Archive for July, 2007

The Light on the Hill, Part 42

by
severnspoon
on Monday

Think about this:

There was a man who did so well for himself that everything that was wrong was saved up and shoved aside. He stored away all his bad thoughts in inaccessible closets in his mind.

One day, his prize bull knocked him over in the mud and he hit his head on a rock.

When he awoke, he killed the bull. Then he killed all the cows. He ran down all the chickens with his tractor and crashed it into the barn where it exploded.

He was thrown onto the ground, only mildly burned by the blast. He hit his head a second time on a rock.

When he awoke a second time, his sons were racing with hoses and buckets. He shambled over to where they were and bit them terribly until their blood was everywhere. Then he shambled toward the house.

Inside, he killed his wife and daughters, smothering the youngest in its crib. Then he attacked the walls till eventually the barn fire spread to the house and it burned down as well.

His clothing smoking, his hair a black stubble, his nostrils scorched off, his clothing still smoldering, he wandered into the fields and set them alight as well.

When his neighbors came at last to help him, he told them that God was punishing him, that God and the devil were toying with his fate up in heaven, making the most awful things happen, just to test him.

But somehow his faith was still strong that God would not forsake him: there were rewards waiting in heaven if not on earth: something more lasting would occur to make sense of it all.

What do you think happened next?

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Joseph Campbell Treasure Hunt

by
severnspoon
on Monday

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The Light on the Hill, Part 41

by
severnspoon
on Sunday

I am a man and thus equipped as well as any other to tell of men and what I’ve gleaned of their essential nature.

Many would discourage this strange consultation, but here we are. You’ve left me little choice but to speak:

Bigfoot, we mean well. We struggle with temptation. We fail endlessly to curtail ourselves. We are like flowers that keep blossoming into new and more incredible forms. We are nearly always in some generative state. It is as if we were each the half of something reaching out.

This brings rivalries, deceit, cruelties in the guise of charitable concern, monstrous ideas that rain down destruction.

Dollars and cents may have become our universal language, but I believe in the free exchange of inspiration:

What man loves is a good joke, a clever bit of play that looks sinister but is nothing after all, a punch alley that unravels the growing fear: everything is as wicked as it seems. The sense of comedic order is intact, Darwin was wrong:

  • Everything is arranged in the funniest possible way.
  • Somehow laughter cures everything.
  • There is no better compliment than to be called a good liar.
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The Light on the Hill, Part 40

by
bigfoot
on Friday

I want to know everything then from the light on the hill. I want to know everything the strange bud has to tell. I make the magic ink of myself and he writes it down.

When there are no more walnuts or spittle, I will make the ink of metal, of blood, of semen, of feces. I will read what all of it has to say.

Nothing will escape my ghoulish generosity. I will give everything to rest in the security of new knowledge. I will die if I must, but I will be certain about something before it is finished. He will spell it out for me without prevarication, if the threat of death holds any sway. I’m uncertain. I don’t know how these mild confrontations work.

Give me the threat of death and I will be decisive. Perhaps man functions the same way. Do men think obedience greater than justice? I mean really, when it all boils down?

Survival is compromise. All things bend. These are ways of understanding through which I can express myself. I will bend the branches till they sing.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 39

by
severnspoon
on Friday

We stood across from each other, saying nothing. He looked more exhausted than ever. I shone my light on him, to see more closely how he fared.

He looked away. He retreated to the tree line. I followed him into the darkness:

When I woke up, I was tied to a chair in this old trailer. A new notebook was open on the table before me. He was sitting beside me grinding walnut husks into a paste and spitting now and again to make a pool of ink in his palm.

He holds it out to me now and I dip this hawk feather in to make these words on this page.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 38

by
bigfoot
on Wednesday

I remember now that he’d taught me one very important thing: to begin again, at every turn if necessary, to stack all my exhausted ideas together and keep guessing, to transform the ecstasy of wakefulness into the quiet promise of dreams.

I had my first dream last night:

I dreamt that we stood opposite each other across the train tracks and he shone his beam over me and called me bigfoot.

I dreamt that lightning struck the rails repeatedly and balls of light raced the tracks between us. Little planets and constellations, all of them blue and electric, slowing, drifting slower, becoming less significant in the blackness of space. We became a tiny dot of life in a vast emptiness.

The burning sun was there. I stared straight into the sun until my eyes changed and the sun turned blue. The sun was a great beacon shining in all directions, burning out forever with all the sun’s great promise.

The blue sun shook with storms of becoming. I turned away:

I was in a parking lot and people were everywhere pushing carts. A great cacophony of tiny wheels bumped over rocks. Potholes were everywhere. A deep one gaped near me. A woman had fallen in and was crying to herself.

I climbed in with her. It was the woman from the diner. She was there for just a moment, then she became my uncle’s boar and screamed, trailing her guts on the gravel.

I beat my fists against my head, smacking the vision away, but could not wake into any but this dream:

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Volume study

by
severnspoon
on Monday

volume study

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The Light on the Hill, Part 37

by
severnspoon
on Monday

I had stacked three rocks before him once and then I’d sung a ribald song so he started crying. It sounds absurd to me now, but it was necessary.

I was the Voyager space probe, carrying its profusion of culture to the stars. I had to say everything at once somehow, tell him everything about man with just such simple, essential gestures.

It made him cry. I was never quite sure why he was crying, but it was the opportunity for a final signifying human deed: I laughed at him.

Joseph Campbell Duck

by
severnspoon
on Thursday

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The Light on the Hill, Part 35

by
severnspoon
on Tuesday

I trust my intuition because I believe man is essentially good and if I beam from the core of me:

  1. I will express into the world a great beacon
  2. New details will appear from the dark sky
  3. We will learn to name things again

I stand sentinel at the tracks, beaming my light like lightning in reverse.

All we ever see are reflections. Glancing things. Somehow we avoid damaging ourselves on sources. We avoid staring at the sun. We rely on conjecture to tell us what things are. We are great guessers, always bouncing our beams off things to decry their purpose.

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