Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

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.

—William Blake

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.

To surface each morning already grasping for every precious scrap of consciousness.

To dance and blow bubbles and reach instinctively for the brightest colors in the crayon box.

To creep through bushes and fling yourself at the world.

To howl and holler and feel the grass between your toes.

To move forward.

To lunge.

To leap.

To stomp through the calendar, oblivious.

To laugh uncontrollably, and cry uncle.

To acknowledge that the place you live remains a foreign country, almost wholly unexplored.

To see all around you entire new constellations and vast galaxies teeming with possibility.

To have pure idiot wonder and faith in the limitless miracles of your body.

To trust fully the things on which you can depend.

To harbor none but exaggerated fears and the smallest of dissolving terrors.

To be hungry for nothing but something to eat.

To be forever trusting in the arms of mercy.

To, once you stand and run, never crawl again.

To recognize that you are blessed beyond measure, and to accept your blessings as the expected, everyday miracles that they are.

To reach out.

To raise your voice.

To bite your tongue.

To listen.

To hear voices.

To change your mind.

To hold out hope, as a gift, as an offering.

To hold on.

To let go.

To be there.

To wave the white flag, victorious.

To embrace with gratitude your gifts and opportunities.

To spend time at the bottom of every day with your inventory of pleasures and fond memories.

To give yourself away.

To know that you’ve done what you could.

To be at peace.

To sleep and –not merely perchance– to dream.

Sweet dreams.

There were four of them in the car. Three of them were crammed in beside each other in the front seat, drowsy and cursing intermittently and squinting into the harsh sunrise that was splattering off a windshield already made bleary with insect grease. At some point in the night they had run themselves through a hatch in some damp, low country.

Lester Chardonay, who was seldom in a mood to brook opposition, was stretched across the back seat, laboring fitfully at sleep. From time to time he would sit up and glare with the others at the new day rising towards them down the highway.

Lester Chardonay was full of words.

“Smite and quench, boys,” he said. “Smite and quench.”

“When you put the instruments of might in the hands of them that’s right,” he said, “no injustice shall go unpunished.”

“And you shall bring his gray head down with blood to Sheol,” he said.

Lester Chardonay’s enthusiasm for some vague revenge, coupled with a long night of drinking, had resulted in the present excursion, an adventure which sunlight and uneasy sobriety were making less and less explicable to the men in the automobile’s front seat.

“I’ve never known you to leave town, Lester,” the driver said, craning his head around to address Lester in the back seat. “How come is it that you’ve come to grief with this fella clear out here?”

“Shut that thick head of yours and drive, you pea-brained son-of-a-bitch,” Lester said.

“Lester,” one of the other men said. “We was drunk. This here has become a labor, and a good piece of travel as well. Speaking for myself, I was expected this morning at the mill.”

“Gob Pritchett will kiss my ass if he has a word to say about it,” Lester said. “That mill ain’t a damn thing but gerbils on wheels.”

They drove then in silence until the sun was up out of their eyes.

“Pull over there alongside of them woods,” Lester said. “I intend to go back in there to do what a man does standing up that requires of a woman a crouch. I suspect the rest of you may need relieving as well.”

The other three men followed Lester Chardonay across the road, down into a ditch, and back into a wooded lot.

“Whether or not this is something that will enrich the soil is not a thing I am likely to know,” Lester said.

“This here is an awful nice place,” one of the other men said, smiling for Lester’s approval, which was not forthcoming. “I imagine there’s a creature or two living out here.”

One of the party went off in another direction, kicking around in the leaves. He let out a whoop. “Well I’ll be damned if there ain’t a bathtub right out here in the woods,” he said.

Lester Chardonay nodded his head and pawed at the steaming leaves with his boot. “Some was sure enough living here when this world was a better place and a man was free to shoot whatever moved through his land that didn’t belong.”

“That so, Lester?” one of the men asked.

Lester stared the man down, his jaw popping beneath his ears. “Get your sorry asses back in that car,” he said. “Before every last one of you follows my piss into this very ground.”

The three men hustled ahead of Lester Chardonay and piled back into the front seat of the car.

Later in the morning one of the men in the front seat spoke up. “Lester, I’d sure like to stop for a can of soda pop.”

“That’s a reasonable request,” Lester said, and issued an order: “Stop this here car at the first place you see along the road that has bottles of soda pop. I am thirsty as the devil himself for a can of Coca Cola.”

When they had stopped a short time later, and were standing around the car stretching and drinking their soda, Lester Chardonay made this announcement: “Many times in my long life the devil has appeared to me as a horseman, taunting me with this errand undone. Up the road a piece, near the next town over, is a snake of a fella who once upon a time gave my mama a bastard child, and put my old man in such a state that life was no use without too much liquor. That good man drunk himself into the earth howling, and my mama, as you may know, went off all those many years ago to live with that child I never did see. This here man is the man that done that awful thing to my life, and I intend to boil the meat from his skull and use it for a piss cup.”

“Aw, Lester!” one of the men said, screwing up his face.

“Mister!” Lester Chardonay shouted, turning on the man with a trembling index finger. “If you ain’t got the stomach for justice, you best stay on right here, because we sure as shit didn’t come this long way for a soda pop and a piss in the woods.”

“I can’t kill a man, Lester,” the driver of the car said.

“Then you are going to watch a man who can,” Lester Chardonay said.

They took a gravel road off the highway and drove a mile or so to a place all alone at the end of a lane, a dirt yard with a chained dog, and an old camper covered from top to bottom with bumper stickers.

“Holy smokes,” one of the men in the front seat said. “It looks like this fella’s been everywhere.”

“Not yet, he ain’t,” Lester said. “You all just watch.” He leaned up over the front seat and glared in the direction of the camper. “Ain’t there one of you sorry bastards gonna help old Lester Chardonay send this fella on his way?”

The men in the front seat stared straight ahead. An old man appeared at the front door of the camper and stepped out onto the porch. He squinted out at the car parked there in his yard.

“He’s an old fella,” one of the men said. “And awful damn skinny. I don’t think you ought to do it, Lester. It don’t seem right. That there’s an old man.”

Lester Chardonay sputtered and turned red. “You cowardly sons of bitches,” he said, and sprung from the backseat.

The old man took a step forward from the porch and leaned a bit toward the visitor in his yard. “Yes?” he said.

The men in the car heard two shots, and saw the old man pitch forward from the top step of the porch. The dog let out a howl and scrambled to the end of its chain, where it jerked mightily and collapsed in the dirt. It regained its feet and crawled away beneath the camper. Lester Chardonay shouted something the other men in the car could not hear.

One of the other men reluctantly helped Lester Chardonay dispose of the old man’s body in a cistern out behind the camper.

Back in the car Lester Chardonay said, “You can’t tell me this world knows the difference one way or the other.”

The three men in the front seat were hunched towards home, squinting into the sun that was now burning down on them from directly above.

“Let’s just see what the devil has to say now,” Lester Chardonay said.

He was a god like no other. That much was apparent almost right from the beginning.

I’ll be the first to admit that I thought there was something sort of funny about the boy; and though you probably won’t find anyone to publicly acknowledge it now, many thought his problems went beyond funny. Lots of folks thought he was just plain off his rocker.

I’ve never seen a lad so ambitious at such an early age. Ambitious, and smart as a whip. He was always building things, creating little animals and plants, all sorts of unusual stuff nobody had ever seen before. I can also tell you that he made a lot of noise. Certainly at least early on there were some very vocal people who didn’t much care for either his attitude or his monkey business, and who felt something should have been done to discourage him.

I remember when he built his first chicken, and then his first body of water, with a mountain range alongside it. At that point some were fascinated, while others were flat-out scared to death. He was emboldened by those early successes, though, and seemed to only get more and more ambitious and even reckless as time went on.

The day he pulled off his biggest trick you just had a sense that this time something really big was going to happen. It was early evening, and he’d been raising a racket and brewing up fearful storms for almost a week. And then, almost as if on command, it all blew over, the sky opened up below us, and everything grew sort of eerie and still.

That night pretty much everybody left their dinner dishes in the sink and took their lawn chairs out to the curb to watch the world be born.

Richard Riggins had a little red robot that made his bed each morning and put his shoes in neat rows in the bedroom closet. He also had a chimpanzee that played ping-pong with him in the basement. Richard and the monkey liked the same programs on television, and whenever Richard laughed the chimp would bounce up and down, clap his hands, and expose his big yellow teeth.

Richard had received the chimpanzee from his father, who was an astronaut and had traveled all over outer space in a rocket. Because his father was so busy, he did not live with Richard and his mother. He would, though, sometimes come for a visit, arriving on each occasion in a helicopter that he piloted and landed in the parking lot of the Mormon church across the street from Richard’s house. Besides his work as an astronaut, Richard’s father was also a famous scientist. He was a strong and handsome man with a fine singing voice.

Richard’s mother refused to acknowledge any of these things about the man who had fathered her child and had once been her husband. To Richard’s consternation she also refused to acknowledge the existence of the robot and the monkey. All of these subjects, in fact, only seemed to make her even more unhappy, and she would often yell at Richard and slap him until he cowered or fled to his bedroom.

Things didn’t get much easier for Richard Riggins when he went to school at Thomas Edison Elementary. He was shy and small for his age. He had bright red hair that his mother cut with an old sewing scissors, and his clothes were ill-fitting and infrequently laundered. The other children picked on him and said things about his mother, who was known to make scenes at the Piggly Wiggly and had written checks that were taped to the wall behind the cash register at the Walgreen’s drug store.

Richard didn’t dare tell any of his classmates or teachers about his father or his robot or his monkey. His mother had warned him that he wasn’t to mention any of these things to anyone.

At night Richard would often sit at his bedroom window in the dark, staring out across the neighborhood of small, low houses. Far in the distance he could see the town’s water tower and the big sign above the 24-hour Conoco station near the highway. For some reason the water tower and the light of the sign made him think of his father. He was determined that the next time he spoke with him he would ask his father to give him a talking bird for Christmas.

Richard’s father would call late at night. Richard would have to tip-toe through the living room where his mother was usually asleep in front of the television. Sometimes one of her cigarettes would still be smoldering in the ashtray next to the recliner, and Richard would quietly stub it out before proceeding to the kitchen to answer the phone. The ringing never seemed to wake his mother.

His father’s voice always sounded like it was coming from someplace far, far away, almost as if he were calling from his rocketship. Richard liked to imagine his father in his space suit, turning cartwheels in the air as he chatted with his son on the telephone. His father would ask him about school, and when Richard told him that he was having a hard time his father would say, “It’s ok. Things will get better.” They would talk about the monkey and the robot, and Richard’s father would laugh at the stories he told.

One night after it had snowed all day Richard’s father called him from a tropical island where he was on a deep sea diving expedition. Richard told him that he wanted a talking bird for Christmas and his father had been silent for a moment.

“I think I might have just the bird for you,” he said. “The one potential problem is that it speaks only French, and you will have to teach it to speak English.”

Richard’s father asked him what words he would teach the bird, and Richard had answered without hesitation. “I will teach him,” he said, “to say ‘I love you.’”