Troubling Things

“A dream of dark and troubling things.” — David Lynch

When I’m dead you’ll find a scar on my left wrist and maybe you’ll follow it like topography and logic and think I tried much earlier, but no, it wasn’t what it looks like, and I’m a lefty, so no. It remains a mark of shame, I admit, the legacy of an instant of stunned outrage wrought in my skin, tracing through accidental glass with eerie precision a family providence and a full blue vein by a lonely millimetre. 

“Where are you, my love? Sister, oh sister, don’t fall. We keep going.”

You might discover one day that I was listening to “Situation: Relation” by Rainer Maria at the very end, and you might be correct in that (and even want to go find it and listen to it, which you really should), but the reality is we’re always absorbing, always broaching new things, and endings are often pale echoes of things that come before.

“Let’s head out, grasp our moment, live this thing.”

Florida and freedom, windshield smeared, we yelped our adrenalized excursion, never sparing a thought for how our return would look. Demoralized inside a pandemic, pelicans and perplexity vying until the panhandle, at least until then.

“Fuck your feelings.”

“Ugly folks in an unlovely place uttering ugly things.”

Did you keep it all to yourself? Head west? Unshackle yourself? Walk miles into canyons, hoping for a retort, to shake something loose from million-year sedimentary rock? You fucking dreamer. I swear to god I love you almost. 

You goddamned cougar ghost, you starfish tramp, you cephalopod tryst. Will you ever grasp the foaming stream, the seething flow, the knock-kneed rocks at the clear untarnished source? Is this our time at last? The quietus? The terminus, the ruined hissing valve of everything? 

“Well, hell, if it is, let’s at least give it some motherfucking dignity.”

__________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Mountain and Midge

“I’m doing what seems the best thing to do.” — Virginia Woolf

My life is nothing, and also it’s all things. I talk to my screen, commiserate with standups suffering from stage fright, laugh meanly at commercials for adult diapers, fill my pockets with rocks, wish with renewed fervency that I owned a jukebox, cook a spicy fish stew, wrestle with pronouns, wonder if I can make anything funny from whispered tales of genocide.

From the Heights of Abraham in the nineteen seventies rises a small tubercular biker named Midge. He says this:

“Never meant this. When I cough, it’s the finest crimson spray, a warm mist from my extended throat. For ten years, I sat pillion on my best mate’s Honda 400, hacking my sickness to be caught by the tailwind and spread like a septic fan behind us. His name was Mountain, and I loved him, I now think. He walked into crowds—partiers, dreamers, backpackers, hikers, utter fucking wankers—and because he always greeted the headwind, he never saw it coming. His death, I mean. The one I let in.”

But that isn’t why I’m here tonight in this diaphanous swirl of peach mesh, this warm apricot skein. I could equally have reanimated the hippie I merged with in Windermere, the one who stared as if in a lake’s mirror and instead of herself saw me. Or the goth in Nottingham, stenciling furious anarchist missives in charcoal spray to a sleeping indifferent city. Or Lana from the Bronx, dancing, always dancing, by herself or with anyone adjacent, before she danced her last dance alone from a smoldering gash in the North Tower. 

(“Today, without notice, my time on this bittersweet earth is done.”)

Suicide in Avalon

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” — Patti Smith

Two nights ago I dreamed I was Hope Sandoval. Can you believe that? What a dream it was moments before it faded.

“Make your way to Glastonbury, and I’ll see you there, okay?”

The thing is, we’re drops of water vapour. I’m a drop of water vapour. You’re a drop of water vapour. And you and you and you. Until we have thousands of drops and then millions and we have ourselves a cloud. And even a cloud seems like nothing, floating ghostlike in a bluish bubble, impossibly close to the nihilist howl of space, until those clouds become bruised purple thunderheads and one day, one moment really, they unleash their collective deluge on the thirsting flanks of a mountain, whose altitude turns them to snow, and they gather and layer for weeks and then months, and one spring day they melt and begin to cascade down channels we call rivers and then hit their limit and flood millions of hectares of land, ruining human lives and drowning livestock, all from vapour. Vapour.

Rain is a killer.

Rain is a cloud suiciding. 

Disappointment at the end, written into the world’s DNA. 

“I waited and waited for you, beyond the horizon, within the protected perimeter, and though I believed in you, you never came.”

The terraced mound a carved breast, its nipple erect, caressed by scarves of mist. Oh Guinevere, oh Avalon, oh holy stonemasons.

“Where were you? Why won’t you answer?”

We are generational, interstitial, living in the spaces between. Good, bad: meaningless. Spillage is unavoidable, though all of us ticks swell fat with the boiling unspilled blood of rank injustice.

The gin-soaked priest and the holy fool and the painted jezebel find their way out of the maze of alleys and enter the rain forest. New stories spin and branch from that great trunk. This is how epics begin. It’s really not much, at least not at first. 

Raven of the Sea

"I see you now."

I might be the stupidest man who ever lived. This is my delayed tribute. I never saw you, but I see you now.

When I wheel her onto the concrete platform behind the fence so she can look out on the cove, her head is like some piñata, loose upon a bundle of sticks, desirous of being hung and being beat. I will never hang it. Or ever beat it. I want her to drink the waters and the misted skies of the bay forever. I don't want to ever say goodbye. But she knows this and brays laughter like a crow.

"My damn voice barely works anymore, and you're a total prick of a man, and I know what you want, and I'll be damned if I'll do what you want right here and right now, you complete and utter…"

Though I tune her out, I am penitent. I barely flinch.

She always was a cursing virtuoso, a maestro of malediction.

A cormorant rises from the shallows like a fiend released in our world and spreads the sodden shawl of its wingspan as if we could discern some profane script inside its scope, then it drags its sopping body impossibly and barely airborne, mere feet above the waves. Inwardly I cheer, but I know that is gauche. What self-respecting lifeform shits and grubs in the shallows and the dirt before it can soar in a blink, and arrow like the dream of a spear? This cormorant. This cursed black serpentine jinx with dripping parchment wings. This ink-dipped oath. Not bat but not bird either.

If somebody says, "I can't do this anymore," that's the time to start listening. 

It's also true that if they say they're struggling, you listen too, but these, these are crisis words, this is the klaxon, the clamor of an alarm aboard a starship where everything's bathed in alternating crimson and black, and sirens blare. 

"Tell me how you are," I say to her.

"I can't… encompass it.

"Try."

"For you?"

"No. For you. And for her…" 

"Prick. See?"

A tide brings the waters in, tosses great boatloads of kelp on the beach like the tendrils of cephalopods, waxes so ferries can leave, wanes like a moondrawn thing. Tourists keep gathering on the heights, to watch, to listen, to smell this thing. This hermetic zombie thing.

Grief lies curled like a dead fern in my gut.

"Talk," I say. "It's your moment. I did you harm, woman, but here's your time to preach."

Like scraping molluscs from an antique hull. 

Then a silence falls on land and water alike, a birdless quiet, until at last she croaks out her testimony. 

"Right. You raggedy motherfucker. What did you ever want with me? With us? Like actors, you want us to drag our indignities like ruined limbs across the stage, explain away our shame… Wait. No. That isn't right. Reboot. Start over…" 

Her voice is a rasp on fibrous wood. Her flintlike sorrow moves from her eyes to her entirety. 

"Lookit. Imagine there's this vast mural painted by generations upon a stucco wall, each segment independent of the rest, great scenes of despair and dread, of busted dreams and the mockeries of hope. Leaving some alleyway trattoria, you stumble on it and you close on some small grey drama, something ugly or mean. Shocked, you look upon another patch of the canvas, equally tawdry, and you think the ugly is winning, but then you go to leave and something makes you turn around and you see the whole fresco and you gasp and you cry out and you finally stand mute, comprehending, and you see it's your life. All your life. And you…" She points a misshapen finger at me. "You were one of the shabby sections is all. Now cut the fence and tip this damn chair already, you gawking ungainly dipshit. Time to introduce this meat suit to the unforgiving rocks."

Grandmother Weighs the Water

The storm came and we weathered it. But we knew there would be more storms. 

And there were. It's how we lived.

Some of our children made a show where they used shadows to tell a story. Silhouette horses rearing against salmon skies. Hands reaching to clasp other hands. Hummingbirds and leaping fish. I sat and watched their shows and cried each time without shame.

But they—the others, not the children—sought our shame, pursued it with their ghost hounds: bible verses, uniforms, corrective lenses unsolicited, soap inside our mouths or worse, fingers in our pants, worse, the eradication of our language, the cultivation of our unwanted chastening. They enclosed us in brick, touched our secret places, and claimed we'd asked them to. Insisted on our gratitude and compliance then made of that compliance a defense, a vindication. They were sly, shrouding their dark urges with blame, concealing their culpability inside deviant retellings.  

That dark is still deep and lonely, but there are shafts of light now.

The baritone tattoo of a hundred hooves on pliant grassland, hollow and dogged and fierce, the sudden calliope of pollen burst afar and spiraling, bone ridge fingers through chainlink seeking a home, palpating the unquiet hearts of a thousand surplus tales.

Suicide is water. It cools your hurt and finds the channels, drains the great wild weighty hope of a fearsome distant peak to some quiet nearby delta. It is female. Yet it isn't. Because female is strong, not weak. We've forgotten how to think about this. Forgotten that woman is robust, that love itself is sturdy. That fierce is good and ironclad severity not so much. The human spine will twist and flex and carry monstrous burdens. Yet an iron rod encumbered incrementally will ultimately break. Suicide is neither female nor male, neither weak nor strong. We think in polarities. Suicide is the water on the lip of the falls, a precipice in our thoughts, propelled by doubt and certitude. Doubt we can go on, and certainty we're saved. On such fulcrums, where the present balances the past and the future, bury our hearts and cry hoarse and wounded and brave enough to waken hope across all this great Turtle Island. 

Cry for me. Grieve. Then honor me, revere me. And all my relations.