Author: Brad Zellar

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

These angels do not look like angels. They look like old people, stooped and weary, clothed in the rags they have been wearing for centuries.

From a distance it almost appears that they are hanging their heads, but in actuality they are looking down, as they so often do, situated as they are at such a lofty remove from the old torments and joys of the earth.

They are standing together, huddled and peering down over the lip of a cloud, watching a bridge burning far below them.

A burning bridge is one of the half dozen earthly occurrences that is capable of breaking even the hearts of angels.

A bridge –all bridges– are essential symbols of the mission of angels, and the destruction of bridges is a tragedy that reverberates through the most distant and rarefied reaches of Heaven.

A burning bridge is even more tragic and lamented than a bridge obliterated through mere destruction or disaster. It is also, sadly, one of the few acts of human willfulness in which the angels are not allowed to intercede. The burning of bridges is an act of terrorism against Heaven, and reduces even the oldest angels to a pack of numb and speechless spectators at the scene of a disaster.

We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind. Routinely discounting the preponderance of evidence is not the behavior of reasonable people, nor is devaluing present experience because it may be overtaken by something worse….

Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themselves, since they must always react to forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame….

Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world. Polls indicate that we in America have not really abandoned these beliefs, and that is interesting, because what I have called our collective fiction is relentlessly this-worldly, very serious indeed about material success, of all things. Success, that object of derision in every wisdom literature ever penned, not more dignified now that it is so very slackly bound to real attainment, not more beautiful now that its appurtenances generally amount to a higher tawdriness. Knowing this, we nevertheless make it stand in the place of worth….

It is because we hope to acquire rather than to achieve –in the old language of religion, to receive rather than to give– that the good we imagine can truly be taken from our hands….

What if we understood our vulnerabilities to mean we are human, and so are our friends and our enemies, and so are out cities and books and gardens, our inspirations, our errors. We weep human tears, like Hamlet, like Hecuba. If the universe is only all we have so far seen, we are its great marvel. I consider it an honor to follow Saint Francis or William Tyndale or Angelina Grimke or Lydia Maria Child anywhere, even to mere extinction. I am honored in the cunning of my hand. This being human –people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced.

—Marilynne Robinson, “Facing Reality,” from The Death of Adam

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Layers”

Hardening your heart is difficult, stressful, and taxing work.

You’ve never been much good at it. You’re getting better, though, as you learn to accept how necessary this work is to your survival in a world where the heart is mostly useless anymore beyond its function as pump and plumbing.

The heart, you recognize, has always been a lazy symbol, unfairly expected to carry too much of the metaphorical burden for all the things –dreams, essentially– that people don’t really feel like believing in enough that they’re willing to actually do anything to make them possible. And every complicated, unrealistic, and fucked-up emotion or situation –the things people can’t process or express or think their way through– gets dispatched with cardiac shorthand.

You say you’re willing to predict that the metaphor of the heart as the repository for all of the finer sorts of human longings and dreams and desires (not to mention human damage) won’t survive the twenty-first century.

That’s what you say, just for the hell of it, just to say something.

But where then, if not the heart, do you pin all these things? What are they, really, and where do they reside?

They don’t reside anywhere, you say. They’re not residents. They’re exiles and nomads, traveling in your blood with their suitcases full of memories and grudges and desires. They wish the heart was a home and not just a useless metaphor. They’re what you are and what you feel and what you’ve been through; what’s been done to you and what you’ve done to yourself. They’re what you’ve allowed yourself to believe and become.

What have you allowed yourself to believe and become?

You’ll be damned if you know.

This world, this life, is constantly forcing you to relinquish your beliefs, sometimes incrementally, through circumstance and stealth and the process of growing older; other times through brutal shocks that we have all somehow agreed to call reality.

By now you’ve stopped believing in so many things. Shouldn’t you, though, reach a point where you recognize that you can’t afford to stop believing in a single one of the diminishing things you still believe in?

Your ideals are invisible clouds

So try not to suffocate the poor,

the peasants, with your sympathies.

They know that you’re staring at them.

—Jim Harrison, from “Easter Morning”

Dance on, you pigs, what concern is it of mine?

—Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1914

Could any of this possibly be true, these things you tell us?

No, please understand, they could not possibly be true. They could not be further from the truth.

Where is Further From The Truth? Does such a place, in fact, exist?

Yes, there is in fact such a place, and you might be surprised to learn that it is not nearly so far away as you perhaps imagine. I have myself been there many times.

You have made the voyage?

It is not a voyage, nothing at all like a voyage.

You have made the journey, then?

It is not a journey, nothing at all like a journey.

Would you at least say that when you have visited Further From The Truth it involved a trip of some sort?

I would say that it involved a short drive; I’ve even walked there on occasion. The original watertower still retains a faint trace of the town’s name, but these days people are free to call the place whatever they like, as befits a community founded by liars. Most of the natives are completely indifferent. They couldn’t care less, which is the name, by the way, of one of the suburbs of Further From The Truth.

What name is that?

Couldn’t Care Less. When Further From The Truth became such a teeming Mecca for every sort of liar and fraud, many of the residents started to move out into new suburban developments and sub-divisions, where they were free to cultivate the indifference made possible by their great fortunes, every one of which had been acquired through careers of appallingly successful deceit. The people there, it is said, are among the laziest and most contented on the entire planet.

The King was widely regarded as a complete fucking jackass, a man who traded his Kingdom and his wondrous gifts for a chain of muffler shops.

The Queen left him immediately, and was followed in short order by his retinue (for he had, in fact, once had a retinue). A few desperate and greasy palace cooks and a handful of stable hands were all that remained of his old life, and these characters he depended on to do his dirty work. There was always much dirty work to be done around the muffler shops.

Who knows where the muffler idea came from? The King himself didn’t have the foggiest notion anymore. All he could remember was that he’d been drunk one night on a riverboat casino, so drunk that he’d not only seemingly lost his magic touch but had apparently abused even the privileges of a king, and he’d been forcibly removed from the boat for urinating in a public drinking fountain.

When he eventually sobered up in a Dubuque hotel room he’d had the realization that he’d lost all interest in being King. Even the gold business had become tiresome to him; when you could turn everything you touched into gold, gold entirely lost all significance and value. The whole formal world of the court bored him to tears. He hated all that ridiculous velvet and the snug knickers and, especially, the strange and foppish hats he always seemed to find himself wearing.

When he found himself penniless in Dubuque he was pleased to discover that he felt absolutely nothing in the way of desperation or regret. If anything, in fact, he experienced something that felt almost like serenity.

Who knows? Perhaps, ultimately, he had been inspired by his older brother, who’d walked out from under his kingdom to launch a hamburger empire. All he knew was that the muffler business –lark though it might initially have been– had eventually demonstrated (and demonstrated conclusively) that he hadn’t lost his old touch after all. Yes, he’d showed them all in the end, Midas had. A man could make boodles of cash in the muffler racket.

I don’t recall if the local giant ever actually claimed to have special powers. It did, however, seem to me that he conducted himself as if he had sprung from the pages of mythology.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that this didn’t appear to be just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill giant. For one thing he was a good head taller than any giant I’ve ever seen, and he could balance small children on his nose and juggle dogs without seeming to cause the animals the slightest alarm or discomfort. The dogs actually appeared to enjoy being juggled, in fact. Some of them even slept while the giant was juggling them.

The giant didn’t have much to say, but he was one of those giants whose actions spoke louder than his words. He had a real knack for catching people when they fell, as well as for locating lost objects. He was always returning things to their rightful owners, things that had been missing for great stretches of time –decades, in several notable instances.

Some folks were suspicious of this talent, and spread rumors that the giant had actually stolen the items in question, and was hoarding these things in his lair. To dispel such rumors the giant took out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper, announcing an open house to which the entire community was invited to inspect his lair and sample his baked goods.

The giant, it turned out, was one heck of a baker, which honestly came as no surprise to his many local admirers. His generous selection of baked goods –many of them quite exotic– put to shame the offerings of any of the small bakeries in town.

Needless to say, those who chose to take advantage of the giant’s hospitality –and there was quite a turnout– saw absolutely no evidence of lost or stolen items. And the very next morning the giant delivered a pristine 1969 Chevrolet Impala, a vehicle that had been missing for over a decade, to the home of its owner, a local school board member.

Any explanation of how or where the giant found these lost objects was never forthcoming. The man was, as I mentioned, notoriously tight-lipped, and most of us had learned to live with his amiable silence.

The giant also had a special rapport with birds; he could persuade them to perch on his head and eat grain from his scalp. On occasion, when he wished to entertain children, he could coax birds to pluck sunflower seeds from his nostrils.

There were some in the community who resented the fact that the giant contributed nothing to the local economy. I have no idea how he survived, but he didn’t seem to have anything to do with money, and eventually there was a successful movement to drive the giant from his lair along a river outside of town to make way for new commercial development.

When the giant left his lair for the last time he did so peacefully, and comported himself with the quiet dignity many of us had come to expect from him. He left behind all of his possessions, with the exception of an opulent, handcrafted, and intricately detailed dollhouse that he carried away in his arms.

A large family of musically gifted grasshoppers inhabited this dollhouse. These grasshoppers, it was said, slept in tiny four-poster beds and filled their little mansion each night with the strains of beautiful music.

The giant finally established a new home for himself (and his family of grasshoppers) in a smaller neighboring community. A short time later we began to hear reports that he was healing people and performing miracles, and that, of course, was when the real trouble started for the poor fellow.

It’s a rather discouraging story, really, and I am too tired at the moment to continue with it, but I shall do so at a time in the very near future.

SWF, young enough, not yet old, weird, fine-enough looking (and that’s not just therapy talking), absolutely no interest in or patience with mingling, machinery, or the usual fanciness. Likes nasty weather, flying and creeping and vulnerable things, C-SPAN when people are just sitting around sipping from glasses of water or clearing their throats, Jeff What’s-His-Name, boiled eggs if someone else does the boiling and knows what they’re doing, Michener (just kidding), Albert Schweitzer (his mustache, anyway, if I’m thinking of the right guy, and I’m probably not), canned goods if they have interesting labels, Chick-O-Sticks, chili, dogs if they do what they’re told, coffee, cold beverages, hippies (although I suppose it kind of depends on what you mean by hippies and if you mean what I think you mean, then no), certain types of music when I’m in the mood for certain types of music, driving on bad roads, sitting on my ass listening to you play your harmonica or whatever it is you play, sitting quietly in the dark, eavesdropping, the sun when it’s least expected or most welcome, people who care enough to wave signs (just so long as they don’t try to get too close to me or ask me to sign anything), hot sauce, roaring fires, mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, potatoes, books if they’re any good, and You: If you ask questions, own at least two forks and one plate, know your way around a microwave oven, have so much passion you don’t know what to do with it all, and would please please please at least make a conscious effort to be kind and gentle and sweet.

The forest. The sea. The garden. The grindstone. The long and winding road. The moon. The stars. Sunrise. Sunset. Ecstasy. Exhaustion. The heart as metaphor. The heart as living, beating thing. Myths. Reality. Then. Now. Here. There. Beyond either here or there. ‘This pining meat.’ This ticking clock. The second hand. The hours. The days. The years. The biding of time. Its passing. Abiding. Abrasion. Erosion. Confusion. Clarity. Grace. Restlessness. Contentment. Hope. Happiness. Hopelessness. The middle passage. The middle of the night. The muddle. The crowded room. The missing thing(s). The mask. The mystery. Longing. Loss. The questions. The answers. The search. The journey. Discovery. Joy. Despair. The embrace. The surrender. The defeat. Losing your mind. Coming to your senses. Stasis. Change. Waking from a dream. Waking from a nightmare. A false start. A fresh start. A new beginning. The end. Resolve. Resignation. Acceptance. Rejection. Denial. Renunciation. Annunciation. Redemption. Resurrection. Crawling. Walking. Running. Jumping. Standing still. Love. Hate. Truth. Lies. Good. Evil. Pain. Pleasure. Passion. Sickness. Health. Torpor. Ambivalence. Indifference. Laughter. Tears. Grief. Glory. Gratitude. Keening. Lamentations. Lullabies. Fate. Destiny. Dreams. Reality. Cruelty. Compassion. Empathy. Energy. Enervation. Fatigue. Emasculation. Entreaty. Imprecation. The thresher. The threshold. Awakening. Silence. Dawn. Eternity. Imploring, pleading, begging: Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.

What makes the engine go?

Desire, desire, desire.

The longing for the dance

Stirs in the buried life.

—Stanley Kunitz, “Touch Me”

When Buddy Clister came up the hill that afternoon he wasn’t his usual shrill, braying self. This was a guy who’d once had a fistfight with Eddie Guster’s mother, and Mrs. Guster had kicked Buddy’s ass and bloodied his nose.

You’d think that would be a pretty tough thing for an aspiring two-bit punk to live down, but Buddy Clister had actually managed to not only survive the experience, but to somehow spin it to his advantage. Chalk it up to childhood, I guess; you had to sort of hand it to a guy who would slug it out with a grown woman in an apron.

Everybody probably has a Buddy Clister somewhere back in their youth: the first guy to smoke a cigarette; first guy to utter the word ‘fuck’; first guy to get his hands on a dirty magazine and, not long after that, to feel up a girl, or at least claim to have done so.

Who knows how or why such desires or knowledge come to some so young, why some seem destined to be prodigies of decadence?

On the lovely autumn afternoon I’m remembering, though, when the sun was hanging there like a herald just above the houses on Banfield Avenue, Buddy Clister, all of a jaded twelve years old, slowly pushed his bike up the hill and announced to the usual assembly of his stingray congregation that he had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.