BEAUTIFUL CITY
O, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CITY
The fellow we’re talking about eats with two hands. His mouth is small and mournful and lascivious. An infant or old woman could have such a mouth. He is a pantheistic at heart, an enormous heart like an ox. In Nepalese valleys in sight and influence of those astral peaks we all dream about, panting and wobbly, he slung a cow bell around his neck and felt content and assimilated. His skeleton could be scavenged for joists. Somehow, no geometry can levitate it. What burden was meant to rest on it we can only guess because history has shunted this weight onto draught animals, but a palanquin comes to mind or better a juggernaut when the need descended and the wheel was yet to be invented. Orphaned from serving, his body has decayed in nascence, a bloated infant, his stomach always hugely empty.
It’s difficult for him to get comfortable in his limerick versed house. It’s got plenty of the cookoo clock’s crafty sentimentality about it; a captured shire cottage has been abstracted in the woodwork of the living room. Don’t ask me how it was done, Mercator projection is the best I can describe it, but blond wood in rafter and beam and panel, carved bows and shepherd’s hook motif at the abutments, cozy and idyllic in the somber hush. And a garden washes up the outer walls; bouginvillas draping, oaks overhanging, an outside stairway to a guest roost, passages and secret culs, a child playing hide-and-seek could be stumbled on at any moment.
Sybaritic flourishes are accounted for. The bathrooms are marbled and mirrored from floor to/and including ceiling, and the bath tubs are roman ergonomic, and he has a swimming pool and deck house. Sprite and sober spirit seemed accommodated here, so he thinks that his dumb physical discomfort that remains unrequited might just be ballasted virtue directly pressed into the flesh. How else can he explain that witty solutions fail to move it? He has no complaints; he’s stoic to his bones, but a point is being made by all this fat slopped onto him. There is hand-writing on the wall but all this lard smothers it. He’s fallen to remedial messages while a lithe language gutters and sputters.
He’s a real estate developer. In Southern California that’s thunder. He’s small for the role; fat could not fill in where the ex-athlete’s shoulders should have been, and a sensitive heart didn’t thrust his chest into affairs, and his head was far smaller, especially his face-he had a weak chin-than his guild peers who had the big, bald, blank faces of public figures. They were for the most part strapping fellows for whom vitality was dominion. Fortunately, there are other ways to make a sale than threatening impatience, and he succeeded with genuine intimacy-the job was mostly sales-coddling the weak that the rest stampeded. The robust swindlers craved action and trophy, while he is prone to musing, and mostly about serenity. He admires them, even fawningly, believes in their freedom but can’t really share it.
He has gone bone fishing around the world with his partners, sometimes for tarpon and sometimes for whores. After a big sale, spirits high, one said if he had all the money in the world he’d get more blowjobs. He thought he might, too, but then thought he didn’t really like a blowjob that much on its own, and then thought it wasn’t worth the time to consider this seriously, and finally drove home thinking what would his life have been like if sex had just been an itch to scratch and nearly cried, but maybe that was because he sensed such nuance signaled vigor ebbing into nostalgia.
He followed disasters-hurricanes, floods, and economic sloughs-mending what god and man had rent asunder and lined his pockets. He invested in mobile home parks. He thought that maybe he was doing good work for people; after all the finagling and skimming people would have roofs over their heads. Often he was disoriented by the size and purity and openness of the people’s feelings. They had stood on rooftops with the water’s rising and deer and coyotes had stood beside them, and stood in splinters with photos, baby cribs, and love letters scattered to the four winds and they did not feel the sky was indifferent but that they had been newly charged with charity and custodianship by a passionate god.
He took one for a lover, a woman with three kids. She was wiry, even meanly built, given life on a pawnbroker’s chit, but her face-how could he say it-narrow, bony, fierce, set, but no tension about her mouth. How could he say it? She had no dread. And it proved to be true. All that night she met his eyes. She faced him the entire night and he never withdrew from inside her. The kids slept on padded benches in the kitchen area of the disaster trailer, wrapped in blankets. They were not as peeled as she was, but they never complained, and three weeks after the cyclone, they were untroubled by nightmares.
He had never fucked with such little movement or greater risk. He felt that neither of them had any choice in this or could exert their will. What dread could be left over if any night what she might consider separately hers or by her made, was evicted? It was the first time he had ever fucked or the first time he had ever made love. Or, that he hadn’t and might instead have been loved, and her face was wrought by that. At rock bottom this act was not a representation or ulterior, and love at all comprehended was misspoke. And it was not a dispensation or relief, and this drove him back to her night after night, that this was inevitable. He was in a world that was not tentative or fragile or fungible and where love was not a lapse in events, a break from necessity, but was as merciless as flood and cyclone. And for a while, and yet to be completely lost and never to be completely detoured from, vocation was manifest in everything, nothing that was not charged by dint of existing.
He was not sure this was the god lost by the crucifixion or when the sun was deposed, but causes here were belayed to minerals. The sky was too dense for fiction. A merely witnessing god was too exhausted to consider possible. He still thought too broadly, a profit would be strained from each object that had dragged anchor just three weeks before and released itself naked into maelstrom. He would be leaving, returning occasionally to monitor the project, and she would never take him back, and so he would derive something relatively diaphanous from what was wooly tartan, horse hair shirt, abrasion, stun and recovered stand-a god fastened upon you who you felt in the heft, found in fucking and the force pressing for encounter in what is solid in stone. He would use it as lime to caulk his city that fucking with her had shown was possible to build. A city hallowed by experience, a city in which each cobblestone refuted atheism with a stubbed toe.
Four walls with mirrors, he stands naked in the bathroom. Using a hand mirror he can even see the top of his bald head. Fate seems most clearly imprinted where your eyes can’t reach. You know this for other people, their pre-literate, rune-stitched dorsal plinths, and each time he spies on himself from an estranged vantage he feels a cleansing sympathy. But, he thinks what he sees can’t be answered by forgiveness, and comprehension seems inadequate. The body can be feed to words but not digested; gristle would seem to be its vocation and medium.
He had been married three times. With his third wife he was growing old. The weddings diminished in ceremony and delusion, but he believed steadfastly in the vows he had heard only in movies, they rang true, and especially “in sickness and in health”. As the two beautiful bodies whose joining was a splendid justification had eroded, an integral weld in the body’s formation that echoed in marriage was excavated; it was life’s own gristly vows to itself, through sickness and in health, such loyalties as must have seemed onerous and glib to spirit as it could be imagined. The body itself held transformative power, as transubstantiating as Eros, though slower, more penetrating than coital epiphany. And the body’s swart persistence during sex at his age completed the heart, defiant, stalwart and charitable.
He opens the shower stall and runs the hot water, his palm in the flow to take its temperature, a pose and habit he finds ridiculous and touching. He braids in the cold and steps in. He is showering tonight in preparation for work on his continuing project. He is designing his city. His project so far is to arrive at means to crystallize it. As much as possible, he lets nothing escape his notice and review because any particular thing might, by an accumulation of effort, become the catalyst that demarks the process.
He towels off and puts on a terry cloth robe and a pair of Japanese sandals made from the same thatch as a sleeping mat. He’s not sure how this worked historically or if it could stand deeper scrutiny, but as far as he can tell until the European showed up, the Japanese let their balls hang free, and possibly every other culture did as well, covering the whole body together rather than wrapping it up in separate parts. Anyway, he likes it better this way, sitting at the computer in the guest house, scratching his balls and farting into the wind.
The problem he has set for himself is this: what are the prerequisites for crystallization? He believes that necessity creates the greatest beauty; he knows that what he finds beautiful gives him no relief to choose. The Kasbah, the monasteries in Ethiopia and Tibet, the yurt, Venice, the igloo, the Greek islands and English cottages, Hopi pueblos are beautiful to him. Windows without glass, doorways without doors, porches, old walls, spindly stairways, they enrapture. For work purposes he has concluded beautiful things are sentient. Necessity most fully commiserating confronts us as beauty, so he must compose a prayer to invite them their sympathy. Upon the strings of such an instrument his city should appear.
A prayer to him would be an unstrung poem. A poem has already sieved the space left open, but unlike prose, a poem tries to leave the portal ajar. It would simulate music by most fully achieving itself at dissolution, the structure disassembling under concentration, each word or note dilating to transparency. A prayer would be a devolved song or poem, a naked poem or song so superlatively amenable that the necessary utterance is continuously shaping it.
When Eros descends in dreams, the walls in the city glow, the citizens pour from the churches onto luminous lawns answering the clarion in your naked flight.
His prayer must solicit the amorous resident in every form. Then the city shall shine forth.
It rained every afternoon in Cuba the week he was there on a sex tour. The air would become impacted; car exhausts mixed into the suffocating broth, but finally a wind would kick up and fabricate sheets of rain. It poured buckets and he sat at a table beneath Moorish arches with the black prostitute. It always flooded; he was soaked to the knees, garbage floated by. Havana seemed impossible, and confident in its absurdity. A withered and gnarled old man would wade by barefoot lifting a blown out parasol like a cardinal’s staff. A valiant clown; impotency tilting against the sky. The waiters with their wonderful, soft eyes and seal plush skin continued to serve espresso and rum while the rain whipped across the small table. A couple of hours and the sodden clouds had skittered, and the sun gleamed and puddles steamed, and the air smelled like flowers.
Havana and Cuba rocked about in the ocean, saturated by nature; the people’s eyes, strut, ease, music, fart and laughter, saturated by nature. Likely, sinking back into it, poverty spilling them back; walls crumbling, cars jerry-rigged, buildings settling, rust and roaches, already sunk to their eyes. A grand, rosy squalor lived with abandon and aplomb.
During the week he had spent with her, he hadn’t once felt a need for privacy or sensed any within himself, and he forgot his plans for a city that would house what had not been included in his life. He lost his compulsion for sex. He didn’t feel he was expelling foreclosed choices or falsity. When he entered her, he hardly noticed the difference from the times he was just with her. The promise was already fulfilled, or rather there was no promise, postponement or beckoning. Havana didn’t separately enunciate her; he did not miss her when she went off to work at the clinic where she was a pediatrician. As sex was not a purge, there was nothing the city forced upon him that would separate them. For once his fat was not a bulwarks; it was soluble. Lying beside her, ripe insects oaring through the breathless humidity, he felt the more of him there was, the more the night he was. Reposing Nature had more place to settle in him.
Money is dread, he thought, of decomposing, witnessed in anything. A negative empathy, repulsion and disgust for any perishing creature we can identify with. Funny to discover this on a sex tour where money lets you act according to your will; to find that only thrashing about in desperation when return home unscathed has become impossible, that you would act cruelly-use the license power is supposed to give-when your will is acting as its own agent. To discover your will has always been your heart spurned, and that otherwise laughter, gentleness, sympathy and courage are possible in you to the degree that you accept the world’s offer.
On another sex tour he went to Vietnam. Always these tours went to the refuse from the American hegemony, and you arrived in some relation to it, adding an identity from it to your own. You were an historical actor, be it healer or exploiter. Consequence adhered to your presence. You bestowed identity on the natives who had been forgotten in your country except as a poetic whim.
He was three times the weight of the girl he bought for the week. He carried her to the tub and bathed her. He washed her hair and closed her eyes with the fingertips of his ham hock hands when he rinsed it. She was an exquisite miniature; he closed her eyes and noticed with surprise the lavender flow of blood through the closed lids. He reached a marvelous conclusion from the sight, and he bathed behind her ears, thinking what proof that the fallen sparrow is recovered from the field, that such a small spot in creation should not be overlooked for detailing. It meant everything about innocence, and especially it meant its reliance on affection and so its purpose, to beg our kindness, and to have no other purpose than that if it wouldn’t turn to feigning. With this thought she passed into his care. He washed her sex and anus, moving her like a child whose modesty has not become coy, scooping her wet from the bath and spreading her downy vulva with the same deference he showed while bathing her, and seated her on his unflagging erection.
Maybe, he would sponsor her to a French Catholic orphanage, remembering the chiming voices of French primary school children tethered to a trace like sled dogs. Maybe, she would become a nun. Anyway, she must stop screwing while she was still a victim. He would be thoroughly forgotten in the normal course of events; he did not want to dim, but it was for her benefit. He wanted her to be preserved as he saw her, because he saw her revealed. He saw her through the scaled eyes of heaven, a soul transparently known, glowing with its translation into form and pilgrimage. He knew what followed would only encrust her. Motherhood would blight her. She’d become haggard and shrewish by trading in life. Or, unwed, in the fullness of time, she might become stupidly happy, stupidly grateful for homeliness, for sleep, food, and every dusty moment that she was torpid and ignored, having resumed a life that had no use for his gentle perception of her fragility so beautifully crafted to astonish earthly redress.
Of course, he loved her, an exaggerated difference in size can do that, the restraint and forbearance, and he loved her that way. He loved her as a memory that would refresh his own tears. She could be treasured, completely surrendered to his care and purpose. He loved her as his creation, with that aching sense in each act of full love that what is here is wrung from the teeth of violence. She was fragile and fine. He could feel necessity had forced his hand in life, but this is what he had been born for, this shepherding of souls, and so his life had been a sacrifice. His coarsening was the only protection she had.
He bought her a fine gold bracelet. How to describe the moment he put it on the dowel of her wrist? He reached out from this world and he was seized with such furious compassion he wanted to erase it, and a song played in his heart.
Between marriages he booked passage for three days on an ocean liner billed as an orgy boat. It steams out of San Pedro into the broad Pacific. No eternity more accessible than the moon dredged ocean. The ship ablaze with light on the black ocean; given this desired city descending from the heavens, what have the passengers wished for? Apparently, a buffet table bending under the weight of food offered three times a day, and an ice cream cow dispensing three flavors without pause day and night. And, of course, whatever it is that leads you to choose an orgy boat over the regular cruise to Ensenada. But, that thing seems undefined, or has been blunted by communal averaging. Or, maybe, the orgy itself was not the real desire. Maybe, it was everybody’s wish to exist without gravity and in free fall.
He was dressed for the orgy by a couple in their stateroom. It was a cop and his wife and they dressed him in a cop’s shirt with badge, service belt and boots, and nothing else. He was outfitted to be an indecent officer of public decency. They were solicitous. He looked at himself in the mirror, bare balls and cock, the wife pulling the shirt to snap out any bunching. The cop helped him plumb the too narrow boots, exhibiting no shower room impassivity even from his kneeling position where he could pile drive Greg’s heel flush. Maybe, this was enough, to be naked and at ease with people who could have been strangers. A wish for friendly neighbors fulfilled. A balance between good fences and commiseration, honesty without bathos or predation. A worthy earthly goal. But, what might they have conceived without love’s tempering or courtesy coming between them and love itself? He felt they might have tested the common tissue that composed them. It might be a new astronomy or cry from the abyssal trenches. But, what remained to them seemed to be faith; boredom was believed.
He slipped out of the rave and wandered towards the bow. On the deck he felt silly with his bare ass, but he was not alone in leaving while the music still throbbed. There were bare-assed couples leaning on the rails, cigarettes glowing. The setting was right for a romance; dozens of films had used it. What did it mean that romance was so perfectly placed here? That it was fearless? Stars and blackness and the deep. Oblivious? Heroic and doomed? That the universe celebrated and secured it? Or that it outstripped any absurdity simply because be it anything or everything, or nothing, you could never juxtapose it. It always seemed right at home. Like a weed, it held seniority over decoration.
They were bare-assed, middle-aged people and should be able to deflect love anywhere, but he knew better than that, though at the moment their bodies seemed divested by Eros. If the long course of civilization were troupes of bare-assed apes wandering through the cities, then this orgy was an epitome. Apes clambering about in the canyons of their foisted imaginations, grabbing pants and stuffing themselves into them, all the time bewildered and chastised. Apes that they are, they want a hug a tick grooming, a schtup and little more, except that won’t do for this self-doubt that has been forced on them. During their rummaging through this moil of ghosts, they grab a tattered old rag. A schmuta, blown onto any thorn. They got to put it on. It’s love.
Love might be many things to apes that could despair. Bravery, futility, defiance, and even victory. Loveless love might be the greatest victory. An act committed with no gratitude or escape. But, one thing it has never been is a free choice.
A voyage through stars and wind, the failure is ours, Greg thinks tonight in the guest house. The ship had arced towards its return during the night, and drove into the rich coastal waters in the morning. He had returned to the bow in the fresh, high and sharp: seagulls skiing, flying fish skimming, and porpoises sleighing bow suds, these forms devouring and being devoured by force, each successively bursting through, no interim ground where crippled fantasies might be disgorged, just action without residue. The sky was form only by freshets, transparency accumulating until blue finally spread soar as source. And he knew then what he had wished to find: The serene astonishment from arousal. Love all illuminating and foretold. To live in love at first sight, the world breathed into us at sunrise. The golden city ascending from the blackened depths.
He looks at what flows through his senses that the soul recognizes as kindred but remain beyond his ken. A song calls it out. But, so do empty spaces, a vista or shadowy alcove, and so poignantly that he’s sure this is whispers between lovers separated by a wall. And doesn’t he nearly hear this whisper while looking in a mirror, as if he’s eavesdropping on the feelings of someone else gazing not at his reflection but through the glass to his exile and bereavement?
A thousand women but he has never committed adultery against the woman who comes to him in music. Palpable as her embrace is to him, she only lightly veils heaven and world, and may be his soul, and the thousand shards he has tried to assemble can’t mend her. Far away, she’s shrunk to nuance, an inflection in things he remembers as a refused plea.
The world at its telling moments has sought us, a thousand stars, a thousand lovers to fill it. It would squeeze itself from us. What form isn’t the universe seeking itself in first love? He has awakened distended to bursting with the soul that first animated him; the soul’s continued gestation and longing an unbearable sweetness fully sensed. He suffers the same nascence as creation, an absolute fullness bereft of object, and is aching, unable to ever release his soul to heal. This has to be where he will found his city.
Drive the marking stake where the message has arrived. Here, remember? The beauty in a lover during coitus, wasn’t that the soul’s persisting innocence amidst Delphic transport? This innocence must be more complete in light. We return no closer than wonder and witness. But, light must rest within its own degeneration before it can feel the original desire. Chaos would be the frenzy in capture as light passes from innocence into compassion, further encumbrance devolves into symmetry and beauty; they could be said to be materialized love, compassion for another as for oneself, that attached and restricted. The city coalesces during embrace.
From coccyx, anus and cock to transparent forehead, the channels orgasm follows up from ordure and pain to white blindness, the chords mined by light through meat. The reverberating immanence from a first exclamation, this repeating paean summoning a vast field of compassion, a web that suffers wounds whenever a form in creation tears itself away, tracing the reaches of the great soul of feeling that was evicted, and the intensity of the ghost’s exile in this inadequate form is a purging grief. The beauty of the grieving soul is the founder’s stone, and these wheelbarrow pushers and haulers of sodden light, the laborers who will raise the shinning towers.
They will house the soul where it finds itself completed.
His city will be the Song of Songs wedded to its echo.
