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Deconstruct, imagine, reassembleÉ. Information superhighway crashed just the other dayÉ I paid it no mind. We have been at work on his letter, Dean and I. ItÕs a strange chemical nightmare landscape populated by hiccup characters that meet and blow apart all helter skelter. ItÕs hell trying to organize the beast that Dean has constructed; he refuses to even number the pages. It is less like a book than a letter out of control. He wonÕt number the pages because he thinks it shouldnÕt matter what page youÕre on. He doesnÕt want you to read it, he wants to you to loose your mind with it. He believes that if you are going to loose your mind, and you are, you ought to have a manual, a grand style, a real purpose. I prefer it simplerÑthe path of a water droplet down rain slick window panes, the curvature at the bottom of the female breast, the eccentricities of the LSD spider web experiments, the small of your loverÕs back, an anxiety attack at four in the morning... But the important point is that you do it. Loose your mind at once. Do it or go west. Remember those wordsÑgo west young man? Sad old Horatio Alger myths told by ephemeral goblins of the human spirit who had not the courage to addÑ because everything here is all fucked up. I was born west. As far west as you can get without going east, no west, no east. Go shoot yourself young man, because you are fucked. Straight up and down fucked. The whore sneaked out the bathroom window with your wad of cash and credit cards kind of fucked. You are being ingested by a parasite. You are being controlled to love controlling control and you have no weapons of self-defense. Who controls control?
The every-man-for-himself days are over, the fight was lost and the survivors regrouped in remote outposts hidden deep in the forest interiors, desert mountain oasis, and underground sewer systems. The entire country is in a state of rabble; the people moving through ruins like the retreating Napoleonic Army leaving Waterloo. Everywhere the lines are falling back, but it is not a real war itÕs a ghost war. There is no enemy, nothing to run from, only hunger, the wretched hunger of the human belly which forces us all to shoulder up and trade time in for tickets and tickets for foodÉ and all the grand dreams, all the Horatio myths are nothing more than a bankrupt game of miserly old men smoking cigars and trying to fill their own bellies. Everywhere the retreat continues, men racing in shadows, hiding from everything and everyone who might steal their bread, their wine, their wives. They squirm like little bugs fearing the boot heels of the old men who are only bigger and more grotesque bugs. Stop hoping things will be better tomorrow and realize that it doesnÕt matter one way or another. Life holds back nothing, asks nothing and gives nothing. All imitations of life are false to it, only a parabola approaching life. Hope is careening like a pirate ship with no port to call home, splintered on the rocks of failure. See little fires burning, outposts in the western lands, retreat camps where those who have given up the ghostly illusion of hope are congregating. To be without hope means that there is no despairing, hope and despair are the same thing at different points in timeÑthey exist only in tomorrowland. Without hope everything proceeds in splendor and glory, one is left free to contemplate the beautiful details, the twinkling minutia.
And in the outpost camps, basking beside warm fires, the weathered elders ask the green arrivalsÑwho monopolized truth? Who externalized it? Who stole it from usÑwe who knew it in our bodies? Who took it out and strung it up by the word where it could lodge in our feeble heads? Show yourselves all! We will destroy you, rip you to shreds. The world can not look itself in the mirror; it slinks like a shamefaced soldier who ran from the battle to the comfort of his dead motherÕs bosom. The world rots on top of the dead godÕs cunt, head still stuck in the primordial womb like an imbecile or a child sucking his thumb. Look at all the pretty things, lovely things, look at what we have built, look at what we can do! Look at all the pretty pictures; hear the pretty stories. And sleep tight at night scream the generals. Never, never dare to question the underlying fundamentals. Shake up your field if you must, but leave the essential framework of the shithouse alone. And yet every real change, every real improvement to the lot of the uncommon, common man has come from the sewer, the prison cell, the last outposts. We crawl down here in the basement where you pay us no mind and slowly, like industrious beavers, we gnaw at the wood frame of the house the monkeys built. The house of the world trembles in fear of us and we will bring it crashing down one day. The beavers. The termites. The wood fungi. Decay always wins in the end. The children gathered around the warmth of the outpost fires know this, they watch, they live, they wait. First they eat themselves from the inside out and then they turn their backs and sinking out of sight, but we are not gone, no, we are here Ñinvisible.
And you think you need the random violence, you need the Super Bowl, you need the microwave dinners, you need a drug that makes you dream, you need the cast iron kettle, you need the coupons from the Sunday paper. You need the saltwater, you need the mountain air, you need a bicycle, you need sturdy shoes, you need a washing machine, you need freedom, but car insurance will do. You need air fresheners, you need a faster computer, you need a genetically engineered future food from the twenty third cosmic outrage of viral man. You need a tampon, you need to shave your legs, you need to work out more, you need a new house, you need pickled pigs feet, you need zinc, you need to be saved from yourself, you need to stop smoking, life is precious. You need dinner company, you need a conversation, you need a street address, you need new friends, you need a good scotch, you need a tailored suit, you need to make love. And the singer on the radio saysÉyouÕve been living underground/ eating from a can/ running away from what you don't understand Ñlove.
Dean is writing you a letter, whomever you may be, be you governments, be you lawmakers, be you law enforcers, be you corporate heads, be you the almighty goddevil himself, Dean is writing you a letter. He arrived home this morning bursting with laughter because he saw you naked in the shower. The water was hot and your skin was flush with words, he read them at a mighty distance, unscrambled all the riddles and mysteries that you think you have sealed so safely behind boardroom doors. You did not catch him, you will not, you cannot, he does not exist to you any more. He exists in what is to come, what architecture has yet to embody, where paint has not yet been put, where chains are made of human limbs, where words cannot follow, he will walk there tonight. He is bursting with energy; it flows inward so that he glows like a backlit screen at a silhouette puppet show. Imagination has cut itself loose from him and he is free to dream what can not be dreamed. His syntax is broken and useless in such a world; he cannot yet bring it back for us.
Dean and I are both sitting on the couch hunched over our machines pounding the keys furiously. We have passed the whole day like this. The ashtray is choked with butts, on the table between us there are two drinks. Have I ever described the cottage? Perhaps itÕs not important, it is really just two large rooms, one a living room and kitchen, and the other a bedroom and bathroom. I like to think the place has the design of a Chinese opium den, San Francisco, circa 1910, but it doesnÕt. The couches face each otherÑFeng ShuiÑit makes you want to talk. In the corner is an enormous, gaudy, high back throne covered in blue and red paisleys. ItÕs the oratorÕs chair. It helps everything take on an added drama, 1910 style. Both the couches and the chair are situated in front of an immense window that looks out into the forestÑit makes you want to shut up. When I first moved in Sandra tried to help me plant a garden under the window, but I am more inclined to let nature run its course, it has after all been gardening for about five billion years whereas I have but a season under my belt. Of course all that is neither here nor there.
I miss Maya ferociously and New York to me is nothing but her. She is spread out over the entire island inhabiting every nook and cranny, every hook and crook; she makes the lights glow, powers the stock exchange, razes tall buildings and creates new ones in the wake of dusty rubble. A year and half we have been living this way like beggars ecstatic over crumbles of time.
Eight
I stumble downtown to get a glass of tea and see if I can fall in love with a few girls sauntering in their summer dresses, gurgling floral innocence. Quetzechoatel and Yahweh are having coffee at the corner table, trying to decide how much longer the universe ought to exist. But perhaps the quiet exchange student from Japan sitting at the next table has designs on them; perhaps he has his own ideas about how long the universe ought to keep up its perpetual pandemonium. I only want tea and there is a boy and a girl, and they are dancing separately on opposite sides of the street and only a coward would be able to chooseÉ so we meet in the middle, dance a lighthearted song and then retire for a glass of tea. Would it be so much better if I tell you how we look, what we wear, how the words come out, what we discuss, how she tilts her head to the side whenever she is debating something with herself, or the way in which he will shrug and stare off into space when he feels uncomfortable, or the way my own hand twitches involuntarily from time to time making me ash on myself, or the way the lingering leaves rustle and shimmy in the afternoon breeze, or the way the table slopes downhill so that our cups go sliding, or that the old man with one eye asks for some change, or the way another bum begs for someone to take him to AtlantaÑan emergency he saysÑor the distant drone of diesel engines grinding up College Avenue, becoming auditory perfume in the afternoon stillnessÉ None of that matters now, weÕre past it.
I take leave of my friends and head out of downtown across the railroad trestle dreaming of Walt Whitman Ñwhere are you? To have written the scene in a scribble of knife sharpened pencil words so eloquent the gods held you up as a sign that man was on his wayÉ and then, as I pass the old refrigerator store turned musical venue, all is not lost, Whitman is not dead, I see it in yesterdayÕs papers; he was sighted in a supermarket in California with a confused but joyous bearded manÉ I am walking across a bridge, rickety, rotting timbers ear-marked for demolition, when suddenly, right in the middle, I become frightened. I realize that I do not know for sure that this particular bridge has been marked for destruction. What if this is in fact a working line and a train comes right this instant, barreling along at seventy miles an hour? ItÕs at least a hundred yards to safety and to jump off, well, that would require me to lose the use of my legs, splinter them to a thousand pieces, and suddenly I see it all exactly as it is. I like to think I know, but I donÕt. IÕll never know until that final second when all the ancient trials are done, the memories go curtain and the feathers list stupidly down and thenÉ well, then IÕll know.
Indian summer is here. Dean is still writing his grand letter. No one else has come by for a few days. Jimmy and Chloe have been keeping to themselves, fighting from what I can tell. So it is only Dean and I and a small chipmunk-looking creature that keeps getting in the house. I have to chase him out of the kitchen from time to time, but he doesnÕt eat very much and never touches the alcohol so I donÕt mind.
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