Many thanks for letter. I hope the enclosed MS is what you wanted. I infer from what you would no doubt call your handwriting that you were taught script at school; the result is that I can’t read a single word of the manuscript part of your letter, so I may not have followed your instructions exactly.
I am suffering unspeakable torments with my serial, having already been at it four days and being still at the second page. This is because I sat down and wrote what was not a bad first installment, and then upon counting it up found it was 3500 words instead of 2000. Of course this means rewriting it entirely. I don’t think I am cut out for a serial-writer.
Even if my serial doesn’t come to anything, and I don’t expect it to, I intend taking a week or so off next month. My people have asked me to come down and stay with them, and if I can get my sister to drive me over, as I don’t think I can drive her present car, I will come over and see you.
I forwarded a letter this evening which had urgent proofs in it. I hope it gets to you in time, but it had already been to your old address. You ought to let editors and people know that you have changed your address.
—George Orwell, letter to Rayner Heppenstall, September 1935
“This used to be Banker’s Row. Every morning they would all go to Berlin, every evening return. These were cultured, intelligent people. They had a modest portrait of the Führer. They closed their eyes when the Meyers disappeared from this mansion over here or the Weinstein family vanished from that house over there. Later, they could get those houses for a good price. Well, you can’t tell where the Jews lived today, can you?”
The other night, for no reason known to me, but one no doubt connected to Satan, some cat, or cats, upended a bookshelf, and spilled the poetry books to the floor.
The cats of my acquaintance have never really approved of poetry. For instance, in another decade, in another abode, the poetry volumes were subjected to a wanton urine rain.
The culprit has never been caught or confessed, and remains at large.
The bestained tomes, meanwhile: too many just too odd and obscure, and therefore not replaceable. So they remain in the collection. Ruint.
Cats are actually proud of their Luciferian penchant for drizzling urine. See the recent best-selling collection of poems, penned by cats, I Could Pee On This, pictured there to the left.
It is a known Science Fact that cat urine is so pungent that fresh spray let fly in, say, Albuquerque, can be smelled within moments on the Moon.
I am not really sure why, of all earthly substances, cat urine is the King Reeker . . . save for “the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity,” as Big Daddy puts it in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. (See: cat: there are no coincidences).
I believe it may have something to do with the fact that a cat’s natural diet is 100% flesh and bones. This requires stomach enzymes so powerful they can basically break down concrete. In their power, these enzymes are of stench.
Cats also use their urine as a territorial marking mechanism. And apparently it is necessary for a cat marking something in, say, Icepick, Minnesota, to olfactorily announce ownership to cats living as far away as Venus.
Anyway. Among the odd and obscure bestained volumes in the poetry collection is I Never Saw It Lit, which is pictured there to the right. This book I remember, and retain, because years ago it caught my father’s eye, when he and I were roving the old Berkeley wholesaler Bookpeople for tomes to retail in our modest bookshop up north, on the Russian River. He thought it a worthy effort. But then said, “though probably nobody would like it but me.” I put it in the cart. Because it wasn’t, it developed, to sell. It was for me to keep. To remember him by.
Another of the poetry collections that the other night spilled to the floor was a thing called Leaves of Poetry. This volume contains a poem or two written by me.
And this is where we naturally segue from cat urine, to my writing.
Apparently I wrote these poems when I was 11 or 12 years old. And they were then pressed into a book, together with poems by other wee ones, and distributed to the masses by the county school system.
One of the poems I wrote bears the wildly creative title “Summer,” and goes like this:
Summer is hot, dull, and dry It’s when under the sun Your skin starts to fry And when, on beaches, Boys like to spy On girls in bikinis Who might walk by.
I see that here I was not only already wedded to the Oxford comma, but also afflicted with the need to employ commas at every opportunity, even inventing opportunities that, to a Normal writer, might not exist. I was also then too aroil with these little mini-strokes that cause me to arrange words in odd order. I was grousing about the blasted heath of summer, a constant to this day. And, even at age 11, Eros was elbowing in.
I frankly do not understand how the bit about bikinis was permitted in a collection of poems by junior-high students assembled and then peddled across the land by school officials.
If, today, I were 11 years old, and submitted such a thing, the teachers receiving it would shriek and poke their eyes out. Then hustle me down the halls—patrolled by “school resource officers” bristling with mace and pepper spray and guns and truncheons and whatnot—to be taken into custody by the deans. Who would immediately and permanently expel me. I would then be placed in a cage, and paraded through the streets, pelted by the outraged populace with eggs, tomatoes, and full beer cans, condemned as a dangerous pervert. I would be thrown in a dungeon, and there be subjected to electroshock treatments. Until I had been transformed into a True American. One pledging allegiance to Thanatos. Rather than Eros. Hoorah.
(In which, by popular request, we revive the fabled Orwell series.)
∞
Unless the India Office takes steps to prevent it, I am in all probability going to India for about a year quite shortly. It is a frightful bore and I have seldom wanted to do anything less, but I feel that it is an opportunity to see interesting things and that I should afterwards curse myself if I didn’t go. I wish it didn’t come at this moment, because I particularly wanted to vegetate for a few months, look after the garden etc and think about my next novel. I am afraid I don’t just at the moment see how exactly you connect up with theAryan Path. I always had a vague idea it had to do with theosophy. The only bit of advice I can give is that on a number of occasions when someone suddenly turned the light up the ectoplasm turned out to be butter-muslin. But I have always thought there might be a lot of cash in starting a new religion, and we’ll talk it over some time. Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday.
—George Orwell, letter to Jack Common, February 1938
when the day goes down on watertown
when the sun sinks low all around
that’s when i know i need you now
yes you’re what i miss
every little kiss
every little one
I come from a place that is all light.
I know: because, even, grounded, here, I’ve seen it. Multiple times.
I see it now.
But here, on this planet, it is most commonly believed that there cannot be light, without darkness.
Nah.
There is this pretty sad persistent duality disability here. Gotta have everything in oppositional twos. Light/dark. Yin/yang. Good/evil. Etc./etc.
Nah.
Where I come from, there is no duality. But instead infinite multiplicity. Which resolves always into light.
And nobody needs darkness to define that light.
Long ago, we, from where I come from, said just this:
There is no darkness anywhere. There are only sick little men who have turned away from the light.
I have all my lights on.
And it is my own face I see in the blazing windows of all the houses on earth.
But that was so long ago. Now there is no darkness, no sick little men. Only light. And all our own faces, blazing in light, from every illuminated window.
Light is just all there is. All gold, all streaming, all forever. All, all right.
This past week, if you were an American, and if you were connected to America, the term and the town of Watertown came crashing into your consciousness. And not in a good way. It came in via violence, and mayhem, and unknowing, and fear. And it squatted like a nasty poisonous toad, across your life.
I love Watertown. The name and the idea of it. I have since it first entered my consciousness.
That was in 1986. I was walking down a street in the Mission District of San Francisco. And from a tiny sliver of a pizza parlor sounded a song I had never heard before, from a band I had never heard before. The song, “Every Little Kiss,” I later learned, by something called Bruce Hornsby and the Range.
I was in that instant transported. Not easy in a city. Cities—like money, and guns, and jobs—among those things that are, soon, going to go. They have to. For they are artificial and dangerous and de-evolved anti-life entities.
Still, if one must be in a city, San Francisco was one, then, to be in.
And, in that city, upon hearing that song, I was transfixed. Drilled to the sidewalk. I had one of those onrushing clarifying totally experienced experiences: that all is all right, and always will be.
Everything in that moment seemed open and possible to me. Because in every moment it always is.
I can recall that moment now, twenty-seven years later, better than I can recall what happened to me an hour ago. Because that moment was real. And so much of the rest of it is just slogging through the sludgy eyes-wide-shut motions.
And what I experienced then, twenty-seven years ago, of Watertown, as transmitted to me through “Every Little Kiss,” is what Watertown is.
It is not that recent-week fraught place of violence and fear. It is not non-ordinary brothers said to have careened through vomiting out every car door bombs and bullets. It is not stolid phalanxes of armed-past-the-tits security goons, in reaction, marching marching marching to Pretoria. It is not a place of darkness.
It is a place of light.
It is, like anywhere else, about somebody wanting to curl up next to somebody.
A man has two legs.
He’ll build a house—from cellar to rooftop, with his own hands.
He’ll put seeds in the ground.
He’ll watch the sun and the rain at work.
He’ll take a woman to bed.
He’ll find enough tenderness and love to get him through the day.
You’d think that man deserved a little something.
You’d think that man was worthy of a jot or two of sympathy and consideration.
You’d think that maybe someone would say,
Let’s just let him alone for a while, and see what he can do.
It is like every other town of human beings on earth.
Occasionally bad people will run through it. But it’s error to think the dark exceptions are the rule. Anywhere. Because the rule is the light. Everywhere.
Eros is always ascendant over Thanatos. Maybe only barely. But ascendant she always is. Else we wouldn’t be here. But we are. And always shall be. Unto The Great Wide Open.
You do realize that everything is connected. That there are no coincidences. And that all is leading into only light.
Among those extinguished in the Boston bombing was a young boy who, in response to the extinguishing of Trayvon Martin, inscribed a sign that said “No More Hurting People.”
What more do you need. To know that there is a conscious universe. That it is willfully expanding all towards light.
Just kiss. With love. That’s all there is to it. Into The Great Wide Open. Into the light. Bring everybody along with you. With every little one.
Here’s how it works. In the video below, the sweet little white boy is missing his sweetheart. He’s out there in Watertown. But, in Reality, in all of his being, he’s anywhere she may be.
Nothing matters, not to him, but her.
He’s at this moment especially and intensely connected to her, through his presence in Watertown. Because of the four elements without which humans cannot live—air, fire, water, earth—water is the most sensual. And he is at present immersed in a whole town of it.
At 5:03 in this video, he enters the zone. Not Bach, not Beethoven, just earnest sloppy rocknroll, but he gets There. To where it could just keep going like that forever. All Eros, no Thanatos, anywhere around. And, in his smile, you know he knows it: is riding, so high, knows it could keep on going like that forever.
And everything would have turned out happily had not rumour of the komarinsky finally reached Foma Fromich.
Foma was shocked and immediately sent for the Colonel.
“What is it? What has happened?” Uncle exclaimed, panic-stricken.
“What has happened? Do you realize he was dancing the komarinsky?”
“Well . . . what about it?”
“What do you mean, ‘What about it?’” roared Foma. “How can you say such a thing? You who are their master and, in a sense, their father! Have you any idea what the komarinsky stands for? Do you know that this song depicts a vile peasant in a state of drunkenness, who was about to commit a highly immoral act? Do you realize what this debauched yokel did? He violated the most sacred ties, and as it were tramped upon them with his huge peasant boots that are accustomed to nothing but stomping the floors of drinking dens! Do you realize that your reply has insulted my noblest feelings? Do you realize that your reply has insulted me personally? Do you realize all this, or not?”
“But Foma . . . it’s only a song, Foma.”
“What do you mean, only a song! And you are not ashamed to admit you know this song—you, a member of decent society, father of fine and innocent children and a Colonel to boot! Only a song! How can a person with a grain of propriety admit that he knows this song without dying of shame, that he has even heard of it? How, how?”
“Well, you have, Foma, seeing as you are asking,” Uncle replied in all simplicity and confusion.
“What was that? I know? Me . . . me, you really mean me! The insolence!” Foma Fromich suddenly yelled, jumping to his feet and choking with anger. He never expected such a stunning reply.
I shall not attempt to describe Foma Fromich’s rage. The custodian of morality banished the Colonel from his sight for the indecency and ineptitude of his reply. Foma Fromich now swore to apprehend Falaley at the scene of the crime, as he danced the komarinsky. In the evenings, when everybody thought that he was occupied with some task in hand, he would steal out into the garden and, skirting the vegetable beds, conceal himself in the hemp, from where there was a good view of the patch of ground on which the dancing was supposed to take place. He lay in wait for poor Falaley like a hunter stalking his prey, and gleefully looked forward to the distress he would bring upon the whole household, and especially upon Uncle, if ever he were successful.
“She was living with a pilot,” said Mrs. Pelling. “Tiny, she called him. If it hadn’t been for Tiny, she’d have starved. He was gorgeous but the war had turned him inside out. Well of course it would! Same with our boys, wasn’t it? Missions night after night, day after day.” Putting back her head, she screamed very loudly, “‘Scramble!’“
“She’s mad,” Mr. Pelling explained.
“Nervous wrecks at eighteen, half of them. But they stuck it. They loved Churchill, you see. They loved his guts.”
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was born in West Point, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal and Nina Gore. He was raised in Washington DC. When he was 10, his parents divorced; his relationship with his alcoholic mother, which ended in 1957 (she died 21 years later) seems to have been at once unsuitably intimate, in terms of her personal disclosures to him, and thoroughly poisonous.
He has recalled her telling him, for instance, that rage made her orgasmic (“I forgot to ask her if sex ever did”) and remarking that she was born only “because my mother’s douche bag broke.” Nina also informed him how, on the way to their honeymoon, his father had told her: “‘There’s something very important I want you to know.’ I was so excited. He’s going to tell me he loves me. But he didn’t. Instead, he said: ‘I have three balls.’” According to Vidal, his father “was in all the medical books.”
“How old were you when you noticed Nina was behaving differently from most parents?”
Vidal laughs. “51.”
“Come on.”
“No. Really. I was a slow developer. The thing is, she was just atrocious. Everybody who knew her hated her.”
“What did she do, exactly? Your grandmother said that when Nina walked in a room, it was like an evil spirit arriving.”
“Yes. This is her own mother saying that.”
“It must be awkward, then, to contemplate the fact that, genetically, you are half her. Is there anything in your character that you recognise as inherited?”
I am on top of the Empire State Building leaning on the railing which I have carefully examined to see if it’s strongly made. The sound of it comes all that way, up, to me. A hum. Thousands of ventilators far away. Now and then I hear an improbable clank. The air, even up here, is warmed by it.
To the north a large green rectangle, Central Park, lies flat, clean-edged, indented. A skin has been pulled off, a bandage removed, and a small section of the Planet has been allowed to grow.
I think, “They have chosen to do this in order to save their lives.” And then I think, “It is not really a section of the Planet, it is a perfect imitation of a section of the Planet (remembering the zoo). It is how they think it might look.” I am struck by their wisdom. Moved.
The elevator is not too crowded. We are all silent and perfectly behaved, except a little girl who is whispering something to her mother. Her mother holds her hand and bends down to listen. The little girl giggles. Hunching her shoulders and screwing up her face. She has told her mother something outrageous.
In the lobby are people who are really doing it, not like us, just looking around. They wear the current costume and read the office directories beside the banks of elevators. I realize there are offices in the Empire State Building! It is not just a tower to look from!
It all starts coming in, on the street. Each one is going somewhere, thinking. Many are moving their lips, talking to themselves. In 2 blocks I am walking as fast as they are. We all agree to wait when the light turns red.
In the subway it is more intense. Something about being under the ground? It is horrifying to let it all come in, in the subway.
A gust of dirty air hits me as I rise out of it at the 7th Ave. subway exit. I am relieved, perhaps because the buildings are lower, the street wider, the intersection a jumble of crazy angles?
•
Years ago, somewhere inconceivably else, I could have been given a strange assignment.
He was a short man, gray haired but mostly bald. He explained the thing to me in a homey kind of office.
“I can fix you up to be, actually be, a Native of a World,” he said. “You won’t be like them, you will be one of them. Think the way they do, see as they see etc with exactly their physical and mental equipment. You can see, of course, what this means! It means your data, for the first time, will be absolutely accurate. You will, in every sense, know what it is to be one.”
I have forgotten all he said about the reports I’d have to make on my return, but I can almost remember the taste of the potion I got. Brassy, but not too bad.
And what is happening during moments like that on the Empire State building is simply that the potion’s effect is flickering out. There are moments of wakefulness, and it all starts coming in.
You see it on the faces of the others. They are all more or less drugged. Many are as straight or straighter than you are, but are pretending not to be. As you are pretending not to be.
It is then, while watching the ones who are actually doing it (not like us, just looking around), that you realize there are only people more or less drugged into this vast, insane, assignment.
He had never wanted anything before; there’d never been anything worth wanting. Lust was too pale a word. It was unfair. Life was so drab and listless, such a routine of shadows. She burned so bright against this dark that she lit even him.
There are so many words. Words everywhere, and not a shred of common sense. Documents multiply amongst themselves, which sire new pieces of paper, loosed from all logic.
And, hereabouts, we call our church this: Kneel Before Mary Holy Mother Of God Blessed Lubricious Wonderment Eternal Wet Waiting Willing Open Golden Flower.
So let it be noted.
So let her be noshed.
I am outing myself, as priest dude, because here, in this 2013 Passover and Easter season, members of our congregation are, more than usual, expressing Despair. As we wander through the wilderness of that time, in this world, when and where there is no god.
Did I mention—speaking of Passover—that I am also a rabbi?
Why, though—the fuck?—should I have to.
Because, as everyone knows, one cannot be a priest, without first being a rabbi.
Musical interlude. While, those unacquainted, strive to process.
“When I listen to him,” Zina said on the second side, “I hear a first boyfriend. Men are like malicious children, but he is like a first boyfriend, the sweet one. Maybe he is a merman, a child of the sea. In a rough sea, on a big boat, I hold on to the rail. Down below, on his small deck, he stands with perfect balance, riding the waves.
“I listen to his innocent voice over and over again. It would be a dream, he says.”
“When I was preparing to be whatever it is I’ve become, I was sent to work in a hospital. Comfort the dying. I remember the mortuary there—it was very Victorian. Neo-Renaissance. In the foyer there was an inscription in Latin. ‘Let smiles cease,’ it said, ‘let laughter flee. This is the place where the dead help the living.’”
The older man in the group got to his feet muttering.
“Bummer!” he shouted at Egan. His heavy face grew red with anger; he raised cupped hands to amplify his voice, and screamed. “Bummer!”
“I’ll describe a picture to you,” Egan told his congregation. “I’m sure you’re familiar with it. A group of men are standing over a pile of corpses. They’re smiling and they have guns. Some of them have tied handkerchiefs across their faces but not to give themselves the raffish air of banditti—because of the smell.”
The priest wiped his mouth with his sleeve and took a cautious step forward. “That’s the big picture, children. That’s how it is now. That’s why you see that picture every week in all the magazines. You know—there are variations, the people, and the uniforms come in different colors, but it’s always the same picture.”
Around them the silences and the darkness deepened. Ramon nuts pattered to the ground through a web of leafy branches, making a sound like soft rain.
“Now why,” Egan asked, “are we made to see this picture week after week until it’s imprinted on the backs of our eyes and we have it before us dreaming and waking?”
No one answered him.
“Will these dead help the living?” he asked. “Are we to seek the living among the dead? What does it mean?”
“And yet,” he said, “and yet—where?” He opened his eyes and peered at them across the firelight. “Because you can stare into the faces of the dead—I’ve been doing it for years, I ought to know—and you won’t see anything. Anything more than plain death, I mean. You can look as sharp as you like, you can pray for a sign, for something, for the slightest hint of something . . . more. Not forthcoming.
“You can look into the dead face of the world, try to catch it unawares—no good. You keep looking, you tell yourself you’ve seen something, some little imitation, you know, of something . . . living. The Living. But it’s no good. You won’t. It won’t reveal itself that way.”
He had been standing, swaying, dangerously close to the fire. The heat warned him away.
“I mean—you look outward. To the stars, to the farthest nebulae. Not a sign. Or you look in. Close your eyes and look down from the outside in and what have you got? Blisters. Skin, eh? Flesh, parasites, sour guts and a little concupiscence. Then we’re down among our several intoxications and delusions and we find our minds, the little devils, the devious protean things. Anything more? A glimmer?”
Some of them sat with their eyes closed looking in. Others stared at Egan or into the fire.
“Maybe yes,” Egan said. “Maybe, eh? Who knows down in that mess? But maybe there is something. A little shard of light. What is it?
“It’s the why and wherefore,” the priest said, “that little radiant thing. I’ve never seen it, you know, but it has to be there. It’s the life. The Life. There’s all this death and this dying and it’s the only difference. It’s the only difference things make,” he told them.
“There aren’t angels,” Egan said. “There’s none of that. Thrones. Dominions. All that business—it’s rubbish. But there’s life. There’s the Living among the dead. I mean, you can’t ever quite see it, can you? You’d hardly know it was there but it has to be, doesn’t it? It’s only mislaid.”
He was dizzy, his chest felt hollow. He steadied himself against the stone again.
“Because it’s there—everything’s all right.”
He tried to see each of them among the shadows and flickering light.
“You have to try and find it, see?” Egan said. “If you can’t find it you have to believe in it. If you can’t believe in it you have to hope you will. If you can’t hope then all you can do is love the idea of it. Love it at a distance if that’s the best you can do, children. Love it like a secret lover.”
He seemed perplexed by their silence. He walked around the fire into the semicircle they had formed.
“It’s the only meaning in all of things,” he said. “There aren’t any others.”
“When I was a cadet, far back in the days of Khrushchev, we set off a hydrogen device in the Arctic Sea. It was a hundred-megaton bomb, the largest ever detonated then or since. Actually, it was a fifty-megaton warhead wrapped in a uranium case to double the yield. A very dirty bomb. We didn’t warn the Swedes or the Finns, and we certainly didn’t tell our own people who were drinking milk under this rain of fallout a thousand times worse than Chernobyl. We didn’t tell our fishermen who sailed in the Arctic Sea. I signed on as a third mate, and my mission was to use a Geiger counter without telling anyone else on board. We caught one shark that measured four hundred roentgens. What could I say to the captain—to throw his quota overboard? His crew would ask questions, and then the cry would spread. But we let the Americans know, and the result was that Kennedy was frightened enough to come to the table and sing a test-ban treaty.”
In the 1850s Muscular Christianity (with its strong vein of latent homosexuality) was popularizing manly sports like boxing and swimming, which required young men to display their naked bodies to each other. The novelist Charles Kingsley was the main propagandist for the muscular cult, and The Water Babies (1863) was, among other things, a long advertisement for the manifold joys of water sport.
The elevator operator was a small ancient Negro whose name was Lyman Enders Knowles. Knowles was insane, I’m almost sure—offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, “Yes, yes!” whenever he felt that he’d made a point.
“Hello, fellow anthropoids and lily pads and paddlewheels,” he said to Miss Faust and me. “Yes, yes!”
“First floor, please,” said Miss Faust coldly.
All Knowles had to do to close the door and get us to the first floor was to press a button, but he wasn’t going to do that yet. He wasn’t going to do it, maybe, for years.
“Man told me,” he said, “that these here elevators was Mayan architecture. I never knew that till today. And I says to him, ‘What’s that make me—mayonnaise?’ Yes, yes! And while he was thinking that over, I hit him with a question that straightened him up and made him think twice as hard! Yes, yes!
“I said to him,” said Knowles, “‘This here’s a re-search laboratory. Re-search means look again, don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re-search for it? How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?’ Yes, yes!”
I used to read the news headlines for fodder, though not anymore. Politics and commerce—mostly the same thing—are easy subjects in that I have plenty to say about what’s going on. When I write about easy targets, though, I end up thinking about them as targets, and I no longer think constant attack is helpful to me or the things I care about. Janice was never comfortable with my political writing, and I’ve come to understand why. In desperation I can fall into my old habits and whip out a rant that’ll fill my box on the back page, but when I do, although I can make me laugh—which is always satisfying—it feels like cheating and a waste of time.
“They were doing renovations to extend the basement cafeteria. A bunch of Turkish workers were digging. They got a little surprise.”
Excavation work had torn up part of the sidewalk. Arkady joined the onlookers on the precarious edge, where klieg lamps aimed an incandescent light at a power shovel in a hole two stories deep and about twenty meters square.
In the hole an organized crew of men in coveralls and hard hats worked on the ground and up on scaffolding with picks and trowels, plastic bags, surgical masks and latex gloves. One man dislodged what looked like a brown ball, which he placed in a canvas bucket that he lowered by rope to the ground. He returned to his trowel and painstakingly freed a rib cage with arms attached. As Arkady’s eyes adjusted he saw that one entire face of the excavation was layered with human remains outlined by the snow, a cross section of soil with skulls for stones and femurs for sticks. Some were clothed, some weren’t. The smell was of sweet compost.
The canvas bucket was passed fire brigade style across the pit and pulled by rope up to a tent where other shadowy bodies were laid out on tables. The colonel went from tent to tent and barked at the men sorting bones to work faster.
Sergeant Gleb said, “They want all the bodies out by morning. They don’t want people to see.”
“How many so far?”
“It’s a mass grave, who can say?”
“How old?”
“From the clothes, they say the forties or fifties. Holes in the back of the head. In the basement of the Supreme Court yet. March you right downstairs and boom! That’s how they used to do it. That was some court.”
Gleb asked, “What if the grave runs under the entire court?”
“That’s always the problem, isn’t it? Once you start digging, when to stop?”
It occurs to me that I should link here from time to time to the writs of a couple of fellows who weekly pour forth words round this dirt patch.
The first is Dan Cohen. His legend begins with the fact that he invented punk music, way back in 1961, down (naturally) in Los Angeles. Fronting a band called Charleston Grotto. Which quickly found itself banned from area venues, for offering songs like “Kill The Teacher.”
Though, truth be told, Cohen’s music is less like punk, than the Bernard Herrmann score to Vertigo . . . if Bernard had felt compelled to aurally illustrate “the true story of a visit to Hell after the subject loses his virginity to a gorgeous Laurel Canyon witch.” With a lyrical sensibility upbubbling lines like “iridescent rectums that resemble marine life.”
In recent years Cohen has released five more-or-less “solo” albums, some of which are even available at places like Amazon and iTunes. If one must have a comparison to a personage a sizable number of folks have actually heard of, try long-time Cohen companero Tom Waits.
Cohen also produces words without discernible sound, writing weekly for a little arts paper called the Synthesis. I hired him for this gig, back at the setting of the last millennium; I hope he gets paid these days more than I was able to offer him then. Though, things being what they are, I doubt it. Cohen’s most recent effort is fully representative of his oeuvre: he is, for No Sane Reason, stalked by an elderly woman, determinedly pursuing him from within a walker, a being Cohen fears may be a “haint” of his recently deceased mother.
Anthony Peyton Porter I did not hire, though I did help found the paper he today labors for. While he is by far the finest scribe in what we used to call “the treesheet,” his work unaccountably appears weekly in the very back of the paper, beyond even the legal notices and the ads for the Potemkin “medical-marijuana” dives and hormonally charged “gentleman’s clubs.”
We will here resist exploring the symbolism of the seating of this black man at the very back of the paper bus.
Like Cohen, Porter is multimedia: he first came to local attention with commentaries aired over the community radio station, KZFR. While immured in the land of snow, he had previously engaged in, as he puts it, “muttering on KFAI, Twin Cities Public Television, and Minnesota Public Radio.”
Porter has an enviable gift for delivering, in 400 words or so, insights that require others to wail away for 400,000. As in this exploration of the same-as-it-ever-was twinning ancient Rome and today.
And, like Cohen, Porter fearlessly plumbs the personal. As here. Wherein—another of his gifts—open to whatever the universe may present, he finds, amid great grief, telepathy.
They saw wild pigs running near the lake, and a soaring osprey. The mountains drew closer. Papyrus grew beside the water. Pelicans made their geometric, card-trick pterodactyl dives.
They had reached the edge of the Paz petrol roadmap Lucas had been using to navigate. Its corner sections were worn away and missing.
“Do we have a decent map?” Lucas asked.
“Just this,” said Sonia.
She handed him the rental car company’s map. It was not very detailed.
“This is the kind of map that killed Bishop Pike,” Lucas said.
at school; the result is that I can’t read a single word of the manuscript part of your letter, so I may not have followed your instructions exactly.
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