One Equals One Half of Zero

About the Book

I awoke to the silence of rain
the rain stopped falling
stopped
tapping
raindrops stopped
tapping on the metal roof of the van
I awoke into...

Thus begins a poem which catalogues a series of step by step memories of a man looking to try to make some sense of his past. This imagined silence envelopes a variety of anecdotes of a youth spent growing up in Northwestern Minnesota centering around the image of a child being born by his mother.

Holding these carefully selected and highly charged images together is a very simple real time narrative structure. A man wakes up in a van where he had fallen asleep reading a book. In a state of half wakefulness he looks around gathering himself into consciousness. A door slams, he is now fully awake, and a little girl comes out of a house towards the van. The poem ends when she enters the van.

The journey into the past has been completed and we understand that the future, although unknown, is faced with an absolute calmness of one who knows the powerful dramas of the past no longer hold sway over the steps needed in order to claim the future as one's own.

"One Equals One Half of Zero" is a contemporary long poem successfully welding many of the genres normally associated with such writing. It is a "stream of conscious" road poem. It is an epic journey of spiritual awakening, and it is also a saga of the Norse tradition.

About the Author

Over the years while working on this epic poem, I have noticed two distinctly different emotional reactions to the title. On one hand, I place the "Why-askers" and on the other I put the "don't want to knows". At this point, you may be wondering "What does this have to do with anything about the book?" or you might be thinking to yourself, "This is nonsense." My belief is that both positions are absolutely correct, reflecting circumstance and nothing more.

"This is nonsense, and has absolutely nothing to do about the book."

How I reached this conclusion is a long story, and if you still feel determined enough to ask "Why?" I suggest, you would probably gain some curious satisfaction from reading "One Equals one Half of Zero."

Not too long ago, while discussing the design and layout of this book cover with a friend at a local diner, a man approached our table whereupon we had strewn quite a mass of papers.

"Pardon me, but I have a simple question to ask you." He said with a twinkle in his eye. "If one equals one half of zero, then does that mean, one and one equals zero?"

"Yes, exactly," I blurted out not taking time to think about it, "and especially if the one and one are our parents, and we are the result."

Surely if one were to make a practice of reducing the value of parental figures down to that of cultural transferring agents and nothing more, such nonsensical matheme's could easily hold their own, when compared (contrasted) within the commonly held and with good reason, belief system, which supports the fact, that one and one equals two. But, to be honest, I have a tendency to follow the school of thought, which takes the liberty to believe, without much evidence other than intuitional sensory perceptions, parental figures can also be considered coincidently as human beings.

I am quite clear in my assumption that a human being, through the very conception of that which might be thought of as one, is at the same time, habitually dependent on, or prone to, making mistakes.

For this I beg your pardon, and ask you, "Is it possible that a personality type known as a 'Why-asker' can easily be mistaken for a 'whiskey drinker'?" In my mind a close association exists between the two, but while at a bar, I often see no difference. "I love them all."

As a writer, a best case output scenario could be described as a composition of iconic events stabilizing a general feeling, something of which could be passed on to a reader.