Category: Yo Ivanhoe

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.

A man finds himself stranded halfway across a bridge that he suddenly realizes is taking him nowhere.

He pauses for a moment in the darkness to catch his breath and notices, for the first time, a river rolling along far below him.

The river is alive. It is moving, going unimaginable places, traveling ultimately to the sea, to which, after its long journey, it will be married. It will give itself away while at the same time becoming a part of something even greater and deeper and more mysterious and tethered to the moon.

In such an instance, faced with such a choice, what kind of fool would not choose the river?

Come on: Jump.

How long, I wonder, was the world’s longest suicide note?

And, however long it was, do you suppose it was long enough?

It was January, a Friday night just like this one.

It got dark early, and it got so dark.

The darkness didn’t even fall; it just seemed to spend half the day creeping slowly in and settling and swallowing up the city. It might have been a grim state of affairs. He could see how it might drive people to despair, or push them into dark hiding places; how it might lead them to will the telephone to ring, and then to recoil from its ringing.

What would they say if they did answer the phone, and could find their voice?

“Come over,” he supposed, or, “Come here.”

The darkness could easily shove people so far into themselves that they would never find their way back out. He saw it in the faces of the people around him –this fear, this process of retreat already well advanced– and tried hard to avoid the suspicion that he caught the occasional glimpse of it in his own reflection in the mirror.

He was lonely, but he didn’t yet wish to be left alone, though alone he so often was. He wasn’t yet ready to renounce human companionship or its possibility, the prospect that his life might still yield surprises, although he had no idea what they would be or even what he would hope them to be. Actually, he did have some idea, at least regarding the first question.

He believed he had a spirit, a soul, some purpose to his life that he had not yet fulfilled. His life, he had long imagined, was a long road that rolled toward him from some unseen place in the future and carried his destiny to him in halting and unpredictable installments.

He believed he was a decent man.

He could not, unfortunately, believe in angels.

All of these thoughts went through his head –very orderly– right up until the moment when he turned his back on the bridge and gently pushed his hands free of the railing.

He drifted out of the reach of common sense early and from then on he could barely be trusted to properly dress himself and was interested in nothing but what he called sonics.

Some days he referred to it as sonus.

He’d be down in the basement and from the top of the stairs you’d hear things, everything from the tinkling of one or two piano keys to what sounded like radio interference, pure bubbling static. There’d also be the occasional burst of some disembodied voice gargling words and belching. Electronic things, you know, squawks and blips and modulated droning.

He would insist that he was not making music.

He was discovering sound, or so he claimed.

“You are making fucking noise, is what you are doing,” the old man would say. “Why don’t we just call a spade a spade?”

Which of course only drove him right back down into the basement, back to his racket.

I guess he became somewhat famous in certain circles where the dicking around of obsessive weirdos was embraced and celebrated in a vacuum of obscurity. A prominent magazine once wrote a profile of him in which he was quoted as saying that he was assembling “a living museum of all the sounds that ever were or ever will be. All sonic possibilities will eventually be explored and discovered, or rediscovered, as the case may be. Sound is still the great neglected frontier. There are sounds from the Middle Ages that have not been heard in centuries. Or consider the cries and murmurs of extinct creatures, or an unmistakable or inimitable voice that was dead, buried, and silenced before any of us were even born. All of these things –every last one– must be recreated.”

Despite the fact that he regularly received increasingly unconscionable sums of money from foundations, we were all prepared to pronounce him a complete failure.

Dead, the slender bug astonished with its complexity of sprung parts and the volume of its viscosity, the evidence of a supreme and comically-mad engineer’s attention to detail.

One of God’s little basement projects.

The poor little dude.

What did this skittering mystery hope to find on the other side of the room? Perhaps the bug was an adventurer or explorer from a moist, subterranean world, this thwarted expedition long planned and invested with ancient dreams.

By now the creature’s community had likely surmised that the explorer was dead; who knows how such information might be conveyed among such mysterious beings. Those antennae –those quivering tendrils– likely served some highly sophisticated function for inter-species communication that humans could not even begin to surmise or understand.

Surely the bug had some sense of the dangerousness of its mission and recognized its position as unwelcome interloper; how else to explain its mad, breakneck dash from the corner, the audacious and risky traverse of the bedroom rug, in the middle of which it found itself so hopelessly exposed and ultimately doomed?

It surely imagined it was going somewhere, perhaps even to an unknown, undiscovered somewhere that had been the dream of generations of myriapods –chilopods and diplopods, centipedes and millipedes: who was to say arthropod didn’t dream of extraterritorial exploration and conquest?

After the boy smashed the bug with a tennis shoe he went back to smoking marijuana out of an apple lined with tinfoil.

He was super rushed out by the whole bug thing.

And Pink Floyd, he had discovered to his maximum satisfaction, sounded most excellent through headphones.

He’d sit up in the darkness staring across the inlet at the lighthouse on its pile of rocks, tossing its feeble light out into the fog rolling in off the lake. It was a ridiculous and hokey metaphor for exactly where he was in his life, but, what the hell, it was oddly comforting.

The Charley Patton, the Robert Johnson, the Skip James records, they sort of cancelled out the lighthouse, but that was the way he lived in the world; that was how he did things and tried to keep the darkness and light of the world in proper proportion.

For at least twenty years, since the first from his ever shrinking circle of friends and acquaintances started dropping dead from cancer, he fretted his way to the butt-end of every cigarette. Something was growing in his lungs; there was some persistent corrosion in his throat, a tightness in his chest. That nonetheless didn’t stop him from working nervously through his pack a day.

There was nothing wrong with his life, really. The things that had happened to him and the things that would happen to his body were things that happened to all sorts of people all the time. Plenty of people had it a whole lot worse, he knew that.

Yet it was an American’s particular prerogative to be miserable when there was really not that much to be miserable about. There was no form of self-pity that could not be romanticized, justified, and otherwise celebrated. That was why he loved the blues; it was so thoroughly American. European music might be tragic, might be romantically tragic, but the blues were full of the vaguest, most saturated sorrow, full of fear and pure, plain, fucked-up self-pity. They made that lighthouse feel like nothing more than the sad, distant metaphor it was, and most nights he could imagine himself crawling through the darkness for days, for months, fumbling his way toward that light, or praying for that light to find him, but somehow never quite managing to get there.

And there was no getting around it: he loved that warm, woozy feeling of drifting in the darkness, just as he loved knowing that the light was out there across the way, vigilant, there not as welcome but warning, a beacon whose job was to push him further out to sea.

Ruckert lived across a pasture from an order of monks who were famous for their gingerbread, their honey, and their singing. They’d supposedly sung at the White House once upon a time, and had made a few records. The had an orchard out behind the monastery, where they kept their bees, and Ruckert often saw the monks over there wandering around in slow motion in their bee outfits.

Summer evenings Ruckert would sit out on his porch drinking beer and watching fireflies drifting around out in his pasture. On many such evenings the monks would throw open their doors and windows and the sound of their singing would travel for great distances in the countryside.

Tormented as he routinely was in those days, the singing of the monks experienced in this manner never failed to give Ruckert a warm burst of uncommon pleasure.

The autumn changing of his storm windows was always a harbinger of Ruckert’s annual onslaught of severe melancholy. He knew that from that day forward, until traditionally the first warm day of spring, he would be locked away from the music of the monks and their languid dance with the bees.

On very rare occasions in the dead of winter, however, Ruckert would hear the faint murmur of the singing monks as he dashed back and forth from his car in the driveway.

In the almost ten years he had lived across the pasture from the monks, Ruckert had never exchanged so much as a word with a single one of them, even as he lived with the constant fear that one of them would someday escape from the monastery and show up at his door seeking asylum.