A Leave

Current affairs: packaging all things dolorous into a short story or chapter. Be back when the wilderness permits.

worthy of its organs

Why the remission--so that we can trace her progress into the sleepiest categories of a hostile nature, cooking and gardening, scraping by on my efforts to conceal her--the remainder, what she knew was beyond capture, was the surplus. As if she was ever grateful that I could never put all of her in here--so grateful that she raised the stakes by interrupting, mocking, to see the balance tipped towards a postmodern narrative--threatening always to make me seem too intentional! Her plays were marked by a freshness and curtness, by a chill continuously engulfed by laughter, like the salving punishment of Steppenwolf after his dower sobriety is raised out and above him like an ax. The executioner is also the jester, so what we have is a stuck philosopher going to shambles with the popular decree, the jury's sudden rupture, the frivolity engaged for his redemption--cruel, but refreshing. This was the elemental fury undergirding the dolorous show--and once I'd been cast a role that could scarcely be denied, her career terminated itself because she suspected I'd know too much of the back-story--which is true, but as it is also fiction once it is represented, she has plainly overestimated me, leaving me with a burden I was not born to bear.

It is her own, and her cowardice even in taking the final plunge is transmuted into my responsibility, as if the project was mine all along! She wants me to admit I've always been metaphysical while possessed of the fantastic, but the truth is I've had to conduct my most laborious study in her favor.

It was a single episode that hooked her on the idea of my being some sort of prophet, a rustic mystagogue--just one afternoon in an abandoned house where I told the short tale of an alien to an empty kid's bedroom. I've had to revamp that story to make it interesting to the reader--it falls in the next chapter--for at the time, who knows what I said. It was the directness of my approach to this imaginary audience, as if even Dolores were vaporized incidentally into it, impregnated with the idea that I was some father of philosophy and poetry and all I'd require for a repeat episode was a stage, the right lack of clarity and the fulsomeness of surrounding characters that evokes the best declarative stance: here, listen, all you empties, to the tale that I'll tell.

But even this requires a direct quote--as it happens, the Violent Femmes--"You wanna know how to take a short trip to hell--it's guaranteed to get your own place in hell."

In that song a child is thrown into a well; in my seminal performance the children had long since disappeared; in her rendering the audience took the blame for every emptiness! Despite the Ann Arborite's avant-gardism, the pit was unfavorable, it reached up and grappled with the implications to prove that its hollowness was only a conceit inverted against the author, in turn pulling them down in it and releasing only when the playwright's been sufficiently flattered. For it was now.

Not that the reviews of her play about me were negative. Dolores suffered at the hand she dealt of chagrin as a member of the audience--not an unusual situation, except that in this space, the spectator was an uncomfortable role for her to put on--she was the original spectator now trying to capture me!

And I'm trying to establish she's got a list of prerequisite flattery.

I brought her back to Alterity and have kept her there. I am her author; she is not mine.

past

I definitely don't want to live in the valley again until I can build my own place for everything artsy, on the property of the red house (now burnt down, knocked over, and sinking back into the earth)

for that is the finale of a story I'll tell about walking up for a Mug, seeing Jason talking in the distance to people I knew I wouldn't know, being deflected by the little stone bridge: a path across the valentine's day field. to cross the river I had to deliberate before a bending tree with two branches, inviting my heroics. It was too far a reach and I stood for too long thinking: had I just lunged and lifted the seat of my pants with the rest of me, I could have scaled successfully across. Instead, after a moment of hovering (amid a depleting energy source unbeknownst to the arms supporting me horizontally in air) my ass sank directly into the water, which I had begun to consider a faintly shifting pool: we'd become familiar, this river and I. Luckily there was another river directly after the first; and lest I think that since I've already wet feet I can just walk across, a broad fence of angry briars detained me. I was now ready for the frontal attack against a nature that never cared whether I was poetic or that I belonged to a romantic project; this walk was unnecessary in the eyes of the landscape, which I felt forbidding me as I stepped---angling my shoes to cut at the thorny sticks growing like ossified blades of grass, betwixt motherly batches of more! Even pestilences have relatives.

They, the entire witch-brew of nuisances, were...the closest I've come to the Real; the horror of nature, the unlimited range of uncaring torments it holds for an ambler! But I had a destination, a place to check up on. Go there I would. Of course the land that supported two equal-sized branches of the same river (neither appearing a tributary of the other) is one obviously at a low level; the flatland equivalent is a marshy field traversable thanks to tufts of hay, growing wild, already dead-manila colored, and providing no single place to stand. Only temporary dryness; but you've got wet freezing feet already. It's not that warm out: it's only a few early days of March that got me out like this!

The only view of the red house must have seemed like the top of the hill far beyond the shit I'm slogging through now; and once I'm on that hill I have had time to consider how to step against a of porcupine-quill mountain. So now I'm mostly okay to do just that.

Fine. Of course I'm out of breath.

There's a sniper's booth 3/4's the way up. I rest by climbing up and staring at a bunch of nothing. more brambles. a field of fucking empty.

Red house? The place to be on a sunny day in the valley? Musing over past lives now all messy and useless yet still, enchantingly grody? Quite, and precisely. I'm going there, yes I said I was and yes I will yes.

Finally I see there's been a path nearby for the duration---very short---of my precarious perch 9 feet up a tree, should have been 10 but I did not fancy sitting on a wobbly aluminum frame. Couldn't let it dictate how I'd see the rest of my stupid little journey, since only one who's out to shoot deer from a high place he cannot get to alone---such was the company that preceded me more immediately. I was after the ancients of the valley, the truly old-school occupants of a strip of land destined to be considered haunted.

But again, nature didn't care, ever.

As for how my finally descending upon the ruins resembled far too much of my oft-repeated dream, why that's too weird to get into right now...

contort.

I wanted to go in for the passions, and the quickest route was the song where the flames are bitter and the singer is raging while shotguns and muddy tube socks fill the stage with a gaseous hatred that has no source yet deflects blame for its emptiness upon the audience, who only want to divulge their own secrets according to the scripts, which by this point is obviously too linear for the lot of them, trained post-structuralists with tepid affairs kept on the burner that has its green light and nothing else burning; you see it's a contagion without ailment, better known as Dolores' final attempt to fit herself within a theoretical framework of any sort--the audience calls out themes--post-colonialist! Subaltern! But the plot is suddenly wavering. All anyone can see is the chair sitting there ready to burn. A set of hands ready to clasp. A bucket about to be kicked--and holy God! Is that the dramatist in the third row? Why are we directed there--who's in charge here!

(Don't type this up. Don't write this out. Don't share this online. Don't hide this from the playwright. Don't call the doctor. Consider the prostate cancer of withholding like a leashed mutt. You are nevermore to speak of this, I think it has chosen you so beware--the manager is near--she needs reports!

She's the one who volunteered. There goes the best creative mind Alterity's ever known. Who can say what brought her into the realm of theory and why her characters are angry now without being funny--a tale for another day. We see Death on a tripod stool with his hands lap-folded before a gallon of fire water. Now he's passing out samples, he's struck that stance which says I know all about your silly situation, it will be the greatest disappointment once you run away from it--for only then will it catch you! Go on, try swallowing her whole, she's a spot on the rug that will stain your socks every time you awake at 4 to make urine--stop wearing socks? Stop listening to her talking after midnight? Why, that's early. Too much worry causes nothing but panic and that is precisely what we need down here--

You! In the 6th row! What do you know? Has her hair stayed straight, or is the rest of the earth realizing its roundness--is the disbursement of ideas and cultures and anxieties restricted to a ball, can it be that the back of her head is pinpointing too much and you had better substitute this clarity for swarthy deceptions? You know she has curly hair and that torture can only work under her disinterested watch--so control yourself. I think we're in for a ride. You have fortunately been drinking wine.

bow

I walked outside today and saw that Nietzsche had 2 fresh bones in the yard and I thought, well, I have 2 new characters--with names. But that was a lie. The second, the owner of the local theater, is to be disillusioned before she gets a name! That is unfair.

time for

The field work of source collecting and quote hunting is past--I wouldn't say it is complete, or that it isn't sorely unfinished, or that it won't take several dutiful hours to coalesce what I have gathered--for the ghosts are calling for a series of sentences that are true to my original intentions, even if what I have thought of late is compromised. For everyone wants resolution--at the least, closure. I am to admit that the the old ideas have partly ceased to be; they have begun their new life in creative writing. I cannot claim fidelity to Durrell's text any longer, and I will appear as a thief if I proceed into fiction without admitting the places where my pen runs after a moment in Clea, for instance; but it could just as well have originated in Justine. To avoid redundancy I won't bother to list the other two books; one gets my drift. The theme is back to:

The absence of the other's mind during the creative act no longer causes dismay, for it frees up one's own mind, allowing unfiltered enjoyment of the other as a separate space moving about in distant though shared joie de vivre. The fortress shall not be compromised--yet the result of so much respect is the "marriage of true minds." I cannot put it other than in Durrell's terms; and by not electing a strict theoretical perspective, I am not obliged to pull out those moments that increase the scope and flexibility of any hermeneutics. My perspective seeks to become creative for an imagined freedom; bondage and debt are constants of literary production.

crank

I had found a place where I could get things wrong, but then was interrupted constantly by old claims. Who cares anymore which direction I take, what is this artificial reality anymore? A sham despite its erudition. To mute it, then. To clench my teeth while talking on the phone with a troglodyte--the music stopped because the electricity was shut off, and I began the course of demystification. Charging my laptop at Bigby's, bringing it home to do the real work of distraction, idyllic, really: as if I could approach honesty with a euphonious strand of sentences. Who can say whether it matters that a single reader takes more than one idea seriously--the point is selfish, the world is outside and I might control it within this suffocating, uncomfortably furnished place of softness and ennui. Losing an iota of perfection is tragic: the merit is in the foolishness of believing in any sort of completion. That was necessary decades ago; else I never would have left the creek where a universe of rhythms and cymbal crashes echoed in the cyclical droning of the bugs, later identified in a lusher setting as cicadas. The valley had other species, I believe, but none of them en masse: the urban graveyard--a city of death? The death of a city?--was the site of an adult's deliberate insanity. The valley was childish reverie of the purest variety. And now? Despair set out to dry, perchance to be quenched by language? Not enough nonsense for that.