One of these ostensibly contemplative souls keeps watch across the river, sees Kia in the daytime equivalent of dreams involving a bell tower that doesn’t exist on the grounds. Richard strays as often as he can from the confines of the monastery, looking for the place where his daytime visions might manifest themselves in tangible form and runs across the establishment quite late in his tenure, at that point in anybody’s life where what we have devoted ourselves to becomes a burden, becomes that which we would escape no matter what the cost. We write sentences longhand on the back of whatever happens to be handy – envelopes or bits of leather – each sentence building on the last into a crescendo of grief or ennui and, at some point, when we are feeling confident or reckless, we endeavor to share them with those in the vicinity. But we realize, frequently too late, that our scribbling, our incessant talking to ourselves and staring away into empty space, has run off whatever family had not to that point already abandoned us to go searching for something crucial missing in their own lives. The cycle bears witness to an odd fact of human psychology, but no one can agree on precisely what that fact consists of. Certain factions, active in the northeast and lumped together under a shorthand moniker referring obliquely to their collective habit of asking too many questions of a very personal nature in inappropriate settings, holds that what we have discovered about ourselves has yet to reach a mass sufficient to fill up a thimble and they have taken to carrying this archaic sewing implement around with them in their pockets so that they can produce it during conversation, thus creating (in their eyes, at any rate) a dramatic gesture that relieves them of the necessity of continuing in words, which are, of course, weak and hopelessly redundant. Another faction, consisting mostly, as near as I can tell, of two individuals cohabiting together somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, pushes things in the opposite direction and comes to the rather startling conclusion that everything that can be known has already been discovered and worked through by hacks and professionals alike so that nothing further needs to be done. We have no more need of attending symposia and writing books and discussing ontology (in an informal manner) with someone standing beside us in line at the market when we are purchasing a gallon of milk. And all these activities would, logically, cease to exist but for the fact that we like to hear ourselves say things even if those things prove, in the end, to be entirely unnecessary. And so, paradoxically, this faction advocates a return to the epic use of words, a pouring forth akin to that which must have occurred when our first stooped and miserable ancestors discovered they could forge words with a felicity rivaling that with which they forged even sharp stones or fire.            

Their faces rarely change demeanor. They seem at times like actual stones set upon the hill to frighten away invading armies. Or crows. They inhabit the darkness like enzymes in prehistoric seas and if it weren’t for the distraction offered by the passing carnival troupes or the salesmen selling hats and trinkets and sometimes even stoves from out of the trunks of their cars, I’d be truly depressed. Of course, we can’t live our lives as if they have been loaned to us but we can’t treat them as legitimate property either for fear of breaking the curse that allowed us to have lives and bodies in the first place. All the same, no one will reconnoiter the far, dark side of creation for me so I have to make certain calculations before I can act. Many of these involve doing fairly complex mathematics on my fingers, but not for the reasons most people automatically assume. It is an effective way to plant an image in your interlocutor’s head and keep it there long after the image, or the concept necessarily sewn to that image, proves fatal. Long after he makes his disdain for the entire procedure something more than a mere inward condition. Across the river, a monastery stands where it has stood for the better part of a hundred years, looking less medieval than one might have assumed if one was in the habit of making assumptions about architecture, particularly the sort associated with religious orders -- not something I’d recommend now that we possess fewer and fewer of these for reasons I couldn’t begin to unravel. Perhaps it has something to do with the way we view the past and then contrast it with the future, the way we illustrate our view of each of them, and their relation to each other, by holding our hands out away from the body and indicating our hands are full by cupping them. This is intended to mean, I suppose (at least this is what I intend the gesture to mean whenever I perform it), that we are carrying both the one and the other, that they are entirely separate entities and we keep them as far apart from each other as the numerous structural limitations and design weaknesses of our bodies will allow. You can frequently see the monks from the freeway as you pass, their ambling about the numerous courtyards of the monastery in twos and threes, their eyeglasses glinting sometimes in the sunlight and that light racing upward again towards its source when the monk’s head is inclined at a certain angle. We might be tempted to interpret this glint in a metaphysical sense, congratulating ourselves on witnessing a rare instance of the spirit made tangible and glimpsed because of our close physical proximity to a place where things like that are expected to happen. Or we may simply chock it up to run-of-the-mill optics, no different, really, than what you might witness at any time of the day or night when a light source is present, and in any other part of the city or the vast countryside that happens to caresses it. Either way, we are mistaken.

Three blocks of wood, very like statues in size and general appearance, grace the entrance to the cave. I didn’t carry them up here and I don’t know who did. Sometimes when I’m feeling particularly restless, I think I should carve them into the likeness of proper beings, individuals, I should make of them a committee to greet people on those rare occasions when I am away and to keep them lingering until my return. But I can’t get my hands to obey even the simplest tasks. Grabbing flies out of mid-air. Sketching a faithful likeness of Eulalie when she stops by before heading home to Immanuel who will inevitably, through inebriation, fail to recognize her. Our emblems are thrust upon us and we either decline or accept. Maybe it’s even more stark than that – the rest of the world making such decisions for us and never bothering to send notification. At a bend in the river, on the western side, the side with a road on it trod into existence originally by skittish wildlife and then domesticated beasts, a woman called Kia serves patrons seated inside a small building and in the open air, tea or gin or strawberry concoctions and sandwiches with Irish-sounding names attached to them by the owner of the establishment who is a man with a memory like a camel’s -- said to be quite good by those who rely on camels in the desert wastes to find their way from one place to another, though why we should lend credence to the opinions of people we have no direct contact with and probably never will, people who, to be honest, because we (and by we, I mean you, not those of us living in caves) are such a narrow and suspicious bunch, we wouldn’t trust to work in our daycare centers or deliver our important packages, is a question someone should look into just as soon as most other questions of similar import have been eliminated as irrelevant or answered sufficiently in the opinion of those who originally posed them. On certain evenings, when the sun has made the edge of the world bruised and bloody and the battery-run radio that fits in my hand is dredging up dark melodramas from the 1930’s, I find myself longing for that idiosyncratic menu, for egg salad O’Leary and other questionable fare, because of Kia’s beauty which is something that hangs in the air around her and seems to speak in complete sentences. You have to fight your way through it sometimes, using of course your bare hands because metal weapons threaten to tear the gauzy fabric of it and will get you thrown into the dust close to the road by larger-than-standard men who turn out to be the owner’s degenerate sons and whose job it is to see to the well-being of all those who make their living inside. Whose job it is too, apparently, to wash the windows or sweep the floors on occasion when they have nothing better to do. We linger forever just at the edge of tedium or ecstasy and expect to push our way through from one to the other without ever really recognizing what the difference is between them, that there might not be a difference ultimately, and that our every expectation then is like a bird on a sandbar in that it doesn’t belong there for any extended period of time. When the wind picks up and the moon hovers close and the water in the river rises and threatens to overwhelm whatever nest the bird has thrown together with fugitive bits of straw and Styrofoam, there is a decision to be made but no one knows quite how to go about it, least of all the bird.

Irrational parameters are still parameters, are still to be respected so long as they run perpendicular to one another and don’t cause us to reminisce about barns and outbuildings in and around which we first inhaled the smoke from imported Turkish cigarettes and learned the melody to songs that weren’t overly laden with melody, that mostly just plodded from one place to another and back again like what one imagines mastodons did when they were still prevalent on the continent. Our turn will likely come soon, third or fourth, but it feels as if we are standing in line for more than an hour and when we check our watches, that suspicion is confirmed. Immanuel plucks his from his arm, hurls it in the direction of the people he takes to be in charge, but as is frequently the case, we can’t determine this for sure because we have no way of discussing it with them. Short of sign language, of course. Short of saying something out loud. Immanuel complains that the sun makes its way down the brainstem and into his throat, passes clean through using some metaphysical trick he tries to explain while tapping mechanically, unconsciously, the tips of the fingers on his left hand over and over again. I can’t understand the niceties of it all, can’t even determine, frankly, why such explanation is necessary. I’ll believe just about anything he says. The consequences are mostly minor and have to do with the skin, the way the skin regenerates itself more slowly as you age. We like to draw parallels with the coatings to be found on the exterior of other objects, like coconuts or plastic buckets. But we reject out of hand any attempt to repeat the procedure using things that don’t actually exist. Or if they do exist, they do so only in the underdeveloped provinces of the mind. Conceptual things, things made up of words and perfectly straight lines that we can then mould and manipulate as we see fit, we can re-arrange and ultimately tear down again into innumerable pieces, all while trying to keep the look on our faces from appearing pained. If we succeed, no one knows what we are up to, but the sense of accomplishment that rushes over us at that moment doesn’t last very long. It dissipates, dribbles away to nothing and before we know it, our surroundings adopt their customary demeanor. Certainly there are dangers close by – the rumor of lynx, never substantiated. People wearing hats made of wool. But we come to grips with these things almost immediately. It is as if they were the medium within which we have been steeped since the day someone decided it’s best we do not emerge into a void. We should be offered clarity and context as something of a birthright -- by summoning into miraculous existence a frame (or stage, depending on where you’re standing) the width of the sky but not as deep and not as tall. There needed to be concessions, after all. A way of confirming we have the resolve, but not the resources, not the bond measures or the people respectable enough to propose them. What we have instead are those (like ourselves) who pass most of the day harmlessly in their cubicles. With their striped ties and their faux snake leather shoes and their miniature joke abacuses on their desks and the instruction manuals for the abacuses, most of these opened ominously to the same page, the very difficult to grasp page seventy-three devoid of illustration and, with it, any sense of something legitimately human taking place. 

The specter that occupies this space (if in fact it is something otherworldly and not prosaic – a stray item of laundry, say, blowing in the wind, someone traipsing about at night because he can’t sleep) seems to have very little it wants to communicate. Its back is almost always turned to the witness and the sounds emanating from it remind one of the sounds of jumbo jet engines rumbling far away in the sky. You could never decipher them unless you too were only partially present at any given moment, distracted by memories that may or may not have happened to you, but which are so vivid nonetheless they seem like straightforward experience – getting stuck under a limb in the river, the cold clear water moving past just above your eyes, the sunlight intensifying and decreasing at intervals with the volume of water passing between you and it at any given moment, or with the frantic movements of your body become now its own agent, its own material thing completely independent of the rest of you, whatever that might consist of. What you don’t recall is the panic, the fire caused by lack of air in the middle of your chest, sensations that must have been present, must have been so overwhelming as to erase themselves finally the way desire is said to consume itself when given nothing but the empty past on which to feed. We borrow our concepts of the places we can not see from those we have formed of the places we can see – the desert riddled with canyons and red earth, the mouths of caves where we hesitate a moment before climbing in. This hesitation is so common as to suggest a form of ritual, a means of taking stock and re-creating ourselves, of generating a coherent whole from the myriad, untidy fragments we were composed of just moments before. Of course, the cave itself should, logically speaking, operate in a similar, if much more thorough manner, and so we are expected to move beyond the mouth of it; we can almost feel the pull as if an enormous invisible hand had emerged from the depths and grabbed hold of our lapels, or our elbows if, as would most likely be the case, we weren’t wearing the sort of thing that had lapels on it. This is why, when we venture down we almost always find others have been there before us, making charcoal reproductions of bison on the walls and other beasts fairly accurate in their physiology, all as part -- so we are told and so we believe because it makes perfect sense, it jibes with our own experience of this damp and alien place -- of ancient fertility rituals and shamanistic religious practice. For my part, I prefer the names or initials of people more recent scraped into the rock with car keys or other implements, frequently in conjunction with those of their purported lovers, heart emblems with bloody arrows through them conjoining the pair forever in the otherwise non-committal bowels of the earth.          

Eulalie stretches a plastic container she finds on the floor to its breaking point and beyond, the sound it makes like a gunshot, if, that is, you are standing thirty feet or more away from the gun at the time it goes off. Her nervous energy keeps her slender, as does her diet of almost nothing but kale. It makes her tense on occasion and causes the skin around her eyes to sink in and turn a not-unflattering shade of salmon. I would follow her almost anywhere if not for the fact that she keeps following me, and the habit has become so ingrained as to stir comment among those who (for lack of a more surprising image) spend most of their time on the sidelines, who promise themselves each morning that, from now on, they will keep their mouths shut, they will count to a pre-determined integer and then wait an additional minute or two before unleashing whatever invective or platitude, whatever torrent of wit or hysteria, has backed up against the easily-breeched barrier of their teeth. We find both the evolved and the rudimentary portions of the mind entirely unsuited to the task at hand, the breaking down of experience into component parts usually no longer than an eighth of an inch and carrying with them the promise of a complicated code. Something to be deciphered if only we can burrow far enough down, to that place where sediments no longer cover over and preserve objects by replacing them, bit by bit, but instead repulse them forcefully, like a handful of magnets. That place where, were you to be able to glance at your own reflection in a mirror, you would see merely a smattering of light waves and plus signs, a vague outline collapsing in on itself in volcanic earnest. Eulalie plucks a bit of rye bread from my lips, examines it in the light thrown by a bare bulb overhead and warns that our desire to slice too thin, to have at the core of all things is akin to our desire to read other people’s minds and will have much the same consequences just as soon as we are successful. There will be a scramble for higher ground, a complete breakdown of trust among all but the most vulnerable individuals, and even they will wander around for a while in packs become so ruthless and unpredictable, we will wish we had been kinder to them in high school. We will spend hours trying to atone in our minds for actions we can’t even be sure we committed they happened so long ago. The tossing of someone’s windbreaker into an open well. The misidentification of blood types. Imagine for a moment if everything that had ever happened to you and everything you had ever caused to happen to someone else, was suddenly common knowledge, the sort of thing we speak about only in whispers and undertones because we are ashamed of what we know. We want others to think of us as, not blank slates, exactly, but perhaps erased ones. With a few numbers scattered her and there and maybe a recipe for a favorite cocktail, all of it made illegible by someone’s purposefully going over it with a moist paper towel or accidentally rubbing up against it with his shirt.  

Begging produces the highest frequency sounds detectable using instruments we fabricated specifically to test for them. There is always the possibility that the effort to detect unduly influences what is detected, that we are privy to but a fraction of what’s actually out there (and this fraction is somehow artificially engendered), but most educated speculation seems to favor what has already been stated – namely, that our evenings are going to get a whole lot less interesting at the exact same time they get a little bit more painful, the smell of melting rubber infiltrating our nostrils for some reason and sending us on long safaris through the deepest, most overgrown parts of our memories, including those environs where something very like rubber trees without actually being rubber trees surrounded the villages where we lived (or where we thought we lived) and we would tap on the surface of these trees with hammers just to make the adults in the vicinity angry. In the corner, looking like a casualty of skirmishes between people that are not altogether real and not altogether mythical either, people with affinities to all possible realms and feet as misshapen as feet can be and still be able to function, a decapitated Holofernes lies in a pile of his own strings and the red handkerchief obviously meant to simulate a voluminous blood loss consequent to the puppet Judith (not immediately visible) taking her vengeance on the puppet stage. Close by this giddy tableaux grins the creature down whose gullet Jonah slides during the tumult of a similar miniature thunderstorm at sea. The girl explains the intricacies of each creation separately, proudly displays her handiwork and clucks her tongue at any questions we might have as if to suggest we need only listen and watch to learn everything it is necessary to know, at least for the moment. I’m not sure why the stucco seems to close in whenever we notice we are surrounded by walls, that we are not simply wandering about on the high plains like mustang ponies, but the phenomenon is one so frequently commented on by those who make a living commenting on the things we see and hear when we are awake that I am almost certain it is an hallucination, one shared by the entire race and dating, no doubt, from the earliest appearance of that race, if not innumerable millennia previous. What purpose it serves, why it should exist and not something else, something similar but without the near flawless logic associated with it, without the emotional content delivered via a mechanism we can’t even begin to decipher or re-assemble once we have taken it apart, is something I will explain, perhaps, at length, when the opportunity arises and when my expertise has reached a position congruent with that of those likely to be in the audience. In the meantime, I will simply draw your attention to the current lack of explanation by all parties, not just myself, and attempt to bring the discussion to a graceful close by mentioning, in passing of course, the clouds just now gathering on the horizon, high and dark and irregular in shape like caterpillars – but not the pleasant, furry multi-colored sort we used to collect during childhood. Rather, the spiny, uniformly green and threatening sort we used to dare one another to pick up with our bare hands, certain that the first person to do so would be snagged immediately by those spines and forthwith poisoned, would suffer a death more prolonged and wretched than any we could possibly to that point have imagined.