I’m got the car loaded with music, my dog, and blankets, and am headed west into the teeth of a blizzard. I’m preparing to be erased by the endless range and big sky. Wish me luck. I’ll be back in a week, and if I figure out how to use the technology I might post from the road.
If you feel like it, send me some poems, stories, or reading suggestions while I’m gone. I’m in a serious inspiration drought.
Please be well.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Layers”
Two days and two nights the tiny ship sailed into the great lake. Just after sunset on the third day the ship came within sight of an island rising out of the lake.
The island was shaped like a large puff pastry, and was dense with sturdy pines, many of which had survived generations in that inhospitable place. Jagged rocks were piled up all around the circumference of the island, and the wind was driving waves against these boulders, creating loud and frequently spectacular explosions of cold water that rose high into the night sky and were scattered like luminous fragments of colored glass.
The Captain gave the order for his crew to drop anchor. My heart was once again loaded into a round tub of a rowboat and lowered into the heaving water. A dozen of the stoutest crew members manned the oars and wrestled the boat through the waves. My heart, frozen and lacquered with ice, was now a surprisingly heavy and awkward burden.
A weathered dock jutted almost imperceptibly out into the lake at the bottom of a trail that emerged from the trees. The mice maneuvered their rowboat into a position alongside this dock.
A trio of young women came down the trail through the woods, their way lit by a swaying lantern. No words were exchanged as my heart was transferred from the rowboat to a wheelbarrow. As the women began to push the wheelbarrow back up the trail, the little boat was already straining back out into the mist of the lake.
The trail zigzagged through the trees, purposely digressive and worn over centuries at sharp, almost forty-five degree angles designed to ease the steep incline. The growth of old trees obscured the fact that the island jutted out of the lake to such an extent that its exact center was a strenuous climb from anywhere around the island’s perimeter. The trees also hid from view a large chalet-style cabin that had been constructed on a stone foundation at the top of the island.
A sort of tribe had occupied this cabin for many generations. They were quiet, purposeful people, small of stature and somehow not entirely human. Though possessed of keen senses, every member of this strange tribe was mute. All of them, everyone that had ever occupied the island, was descended (in a manner of speaking) from a man who had settled there long, long ago, this after having traveled a great distance by boat, accompanied by three giant mastiffs.
This man had fancied himself an alchemist. Once established on the island, however, all of his attempts at alchemy had been failures. Undaunted, and gifted with a prodigious and magical imagination, he had nonetheless succeeded in time in conjuring, out of the raw materials at hand, companions for himself. In the laboratory where he had hoped to turn base materials into gold he had learned instead to produce breathing beings. And having failed at alchemy in a literal sense, this founder of the island, and the generations that followed him, became in time recyclers of human hearts. They were surgeons and they were artisans.
The first heart had arrived on the island in the middle of the 19th century, on a cool June night when the moon was full and the sky was so clear that the moonlight had made of the calm lake’s surface a glimmering jewel box. The original heart made its journey alone in a boat.
Perhaps its arrival in that place was purely happenstance, and it is entirely possible that had not the moon been so bright that night, the heart would have drifted right past the island and continued on its solitary journey north. As it was, though, the heart had glowed like a luminous garnet floating far out in the lake, and some of the island’s residents had spied the mysterious object and rowed out to investigate. Puzzled and amazed by their discovery, they had towed the boat ashore and lugged the heart up the trail.
The founder had known immediately that what he was looking at was a human heart, badly damaged if not entirely broken. Without hesitation he had determined that they would repair this heart, and after much trial and error he and his assistants succeeded in restoring it to perfect working condition.
Having mastered the most difficult task of all, they were faced with the question of what to do with the heart. For a time they kept it in a jar in their laboratory, where it pumped and gurgled and provided continual astonishment. The old alchemist was troubled by its presence, though; he felt certain that the result of their hard work was destined to find its way south, back to the human world, where he knew good hearts were always in great demand.
Eventually, as is so often the case, birds provided the solution. A charm of finches that often spent summers on the island had established a sort of telepathic communication with some of the mute residents, and when the finches flew south in advance of the first snow they carried with them the story of the repaired human heart. In the land beyond the lake the word traveled through all the animals of the forest, and finally was passed along to an ancient Guild of heart deliverymen. Though the members of this Guild hated being called fairies, they were in fact, at least technically speaking, fairies.
The Potentate of the Guild of Heart Deliverers worked closely with a network of animals and angels (this sort of thing, of course, is always difficult to understand and explain), and had been providing heart transplants centuries before human medical science had ever dreamt of such a thing. Before connecting with the island laboratory, however, the Guild had always had to work with whatever raw materials (often damaged) they could get their hands on, even as they were diligent in attempting, as often as possible, to replace bad hearts with hearts possessed of genuine goodness.
Once a relationship –however unusual, mysterious, and informal– was established between the Guild of Heart Deliverers and the old alchemist, hearts began to arrive at the island on a regular, if unpredictable, basis. Some were transported by geese; others, like my own, were ferried by boat.
These days each of the hearts is boiled in a mixture of fish oil, cedar berries, and quicksilver, jostled for days in a contraption that resembles a giant rock tumbler, and then outfitted with all new plumbing.
Twice a year –once in the early spring and again in the late autumn (usually as a harbinger of the first snows)– a flock of sub-angels arrives at the island. These creatures are grimy and ungainly, seemingly part geese, part human. They are, though, celestial beings, but crippled, still tormented by mortal dreams and aspirations, and as the lowest order of angels they are assigned a majority of the grunt work.
The repaired hearts are fed to these angels, who fly them back south and implant them in the chests of their intended recipients as they sleep.
The ragged angels will be making their semi-annual trek to the island in a few weeks. I’m holding out hope that I’ll be one of the truly rare and lucky recipients and will get my own heart back. Bigger, I hope, and better.
God says if you love me you will make me Beef Wellington. Even though you are a vegetarian. We will go bow hunting for angels. Aim for the heart, even though they do not have hearts. They are most vulnerable when they are playing the harp. I hate harps. They keep me up when I want to sleep. I must change this some day. If you love me you will let me sleep. If you love me maybe I will. Let hours turn into years. The smell of meat and pie floating through endless kitchens of desire, which is heaven, what else could it be? Warm ovens burning all day remind me of loss. Which is another word for love. Which I have been explaining for thousands of years.
–Hugh Steinberg, “The Cranky God Poem.” From Potionmag.org (via Rileydog)
But when he came home there was no one to tell what he had seen –and if he picked the flowers and brought them home in his hands, there was no one to give them to. And when at evening, past the dark blue shape of a far-off island, the sun sank under the edge of the sea like a red world vanishing, the hunter saw it all, but there was no one to tell what he had seen.
—Randall Jarrell, from The Animal Family
But I’m here, though, aren’t I? At least for now. Don’t count me out.
There is grandeur in this view of life.
Funny how we hunker down in our little canoes
in the middle of the scummy green swamp and wait and wait
for hope to appear, for ghosts to die and come back as bodies.
–Susan Wood, from “The Lord God Returns”
One night a few weeks back I got whacked with a shovel and shoved in the trunk of a beat-to-shit Nova. The tweaker who whacked me drove me out into the country and dumped my body in a corncrib.
It was a cold night, and as I rocked at the edge of consciousness my heart was removed from my chest by a tiny old man with strong hands. This little man, who was wearing a miner’s helmet, perched on my breastbone and opened my chest with a rusty saw. There was a stiff wind whipping across the fields, and to keep himself from blowing away, the man –he was from a long line of heart deliverers– had secured his body to the framework of the corncrib with strands of baling twine. He worked long and diligently, and the procedure was precise but bloody work.
When he had finished he wrapped my heart in burlap and loaded it into a waiting carriage pulled by two peacocks and driven by a fox wearing a red velvet top hat.
The carriage traveled many miles along dark roads. At some point during its journey it began to snow, and the snow grew heavier the further the carriage traveled.
Eventually the carriage entered heavily wooded country, where the sky was suddenly blown free of clouds and a bright moon illuminated mile after mile of evergreen trees heaped with snow and mottled with shadow.
The fox drove long into the night, all the while singing and whistling quietly to the drowsy and plodding peacocks. In the early hours of the morning they arrived at a lake deep in the woods.
The lake was a vast thing, dark and ceaselessly rolling shattered moonlight ashore. It stretched to the far horizon, and was so black in the distance that the constellations appeared to be complex geometrical diagrams drawn upon a chalkboard.
Out in the lake some distance was anchored a miniature sailing ship with a scurrying crew of mice. My heart was a very small thing by this time, and it was carefully unloaded from the carriage, unwrapped, and packed in a nest constructed of pine needles and birch bark. It was taken aboard the ship by a contingent of mice in a rowboat.
While the peacocks drowsed and pecked tentatively at the snow-covered earth, the fox watched these proceedings from his perch on the carriage. Though he had been trained to not eat the mice, he was distracted by their presence all the same.
Once my heart was safely secured in the ship and the crew members were back aboard, the captain, a fat old mouse with long whiskers and a jaunty cap, gave the order to set sail. The ship eased out into the darkness of the lake, rocking in the turbulent waves, its sails providentially bowed by the stiff breeze that carried my heart north at a steady clip.
(To be continued)
Again and again we put our sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed them back into their death, each moving slowly into the dark, disappearing as our hearts visited and savored, hurt and yearned.
—Jack Gilbert, from “Kunstkammer”
Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight
can never pass away.
What then is required? Light! Light! Light in floods!
–Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
A shattered mirror, I’ve discovered, really is bad luck.
I stare into the fractured reminder of this fact every morning, and it’s as if entire continents of my face have broken free and drifted out into the dark sea of who I once was and who I thought I was going to be.
Still, I thank god or someone, some big over-thing that lives above me or in my head –it doesn’t matter; whatever and whoever it or he or she is, I thank them. It could be a consortium or a cabal for all I know or care, just so long as they don’t forsake me.
It’s a big something, that’s all I know. It shoves me. It calls my attention to the sky when the sky is deserving of attention, which is often. It stirs things in me, and keeps moving words from my skull to my fingers and tongue, even when I am –or should be– too weary and brain-fogged to speak my own name, let alone form complete sentences.
It keeps shooting off bottle rockets, flares, and the occasional full-blown fireworks display. Time and again it drills its way through the murk to the place where my laughter and wonder are stashed, and calls them forth in bursts and spasms.
For all these gentle miracles I thank God or someone, some big over-thing, etc. I give thanks also for Otis Redding, for E.B. White, for Czeslaw Milosz and Stanley Kunitz, for the Brothers Grimm, for Tom Waits and Ornette Coleman, for sweat and love and tenderness and compassion, for human hands and hearts, for the companionship of dogs, and for Nat Kendricks and the Swans’ version of “Mashed Potatoes.”
And for mashed potatoes. And for fried potatoes at the Band Box. And for potatoes in general.
Because of this gratitude, I want, like Zbigniew Herbert, to make of my imagination “an instrument of compassion.”
Like Tolstoy (I think), I want to learn to believe that people are more important than art.
I want to believe that.
I want to offer love, understanding, and compassion to the troubled and broken people I come in contact with. I want to hear their stories, to listen to how they hurt and how they got hurt and how they got lost. I want to understand if I can their strange logic and imagine the unreal places that have become so terrifying and so real to them.
I know I will fail and fail miserably (I have failed and failed miserably), but these are things I want all the same.
I am trying very hard not to be sad in this world.
Last night, after midnight, I took my snow saucer over to the big hill by the lake and plunged again and again into the darkness until I got what I came for: tears. Tears of sorrow. Tears of joy. Tears of gratitude.
Lord, grant me the strength and agility of those who build sentences
long and expansive as a spreading oak tree, like a great valley; may they
contain worlds, shadows of worlds, and worlds of dreams.
—Zbigniew Herbert, from “Breviary”
I could write a treatise
on the abrupt change
of life into archaeology
–Zbigniew Herbert, from “Abandoned”
People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.
—James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Many people are understandably concerned about the status of their beloved companion animals in the afterlife. We receive queries on the subject all the time. Before I address that issue, however, I’d like to clear up a few semantic misunderstandings regarding Paradise.
We’re decidedly old school up here, as you might imagine, and so far as we’re officially concerned you’re all animals –find a Latin dictionary and look up animus or anima sometime; while you’re at it you might find it curious, if not instructive, to note that animus, a word that originally connoted mind and spirit, is now commonly defined by humans as a feeling of hostility. Something to think about, I suppose.
At any rate, what you tend to think of as animals are here regarded as beasts, and the admission criteria for beasts is a complicated business. The rules and regulations have evolved slowly over many centuries. I can, however, tell you that no beast, not even the most ill-tempered, poorly behaved, and ferocious, goes to hell. We don’t hold these creatures responsible for their behavior, and when they die or are killed, they are simply dead.
There is, though, a place for beasts in Paradise; there are, in fact, a number of places. Some of them are what you might think of as sanctuaries or refuges, where the majority of the beasts are segregated from the population of human animals.
Most of the bestial sanctuaries are actually, in fact, offshore, a couple islands just off the coast which have been set aside for cats, primates, and horses. As with humans, however, not all cats, primates, and horses are admitted to Paradise, although virtue is not the determining criteria for these beasts. To enter Paradise –or rather, to be granted eternal refuge on these Paradisiacal adjuncts– a cat, horse, or monkey has to have had the sort of relationship with a human whereby it was perceived by its human companion to have been in possession of a soul. Such relationships constitute what is officially called “Empathic Baptism.”
This is admittedly a rule that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it’s been in place since the last major ammendments and revisions to the admissions criteria were signed into the Book of Law at the end of the 19th century.
Some of the more intelligent beasts have traditionally been granted special exemptions in Paradise. An ocean was created to accomodate certain aquatic creatures, a decision that was not without controversy, particularly after dolphins rather quickly found eternity boring and petitioned for removal, a request that was, following much deliberation, reluctantly granted. There are no watercraft in Paradise, and very few of the human animals partake in swimming, even though the activity is permitted under certain circumstances.
Dolphins, we were led to understand, are naturally curious and social beings, and they compared the ocean in Paradise to an aquarium with few visitors and even fewer diversions. God, they also complained, showed insufficient interest in them.
Dogs are the only beasts given a blanket pass to Paradise proper –good dogs, I should say, but there have been very few remembered examples of dogs having been denied admission. I have to admit that, being a dog person, I find this arrangement more than satisfactory. There are, though, plenty of people –activists, mainly– who carp about the issue all the time, but it’s the way things are in Paradise. This is essentially a very conservative place, where proposals for even minor changes are frowned upon and met with stiff resistance from the governing council. There are also, I should say, a lot of people here who have no apparent love for beasts of any kind, and this is a constituency that is constantly complaining about the absence of meat from our diets. If we had a democratic system in place here and the matter of admitting beasts was put to a vote I have no doubt that the creature lovers among us would be soundly defeated.
Certainly people recognize that if you open the gates to cattle and chickens and rats and the like you’re going to have a big problem on your hands in a hurry. The mortality rate and life expectancy of most beasts makes any sort of concessions or compromises on this point problematic, to say the least. We’re already packed in so tight that social interaction is all but impossible. The streets are always so crowded that, with the exception of my daily trips to the office (my job, like all jobs here, is a volunteer position) I virtually never leave my dormitory any more, and I’m forced to share my bed with the six dogs who spent most of their earthly lives with me. It’s admittedly not the most comfortable of arrangements, but I guess that’s the price you pay for attaching yourself to other living creatures, and I wouldn’t think of making a fuss.
I had a neighbor for a time –a woman from Portland– who bitched so loudly and for so long over the refusal to grant an exception for her ferret that she was eventually shipped back to Purgatory until she learned to keep her yap shut.
I can’t say I was sorry to see her go.
A man went out to his car one night, started the ignition, inserted a Chuck Berry disc in the CD player, and drove off into the darkness in search of space.
He wanted to get out from under the street lights and the general overglow of the city, out beyond the tangle of freeways and the noise of rising and falling jets. It was an old habit of his, to just pack his bag and go off in search of the unfamiliar.
He’d been running from things most of his life, and had become expert in the art of retreat. By this time he could find the dead spots all around the country without an atlas. He knew how to follow rivers and find large bodies of water. He could feel the darkness drawing him like a magnet, and knew that where there was darkness there would be silence and space. There would be little towns thrown down in the middle of nowhere, towns where every home and business turned out the lights, drew the shades, and retired at a reasonable hour.
He’d roll down his car windows and any music at all –Hank Williams, the Four Tops, Jimmy Reed– would sound like the most abrasive punk rock drifting out into those empty streets.
There were reliably forlorn motels in such places, motels where he’d have to rouse the owner from bed and could back his car right up to the door of his room.
On such nights and in such places he could still be anyone or anything, and that was a feeling he’d been trying to hold onto his entire life.
All night in my dreams,
a battle raged, destroying
the only world I loved,
bombs falling on the city
where my beloved slept, in
another house, another bed,
on the other side of a lake.
Deep in sleep, which I
surrender to willingly,
if seldom, I felt such
despair and tried without
success to kick my way to the
surface, but was sentenced
to drown while anonymous
armies plundered my town.
In the morning, when I shook
the sleep from my head
and hauled myself from bed,
there were soldiers at my
door. Beyond them I could
see my neighbors already
face down in the street.
One of the soldiers, barely
a man, pointed a rifle at my
teeth. Come along now, he
said, You’ve had your fun.
I do not wish to go below now.
–Henry David Thoreau
I’ve got no stomach for demolition. Hell, I can’t even stand the thought of dismantling the Christmas tree. It tears me up, so there it sits, six weeks beyond the holidays and still strung with lights and hung with ornaments, the needles showering to the floor every time the door opens or closes.
So there you have it: I’m one of those people.
Turns out I’m also not much good at loving. My first mother pronounced me unlovable right before she handed me over with my suitcase to the woman from the county. I was plenty old enough to understand exactly what she said, what she meant, and what the hell was going on, and you’d be correct in assuming that an experience like that will leave a long-term impression on a boy.
My other mothers, such as they were, apparently didn’t see much in me to refute the first one’s assessment. Lord knows, though, it isn’t for want of trying that nobody’s loved me, at least so far as my end of the deal is concerned. I learned early to “Yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am,” and I’d skedaddle to fetch a drink of water for anybody who asked. I always made an effort to hold the door for the ladies.
Not, of course, that any of it ever seemed to do me a lick of good. You’ll understand, certainly, that being so wholly unlovable left me in a mighty tough position. Leaves me, I guess I should say.
I could dig around in my closet and find a Scrabble game whose tiles are stained with my own blood, and the story I could tell you regarding that curiosity might go some ways toward explicating the sort of man I’ve become.
I’ve learned, though, that that would be a complete waste of time, mine and, most especially, yours.
I close my eyes, whistle, and send the dogs off into the brush to see if they can scare up any words. I’m not sure how long I sit here –it varies, I suppose, from night to night. When it gets quiet like this, though, and I can’t even hear the rustling or baying of the dogs, I get a little bit spooked.
Some nights –more and more often lately– they’re out there a long time, traveling great distances across the barren fields. Winter tends to drive the words underground. I’m too tired to run with the dogs, it’s dark, and there are too many slippery patches, so I just sit here quietly with my eyes closed, waiting.
I no longer expect the dogs to bring back any stories or even paragraphs, and a sentence of any length would frankly be a surprise at this point. One night, I’ve no doubt, the dogs will finally disappear for good, but for now I’m grateful for whatever random, useless words they manage to drag back and drop at my feet. A ‘why’ or two, a ‘what,’ maybe a ‘mule,’ ‘moon,’ ‘river,’ or ‘road.’ A good night might net me a handful of multi-syllabic words: ‘casket,’ ‘donkey,’ ‘scapegoat,’ or ‘steeple.’
At the end of the night, usually when the winter sun is casting its first bruise across the eastern horizon, I’ll gather up whatever words the dogs rustle up on their rambles and tote them back home across the fields. I’ll then brew up a pot of coffee, spread the words out on the kitchen table, and spend a couple hours moving them around, trying with little success to make them say something.
In the morning I’ll burn them in an ashtray and then toss the ashes out in the backyard.