CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
Writerly Evolution
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of Master of Arts
in English
By
Richard McGinis
December 2013
The thesis of Richard McGinis is approved:
_______________________________________________
Prof. Dorothy Barresi, MFA
__________________
Date
_______________________________________________
Prof. Mona Houghton, MFA
__________________
Date
_______________________________________________
Dr. Katharine Haake, Chair
__________________
Date
California State University, Northridge
ii
Dedication
For the people who believed in me long after I’d exhausted any possibility of
believing in myself: Sue Holland, Pat McGinis, Ken McGinis, Ed & Lynn Funk, Chuck
Velona, and a host of other friends who insist on remaining anonymous: you saved my
life, and made it worth living after all.
For the faculty, who continuously amazed me with their patience, generosity, and
good will: Dr. Kate Haake, Prof. Mona Houghton, Prof. Dorothy Barresi, Dr. Leilani
Hall, and Prof. Martin Pousson. It was foretold that mighty companions would join me
as I walked this road, and indeed it came to pass.
And lastly for my father, who wasn’t able to bear witness to any of this, and who
surely would stand amazed.
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Table of Contents
Signature Page…………………………………………………………………………….ii
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iii
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………...…….v
500 Word Family History ....................................................................................................1
The River Sutra ....................................................................................................................3
Waiting...............................................................................................................................13
Bardo ..................................................................................................................................16
I Want To Write A Good First Sentence ...........................................................................35
Dagnar-Vala .......................................................................................................................41
And What of the Prayer of St. Francis?.............................................................................63
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Abstract
Writerly Evolutions
By
Richard W. McGinis
Master of Arts in English
This thesis is comprised of six separate works arranged in three pairs, each pair
consisting of one short work coupled with a second story of more conventional length,
and an epilogue.
Taken as a group, these six works demonstrate a distinct repertoire across a range
of genres, moving from conventional modernist works drawing heavily on
autobiographical elements to works constructed in dialogue with a larger body of
discourse, and then finally to works of speculative fiction containing parodic elements.
The first pair can be seen to work in the genre of Creative Non-Fiction. The
second pair, although written in different modes-- one socio-political, the other in
dialogue with a specific literary precursor-- share common motifs: the afterlife, the
collective unconscious, control of individual identity, and transitional states of being. The
final pair, crafted in the genre of speculative fiction, are parodic of literary theory and of
the speculative fiction genre, respectively. The epilogue is a stream of consciousness
meditation that operates as a coda to the collection.
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500 Word Family History
Ancient Tuatha De Dannaan warrior-poet Aonghus did his best to keep the
Romans out of his beloved Eire.
In the end, he was driven from the land by St. Patrick and the rest of the snakes.
What the Romans couldn’t conquer, the Catholic Church finally did. What the Catholics
could not utterly eradicate, they left to the English Imperialists- and that settled the Irish
Question.
The sorry tailings of his bloodline wound up in Scranton, digging coal and laying
track.
For those unable to conjure the price of passage, another way off that priestriddled pestilent rock was by taking the ferry to Liverpool, donning the raiment of their
conquerors, and losing their freckled complexion, and their real names, forever. But, in
spite of all their efforts to blend into English obscurity, the spirit of the ancient warrior
inconveniently continued to echo through them.
One such echo was the captain of a cable-laying ship that laid the first
transatlantic telegraph cable. He married a kind black woman and died of old age in the
sunny Caribbean, like many Irish did.
Another one of these echoes was a governess who smuggled Jewish children out
of Paris when the Nazi’s came to call. She knew better than to think that the Germans
would be reasonable.
Anne, her niece, inherited her defiant streak and went to nursing school. She
nursed an opium addict to death in the Bahamas, and then settled in Buffalo, New York,
the Silicon Valley of its time, in the hopes of finding her fortune.
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One of her patients, a large man who spent three months in traction, came from a
very wealthy family, and she thought she was in luck. But the Great Depression changed
all that, and they lived in a tent for three years after they got married. At least the tent had
a stove in it. Her recipe for squirrel still survives.
Her red-headed daughter, uncomfortably Irish in appearance and temperament,
moved to New York to live a life of culture and vibrancy. Her husband, the faintest of
Aonghus’ echoes, acted in plays and directed theatre productions until he decided it was
better to feed his family. He took a job in an insurance firm. On St. Patrick’s Day, he
liked to put his son atop his shoulders so they could watch the parade go down
Broadway, with the bagpipes and the marching bands.
His son loved the bagpipes and the smell of chestnuts toasting in the street
vendor’s fires. He loved to shout Erin Go Bragh, and listen to the grown-ups plot
Troubles for the English.
Eventually, the son of this faintest of echoes got to visit the great tomb in
Aonghus’ valley. Feeling along the stony walls, he wondered what his life could have
been if the Romans and the Catholics and the English had not come. Later that night, in
the pub at Doolin, he bought a pint for the Uillean piper and knew that this place was
home to his kind no longer.
2
The River Sutra
The man parks his car in his driveway, goes in to the house and lies on the bed
next to his partner. She is reading a magazine. She asks him about his day, and he tells
her. He is taking classes at the local university. He talks to her about how the young
people there are all in love with their darkness. How they caress it, how it seduces them
so completely that they seem forever lost, like children in some dark Gothic maze. He
speaks to her about the evolutionary dead-end that they have made of storytelling. “After
all,” he says to her as he stares at the ceiling fan and she reads her magazine, “If nothing
means anything, and anything can mean anything, and nothing matters, what is the point
of writing anything?” “That’s not right,” she says to him, “That’s not right at all.” And
they kiss each other good night, and the man gets up and goes back to his office on the
other side of the house, because he has much to do while she sleeps.
So perhaps you will think that this story is about suicide, murder, or terminal
illness. And perhaps for you it is. But perhaps it is about something more. Perhaps it is
about something bigger. Perhaps a mind, in an attempt to remind itself, to prove to itself
that it is not alone, to overcome its separation from all the other minds it sees but does not
touch, attempts to communicate something to another mind. All this attempt may produce
in the end is a knowing nod. Identification. Communication. The echo of an idea,
perhaps. But that is enough.
The man checks his stocks and the news, eats his late dinner, looks at his
computer and types for a time, goes back across the house, undresses and lies back down
in bed next to his partner. He reads for a time- economic history, nothing interesting. He
catches himself drifting away, so he turns off the light and the book falls to the floor.
3
Soon, he dreams. He vaguely begins to recognize, along the edges of his mind, that he is
dreaming. Sometimes, when he realizes he is dreaming, he can awaken himself. But often
he cannot and he awakes feeling somewhat sickened. “Why,” he asks himself, “can these
dreams never be anything pleasant?” The feelings aroused by his dreams often stay with
him for a day or two, beckoning him to a mystery that he can never seem to completely
unravel. Tonight he cannot awaken himself, try as he might. So he is trapped.
Over the years, he has asked many learned people – sages, psychiatrists, therapists
– for help with his dreams. The closest he has ever come to an answer was from an old
grizzled veteran who lived in a trailer park, a World War II bomber pilot who had
befriended him out of boredom. This other man, a sinewy-tough, desert-dried, blue-eyed
old man had cocked his head to one side and made the observation that “The mind just
manufactures this shit. It’s meaningless.” The man embraced this rationalization. It eased
his suffering for a time, but in his heart he knew there was more to it.
One dream that came back many times through the years was his dream of
Niagara Falls. Now, it is important to know something of Niagara Falls and of this
dreaming man to understand. But you will be left to ascertain its meaning for yourself.
Do you remember the old parable of the Zen master silently pointing his finger at the
moon? That’s why.
In any event, as a boy, the man, whom his family called Buck, was sent to live
with his grandparents in Niagara Falls. This was done because his father was alcoholic
and his mother was having difficulties as a result. His grandmother was a nurse who
worked in the obstetrics ward of the hospital in which he had been born. His grandfather
had sold the supermarket that the family had run for many years. They owned the
4
building that the market was in, and as was common in that region, lived in the large
apartment above it. The building was across the street from the great Niagara River. The
grandparents were concerned, what with having a six year old boy in their charge. So
they would tell him stories about children who had drowned in the river. “The river is
dangerous,” they told him. “It looks calm, but it has a strong current. You must never go
swimming in the river, and you must promise us that you will never go down to the
waterfront by yourself.” The boy nodded his head and promised, and they ate their roast
beef and boiled potatoes and boiled green beans.
Now, I told you that you need to know something about the Niagara River to
understand. Let me tell you what you need to know.
The Niagara River runs north along the border between New York and Canada.
The other Great Lakes empty into Lake Erie, which empties into it. Where Lake Erie
meets the river is the City of Buffalo. The City of Buffalo was once a mighty hub of
industry, but is now a decrepit, rusted wasteland. The River flows through the suburbs of
the city towards Niagara Falls, slightly less than halfway to Lake Ontario.
The Falls are approximately thirty-six hundred feet wide, and about one hundred
and seventy- five feet high. Roughly six million cubic feet of water flows over them
every minute of every day, and has done so for the last twelve thousand years, when the
receding glaciers of the last ice age carved them out of the rock that is called the Niagara
Escarpment. As you might expect, at the foot of the Falls there is a massive gorge. The
river then widens again and calms as it passes into Lake Ontario. The east end of this
inland freshwater sea then flows into the St. Lawrence River and joins the Atlantic
Ocean. It takes approximately seven years for a drop of water that goes over the Falls to
5
join the Ocean. What many people do not know is that twenty percent of the fresh water
supply for the entire Earth passes over them.
The boy’s grandparents, being good people, were concerned that he seemed
anxious and frightened as a result of the experiences he had before coming to live with
them. So they decided one day to take him on a trip to see the Falls. It was not far. They
promised him ice cream and a souvenir, and drove Downtown, as they called it. Buck’s
eyes lit up and he became shyly quiet as they stood overlooking the American Falls. He
wanted to leap over the fence, to join the Falls. This was not because he wanted to die.
Quite the contrary. The Falls held some strange powerful attraction. They pulled him to
them in some way that he could not understand. Such power – he had never seen
anything like it. He wanted to be part of that power. He did not understand at his young
age why he felt this way. It frightened him, that he should be pulled to the water this way.
He thought that perhaps something was wrong with his mind. He would continue to feel
this way for many years.
They walked along the gorge to the whirlpool, and stopped to look over the edge.
Buck was completely fascinated, stepping on the lowest rung of the railing and pulling
himself up so he could look down to the water that pulled at him so. “What would happen
if I tried to swim in that?” he asked his Grandfather. “You’d get sucked under and
drown. Happens to big men all the time,” his Grandfather replied. “How come the Maid
of the Mist doesn’t get sucked in,” Buck asked. The Maid of the Mist is a tourist boat that
floats over the surface of the water and goes close to the falls so that people can feel the
power of the water more closely. “Because boats float… But,” his Grandfather said,
holding Buck by the chin and looking into his eyes, “little boys don’t. Don’t you ever go
6
down to the River alone. The Rapids will suck you away and you will die. It’s not like the
bathtub!” Buck looked up at him and knew that this was true. Grandfather was a rough
man, had even killed another man once when he was in the Navy in World War I. But he
never lied to Buck. He loved Buck, and Buck knew it.
Once when Buck was in the tub, his Grandfather had come in to shave. Buck
looked at his tattoos and asked about them. On one burly shoulder was a tattoo of the
U.S. Navy anchor. On the other was Christ on the Cross. “Do you like your tattoos,
Grandfather?” Buck asked. “Goddamned things are the biggest mistake I ever made-I
hate these damned things,” his grandfather spat out as he shaved with his brass razor and
his brush and mug. That made quite an impression on Buck. After all, his grandfather
had laughed the night Buck vomited hot dog and root beer slop all over the hallway
carpet while running to the toilet. Buck had expected a beating, but his grandparents
never hit him (His grandfather had once lifted Buck by the ankles and banged his head on
the floor until the money fell out of his pockets, but that had been funny and they had all
laughed. “I’ll teach you to brag about havin’ money, young man!” he said to Buck,
laughing so loud the walls of the house shook). So for Grandfather to blurt out bad words
about his tattoos meant that they must be bad things indeed. He would also say bad things
sometimes if he was frustrated. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he would bellow, or “God
Damn It.” Not ‘Goddammit’, but ‘God Damn It’. He had a way of pronouncing the ‘N’
so that his tongue would rub against his teeth and the purple veins on his temples would
bulge out. Buck’s Grandmother would admonish him. “Frank, please stop that talk
around your grandson,” she would say, puckering her lips while she stirred the beans in
the pot. After dinner, they would watch television for a time and then Buck would go to
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bed, to the captain’s bunk in the sewing room, and he would read. Buck loved to read his
grandfather’s Outdoor Life magazines because they were full of adventures. After a
while, he would turn off the light over his bed and fall asleep.
One night, shortly after they had made their trip to the Falls, Buck had a dream.
Buck did not like to dream, because he would often have the same dream over and over
again, but the emotions of his dream would be as vivid each time he had the dream as
they had been the first time. And his dreams were never happy. They were always
unpleasant. This particular dream was one of a few he would have over and over again
down through the years.
In his dream he is being sucked down the rapids towards the Falls. You see,
somehow although we don’t know how, as is often the case with dreams, he had been in a
boat with another person, and the boat flipped over and sank. Now, trying as hard as he
can, with all his might and all his will, he is being sucked down the River towards the
Rapids, and he is being drawn, drawn down towards the Rapids- towards the Falls. And
he is shouting to the other person but they cannot find each other, and he is struggling,
gasping for air, trying to get out of the River, but he cannot reach the sides. And he is
screaming and choking on the water, and crying out, and people are running along the
bank of the River and he is pulled under the Grand Island Bridge and down towards the
rapids that run to the Falls. Once when she had come to visit, his mother had warned him
that if you got pulled past the bridge you were gone for sure. And suddenly it has become
winter, and it is very cold. Ice has covered all the rocks, not the kind of ice that you
know, but ice that is hard as steel, clear and hard, hard slippery ice. So that every time
8
Buck tries to get to his feet, the water knocks him down and he slips and stumbles and is
dragged further down towards the Falls.
Finally, he begins to slide over the Falls. And he is scared because he knows that
he will be sucked into the big whirlpool and die. He tries and tries, but each time he gets
to his feet, he slips on the ice and stumbles again. People are cheering for him and
pleading with him and trying to throw a line out to him, but they cannot reach him. He is
terrified that he can see the Falls coming, and hears the roar of the water onto the rocks
below and out into the gorge and down into the whirlpool. Finally, he tumbles into a
chute and there is melt water and he is sliding down. But for some magical reason there
are cables running down the sides, and he can see other people struggling, too. They
aren’t really people, but shadows, brown dark shadows. People bundled in heavy wool
coats, perhaps, with big black rubber galoshes on, the kind with the metal buckles that fit
on over their shoes. Then he realizes that maybe it’s not what he thinks, this business of
falling over the Falls. He grabs the cables, cables like when they stopped the Falls to fix it
in nineteen-sixty-nine, he looked at that and was fascinated, fascinated – how could they
do that? How could they stop the water? There were men walking along the top of the
Falls, and there was no more great rush of water, just a meander here or there down the
side of the cliff. And Buck stared and stared and stared. And then he slips and begins to
fall again and the water runs down his neck and into his pants and he is falling and
rolling, falling and rolling, falling. His feet are kicking against the ice-covered rocks. And
there is spray and roaring and then he is in the water, sucked under, down and down,
flailing and spinning and then spinning ‘round and ‘round in the whirlpool. He knows
9
that now he will die. And he accepts it, although it makes him sad because there is so
much more that he would like to do.
Just at that point where things have turned gray and are about to fade to black,
like a TV screen that has been turned off in a dark room, Buck wakes up. He knows he is
still alive because he sees the window, and the streetlight outside shining in through the
thin white curtains and the wavy old glass. He is still alive, and he is perfectly fine,
tucked into the high captain’s bed under nice linen sheets and a crisp wool blanket, in the
sewing room that his Grandparents had set up for him, with the light over the bed and the
magazine on the floor just as he had left it. And Buck, the boy, is frightened, terrified
really, and confused, and doesn’t understand what it could mean. Is it an omen? Is he bad
in some way? Is God punishing him for something? He lays awake, sick in his stomach
and sick in his head, woozy and questioning, until Grandmother gets up to make
breakfast, singing a cheerful song to herself as she fries the eggs and makes the coffee
and the toast. “Rise and shine Morning Glory, you’re up early today,” she says to him
sweetly as he sits on the metal and vinyl chair next to the kitchen table staring up at her.
Now, Buck’s grandparents had a cottage on Lake Ontario, the Great Lake that the
Niagara River empties into. You see, in those days, a shopkeeper and a nurse could make
enough money together to buy a house and a car, to save money for old age, and to help
their daughter when she married badly by taking care of her oldest son for a year or two.
They could do that and still live a decent life. It was not like today.
So they had a cottage on The Lake, as they called. They had deeded the cottage to
their son, Buck’s Uncle Ed, and he was making it into a house. But they would still go
out there in the summertime. There, Buck could be free. He could swim and fish, and eat
10
the raspberries that grew out by the shed behind the cottage. He could dig clay and make
things from it, or walk along the cobblestone beach and collect bits of drift glass, or
interesting pieces of wood that had been polished into strange shapes by the waves.
Sometimes Grandfather would get the binoculars out and they would sit and take turns
looking at the gigantic lake freighters, the huge ships that looked like snails on the rim of
a glass when viewed with the naked eye, but were really giant ships that carried iron ore
through the lake to the Ocean. And when they had corn on the cob for dinner, he could
take the cobs over to the neighbor’s farm and feed them to the pigs. Sometimes, his
Grandparents would let him spend the night in a sleeping bag out on the lawn under the
stars, and he could stare and stare and stare at the Milky Way going round and round
while the waves lapped the shoreline. It was as close to Heaven, here on the shores of
Lake Ontario, north and east of the Falls, as Buck could ever have hoped to get. He was
never afflicted with dreams when he was out at The Lake.
The man opens his eyes and looks at the clock. He flips the covers off of himself
with a grand waving gesture, and tosses his legs over the side of the bed. Sitting for a
moment to clear his head, he marshals himself to meet another long day’s march, a day of
work and classes and stock markets and late dinner and reading. He pauses for a moment
to consider his dream, this same waterfall dream he has had so many times. It no longer
frightens him with the intensity that it used to when he was a boy. Today, this time, after
almost half a century of strolling around on this earth, he is not quite so sick, not in his
head or in his stomach. He has lived long enough to have the glimmer of an idea about
what this dream means. “Here we go again,” he mutters to himself, as he lurches to his
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feet and walks into the bathroom to turn on the shower, thinking of the Lake and how
happy he will finally be when he gets to go there once more.
12
Waiting
They were the first generation that went to college, and there was nothing else
they could have done other than move to New York, the New York of the 1950’s with
Charlie Parker and the Village Gate, and the Beats, and a Communist Party that actually
got votes. Train rides for a nickel and jobs for anyone who wanted to work.
They came from the steel towns, from the hearty European stock that had settled
in the lands where the cold winds blew, where the ground froze and snow started to fly at
Thanksgiving, where there was always snow at Christmas, just like on greeting cards but
not really, bitter and frozen and dirty and hard.
Their fathers, men of that era before television, were deceptively learned men,
men who read books, men who knew how to build things, men who had brawled on the
picket lines with axe handles against other men with guns to get weekends, and the eight
hour workday, and their fair share of the wealth they produced. Men who wore the
dignity of physical labor on leathery faces and scarred hands. Who knew how to weld and
form steel. Those men who in their youth had ridden rail cars out to Saskatchewan to
work the wheat harvest, sending money home to mother so she could feed the little ones.
Who had gone out into the Adirondack woods to live as hunters and fishermen so that
they were not just another mouth to feed around the dinner table. The type of men who,
when the factories fell on hard times, all took the same cuts in the hours they worked so
that everyone would have enough to eat, everyone got enough to keep body and soul
together. They were the men who came together to fix leaky roofs, who drank and played
poker in the summer time, formed volunteer fire departments and stopped what we now
call domestic violence with the administration of the firm peer pressure of a sound
13
beating. Who filled cellar freezers with deer and pheasant and duck, dressed up like Santa
Claus at Christmas time and made the children sing for their presents. Their children
who later went on to college at the public universities they had fought for, and then to
New York City to live lives of culture and grace. The children who bundled their own
babies into the way-way-backs of Volkswagen Beetles and drove the nine hours home for
Christmas, to sit at the dining room table and eat ham and sweet potatoes and homecanned green beans while arguing politics.
And then bundled their babies back into the way-way backs and drove back to
New York City, to the world of Charlie Parker and the Village Gate and the Beats while
the men waved good-bye from the porches of their tidy little houses. Went back to New
York, back to their dinner parties, and book clubs, and local stage productions of Moliere
and Pinter and O’Casey, back to live in the vibrant City, where their babies grew up and
went to school with all the other children from all the other people, some rich, some poor,
to learn and to grow and to compete to see who was better at what, as if that was going to
determine at last who wound up where. With the self-assurance that they had won out,
that their generation was at last the one who had crossed that great divide in class
structure and become somehow better. But who had lost the thread of it, who didn’t know
anymore how to build things, didn’t understand the way that owners lie to workers, didn’t
ever pause to consider the lessons that had been learned by those who had gone before
them, as if that was from some other time and place that no longer existed, from a
different era altogether. And who were therefore doomed to learn again from scratch the
things that those men, their grandfathers and great uncles and second cousins, had learned
the hard way. Were doomed to repeat the same old storyline again, but this time without
14
the benefit of the narrative that their own history would provide, if only they had know it
and not been so willing to cast it aside. But it had been removed by the generation who
had gone off to college and in the hastiness of youthful exuberance had left all that
behind, thinking that it was no longer needed, that it was a dark chapter which would
never be repeated. And the fact of their forgetting made it plain that it would have to be
learned all over again, harder this time and at an even higher cost.
And the now-grown children of the children of these men trembled in their hearts
because they knew that they were not up to it, were not capable of living up to the lost
heritage of those men with their leathery faces and scarred hands, who lived in the era
before television when men read books. And these children tried to tell themselves that
those men had been wrong all along, so that they would not have to reckon with the hard
truth of what had been lost, of the legacy that was theirs to live up to. Their new masters
thoughtfully removed these truths from them, replacing them with a narrative more
carefully crafted to suit their own designs, confident they would finally succeed and
enslave the children, as they had tried but failed to enslave the men. They fettered the
children with the hardest shackles they could invent, ones made from ideas carefully
placed within the children’s very own minds. These shackles could never be broken by
the children themselves; they could only be loosed if the children sought communion
with the ghosts of those old men who stood so patiently looking on, and waiting. Waiting
for the suffering to reach its limit. Waiting to see to it that the children lived up to their
legacy. Waiting for these children to wake up from the dream that began when their own
children had gone to New York City, to the land of the Village Gate and Charlie Parker,
and the Beats.
15
Bardo
What a relief to finally be dead! It is, as I once overheard someone say, akin to
removing a tight shoe. Entirely painless, apart from the embarrassment of expiring in the
presence of so many young people. That and the final insult, life’s four-hundred-and-first
blow, of failing to outlive my mother. Apart from these petty humiliations, I find the
sensation quite pleasant, the battery of my soul having run so low that the entire device of
my being simply shut down, noiselessly and irrevocably.
Ahh! Free from the wretchedness of the day-to-day, as if awakened from the
worst sort of dream, endlessly dull, like watching a movie you’ve seen a thousand times
before, simply because there’s nothing else on, and nothing else worth doing. I once
complained that all my dreams were bad; but at least chasing or being chased is exciting,
unlike the endless slog through days that never seem to change. Even the escape of
writing proved insufficient, its euphoria abandoning me in the middle of a moonless
night.
They will, no doubt, butcher my body in the casual fashion of fishermen stripping
the day’s catch in preparation for market, and determine that I died of spontaneous aortic
dissection. How shamefully provincial and banal-- an utter cliché, dying of a broken
heart! Even at the last life betrays me with its symbolism. And my papers, the sum total
of my creative life? Binned! Tossed out with hardly an afterthought by people who think
the most important thing in life is whatever sum of money you leave behind.
Whatever the imperfections taint the process, the flaws in timing or method, my
spirit breathes freely in relief. The scene into which I find myself deposited upon my
disincorporation from the material plane is pleasant enough; it reminds me of the woods
16
bordering the University I attended as a young man, back in the time when Naivete,
sweetest of angels, so completely seduced me, convincing me that life held so much in
the way of promise and blessed providence.
A short stroll through knee-high grasses brings me to a riverbank. I am both sad
and relieved to be alone. Sad, because my apparent solitude makes it clear that I am in a
vision of my own making; relieved because I have no desire to share this placid tableau
with others, or have my appreciation of its beauty disrupted by aimless sociability. After
all, I did not walk through life suffering the cares of my fellow travelers. Why should it
be any different now? I pause, remembering a story from antiquity, and think that perhaps
I should like a drink from the river, a drink that might make me forget the horrible beauty
of my life. But I abstain, in the manner of one who has placed all his faith in his own
intellect, and so finds himself lacking the courage to take such a leap of faith.
Relinquishing the stygian boundaries of my intellect for the unknown horizons of some
new world seems folly.
I stand there, embracing the certainty of my dilemma, and casting my gaze along
the river. After a short time, the eternity of an instant distilled into the teardrop of a
moment, a lone figure glissades towards me from downriver in a flat-bottomed aluminum
skiff, a working-class possession similar to those I commonly encountered during the
lazy summers of my childhood. His approach arouses my conditioned sense of muted
apprehension to the appearance of strangers. Has this ferryman come to carry me across
this river and into the Hades of the Ancients? The thought frightens me, terrifies me,
paralyzes me, for I can think of no greater horror than the notion of an afterlife authored
by a consciousness outside of myself. I squint to focus my gaze across this river,
17
searching for clues as to what might lay beyond. Am I to be carried across, past this veil
of color and light, my short time spent in this idyllic scene naught but a tantalizing respite
prior to being delivered unto a world even more grey and colorless than what I’ve just left
behind, there to spend all eternity in dread, waiting for something to happen?
“I don’t suppose you’ve any pennies?” the bearded figure asks wryly, in the
manner of one telling a joke to a friend in a drinking-place. His tone and demeanor shock
me out of my terrorized state as the skiff approaches. His voice carries the faint lilt of a
Gaelic accent which both relieves me and consterns me in its dissonance with my
projection of the narrative of the scene. I write my reply with my ghostly form as I feel it
to exist in this place, lowering my gaze to my muddy shoes to signify “no,” and stand
with my hands in my pockets, portraying my immense anxiety as sheepishness and
uncertainty.
The Ferryman guffaws, startling me, and I leap backwards, arms outstretched in
terror, as the bottom of the skiff skids ashore on the riverbank. “That business all started
as a flirtation with a pretty young lass who wasn’t supposed to be here– it was never true.
Give me your hand,” he says, a bright smile beaming from behind his silver beard as he
reaches out to me. The scene is made all the more horrifying by the powerlessness of my
resistance to him. Who is the Author of this afterlife? I would like a word with him, I
think. For this one who performs the duty of Charon is not at all as he has been written!
He is, instead, a pleasant and gentle soul with sparkling green eyes plying his trade in the
manner of a simple fisherman, enjoying the sensation of being afloat on the water with
the warm sun on his face, a pleasant enough way to pass eternity, I suppose, for one not
inclined to struggle with Art. But his appearance, and the scene overall, both such
18
obvious departures from the narrative of the setting as I was led to understand it, arouse
in me the groundswell of anxiety that leads so often to despair.
The river, this re-written Acheron, is in complete juxtaposition to the roiling rapid
full of tortured souls so commonly related to schoolchildren. Tranquil and deeply quiet as
the tannin-tinted waters of any Adirondack creek I’d ever fished, clear and full of trout,
this both comforts and alarms me because of its dissonance from the known narrative to
which this scene adheres, a narrative not of my construction, yet tinted with hues from
the life I have just left. On the opposite shore deer sip the cool water, while some ways
further down the river widens and deepens as mallard ducks quack and play, diving deep
into its depths under the surface, then bob to the surface, gleefully preening themselves
as they drift along with the current. I am wary, thinking it some sort of cruel trick. It
strikes me as odd that I, an avowed city-dweller who spent his life alone in a city of
millions, should perceive the peaceful sense of beauty in being that suffuses this scene.
Another fellow, also white-bearded, but decked out in olive-green waders, a tan
vest and matching hat, with a fern-lined willow creel strapped to his side, stands in waistdeep water a few steps from the opposite shore. He raises one hand in acknowledgement
of our passing as he quietly waves a twelve-foot fly rod back and forth over his head with
the other. My Gaelic ferryman cheerily waves to him as we glissade past in the skiff. The
work suits him. He is in excellent physical condition and betrays no sense of fatigue or
strain. Am I in a dream within a dream, a narrative familiar but not of my own making,
as I prefer my narratives to be?
Propelling the skiff onto the muddy bank with one great final stroke, he delivers
me to a parting in the cattails marking the foot of a path leading into the woods beyond.
19
His left hand keeping a firm hold on the pole, he turns and raises his right hand in a grand
sweeping gesture, a gesture that would be darkly portentous if not for this most casual of
settings, indicating that I am to proceed up the path. I am vaguely hurt by his
unwillingness to further engage with me, and so I step off the skiff with only a sideways
glance of acknowledgement.
The path he set me on winds quickly away from the river and into a forest of
Douglas fir, red oak, and alder. I muse to myself about the nature of the text into which I
have been delivered, how it contains both elements from outside of me and intimate
details known only to me. Is it simply that the authors of antiquity upon whom I’ve relied
constructed versions of this afterlife that were distorted, lensed through their own
symbolic orders, before being further prismed by the mediation of my own
consciousness, and so inaccurate? Perhaps it is so. It seems tyrannical to me that a
mediating consciousness could both create a world superseding those created by me and
yet incorporating elements so distinctly familiar. A reader who is himself an author, for
whom I am nothing but a character employed in the mediation of his text for purposes
unknown to me, an intolerable situation that results only in the deepening of my despair
unto resignation.
The angle of the sun in the sky tells me it’s twilight, and the orange and pink hues
overhead give me the impression somehow that the golden star is setting behind
mountains in the west. The trees begin to thin until I pass beyond the border of the forest
and onto a large well-manicured lawn. Opposite me, at a distance of perhaps a quarter of
a mile I see a flight of stairs perhaps a hundred yards wide sweeping up onto a grand
piazza, beyond which lies a magnificent stone-and-glass structure. I stop for a moment to
20
gather myself. The spectacle strikes me as horrifying, and I begin to pace quickly from
side to side there at the edge of this lawn, five paces left, then five right, courageously
combating my own stupefaction until I can withstand the sweet pain of the upwelling
within me no longer, and I begin striding directly across the field. Every step I take
forward across this fine green lawn makes the silhouette of the building grow larger in
my field of vision until I can see nothing else. Reaching the base of the stairs that sweep
up onto the piazza, I now see that they are constructed of gleaming red granite,
meticulously polished to a mirror finish.
There is much to be discerned about the culture of a place by its architectural
monuments, the quality of the craftsmanship as well as the purposes of the buildings
themselves, and I become excited, recognizing shelves of books within through the large
glass panels that form the windows, marveling at the shelves that seem to go on forever.
The interior is well lit, and warm golden light emanating from the library suffuses the
piazza and the greens surrounding the majestic structure. It seems even that the elements
of this lighting were taken into account by the creator of this place, as various sculptures
placed in the gardens about the building are intriguingly framed by the light. It occurs to
me that this is a novelty, if it is in fact a part of the final feverish dream of my dying
brain, because it is exactly these types of details that I seemed to always neglect when I
was alive, the precision of the sort of consciousness that takes into account these types of
details in constructing such a place utterly eluding me in favor of more pertinent
elements.
I begin my ascent of the granite steps tentatively, recognizing the presence of two
large griffins, not sculptures themselves but very much alive, eyeing me from massive
21
marble perches set alongside each of the gigantic bronze doors signifying entrance to the
structure, the luminescent blue and red feathers of their wings shimmering in the light
from the windows, each deep green scale of their hides reflecting a small image of the
building they guard.
My tongue laps the back of my teeth and I taste a dull, acidic, almost metallic
flavor that causes me to pass my tongue over the surface of my teeth to moisten them. It
occurs to me that perhaps I am in Hell after all, the first of the eternal punishments that
await me consisting of finding this place only to be gleefully torn apart by these griffins
as I stride across the palazzo towards the doors of the very place I’d often remarked
would be a sort of heaven to me. It would be a clever punishment, I surmise, to have this
pair of beautiful terrors fling pieces of me to the base of the steps, where I would be
somehow reassembled and forced to endlessly repeat the Sisyphean process for all of
eternity. The owners of the library could come outside and stand at the top of the stairs,
hands on hips, laughing at me, laughing at this hubristic notion of mine, the folly of my
presumption that one so insignificant as myself might be allowed to enter their divine
refuge. I am naught but a trespasser here, an imposter of the sort that plainly cannot
escape the conventions of antiquity that have permeated my journey thus far.
The griffins rise from their perches as I approach. Trembling, they toss the
golden feathers of their manes, which sparkle as they quiver in the light. Squinting, I pull
up my shoulders, bracing myself against what I feel sure to come as I cross the palazzo
towards the grand entrance. To my great relief, the griffins seemed to recognize me, for
they lay down again, dropping their magnificent heads onto their crossed claws and
22
sighing their acceptance of my presence. Resigned to my fate, I step forward. The bronze
doors swing open of their own accord, slowly.
As I proceed forward into the vaulted entry hall, I see a figure seated at a
magnificent carved mahogany desk. The figure is draped in red, but I cannot make out its
features from where I am, and so move forward, my eyes adjusting to the bright warm
light suffusing the hall. As I come upon the figure, I see that it is a woman, her head
shaved and her figure draped in the saffron robe and black silk sash of a Buddhist nun.
She raises her eyes to mine and smiles, sliding an exquisite piece of stationary across the
desk in front of her. I unfold it, and read the message it contains, painstakingly inscribed
in gold-leaf calligraphy:
The Pleasure of Your Company is requested tonight at our residence, for a
dinner to be held in your honor. We have arranged for Arjuna to meet you at the
West entrance at exactly seven-fifteen. In the meantime, please enjoy browsing the
library.
--Elena
I stand for a minute, perplexed at this development, and then thank the red-robed
woman, who smiles without looking up from her book. “Are you--” I begin to ask. She
shakes her head no, raising her right index finger to her lips in a gesture of silence, and
goes back to the book she has cradled in her lap. Slender and tall, her eyes coal black,
her opalescent ivory skin shimmering in the light, she appears to me in that instant, that
briefest of intervals in which time is suspended forever, most astonishingly beautiful. I
recognize a phenomena that occurred to me from time to time when I was alive – certain
scenes, apparently meaningless at the time, registering themselves in my mind in the
23
manner of photographs, images I would reflect upon from time to time, appreciating their
beauty and wondering about their significance. It had seemed to me early in life that this
was somehow a recognition by my subconscious mind that the particular image was of
special meaning, a portend of some event to come that would forever alter the course of
my life; but I’d come to believe it nothing more than a sort of manifestation of
neurological miscues, a mental tic to be willfully disregarded. Amazing how one can
place so much faith in superstitious delusions. She waves me on into the library without
speaking or lifting her gaze up to meet my own.
Having had no experience of any bright light while dying, no de-briefing from
any guardian angel or holy person, sensing not the presence of any ancestor to reassure
me, I begin to feel irritated by the misdirected expectations created by these narrational
devices of various world religions. Silently, to myself, I begin to question the meaning of
the various specters I’ve encountered thus far. If all this is simply a hallucination, the
product of my dying mind emptying itself in one last grand gesture, one last grand
gesture of text issued forth before all goes black and I am plunged forever into the
blissful silence of the endless abyss, it is a grim farce indeed to have derivatives of these
various texts injected into my final moments, rather than this world being entirely created
of my own discrete conceptions, of which I had so very many. But the griffins had
allowed me to pass, after all, seemingly in fulfillment of their function and here I stand, a
man who preferred dining alone, with a dinner invitation in hand and a sense of deep
foreboding enhanced by my reactionary sentiments against sociability. I fold the note into
my left jacket pocket, and rifle my memory for some indication of who this mysterious
red-robed priestess might be. It has been so long since I’ve read anything of the Far East I
24
cannot be sure, but am I certain because of the setting that she is not Kali. The creators of
this place were far too considerate in their attention to detail for such a thing to be even
remotely possible. Could she be Quan Yin? How disappointing. And why not simply
appear to me in their own right, absent these intermediary constructions? Perhaps I am
not capable of perceiving them and would be destroyed by the power of their direct
manifestation.
A large clock hanging above the archway reads twenty to seven. Walking over to
the nearest stack, I withdraw a green leather-bound volume at random, and settle into a
nearby armchair. Certainly this must be heaven if I am in a library with time to read,
notwithstanding this curious invitation in my pocket. People around me sit reading
casually, in no apparent distress, leading me to believe that perhaps I am not in some
Library of the Unrequited Author, some purgatory for failed souls, which I feared
because of the circumstances which brought me to this place. Opening the volume, I
discover it is a book of love poems from Ancient Egypt, composed by a stonemason
working in the Valley of the Kings. I set it down, assured that I selected the book at
random. Although written in hieroglyph, I find myself fully able to understand them.
He’d written them for his wife while she was out working in the fields, singing the
praises of her devotion to him and to their children. As I read them, I am struck by the
certain knowledge that she was an adulteress, although I cannot speak as to the sensation
of knowing that based solely on the evidence supplied by the poems themselves. They are
quite lovely, really, and remind me of sonnets, although entirely different in meter. I take
the time to read several, taken both by the poems themselves and in complete fascination
at my new-found ability to read through them and into the history of the text itself until,
25
glancing up at the clock, I realize it’s time to find the Western entrance, and meet this
Arjuna, this supposed charioteer. I set the volume down gently and return to the lobby.
The red-robed priestess simply points to her right without looking up from her
book. Not satisfied to take my leave without identifying her, I lean over the counter. “I
once read a book that made a great impression upon me. At its center was a marvelous
machine, one that crafted all manner of stories without any regard for the expectations of
those attending it. It was said that the machine itself was possessed by the ghost of the
wife of a most famous author. I cannot help but think that you resemble her in certain
light, and I wonder…” my voice trails off, the question seeming at once both insulting
and ridiculous. I am embarrassed.
She casts her gaze upon me without answering.
I turn and walk over to an airport-style moving sidewalk, wondering about the
need for clocks. What difference does it make what time it is, I think, again critiquing the
author of this place. Shouldn’t it be an endless Sunday afternoon? Emerging at the
western portico, I am famished. Why should there be hunger now? Why would the bodily
distractions of mortal life still burden me here? The doors on this side of the library are
similar to those at the front entrance, but crafted of oak with large wrought-iron
hardware. They open, and I find myself atop another set of short stairs, these guarded by
a pair of coiled serpents perched atop large glass spheres. At the base of each sphere is a
plaque, one inscribed with the word “Narcissism,” the other with the word “Pessimism.”
The serpents eye me, their tongues slipping in and out to taste the air around us. This
startles me, and I move away from them quickly, not caring to stand and contemplate the
obvious symbolism.
26
The heavy thump of hip-hop music accompanies the roar of an engine coming up
the drive. An iridescent orange Porsche Turbo Carrera comes roaring up the drive and
chirps to a stop alongside of me, Brembo brakes seizing its wheels. In the drivers’ seat is
a dashingly handsome raven-haired East Indian dressed in new Levi jeans, white Adidas
tennis shoes, and a black T-shirt, his eyes hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, a
winged skull emblazoned across the front of his shirt, below which the words “Kill Them
All, Let God Sort Them Out” are painted as if in flames of yellow and orange. Sliding a
cigarette into the ashtray with his right hand, he pulls his mirrored sunglasses down the
bridge of his nose with his left index finger and smiles at me brilliantly, his teeth so white
they appear as if carved of starlight. He waves me over, yelling words I cannot hear over
the din of the hip-hop music thumping from the two gigantic woofers stuffed into the
jumpseat of the Carrera. The scene baffles me utterly. I have come west instead of east to
get here, only to be greeted by an Ancient eastern archetype completely accoutered in the
culture of the west. Why this specter instead of Apollo? What consciousness would
choose to toy with me so, to what purpose? I feel as if a puppet on a string, a marionette
dancing across a stage deliberately reversed.
I descended the stairs and approach the car, but as I do so I catch a glimpse of a
man standing on the banks of a small lake in the center of a park just across the road. “I’d
prefer not to!” I shout at the charioteer over the roar. He smiles, pushing forward the
gearshift lever of the car. I stand there for a moment, awed by his exuberance and
vitality, as he jams his foot onto the accelerator and the car fishtails before rocketing
down the road. Watching him go, I can’t help thinking of Stephen Hawkings’ observation
that if every book was stacked end to end as it was published, you’d have to move at
27
ninety miles an hour just to stay even with the end of the line. I pause. These idle,
negative facts that replay themselves time and again in my mind’s eye, making me so
unhappy. Did I author them, or are they, too, the product of some unseen narrator?
Perhaps I should have drunk from the river on my way to this place, so that I might
escape the incessant questioning, the fountainhead of my despair.
Even if you empty your cup, you are still holding, after all, a cup – one crafted by
yourself, on the potter’s wheel of experience. Writing had been a way of sweeping away
the fragments of the cup I’d left shattered on the floor. There were many more in the
cabinet of my mind, and the collection had grown as I’d made them, somehow.
The chaotic scene becomes quiet once again, and I cross the road, walking
towards a figure standing in quiet contemplation of the pond, searching for something he
has already found. His hands are at his sides and, as I cross the path and walk onto the
patch of grass separating us, he bends his knees and extends his left foot out to his side. I
stop for a moment to watch him. He begins to raise his hands up in front of him, and I
recognize what he is doing. I gather myself up beside him and inhale deeply. His lips curl
into a slight smile as I raise my hands in front of me, emulating his movements one by
one. We complete the movements of the form, twenty-four in all, a standard Asian
exercise practiced in city parks the world over, in silence. When it is over, I turn to him
and smile. He turns and starts back along the garden path of the park, glancing over his
shoulder to be sure I am following.
I recognize this man from the publicity stills I’d seen of him, and admire him
greatly, for he was an innovator in literature. I wonder at his level of success. His
experiment had not been overtly successful, even though it had brought him what he
28
wanted in the end, for the characters he had written into being had not been able to break
free of the existence they held within their pages. But it occurs to me now that perhaps
the honesty of his attempt was enough to underscore his vision, and the vision itself, not
the text, was what he had been trying to make real. The text without a beginning, the
closed world of the immortals a clue, only a clue, brought into contact with the realm of
the Real through language, as close to the edge of it as it could be, his cosmic answer to
the boundaries of language. The positioning of Eterna as external to the storyline
pointing to the nature of the project, the separation of the muse from the lives of these
two characters. The entire construction akin to the image of an old Zen master pointing
solemnly at the moon, asking the student to perceive what lay beyond words, an image
that had pointed to this known boundary for centuries, but that answer had not sufficed.
He spent most of his life trying to pierce the veil with words, affecting a construct both
hidden and eternal. There was no way to drag the symbolic into the Real, not in full, but
as I follow along behind him, staring at his back, it occurs to me that perhaps that had
never been his objective at all. The value of the exercise lay in the effort, relentless effort
across the decades comprising his entire lifetime, of the creation of a world discrete and
knowable, complete in and of itself. That could explain the pain of the characters as they
struggled to break the bonds of the narrative, ultimately realizing that they could not, and
perhaps would rather not. An expression of his own pain as he reached through the
symbolic to his Elena over and over, never quite able to reach her, a testament to the
highest form of love, the love that causes us to keep trying, the highest reach to which we
can attain within the symbolic order all around us. The writing into being does not occur
within the pages, but is instead what occurs outside them, the action of the process itself
29
upon us. We are all in the process of writing ourselves into being, not in the pages of the
texts we create, but outside them. I reach into my pocket for a notepad upon which to
capture the poetic elements of this sudden flash of insight, only to realize that the jacket
pocket in which I had always carried a notebook in life is curiously void of its
accustomed contents. This awakens me from the happy reverie of my thoughts, forcing
me once again to face the terrible beauty of my present experience.
We come to a house, a comfortable mid-century modern, with a spacious open
floor plan and large windows, and walk inside without ringing the bell. Apparently there
is a dinner party underway, with people gathered in twos and threes, drinking and talking.
My companion goes to the dining room and hugs a woman standing off to one side, a
radiantly beautiful woman, with the upright posture of a dancer and long silver hair
pulled back into a ponytail. As she looks over at me, her emerald eyes glowing like
jewels set into the sculpted lines of her toasted- almond skin, she smiles. My throat again
goes dry, the familiar sensation of an electrical charge gathering in my midsection and
radiating outward through my arms and legs. She moves across the room with effortless
grace to greet me, and I am terrified, suddenly aware that I do not belong in this place.
Long arms outstretched, she takes each of my hands in her own and stares deeply into my
face in the intimate manner that causes me feel as if there is no one in else the room, no
one in the universe, even, at that one crystalline moment but we two. Kissing my cheek,
she lets go of my left hand and wipes a tear from my cheek with her right. “Come,” she
said, hooking my arm with her own and guiding us across the living room.
It strikes me as odd that she is the only woman present, and I attempt to place her
in narrative context. In a medieval tale, she might be the white queen, or in the tales of
30
antiquity Hera or Venus, not Helen of Troy given how everyone is getting along
certainly, and not simply a muse as no one here seems mesmerized, and there are no
serpents visibly hovering about her head. But strange that there are no other women
present, either of their own accord or as companions to these men. I take my place, and
they sort themselves out on either side of me. I was never any good at these types of
situations, so I simply turn my attention to the large abstract painting hanging on the wall
opposite, admiring it as I eavesdrop on the conversations around me.
Two across from me on my right are taking turns scolding each other over matters
of politics, one of them an ardent communist of the sort that finds fault with anyone and
everything, the other more of a classical republican, in the old sense of the word. I abhor
such conversation, the goings on about communism and democracy, foibles of the weakminded who had not the courage to grapple with the pressing artistic questions of the day.
It is part and parcel of why I preferred to dine alone, for then I could be left to enjoy my
own thoughts rather than subject myself to the inevitable turn to such matters all social
conversations take.
To my left is one I recognize as one who fell silent, ruined by fame and wearied
by the totalitarian demands of the mob that formed his audience. He presents no threat of
drawing me into unwanted conversation, for which favor I silently thank him. I admire
his tenacity, his sense of artistic integrity, but the notion of being tipped into silence is an
idea I prefer not to ponder.
As I look around this comfortable scene, made uncomfortable by my implacable
sense of anxiety, I begin musing again over what I have experienced this day, still unsure
as to the manifestations I’ve witnessed – is all this the final fevered dream of a dying
31
brain, the last great vision before all is consumed by the vast expanse of nothingness? Or
am I truly in some other place, delivered to another dimension of existence, my work on
the earthly plane complete, the day’s affair an orientation of sorts, an introduction to the
next step in the development of my cosmic being? Glancing about me at the cast of
characters presently in my company, all of them familiar in some strange way, and yet
myself alienated from all of them, it occurs to me that if I had been other than who I was,
I would not have had occasion to know who any of them are. What’s more, the
fragmented archetypes that have irritated me so greatly, both in their familiarity and their
dissonance from it would not be present had not my own individual consciousness drawn
upon these elements in order to create the scene. And so, although I am the nexus of this
experience, I am not its sole author. This is the essence of my present vexation.
The man who brought me to this elegant affair is absorbed in conversation with
the hostess. The two companions who argue politics do so with eternal ardor, while to my
left is the one fell silent, and opposite him the one I call the machinist, himself the author
of a marvelous and terrifying story telling machine of which I had inquired at the library
itself. He might be one from whom pertinent information about my present dilemma
could be gleaned, but the arrangement of the table prevents us entering into direct
discourse without great rudeness, a situation which ordinarily would cause me no second
thoughts whatsoever, but seems a great risk given the circumstances. Additionally, with
no social demands upon my intellect, I am free to attempt to decipher things myself,
again a condition that I would not chose if I alone was the sole creator of this tableau. It
occurs to me that, had I been better prepared for the fact of my passing, I might have had
time to construct a narrative more to my liking, one closer to my own demands for
32
authenticity, fully considering the elements it was to contain. The suddenness of
circumstance has conspired against me once more, with nothing to do but wait for the
darkness to descend as my fevered mind extinguishes itself. I take time to remember the
authors I read so greedily, to focus my mental faculties in an effort to make one of them
materialize into this scene – an Irish poet, perhaps, or Japanese. I focus my gaze on the
candle set on the table in front of me, hoping that one or the other will come forth from
the shadows cast by its light and so prove my final hypothesis, but no matter how
forcefully I concentrate, nothing occurs. I am plagued by the question of how this scene
exists: Could it exist without me? Would these people all be sitting around this table
dining and chatting if I was not present?
At last, the hostess breaks away from her lover, my silent companion, and taps her
knife on the side of her glass. “Our guest must be returned to the Library. Who among us
will accompany him?”
The machinist nods his head. Although later it would occur to me that, given what
has transpired, it is perfectly appropriate for him to play this role, I am in the present
frightened that asking the question is plainly impossible. I am instead somehow bound by
the same silence that accompanied so many of my living dreams, the inability to speak no
matter how great the necessity or the wish, and so I become sure that this trip back will
mark the end of my consciousness. How unfair and cruel a turn, to have such a place, a
repository for all the literatures of the world lost forever to me in the vast void of time.
He produces two cigars, and we puff as we walk back to the library, finishing the
cigars just as we arrive back at the foot of the library steps. We snuff them out and stride
up past the griffins, who eye us casually without so much as even a toss of their heads.
33
Entering through the large brass doors at the Southern entrance, I am delivered to the redrobed priestess who looks up from her book and smiles at us as she stands. He nods at
her, and then turns to me to shake my hand, staring deeply into my eyes without speaking
for a moment before turning and walking away. I look to her as she gazes at me with her
coal black eyes.
“Ommmm…” she begins, and I follow her gently:
“Ommmmmmmmmmm…”
34
I Want to Write a Good First Sentence
I want to write a good first sentence. I want to write a good first sentence because
the first sentence carries within it the imperative of its own next sentence. I want to write
a good first sentence that carries within it the imperative of its own next sentence because
I want to write a good paragraph, and then another, and yet still another. I want to write a
first sentence that carries within it the imperative of its own next sentence, going on from
there to write good paragraphs that turn into a good story, because I did that once and I
enjoyed the feeling. In fact, the feeling of having written a good story is quite spectacular,
a fact to which other lucky souls who have managed to write good stories will readily
attest. I want to write a good story based on a series of good sentences, etc., that begins
with a good first sentence because I did that once and I enjoyed the feeling, and I don’t
want to end my time here having only written one good story.
In truth, I have written more than one good story. I have written three or four,
depending on how you look at it. But that will not suffice, because the one good story is
clearly superior to the others. Or, at the very least, it was longer, and so the feeling of
writing it lasted… better.
Of course, the anxiety produced by this established need to write a good first
sentence has created a state of mind in which the writing of a good first sentence is now
impossible. Many such sentences have been written into the ether, the backspace key
acting as a sort of dimensional portal. I’m sure that, in some alternate universe, I have
won prizes. Or perhaps the civilization that dwells there has a class of prophets, who hear
the first sentences I transmit via the dimensional portal key resting just above and to the
right of the pinky finger of my right hand, and take them as the divine whisperings of a
35
wrathful deity. This first profoundly important intentional fallacy then serves to distort
and misshape an entire civilization of otherwise pastorally peaceful beings until, whipped
into a frenzy over disagreements regarding the transmitted meanings of my failed
attempts at the writing of a good first sentence, will destroy themselves in a massive
conflagration they created while under the spell of separation caused by the
misinterpretation of a phrase that was only transmitted to them because of my previous
lack of awareness regarding the function of this portal key, known to me only to delete
text, and not as a transmission mechanism for the twisted gospel of separation that they
have in turn received.
Perhaps there is a temple where these innocent beings come to worship and
venerate the various attempts made by their prophets to interpret this received text, which
is in truth nothing more than another of my erased attempts at writing a good first
sentence, constructing their own complex and replete narratives. These stories,
constructed by their class of prophets, would organize themselves into a power structure
whose adherents will ultimately be guided by the interpretation of the interpretation of
the interpretation, and so on, of this one faulty and accidentally transmitted sentence,
originally sent to them solely because of its misplaced adverb without any intention, or
even knowledge of, its transmission, really, and determine the course of their
civilizations, with myriad texts blooming around it to form a body of critical
understanding around what, to me, the actual author, was just one of thousands of
attempts at creating this one good first sentence.
But really, why should I care what they do with the course of their own
civilizations, when my sole intention is to write my own good first sentence? I have no
36
control over what happens when this faulty text is transmitted out into the ether via the
dimensional portal key just above and to the right of the pinky finger of my right hand,
and so as a rational being should rightly choose to dismiss such codependent notions of
responsibility for any such eponymous “Other,” and continue on.
Perhaps I am myself just a replication of a faulty first attempt at writing a good
first sentence, and am sitting here waiting for the author to provide the next step in the
construction of the narrative. That would certainly explain a lot. I do wish she would
hurry it up a bit. But this author, in this other dimension I can only dimly imagine, has
moved well on, and is not in the least concerned about developing the line of narrative in
which I dwell--hence, perhaps, my present dilemma. My creator, who herself is at this
very moment taking a hefty swig from the mocha almond latte that, to hear her tell it, is
an elemental prerequisite for creative work of any kind, is not the least concerned, or
even aware, of the fact of my existence or its implications.
Of course, that would mean that I myself, at the root of my being, existentially but
without my permission, am little more than simply a hiccup, if you will, along the
continuum of time, a fragment of a sentence faultily composed and hastily discarded,
doomed forever and forlornly to making this attempt in vain, thus triggering the
grotesque distortion of meaning that in turn causes war and suffering throughout these
myriad worlds that exist so peacefully until receiving and misinterpreting one of the vast
array of misbegotten clauses I have created at the behest of my own creator who is
herself, as I’ve said, at this very moment nonchalantly imbibing yet another hefty swig
from the mocha almond latte that is an elemental prerequisite for creative work of any
37
kind, and has forgotten all about me, never mind the worlds for which I am, however
accidentally, responsible.
This seems more than reasonable and most certainly and inductively must be the
case for, after all, if I was alone in manifesting this sort of creation that fact would, I
suppose, establish a hierarchy to the binary relationship that is this mode of creation.
Then, as we have been told, such a hierarchal relationship would undermine said binary
and render it invalid. And so it seems only fair that I should not be alone in this position,
manifesting these misbegotten lines, but should myself be equal to these unfortunate
beings who have misinterpreted my text, equal to them in that I am in truth only a
simulacrum of a being, having been created as I was by this woman, who manifested me
into this dimension of reality through the seemingly innocuous action of her own right
pinky finger on the backspace key of her own keyboard.
And no doubt the inhabitants of the realm that have received my misbegotten
sentence with its misplaced adverb, misinterpreting it as all such civilizations invariably
do, have themselves progressed technologically, relentlessly driven by the separation
from the essence of their being that receipt of my text has engendered, in the pursuit of
the various weapons of mass destruction they believe will allow each of them in turn to
demonstrate the superiority of their own misinterpretation by virtue of the triumph of
their message of separation over the myriad of other misinterpretations, have themselves
have created keyboards with backspace keys, with those among them who sit typing
ceaselessly, carelessly and blissfully unaware by virtue of their cultural conditioning of
the fact that they too are transmitting texts with the pinky finger of their right hands,
38
which are in turn received and misinterpreted, leading to the destruction of civilizations
of which they themselves are not in the slightest aware.
Perhaps then the key to saving all civilization across all dimensions within the
continuum of time as it exists outside the limited perceptual constructs of our distorted
consciousness is the one person in this endless cycle who acquiesces to the fact of his
inability to write a good first sentence and turns his attention to idle pastimes, thereby
averting the tragedy of this inadvertent and careless misinterpretation of a text by those
whose interests lie in the acquisition and exercise of power rather than in the
advancement of comprehension. Therefore, by willfully acknowledging my inability to
write a good first sentence, I become the savior of all intelligent life across infinite
dimensions, sidestepping any culpability I might otherwise bear as the unintentional
narrating agency responsible for such immense suffering and misery.
Simply by choosing instead to lift my hands from the keyboard and push away
from the desk, rise from my chair and pad into the kitchen, recover a spoon from the
silverware drawer and turn to open the freezer, simply through this singular act of
indulgent self-obsessed compulsion and nothing more, an act that outwardly consists only
of partaking in my favorite present late-night vice, which at this time has taken the form
of Peppermint -Chocolate-Chunk ice cream, by such act of indulgent compulsion I am
made the true savior of civilization, a mantle of grave responsibility that I bear with the
good cheer of complete unknowing, forthcoming remorse over my grossly excessive
caloric intake notwithstanding.
Therefore and shall I say, quod erat demonstrandum, as it where, by relenting in
my pursuit of a good first sentence I have been anointed the anonymous savior of
39
innumerable civilizations that will live long and prosper in the absence of the relentless
will to power my unintentionally contentious text would otherwise engender.
40
Dagnar-Vala
Dagnar Rithskjeld was starting to suspect he’d suffered some sort of a brain
injury. He’d been painting for weeks on the tabulae rasa of three-by-five-foot Masonite
boards he currently favored, and had nothing to show for it but a sprained back and a
series of childish messes best contributed to the great pyres at Burning Man. Grimacing
as he rose from his chair, he walked through the sliding doors into the house, stopping in
the kitchen to grab an ice pack and a plastic jar full of Advil on his way to the sofa. As he
lay on the sofa absent-mindedly scrolling through the infinite abyss of what his local
cable provider passed off as “content,” he could feel the spike of yet another migraine
swelling behind his left eye.
The ice soothed his sore back somewhat, and after a short time the Advil smeared
the boundaries of his headache. He dozed fitfully, racking his awareness for whatever
insult had caused this clearly malevolent God to so maliciously withdraw support for his
creative endeavors, the line of reasoning characteristic of the black mood he’d been in for
the last several weeks, in spite of the fact that the affable doctor who’d diagnosed his
sprained back had prescribed a period of couch surfing followed by a summer of
swimming, light walking, and working on his tan. Dagnar had instead come to the
conclusion that God was simply torturing him as a form of idle entertainment, although
he was aware that this thought implied a special significance to his existence, which
made him all the more wary.
Concomitant with the general obtuseness he had been manifesting all summer, it
took several weeks for his consciousness to manifest the good doctor’s prescription as
positive news, a fact that was not lost on him, and was in itself another piece of evidence
41
in the self-diagnosis he was presently constructing as either having suffered some sort of
minor neurological insult, or ischemic event, or even perhaps the onset of some
doubtlessly rare and tragic form of early senility. He then began to laugh, amused at his
own capacity for finding the singular grey shade of whatever rainbow happened to show
itself on the horizon of his life.
Into the apogee of this emotional outburst came the Heiress Sowecki, his current
partner, or significant other, or whatever you want to call a person who is clearly more
than a girlfriend but not a wife, certainly not a wife, the youngest of the three heirs to the
multi-billion-dollar Sowecki Aerospace International fortune, home from her present
occupation at one of her father’s charitable foundations, wholly-owned subsidiaries
whose budgets he expensed as marketing, since they diverted attention from the fact that
his main stock in trade consisted primarily of packing explosives into the tips of
sophisticated rockets.
The Heiress was greatly relieved to see Dagnar laughing. The adventure of living
with someone she felt might be a great artist of major potential, while sweetened by her
father’s disapproval, had been a singularly tedious affair this particular summer, so seeing
his bright smile as he lay on the sofa, even if he was pressing the palm of his left hand
against his left eye, was a welcome relief that instantly brightened her spirit.
The Heiress Sowecki was naturally effervescent and energetic, traits that a life of
boarding schools, entitlement, and fierce competition in various arenas of gladiatorial
social combat with that most savage of all breeds, the Northeastern WASP, had focused
into a neatly compressed and flawlessly coiffed package of total composure. Dagnar had
not relayed his suspicions to her regarding what he was becoming increasingly confident
42
must be some sort of neurological infarction, as he thought it would be supremely
ungallant to dampen her spirits with his hypochondriacal musings. He also thought that it
if some catastrophic hemorrhagic event were to befall him, it would be more poignant to
shuffle off this mortal coil while laughing in her presence.
They sat together reviewing their respective days, a process generally consisting
in the main of him listening to her describe the various political machinations underway
at the offices where she presently worked, as he provided whatever insight he could into
her best course of action. The Heiress, in the due course of conversation, and with the
impeccable timing reflective of the profound social skills that came with an upbringing
tempered in the fiery pits of Old Northeastern Money, asked him to accompany her to a
dinner with her father and his associates at a local steakhouse. Dagnar tried, to no avail,
to demur, knowing that he’d have to sit through at least two hours of the Old Man’s talk
about leaving for Mars, and how people didn’t properly appreciate him, had the simple
audacity, in fact, to question the wisdom of making the world safe for democracy with
explosive-packed rockets, while taxing his hard-earned money, mooching off his
capitalist genius so that a bunch of black women can have six babies and never work, just
sit around getting fat off the welfare checks they get from the theft of his hard-earned
money, and he’s had enough of this nonsense by God, he’s going to show them.
It was always a recipe for a monstrous headache.
The two of them referred to her father as The Old Man, and Dagnar had grown
resigned to such command appearances with him, as they happened on roughly a
quarterly basis. Being of European middle-class upbringing, he was not without
considerable social skills of his own, although he often found it difficult to refrain from
43
pointing out to the Old Man and his associates that he’d come to Southern California
from a socialist country that, contrary to their cherished ideological constructs, had higher
overall standards of living and scored better than theirs by virtually any metric, from
educational attainment and infant mortality to per capita income and lifespan. Such
inconvenient facts did not mesh well with their sacred dogma of America as the best
country in the world, and he did not want to cause The Heiress any embarrassment,
although during the car ride home after such command performances he would erupt into
an almost rabid tirade, fervently reminding her that America was in fact a country born
of a genocide, constructed by a gang of sociopathic cutthroats using slave labor, and that,
furthermore, empires throughout history had marched straight into the maws of perdition
maintaining some ignorantly hubristic delusion of a similar nature, from Achilles and the
Ancient Greeks to the Third Reich, etc. etc., etc., until he collapsed into an apoplectic fit
and was forced to retreat to a darkened room with his ice packs and his jar of Advil for
two or three days.
The Heiress, rather than taking offense, enjoyed these tirades as the passionate
counterpoints they were to these stultifyingly boorish affairs, and instead of simply
accepting them as a sort of contretemps in their relationship, embraced them as a form of
refreshment, in that they illuminated for her the values which she held in her heart but
dared not manifest in the presence of The Old Man or his loyal, dogmatically-bound neoconservative, highly-pedigreed, social-Darwinist minions, who fervently strove to remain
intentionally oblivious to facts that failed to support their odiously strident form of freemarket fanaticism. They quite preferred to think that the God of their Fathers had favored
them by right, or that they had been gifted with attributes that set them above the
44
common man, and were utterly entitled to rule, as true nobility always had. And so
Dagnar would play along, ever the good sport, careful never to embarrass The Heiress,
keeping his true opinions of them to himself until safely ensconced in the isolation
chamber of their Lexus sedan. He had decided that his best position was a subversive
one, egging them on to their own destruction as a sort of guerrilla tactic, treating the
axiom of enlightened self-interest so simply formulated by iconic American Henry Ford
as a truth their enfeebled and damaged minds were utterly incapable of grasping, in the
same way that all mortal ears were incapable of attenuating themselves to the Voice of
God. Primarily, then, as a way of forestalling and dampening his apoplexy, he began to
encourage their extremism whenever possible, attempting to transmute the experience
into a form of entertainment, an all-too monstrously real theatre of the absurd.
Dagnar was often confounded by the Old Man’s choice of venue for these
mandatory gustations, unable to discern whether he chose them from a position of
genuine pathological disconcern for his daughter’s sensibilities or as a profound insult
signifying his tacit disdain for Dagnar as some sort of effete European. This particular
evening was no exception. The establishment was located in a forlorn stucco industrial
building with a gravel parking lot, adjacent to a major freeway and alongside of a large
regional railroad siding. Dagnar and The Heiress relinquished their Lexus into the hands
of a parking lot attendant and entered the place through pneumatic sliding-glass doors of
the sort one might find at the entrance to a supermarket.
Dagnar had lost all interest in attacking the Old Man’s abject delusion of
specialness, but his awareness of it made the gesture of the slide of the plastic credit cardlike tickets across the table of the steakhouse somehow touching, as if the feeble
45
remaining light of The Old Man’s soul was trying to wend its way around the curtains
drawn over the windows of the Temple of Fear he’d put in its place at the center of his
innermost being, in order to show that it, his soul, still existed. The Heiress took the cards
into her hands and, with a nervous fluster, deposited them into her purse, after which she
embraced the Old Man, holding him for a long, slow moment, as if to say that she
recognized the light he had attempted to show her as akin to her own and wished to
signify her acceptance of the mandate that she propagate it out into the Universe.
Dagnar sat idly in witness to this exchange, and did not inquire as to the purpose
of these cards, as he had learned long ago that there are interactions between father and
daughter into which one must not intrude. Later that evening, when she revealed to him
that the cards were in fact passports to a soon-to-be-revealed Martian colony, he would
collapse into a state of shock beyond apoplexy. But, not knowing this in the present
moment, he simply sat there sipping the cheap blended scotch passed off as top-shelf by
the steakhouse, doing his best impression of an artist’s look of detached bemusement
while praying for the Angel of Death to swoop down and claim him.
The Old Man believed that America was the Greatest Country on Earth, attesting
to this alleged fact with the same hypnotic fervency of the true believer with which a
four-year old attests to the notion of P.T. Barnum’s Circus as The Greatest Show on
Earth. He’d won a cosmic lottery ticket, born as he was onto the cusp of the gigantic
economic wave that occurred when Europe destroyed itself, but steadfastly denied the
truth of this happy accident, firmly maintaining that it was his own skill and overall
excellence in enterprise that created his success. The Old Man’s value system, derived
from the oxymoronic American role as the Arsenal of Democracy, also allowed him to
46
maintain a rigorous fanaticism about the need for ever-expanding investment in
munitions, allowing him to remain willfully blind to an essential truth that the founders of
his beloved circus, slaveholders and brigands themselves, would have readily
acknowledged, which was that the essential ingredient in all great confidence games is a
key kernel of truth. He managed to maintain a fastidiously willful blindness to any
proffered notion that perhaps six times more than the next six largest countries in the
world combined was a disproportionate amount of money for a so-called civilization to
spend on guns and bombs.
Dagnar had learned the hard way that one of the secrets of domestic bliss lay in
never challenging this maniacal ideology during a holiday season three years past, when
he’d mistakenly responded to The Old Man’s criticism of Danish socialism by pointing
out that at least the form of socialism practiced in his home country didn’t have the
ultimate destruction of human civilization as it’s colonial primogeniture. He’d then
expanded this quippish retort by positing the notion that the malignant and bloated tumor
of a war budget was nothing more than a form of government-sponsored jobs program, a
perverted form of socialism in its own right. This the Old Man declared an outrageous
heresy, self-righteously tossing Dagnar out of his mansion, ruining Christmas for all
concerned. They hadn’t spoken for six months afterwards, and the coldness displayed by
The Heiress until three weeks after New Years was more than enough of a prompt.
Dagnar learned a firm lesson in the boundaries of national pride. He apologized to the
Old Man using misguided patriotism as an alibi, something the Old Man could more or
less respect, although for a long time after that episode he eyed Dagnar the way one
might eye a known pickpocket.
47
As penance, he’d been forced to go golfing with him every Saturday for the
balance of that particular spring. This worked in effect as a potent form of psychic
torture, one he was empowered to endure solely as a hero’s rite of passage, guided by the
beacon of love he envisioned the Heiress held for him in her heart. Later, he would
realize that was during this period that his headaches began to occur, while his creative
energies simultaneously began to slowly dissipate. The ecstasy he felt at being released
from this commitment after completion of his penance, a deep and profound joy akin to
that of a monk upon being released from his cell after devout years spent copying an
illuminated manuscript, he kept to himself in consideration of the fact that The Old Man
was The Heiress’ father, after all, and the divine intervention that had freed him from
captivity was a massive heart attack necessitating the insertion of several medicated
stents and the grafting of several veins onto The Old Man’s coronary arteries. He
suspected that The Heiress also secretly hoped for the Old Man to die, but he also knew
enough, after four months of traipsing around a carefully manicured cow pasture chasing
polished rocks while carrying a heavy bag of sticks, to act like those feelings of hers
didn’t exist at all. He’d learned to keep his big mouth shut, as she liked to say, and did a
passable job of pretending to be upset about the Old Man’s brush with the Grim Reaper.
Upon his release from this sentence he had been, in the main, headache-free and
cognitively sharp, and had completed several exciting new pieces, brilliant works of
abstract expressionism which sold well at the Downtown gallery that carried his work.
Dagnar could usually get the Heiress laughing hysterically before they arrived at
whichever tacky bourgeois steakhouse the Old Man selected for the requisite feast that
made up these get-togethers. Americans of the aristocrat class loved their beef, served in
48
giant slabs on a platter the size of a trash can lid, with a form of potato genetically altered
to grow to the size of a watermelon. What’s more, they insisted that these freakishly
mutated tubers be slathered in heavy sour cream laced with enough antibiotics and
endocrine disruptors to disrupt the reproductive cycle of a full-grown mastodon, or, if
feeling peaked on that particular evening, slathered with enough chemically-enhanced
butter to bake a medium-sized tray of pastry. They would even devour the potato skins, in
spite of the common knowledge that the spectrum of fungicides and pesticides used to
prevent any sort of disease interfering with the optimum development of these
watermelon-sized, Godzilla-esque mutant potatoes was so toxic that the bags they came
in carried warning labels. The fact that one result of this caloric intake was the inability
to tie their own shoes was of little concern to people of this stratum. They simply added
an additional course to their meals, a variety of pills designed to abate the more
deleterious consequences of their gluttony, and continued eating.
The priestly class among them, the economists, had developed an argument to
justify this consumption. They classified it as a form of economic signaling, and issued
forth a proclamation that it was a marker of great prosperity. Thus, the physical ailments
produced by the waistline expansion of this incredibly taxing diet became a sort of social
currency, both an item of conversation used to establish the pecking order within their
ranks and a form of ostentatious display for the men of the Old Man’s generation. But, as
is so often the case with fashion, that which all possess quickly falls out of favor. In
keeping with the incessant mantras of the priestly economists, the same people who
produced these large slabs of delicately-marbled steroidally-enhanced beef sought to
maximize return on their investment, rendering the remains of the genetic mutants
49
previously bred, raised, and slaughtered for the gustatory indulgence of this oligarchic
class into an ammoniated paste that could be efficiently unitized and presented to the
teeming unwashed masses of the underclass as food. The excremental chemical
concoctions formulated from the offal of these same mass-produced cow-like creatures,
whose better parts had been fed to these oligarchs, went on offer to the indentured wage
slaves constituting the broader society, which in turn began producing an outwardly
similar result among them. Over time, obesity lost its cachet as a store of social currency
(these obese plutocrats, incidentally, took to calling the working class “useless eaters,” a
twist of phrase Dagnar considered sublimely ironic). The scions of these oligarchs then
began to place greater value on the consumption of increasingly rare and expensive types
of food grown without the benefit of all this aforementioned chemical engineering, much
as the degenerate late Romans, addled by the lead in their water system, and generations
of inbreeding, had come to consider fried or broiled songbirds as erudite culinary fare.
The interior of the steakhouse (the best prime rib in town, the Old Man had
declared) was made up with wicker and lattice works spray painted white, punctuated
throughout with lime-green artificial ferns and ficuses that gave it the feel of a sort of
weird plastic garden. It occurred to him, perversely, that it was ultimately postmodern in
its overall aesthetic, the real being supplanted by the false in utter disregard for the
connection between the symbolism of such objects and the subtlety of their true material
existence, as though recognition of the word “plant” as an arbitrary signifier made the
substitution of plastic ferns and ficuses for the real thing a perfectly acceptable
equivalent, discounting what one saw with one’s own eyes as utterly irrelevant. The floor
was grey indoor-outdoor carpet glued over concrete slab, and emitted the characteristic
50
chicken-soup odor reminiscent of such establishments. Behind the bar, which was
covered in long vertical slats of mirrored glass and had a grey arm-pad along its length,
stood a trio of stages, each of which had a brass pole anchored to its middle, with a pair
of mirrored disco balls hung to side. The Old Man had decided to take his daughter to
dinner at a strip club, and a not very successful one at that, considering the fact that the
owners had converted the place into a dinner house during week-nights. Dagnar found
himself wondering if the Old Man could really be that unconscious, or if he was
purposefully being a prick by choosing this place. He decided on the former, so he could
view him through a more compassionate lens and more easily dissociate himself from the
proceedings.
Witnessing The Old Man’s abject tastelessness and passive-aggressive hostility
brought to Dagnar’s mind an oft-cited literary cliché that crossed his mind during the
course of his relationship with The Heiress Sowecki. In an earlier era not entirely
dissimilar from this present one, an author had manifested into the discourse the idea that
the very rich are different from you and me. Whether he manifested this notion in order
to become famous or had become famous as a result of manifesting this line quickly
became irrelevant, as once it had been entered into the circulation of the intellectual
bloodstream of the day, it replicated itself much like any other opportunistic infection.
This small group of exceedingly fortunate people seized upon the phrase, ensconcing it in
a very dense set of constructs which were really in the end nothing more than a
conveniently myopic and narcissistic rampart around a central treasury containing naught
but the purest distillation of their own fear. These ramparts insulated them from the
51
assault of legions of empirical evidence contrary to the statement of its author, who had
most certainly been inebriated at the time of its making.
Dagnar drank his watered-down Scotch and ordered the most modest slab of beef
on the menu, a twenty-four-ounce Porterhouse steak with its inescapable mutant potato
accompaniment, which he picked at, unable to eat despite the effects of the Scotch. After
a time, they left the strip-club-slash-dinner-house, and retrieved the Lexus sedan from the
valet. It was only then, as she drove them home, that the Heiress revealed to Dagnar the
true nature of the tickets she’d been given. Dagnar had made her pull the sedan off the
freeway and park it, and had her repeat the news slowly and dramatically, acting as if he
had misunderstood her. After repeating back to her the words she had uttered to be sure
there was no mistake, he launched into a scatological tirade that failed to provide her with
the customary amusement, lapsing into his native Dutch at those intervals when he found
himself unable to produce the necessary profanities in English. He went on at length
about the sociopathy of her father and all men like him, men who had the resources to
heal the planet and assure the well-being of all its inhabitants but chose instead to
rapaciously plunder the place until there was so little left, and the damage so great, that
the logical extension of their insatiable avarice was to pull up stakes and leave,
demonstrating the complete absurdity of the oft-cited rationalization that their behavior
was leadership. Interlaced as it was with such a spectacular display of profanity, the
impeccably coiffed and polished Heiress quickly determined that her most diplomatically
constructive course of action was to get Dagnar to agree to just go home and think it over
for a day or two, as they had no immediate imperative to act either way, which caused
him to launch another wave of curses into the air between them.
52
A few days after this command performance, just as he had fully recovered from
the revelation that there was in fact a secret Martian colony under construction, and that
the plastic cards The Old Man had slid across the table that night were their passports to
it, the Heiress gingerly asked Dagnar to drive with her out to the desert, to a Sowecki
Aerospace rocket testing and launch facility. This began a series of passionate arguments
between them in which The Heiress revealed the stony core of her most cherished beliefs,
shocking Dagnar, for he soon became aware that she had not been affected by his screeds
against the evils of capitalism in any meaningful way, but instead had simply been
indulging him with the same sense of detached bemusement one maintains in regard to an
ill-trained house pet. Enhancing the horror of his realization was the calmly insistent
demeanor she effortlessly maintained while proclaiming that their inclusion among the
capital elites selected for the Colony was an affirmation of their superior evolutionary
traits, and a testament to his greatness as an artist, especially given their awareness of his
suspiciously socialist leanings, which they charitably ascribed, according to her, to the
cultural errors of his upbringing. He retreated to a front bedroom in the house, one he
sometimes used as a painting studio during the spring rainy season, and laid on the floor
in a fetal position, clutching his head until the four Advil tablets he’d retrieved from their
container in a grand swooping gesture took hold.
When he felt well enough to engage her again, he emerged from the room to press
his original argument, claiming that they were not elites by anything other than accident
of birth, and were committing foul treachery by abandoning their fellows. The Heiress
regarded him disdainfully, but remained otherwise unmoved. On this second attempt, he
followed up with the speculative claim that the colonists would most likely destroy
53
themselves in some petty conflagration or another over political power, an idea she flatly
dismissed as outlandish. She riposted with allusions to the wanderlust of his
Scandinavian genealogy, further trying to entice him by claiming they would be like the
Mayflower Pilgrims come to Plymouth Rock, an analogy he attacked as to its
implications from the perspective of the indigenous population, which she pointed out
there was none such to be concerned about on Mars. In this way they went round and
round until neither of them wanted to speak to the other, and he retreated to the living
room sofa with more Advil and an icepack for his back, which was now terribly sore
from lying on the floor of the studio.
It was during one of these silent intervals, while Dagnar had been laying on the
sofa flipping through the “content” listings on the TV screen that he first came across a
show about Vikings. The location in which it was filmed was lush and green and wet.
The imagery on the TV comforted him, although he could see that the version of Viking
history they were purveying was sanitized, leaving out, for example, infanticide, as well
as certain other acts of gratuitous brutality he knew had been practiced by the marauding
culture of wanderers from which he’d descended. Still, the main character of the show
was quite cunning in his negotiations with the various villains he encountered, and this
caused Dagnar to begin to consider his own situation. He was wary of the images
projected into his awareness by television and their effect on him, knowing as he did that
the entire medium was little more than an instrument of psychological conditioning, one
that drew its victims into a sort of narcotized state of pseudo- hypnosis from which they
generally emerged as zombies of never-ending mass consumption, a thought that had
come to him while watching a different show on the same channel, a sort of music-less
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opera about the survivors of just such a zombie apocalypse. When he had first seen this
post-apocalyptic zombie opera the previous spring, it had changed his viewing habits, for
he found himself suspecting that this sort of programming served as disclosure of an
agenda actively pursued by the established powers that be, and he began flipping through
the channel selector late at night in an attempt to find revealing clues. Nonetheless wary
of the effect these images might have on his psyche, in order to avail himself of the
temporary relief it provided from his incessant thinking, he compromised by recording all
his programs using the Digital Video Recording feature of the cable box and fast
forwarding past the commercials whenever he could. In this way, he felt able of
reassuring himself that his conscious awareness of something sinister being afoot would
somehow save him from it. The result was that he now had over a hundred hours of
programs to investigate stored on the DVR, and it was to these he turned his attention as
he contemplated his next approach to The Heiress.
They went round and round like this for several days, moments of furious debate
following by hours of television and the silence between them, until he at last extracted a
promise from The Heiress that going with her to the rocket base would in no way be
construed as a commitment to any particular course of action. This small measure of
détente achieved, they got into the Lexus and drove out into the desert, to a quasi-military
aviation facility operated by one of The Old Man’s innumerable subsidiaries. As they
walked across the parking lot towards a gigantic aircraft hangar, Dagnar slowly became
aware that his consciousness was shifting out of focus, and that small specks of pain were
beginning to accumulate behind his left eye. He did his best to focus, thinking about the
hero of the TV show he’d been watching.
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They walked to an office built into one corner of the hangar and were greeted by a
heavy set brown-eyed young man wearing a navy blue polo shirt, his blond hair shaved
into a crew cut. He took the cards and swiped them through a machine that resembled a
credit card machine, only much heavier – obviously a military grade piece of equipment.
The scene was reminiscent of a checkout counter at a retail establishment, and thus would
be readily familiar to the class of elites interacting with it, even though the young man
had obviously been trained by the military, and so maintained such an aura of foreboding
about him that they would hesitate to raise a self- indulgent ruckus over some perceived
slight, stamping their feet and demanding to see a manager. At the same time, not one of
them would pause to consider what would befall this composed fellow after they selfrighteously fled the place, saved from such weak-minded thought by their consumerist
conditioning against the personalization of such interactions. The man directed Dagnar
and The Heiress to place their right hands on a metal box the approximate size of a
phonebook while they looked directly into a camera placed just across the room. Once
the algorithms of their plastic cards had been validated, their palm prints digitized, and
their retinas scanned, a faintly mustachioed woman in a drab rayon pantsuit appeared.
She led them down the hall of the office and into a room set up as a small theatre,
directing them to comfortable theatre-style seats in the first of three rows.
Dagnar’s head began to throb, and he wondered if this might be it after all and at
last, a true ischemic event, arriving on the black wings of destiny in order to save him
from himself. The woman waved a remote control towards the ceiling in an incantatory
gesture, causing a large screen to descend from the ceiling. He felt the pain behind his left
eye grow while in the dark space just above his right ear a scene played itself from his
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memory, a particular instance in which he had stopped to fuel his automobile and glanced
at a headline of the local newspaper. It proclaimed that life had been discovered on Mars,
and in the mood he had been in at that particular juncture, he’d remarked out loud that
that certainly explained why he felt so out of place in the world, and that maybe the
Martians would come and pick him up. As the video presentation progressed, a scandal in
and of itself for what it reflected as to the intentions of the Old Man and the other
oligarchs as well as the sorry state of the planet, Dagnar found himself increasingly
disconnected from the proceedings, a flood of information coursing through the nowblazingly painful and growing spot behind his left eye. A series of images bearing no
discernible relationship to the video began projecting themselves into the space behind
his right eye, a kind of fast-forward rendering of information and understanding, inchoate
and disjointed, but seemingly full of discrete packets of important information. It was a
sort of data stream, if you will, overpowering his conscious awareness, falling into order
in a rush. The thought crossed his mind that The Heiress, so cold these last few days,
might have somehow arranged to have him poisoned, a thought that terrified him all the
more given the intuitive sense it made, her flawlessly coiffed and polished Northeastern
Old Money demeanor suddenly identifying her to him as a potential modern-day analog
of Lucretia Borgia. He held back a gasp. At the same time, he began to feel the presence
of a sort of membrane, an impermeable barrier between himself and his surroundings that
prevented him from speaking or crying out. It enveloped him and thickened, causing The
Heiress and the unattractive woman to fall out of focus, and pushing away the video on
the screen until it was altogether beyond the field of his awareness, the spot behind his
right eye growing until it formed a private television screen he alone could see.
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One particular sequence he grasped from the stream of images flooding his head
to organize itself within the confines of his functional consciousness was the iconic
image of the Viking hero from the television series. This figure smiled at him knowingly,
whispering to him how supremely ironic it was that he, Dagnar, a descendant of Vikings
himself, was now in a position of refusing to take such a great journey, countervailing not
only the current community to which he presently had ties, but the cultural ethos imbued
in his very genetic code. The character also wordlessly conveyed, through the singularly
powerful and overwhelming sensation of presence and understanding emanating from his
eyes, and the image of his own head on display in the space in Dagnar’s private mental
theatre, the vital importance, absolute correctness, and complete necessity of Dagnar’s
refusal. This image and all of its associated sensations lodged itself into the forefront of
Dagnar’s conscious awareness, lodged in his buffer, a stack overflow of his neural
network, as the maelstrom of data and images and sensations currently streaming into his
mind through the now painful orb of red light over his left eye began to solidify into a
psychological certainty.
I’m not going, he began to whisper, I’m not going. He uttered this over and over,
sometimes in Danish, sometimes in English. With each utterance the words seemed to
press against the enveloping membrane that prevented him from speaking while this pain
occurred in his left eye, the images playing rapidly in the space above his right. The
Heiress, sensing he was not well, reached out to him, piercing the membrane as she put
her hands on his shoulders and turned to face him directly. It took several utterances of
the phrase for her to discern what he was saying, and with each repetition the membrane
began to fall away. As she began to understand the phrase he was uttering, her expression
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turned from concern to shock and alarm, then into frenetic rage as her ironclad sense of
composure finally shattered. She began flailing at him, cursing. She stood up and turned
towards him, repeatedly kicking him in the shins and slapping him around the head. He
raised his hands to his face to protect himself and stood up, backing away from her
towards the door, repeating the phrase louder and louder, yelling it over and over again.
I’m not going! I’m not going! I’m not! He cried, while she struck him. The unattractive
woman cowered silently, completely unequipped for this type of occurrence, as the
people she’d previously ushered into the theatre up to now had been somewhat pompous
and entitled, but happy about the fact of their coming journey, and so generally
peaceable. She was unsure who would be held to account for the breach of protocol were
this event to become known, but said nothing because one of the many occupational
benefits she’d garnered was a chance at her own passport and she desperately wanted to
keep it. The Heiress’ immediate rage exhausted, she turned and grabbed her purse in a
studiously dramatic gesture, following Dagnar out of the room and down the hall, then
out of the facility, across the parking lot and back into the Lexus, back the way they’d
came. The car was full of steely silence for the entire ride back to the house.
They never exchanged another word after that. The Heiress packed a bag and left
the house that evening, and a few days later a group of uniformed men arrived with a
truck to collect her possessions, warily eyeing Dagnar as if they’d been warned about
him. He missed her terribly at first, but he soon noticed that his variety of ailments began
to slowly subside, as if his body, or even his very being itself, had begun a process of
detoxification. The frequency and duration of his headaches seemed to lessen with each
passing day, and his mood seemed somehow to brighten, if only in incremental shades;
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his back hurt less in the morning, his spirit seeming to grow better with each passing day
as he began to once again feel himself enveloped by a broad sense of artistic inspiration.
In his mind’s eye there was a silent image of the Viking warrior from the television show,
standing silently while slowly nodding at him in acknowledgement.
The last image he’d seen of the Heiress had been on the news waving goodbye as
she, among a boarding group of the scions of various oligarchs, stood on a platform
fielding questions from the press one last time before ceremoniously filing into the
launch vehicle. They had christened the ship The John Galt in tribute to the literary
propagandist whom they felt had contributed greatly to their understanding of themselves
as elites. The news media, which had been entirely under the control of the group of
people now shuttling across space, acted for a time much like the body of a warrior
beheaded on the battlefield, moving forward instinctively by virtue of its conditioning
and without benefit of its cognitive faculties, which in this case meant reporting affairs as
they always had, prismed through the lens of the people signing their paychecks, thinking
they still were charged with doing so, until it became apparent that this was no longer
required and they began reporting events as they actually saw them, which drastically
altered the nature of the news broadcasts. Tremendous social and political upheaval
occurred in the weeks and months following the revelation of the Starship John Galt’s
existence and the plans for the elitist colony, now named Plutonomy by the newly
unfettered news media, partly as a result of the newly discovered tactic of truth-telling. It
made for spectacular entertainment.
Dagnar fell into the habit of watching the news each evening, and noticed that a
new phenomenon had begun to emerge, one that contributed to his brightening demeanor
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and fed his new-found energies. As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks to months,
the nightly news evolved into a steady stream of good tidings that attracted him more and
more, until he began to look forward to the broadcast as the highlight of his day. Freed
from the systemic burden of the colonists, much in the manner of a cancer patient in
remission from illness, the planet and its people began to recover mightily, each night’s
broadcast showcasing progress being made, with special features each week about
diverse new discoveries ranging from technologies that had previously been suppressed
for economic reasons to the flocks of gifted children now popping up in the inner cities.
He began to sleep peacefully, and from time to time arose in the morning intuitively
aware of the passing away of one of the original colonists, many of whom had found
themselves terminally ill-suited to the rigors of extraterrestrial colonial life, solely by the
brightness of the sun and the clarity of the day’s sky, a form of intuition invariably
confirmed later that day by a news announcer wearing a very self-consciously wry frown.
Eventually, news updates from Plutonomy ceased altogether as conflict broke out among
its remaining inhabitants, just as he’d originally speculated it might. But the larger
portion of news on the TV continued growing more positive by the day, and although he
hadn’t quite lost his suspicion of television, sometimes pausing to hold his outstretched
hand over his right eye, checking to be sure there were no longer any unexpected
archetypal images dwelling there, on the whole he felt his spirits uplifted.
In the evenings Dagnar would stand out in the yard, looking skyward while
drawing in deep breaths of cool, fresh air that felt clearer and cleaner in his lungs with
each passing turn of the tides, watching Mars rise over the horizon. He hadn’t had a
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headache in a long time now, and his mind felt as utterly pellucid as a pane of freshlypolished glass. In the morning he would paint again.
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And What of the Prayer of St. Francis?
(A meditation on the work of Fernando Pessoa)
Mad delusions, idle fantasies of a fevered mind (but robins and larks would come
and rest on his shoulder, what about that?), in the end all we are, and all we have to hold
on to, but what of it?
The notion of the stoic hero, sweat in his eyes and his back to the void, leather
sandals slipping on crumbling shale, fighting on until that one sweetest moment, the
joyous last ring of the gladius….
What are these molecules of stubborn refusal coursing thru me, genetic remnants
of…what? Some ancient Finn, some T’uatha De Danaan warrior felled on the plains of
incoherence…echoes of past heroes rippling through me and on into eternity until fin… I
die without issue—
A lawyer’s term.
It was Achilles’ to perform, but it was Homer’s to record, and it was the
recordation that secured Achilles’ place across time’s expanse. So far…so far.
And yet. Finding what solace we can where we can, locking ourselves away in
attic trunks, in the hope that the genius of both/and binary enhances our own echo. Isn’t
that all there is left for us on this Earthwalk? Roy Batty, the uberdroid from Bladerunner
sticks his head out the window, smiling, and asks “What are you doing?”
Both/and, famous for obscurity…an extension of Blake…where are the Four
Zoas? “Where the farmer plows for bread in vain.” Aha--Look! He left a clue…an
essential romantic, that explains the depression.
I find these books, discards from people who’ve moved on, I can’t understand
why someone wouldn’t want that on the shelf to have, to know they possess, the
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obsession, three different copies of the Bard’s folio, and I wouldn’t give up any of them.
There it is, right there under my nose, a piece of a collection purchased at a church
rummage sale. The set must have included a hundred books, they only had a half dozen
left, I bought all six, not caring if I already had other copies, collecting these fragments-how do I keep track of this? I can tell you what I own and most times find it, except I’m
slipping a little. Pulling a piece of furniture away from in front of a bookcase is like
Christmas morning.
The idiosyncrasies of obsession and memory, like that attorney I worked for on
Park Place, years ago – so many years, what happened? File jackets stuffed with reams of
transitory and meaningless documents piled all over his office, he could put his hands on
anything in a moment… Used to walk over to a stack on the brown leather sofa, the
overstuffed kind of sofa with dark brown buttons all over the cushions, pull a file out of
the middle of a stack and hand it to me. “Run this up to 40 Rock,” he’d growl as he
puffed away on a cigar. It was his office, he could do whatever he wanted.
Can we read ourselves into being, I wonder? We can write ourselves into being,
after a fashion, but can we read ourselves into it? It seems that way, given the effect of
certain texts on the fabric of my existence, taking their ideas to heart, acting on them in
my own life, confident in the belief that they’ll produce the desired effect.
I used his secretary’s IBM Selectric to make up a bunch of phony ids, ruffian
entrepreneur that I was. She had a large assortment, I think as many as six or eight, of
font balls in the drawer of her desk.
Even when I find that I have multiple copies of the same text, I can’t ever seem to
bring myself to sell the extras, or give them away. It seems somehow sacrilegious.
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What is this separate consciousness stuff all about? Aren’t we making too much
of the differences? What about the similarities? Not between us and the animals, between
us and each other, I mean.
Yeats tried to reformulate druidry, but he never went to Africa and he should
have. They wear their ritual masks to show who they truly are, recognizing that the faces
they wear everyday are their own true masks…this endless issue of persona, the ethereal
struggle for authenticity.
This heteronymic construct as a form of alchemical distillation, a form of artistic
limitation designed to separate, and therefore focus. But how is that different from any
narrative construct, prismed at it must be through the privileged mitigation of an Other’s
experiential frame…still, I can see how it would help you focus on what you’re supposed
to be doing…
Far too much made of this subjectivity, underscoring the inherent and elusive
ephemeris of the contact zone, as if that was the point of the message. I fold in upon
myself again and again, until I fold completely outward.
The attempt at reductive funneling, like a topographic feature, terrain narrowing
until the footfalls leaves no further choice but to shakily traverse a defile between two
crumbling palisades…What was it Sun Tzu said about he who knows the terrain…to
“make the devious route the most direct…” Fiction, a map to the essential
statement…distillation as a form of reductive funneling, guiding to the narrow bridge,
gathering the courage to finally cross, feet sliding over the fractured stone ever so
cautiously, step by step, until the passage begins again to broaden. “If you would take
my words as a bridge to cross--” I can’t read you right now Jiddu, I have work to do.
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Someday, someday, I’ll just sit around under a tree all day and read until I
disappear. All this other stuff is just in my way, the daily nonsense, the pretentious
dimwits. How tired I am of explaining myself to people who haven’t the foggiest clue
what I’m up to! If life is just a form of narrative indistinguishable from dreams, why
can’t I just write them all out of the story? They’re flat bit-players, ballast,
clutter…clutter everywhere. Hell is other people, but the statement is incomplete…hell is
underdeveloped characters who serve no useful purpose in advancing the plot, more like.
But I can’t do anything in a vacuum. In a vacuum, I wither and die from the asphyxiation
caused by lack of creative atmosphere. Perhaps I am just a meat machine, or a more
complicated version of the robot in the old movie Short Circuit, running around crying
“Input! Input!”
Ought but a heteronym trapped in an eternal workshop. This entire problem
emanating from alienation fostered in the crib, the eternal fictional separation. Ensnared,
one need only look away, to the Upanishads, or Arjuna’s heroic struggle, a literature
pointing to the deficiency of the Western construct by its heteronymic lamination.
Reduction through complication. Unmitigated genius. What of the negative theologians,
Catellus, Pseudodionysius?
Is it the wink of an eye, the smile of the falling warrior dying well as Valkyries
hover ‘round? The act of creation made complete through the creation of an author, the
author writes himself into being and in so doing, solves the riddle that opens the gateless
gate…and what of the author who writes himself out of being? Is this the final
transcendent act?
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I write myself into being not in the sense of creating a self on the page, but along
the lines of what a man once stated: “Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.”
If the notion of authenticity is naught but an arbitrary selection from a schedule of
available personae, then there is no authenticity, except in the act of selection itself.
Invert the relationship and jettison all of the detritus of the day, channel the
energies of another day’s frustrations both large and small onto the page, and one of the
chief outcomes of this endless exercise is writing myself into being as a happy man
manifesting his life in his natural state of exuberance, writing the accumulated toxins out
of my being, like the old cowboy who said, “When I have a problem in my mind, it spans
from horizon to horizon, from ear to ear. But when I put it on a piece of paper it’s only 8
½ x 11 inches big.”
I’m trying to think of an author who invented a happy and contented heteronym.
Kilgore Trout? More resigned than happy, it’s true. My dreams are most often
nightmares, the ones I remember most often ending unhappily. I am the man who dreams
he is a butterfly, only to be eaten by a frog. If I was a butterfly, I imagine I would dream I
was a man who gets blown to bits by an artillery shell. I would rather make all of my
waking life one long, happy reverie about a man with no troubles who manifests a
wondrous life every day. Or is that the tedium you describe, since if I did that I’d have
nothing to maintain the inescapable balance other than my nightmares?
The very essence of creating meaning through the stoic struggle. Does that make
me one of your simpletons? Probably so. Is there a manner of artistic creation that allows
us to write beyond the page?
And what of the Prayer of St. Francis?
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