Author: Brad Zellar

Easy world, you gave it once–

please quietly welcome it back,

that hand.

–William Stafford, from “Going On”

…what is it we are all doing, what is it we are about, pray tell? And why are we gathered here?

–Raymond Carver, “All My Relations”

What the hell do we want? What is our heart’s desire? What are all the dreams we still cling to as realistic and attainable? These, of course, as opposed to those we still harbor as old scars from the people we once hoped we would be and the lives we imagined ourselves living.

For some of us, those old scars –the remnants of exploded dreams and ideals– have left us hobbled and hunchbacked. Still, though we may never be astronauts or artists or pop singers, there are still things we desperately want. We are not finished with desire. Those who would claim to be –and I don’t give a rat’s ass if they consider themselves Buddhists or burnouts– have left themselves for dead. They have shut their eyes. Or they are liars. They may have no waking recollection, but they still dream they are flying. They still climb ladders into the clouds and revisit magic sanctuaries they long ago tried to convince themselves didn’t exist. In their dreams they still feel the consoling touch of human hands.

Such people have forgotten that invisibility was once upon a time a wondrous fantasy rather than a modern malaise, that it was a gift that allowed those to whom it was bestowed the opportunity to see the world and their place in it with absolute clarity. Now, though, it is an easy trick to pull off, an affliction from which we pray –if we are still able to pray– to be delivered.

We may want many things, but what we desperately want is to be seen, and once seen to be recognized; once recognized to be heard, and once heard to be known.

All men should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

—James Thurber

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

—e.e. cummings

If I die, survive me with such sheer force

that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,

from south to south lift your indelible eyes,

from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.

I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,

I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.

Don’t call up my person. I am absent.

Live in my absence as if in a house.

Absence is a house so vast

that inside you will pass through its walls

and hang pictures on the air.

Absence is a house so transparent

that I, lifeless, will see you, living,

and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.

—Pablo Neruda, “Absence”

Somewhere earlier in the afternoon there was a string of words that seemed almost like a revelation. That is now an old, painfully familiar story, and at the bottom of the day I can no longer recall those words, that revelation. I cannot even truly retrace my steps, or the journey (a laughable term in this instance, as in many instances) of the day behind me.

I do remember thinking at some point, “Look at this fucking place,” referring, I think, to some typical stretch of over-developed suburbia. I also remember thinking, “Why doesn’t the President just decree that henceforth all American flags be displayed at permanent half-staff?”

That wasn’t my revelation, but it does make real sense to me. It would be a rare and honest acknowledgment that this country is in a now constant state of mourning, and so lingering and pervasive is the sense of sorrow that most of us really could use such ubiquitous public reminders of the shame and grief we should be feeling.

As I say, though, that wasn’t my revelation, and so qualifies as little more than a digression and a brief reprieve from my usual preoccupation with words that have gone missing.

But couldn’t it all have been

a little nicer,

as my mother’d say. Did it

have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?

I know this body is impatient.

I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.

Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.

I want no more than home.

—Robert Creeley, from “Goodbye”

I cannot ask, cannot say, cannot bring myself to you, to this, to the world. I am not strong. I cannot find the lamp switch, cannot carry the light, cannot move it into all the dark places where it is needed. I cannot keep scattering bread crumbs.

I cannot formulate questions; the words get all tangled up in my head, the important and necessary punctuation mark appears in all the wrong places. It keeps asserting itself –inserting itself– too early and often, impatient, whether in an attempt to keep it vague or simple I can’t say: What? Why? How? Yes? No?

I have no control over the weather. It does whatever it wants to, entirely against my will. I have never been able to find this arrangement acceptable.

I do not eat, do not allow myself to desire, refuse to acknowledge need. I hear, whether I like it or not, bongo drums, insistent, relentless. I hear the rising and falling of jets, a ceaseless torment, the sound of some freedom I don’t have.

I wish this world trafficked in simple explanations, a foolish and naive wish if ever there was one.

I heard a man say, “I fell into this racket a long time ago and I’ve been falling ever since,” a comment that has returned to me again and again over the last several days.

My hands have become useless, can no longer reach, or have nothing in reach they wish to reach. My hands are done wishing.

I do not know what I have become.

“They’re bad and they’re good,” said Pod. “They’re honest and they’re artful –it’s just as it takes them at the moment. And animals, if they could talk, would say the same. Steer clear of them –that’s what I’ve always been told. No matter what they promise you. No good never really came to no one from any human bean.”

–Mary Norton, The Borrowers

It may be that alien animals are attracted to individuals possessed of certain psychological traits.

We can surmise that energy-seeking entities were around that night, and that the poacher’s blood would have met their needs.

Scattered work.

Magic of the city.

Web of shopping.

Antonio Villas Boas had blood extracted from a clean incision just under his chin by the unknown creature or creatures.

It also seems to be blood that the cattle mutilators are after.

Mike Corradino has reported finding ‘dead animals, chicks, rabbits, raccoons with their heads bitten off’ and the blood completely drained from their bodies. This is in areas where sightings of the skunk ape have been recorded.

Eccentric nucleus.

Degrees of publicness.

Old people everywhere.

Neither shooting nor electrocution seems to have deterred the Jersey Devil.

As near as I can describe the terror it had the head of a horse, the wings of a bat, and a tail like a rat’s, only longer.

Dancing in the streets.

Teenage society.

Sleeping in public.

The beast looked like no animal he had ever seen, and it was removing an overcoat from an old woman who was lying face down in the snow.

The rabbit-like creatures, working in concert, were purportedly strong enough to bring an ox to its knees.

Grave sites.

Holy ground.

I’m throwing a going away party

A party for a dream of mine

Nobody’s coming, but a heartache

And some tears will drop in from time to time

Don’t worry, it won’t be a loud party

Dreams don’t make noise when they die

It’s just a sad going away party

For a dream I’m telling good-bye

—Cindy Walker, "Going Away Party." (There’s a great new version on "Last of the Breed," the forthcoming Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard/Ray Price collaboration on Lost Highway)

So, then: Even after all that impenetrable darkness and the long, bruising fall, he would live, and emerge gulping and incredulous into a world painted over in a flat coat of muted gray.

In the old happily-ever-after version of such a tale, a man in the grips of blind despair would be saved by an angel and delivered into the loving arms of a family and a community of which he was an essential and irreplaceable member.

There are, though, only humans in this place we still insist on calling the real world, but some of them –and even perhaps most of them– are from time to time provided a moment of difficult grace that allows or compels them to perform the sacred duties of angels.

It happens. It has happened, even if the realities of the present require that a man in the grips of despair be first conscripted to a version of bedlam that is both humiliating and harrowing. Such a man must live through a dress rehearsal of dying on his journey back to life, and he must be able to see in bedlam a mirror as well as a sort of fractured kaleidoscope of the world he lives in.

He must recognize that he lives in, and belongs in, all versions of that world, and must learn to believe that the terrible and terrifying things he has seen and experienced are gifts just as surely as are the wonders and the wild happiness and the heavenly days he has been allowed. The man has to learn that he is who and where he however helplessly, however reluctantly is, and that is all he has, and it is a precarious –and precious– gift.

Why don’t you begin by telling me about the dreams you said have been troubling you?

I’m locked out of my house and can’t find the keys.

I am walking around in an unfamiliar city and everyone I encounter is speaking a language I can’t understand.

I look in the mirror and I don’t recognize the face that is looking back at me.

I’m moving through a huge crowd with my family and friends and when I turn around they’ve all disappeared.

I’ve lost my way in a dark forest.

I’m being swept away in an avalanche.

I’m falling from a great height.

I’m in a little flooded boat that is rapidly being carried far out to sea.

I am drowning.

I’m being suffocated, strangled, smothered, buried alive.

I am trapped in a burning building, aboard a sinking ship, in a car that is spinning out of control.

I open my eyes and can no longer see.

I open my mouth to speak and nothing comes out.

I put the needle down on record after record and hear only silence.

I wake up one morning naked in an unfamiliar room and there is a pile of blood-stained clothes next to the bed.

An inquisitor I can’t see makes impossible demands of me, and my failure to satisfy these demands will result in my banishment from the kingdom that is my life.

Driving home from work one day I discover that my address no longer exists; the house I live in and everything in it has disappeared.

I drive around and around for days at a time and never find my way home.

It was like this.

It was this way.

Here was the way it was.

This is how things stood:

Silently. Still. At attention.

That was one moment and

unfortunately this world is

all about one moment to another.

In the next moment everything was

swirling and it was as if I was a

plastic man crouched in paralyzed

terror in a snow globe filled with

sand and loose garbage and shredded paper,

cupped in a pair of giant hands

that never stopped shaking.

I felt so small and yet still

could not bring myself to answer

the phone or return your calls.

They have a term for this feeling, I’m

sure, and a remedy whose name would

fit conveniently on ballpoint pens

and pocket protectors and desk

calendars and NASCAR jumpsuits.

But, anyway, listen:

I apologize. Truly, I am sorry.

Surely nobody chooses to feel

like their skin has been

turned inside out and salted.

I suppose I learned too early

that they have a word for everything,

and that has been a ceaseless torment

as well as an occasional delight.

You should do me a favor and take

my dictionary. I would miss it,

but, really, you should. I beg of you,

take that fucking thing and feed it to the dogs.

You see, it was like this.

It was this way.

This was the way it was:

The library was the garden

where my mother took me for

swimming lessons and I

learned to drown.