He had kicked the can of the apocalypse down the road for a long time now. God, feeling both lazy and ambivalent, kept putting off "the inevitable." Like growing up, the end of the world seemed more bother than it was worth, more mess than solution, an unnecessary disruption to an otherwise lovely day. He was patient. Why rush? The contented farm boy in him let the weather--nature itself--get inside him and bend time to its own purposes. This day, this hour, this minute was eternal, burning beyond imagination or memory, into something someone might call "real."
(Breathe deeply.)
The thunderhead on the horizon was cotton candy, bright vanilla taffy being pulled out of thin air. Summer. God had twine woven through the belt loops of his dungarees, well-worn Converse All Stars on his feet. He was shirtless for August's afternoon sun and ambled the gravel road without direction. The familiar rubber tip of his sneakers connected again with the rusted, dented can; a cloud of dust billowed briefly, a miniature storm, God's wrath (and his laughter, musical and filled with the bright light of youth and harvest).
What will come, will come. In time...
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The idea of annihilation is not new to me. I was a boy once, too. By the wizened age of five, the weight of anti-matter, the gravity of unbeing, haunted me from the inside, a whirlwind inside a black cavern, all bluster and noise and (unreadable) garbage.
These anxieties, the aching that they caused, ignited in me a curiosity that wanted both facts and spiritual succor. But the bigger the book, the worse the prognosis. The material and the magical were both racing to the end (of the page, of the day, of the life). It is as if the universe in its adherence to certain laws had lost sight of the little man. The shrinking individual was being devoured by the gang, the mob, by the exploding species. The significance and influence, that is to say the actual autonomy of the individual was eclipsed by the nearest star. Small already, we were each dwindling, disappearing slowly.
In this substantial shift in axis and tide, the creation was compassionate in phrasing its answers but largely disinterested (and naive) to the actual battles of being. For example, the various and seemingly tailor-made maladies and handicaps that describe the human condition are, perhaps sadistically, custom-designed, corroding the body and eroding the mind; each one seems to be a hand-crafted gift created "just for you."
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Its personal. Personalized. Purloined. We have stolen this life, this consciousness, out of the jaws of a gnawing jackal pup. He will sharpen his teeth, his wit, his mind--like us--on anything he can find. We too are scavengers. We are satisfied with dead meat. We are, ourselves, already dying. Your gut shuts down for a second. Sinking. You want to be light, lifted, dancing but there is heaviness that holds onto your feet, your tongue.
Hold your tongue.
There is nothing about your death that will matter. There is nothing from your life that will retain. Because we are inconsequential, both urgency and burden are removed. They are extracted, bad teeth or extradited, bad eggs. A just balance is found between expectation and obligation. (I promised you a new brand of freedom.) With waxed soles and a Wonderbra, we will have to unlearn habits that have settled into us as nostalgia and believe again that we can dance. When we wish to dance, we must revive. We can dance away doubt . We can dance down despair. Orphaned by God, we will dance like a dervish in meditation and prayer.
Again, I am six or seven. I have--instinctively--fixed my eyes on heaven. Momentum comes in outstretched arms; I spin. I spin.
There is rotation,
there is propulsion,
I am spinning. I persist at the bottom of a thin and nebulised thread. I am the good-luck spider that is suspended, at the end.
The velocity of the centrifuge will, inevitably, turn all of us into ourselves, while tea leaves cannot help but tell their tales out of turn. All the memes that would come to destroy me and all the memes that would try to rescue me were part of childhood's amorphous stew of anxiety and fear. This was the stuff of bad dreams. Anticipation is a kinder word for dread. Nostalgia is a kinder word for regret. But then...
I was paralyzed by my desires. (You were too.) They were circulating around me without benefit of vocabulary, indecipherable, ghosts from the future hosted by my soul, in my body, run by my mind with its over-active imagination.
These anxieties, the aching that they caused, ignited in me a curiosity that wanted both facts and spiritual succor. But the bigger the book, the worse the prognosis. The material and the magical were both racing to the end (of the page, of the day, of the life). It is as if the universe in its adherence to certain laws had lost sight of the little man. The shrinking individual was being devoured by the gang, the mob, by the exploding species. The significance and influence, that is to say the actual autonomy of the individual was eclipsed by the nearest star. Small already, we were each dwindling, disappearing slowly.
In this substantial shift in axis and tide, the creation was compassionate in phrasing its answers but largely disinterested (and naive) to the actual battles of being. For example, the various and seemingly tailor-made maladies and handicaps that describe the human condition are, perhaps sadistically, custom-designed, corroding the body and eroding the mind; each one seems to be a hand-crafted gift created "just for you."
-------
Its personal. Personalized. Purloined. We have stolen this life, this consciousness, out of the jaws of a gnawing jackal pup. He will sharpen his teeth, his wit, his mind--like us--on anything he can find. We too are scavengers. We are satisfied with dead meat. We are, ourselves, already dying. Your gut shuts down for a second. Sinking. You want to be light, lifted, dancing but there is heaviness that holds onto your feet, your tongue.
Hold your tongue.
There is nothing about your death that will matter. There is nothing from your life that will retain. Because we are inconsequential, both urgency and burden are removed. They are extracted, bad teeth or extradited, bad eggs. A just balance is found between expectation and obligation. (I promised you a new brand of freedom.) With waxed soles and a Wonderbra, we will have to unlearn habits that have settled into us as nostalgia and believe again that we can dance. When we wish to dance, we must revive. We can dance away doubt . We can dance down despair. Orphaned by God, we will dance like a dervish in meditation and prayer.
Again, I am six or seven. I have--instinctively--fixed my eyes on heaven. Momentum comes in outstretched arms; I spin. I spin.
There is rotation,
there is propulsion,
I am spinning. I persist at the bottom of a thin and nebulised thread. I am the good-luck spider that is suspended, at the end.
The velocity of the centrifuge will, inevitably, turn all of us into ourselves, while tea leaves cannot help but tell their tales out of turn. All the memes that would come to destroy me and all the memes that would try to rescue me were part of childhood's amorphous stew of anxiety and fear. This was the stuff of bad dreams. Anticipation is a kinder word for dread. Nostalgia is a kinder word for regret. But then...
I was paralyzed by my desires. (You were too.) They were circulating around me without benefit of vocabulary, indecipherable, ghosts from the future hosted by my soul, in my body, run by my mind with its over-active imagination.
-------
When the sirens find this road--adrenaline red ignoring the yellow ribbons, the black tar--it turns me, changes me, turns me inside out. And I run screaming, hands held cupped over the ears, past the house, through the yard beyond the fragrant wall of lilacs into a muddy patch sprouted loud with rhubarb, its broad and honest leaves (and the snakes that they conceal).
I am crying.
These tears are a kind of sweat. I am enduring something. I am enduring the idea of loss or threat that the sirens imply.
The Doppler's cry subsides, that strange and histrionic bird.
Tears dry.
The palms I have been pressing, invested on each ear, slide down to my sides (wiping what embarrassment still stings in salty pools, in alkali rivers that cut something into my four-year-old face. Tears...).
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For fears are nothing more than fantasies of loss and/or annihilation, dark imaginings that might instruct with their obsessions. Sometimes too obvious, sometimes succinct in disapproval, judgment, the lessons arrive inevitably late and looking like something that you swear you knew all along, something you believed. You spend your middle years (and later--more desperately--your final years) trying to craft that handful of sand called learning into something you could prettify and pass off as wisdom. But you know, now, humbly, that this is just a jumble of words.
That is my intention, my obsession, here. I want to traverse the muddy headlands of meaning, of vocabulary, and "make sense" of something. Or, if that ambition is too much (for this late hour)--the ephemeral and mutable mots moving with the taunting and slippery grace of butterflies--I will content myself to look for bones and stones and berries to string together. I will bead the seeds of some new language, laughing. And I will wear the weary string around my neck. It is enough to create patterns here. It is enough--meaning aside--to piece together something pretty with which to decorate my naked, trembling self.
-------
Meanwhile,
God has gone fishing, followed by his faithful hound. The worm squirming on the hook of this humanity hasn't a prayer at this point, at least one that could be heard. He can't be bothered, a small town judge in semi-retirement, an 8 year old knowing only these forty acres and (at least for now) satisfied with the path along the river, the whispering sandstone caves, the lower pasture punctuated with wild flowers--white, purple, and yellow--where the horses are like statuary, dappled by the sunlight fractured in the leaves of the oak that first found this spring.
Meanwhile,
God has gone fishing, followed by his faithful hound. The worm squirming on the hook of this humanity hasn't a prayer at this point, at least one that could be heard. He can't be bothered, a small town judge in semi-retirement, an 8 year old knowing only these forty acres and (at least for now) satisfied with the path along the river, the whispering sandstone caves, the lower pasture punctuated with wild flowers--white, purple, and yellow--where the horses are like statuary, dappled by the sunlight fractured in the leaves of the oak that first found this spring.
--------
These storms, warmed in that sapphire eye, rose to writhe and boil. They come as a cataract; the thunder is persistent like the fictitious friction one imagines on the approach to a tumult of falls. It is just half an hour now. The waterfall is waiting round the next bend (or the bend after that). The cold stream dreams of the basalt walls, and aches for the moss-eaten boulders down below. When you stand close enough, the mist is more like rain. And all of that energy is dissolving into the effervescent dare to act.
To be.
To plunge.
But I am under a spell. Hell demon or well-meaning angel, you caution me: Don't cross the creek on the slippery log., Stay on the farm., and Run when you hear sirens. Each day is an agenda crowded with a thousand novel fears; you think of Everything. Wake up. What can I worry about this morning? You devoured my confidence for breakfast and brought limitation into the world. By lunch the hum of summer was behind everything--the humidity, the heat--like the low pulsing of a fuzz guitar before it possesses the world, flirting, fighting and fucking. Turn down the volume or you'll go deaf.
Meanwhile, there is a willful teen in each garage practicing guitar and the art of being popular. The younger kids, the middle-schoolers, laugh and gabble playing sack in the street. Their fathers make the mowers go and know (without hesitation) that their children are as high as they were, once, on some Sunday in August two decades ago. Summer is noisy; it is claustrophobic, even for the sun. The bikers unzip the main drag; black asphalt is tanned by the vibrating migraine of these machines. Mix in the cliched song of cicadas, the sizzling grills and the hissing transistor radios.
It occurs to me: Both my nervous breakdowns happened in Summer while those around me were basking in the enforced happiness of the season. I tried to disguise it; but under the legendary sky--blue, unblinking--I went slowly, confidently, mad. Today, I lay like a corpse in a hammock, eyes closed, reflecting. I am motionless. I am patient. I can hear the television through the open window, the neighbor's radio, the cluster of wives convening in the cul-de-sac (gossip in equal portion with angst). You think I am asleep but I am listening intently. I am waiting to hear a forecast.
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