Sasha Fletcher’s When All our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds: A Review By Troy Urquhart

In the second chapter of Walden, the nineteenth-century naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau asserted that the ultimate creative act is, fundamentally, an act of self-creation, an act in which the artist shapes not objects in the world, but his own view of the world:

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.

Sasha Fletcher’s first book When All our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds takes this charge seriously. Its narrator constructs his own vision of the world, portraying it through a flexible lens of creative possibility. For Fletcher’s narrator, the line between imaginary and real is often a tenuous one — one that can be manipulated and crossed almost at will. He tells us, “I kept thinking about it until it was like I did it, which was great”.  This is, after all, what the artist, and especially the creative writer, does.

With When All our Days Are Numbered, Fletcher celebrates the creative act and explores the nature of art, searching for the boundary at which the imagined completely — or almost completely — consumes our experience, searching for the ways that art allows us to share our lives with others, but also for the ways in which art can threaten our connection to others, to the world. He demonstrates an intoxicating creative power, magically reconstructing everyday experience through association and metaphor, but in doing so, he also demonstrates the risk inherent in the creative act: that of becoming disconnected from the world. He recognizes the power of language, and he uses it here to find (or, perhaps, to create) a sense of wonder in the world, but he also recognizes that the artist risks losing touch with what is real, risks mistaking the symbol for what it represents.

The book opens with a warning from its unnamed female character to the narrator: “Don’t get carried away out here”. And in fact, the narrator is carried away almost immediately (and quite literally) “by a string of balloons”. Throughout the novella, this pair strikes a balance between the creative possibilities of art and the practical realities of everyday life. When the narrator muses, “Few things are probably outside of the realm of possibility,” she tells him, “Stop thinking about the realm of possibility”. When he creates something, like a pair of trees that form a hammock, and offers it as something magical, she is quick to point out, “You just made that. . . Out of brown paper”. And early in the book, when she reminds him that “There is . . . A world outside what you can build”, he is not so certain: “I wrote the word waterfall on the wall. I hoped for the best”.

It might not be going too far, here, to say that he trusts the written word waterfall more than he would an actual waterfall–that he trusts the symbol of the thing more than he would trust the thing itself, if it were there.

The narrator of this book is driven by his desire to create, and by the desire to share that creation with another person. He envisions a whale, unloved, and tells his female companion, “If I were the whale I would have hanged myself from that old dead tree over there”, and it doesn’t matter that a whale can’t really hang himself. What matters is the reason he would kill himself: the “Infinite sadness” of being alone.

The creative act offers a possibility for companionship, for connection between people, at least in as much as art allows the artist’s view of the world to be shared with another person. And this narrator wants to share his artistic vision absolutely. Holding his companion’s hand, he thinks “about how if I move my fingers right then we will trade fingers”, and this is his desire, to enter completely into another:  “I wanted to wear you like a skin.”

What he longs for is intersubjectivity: not merely to tell her his vision of the world, or for her to tell him hers, but to enter each other entirely, literally to experience the world as the other.

She, however, is not so certain. In the novella’s conclusion, he calls for her to join him on the roof, to see the world from his perspective, and she pleads for him to join her in reality, to “Come down from there,” promising him, “We’ll just sit & we’ll eat & we’ll be so close that we’re touching” (83). But he refuses, and his insistence that she join him comes at a cost: in joining him from his artistic vantage point, a place in the sky, she is “covered in bruises”, and she has to admit, ultimately, that “we all of us got a little carried away”.

There is a line here, a space that keeps people separate, a space that keeps what is imagined separate from what is real, a space which is damaging to cross completely but which must be narrowed, if art is to do its work. Fletcher envisions our lives as the intermediary tension of this space, a narrow band between the isolation of water and the expansiveness of clouds, between the dark reality of water and the electrical creative potential of clouds:

. . . & at that point the water will be right next to the clouds & they will be so close that they could kiss but they will not kiss, they will both just stand there looking at each other until forever.

It is important, here, that clouds and water are, elementally, the same. But the form they take is very different, and it is on the tense boundary of these two forms, the edge of the real and the imagined, that Fletcher’s artist tries to balance.

Ultimately, this book strikes me as enamored with creation, its narrator (and, I presume, its writer) very much in love with art and the way that art allows us to see meaning in the world. He recognizes the power of the artist to re-create or re-envision the world, but he also knows that like a balloon, he needs an anchor to the world, to the real. As much as art offers a new, higher perspective, as much as art offers an escape from reality among the clouds, he fears being lost entirely in that vision, in a world where there will be “no one [to] tell me when I was getting carried away”.