There is someone here. I can feel their breathing against my back, the slow, spider-crawl of pressure walking down my spine. It is not just these words, fading and brittle, disappearing from the page, but anxiety’s algorithms dancing under my skin. Is this the divine? I’d pierce it, but I have not the tools to understand. I’m one of the countless, thoughtless damned.
When I was a child, my mother always took me to Church on Good Friday, to slowly walk along the pews, reciting the Stations of the Cross. Those simple figures–a piercing here, lamenting women over there, the rhythmic cues of staged agony–all these spoke to me in haunted murmers, a foreign language. Why should I care? I stood beneath the cross, staring at the bright red blood dripping down his foot from the metal nails, and I could never get past the pain, never reach the spirits that hid their secrets inside that polished wood. I just imagined that moment, almost sexual, when the nails went through the skin, and I wondered about the man who held the hammer. I wanted his courage. But he was not there.
A dead classmate. Hit by a car, or was it a truck, when he was nine. I had played with him during recess, eating soft pretzels and shoving each other on the asphalt parking lot, baking in our uniforms in the Maryland sun. At the service, a priest said he was playing with Jesus in heaven, and that he never had to worry about homework ever again. We planted a tree, but my memory had already begun its slow fade. Heavy clouds filled the sky, the late summer rain.
I am lost. In between waking and sleep, my eyes are open but my body is locked. Helpless skeleton, withering on the mattress, such a shabby fruit. There is a window in the far corner, I see a snapshot of an ordinary tree. A quote from Blake, picked by Tilbury, comes to mind: “The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act.”
This Is Not Too Explicit, I guess. Sounds are jumping out of the shadows, leaping from darkness to darkness, heavier than sand. I am swimming against the tide, waves flood my lungs, I reach for the window.
Owls. I keep having dreams about owls. Not the ones with broken wings, tottering behind glass walls, being hand-fed mice. No, I mean full-blooded owls that are perched on branches in the wooded areas that skirt our neighborhoods. In the dream I collect them but my father keeps going out in the middle of the night, in a metallic green Mazda, stealing them from the trees. He brings them back to the shed and kills them. In the dawning light of morning I go out and look for them, but they are gone, and my father’s hands are covered with blood, feathers mix with sawdust on the floor. I reach down to touch but my hands come up empty but for the granules of wood and dust.
Silence. This is the part where no one wants to play.
Through the cold fog, watch me while I am still here. My fingers are poised; I have not yet grown so tired, not yet surrendered entirely. I meet each day with lethargy; the slow, blue music that crawls under my skin. Doors, pushed by the wind, swing shut, a startle. Or was that a different song?
Let me put it plainly: life is wreckage. Books, discs, clothes, scatter over the industrial carpet. They make their own sculptures. I claw my way through the narratives, scraping the skin off each story, hiding the evidence under my nails.
(Please) don’t ask questions. No politics, music, art, literature, history. Sound is constant, ever present. Hold it in your hand and I will pay attention.
I am traveling in a pressurized cabin, through the deepest, most bitter hours of night. The overhead light gives off a dim reminder of birth. The plane shakes, no one is really asleep. I turn the page of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Halfway in and the words are already a blur. Or maybe shock value bores me in the end. I can’t say.
Below my feet, storms wrack the uncaring oceans, gray and without end. We are suspended between worlds, hanging in the early morning air. I think of Lockerbie, TWA 800, and other doomed voyages. I look around me at the pale faces of men and women, imagine them reprinted on recycled newspaper; images beamed across the Northeast. Let it end in a flash.
The music is at war with itself, fighting the urge to be beautiful. Voices trip over each other, there is too much to be said, but not enough worth saying. Reach out your hand, feel your way through this cluttered room. You know the objects and you will not fall.
I try to pull myself out of the silence. My words from years ago are rediscovered, they are the mutterings of a being from another planet. One bursting with ideas, opinions, arguments. Was I ever him? Is that person dead now?
The music plays with a cliche, holds it in its hands, turns it, examines it, then lets go. The intensity builds, sound pushes us forward, towards the edge of volume, limitless, pure streams of sound building over the rocks, building, building, building, and then…punch to the stomach. Gravity returns, the waves are calm again. I put my feet in the water, feel the sediment beneath my toes. Look out at the horizon and wonder how far it is to the other shore. What people are now lost out at sea, surrounded by gray waves lapping against the stern?
Last night I dreamed that I was going back to college. The bus taking me there was a roller-coaster; from the peak I could see the buildings on the horizon below. It wasn’t a city I recognized. Someone said it was Boston. Then Atlanta. Then Baltimore. I switched buses, fretted over the absences I was piling up. Life contracted, narrowed into one clear path. The architecture of highways became the architecture of hospitals. I waited for the helicopter to take me to the roof of the medical center, to bring me into surgery, where my brain would be carved open like a yellow watermelon.
My dreams are always about the past.
The pounding of a drum, the gentle plucking of strings, announce new directions. Electronic feedback occupies the lower depths, the crackling foundation of life. Being is clear again: there is only this moment. But hurry, the ink is already drying.
The music gently pushes me out of the shadows, out of my encased, somber field of sleep. The sounds come to me like a waking dream, my eyelids are heavy but I reach for the objects placed in front of me, slowly turn the familiar textures in my hands.
I search for more words, the fewer the better, to accompany this sparse landscape. Inadequacies, failings, all these abound. I remember walking along one of Washington’s avenues in 1997, the crisp darkness of fall cleansing my lungs. I was headed to the bookstore, to the bright, clean aisles of poetry and prose. The world was opening up before me. Tonight as I listen to the music I cling to the imprint of this experience. My brain bleeds from the weight of those times.
Sedated. A light shines from across the street, its beams reaching me in my broken attic, where bats are regular midnight intruders. Looking at the light I think of the Futurists, the bold, colorful paintings that demanded the destruction of museums. Passionate manifestos filled their pages; riots haunted our dreams. I thought I saw chaos…it made me feel tired. The Sleeping Muse languidly turns its head on a pillow of stone. But who has time for Brancusi? Everything is running short, the nightmare is coming to an end, bloated bodies float to the surface, dance on the rim of the lapping water.
This week my father killed a fish. It had swallowed the hook completely. I watched its gills move spasmodically, just before my father took the side of a hammer and bashed in its head, leaving blood on the towel. We took the fish home, cleaned it, then ate the cooked flesh in between its delicate, intricate bones. I was once a vegetarian.
All that surrounds me writes poems about loss. The silence grows thickly in between endless columns of sound. Stop here, take a deep breath. I will paint the picture for you.
In the midst of another anonymous summer night, sound washes over my body, a cool darkness gently pulled from the hanging leaves on the tree outside my window. I sit in my orange tee shirt and navy blue shorts, a cracked pair of Bose headphones resting on my head. Vanishing point. I want to disintegrate into this swirling postmodernity and all its hypocrisies, untold contradictions, disappear into the clear transparency of my laptop screen, reduce myself to binary abstractions, the old and new art of dying in the present tense.
Death. Vanishing point. The other night I dreamed (as I often do) that I was awake in a well-stocked comic book store. The bright colors of Captain America and Green Lantern covers beamed at me from the white racks. In the dream I felt that I was home. I would piece together my personhood through the variety of comic books I would collect. I would change as my collection changed. I was poised, ready to begin. The world of nightmares, of disappointment and calculus exams and atomic holocausts, was only a shadow on the floor of my dream. I walked over to the rack. I pulled up an issue of a magazine devoted entirely to taomud (The Area Of Music Under Discussion). I woke up, and knew then the creations that lay in my future.
There is someone here. I can feel their breathing against my back, the slow, spider-crawl of pressure walking down my spine. It is not just these words, fading and brittle, disappearing from the page, but anxiety’s algorithms dancing under my skin. Is this the divine? I’d pierce it, but I have not the tools to understand. I’m one of the countless, thoughtless damned.
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