Archive for August, 2007

The Light on the Hill, Part 58

by
bigfoot
on Friday

There is just the story of this conversation, the story of me telling the story of him telling the story of me forever until everything is the shape we share. I want to scream until I understand.

Cornsilk and daisies.

A bee over sand.

The smell of green onions on a breeze.

The trees clattering in complaint.

A buck, stooped to tear mushrooms, stands in the hard balance of his horns.

Green. Brown. Purple.

There was something else I was leaving behind once.

I am just my own now.

It is in my story that an otter came to rule the great lake, came to merge himself with all things, came to choose what was the finest. He was a creature of great discernment.

All I know is my descent.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 57

by
bigfoot
on Wednesday

Waking dreams of what might be, haunt me now. Thresholds of knowing close behind me. I have a new kind of question: “If.” How can I answer?

I know nothing. The future is a tangled mat of hair the present keeps combing. I am constantly crashing into other trajectories. Everything has grown elegantly confused. My mind reaches toward the possibilities too aggressively for me to know where to place my next foot. I sit here for lack of reason.

I walked until I found him. His light on the hill beckoned me. I sat down and would not rise again. I lay on the tracks and moaned with heartache. I hadn’t strategies for anything. Lie still or clench up, rollover, run. I needed to be saved and he saved me.

He spit on me till I slowly recovered myself. He provoked me to attention and then we started talking. It seems like we have never stopped talking.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 56

by
severnspoon
on Monday

Spontaneous combustion, I explained, was an unusual but not unknown phenomenon. Sometimes the wiring inside shorts. Sparks create flames that set the whole body to burning so bright only ash remains.

I wonder what ecstasies… every possibility turned on at once … … everything getting its due, losing a last war with all its heroic forces, breaking everything to be… … ecstasy … surety.

If I were able to choose my form of death, I would choose spontaneous combustion. Let all consciousness loose at once. Race like an angel into the world, an invisible man stepping outside of himself and running through the air: a disembodied spirit to grip some anchorage and stay, in some new way.

If only I could bring pen and paper and make some record of it, write the machinations of people and places, buildings rising and falling to ruin, wars decided, all secrets diminished to plain and unnecessary truths, everything glowing with vectors, all the urging toward unique forms… … …

And even further: find the dreams that drive the cogs of it all, whatever they are.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 55

by
bigfoot
on Saturday

I walked away. I was sleepwalking. I walked outside as if I might be right back and then I walked down to the creek as if I might be fetching water and walked on to the railroad tracks and down to the shed and further along until the night came and I was just walking without thinking, blocking any thought or intention.

I wanted something sure to rise up and tell me how to proceed. I had no idea what could resolve it. My brain was useless before this next thing, this human feeling I felt flare up as if I could burst into flames and eject the great force of life that strained in my chest.

I had to race away or die at once, the great urge to offer myself entirely in service to her. If I could survive the flames coming from my chest and my head, if I could dampen all thoughts and burn off the fuel through my feet, then I needn’t ask to be with her anywhere she chose, serving her in any way.

I will not dream she might return these attentions. I can’t take it. If she loved me in turn and we held this great ball of lightning between us, I would explode. I was not made to take this. Whatever lymph humans use to store this juice, whatever wires channel it through the system, whatever clog, whatever reserve, I lack it all.

I am like a length of branch stepped into a fire to burn right through the middle and fall in two halves.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 54

by
bigfoot
on Thursday

“Don’t let my peeing scare you none, ma’am.”

She was looking at me in the mirror. I say such stupid things. She had a little mirror. I’d always somehow managed to not notice mirrors. I had no use for them. I didn’t even realize that they were used for anything but decoration. There she was, touching her lips with her fingers in the small round frame. Her eyes were seeing me peeing, reflected in the mirror.

This would have been a useful thing for me to decipher early on, all these optical proceedings. I was contemplating this when I saw my mother’s face suddenly appear in the small round frame.

My mother. Somehow my mother in the circle of sky she held before her. Somehow then it became me and it was as if I was inside my mother in the mirror. It was as if I was dreaming my own astonishment there in the depths of my mother in the mirror. I couldn’t reason it out, but something essential was coming plain.

I saw my own eyes staring back at themselves and I saw the glow of life around me. Whatever I drank of the world, I drank of myself there in the mirror. I was frozen. A predicament. I thought I might be trapped to stare forever at my reflection until I turned to stone.

But she closed the mirror.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 53

by
severnspoon
on Tuesday

There are just these frames we keep breaking through. Things that almost bind us, snares that nearly hold us fast.

At the end, we are outside of something vast and important and can bear witness to it for the good of all. In the process, we become a next snare and a next to problem other men.

We ask the hardest questions we know. We somehow fail to escape our own traps though. We stay intimate with our problems. We live with them. We are brought down by those whom we sought to defend. It is an ancient story:

We hang forever with no hope of freedom till the little things devour us.

Or

We climb into the sky and live forever in perfect bliss and harmony with all things.

Or

We are dust and ash to dust and ash the earth with next things.

We are little to some, big to others. Reality is a great onion.

We exist to contemplate the onion.

Or

We exist merely to continue on.

Or

The sky is a thin sheet peeling free.

Or

The mysteries have defeated us.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 52

by
bigfoot
on Sunday

The sun lit the dust through the gouge in the roof. Little convections behind her head. Her face in shadow. Little jewels of blue light from her ears, trace the walls into the depth of shadows, quiver with life and blind me where I lie bleeding, considering.

She bandaged my head with her torn pantyhose. It was heaven to lie there in the beam of sunlight. She lifted my arm and helped me stand as the clouds creased the light and left it dim again.

I looked around. Everything had come loose from its piles. I picked up the table and carried it outside. I heaved it on the roof where it covered the gash neatly. I pushed all the metal back into its seams best I could. I stuffed the rest with moss. By the time the rain began, it was finished. So far, just a few drops inside.

I can’t sit still any longer. I put a roof over my own head. I need the rain on me. I need my face wet once more.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 51

by
severnspoon
on Friday

Use small rhythms, the repetition of simple actions, an obsessive fondling of things that go so often neglected. Touch whatever has gone untouched. Be allowed. Be guided towards new thresholds. Go easy. Be patient. The answer should race the question until both are exhausted.

Touch her hand. Touch her ear. Stroke her shoulder, fast at first and then slow. Show her your touch. Let her know the texture of your skin, the warmth that passes between you. Hold her eye. Make a game of it. To always be staring into each other’s eyes. Let everything be guided by the significance of one small triumph and another.

Let her lose her skittishness in her own way. Let her race, awkward, into your arms. Don’t laugh at her. Don’t mock. Let your steady warmth open her like a flower. Tangle about one another on long tendrils of careless saliva. Extrude your organs until they entwine.

And then release, allow for her escape. Let her always have a choice. She must always be allowed to leave. Even when she says she wants to leave but doesn’t mean it and you know, even if you’ve already started playing the game of you as aggressor. Back down, back down. Be a gentleman.

Otherwise, someone steals the locks and all the treasures get trampled. Precious things should be guarded and secret.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 50

by
bigfoot
on Wednesday

When she woke up, I fed her what I had fed the electric man while I had him tied up. It was a sort of paste made from beetles and lightning bugs. I chewed the life from them and then spat the rest in my hands and crushed it. Men are always cooking their food, so I made a fire. The smell of it brought her outside. She said it tasted like hamburger.

She crouched against the trailer hitch and watched me.

I climbed an old oak.

She watched me climb.

I swung out onto an overhanging branch and moved hand over hand until I was over her.

I hung there until she lost interest and stared off somewhere else. Then I jumped down on the roof of the trailer.

I should have known it wouldn’t hold me. The metal tore a long seam and I fell straight through and crashed down on the table which broke as well. I laid awhile as the trailer stopped rocking.

Dazed,
everything spinning.

I don’t know how long it took, but in that time she had run off and returned again.

When I opened my eyes, she was standing over me, rubbing a damp cloth over my head.

It appears I fell on my head. A bump like a morel pulses even still.

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The Light on the Hill, Part 49

by
severnspoon
on Monday

I tried to explain to him that some people get pretty erratic at times and have to learn to live with the strange thoughts that come to them.

I told him the story of those early men who came to America to get to Asia. Fleets of ships lost among the icebergs. Men broken to gnashing and prayers, prone, hands to the sky for fear, resorting to mad gestures at the floating cliffs white as a cloud, blue as an angel’s wing, moving on their impenetrable vectors scattering the waters before them.

Ships sailing through a maze of shifting rooms, taking passages that seem viable, exhausting themselves with choices on that mad ride. I think my mind works the very same way. The drift of logical gates that make up my thoughts are borne on millions of choices creating tendencies of intention.

The mind is the strength of that particular force of will. Mind is a volume, a capacity for engagement. The number of ships sailing in congress with icebergs.

The soul is that will alone, surfing the rough seas of mind and body, the captain watching his fragmented forces dissolve into the ice. The cruelties of that vast and penultimate other which cannot be relied upon to save itself.

Bigfoot and I share this urging of will that is always questioning that ultimate unmovable force that drives things. Say we grope for knowledge of the mind of nature. We attune our morality to the most ancient systems we can imagine.

I can’t defend us all, but I do believe that a man calling for his life crouched in hysterics, his frozen tears mounting, the ghostly shifting of the heavens ready to crush him like a bug, warrants some forgiveness.

We are human beings. We have those higher faculties that allow for transformative experiences. We are always ready to hear the punch line. We forgive each other. We can take a joke. We can endure much cruelty for the promise of mercy. We can always accept a misunderstanding. We are fallible after all. First and foremost, flawed. Pawns of history, no different than the icebergs we drift among.

And yet we have intentions that are greater than simple physics (which will not save us). We have the urge to cry out for help to the sky if we must. We think it proper a hand should appear and reset the game so we might try again some other course.

Bigfoots don’t look for help.

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