The Invincibility of the Bulletproof Individual
The two-leggers are the strangest of dogs. They keep food in a box and don't eat it. In my opinion, you should eat food as soon as you find it. If you don't, some other dog will and that will be the end of it.
The two-leggers can open the wall and leave the den at any time but don't. They stay home, sometimes all day, and every night. Or they leave but don't let the rest of the dogs out.
When they do open the wall, they open it just a crack and stand in the way, as if they don't want us to go out. This is very inconsiderate when I'm so eager to go out. They open the wall, come in or go out, and then close the wall. I don't understand why they just don't leave the wall open and any dog can go out at any time.
They make the floor wet with a foul-smelling and terrible-tasting water. If I wet the floor, they bark at me.
And they never mark a tree. Never. There are times when they have almost no odor.
Nor do they howl with the wolf-god. I've never seen the wolf-god but I hear him, running up the street and fading into the distance. He's a hard runner. I wonder how he marks a tree. The wolf-god has a fine, loud voice and I join him in song whenever he runs by my house. I can hear him miles away. From his voice, he must be very large and very lonely. I yearn to hunt with the wolf-god, running down some swift-footed beast full of fear and dripping blood, or climbing a high mountain pass on a moonlit night, howling out our loneliness. But not the strange dogs. They don't go out at night when the moon is full and the despised cat creeps the fencetops and the great, mournful wolf-god howls up and down the streets, smelling of blood, unconstrained by walls. No.
The strange dogs stay in their dens with the walls closed and watch a flickering light.
They won't help me kill the hated cat. It'd be easy but they won't do it. They can climb the fence like a cat. They can pick up a stick in their paws. I've seen them. They could knock the detestable, stinking creature from the fence and I could bite it hard, crushing its bones with my sharp teeth, furiously shaking it and killing it. We could play tug-of-war with its dead body. Never again would the hated cat leer at me just out of reach. The two-leggers deliberately ignore the cat.
I wonder if they're dogs at all. Should I stay with them? Should I seek the wolf-god's pack?
I stand at the window. Today seems longer and brighter than yesterday. The couple who last night thumped against the wall for twenty minutes, one of them moaning, today are having words in the hall. The people in the street scurry fearfully. Our regular teacher is not here today. Nothing of importance is happening.
I pray to the radio to give me that song, the one that recalled that moment when, for one brief miracle, time and place paid off and the girl looked back at me, when I reached for the highest ranges of limitless love, before I bounced off the bus and no one caught me. I open the window and lean out. Across the street and two blocks down a tall tree stands in the park. It does not look as if it were painted onto a backdrop but seems to explode out of the ground in several directions as if it had erupted only a second ago and its branches had reached their highest point, their tips hanging there motionless for an instant, its golden leaves tinged with red, poised for the collapse of death.
I can direct my hands to do things. I could drive a car. I am a disembodied mind wishing it could float free on these chaotic ranges of constraints, those things and events that people say are actually happening, the things people say are true. I could strike a pose, that it must be some other way, a fantastic state. I sit in the chair by the radio. seeking peace and lusting for war. The street walking stops, the cars stop, the plant stops growing. The sun crawls hot to the center of the sky.
Like a funnel, it narrows in width as it plunges rapidly into the abyss. It's broad and desolate at the top, spreading to a vast plain leading toward the distant mountains and the stars beyond.
The sides of the Gallery are memories of experiences, a book, a face, tales that was told, a Little League trophy, a fact, portraits. When examined, each object is found to be composed of memories, evenings and mornings, expectations and disappointments. And each moment is linked without end to its own explorable set of details.
The objects that form the walls of the Gallery at the narrowest extreme are private. Here are stored the fruits of early desire, certain faces, bashful moments dreamily organized, pride and hunger loosely associated with fear and loathing leading down the steep and difficult terrain of selfishness.
The middle range of the exhibit is composed of the repetitious events of daily life, landmarks on the way to work, schedules, more faces, a book being read. Headless trophy. Naked doll. Broken mirrors everywhere. Everything can be seen. Darkness behind and light above.
The Gallery opens onto the immense field of natural possibility. Trees cling to the slopes of massive mountains jutting abruptly from the cusp of the funnel as it slopes away from narcissistic past. The high ranges loom blue and distance.
Refreshing the air, the wind blows across the mouth of the world, carrying away in great clouds the foul odors of what is no longer. Fresh at first, it begins to howl just as the terrain smoothes out and the way becomes clear. Cold with betrayal, it drives ice and bits of rock against the cheek, into the skin. If you turn your shoulder, bend into the wind, eyes covered, some progress can be made. Finally shelter is sought in the drifts of sand and snow that eddy around the leeward side of a beaten mountain, a pile of bones lying bleaching in the heartless sun.
The yearning for the security of past bends the gaze backward, toward the origin, crawling back where the wind can not reach, retreating past the portraits, back to the old place again.
Some are here a long time and seem to enjoy it. They relax like practiced tourists, taking a seat in the cafe with a view, patiently awaiting the waiter, and are grateful for the service.
Others are here just as long but crossly regard the servants (who are only temporary), clamor for attention, demand satisfaction and seldom receive it, except perhaps in some secret cackling group as if they owned the place or knew someone that did.
Others are here but a moment, hardly enough to be noted with a name but are mourned in passing, sometimes beyond all others, as though their dreamy potential weighed huge in our tender heart, that organ that feels loss heavier and absence far deeper than the grossest physical oppression.
I envy the chained, manacled together in marriage, corporations, mortgages, ownership, commitment, family, liability, maternity, fraternity, and eternity. Though traveling for years, I have yet to arrive. I never know what to do with my stuff. It's never around when I need it and falls on me when I don't. I'm forever stumbling into someone else's living room, trying to feel at home, as coarse as a mule in a pharmacy, awkward as a peasant at a coronation, and as puzzled as a philosopher at a beautician's. I'm often endured as they look at their watches, until even I take the hint and heave onto the road again.
We always wondered how Fumble Joe, of all the people in this wide world, had discovered it. Only Stan Mildish spent those last years with him. They kept two chairs around the cast iron stove with its youthful flames and its rusting tin pipe reaching for the cabin roof. Joe would sit, remembering, and rise, shuffling to the window and looking out, peering through the old glass at the daylight or the darkness or at dusk or at dawn. Stan tried to figure it too.
Joe sat back down and put his fingers to his chin, a meadow whose seeds had long ago sprouted, withered, and died, and then he looked up. He frowned, not scornfully, but gently, and all the while Stan Mildish stood there, with that half-smile of his and his hands in his pockets.
It was a long crawl for Joe, around the fringes, avoiding the light, skirting around the world like a quiet nocturnal creature, a furtive, shy animal that late at night sniffed the leavings of great daylight banquets, sniffing out the crumbs of crumbs and the faint aroma that lingered in the air until the slight breeze deprived him of all chance at participation. Stan Mildish thought Joe remarkable, that on this diet, he could feed his faith, that something might be going on somewhere and that it was possible that he could be a part of it, that if he just thought in the right way or showed up at the right time and place, he could join.
But too late, Joe discovered his tourism, in his going where important events were already over, eternally tardy. At his age and degree of discouragement, he was no more capable of starting an event than he was of sprinting across the plain and up the mountain. He rose from his chair and opened the stove door. The fire was still burning. He sat in his chair and watched the glint of the fire.
He could go to the closet where his old coat hung, waiting to go outside. He could almost see that. He'd be the last to know.
As I drive by the park each day, I see him, shoulders stooped, pacing the walkway, muttering what he should have said, one arm whirling its hand in rhythm. Sometimes he retires to his bench, wondering at our rushing traffic.
One day an old codger stood near the bench, under the over-arching trees, feet planted wide, mouth agape at the rushing world, and pleased that he had come this far. His cane steadied his frame against the wind.
The younger man regarded him skeptically. Will he tell him what he should have said?
The older man, having come all this way, stood ready to smile.
To approach the edge and to peer into the abyss, to thrill at the danger, is to perceive as merely apparent the division between conscious being and the truth of what really happens. All that can be recounted is the impression of the vastness of the depth glimpsed so briefly by the creature. Art fades quickly in the man tending his tiny shop, hiding from the vision, thus keeping its secret.
The challenge is to exceed simultaneously the machinations of the mind and the animal's greed, both fused in man. Dare the edge. Do not leave the word alone.
All in a row and crowed and cackled on the couchette my little cutie and me and the rest and especially the precious one on the far end, far away, so far.
All smiles, each with their secret secret, all the same, predator and prey, the prayer and the prayed-for on the davenport, apparently happy, appearing together.
If X is the object desired, exact in its beauty, coying around its own secret, cloying at its desirer, each with a proper mantle, like a costume hiding its hidden agendum, the only clue a cracking smile, a looking away, a changing of the subject: Any distraction will do! Hide the hideous, what must not be peeled away, must be concealed to tempt the thief to steal a peek, a sneaking reek, couch, touch, famous for being famous, beauty violated, the precious spent, higher purpose coincidental to the individual casualty, causality, casuistry, the highest purpose the sum of it all, really, incidents and their issues, inherited tissues and other secrets, which must be kept where?