Twice Melvin

Reared by traveling evangelists, author James Pumpelly's sheltered years were a moth-swarm of questions and quandaries. Like drawn curtains against the sun, his naiveté rebuffed the dazzle of temporal joy. He feigned comprehension, for to do otherwise was to be reproached by the happiness of others - until the milieu of university curricula enlightened him. As Eudora Welty wrote, "A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." In retrospect, he treasures the innocent years - as most do - a kind of throwback to Thoreau's life at Walden. Yet, as he writes, he suspects only God and romanticists empathize with his quest, his yearning for warmth - like a meadow on a summer day. Peace. A palliative of which the world is bereft. Having eyes that see, and ears that hear (in the biblical sense), he often feels complicit in the world's duress; escaping via demiurgical expression, creating characters, places and events by the whim of fancy. Freud instructs us to hold our parents accountable for our problematic existence; Marx tells us we should point the finger at the upper class, when, in truth, we have only ourselves at fault. Blake believed if the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see everything as it is. Infinite. But truth is beyond the rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Beyond thought, even. Accordingly, he has stumbled through the fifty states, and much of Europe and Asia, gathering impressions for his narrative. To quote Melville, "This world clean fails me: still I yearn." Such hunger funds the heart, the will to live. As the journey lengthens and the destination seems never nearer, he has grown to accept that his journey IS the destination. A writer's duty, he thinks, is to brave possibilities. Temerity breathes life into characters. Accepting the challenge, he has been writing since the mid-seventies - poetry (that window on the soul) and short stories, reflecting the uniqueness of station and local. Before college, he was homeschooled, due to his parents' constant travel. As an adult, he has called home by many names: Texas, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Louisiana, among them. His hobbies include reading, cooking, gardening, and piano (the latter one of his college majors). Surmounting these four is writing, making memories into more than they were; for memories are living things, conjoining the past and the future, resurrecting the dead and imagining the unborn. Two thousand years ago, Pilate asked Christ, "What is truth?" The answer being every man's quest - to which he adds another Pilate excerpt: "What I have written I have written."