Sunday, February 10, 2008

Literary Exercise #17--Say Goodbye to a Bygone Era

Say goodbye – I – say goodbye to a bygone era. To leave one vice behind in hopes that I won’t pick up another one ahead—in hopes that I’ll cease to pick them up at all. Cigarettes never really symbolized anything but a symbol—that I needed affirmation, exultation—wonder and excitement 10 to 15 times a day. Gone—the gates guarded by the flaming sword of an archangel, my footsteps mimicking the man-trail whose usage has become archaic. But my Eden-need has never left. It is simply wandering through arid places seeking rest—a wink and a nod to my perseverance until it chooses another form of attrition.

Yet I wonder what the great literature would have to say about this—theirs, my own—respired into my lungs – the Savage’s mustard and hot water – working things to the surface, purging me of pretense and any subtext I detected or inferred. I am more in need of this than air—the atmosphere only stimuli to further the chemical reaction—agitating cube crystals of thought that are set on a spoon and melted into prose (cause only liquid can flow along uneven surfaces and human veins).

Oh fiend! Oh friend! If you could only see me now! I am Kerouac on the road, Bilbo’s kerchiefs left at home—a set of contradictions null and imaginary—and thus very much within the reach of modern science. Oh victor! Oh assailant of the night! How tempting it is to trod your textured, luminescent path—Van Gogh’s or someone less predisposed to madness. How dark and how deep, how utterly lovely and insatiable your velvety down of ambiguity! What the scant! What the chance! What the paucity that I could pillow into your feathered symmetry. Oh I hate and wretch until I bless the earth with my belly’s provisions and leave it richer in search for solid ground. And still, I pick up the brush, stumbling toward the canvas, raking an unsteady hand across it’s surface—hues that blot other tints in their shadow—and paint myself of that same color… two dark strokes under two pallid moons, a steep ravine and a dark crevice that emits heat in dreadful blasts—hiss! and pops! and burns!

But I reject that. Not to give objectivity the upper hand. But if my words cannot be measured, sawed, and slotted into a foundation, I have no hope for my acts. Thinking clearly helps one to live clearly, and living clearly must involve one or two things about pencils and pieces of paper.

So what is at the end of my dock that occupies my thought when the wave’s lap lulls my lesser objectives to sleep? I could tell you in three’s: love, God, and purpose. What is to be done when a young lady refracts my life’s situations into fantasies of family life—socks and shirts and ripped jeans, sandboxes and vacations, fort building and doll houses, and of course, the time when we did all those things alone—with all the glee of a newly wedded couple. What is to be done with a God who claims to know if that woman is the one, or if I have yet to meet her, or if she exists at all? Can love be photoshopped into scenes and scenery, the understudy center-stage but the scenario never quite the same? Are the lines or love as meaningful when they’re delivered with the same force from two different souls? Asking questions like that prompt a change of subject. So…what is to be done with the two of them…love and God and the love-God…are they intertwined to form a two-pronged purpose or is purpose a separate, un-Trinitarian concept in itself?

I exhaust myself. I admit I don’t have much of a mind to mull these much longer. I’d much rather be drinking spiced wine that finally leaves everything in its right and proper perspective, and keeps it there till morning until I can find someone else to control the universe. Staffs are meant to be leaned on, not attached to strings in charge of planetary motion…so really, I’m like Moses who gains the Lord’s favor, only my arms aren’t strong enough to win the battle and I need a mighty fortress to restore myself. Is it bad to ask that the bulwark comes in the soft touch of a slender hand? I swear she knows a sacred spot—a reassuring hand on my side that was the entry and exit point God used to make woman from a ribcage, connect her to my flesh.

But we shall see. Jacob wrestled the same holy struggle—and was lamed! God! The angel’s hand, in the same spot that gives me such hope and elation! A warning…to my will…if it is turned to anything but the Lord's. Oh, if this could be a subject of epic poetry long-lived and long-past, for other minds to dwell and agonize over.

It seems quite personal and alarming that I would write this for you—the unattached observer to take in. Really, I don’t do this as much for you as I do for me. And it is only for me so that I can fail in description…because I don’t know any way to describe that clear, necessary, beautiful, refreshing, mystifying, and regenerative touch...in logic or in love...except to say that I can’t.

 
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