A Review: One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder by Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle was a beautiful, whimsical, wise writer.

ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike, is a batch of his essays, published posthumously. (He passed away at only 61 years of age in 2017).

Here’s something he wrote about silence: “I contemplate snippets of silence in mine existence and find them few but I find that this delights rather than dismays me, for the chaos and hubbub in my life, most of sea of sound, are my children, who are small quicksilver russet testy touchy tempestuous mammals always underfoot in the understory…”

Or how about this?: “You either walk towards love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.”

And he writes about his then-young daughter Lily, composing notes to the daoine sidhe, the small people, to find outside their home. “I think that mostly what people think is supernatural isn’t. I think there is much more going on than we are aware of and sensitive to and perceptive about, and the more we think we know what is possible and impossible the more we are foolish and arrogant and imprisoning ourselves in an idea.”

In another essay, he goes on to say: “I am fascinated by how language is a verb and not a noun. I am riveted by how language is a process and not a preserve. I am also absorbed by the way that we all speak one language but use different tones and shades and volumes and timbres and pronunciations and emphases in order to bend the language in as many ways as there are speakers of the language.”

About a boy and his young father going to see a gigantic sturgeon named Herman, Doyle writes: “…Herman slowly filled the window like a zeppelin. The boy leaped away from the window and his hat fell off. No one said a word. Herman kept sliding past for a long time. Finally, his tail exited stage left and the boy said, awed, clear as a bell, Holy Shit, Dad. The father didn’t say anything and they stood there another couple of minutes, both of them speechless, staring at where Herman used to be, and then they walked up the stairs holding hands.”

Quite often, Doyle slips in a slice of wisdom so delicious you have to stop and savor it. Like when he’s writing about some of the reasons people give for divorcing: “The instant there is no chance of death is the moment of death.”

ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG has essays on the U.S. munitions industry, and meeting two firefighters in a New York City bar post-9/11, and meeting God at the Post Office.

Here’s another example of Doyle at his best: “…Humor has something crucially to do with humility, and that humility is very probably the one inarguable mark of maturity, and whatever it is we mean when we use the word wisdom.”

Towards the end of ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG, is Doyle’s longest essay, about the trial of the poet William Blake. It took Doyle five years to research and complete it. And in trying to answer why he took all that time, he attempts to answer why he writes in the first place. “I don’t know why I write, exactly. Catharsis, the itch to make something shapely and permanent, the attempt to stare God in the eye, the attempt to connect deeply to other men and women, because I can’t help myself, because there is something elevating in art, because I feel myself at my best when I am writing.”

And Doyle writes about missing how his father used to listen. “His listening is now largely a thing of the past; he and his ears have achieved a great and venerable age, and his hearing is a shadow of what it once was. His mind is as sharp or even more so that it ever was; his generosity and grace remain oceanic; and you could search whole galaxies, to no avail, for a gentler, wittier man. But this morning I find that I very much miss that one little thing he did so well, that was not little – the way he stared at your face as you spoke, with all his soul open and alert for your story...”

A lot of ONE BEAUTIFUL RIVER OF SONG is really an ode to Doyle’s dad, siblings, wife and children – his family. There’s a lot of tale telling. And it’s not surprising that the last two lines of the last essay are this: “Time stutters and reverses and it is always yesterday and today. Maybe the greatest miracle is memory. Think about that this morning, quietly, as you watch the world flitter and tremble and beam.”