Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

Everything requires careful consideration if one is to understand it. In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words: ‘virtue’ and ‘morality.’ Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words –‘Eat People.’

–Lu Hsun, “Diary of a Madman”

There are cases at the present time in which the practice of using human flesh for food is customary on a large and systematic scale. On the island of New Britain human flesh is sold in shops as butcher’s meat is sold among us. In at least some of the Solomon Islands victims (preferably women) are fattened for a feast, like pigs.

–William Graham Sumner, Folkways

I have in my possession a song of one of these prisoners, which contains this challenge: that all come boldly and gather to dine of him, for they will be eating at the same time of their own fathers and grandfathers who have served to feed and nourish his body. ‘These muscles, this flesh and these veins are yours, poor fools that you are; you do not see that the substance of your ancestors’ limbs is still contained in them; but savor them well and you will taste the flavor of your own flesh.’

–Montaigne, “On Cannibals”

One unusual feature of Hangzhou in that period (the Song Dynasty) is that there were establishments that served human flesh. That of women, old men, young girls, and children was served in separate dishes, since each had its own distinctive taste. The food in general was referred to as ‘two-legged mutton.’

–Alasdair Clayre, The Heart of the Dragon

None of the tribes of West Africa eat human flesh, but the interior tribes eat any corpse regardless of the cause of death. Families hesitate to eat their own dead, but they sell or exchange them for the dead of other families.

–Sumner, Folkways

I don’t intend to stand here before you and attempt to deny that my client did, in fact, cook children and eat them. The preponderance of evidence on this point is clear and overwhelming, and though the prosecution has chosen –for what I would maintain are purely the purposes of pandering to public outrage– to emphasize the cooking and eating of children, it should be noted that my client has also acknowledged that he cooked and ate many others as well –many, many others, as you have heard.

He has cooked and eaten adults –the able-bodied, the elderly and infirm– as well as children. And while I cannot defend my client’s actions, I will attempt to show that, as offensive as this behavior may well be, and perhaps rightfully should be, to our modern sensibilities, it was not, in fact, all that long ago that the predilection for human meat was common in many parts of the world.

Indeed, there are reports from the field of anthropology that indicate that this practice is still being carried out in some areas of the globe today.

As such I would maintain that my client’s crime is the product of a rare atavistic condition, and purely genetic in nature; you have heard evidence that the practice of the cooking and eating of children was long a tradition in my client’s family. For many generations his family has largely subsisted on human flesh.

That said, we make no excuses in pleading for your leniency. My client takes full responsibility for behavior which doubtless strikes many of you as reprehensible, yet given his otherwise exemplary conduct –he has raised four productive children of his own that he did not cook and eat, and who do not themselves cook and eat children– and his years of political service to his country, I would ask that you recognize his potential for full reform in considering his sentence.

It is my belief that a moderate prison term, during which my client would be subjected to a strenuous program of dietary reeducation, is in society’s best interest, and will insure that he is eventually and successfully reintroduced in full standing to the human community, where his leadership skills and winning charisma can once again be utilized for the greater good and the benefit of his many political constituents.

I have a drain where my brain ought to be. Everything that comes into my head runs straight down into my stomach, where it gets churned into mulch. The drain is a rickety thing. When I shake my head I can hear the drain rattling around in my skull. If I sleep on my side I can feel it fluttering up against my ear whenever I snore.

The drain puts me in a bit of pickle, particularly as I have urgent work to do, work that requires some careful thought.

The problem is this: I built a duck, and now I need to create some sort of pond in a hurry or I fear the duck will die. I’ve been keeping it in the kitchen sink for the time being, as I already have a red-headed mermaid living in my bathtub and she’s threatened to eat the duck if it tries to encroach on her space.

The mermaid’s been living in the tub for almost a month now, after escaping from a shampoo bottle that I dropped while taking a shower. I guess I’d have to describe the mermaid as malevolent, or at the very least ill-tempered, at the very least ornery as all get out. It’s possible, I’ve decided, that she has a bit of dragon or sea serpent in her, based on her generally aggressive manner and the amount of time she spends thrashing around in there and roaring imprecations. She creates so much steam that some days it feels like I’m living in the clouds, and I’ve grown so afraid of her that I’ve taken to pissing in the sink down in the laundry room.

I’ve thought about killing the mermaid somehow, but every time the idea starts to take shape in my head it gets gurgled straight away down the drain.

Them poor sick creatures going up the street at two in the morning, dancing with bells on their shoes, wailing and baring their broken teeth at the moon, just throwing them heads back and shaking them devil sticks. It’s a racket, I can’t say it isn’t, but I wouldn’t go so far as some of the others and say there’s anything terrifying about the spectacle. Doris, the woman across the street –so dramatic– tells the man from the television news, “It makes the hair stand up on my arms.”

No, them ghosts or whatever they is don’t scare me. Pitiful, is all it is. They’re all so skinny and bat-shit loony that I can’t imagine they could hurt a fly. I wish they’d keep more reasonable hours if they’re intent on making a public fuss every other week, but that’s not the nature of their business, I guess. They’re late-nighters. Always was.

They say drugs took most of them, or guns in the hands of wicked imbeciles broke-down-crazy on drugs. We see a lot of that around here. We’ve been seeing a lot of that for quite some time. First they turn themselves into poor, helpless children or animals, then savages, and then, finally, ghosts.

Up at Our Lady they do the best they can. They bury the poor creatures in the cemetery for folks without money, but trouble is the sisters can’t keep ’em buried. They crawl their way back out of them holes and go jingling’ and devil-stickin’ up and down all the old streets where they was children once upon a time.

Just last week I seen one of ’em out in my backyard, flopped on his back and giggling like a wild boy. He was making an angel in the snow.

For a brief time, early in my days as a desperate man, I had a job at this ubiquitous sandwich chain. It was outrageous. It was awful beyond belief.

I worked for this flinching woman who sat in the back room all day “portioning,” which basically involved sorting meat. You’ve probably seen how this works: they put slices of lunch meat in various combinations between little squares of wax paper.

Everything in these places is placed on a scale to make sure everybody gets exactly the same amount of everything, which isn’t much. When they train you they actually stand there and weigh your sandwiches and say things like, “This sandwich looks a little lettuce-heavy,” or, “only use enough olives so that the customer can actually feel like he’s getting olives on his sandwich. Never use more than two fingers, that’s the best rule for customizing.”

Jesus, that was a terrible job, and I had to wear a uniform.

The worst part of it, though, was the way the customers stood there staring at your hands while you built their stupid sandwiches, watching your every move. It was like you were trying to pull something over on them. I swear, humans are worse than dogs. I would love to have a videotape of people watching their sandwiches being prepared, standing there completely slack-jawed.

If the average person had to see themselves the way I saw them across the sneeze guard everyday, I’m not shitting you, they’d fall over dead from embarrassment.

Umarked solitude absorbing time, bloating to become an environment….

–Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture

The monks at Lodeve, in Gascony, sanctified a mouse who had eaten a consecrated wafer.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

In his reluctance to embrace any sort of tidy resolution he kept spiraling further and further into disorder and confusion. He couldn’t wrap anything up, couldn’t wrap his brain around things.

When he would say of something, ‘That’s too tidy,’ it was intended as a criticism, and signaled that he regarded whatever it was as a failure. Certainly nothing he ever did could be considered too tidy, or even simply tidy. He wrote and imagined himself into tangled messes that he was incapable of finding his way out of, and as a result would drop whatever he was doing –whatever he was in the middle of; he was always in the middle of something– and lurch right into the next tangled mess on his list of proposed tangled messes. Not, of course, that he actually kept any such list; he was not a list-maker.

He did not have a mind that could embrace order. Or perhaps he was just lazy, a creature of chronic sloth that was constantly at war with unmanageable curiosity. He kept thinking he was going to find a way to bring everything together, to integrate all his mess making into something great and coherent.

He kept hoping, kept looking forward to some triumphant day of revelation that was ever receding before him into a more and more indistinct horizon cluttered with spare parts and heaps of fragments, a mirage in which increasingly he was at a loss to pick out a single detail that made sense. It was becoming nothing but a massive and trembling wall of static and vapor.

Something, surely, was out there all the same –his destiny, perhaps– and he kept right on plodding in its direction. He had no idea anymore what he expected to find were he to someday reach something resembling a destination, but there was really nothing left for him now but to hope that one day eventually he would stumble across some sprawling and improbably elegant design, and would recognize it as entirely his own.

I don’t know who these people are, have absolutely no idea what they’re saying. Every day, every day, every day some fresh confusion.

Fog, I guess, a gray shroud I hunch my way under and through. These weird, fuzzed lights emerging, gauzy red and yellow blobs blooming above me. A sinking plane emerges, the underbelly, apparitional and floating through the clouds, coming down.

Equilibrium is never going to be my thing. Every moment I inhabit seems to be a time bomb.

I hear dripping from somewhere, and the sound of a television in a dark room, the loneliest sound on the planet. I remember being wide awake in the middle of the night, holed up in a bedroom and listening to a television on the other side of the house, the voices and canned laughter and applause carrying, sound creeping down the hallway and through walls, an absolutely unique sound pulled from the sky above the house, those voices and images drifting all night in the darkness, looking for entry.

I have no idea how a television works. If I actually try to think about it in any kind of hard and concentrated way I can still convince myself that I’m dreaming this entire life, this room, these books, the additional miraculous puzzle of phonograph records, the wonder of this pen, these ink trails and odd symbols representing some inexplicably agreed upon meaning. All of it –every last thing I can see and hear and touch and remember– nothing more than the confused dream of a fat gob of matter lost in a muddy puddle somewhere.

I wish man had never gone to the moon.

This world has tenderized me. I am a vulnerable adult. We all are. We are up to our ears in fairy dust and horse shit and monkeyshine and moonbeams.

So let me tell you what I’m looking for. Let me tell you what I want: I want to be stunned. I want experiences that leave me howling with pleasure and wonder at the abracadabrant possibilities of this world. I want to feel my heart swelling in my throat until I’m choking with happiness and gratitude, until I’m reduced to hoarse, hysterical stuttering and laughter.

I want magic. I want to see things that make me doubt my eyes. I want to hear voices. I want the life that is left to me to be pure astonishment, to return me to the epistemological ground zero of the confused and awe-struck child.

I want animals to speak, and I want them to tell the truth.

I want an mp3 of the laughter of everyone I have ever loved.

I want to come home late one night to find my parents slow dancing in my living room to a Jo Stafford record.

I want that hawk that’s been watching me for almost a year to lay its cards on the table.

I want to get my knees dirty, to claw at the earth with my fingers, to feel the sun on my teeth.

I want to give it away, all of it.

I want it all to be a dream, a good one. I want to recognize that that’s exactly what it is.

I want what I really want, what I’ve always wanted, and I want it bad. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted it.

I want to give thanks.

I want to say thank you.

My heart of silk

is filled with lights,

with lost bells,

with lilies and bees.

I will go far,

farther than those hills,

farther than the seas,

close to the stars,

to beg Christ the Lord

to give me back the soul I had

of old, when I was a child,

ripened with legends,

with a feathered cap

and a wooden sword.

–Federico Garcia Lorca, from “Ballad of the Little Square”

“There simply aren’t enough letters in the alphabet,” Mr. Lyle Baumgartner announced to his freshmen English class one afternoon. “As presently constructed the language is wholly inadequate to express the depth of my feelings.”

He stared out at the blank or incredulous faces of his students. He then leaned on his desk with his left arm while dramatically and delicately touching his chest near his heart with his right hand. With this visibly trembling hand he made a patting motion and fluttered his fingers.

There was a long moment of silence while Baumgartner surveyed the class and appeared to be rummaging in his skull for additional words with which to furnish his address. A lumpy, rumpled character with a head of greasy and thinning black hair, Mr. Baumgartner was legendary for his dandruff, his indescribable cologne, and for having worn the same pair of scuffed and clunky brown shoes every day for more than a decade. He was also notorious for once having had a hysterical breakdown while reading aloud from A Day No Pigs Would Die.

“I know,” he said, “that many of you are familiar with Miss Yennish, the distinguished business education instructor at this high school. What you may not know, however, is that that comely woman has laid claim to my soul, even as she remains blithely indifferent and even, one might say, blind to not only my affection, but also to my very existence. My every effort to woo the object of my desire having proved entirely ineffectual, I find myself driven to a level of distraction and despair that verges on the maniacal. Given this unhappy set of circumstances I am going to ask that, in lieu of your regular assignment, each of you compose a letter to Miss Yennish on my behalf. This assignment will be graded, and those missives I find to be most heartfelt, ardent, and artfully constructed will receive extra credit. They will also be delivered to Endora Yennish’s home, along with a dozen red roses and a poem of my own composition.”

By the time I pulled into this completely unfamiliar town my radiator was shot to shit and I was so stoned and hungry that I tried to get the woman at the Taco John’s to sell me a sour cream gun.

I was headed for a seminar at a tanning academy, and that notion struck me as more ridiculous by the hour (I’d been dispatched by my very-soon-to- be erstwhile employer, Baked to Perfection, located in the historic Ho-Chunk Shopping Plaza in my hometown). It seemed like I’d been following cement trucks across three states, and I’d been having deep thoughts along these lines: What in the world do we mean when we say ‘What in the world?’?

After I gorged myself at the Taco John’s I went down the street to a bar called Hung Mike’s. I ordered a beer and asked the bartender if he could recommend a “promising motel” in the vicinity. I immediately regretted my word choice, and the bartender looked me over for a moment and shrugged. “This is hardly a town for engaging propositions,” he said. Without turning his head in my direction a guy at an adjacent bar stool chimed in: “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“They ought to just paint that on the watertower,” the bartender said.

This was followed by an awkward silence, made all the more awkward by the fact that it wasn’t truly silence. There was music playing from the jukebox, and the juxtaposition of songs was jarring; Fleetwood’s Mac’s “Landslide,” for example, was followed by a Dixieland version of “Camptown Races.”

Jarring juxtapositions seemed to be a specialty of Hung Mike’s. On the mirror behind the bar was a sign: “Only a fool says there is no God, and fools we are not!” Right next to that, another sign, hand-lettered, read, “What are all you fucking assholes smiling about?”

When he brought me another beer the bartender jerked his head toward the guy on his stool and said, “Why don’t you ask numbnuts over there about the time he tried to eat the air freshener.”

“Fuck you,” the guy said.

There was another prolonged silence, during which the bartender disappeared into a cluttered office next to the bathrooms. I could see him in there hunched over a desk and furiously punching the buttons on an adding machine. This appeared to be an obsessive behavior rather than something actually necessary and productive.

And then what? I don’t really know then what, to be honest with you. The night sort of got away from me. Nights seemed to get away from me a lot in those days. I do, though, have a dim recollection of wandering up and down the Main Street of that town. I no longer remember the name of the place or even what state it was in, but I remember that it was one of those anonymous and dying little towns that are strung out all over the Midwest, places where Dollar Stores and tattoo parlors are the main growth industries and where half the women are licensed cosmetologists.

The main thing I remember, though, is that I woke up the next morning in the backseat of my car, which was parked in the corrugated tin quonset bay of a do-it-yourself car wash on the edge of town.

A morning like this, a morning on which you will not truly wake up, but rather go through the habitual motions of waking up –brush your teeth, shower, change your clothes, walk the dog, and go off in the usual stupor to work– you’re left wrestling with the old, hard-wired reactions to nights like the one now behind you.

All night you heard ridiculous phrases like “the tide of history” and “the winds of change.” You understand, even if you cannot reconcile, the cyclical nature of politics and public opinion. Waves break on the beach and roll back out to sea. Stuff always gets washed up and left behind. The moon works its reliable and spectacular magic and the sun comes up in the east.

Still, you hope and you doubt. A morning like this you like to think your world has been transformed, that things will be somehow different, if only in terms of a heightened sense of solidarity and shared values (which would be no small victory, really); yet you know that whatever actual changes might result from our collective yawp into the void of representative democracy will likely be small, incremental, and subject, as all such changes are, to swift and arbitrary reversal.

Meanwhile, some things seem both inevitable and irreversible, things like enchantment and disenchantment, which somehow manage to eternally coexist in their inevitability and irreversibility. The former a blessing that comes with simply being alive in this world; the latter an affliction that unfortunately also comes with simply –or not so simply– being alive in this world.

If your little red “I Voted” sticker is some acknowledgement of a small and utterly painless investment in faith, what exactly is the nature of your investment? What is the nature of that faith? And what sort of return, if any, do you expect to earn on that investment?

You’re not so sure, really. Maybe it ultimately boils down to little more than a feeling, a hope, a sneaking suspicion that this country might still work, might still be a better, more compassionate, more peaceful place. Or at the very least that it might one day soon make more sense.

Maybe whatever happened last night just means that you, along with millions of other people, are exhausted by a political and cultural climate of virulent dishonesty, a strain of dishonesty so fierce and prevalent that you no longer feel safe in your own skin, and can no longer trust the words that are lobbed in your direction every day, or even the words that tumble around in your own head and roll off your tongue.

This, however, is another day, another pure opportunity to be stunned. The first bruise of sunlight is creeping behind the houses across the alley. Does the world this morning feel like a better or safer place? Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, and can’t answer that question with any real honesty or perspective.

You know this much: When you drive downtown the hobbled parade of scrap metal entrepreneurs will still be pushing their grocery carts slowly along the streets around your office, and your desk will be exactly as you left it yesterday afternoon.