piece was a really great, grounded reflection on sight (literally), perspective, and abstraction/performance – what we take for granted, and what we have to learn to appreciate.

I could see what was going on, not perfectly, but enough to take in the spectacle. And then my eyesight blurred, not because I was losing my vision, but because I was seeing something that I had missed. I was crying from the intense, fleeting, overwhelming joy of it all.

It’s easy to forget why we do things. You might not notice the slippage, but one day you look down and the ground has given way. This is not irrevocable. It is up to you conjure it again, remake these foundations. The two greatest things one can do (continously) is to remember and invent.

I think back to Dante and his terza rima (ABA BCB CDC …). There is a sense of movement in his interlocking rhyme, a interminable falling forward. We understand ourselves with words evincing movement; we move through space, time, traverse the verticality of social/economical strata. Identity can collapse into function, and we can forget that function is inscribed within ourselves, expressed, and not self-standing.

Wolff’s piece resurfaces in my thoughts more frequently than I would have expected. I believe we can parameterize everything in terms of loss, but Wolff reminds me to consider what we rediscover².

“Shortstop,” the boy says. “Short’s the best position they is.” Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat what he’s just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he’s being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn’t it, not at all - it’s that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.

The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.