Last Chapter (Room for cream) Holding his cup with both hands and smiling, like the woman in the commercial, Leslie sipped his coffee and paused to reflect. He recalled his life as a click-beetle, deep in the nameless jungle .. remembering the taste of the sweet loamy earth, and feeling again the soft jungle rains, quietly running off the leaves, dripping like tender poems onto his hard, stern little back, softening his tiny heart. And he began to cry a little, just as he had then, his feelers aching with relentless excitement, finding a sensual intensity beyond human imagination, and knowing the exultant joy of living each instant with the full force of an all consuming final purpose. This reminded him of something, and he took from his pocket a worn piece of paper and placed it on the table. It was his favorite poem, one which had given him comfort in some of his most troubled times: Table 4-4 Series of Random Numbers. “And here I am again,” he thought, quite apostrophically, “digging my grave with dreams..licking from moist bowls of orthodoxy set before me by a trembling hand. Cell division, and the carbon molecule- here and not with birds we will commence with the divinations of our days. But I grow weary of the end-game. It’s not as radiant as it once was. Still, Paul was in Athens .. Paul was in Athens!! Here is a solace - a theosophical, if not theological one - a salve, a poultice for the eternal wounds of emptiness and despair. The fusion of creeds will be accomplished. Of course it is already accomplished, it’s just that we are not yet permitted to possess a full integration of all the dimensions of understanding. Those eyes do not belong to us yet. It’s not our fault. ..All sounds, all numbers, are one. Everything goes into the same file, ultimately. Letting go of everything really isn’t the solution .. it’s a solution; but not The solution. Maybe a part of the best we have though. There is no understanding without letting go. Emptiness is a metaphor ..for everything.” “With words we are dousing, like the giants of old, for preterit truths hidden somewhere in the earth. But what is Truth to that woman who sleeps on the heating grates on Broadway .. the woman who says to me almost every day: ‘I can taste the iron in the sky at night, Leslie, I can taste everything... Please, have a drink of my wine that you might taste, and remember, too.’ But still I won’t drink from her cup. I wonder if I am even capable of wanting to.” “When I listen especially closely, when I disappear, I hear sound for sound’s sake, and for a moment I might feel free .. but there is an unquiet hissing underneath it all. Yes sometimes I can feel and taste the distortion. Still, not all explanations for things have been offered. And the void is not large enough to contain even the simplest god .. not even a single word.” Leslie’s heart was breaking .. breaking, into shards of crisp eternal pain and gladness. A heart of gladness. That’s what he had always wanted. Today was one of those days when he felt himself drifting even further away from a heart of gladness, and yet thereby also finally approaching true ownership of a heart of gladness. Why did he have to keep letting to .. leaving himself .. disappearing .. to have any hope of finding such a heart? He was terrified, and he ached for understanding, for someone to explain to him just once, everything. He longed for Beverly. He looked for her. But he could see her only in his dreams. Unable to answer her eyes, he looked back outside into the rain. He longed to be out there somewhere, somewhere else. And forgetting he had already been alone for such a long, long time, he longed to be alone again. Then, looking down, he saw in the booth beside him an old brown paper bag. He recognized it as his, and one that he had been carrying for days. He opened the bag and saw two books: How to Develop a Wide Thick Muscular Back, by Dr. Franco Columbo, and Caricatures of Polish Mathematicians, by Leno Jesmanowicz. He could not recall where he had got them, though they were clearly his, and what’s more he knew that they were meant to be his. They didn’t mean much to him at the moment, however, except that he knew possessing them somehow helped him hear less of the hissing underneath things, helped him to taste less of the distortion. He dug around in the bag and found his ‘notebook’ with some notes from a research he had apparently been conducting. That’s what the title of the notes said: “Research for Monday, July 17th” He read the following entries: “Although their surfaces look similar, nubuck leather is created by buffing the top grain of an animal hide until it takes on a very fine nap; suede's more velvet-like surface comes from buffing the underside of a hide. Surface difference aside, nubuck and suede have this in common: their quality varies from inexpensive to pricey, and both tend to stain easily. Treat both with a soil repellent spray.” “Most food or substances with a reputation for enhancing the libido - including oysters, ginseng root, powdered rhinoceros horn, animal testicle, turtle eggs, and Spanish Fly (a preparation of powdered beetles that irritates the bladder and urethra) - are nothing more than placebos.” “If you develop trenchfoot, handle your feet very gently. Do not rub or massage them. Wash them carefully with mild soap & water. Dry and elevate your feet. Leave them uncovered at room temperature.” The thought of gentle treatment of feet seemed to help. Leslie’s breathing slowed and peace seemed not so far away. He saw some other papers in the bag. There was a letter he had written but evidently never sent. Dear M. (who was M, he wondered) Sometimes life seems somewhat less than asymptotic with regard to any eventual transition into an eternal, purified existence. Ever encroaching commodity oriented architectures/economies for speech, movement, sound, and feeling, as well as sundry other ‘stultifying modern pedantries,’ take their toll. And is it falling away from the Word, that causes the thinning veil to become more like a firewall, thickening the despair of some, and perhaps leading to a longing while on this earth to at last be outside the crushing tonalities of prevailing meanings - listening for the dissonance which promises a return to some other home? Weary of language speaking us, is there not sometimes a longing to “give the slip” to the ‘surly bonds’ of signification, and dwell in the spaces between the words (theory), play between the notes (chromaticism & microtones), and pray without words (zen/silence/nothingness). God may be a nationalist; can He not also be the God of Buddhism, such as it is. Such as He is? I admit I am frightened by an age old answer: no. Is the god of Luther really not the god of Aquinas? The relationship of language to Truth seems strange, yet the spaces between the signs are rendered meaningful only by virtue of the presence of the Word some will say; thus are we intentional (moral) creatures after all. (Though often rent by our own interpretations). Perhaps in the end there is no giving the slip to the music of the spheres: the 5th is profound for a Reason, and the octave has the last word, if you will. And Bach does joyously inform the heart that an absolute silence- quiescence- nothingness would indeed not be a happy enough answer. “One of the objections to the conventional theory of harmony that Hindemith raises is that ‘by raising or lowering tones of the diatonic scales the chord-supply of a key may be enriched.’ H. implies that, historically, the principle of alteration, when it is applied to only a few tones of a scale, was a valid one, but that, when the alterations became very numerous, the theory of the diatonic scale with alterations should have been given up in favor of the multitone scale.” G. Thaddeus Jones, Music Theory ...The heart is polytropic, turning toward the many, lured by seductions of Enrichment and multi-god systems beckoning diatonic souls . . . sloping toward polytheism, under the curious airy weight infinite alterations, -luxurious spices for the great commission: Interpretation. Words at once constitute suppression, and rejoicing - such is the history of the soul vis-à-vis Language. Is there consecration or transubstantiation of any kind without (a) language? Well, the transcendent narrative is to be fulfilled only somewhere beyond the pleasure of forms. Form yields satisfaction - but only so much. Form, our consciousness of which derives from the body, like meaning: ‘is exquisite .. yet leaves on unsatisfied.’ Still, there are some things which may be said. Concerning your reflections on the pasts of others and of yourself, there is a reason that some are left with only a grim and fading reminiscence of the lost years. The amortizations of the heart begin to take precedence at an early age, and generally unbeknownst to us. The gradual taxonomies of the spirit introduced, implemented, and enforced by others go unnoticed, unregarded, and the cartographies of the soul become a lost art. Again, lost at an early age. You ask how will you know if things have worked out, as they say. Well, what can I tell you? The only things you can truly know are those you teach yourself. Of course the spirit may guide one; but I am not talking about that now. As far as what success ‘looks like,’ all I can say to you here is that as things work out, it will become more difficult to distinguish yourself from the beauty around you. The beauty around you will become the beauty within you. You will make fewer distinctions altogether, draw fewer lines between that which is beautiful and that which supposedly is not beautiful. Draw fewer lines, my friend. If you are truly successful ‘the arbitrary’ will become a source of much hope and a true force. When nothing strikes you as arbitrary, you will have begun creating yourself. Is there danger here? Yes there is. To suffer no distinction is one form of madness. Our suffering seems arbitrary sometimes - that’s the horror of it. And could one be so mad, for example, as to find beauty in a rotting river, full of corpses? Maybe. But it is not madness to try. Someone has learned something from that river. Each corpse brings some kind of release for something, somewhere, perhaps someone else connected only remotely to the suffering of those closer to the situation ..a new path perhaps is now made available which holds some form of beauty not manifest in an old path, even though the old path may be much to be preferred for any number of godly reasons. We sail into eternity on a rotting river. Rhetoric is a transaction. Grammar is Narrative. There is a reason we feel we don’t exist without a sense of ‘story.’ There is no beauty, no love, without change. Don’t fear aloneness. Solitude is a crucible, burning off the impurities of opinion, most importantly your own! Do you seek to create? Then you must also seek to destroy that which you have created. Both desires must always be present, though not necessarily in equal proportion of course. All situations are fluid, all dynamic. Always be killing the Buddha. As far as meeting him on the side of the road? .. hunt him down if necessary! (It is). What I am talking about are your own self-perceptions, ‘understandings,’ etc. Always be seeking to disown some element of that which you understand, know, to be True. No construction in one’s mind or heart is ever whole. It is always wanting in some way. Deeper understanding is a function of letting go. Always be exhuming Jefferson's body. We must turn back, retrieve, dig up, our sins. Show them to others, like a prize. Infinite Jefferson’s bodies lie still undisturbed, with a living history which we must forever exhume in order to re-tell our own futures. The sacrifice of knowledge is greater than the sacrifice of possessions. so says the gita. To write the future, you must always be willing/looking to re-write the past. “The past does not influence me, I influence the past,” wrote a painter. Remember, meaning/beauty must be forcibly extracted if necessary from each day. Put your hard hat on. Punch in. Show up. Significance will not always be ‘thrust upon’ us. And yet how we still gorge on the desultory flames of meaning! Binging on the material potentials seemingly latent in signs, and consumed with _ minced fervors we little understand and can no longer even sense! I assure you we are quite beside ourselves!! We sip with glowing lips and a wan smile at the bittersweet cup of signification. A little interpretation is a dangerous thing .. drink deep or taste not from the infinite spring! But who does not cry out in the wilderness. What matter does not shout praise, like the stones on the side of the road. All substance is conscious at one level or another. But not all is divine consciousness. This is human alone. And remember there are also distinctions. And categories exist before they are created. Who is Buddha without Bach. Would you want one without the other? Does not one enhance the other, make their gift more precious, more beautiful? Do we not know one better for knowing the other? Also the spirits of the natural & material world exist as equations, purely in our mind. How could this be so, unless the mind/soul is somehow divine, eternal? The universe does not need our equations to exist!.. but there they are. I assure you, long before Aristotle, ...there was Aristotle. The rocks and the wind him long before he presented himself to us. He and Plato were made for each other. Truly. They are one and the same man! Everything is already reconciled. All things point. All things teach. It is up to you to make what you will of your direction. In the end, all solutions disappear.. Sincerely, Leslie Leslie put all of the papers back into the brown paper bag. He was going to need a new one soon. His body felt like that paper bag sometimes “..for the sword outwears the sheath and the soul outwears the breast..” How does the rest of that go? he thought. “ok there’s the day’s research .. where things go..” Epilogue An indeterminate amount of time passed. Looking around the coffee shop, which was more of a diner really, Leslie saw that all of the people were different from the ones who were there when he had come in. Or were they exactly the same people? Or, were they the same people, but now unrecognizable, so terribly different were they now from who they had been when they entered. Leslie had no idea. “There’s no real way of knowing,” he thought. “That’s the trouble, there’s no real way.” He looked down at the table. The waitress had long ago taken what remained of his rice & bean omelet. He hadn’t even seen her take it. He was sorry she had. For he would have kept it, as he often used what remained of his meal as a kind of tarot - for purposes of augury - divining from the scraps and remains a few of the infinite stories looming in day ahead. Now if he wanted some indication of what would befall him, he would have to use the patterns in gold specks of mica on the restaurant table. He had unlocked the code to these years ago, in Denver, with the help of Storebought Man. At least he thought he had. Looking at them now he thought ‘the fates of many more than one universe are told here.’ Beverly had said to him once that when the patterns of mica on tables made less sense, even if it was because they seemed to tell so much that he could not withstand knowing, that that was a sign in itself he was doing better. The patterns made him dizzy and he had to look away. The only other evidence remaining that anyone had been there at all was the little top piece of the clear cellophane wrapper from someone’s cigarettes, and for which evidence of the day's reality Leslie was just now especially thankful. “Nevertheless, some of you want to know what the end looks and feels like. Well,” he said, looking at the little scrap of cellophane, “here is your apocalypse.” The rain had stopped, and there was some sun now. Then, from off-stage, off-world, from out of the void, the waitress re-entered the scene. She walked straight to Leslie, carrying before her, of all things, fresh coffee. Leslie was a little unnerved by her smile, which seemed to precede her body by some distance. Was it an omen, a portent, he wondered?, the way people in stories sometimes wonder about things that are not important at all. When she got to the booth she did not speak, she just held up the coffee pot and raised her eyebrows a little, nodding her head toward his cup. A human question mark. She was quite pretty. Reassured, Leslie smiled, and nodded toward his cup in agreement. And as the girl poured, he decided it was going to be a good day after all. That there was much more to learn, from Beverly especially, and from the others. And there was so much more to listen for. Perhaps there wasn’t as much hissing, distortion, dissonance, underneath everything, as he had once thought. perhaps. At least not today. And who ever has more than today anyway. If you have today you have forever. Just then, Leslie felt to have anything was to have everything. Beverly had shown him that new ways to understand things would continue to present themselves; that what we don’t understand now may be understood tomorrow .. and that there was indeed a reason to move forward .. that everything was moving forward. Yes, and he looked forward to seeing her again very much. "A little cream, too, if you don't mind," he said to the waitress before she left him again. And she seemed pleased to hear it, as though she had been waiting such long time, so many years so many lifetimes, for him to finally ask for a little cream. "Sure," she said, with a genuine smile. And then, leaving poem Table 4-4 Series of Random Numbers behind forever, Leslie picked up his porkpie hat, placed it cavalierly, though not without a kind of liturgical care, upon his head and, with the heavy yet floating step of a holyman passing through the people and entering the realm of world, walked bravely out into a truly lovely morning .. looking for more. |
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