He stands at a lathe now,
With a chisel in hand, boring out a hole
Of indefinite depth until nothing is left
But the spirit he gives it,
Which is one of a terrible violence, because he is,
Today, a god of vengeance,
Because he wants revenge.
How fitting that I should carry the namesake of a man that forked himself in to the family tree three generations ago, as if to share a first name was to finalize what I would otherwise inherit and continue on with a surname. A conciliatory legacy, I suppose, of things that will live on after death in a way that mattered in life. It mattered to him, I think, even if it was only a first name.
I was little when I would follow him to the shed that housed his idle 1966 T-Bird Convertible. He’d crank the engine and have it run for a good ten minutes to keep the vehicle in working order even though he never drove it. I’d sit in the driver’s seat and he’d role play this aloof pedestrian that I’d honk at and startle. He got a kick out of that as much I did at that age.
Another time, I was playing on the stairs with some transformer knock-off toy when he approached with wobbly sea legs and a wide rimmed glass in hand. He put the other hand on the banister to sturdy himself, and he stared at me as if before an audience and about to give an address. He told me he loved me, and then he hugged me. I remember the brisk whiskers on his cheek and the smell — God, that smell, and I told him so with the bluntness of a child. The rebuff stirred a long silence, and all he could do was slink away.
I didn’t get the meaning of the moment until some years later when I had that same wide rimmed glass filled with ice cold gin while looking at a bottle of vermouth, and then a splash of vermouth, and so on until ratios seemed right for the moment. Not 1 part this to 4 parts that, but instead .08 and higher so as to thin the blood and help the heart not to work so hard to beat out ‘I love you.’
I got it. I think I got it. And how things have changed that I can be stone sober and say, “I love you, too.”
It was winter with that sweet smoke from the wood burning stove he stoked. He worked the iron with his small arm, and turned the coals, nesting a spot for the next log inside. And he watched the fire like a sparkle of fuse as pockets of sap went off until the fracture of coals with a pop and puff of ash. It was a false danger, and he chuckled the fear away as if understanding the trick, but when he inhaled, he detected beyond the terpene sweetness an acrid burn of an ester smoke coming from behind; it rose like a white ribbon curling from the floor as the hot coal sank, welding the fibers, until all that was left was a black button to match the others.
His first reaction was to check for his father, to ensure he was alone before flicking the coal from the burn-polished floor. Still, the button sheened; the crater a flat scab in the crisp piling. He picked at the edges, then ground his heal to rough the mark indistinguishable from the others. And he looked at his work: the scab split with tufts worn down and frayed. It stood out, but was only conspicuous to himself. Then relief as he was convinced the details of difference weren’t at all that stark until turning to see his father filling the room.
There was no escape. So he faced his old man square with body lax as he prepared.
First, an open hand that turned his head on end and body off balance as he rolled into the floor. It was the shock of a thousand bee stings into his cheek that hurt at first, then the pointed kick to his leg that knotted the muscle. But beyond was merely sensation as his balled up body rocked like a buoy against the wailing fists pounding his back; a preferable spot girded with rib-bones and muscle. And he held his breath to keep solid as a shield against each punch a release until the old man wore himself out.
But he didn’t stop.
Those wild arms bashed as he contorted himself smaller with each strike met by rigid flexion. Fore-arms up and over his head, and shoulders clenched to the ears, and elbows shut tight and tighter with knees to his chest and shell-side up. Then it happened, as it does, when there is no other retreat — when pressed to the keyhole and through, and somehow safe on the other side as the pummel continued.
He was the audience: a spectator divided and observing the first of five acts. Though he knew what to expect from the playbill outside: the poster stuck like a leach to a brick wall graffitied with paint and piss. Then the abstract print: a haunting visage like a patient virus. And he paid his money and sat with chattery patrons in the full house save an empty box-seat on the mezzanine until the front curtain opened like a grand gesture to silence the crowd. But it wasn’t the curtain that stole the sound; it was the image on stage that choked out the air.
Some laughed — a quick burst from the throat — to ease the constriction and move the scene to end while others froze with jaws hung to the hollowing of their eyes. Others winced deep into their cheeks or averted themselves to filter the stage through the vague periphery. Still others viewed through their fingers like clamp traps over their faces after shrinking into their seats.
Some hungered for air through opened throats or pursed lips to stomach what overly filled them, while others held their breath as if submerged and not wanting to drown in the playwright’s awfulness. And still others where atrocity implores rationale to invent meaning, to add purpose and reason — to confine the abyss — only to discover merely being is defiled beyond redemption that such a thing exists. And the devil wants no part of it.
It’s late; it’s closer to sunrise than sunset. The birds will be chirping before the alarm, and the guinea pigs will be nibbling on the hay beneath the bed.
It’s weird going outside during any part of the day now. I have yet to explore the world before dawn since there is no reason to ride my bicycle to work anymore, though, I somehow suspect the world is almost as quiet during the early morning as it is right now — just a few more cars, maybe.
There is a part of me that likes the world better now — not so active, entropic, frenetic — not so anything anymore, as if the population were cut in half only in that they are stationary for a while for as long as their reserves will nourish them.
I sat outside the other day and looked at the buildings with their units all honeycombed together and their satellite dishes stuck to the sky — their azimuth and altitude set like a stuck sunflower gazing at the same spot while the sun courses overhead and down, and down as if there is some opposite to the heliotropic nod of the flowers — an unnaturalness in being set at one station… an unnaturalness, for there is not much else to call it.
Yet here we are with a soft quarantine. And things feel how they are supposed to feel, in some regard, with our faces like those satellites not moving so wild anymore.
But i’ve always been one to find comfort with my eyes drawn to a certain spot. And I am now more in my element than not.
Physical pain is sobering;
It limits your focus to the essentials.
Without the extraneous,
You can only see tomorrow
With its death mask blooming
In celebration to the immediate
And no more.
There is no future beyond my eyes
Unless I labor myself to open the door
Or ascend the stairs or exhaust myself
For as far as these crutches can take me.
But it’s tiring, and shortens my gaze.
And though I’ve never been able to see the future,
Right now, I can’t even try.
When you escape your demons,
Is there a pneumatic release,
As if suddenly unlatched or unleashed —
You are suddenly lighter and can run.
Or is it like moving to a new city or town
And having to reacquaint yourself
With new analogs to the past.
Where will you work, and what route will slip by as you live in automatic?
What restaurants are there and will you prefer Indian now for comfort food on those cold days?
Who will your drug dealer be and can you trust him?
And, at this age, who has time for friends?
And as you escape your demons, what changed?
Do you see the shadows or the flame,
Or the sun outside the cave.
Or maybe it is more of the same.
I imagine a man walking up those concrete steps and through the glass door into the main lobby of a local museum. He hands over double the suggested donation to view the works that ultimately leave him uninspired. What’s worse is a major section of the gallery is cordoned off while they prepare for the next exhibit making its way around the country. And he thinks to himself, “a day too early, or maybe a day too late.” The money is of little concern in spite of the expectation in getting what he paid for that hangs about his mind. Still, he decides to leave.
About eight blocks east on second south is an artists’ residence set up innocuously enough from the outside as a regular brick building except for the grand mural that covers the eastern wall. The brick is old and time stained with drilling holes from long gone signs filled with foam or caulk or backer rod. The smooth brushed joints worn away such that sediments of white aggregate show like bits of teeth within the mortar beds. The brass push plate on the main door polished bright from sixty years of use, and used again this day as he enters.
What hooks him first is the smell. Solvents and the faintness of creosote. And beneath that first impression is the old building smell. A dampness in the wood and brick, of earth wafting up from beneath the stuffy crawl spaces in the way of old buildings. A bouquet like a whiskey that tastes better while inebriated.
Next is the sound of the door snugging in to place with a squeak and click from the bolt against the misaligned strike plate. Then the squeak of the floorboards beneath his feet as he makes his way up the stairs that amplify the sounds of his steps no matter how conscientious he is of rocking his feet from heel to toe, and heel to toe.
He looks around from floor to floor, from studio to studio, and gets his view of the artist in the raw, of unrefined ideas, of creativity so schizophrenic it comes about like wild gashes no matter the medium; as if the works were so lit with meaning that he was blinded to their very nature. And, of all the creation myths that persist in the world, it seems that all before him is of another kind of clay.
Yet with all these works, there was one that stood out among the others, and it started with a side-glance that stirred the feelings in the depths before realization catches up some four strides after. And so he turned. And he stepped back to peer through the doorway into the meager studio of paint splattered on the walls and a sink seemingly covered in fordite from layer after layer after layer of paint washed from the brushes.
In this tiny studio were canvasses leaned up against the walls with their backs turned or stacked from left to right like a library of books. But there was one still easeled. A landscape about four feet high and six feet wide. It was dark in value except for the scrapes of titanium white like phosphenes skittering past the dark light when you close your eyes, and then other colors alternating between hues of grey and blue and violet. Simply brutal in its composition of straight lines knifed on. And haunting in that it was understood beneath the surface of an unstirred mind — understood only through the lens of a deep sleep, where somehow, the next morning arrives and the world is different.
I imagine this man, walking home, yet completely oblivious to the intensity of the undercurrent stirring. The only inclination in his mind that something happened is that the particular painting lingers. And it lingers into the next day, and the next. After a while, he is so aware of the lively opinions in the world that he can see nothing else except the limits of acceptability. So he goes to a bookstore, a major retailer traded on the New York Stock Exchange. But he finds much the same as he imagines the books here are similar to the books on the south end of town as are the books on the west side.
They’re the classics — there’s no denying that — so their profit margin is almost guaranteed. And these others are popular and along the trend. And still others sell better than what they would not carry. And as he wanders, he sees an empty author’s booth, either to be filled up or taken down until the next time a new artist hustles their work.
“A day too early, or maybe a day too late,” he says to himself before leaving.
Not more than an hour later, he is at a cafe and drinking coffee and staring blankly at his surroundings when a bookcase in the corner caught his mind. It was a secondhand antique of Art Nouveau: the simple curve of the valanced skirt upon slippered feet leading to the rounded mid-molding and to the uppercase where on the top shelf sat a spiral bound notebook among board games and magazines and the occasional schlock. But it was that notebook that stuck out most of all, as if within that bookcase was a portmanteau emerging from the mismatched ideas, but it was the notebook that struggled its way through as the best fit for its place.
And who knows why he found significance in what he saw; the meaning was arbitrary in much the same way a schizophrenic obsesses over a specific leaf in a tree via some preternatural awareness, as if to intuit another rank in the taxonomy of life where this blade of grass comes from the other side of the river. Sometimes, things just work out in the daily meanderings, where there is no reason other than faith or some stubborn belief or delusion or inspiration. But still, significance remains, albeit, beneath the trappings, and it was significance that lead him to this — a notebook written by a teenager. At least, that’s what he surmised from the class list on the inside cover.
At first were the studious notes as nothing more than a mirror to the voice of education and structured like a simplistic religion. Soon, however, the thoughts wandered off into a blooming adolescence faced with the death of a mother in poetic form:
Today, today — a summer’s day —
Seems cold and gray
With your departure,
But forced to grow up this day.
And I fill the space
Into your absence.
What will I do without the grace
Of a mother’s embrace
When life is hard?
Of all the things there is to say,
While in the fray:
“Not today. Not today.”
He awoke
to a body like debris
tossed by the wave
and awkwardly placed
by the absence of fury.
He straightened a rag-doll arm,
worked a leg past the mid-bend catch
to stand and take in the surroundings
through headache and eye blur.
A ramshackle wreck of
bookcases tipped.
Curios smashed into kindling.
Cabinets thrown open
with brass leaves bent,
some unhinged by the force.
There were overdrawn drawers
with their contents pulled out,
and searched through or
scattered on the floor.
Boxes of artwork and portfolios,
the albums of photos,
and sketches and notes;
all the adventures and experiences
organized and stowed, now
lay disarranged
like memories on the floor
seemingly ready for the burning.
And out there is a world
a child will inherit.
No longer the grass
against a vanilla sky,
the house on a street
and manicured trees,
nor twilight lamps
softening the night.
Nothing as picturesque as a painting.
And every day
with eyes into the world
to see what was coming:
the beauties
that belied the threats,
like a rolling wave
fringed with red.
And though there are signs,
the world is slow
as it turns;
and it turns normal
until it’s not.
A silver wire frayed
From my hair as
I washed my hands
With my reflection
Today.
Time is coming and
Time is going.
But somehow I stay here
Waiting
For my time.
Such is the undertaking of
A project in years.
I tell them that
I am two-thirds done
After two years of work.
It seems that way,
I think.
Then the followup question:
What is it about?
As if it’s some tattoo,
And then the answer
…
Then there is the true answer:
The plot is secondary.
At the cliff’s edge, on the mountain pass, beneath the bronze sky, and over the wine dark sea was Empedocles. He stood over his students like some grand idea of a god as he spoke with his stentorian voice over the wind. The four roots, he would say, are in everything. And differing degrees of each made up the variety in the universe, even the colors: light, dark, red, and yellow.
Empedocles’ voice echoed through the pass, past the soldiers leading the merchants, and to the piqued ears of the dye-master’s apprentice who was learning the secrets of the universe through the secrets of color. The apprentice slowed his cart to listen to Empedocles purvey his truth to the masses, but as he did so, he noticed the alchemy of Empedocles’ words narrowing his perception. And for a second, there was no hue, but only shade — only values between red and yellow.
He has the philosopher’s disease, the master said. And with that, the apprentice remembered his master’s riddle and said it as a focus to remember: you cannot perceive what does not have a name, but if it does not have a name, how do you come perceive it? And he looked at the soldiers and saw their bronze armor and compared it to the sky, and they were different. And he looked at the glaziers behind him with their clear bottles of wine and compared them to the ocean until liberation. Still though, the apprentice wondered how such a stout view could have such an affect
And he raked the cloth in the dye-vat, the brown liquid penetrating between the warp and weft, his movements automatic as he kneaded the fabric — turn and fold, turn and fold. The apprentice sunk in meditation with the repetition. He fell further in the emptiness of thought where things and no-things do not exist in the unconditioned mind — his own view falling away. And turn and fold, and careless as his arm knocked against the lye and the powder fell into the swirling brown liquid.
The apprentice startled himself out of his meditation and he looked down at the dye still swirling. He squinted. And veins of a color appeared that he had never seen before. At first it seemed light and yellow, but that wasn’t it. It almost had the hue of the grass, but darker. And it was rich in color with a depth of wine. And then he saw it for what it was and exclaimed with excitement: Master! Master!
And the apprentice put his hands in the dye, and they tingled from the burn, but he didn’t care as he marveled. He sloshed the water like a child in discovery. But it was fading, just slightly. He reached his arm in to stir the pure color, but that hastened the color’s muteness. And he stuck his arm in deep and stirred violently, but the more the water splashed, the faster it died until it returned to the color of that loamy brown.
I am me 