Chris Rice Cooper
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John
Gallaher’s
In
A Landscape
“The
Problem With Happiness”
John Gallaher
Sandy Knight
Richard Foerster
Gallaher wrote In A
Landscape between 2009 to 2014 detailing his past, his present family
life with his young daughter Natalie and son Elliot and his wife Robin; broken
relationships; death; his struggle with identity at being adopted at age three;
violence; the difference between time and eternity; and the impact famous
singers and poets have on his life.
In the first stanza of “1” Gallaher
presents us the reader with the problem of happiness: Are we happy?
And what make us happy?
“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe,
“Do you think you’re bappy?” with its more negative
tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes
falling. That’s part
of the problem too,
but not all of the problem. Flowers out
the window
or on the windowsill,
and so someone brought flowers.
We spend a log time
interested in which way the car would
best go in the
driveway. Is that the beginning of an
answer?
Some way to say who we
are?
Gallaher considers the possibility that in order
to be happy one has to be ignorant about certain things
or knowing something
I didn’t want to know,
as knowing things
brings a certain
responsibility.
In “XI” Gallaher questions the relationship
between happiness, getting things done, and being nice.
We do, as we say, what
has to be done. The way things
are often, as we also
say, at an impasse – when there’s no way to go
but through another
person
in much the same
predicament. Does being a nice person
help? And have I been a nice person?
In “XX1” Gallaher considers Kurt Vonnegut’s view
of Heaven.
In heaven, according
to Kurt Vonnegut’s
Play Happy Birthday,
Wanda June, you are
Whatever age you were
your happiest.
In “XX111” Gallaher once again relates ignorance
to happiness in this conversation he shares with reader.
One of the best things
about life
is that you don’t have
to understand it
to catalog it. It’s another part
of our conversation
about usefulness.
Gallaher experiences happiness twice– the
actual experience he writes about in the below verses; and the actual writing
of the same verses.
This morning I’m sitting in my
pickup
in front of the gym,
drinking my coffee. My door’s open
in the present
tense. (And now there’s a second now,
two hours later typing
this up.) And I have this feeling of
complete happiness.
In the next lines Gallaher tells the reader what
is making him experience happiness.
I know where everyone is,
and everyone’s
OK. A song is playing on the radio,
“Exhaustible,” by
DeVotchKa, that I like.
We’re always happiest
between things: the rush, the
whoosh the empty
space, the impossible
to estimate.
Gallaher then looks on his own life and comes to
the conclusion that he could push the button.
So, yes, the guy
pushes the button
right there on the train, as I
should be pushing the
button right now, I guess, only
there’s no
button.
Gallaher
then blames art for giving us this falsehood that there is a button.
It’s another of the ways
art tricks us, how we
might think there’s a most
happy.
The last lines of “LXX” Gallaher reveals to the
reader that happiness is not what we should be searching for.
And “happy” isn’t the
right word. The right word
is “Landscape,” or “I
feel I’m on a train.”
So we ask ourselves
what’s left there, and
we don’t know. But we start off anyway,
Because that’s what we
do. And then one day we just stop.
