Posts tagged `prose`

The Vagaries of Narrative

Aliena nobis, nostra plus aliis placent
- Publilius Syrus -

Green children perch on tiptoes to reach the crayon-wax sun, cicada-giggling to the squeak of fog-swing. The crayon is Helios Red, screaming the flesh from the mist; a dawnmoses parting the decrepit grey sea. The sun throws spears at the copper roof of the swaying birdhouse, which sloughs off the projectiles with practiced insouciance. Thus deflected, the cloying rays dance their noisome dance across his prostrate form, tangled in epic battle with restless sheets.

He’s convinced the world is better when viewed through closed eyelids. When you’re just waking up, the distinction between dream and reality is just myopic enough that you receive neither part of either world— a sort of non-existing downtime without the hope of sleep or the burnt toast of morning, and if only for a second we are treated with absolute nothing; of a monumental and somewhat metaphoric silence found elsewhere in the bottoms of brown-ringed coffee cups and the business end of post-coital cigarettes. If only for the briefest of moments we can melt away like the sun the night before, just when it settled into the horizon’s cradle and the clouds like melted butter, spilt blood, and raised bruises reached into his brain and plucked consciousness from the briny deep.

Open your eyes. Don’t move. If you’re like him, the simple act of recognizing your breath is action enough. Your cortex knocks down spiderwebs with a chemical broom.

Slide your legs across the sheets, stretching subtly. You still grasp futilely at the dusty bookends of a dream; the sort you will sometimes remember but never decipher.

Pull open the covers, blink away whatever remains of your functional memory, painful though it may be. Overcome your vertigo as you stand: if you’re dizzy as a lack of blood blots grey in your eyes, then welcome to my world.

Stagger to your bathroom, feet shuffling on the scratchy carpet. The shower, such a hot, moist arena, reminds him too much of the womb, some eternal nine-month sleep. He realizes what a terrible day it was that he emerged.

He always wonders how a baby feels when it comes to the joyous moment; if a naked, shriveled baby honestly gives a good goddamn about the miracle of birth—or if, more likely the only thing an infant wants to do is escape the frigid, raucous, glaring outer world by crawling back into the reactor core and sleeping for æons. Body fluids all tend to be similar: it’s just as easy to dream in a sac of amniotic fluid as it is with a pool of warm blood or hot semen. Sleep waxes violent and sexual and wonderful, but rarely tangible. He supposes that makes it more art than vice.

The closest facsimile of conception is sleep.

By the time he steps out of the shower, he is naked, wet, shivering, and still thoroughly muddled with blur and amnesia. Understand that waking is reliving a trauma. Remember that the day you came into this world was the first day of the rest of your life.

But this isn’t really about you, is it? It’s about him, and while he stumbles around this morning, eyes thick casks of blindness, he begins to realize how little difference it really makes.

§§

Outside, defying coffee cups, the world grinds on, its sky a hot blue industry, its verdure a terrible engine of creation—ceaseless streams of visceral language cascade like similes from the big dumb grin of that idioglottic sun.

He watches the birds, incensed by their chattering song. You can see his full mug, filled with the dark product of his own industry. Silver steam kisses the harshness of his stubble, thrown into a stark curve by the impetus of his scowl.

Watching him stand restlessly at the window, you understand intimately the way he clicks his tongue when he talks; the ratcheting noise of his rubber soles; the phenomenon of his faithless swagger; the way he knows, in some imperceptible way, that you know this about him.

Remember, when you’re just waking up, the distinction between fact and fiction is just amblyopic enough that you receive neither vice of either mode. And as he struggles to grasp some narrative thread on which to hang his day, he finds the lines of his biography have ceded to impressionistic gestures and the foreign tongue of a broken fourth wall.

§§

The copper birdhouse roof still glints petulantly, perhaps representing the insistent demand for precise mapping of elegantly symbolic storytelling to its corresponding semiotic. Conveniently unnamed, he has finished his coffee, chosen his tie—it is paisley, today—cursed the birds, forgotten the abstrusity of last night’s dream, consumed a poached egg and an apricot and a piece of buttered toast; he has done all this without the benefit of language or preface, leaving the epistemological a priori of the world he inhabits a large and imposing question mark in the minds of those nosy, voyeuristic authors and audiences who seek to fetishize the mechanics of his sleeping, waking, percolating, fornicating and querulously wonder after his continued acceptance of the copper-roofed birdhouse outside his window, which is beginning to oxidize anyway and hasn’t been filled in godonlyknows how long. Now, as you watch him climb in his car, you are intimately aware—because you are reading it—that he is filled with doubt involving the nature of the Self-with-a-capital-S, mostly because the god to whom he does not subscribe is an author with a predisposition to sesquipedality and romantic irony. Having dedicated his morning to the pursuit of metafiction, he now leaves, as all characters do, to spend time enjoying the visceral pleasures of acts sadly beyond our discursive limits.

§§

The sun hurls its invective at the oxidizing copper roof of a birdhouse just outside my window, which sloughs off the heat with practiced insouciance. Thus deflected, the maddening rays dance their noisome dance across my prostrate form, tangled in epic battle with restless sheets.

I’m convinced the world is better when viewed through closed eyelids. When you’re just waking up, the distinction between dream and reality is just myopic enough that you receive neither part of either world— a sort of non-existing downtime without the hope of sleep or the burnt toast of morning, and if only for a second we are treated with absolute nothing.

§1811 · April 12, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: ,

Pondering a Wall

A short piece of semi-prose I found in my archives:

When the lemon-wedge of the sun had burnt a sullen ember—when our hearts took on stones and water—we could not have seen, you and I, just how devastating the dusk can be for two beasts without a light between them. We could not have known then—as we do now, for the old and wicked night has been to us a solemn teacher—the steep pitch of sleeplessness and indeterminate hours heaving alone together.

There is no warm and slick divide where we may hide awhile, balm and embrasure always the elusive corner, yes, always mere breaths from capture—still wholly free.

We are a fruit tree, you and I, precocious and past bloom, heavy with out weight and the birth pains of stolen creation. When did our boughs bow so low, drooping wrecked and sullen?

This, then, is the darkness whose dread passing blights the paints of many single portraits. This is the cleaving which knows no surcease. In the quiet grey hours of the morning, you will go, pondering a wall, determined as Lot to spare not a glance behind, thinking me a handful of salt in your wake. In the quiet grey hours of the morning, before coffee and drapes, before the distance swallows with permanence, before the bulb of sun returns in mute procession, I will run after you.

§1826 · April 8, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: ,

Armor for Sleep

The waves speak quietly to me
When the tempest sleeps deep beneath.
I wish that I could give to you
The sun before it weds the west.
— Jason Byron —

Far off now, the beach is a thin strip of dried oatmeal, brittle and pale. They mar its surface like raisins, mere dots—he imagines that they are calling for him, that she, though long past, is shouting herself hoarse on the epithet of his name—but the ferocious wind strikes them dumb. Wind, but no rain yet.

He stands some distance out, the water only breaching his hips—the water is black in the dim light; everything seems devoid of color… the ebb of ebony against his waist; the cinderous stretch of stormclouds pooling overhead, their pallor stretching beyond the pale of his imagination; the bland cereal-beige coastline extending no invitation; the stark white froth of the ocean’s madness, like semen crested aqueous inside a crashing womb.

How long ago had it been that he waded out here, alone, where all is quiet and ferociously calm? He cannot remember—only knows that the approaching storm’s violence is mesmerizing, an aching song from the waves of onyx crashing harmlessly upon the sand, woolly steeds of a dark master expiring wetly and rising again from some distance.

The rain will consummate everything soon, when the full weight arrives like Tomorrow and effaces him and the distant callers-out with its peppering assault. He shivers for the first time, despite the balmy warmth, tastes wavethrown salt like spun glass on the tip of his tongue.

He turns from the black specks, letting the gestalt of distance turn them into sleepy abstracts, damp newspaper print. Seeping out into the unknowable distance—smoke osmosing across the sexed distance of a twilit room—the ashen ceiling diminishes to even darker angles, unperturbed by vagaries like memory or the politics of loss. He thinks of her now, her face framed in curls.

A low rumble of thunder sends dull, moaning shudders through the inky water, clinging to him like vixens. He turns again, dizzy from the coming behemoth, its breadth looming much larger than his field of vision allows. The shore is lost to him now, gone in a spray of dark water stirred by the blustering wind. But he feels no melancholy, for the rain begins now, cleaving him unto the ceaseless mystery of the distance and from the fastnesses of grainy, distemperate earth.

The stillness is riven with sudden violence, hurled bolts of fire tearing the veil from grace, mute in monochrome, etching a scorched path through waves of inconsolable rain. His world slants as he lies, suddenly sleepy, on the water, its lulling motions a downy bed. Above him, the clouds roil with undisguised fury, but slowly cede to the shadows that creep like spiders into the corners of his vision. The thunder lumbers like a father’s baritone prayers, the rain’s plash a thousand spent summers asking plaintively after her last days. Everything is so beautiful in its infancy.

The deep claims him, quite suddenly like narcotics, and he drifts away imagining coppery auburn and heart-burgundy chiffon.

§1810 · April 7, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: ,

Stonefruit

Deep in the apricot’s tumultuous heart the hornet hums
—Melvin Walker La Follete

Thousands of years ago, beyond the pale of recency, in Lushan, China, a local doctor asked cured patients to plant apricot trees in their backyards in lieu of monetary payment—those cured of serious illnesses planted five trees and minor illnesses only one. The result, within the doctor’s lifetime, was a hundred thousand trees flourishing in that ancient city, filling its proverbial cup with ruddy fruit, heavy with flesh and dark stones.

Native to China, the apricot is often more closely associated with Armenia or Damascus. The Linnaean name is Prunus armeniaca, or Armenian plum, because the fruit reached Europe by way of Armenia. In Hispanic countries, it is known as a damasco, derived from its ostensible attachment to Damascus, Syria—at one point in time the locus for the trade of everything from stonefruit to deadly weaponry.

It is indeed Armenia, though, which harbors the apricot’s origins. Apricot seeds—ovular stones, like those of peach or nectarine—have been found during archaeological excavations in 6’000-year-old settlements there. The smooth stones seem immune to age, speaking even lately of the juice of many millenia past.

The bold nature of the apricot is its essence: it has an etymology like a deep-drinking root, the name arriving in English in 1551 as “abercock,” soon thereafter “apricock,” from the Spanish albaricoque, from the Arabic al-birquq, from the Greek praikokion, from the Latin præcoquum, which means “early-ripening” and shares its origins with the word “precocious.” How odd that my memories of summer, with its apricot sun flayed like a split fruit laid to dry on blue sand, would be so colored by something which is less a marker of the season and more its harbinger. It blossoms earlier than its peers, braving temperatures below -30° C, exposing its buds to the threat of wrenching frost. It is a precocious fruit, rude in timing, seductive with sweetness, the central weight of which has crept into culture as an icon of seduction: In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania offers “apricocks” to the singing Bottom; in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, they play a central role in the plot’s tragic machinations. In fact, the original Latin name for the apricot, when Lucullus brought it back to Rome from conquests in Syria, was malus Armeniaca—Armenian apple—and was associated with the original apple that supposedly plunged the world into sin at Eve’s first delectable bite, prompted as she was to revel in its flavor and the knowledge that disobedience brought her. It is a precocious fruit: the extract , of its stone, amygdalin, is sold as a cure for cancer, and though it never vanquishes a single malignancy, it does sometimes dispatch the host with its deadly cyanide. It is a precocious fruit, an apple of sodom, an aphrodisiac, a laxative, an inducer of labor; a hot, dripping beast in the sky of my memory, red and orange like polished copper, disturbing the fastnesses of imagination with the knowledge of its insides.

Long before the French and Spanish carried its stones across the ocean to flower in the New World, its hardy trees populated the borders of Russia and China. Its fruit traveled the Silkroad in foodsacks, and dripped at the corners of every bite, and sat like ripe children in contented bellies; its stones savaged the wombs of beasts of burden where they were placed to prevent pregnancy; its pink blossoms erupted and either fed the amniotic fruit or withered in cruel springs.

I have understood, viscerally, the apricot’s precocity, its biting sugar; I have carried its stones in my pocket, hurled them to the whim of fish or foxes. It is a stone of summer, the heaviness at the center of the season, halved with the sudden violence of its coming. It was there before all else, before the warmth of the sun, before the lusting throngs which seek to devour it, before even the tree that bore it. It is a precocious idea, this early ripening.

Having myself lusted after split fruit, gutting the stones from orbs of red and orange, that I have known, intimately, the apricot’s precocity, and I think that I have shown no ripening in early spring, having come to some bitter fruits only in hot lateness, sufficient perhaps for strong, astringent brandy, dark and brown in deference to looming October. But what if I could stretch back across time, across thousands of years and thousands of harvests and countless heart-shaped leaves and stiff buds bare and resolute against the blustering wind? Perhaps I might dare, my heart a stone, to flourish in my spring, in a raiment of white and pink, arms dipped low with swollen fruit. What if the legacy of my blooming, black stones like dried blood, could face long centuries of dust to tell some searching descendant of the work of my age?—the tang of swords and fruits at a crossroads in Damascus; the peaching sun of my childhood, whispering to me of distant reapings and ruddy brows; the short infancies of lost empires expanding into the east; the prurient symbols hiding in split stone fruit, bleeding juice. This is a precocious fruit.

§1767 · March 24, 2007 · 2 comments · Tags: , ,

The Finite God, pt. I: Of Man’s First Disobedience

Last updated 2 May 2006. Get the PDF

In The Beginning, there was God. Of course, this isn’t very specific at all. God existed, so to speak, at 7.41 am on a very drab Tuesday morning. At the time, God found temporality to be very boring, so he hitched up his pants and stretched himself across eternity, so that all moments that have, do, and will exist are recurrently transpiring. And quite frankly, this was boring too, so God decided to create.

Read more…

§1113 · May 3, 2006 · 3 comments · Tags:

← Older entries