Category: Yo Ivanhoe

There are such beautiful stories tucked away in even the quietest, most settled lives.

Maybe people today don’t have the kind of access to memory that folks seemed to have in previous generations. The whiz-bangery of this world crowds out the wonder, and makes it hard to have, or recognize, singular experiences for what they are.

All that bright spectacle and noise pounding away at everyone from all sides, and so much desire, so many commonplace marvels to take for granted, that I suppose it’s rarer all the time for anyone to feel like they’re ever truly and actively in the moment.

We live surrounded, and even when we’re alone we’re distracted, occupied by passive entertainment, and lonely.

Still, people do stumble into moments of grace or pure magic, and sometimes they can’t help but be momentarily startled out of their lives.

That’s the sort of thing that used to happen all the time.

I have a journal in my great-grandfather’s hand in which he recounts his rural childhood in the days before electrification. He writes of venturing out on Christmas Eve and walking down the long driveway of the family farm. He and his siblings would stand in the middle of the dirt road, surrounded by the snow-swept countryside, and they would listen to the church bells ringing out from the little towns that were scattered throughout the dark fields in every direction.

He said: This is a disappearing act for the ages, with a little of that all-the-king’s-horses-and-all-the-king’s-men business thrown in for good measure –although I should say that it never struck me as particularly surprising that horses wouldn’t be much good at putting things back together, lacking as they do opposable thumbs, not to mention hands.

It’s bad, though, the place I find myself, he said –or, rather, wrote.

This was on stationery from some Howard Johnson’s in Florida:

I’m smeared all over the sidewalk, my brains sprung clean out of my broken skull, black birds picking throught the gore.

Have you ever wondered what happens to the stuff that’s in your mind when your brains get bashed out? Does it evaporate like a gas? Or is it still all stashed away there in the leaking coils of meat? I don’t have any idea. I suppose I’m about to find out.

Do me a huge favor and give me back my corner, my floor, the feeling of solid ground beneath my tangled feet.

I’m waiting for another dog to answer my piss.

Hey, wait, listen to this.

What’s that you say? You don’t hear anything?

That’s exactly my point.

Anyway, here’s the thing, to get back to my original question: You can’t just stick a knitting needle into a pile of brains and say, There’s an idea.

There’s a thought. There’s a memory.

And there –right there— is a fucking dream.

Was, if you know what I’m saying.

A night for Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” for roast beef sandwiches with horseradish, for wrenching squalls, for geese sailing across the sky, for the tired old monkey business with the flag and the usual recrimination, for the bowed back and the metaphoric broken teeth.

What do you take me for, a leader? I am only a little more this every day, maybe a little better or a little worse, but always this same skin, these same bones, the same cross-wired brain and stuttering heart.

I make a good mix CD. I have decent taste in footwear. I have a way I like to imagine the world, but the world is just a solid, reliable, and challenging reality, and is unconcerned with my imagination.

But still.

What an unsettling business, that hamstrung day behind me. This is the time of year when a man should live in the country, where things are clearer and you can watch things develop in a more leisurely fashion. You can see stuff coming from a long way off out there. There’s a lot more darkness of the pleasant kind, and music fills a quiet room the way it never quite can in the city.

Was it a pale bird or a pale horse I saw in a dream, standing silent and unmoving in a late autumn wood shot full of moonlight?

Why the fuck should so much depend on a red wheelbarrow, no matter what color it might be?

Three a.m., pacing and muttering and climbing the walls and karate-kicking like a madman.

I had waking dreams of the end of the world. I was trapped in a bell tower, tossing pennies –penny after penny from a giant bucket full of pennies– at chickens rooting around in the rubble beneath me. The stairs that could have taken me down from the tower had collapsed. In the distance I saw a line of blindfolded children, holding hands and being led along a trail by two hooded dwarves. I tried to get their attention by banging on the bell with my fists until my knuckles were bloody.

At exactly this moment in the waking dream, I was standing at the front window, staring down into the street, when I felt what I was certain was a hand grasping my own. I turned around, startled fully awake, and discovered there was no one there.

Okay, Mister Bones, let’s go out back and see just what you’re up to.

–Image copyright Karel Cudlin

What am I? What shall I do? What can I believe and hope for? Everything in philosophy can be reduced to this.

–Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

As long and as far as they can stare into their magic spyglasses they strive to glimpse ever deeper into the star clutter, those little men with their frightening focus and faraway eyes. Lab-coated pygmies dreaming into the darkness, looking for further evidence of their –and our– insignificance. Let’s face it: they already have in their possession too many useless secrets while the rest of us are still five years old and paralyzed, wonder-stunned in the presence of what are essentially variants on the old Alka-Seltzer rocket, the spider web, and the firefly.

The world can do whatever it wants with you. Don’t hesitate. It can all go so quickly, everything, and then you’ll be left alone in the dark with a television, trying to either forget or remember your dreams, depending on how far along you are in the process of evaporating.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

–Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

‘You must journey down another road,’ he answered, when he saw me lost in tears, ‘if ever you hope to leave this wilderness.’

–Dante, Paradisio

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

–Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

Never before had a mind come to a more majestic halt.

–Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

The summer is fading. The moon is easing down to sleep in the trees, even as the stars step back into the dark country of heaven. They look like a small cluster of island villages in the North Sea, seen from an airplane at night.

A fox, interloper here in the middle of a city overrun by the swelling chorus of cicadas singing summer’s requiem, does its solitary, long-legged Mardi Gras dance down an empty street.

These are, I suppose, precious days in the middle of a man’s life. If you’re going to find yourself at the crossroads it’s nice to have such pleasant diversions while you mull your options, nice to still have options, to still sense the road forking off in so many directions wherever you happen to find yourself.

Take your time, the night says, it’s yours, even if there’s less of it now than there was yesterday, than there was last September. Take your sweet fucking time.

It’s hard to imagine, on an evening like this, that there’s a single thing out there to be afraid of, or that all your failures add up to anything but a series of minor follies. It’s all frankly hard to imagine, this life, this world, the world stretching to the horizon in the darkness and out into space beyond even the most distant stars.

I’ve had one too many fucking nickels pulled out of my ear, the younger of the two men said.

He was sitting on the floor, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, pajama bottoms, and badly worn bedroom slippers. He had declined the offer of a seat on the sofa, choosing instead to slump down against the wall and cross one leg over the other at the knee. He was nervously jostling the slipper on his left foot, slipping it on and off and tapping along to some beat in his head or blood.

Butterflies walk, he said.

They fly, the older man said.

But they must also sometimes walk. Some of them probably spend a good deal of time walking.

The older man shrugged, removed his glasses, and placed them upside down on his desk.

This shit wears you out, the younger man said.

What shit is that?

This query was followed by a prolonged silence. The older man eventually repeated the question. What shit is that? he asked.

Oh, the younger man said, I think you know what shit I’m talking about.

Why don’t we make an attempt to narrow it down, the older man said. Perhaps we could isolate some specific things that are wearing you out.

Shit, the younger man said. The shit. This shit. We’ve been over this before.

Well, the older man said, the problem as I see it is that we never seem to get beyond this same general complaint. I think you need to dig a bit deeper into things.

Into the shit? the younger man asked.

If that’s how you choose to think about it, yes.

What is this music? the younger man asked.

It’s Chopin. The Nocturnes.

Please turn it the fuck up, the younger man said.

 

 

The way you throw your head

back and show your broken

teeth to the stars.

How you laugh laugh laugh,

nodding, your eyes pinned

back to your perfect ears.

I love that.

The places you take me

and the way you allow

yourself to be taken,

wherever you might be,

so suddenly by sleep–

I love that.

Especially that.

Early Berleson had long since grown accustomed to the static routine of his middle years. He would sleepwalk through the day at work, make his way home in a sort of empirical blackout, and then, eventually, the night would just fall out from under him and leave him floating in murky space, listening to the strains of Mahler from someplace far off. It sounded almost like a transmission from a ghost satellite.

The planet felt frozen in his skull like a starfish paralyzed in amber. He could sometimes convince himself that his bones were locked up in his skin, and he supposed he would never again shimmy to an ecstatic piece of music.

As a younger man, life had rolled through his veins like a carnival ride, and he had found great and simple pleasure in those moments alone in his bachelor apartment, lunging around –often enough naked– to his old records. It frequently depressed him to recognize that he would in all likelihood die from shame if he were ever subjected to a videotape of himself in the midst of his happiest moments.

Now, outside his windows in the night there was a humid scrim crouched on the neighborhood and he could hear the dense rattle of bugs and the sound of idling air conditioners and sprinklers shaking their sand maracas up and down the block. Beyond that, the city, a wash of white noise interupted by the occasional burst of something sleepless.

It would likely be fair to say that people who wrote about concrete for a living couldn’t write for squat, and Early had made his peace with the fact that it wouldn’t do him any good to try to sprinkle a little fairy dust on the copy. Who really gave a rat’s ass?

Even after editing the damn magazine for almost ten years he still didn’t have the foggiest idea who read the thing, but assumed increasingly that no one did or could. It was clearly just one of those things that people in the trade received and threw on the coffee table at the office.

The journal had a peer review process that essentially made Berleson’s job unnecessary; he was supposed to edit the thing for grammar and style. If he was feeling particularly bored or ambitious he might go through the copy and clean up obvious messes, but lately it took more gumption than he could muster to read through most of the stuff even once.

Every once in a great while he’d receive a letter from someone complaining about the virtually unreadable nature of the journal, and these letters gave him immense pleasure. Berleson relished one letter in particular, so much so that it was hanging in a frame above his desk. “I realize it’s only a concrete magazine,” this person had written, “but, Jesus Christ, I’d think you could at least find some better writers.”

Only once it happened, only the one time, that once upon a time, the only memory I have left that inspires anything for the man but disgust.

And even so, it wasn’t love I was feeling that day, but a sort of plain pity and cruel fascination, but, Jesus, it was a great moment, almost like something from Shakespeare, if Shakespeare is as great as everyone says he is.

And that day is one thing that can make me look back, into that sad, lost territory of forever gone, where the only family I ever had still lives.

We were never a clan that had a very generous interpretation of the whole concept of a family.

My dad had a brother (this also I guess I remember), and one night the two of them stood in the shadows of the entryway to our house, arguing as they often did, and I heard the brother say something about blood, maybe “blood is thicker than water,” and the old man hissed, “That doesn’t mean shit to me,” and that was the last time I ever saw that particular uncle.

Yet whatever else you can find to say about my father, he loved my mother in apparently the only way he knew how. She was a nervous, harried woman, a dramatic smoker who could get loud in a hurry and make spectacular messes, and I suppose I can say this now: I don’t believe I was ever inspired to really love either of them.

This one time, though, I was young, but already at an age where I could see my way out, or imagine it, and was thinking pretty obsessively of someplace beyond all that then.

My mother had left us, gone a few towns over to live with her sister, and I can tell you now that it was permanent and had, I think, something to do with poverty.

This was after the war, and my father had not gone (asthma), but had stayed home and did what I cannot honestly tell you, but we had never owned anything. After my mother left, my father went through this long stretch where he saved every penny he could get his hands on, and after moving down a long post-war waiting list he had finally taken possession of a gleaming black Impala –or something that looked kind of like an Impala– and that day, I remember, he came home actually trembling with excitement and laughing in a strange and almost nervous way, and he said, “C’mon, kid, let’s go say hello to your ma and just see what she says now.”

So off we went and it was rough country and the old man was taking the long way so as to avoid gravel.

I can still see it all clearly even now: the black clouds boiling and moving fast, almost like time-lapse photography, this swift, spectacular production of weather, what weather can do when it’s in a hurry and it’s July and humid in the middle of the country.

The windows were open and you could smell the wind, the way it is before a big storm moves in, wet, suddenly cool, and sweeping along with it all the smells of the country.

The old man was really rocketing along in that Impala, leaning and squinting over the steering wheel, muttering something not yet angry, but more pleading: Go, go, go, you sonofabitch, go.

The rain came hard when it came, chopping rain, and the wind rose up and drove the rain across the road in rippling sheets, and there was hail right behind it, hail growing right before our eyes until it was the biggest hail I’d ever seen. Hail that was loud, deafening, banging off the roof of the Impala and richocheting off the hood and careening at wicked angles into the ditches.

The place he finally found was closed, a truckstop long since vacant, with a big, empty parking lot. The old man beached the Impala there, beneath a pump shelter that was cluttered with trash.

And there we stood, the old man hunched and incredulous, his face gray and screwed into a squint of absolute disbelief, his bottom lip clamped in his front teeth, a cigarette burning in his trembling and stained fingers.

That one time I think I saw tears.

I’m sure I did.

He tossed his cigarette out into the rain and clenched his fists and he cried. Then he seemed to be leaning, almost like he was going to pitch over, and rocking on his heels, and cursing under his breath as he stared at his new car, which was gleaming even then, even as hailstones were still puddled and melting in the rooftop dents.