Eros & (Fill in the Blank)

Charles Freeland

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

Eros & (Fill in the Blank) by Charles Freeland Copyright 2009 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 9781935402732 Library of Congress Control Number 2009910028

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When events transpire the way they do which is to say like locomotives appearing where there are no tracks we are disappointed. But not altogether without recourse. Before you know it, stakes have gone up around the periphery of town. And the sweet smell of wood smoke fills ones nostrils. I suppose it is cherry. I dont know. There are, of course, different versions of a single event depending on how many people you question afterwards. And in what manner. Survey. Gossip. This is a commonplace that has no business in these pages. But it appears anyway because the alternative is so bleak, we cant face it. It hovers just beyond the edge of our vision like a fruit bat having a go at a clutch of mangos. The listing to one side you feel in the morning then is not going to get any better no matter how hard you try to live your life right. It is a symptom of something much deeper than morality, something beyond just salts and minerals. It is a
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holdover from that time when human beings were not so thrifty as they are today. They were willing to spend whatever they had amassed among the reed beds. If this meant starting over on occasion, it was worth it. If for no other reason than the feeling they got from eliminating their pots and their bowls and their blankets was very similar to that we get now from wagering three months rent on black. Or bedding someone we know is not the least little bit discreet. We are lighter for it. No longer weighed down by that which keeps us forever in the photographs. Even those no one really looks at anymore. And its funny, the way we stand there, waiting, tugging our lips up at the corners. Its as if we are engaged in the most important activity in the world and we know it. The settling of the image once and for all. The halting of the face just long enough to prove that it was an actual thing. Something someone looked forward to addressing come dinnertime. Even reaching out and stroking on occasion. The way you might attempt to calm a parrot in its cage after it has heard a loud noise. She assumes the visions that appear in the early morning are somehow more fundamental than those that come in the mid-afternoon. When the sound of the breeze in the magnolia tree is something to record in your journal. If youre sure no one will read it. If it is safe from prying eyes, like those animals that spend their whole lives in caves. Crustaceans, mostly. Such things as make life itself doubt its own direction. Ask
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in the form of seizures and red tides questions one really ought to leave to the clergy. Or those bullies who are never content to take your lunch money, but must also bring on darkness. That metaphysical dread she had always before assumed belonged to others. Like cuff links. Or a fancy pair of shoes. Parts of the accomplished world that she, with her broken zipper and page-boy cut, would never be able to enter. Where the logo on the side of the truck breaks the plane of consciousness, but the lumber in the back does not. Because it is not representational. Odd, she thinks, how we remark and remember the artificial with much greater clarity than we do those things we had no hand in creating. This is, in fact, one of the oddities of the human organism, and may even function as a perfectly workable definition. We are that which prefers the madeup. Whereas everything else is simply bored by a picture, if it even notices it at all. Put, for instance, the Le Dejeuner sur lherbe in front of a housecat, and it will demand its supper. Not from the painting but the person carrying it. But ask yourself: which would you rather spend time with? The artwork or the model? Well, probably neither if you are anything like the people she finds herself surrounded by every moment of every day. People so utterly unresponsive to both the things of this world and the things of the mind, she begins to wonder just where it is they reside. Perhaps youve been approached already by those who
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make a fortune selling flesh to people who believe they cant get along without it. Which is pretty much all of us. But who is there to witness this, if not your nemesis? Or the coaches, of course, of the volleyball team? They are caught out where they dont belong. And have to make their excuses like ordinary spies. They fail to arrange for the limousine. Or to pull the carrots from their accusers gardens. Some other, weaker-willed individuals might try the same if they find themselves in difficult circumstances. But, of course, the value of withholding vengeance is not something obvious. Especially to those who hurt themselves in the process. Who pull tendons. Or wind up in divorce court when they didnt even realize they were married. Which means all our backward-facing encomiums must turn around eventually and acknowledge the horizon. They must find their way in the world, like prospectors. Otherwise, we are trapped forever in a dilemma of our own making. One that nevertheless seems like the work of unseen forces because we cant imagine ourselves cooking up something so elaborate and untoward without a certain amount of training first. Or, at the very least, the use of a chalkboard. One where the directions have all been spelled out ahead of time. In an unusually elegant hand. Your provisions include a screwdriver. Several tins of soda crackers. Whatever metal is in favor at the moment. For trade or simply decoration. Which is how one proves one is civilized. How one suggests
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the need for better table manners. You notice almost immediately a glow to the horizon not caused by any heavenly body. But more likely the activity of the electricians who call that part of the world home. When they are wont to call anything by its proper name, rather than what we might term its biological designation. Its insect moniker. Butterfly clamp. A Boll Weevil moon. Innocent metamorphosis of this sort frequently informs the songs your neighbors sing. When they are milking cows and folding laundry. The songs, in other words, that keep their minds occupied while their hands scuttle about like crabs. Or indicate what is desired. How we should address our elders once we have drunk too much saki. And the paranoia sets in like an avenging angel. Or, for that matter, like twilight. Which always seems to arrive just in time. You imagine what you want is the sound of nothing happening. The intermittent buzz and far-off movement of water in the pipes. The occasional dog barking a street over, the sound of it muffled in the windows, in the curtains. The dream is to have isolation and deem it something more than isolation. Something benevolent as flowers, assuming you are not allergic. There are those who will stop at the window when they see bellydancers practicing. That coterie of otherwise solitary housewives learning to move in ways that trouble strangers. What we find outside the self varies, then, in terms of value. In terms of how much well spend to acquire it, or keep it at bay. We
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realize there are no anchors. Nothing to keep crinoids from showing up where they dont belong. And if this isnt sufficient to make us wish the moon had towns visible from our own, or the ferns would make themselves scarce like the fedoras we wore once in their millions, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. We know the cans in the cupboard havent moved exactly so much as they have been replaced by other cans. Those which dont contain whats on their labels. Or at least not much of whats found there. The sunlight, the linen, the cathedral at the center of town. They trick us so completely, you might almost think we wish to get tricked. That we court illusion the way some people court prisoners or rich widows. One cant help but wonder if there is anything at stake. If the continent has shifted beneath our feet or the programs featuring French horns may not, in fact, be just so much exercise of a nervous mind. One that imagines itself on a stalk. On a ladder, overlooking the rest of the world. In broad daylight maybe, but mostly at night. When the avenues have dressed themselves up in neon like deep sea animals announcing their outlines in a void. One they had no say in making. Nijinksy, when asked how he stayed in the air so long, said there is no reason to come down immediately. Stay up there a while, why not? Madness often allows us a glimpse of the machinery that moves it from the interior to the borders. Where people are waiting around fires. Harmonicas in their pockets. Gallons of cheap
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red wine. No matter how you phrase it, how you try to make of what terrifies you something that appears, at best, every couple of Wednesdays, there will always be that sense that you are surrounded. By living rooms that dont belong to you. By dogs that have learned to call out at the moon. Not from instinct, but the same arch sophistication that contaminates their masters. And the crust of the Earth. Because ours is an advanced planet. The kind of place you read about in magazines but never in books. Just as though a man of genius might be expected to dream up Orions Belt. But Destin, Florida! Leave that to the professionals. True opportunities have a way of camouflaging themselves, though. Turning walls into permanent miracles and sending us stumbling about in the cold like those half-things, ghosts, who have no forward momentum. Youll say such things are rare, but even Paraclesus, castrated in his youth by a hog, knew gold is not a byproduct of alchemy. Nor is it, really, the goal. His name should grace our every bottle of aspirin. Treasures come in different sizes. According to when they were buried. Tuesdays, for instance, are set aside for trinkets. For diamond earrings and the stamps first printed in Mozambique. From there, you may expect dozens of interested parties. The Dutch throw windbreakers over their shoulders. The barely experienced try to hide their shortcomings by drawing pictures. Of the castles theyve seen and where the water is. We might, we believe, be forgiven, if
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no one else speaks the language. But to rely on the kindness of nature is simply pushing the matter to the very edge of credulity. The mosquitoes, for instance, pull themselves up on the surface of the water like Olympians. They make one long for chemical agents. But that just means there are other worlds beneath this one. Where the residents wish for transcendence so persistently they show up in the garden. On the bus. At the very edge of Navajo settlements. Bringing with them a half-formed knowledge of what has happened before. Something they could sell to strangers if those strangers understood the danger they were in. The cake-like fragility of the earth. Of course, it doesnt take long to figure out believing in a place, any place, is apt to get you sent in the opposite direction. We learn this the moment we are born. And we go on learning it like tadpoles let loose in a bucket. Bumping into the sides and turning on themselves so that, eventually, there is a place in the middle where they congregate. They think there is no danger there because there is no extension. We are optimists of a sort. Even when our ribs are showing. Paradox thrives in verse as well, so that you need only be familiar with Tennyson to suspect there is no way out. In reality, we are trapped the way animals are said to be trapped when they choose to bite instead of turning to stone. The best route to a repertoire, then, is through the delta of some river far from where you were born. The people there should speak a language so
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unlike anything in your past, you begin to wonder if it isnt simply invented at every moment for the purpose of buying leather goods. Of turning the darkness of the closet into a myth instructive for children. Because they spend so little time there. But the perpendicular face of even the simplest wall and the temerity of strangers convince us what weve stumbled on is not the beginning of our time alone, but the very center of it. Where we will remain in spite of our own best efforts until the chorus begins and the snows turn the valley a condescending gray. Still, how does one alter the view in the window without first falling asleep? Or breaking out the oils someone left in the attic when there was no more time for art? When the townspeople crowded around on the sidewalk with torches? Imagine if peacocks had arrived then in cages made of whale bone. Would we still find them exquisite? We abandon the image of ourselves we have created just when the fiction is about to pay off. The whole world, it seems, outside the door and waiting for a statement. About fly fishing. About the state of ones soul when everyone else has dropped theirs on the pavement. And if you were to see them, searching, you might suspect the sun was so close overhead, it wasnt the sun anymore but the very thing that had made them crazy. This is why Boccaccio puts the tale of Mithridanes and Nathan toward the end. So as to hide whatever brilliance might otherwise make us blind. He knows you have to work your way
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up. Follow those whove come before. Of course, the air there is nothing like the air we breathe down here. In the morning. When many of the most beautiful women in the world are wide awake. They wrap themselves in coats and head out into the cold. Searching, despite what their neighbors might say, for nothing more scandalous than rope. Once again, they have filed the tusks off the walrus. Afraid, apparently, it will set the record straight. And the children are all visiting from the cancer ward. They have dropped their cameras because there is nothing to take a picture of. No ripened fruit. No John of the Wilds. No soot on the Hartford Building where Wallace Stevens spent his lunch hour dreaming the end of the sea. No treasure in the top drawer among your fathers pornography. The watchbands. The coins the coyote buried once in desert sands for reasons we cant imagine. No Juniper Tree because we find it altogether too graphic. No rigatoni. No people whove come to desire everything. Who gather behind the Dairy Queen when the cyclone sheds its coat and stumbles past as if it had planned all along to tempt them. No long-lost brother. And yet, what can we know of other people? That they convince themselves love is something good for you, like cucumbers? That the wind doesnt make the sound they remember? Its not the history of the nine that concerns us, but the history of the number nine. The way it makes its appearance just when we thought it had become unnecessary.
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Whichever faction takes its name from the numeral is less important, ultimately, than is the schools mascot. Still, we ought to pay attention to the demonstrations in the street. The tambourines overseas. Otherwise we are just bumpkins. With no real sense of why things happen the way they do. Or who made them happen that way in the first place. This is what the girl told herself, at any rate, when she was riding her bicycle past the laundry and thought she saw inside a poster of a man. One whod arrived there from her mind, the way coconuts wash up on the beach or the contents of a letter reveal nothing is as it seems. Unless its the letter itself. Which is so solid even a magician would be hard pressed to turn it into something that does not resemble paper. Like rubies, for instance. Or those tortoises people used to decorate with rubies. And other precious gems. Because they were bored. Because they had been reading the poems of Prousts friend Montesquieu, when they should have been reading almost anything else. The scrub pines are artificial, trucked in from the back lot and forgotten, overlooked like those waterholes where porcupines show up to gnaw the bones of any creature who succumbs. To the water itself, which is full of microbial hazards, but which retains nevertheless its sweetness, like a child. All is lost ahead of time. Every strategy. Every plan and bouquet. Every seedpod let loose on the wind. Or snagged at the edge of the carpet, which amounts to the same thing. If we are
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going to determine the future with questionable methods, like standing in the rain at the gas station and waiting for the lightning to coalesce above our heads, or reading the entrails of a chicken, then whats to keep someone from leaping through the parlor window? At the very moment when we are gathered there to remember an aunt who used to claim nothing extraordinary happens. There is nothing to differentiate this place from any other, with the possible exception of the spiders, which all walk around with question marks on their heads. The invitations dont mean what we think they mean. Especially if they come out of nowhere like pigeons we thought were extinct. But which have merely been idle on the island of Sri Lanka. Of course, the names change every time someone new comes to power. And someone else gives up his power reluctantly. Just as if wed rather drop the salad fork, rather pry our lips from the lips of the woman we love, than acknowledge we have no control. No say-so in matters of destiny. The affairs of the liver. Houses spring up all along the highway. The sand flies make life so miserable youd think the mangroves would be left to stretch undisturbed for a thousand miles in either direction. But there are people who will spend the day flapping their arms at the edge of a crater. Or badgering the occasional sloth bear with a camera. All in the belief that nothing bad will happen. That they can just continue on their way from one everyday miracle to the next. Like Satyrs.
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