Shortly thereafter, his rehabilitation complete, Pound left for Venice where he gave the fascist salute to reporters on his arrival and lived in a grumpy and regret-stained ménage with his wife and mistress until his death at age 87 in 1972.

A past-life regression? More like a past-life digression so far, you’re thinking, and yet 1955 and 1916 and Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway are a way of talking around my exploration here, which concerns how you or me or anybody writes in the face of the nothingness that our culture has come to believe in. Just as Hemingway’s blood lay on the linoleum in patterns that showed the empty, clean space where his body had fallen, it might be possible to learn about emptiness by looking at what lies at its edges.

In the fall of 1955 I was five years old and was facing a world filled with somethingness. My parents had bought a place in the Sawtooth Valley, fifty miles north of Ketchum. My father had quit the mines and was working as a ski bus driver for the Sun Valley Resort in the winter and spring, and as a trapper and a fishing and hunting guide in the summer and fall. My mother was working as a nurse, and it was her income that kept the payments up on the 40 acres in Sawtooth Valley. We had also moved from the Triumph Mine company town to Hailey. Even if my mother hadn’t enjoyed working as a nurse, hadn’t found in her work self-confidence and a continuing education and a way to ease the suffering of others and so make the world a better place, she still would have had to work or she and my father would have lost their small ranch on the river and their bright-lit dream of an independent life in an unspoiled place.

It was a good deal for everybody in the family but me. My older brother was in school, but I had to stay with a sitter during the days.

The person they hired to care for me was a desperate housewife before desperate housewives were cool. She was the young wife of one of my father’s colleagues at the bus garage, and she had three children under four, and even now I can remember her screaming at them when they got too loud or when the television didn’t work. The television often didn’t work because the reception from southern Idaho stations was a matter of the right configuration of clouds and sun and ozone, and the right configuration was rare.

When she went shopping at the Hailey Mercantile, she locked her children and me in a car that had the lock-posts removed. When lock posts were unscrewed from their internal mechanisms, it became impossible to unlock the doors from the inside the car. It was a way to use cars as portable pens for small children, although you had to leave the windows open a crack in the summer or they’d die on you.

But when she left us there in the car and disappeared into the Mercantile, we would scream and cry and honk the horn until she would come raging out of the store, unlock a door, grab one of her kids and pound on it until the crying and the screaming and the honking stopped. Then she’d throw the kid back in, lock the door and disappear. I don’t remember that she bought much, but she had a rudimentary sense of guilt that had her bringing candy or ice-cream bars out of the store on the days when she had hit one of her kids.

She only hit me once. It was a solid slap across the face that sent me to the floor. It was in early December of 1955, and I had been talking with my older brother, and he had told me that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Santa Claus wasn’t really a generous old guy with a big white beard in a red and white suit. Santa Claus was really your parents sneaking in an extra gift for you.