Rumor has vineyards flourishing in
the vicinity, stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions and giving
off aromas so thick you might mistake them for isolated clouds of locusts.
After days of searching, I fail to locate even so much as a fig tree in bloom
and I feel as if my toes are turning inward, folding over themselves in an
attempt to pass my feet off as works of art. Who knows their motive? Perhaps I
should relegate all rumors to the status of incomplete truths and not write
them off altogether but not jot them down as soon as I hear them either. In
this way, I might be able to enjoy whatever months and years remain to me in
this place before I hop on a train and start over. Eulalie says the fumes from
the gasoline in cans Immanuel spends most nights huffing circle around her head
and refuse to dissipate even when she waves a towel about, when she whispers
spells at them that she makes up on the spot but which should have the power
nonetheless to affect in some small but crucial way whatever she aims them at. After
all, she is not helpless. Even the night sky takes its overall structure from
the way her name sounds when you say it out loud. Eulalie gets angry, impatient
with my endless pleading whenever she comes to visit, dismisses my arguments out
of hand even though they make perfect sense. What does my heart care, she says,
for the twists and thievery of logic? Why should it pay attention to you who
are so full of words? I start unbuckling everything then, dropping my hat and
my clothes to the ground by way of both silent and (as I imagine it anyway)
eloquent rebuttal, but she is not convinced. We can do whatever you want, she
says, her arm on mine, her mouth so close to my ear as to seem suddenly a part
of it, one of the ridges and contours intended to capture and direct sound
waves, to gather them and concentrate them and channel them deeper and deeper
inside, but you can never lure me away permanently, so don’t try. At moments
like this we know better than to unpack the satchels of causation, to attempt
to find within them sustenance or footwear. I remember once lying awake for
hours beside the still form of a woman whose name was so close to mine we got
them confused. I wanted to know what occurred inside her mind then with the
unconquerable desire of the man who can never actually get what he wants, and
worse, is conscious of the fact. Knows it the way he knows the deep meanings
associated with a substance like blood – which is to say instinctively, without
benefit of schools. Perhaps she was even then making room for me, clearing away
back passages, throwing away candlesticks and what looked like family Bibles
but turned out on closer inspection to be mere phone books that no one ever
used. Or perhaps, in there, her kingdom was -- like Edgar’s, according to
tradition -- suddenly overrun by wolves.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Monday, July 30, 2012
Unless the phenomenon occurs before
our eyes, we tend not to understand that it can occur at all. We lump it in the
category of those things that have been described by experts in the field but
only after they have emerged from a very deep sleep. The sort that can alter
the color of your hair overnight or make you forget who you are for a moment
and where you are located and why no one will speak to you any more when you
show up at the corner store to purchase a bottle of cola. I liken the
experience to hunting big game but not being able to locate any, realizing
after the safari is over that you didn’t even bring enough ammunition with you to
go around and that if something had indeed charged you from the long grass, you
would have been doomed unless there happened to be a suitably tall acacia tree in
the vicinity to scale. Not that I wish the outcome would have been different. I
spend my days happily whittling twigs and sitting in the mouth of a cave that
overlooks the area where Immanuel and Eulalie have decided to settle, or at
least that part of it that isn’t concealed by perpetual rain clouds and a blind
spot produced by the abrupt topography this region is known for. Panic sets in
around twilight and lingers for an hour or two each evening, but I have grown
adept at keeping it at bay through various techniques I will relate when the
time is right, when I no longer feel they are necessary. Trying to unlock those
secrets prematurely, trying to wrest them from my fingers, so to speak, before
I am ready to turn them loose upon the world, will only strengthen my resolve,
will only succeed in making my teeth sore from my grinding them together in
exasperation, as can be attested to by the diminutive human being who showed up
here last Tuesday, I think it was, though I have long since lost the use of anything
approximating a calendar in the deep dark tissues of my mind. What use could
such an adaption be out here where the scenery never changes, where there are
no crops to be put in and no fear, ever, of missing the important festival
dates and celebrations for one be-feathered, lopsided deity or another? The man
spoke a language I did not recognize, though I pretended to understand every
syllable he uttered, nodding almost always in the affirmative until such time
as he produced a primitive tin blade and forced my hand. I am not proud of the
outcome, nor am I filled with the shame that keeps some people from penning
their own definite autobiographies. And I do not admit now something I would
refuse to admit under oath, but I can assure you the man still draws breath and
spends some time on the front porch with his family before trotting off into
town, despite their protests which follow him almost all the way there
like mongrel dogs, where he tells stories that sound an awful lot like this
one, with the exception that they rarely come to a definite end (or so I’m
told). They meander about like cetaceans with little but the wide, featureless blue
oceans of the world to contain them.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
At the bottom of the hill, ruins
stretch away into the distance, clay brick foundations of homes and other
structures long since abandoned because of an adverse climate perhaps, or
invading hordes. You have to ask the archeologists if you want the full
picture, or read the literature the archeologists have left in their wake,
literature which is, nonetheless, difficult to get your hands on, if only
because your hands tend always to be in your pockets. I like the layout of the
place, recall it later and describe it to friends who have little chance of
visiting themselves because their lives are centered around careers that do not
leave one time to appreciate that which is not somehow tied up with dividends
and miniature calendars printed on card stock. Immanuel stops long enough for a
photograph at a place where a stream once meandered through and the monkeys
gathered in the trees to bark at one another and throw seed pods in a relatively
complicated way that suggested, to some observers at least – those with a
particular interest in passing on colorful anecdotes while simultaneously
suppressing all evidence that went counter to their own deepest religious beliefs
-- a rudimentary form of gambling. Immanuel laments the loss of such creatures,
the ominous silence now where before there had been sound. Or something very
like sound even if there was no one present to register it. I get the feeling
sometimes that Immanuel doesn’t recognize me anymore. Oh sure, there is the
little matter of his saying my name out loud at such regular intervals, it
threatens to drive me insane, but that seems more of a bad habit than anything
else. It is the look in his eyes I am referring to, a strange gray fixity I’ve
seen only once previously, on a man who I didn’t know but who insisted on
following me around when I was trying to buy soapstone for carving at a market
upriver. His hands were mottled and his liver diseased and I was only able to
escape him finally by pointing out a black condor making enormous ovals in the
sky. I told the man to pray for it because it was obviously lost and required,
at the very least, some manner of divine intervention. For his part, Immanuel
has earned the right to look past and through anyone he encounters, even
someone like me who has traipsed along beside him lo, these many months.
Slogged through the same inundated fields. Endeavored to treat the same
ailments with iodine and zinc.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Once free of the shell, once you
are hatched, so to speak, all things begin. Horizons, which before had been
immediate, called down upon your body and your senses like a blanket, remove
themselves to a proper distance and objects come into focus. You are still not
capable of registering them at first as anything more than what they appear to
be, you are not able to weave them into a fabric with a beginning, a middle,
and something approximating an end, but that point is approaching and it will likely
catch you off guard when it arrives, though afterwards you will explain to your
friends and acquaintances (more of the latter than the former, unfortunately)
that you had an inkling, a foreboding ahead of time and you might have done
something to prevent the arrival of this fully-formed world and your ability to
comment on it, to make at least a modicum of sense of it, if you had known what
would happen, the unpleasant consequences, and if, of course, you hadn’t become
so lazy in the meantime, so apt to trust providence to do what it does according
to its sterling reputation. No one will believe you, of course. They will
remark that nothing has actually changed, that you are, in every respect, exactly
the same degenerate you were before the supposed advent of the supposed world,
of the horizon and everything that populates space between you and it. In my own
attempt to postpone such criticism, to throw it off track the way you throw
salt over your shoulder to ward off what we refer to as bad luck because we can’t
completely wrap our minds around the concept of there being neither luck nor design
nor chaos, I stumble down a path first worn in this part of the forest by wild hogs,
I suppose. I have been warned of their presence by no fewer than four different
people, none of whom seemed prone to exaggeration, though I can’t remember the
last time I have seen so much as a photograph of a hog in a newspaper or a
magazine. Eulalie says sometimes things go missing from your consciousness so
thoroughly it is as if they never really existed in the first place, and when
you happen upon them again by accident later, the shock is identical to that
you might experience upon being told that the people you had grown up believing
were your parents are not really your parents at all, but cousins of the same or
even complete strangers. In either case, there is a sudden tear in the fabric
of the universe as you have experienced it to that point – or more precisely,
as you have endeavored to stitch it together -- and the danger is that you will
lose your balance in your attempt to examine that tear more closely, and you
will fall right through.
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