Solemnity
or,
When We Stand Here At the Edge of This Abyss, It Is a Harrowing but Powerful Experience, Because the Harrow Is Both the Edge and the Abyss Below. Thus, the Butterflies In Your Belly.
Solemnity is, in its way, a love story. It is a vehicle for its narrator to understand the collapse of his relationship and his sanity, an attempt to answer the three questions Abraham Lincoln posed in his first inaugural address:
IS IT POSSIBLE, THEN, TO MAKE THAT INTERCOURSE MORE ADVANTAGEOUS OR MORE SATISFACTORY AFTER SEPARATION THAN BEFORE? (yes)
CAN ALIENS MAKE TREATIES EASIER THAN FRIENDS CAN MAKE LAWS? (no)
CAN TREATIES BE MORE FAITHFULLY ENFORCED BETWEEN ALIENS THAN LAWS CAN AMONG FRIENDS? (yes and no)
The narrator, a small-town grocery store manager, begins researching those answers after his wife leaves him, and his history of the failed relationship—told through an engagement of Lincoln’s questions about intercourse and aliens—also chronicles his mental declension. He soon begins hallucinating both aliens and Abraham Lincoln. His investigation soon turns to the reasons for their appearance, leading to a stay in a mental hospital and the dissolution of his relationship. He is, ultimately, crafting a history of his life’s meaning, and thus the story is told with the accoutrements of history writing, footnoted, bibliographied, and illustrated.
