BEAUTY
BEAUTY AND OTHER NIGHTMARES
She was a concert pianist celebrated around the world. Critics raved in flowering language or else would have seemed bitter and withered. Muted praise was cynical. Suffering husbands dragooned to the concert were converted to acolytes after a single hearing. Actually, they were converted at first sight. Within the imagination dwells the figure of the classical musician. It is a hierophantic figure, perfected and slightly embalmed. Pale skin, elongated limbs, a figure ailing from a surfeit of passion or destroyed by congress with angels and the night. She fit this popular conception so precisely that critics should have been dubious and tempted to be acutely perceptive, but they were frustrated by her genius. The greater skepticism might well be focused on why such a form as hers is anticipated as a vessel for music. Why this braiding of death with transport?
She began as a child prodigy-a pedestrian requirement for soloists and clairvoyants and completed lunatics-and so an aura of divine mystery hovered about her. Her husband would never peck through this image of a fated avatar. Reverent to a degree that suffocated rather than leaving off at breathless, he attempted to make love with her, to make love with her appropriate to what she embodied. A tall order, and he reached guiltily towards her, repelled and fascinated by the nipples of her small breasts, somehow over-ripe or livid, a sign of appetites festering in realms below the deep brown eyes whose sadness was that of every soul awakened by music. He was unable to meet their gaze, seeming to shiver in sexual culmination with his own piety before the numinous, and libeled when she became aroused by his touch, or more truly by suggestions of ritual violence. Her eyes never changed, her sadness remained, as he imagined it would for a pagan who acted on reflex, their expression fixed by nature to reflect nothing sentient, nothing even really felt, indentured to the deity that set the fathoms in her echoless eyes. He kissed her magic hands and the lids of her sainted eyes, and never regained the erection that had squirreled about beneath his overcoat as he sat in the darkened theater rapt in the sight of her fragile vertebrae as she leaned over the ivory keys.
The music, what does it do to the dark in the felted theater? What in music leads the audience to receive form from the formless? What author demands the upholstered drear to be deliciously fatal? Happiness always seems a meaningless fanfare. Is it possible we do not doubt it but can not respect it? Genius scorches all with mortality, so like beauty he suspected beauty was its ulterior motive, its instrument for expression.
In her husband’s experience, nothing had aroused him as much as hearing her play in a darkened theater. Female and feminine realized; certainly the music, a thing he must have always expected from women, the sibylline, an enchanted foreboding of mingled longing and nostalgia, but the stage equally necessary, an invasion of privacy and a triumph for it. A communal experience of the agony in Eros, each individual death foretold? Not that it would have worked without her. She was essential, her chaste or estranged rendition, like a median, unconscious of what flowed through her. His heart expanded to fill his chest as it had few times before, a peep show just off Time’s Square, the slimy booth with the metal slot lifting for a few coins, and voila, the ass filling the temporary window, luscious and inert, as were the face and the eyes of the stripper and those of the circle of spellbound male heads projecting from their stalls. Culpable, maybe that was the source, a blow against innocence, or closer a sortie to recapture sufficient guilt to recall innocence and rejuvenate the candle to be lost or gained.
His heart had filled his throat when he saw the rubies in the coal cellar. The rubies were rats’ eyes reflecting the light from the opened trapdoor. They remained gems even after his discovery, an element in soul that is mined from the grave.
He did not lack humor. He had a rapier wit, but no belly for laughing. Wasn’t humor just the means to start you laughing? It didn’t really matter how silly the expedient, either you were a fool for laughter or you were stuck a prig. He lacked scruples, which if not jolliness itself is a plausible facsimile and a royal quality. He was rich, but unfortunately the computer provided a middle road for the self-made millionaire between joyous plunder and miserliness.
Had she spared him squalor? It could have gone that way without her. He was apt to treat the unknown as mystery rather than material experience, and he was privately aware that this was fastidious and kitsch rather than adventurous. A person so inclined, though he gained the world, as the saying goes, would not leave himself with enough soul to be worth mentioning. He was a severely handsome young man, a thin, necessarily elegant figure, olive complexioned with thick, nearly waxy black hair, precise in dress, dour and rational in aspect, doomed to aesthetic disappointment in the world and recognizing this in himself, he feared he would one day know his life was a parable, the fate of saints, aesthetes, and therapy patients, all of whom believe in a higher order using them for vernacular utterance.
What is more squalid than such a reduction?
No sooner did he touch his finger tips to hers, hands held palm to palm with painfully evident contrivance then she began moaning in a childish and theatrical manner, sweating like a pig, a smell of musk and fear enveloping her. She squirmed away from him, lisping in a tiny voice, ‘no-eee, no-eee’, and on her hands and knees presented her ass to him.
She detested the piano, an emotion out of proportion to her tender years. This precocity was as developed and eerie as her genius on the keyboards. How was this frail, nearly wasted little body to contain and service these passions? It might seem perverse to suggest both flowered as the same devious expedient. It was the frustrated passion that grew the rose arbor, blossoms on snaking sinew. She provoked her father by refusing to practice. He was a cardiologist who rebelled against the bondage common to certain medical fields that would require him to fain an intellectual’s cultural inheritance. His parents were immigrants and he disdained the immigrant strategy to propel children to status through musical virtuosity; its exquisite performance of servile faith. He felt exposed by her. He would have preferred a talentless daughter over the accusation of incest and atavism, and caught in the toils of this contradiction, this visitation or stigmata, no sooner did she throw a tantrum than he put her over his knee for a libertine spanking.
It is difficult to exaggerate his turmoil; shouldn’t his life and profession long ago have eclipsed this agitation? Corporal punishment had never been inflicted on him. He doubted his parents had such certainty about themselves. When it one came so readily to hand he wondered if he had always been a quisling or worse, satisfied-sickly appetite-with the inverted rewards of slyness. Now, he found himself in Rabelaisian fettle. He was exhausted and cleansed, if by nothing more than his sabotaging expectations and decorum, surprised at what still breathed inside him. He had become disenchanted with his wife who he had married because he loved her too reasonably, he had come to believe. The heart should have fewer reasons and more compulsion. She was beautiful and accomplished, the sex was nearly psychotic, a frenzy of mutual sarcasm, a transcendent frustration, in short, marriage for the best and tutored reasons of caste: free choice. No motive is more anathema to the heart.
The two of them were in full possession of their lives that thereby seemed culminated.
A thesis could be written on the morbid traits that flag musical genius; a twisted allele joining life and death, sleep and panic, surrender and victory, unity and reprisal. She had always put innocence in the docket. Immaculate beauty, separated from the tawdriness implicit in suffering, merciless and joyless as an angel. Like an angel or marionette she would have tumbled into paste and straw if the chords playing through her should be released. While warming her fanny, her father would get an erection. From the beginning it would seem she was aware of the lump pressing into her belly. Should her father tire in his prosecution, she pumped her legs to re-inflate him. This continued until she was sixteen and had fermented into unapproachable elegance. Her mother tried to intervene in this grotesque ritual-a middle-aged man, rather pudgy, a parsimonious dewlap beneath his weak chin that made him look to have fastidious, secretive emotions, sitting on a piano stool whirled down to where a tall woman could prop herself on knees and extended arms across his lap with her sharp breasts in his thigh, auburn hair trailing to the floor baring her nape, getting a butt tanning while she whined ‘no-ee’-but her daughter had thrown her arms around her, and sobbing horribly managed to enunciate her misery: “Oh, mother, if I killed you, I would be left with daddy and God will judge you harshly for abandoning me to that blasphemy.”
This story ends happily, in fact, happily ever after, as fairy tales do. After all, fairy tales are nightmares we don’t waken from, and in common with the greatest art audit the universal. The pianist and her husband realized their love and had children. The children were stout and lively, filled with chortles, giggling, tantrums, glorious rages and sweet brotherhood, all the trademarks of life and a passionate conception. Her husband can be seen as a man who loves as love is-by order of the stars and sidereal space, and after finally wedding their emissary, submitted to their mentoring. Because music does not represent us but escapes from us. It is a failure: Our grasp fails us and we are left tempered to survive. The failure is greater than just ours. It is Creation’s. All still left over sounds in it, all not brought into existence. Music must be restored to grunts and roars if our prayers would be heard. So we were marooned, so we echo the spheres. Relieve us or return.
And if we grab the golden apples of the sun-who knows the device, the sly luck-the silver apples of the moon?
He is a man caught up in beauty’s moils. I think his mother is to blame. I’ve come to see it that way, a biography in the mythic mode, figures morphing into one another, destiny playing itself out in compressed time-a lifetime here-but still possible to see entire like a three act opera. Both parents died young, young enough to require consolation and revenge if you lived in that smug, anxiety-pocked suburb where the father was actually eulogized as an asset to the community in spite of being a flop. He was broke when he died and the rabbi booted him into the next world giving faint hope that his debts would be forgiven there. I think this man took after his mother. He had a female way to him. He depended on his charm; he wasn’t handsome, but he just missed, and it would have been made handsome by female refulgence. His features were fashioned generously, large eyes with long lashes, pools as they say for a woman, but his skin was rough and his face put together kind of sloppily, not just banged into place, but out of cheap materials, putty, and you couldn’t edge it off with that as a medium and groove out the bones. He looked self-indulgent, self-reflection gone blousy. Sloth, too, played a part. His face looked unexplored, as if-and I believe it- he stopped with his long-lashed eyes and the confidence in insight those who count their eyes beautiful have. He provoked you with patient empathy or was it forbearance, like a woman needling at your obtuseness? Later on I was to take it as curiosity on his part or humanism that he gave attention to me at all, but by that time it was not just his damp near-homilies or flirtingly self-satisfied discoveries that clued me to this but his wife.
She ignored me effortlessly. She wasn’t interested. I mean widely. I wouldn’t see her for years at a stretch, and each time she was in a rush, busy, indispensible and monomaniacal. Her rescues had style, not necessity, but style. Upper Class, adept improvisation, hand made, classy and individual that way, arriving on the wing ahead of time, called by original cues, immersed and imaginative and sympathetic, attentive and prepared. The classy part was to emanate litheness, a woman acting within her nature, and she nearly brought it off. She participated in moments unselfconsciously, openly frazzled, but gloriously because she remained lovely or sincere in the tossing and absurdity. I think of French mothers being like this and New England mothers-based on films and my ignorance-psychologically and biologically aware, and slim, alert and graceful, retaining something of the virgin in maternity, its pragmatic idealism. I didn’t buy it. I knew it wasn’t where she was from. She was from this very place, and I thought her creativity had bottomed out. She was depending as much on voyeurism as I was. She had become an upper class parent, but I knew they were nearly broke and that she really hadn’t fallen. Her family was new money; she could not play at stoic decay and its fertile eccentricities.
She would have worn the pants in the family except she had given up on her husband. He probably exasperated her. I think she was resigned to a choice that had turned out to be less than brilliant. I think her resignation was the best part of her, or it may have been that she could picture struggling as cliché, and then have to see herself as an average spectacle. Whatever her reasons, she didn’t seem to chafe at the boundaries of a common life. She would do it well as it was. I think she had pride in seeing it for what it was, might have thought it was extraordinary that she could, see reality originally, illuminated by itself. Her husband had fantasies, but these can never have the scale seeing the world does. I don’t think she pressed the point; that would have been spiteful. She lived around him and he moldered a bit, his eyes staying bright and liquid. Not that he lacked insight and objectivity enough to appreciate nuggets, the found revelation, even to regard such moments as midwife service to awareness in the cosmos, but he was always too conscious that he was skilled at the innovative twist, and charitable by being content in the mundane. Played out in privacy these two smug détentes may have abetted the other. They just may have been lucky.
She could have been beautiful, and I’m sure had been raised believing it over-thoroughly, like comprehending a possession or knowing thyself, as if she could push it aside because it was hers absolutely, giving her a special dispensation from awe, liberty from it, free action, sole paternity, even a self-expression. I don’t think that is any better than exploiting it, although probably far less disastrous, but whether taking it for granted or riding it like a Lippanzer, efficiency jades the heart. She was from a house of sisters, and they formed a secular coven. Her mother, like her husband’s, had been an artist. An original, the rumors had it, frivolous I think, contemptuous of previous effort, of its pretension, and putting together witty objects, giggles I suspect, whose irreverence was to be appreciated, her ease in refuting grim effort. I imagine her as an atheist who prided herself a pantheist. I picture her daughters raised as feral aesthetes, versed in schools but even more in rudeness, independent spirits that would subside and refine into superciliousness. They didn’t believe in art because it was an imitation of what they had vitally, I don’t say vigorously-that confesses submission-but implicitly. They had the whip handle. The rest were floundering towards what they already were. Art has recorded our diminishing awe; they were the culmination. They had defeated history by being degenerated heirs. Except as a matter of pride, I doubt these sisters lost themselves in Eros. Even childhood had left her unscathed.
Beauty can’t know itself, or only with innocent vanity-pure, touching and vulnerable. If sophistication intervenes, we have to summon terror. Unfortunately, the shrinking heart must always escalate the terror. And if beauty seems to contain the universe, then it follows that the universe is innocent, and we suffer for it. Or once did. By now we suffer from its lack.
As I said, my friend was in the moils of beauty. Beauty has a life in the world as well as apart from it, and if somehow, like karma or just a double dose of the human condition, you’re an intimate part of it, you’re going to become pragmatic about it-bills, tantrums, dental appointments, boredom, the fleshy moil-and a little perverse-a skeptic, a wit, an atheist, a humanist, a blustering intelligence with a heart that lags behind hobbled to solid forms. You try to become an expert in the world, but the world necessarily includes everything surprising and intense that without a knowable periodicity still inevitably arises, and that you can’t become expert in, only lose the ability to experience. Beauty may still shock, the living presence of life’s value reflecting on every dimed aspect its own chance to be vivid. How can this experience be accommodated? I don’t think he had the goods to bring it off, but he would have been a virtuoso at balance if he could, I mean bilingual, feinting this way and that, running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds. For the moment’s own good, he would have given an ear to its accompanying harmonies, and then carry on, a stoic filled with glee. His awareness would refresh, and because he was a little vain, his awareness had to be noticed. He had wed nativity. Towards converts he was generously wry. His lack of ardor had flair.
I said to him that his daughter was beautiful, and he answered that most people wouldn’t say something like that. I can see where a father more than most would know that beauty is unprotected and I can see him trying to regain his privacy, assert a special familiarity versed in implications I didn’t get. I think that was there along with his belief in his originality, his benign patronization, and bemused self-infatuation, and they framed the koan that he came out with. I think a real tragedy in life is that we’re slaughtered for petty crimes. But, it costs us our life to try owning what defines us when we are so obviously defined by what we don’t own, and are the creature that withers with every domesticated perception.
The eaves needed mending and the roof had lost its squaring. The backyard was going to seed. It had the air of an outdoor attic. They were proud brothers, none of them would stoop to renovation or additions, to any improvement; still, no sense of noble rot transubstantiated the place. Dandilions and crabgrass, aluminum lawn furniture with plastic rattan, sprung and missing wheels; the place couldn’t shed failure. Will was less in evidence than sullenness. His kids entered and exited through a warped screen door that flapped back with a flat, mushy sound, sister and younger brother, startling face on her, dignity, too, chin unbowed, decorum more than modesty or shyness to the way she moved, self-possessed, not unusual in a ten year old, an age when childhood may have a grip on itself, mature and ripen just before adolescence dismembers it. A connection to natural mysteries, fairies and such, and nightmares, to the world within. In some cases they’ll never be better, the more perfect symmetry in the miniature, and their density, they’re filled to the fingertips with tangible reality. You almost think they should lead, parent their parents. A smaller sphere but more attention to it, and possibilities for a natural morality that is always soon lost. My friend may have believed she was his brain child. Her poise bequeathed through his operating familiarity with incarnation. She would inherit from him personal grace in her spirit. This would animate her without superstition. She would be lit from within, healthy, happy and ageless. His vanity would be expressed to its best advantage. I doubt he ever gave this a thought. He tried to take things for granted; it was a hard won insight into how to thrive. Accept bounty as your due. Marrying a beautiful woman suited him. He was intimate through the soma with eternal verities. He knew the body was a woman, knew it in the biblical sense, the song of songs even, a psalm to wild life and agriculture in which the stars play no part, and-in this he would take pride-knew it as a woman does, which means as a bleeding, smelly intimate, debunked and sympathized with. She would have been his heart child as well. I think he believed he could love well.
One brother was long and loose, easy in his body. He looked like he played jazz, the trumpet, as loose and easy and cool as that. One had raised his family in the three brothers’ childhood home. Two had married childhood sweethearts. All three married Jews. The oldest brother lived slovenly and arrogantly in his parent’s house, like a scion of landed gentry degenerating to the noble prescription. I admired his pride and confidence. He stuck it to the neighbors who’d heard the eulogy. He drove an argument home. He had a high forehead implacable as the driving end of a hammer, and a mustache and manicured goatee abbreviated the family’s full, female lips. A big voice, strong and cock-sure; I believe he could have made it boom like an opera singer. He spoke from his diaphragm; he believed himself which is pretty rare. His voice was not developed through bombast. He’d taken charge when the parents died; the eldest had to arrogate final judgment. Righteousness gave him commanding volume and timbre. General consensus would have had their father weak; no one would make the mistake of repeating that canard to his first born. The youngest brother who might have played the coronet-he always looked as if he were letting the other members of a band display their licks, the way that key soloists move off center in an acute meditation on the music and whose syncopated presence in the wings is the organizing principle-their mother emerged in the cool cat: svelte, silky, qualities sexual in either gender.
I was nosing around the older brother’s place-that was where the three families would assemble. If things are neatly arranged and pampered I restrain this urge but his cluttered haunts invited rummaging. Among books and bills on one battered set of shelves, photos had been squeezed in. A gilt frame easel held a portrait of his parents. They made a vibrant couple; the black and white photo brought it out more than color would have, as if it were entablature rather than light, a mineral aspect, something pulled up through roots. ” She’s the only mother I’ve ever seen as beautiful as mine” I blurted out. He embraced me.
In my mother’s portrait her braids are tied across her head, but there are photos of her where she looks like an actress from the 40’s, her mascara eye-shadow and eyebrow pencil, and her lipstick. She had rouge pads and atomizers, scarlet and violet, jewelry in satin cases; his mother was decked out for the evening, she was alluring as my own had been to me painted and scented. Both women would have been called Jewish beauties, an expression that died with assimilation. You needed echoes to the old country.
At the deepest level, these women had the faces where sacred script is written. A sacred script is a topology approximating what is in faces, following their form to trace the intent of universal forces. Certain faces seem clearer calls to absolutes or quintessence.
Jewish beauties: They would be swarthy or olive, a palette of umbers, sometimes a striking contrast between white skin and jet black hair, contrasted to the gentile vision-the winter sky colors, icy, ethereal perfection, the soul bound to be soiled by desire. Blood was the solvent, irrigating passion. Where was the room for it in a man’s life, what you’d have to dedicate to it, I’m talking about the Yiddish or ironic side to these beauties, what you had to live with day after day? The word written in flesh, the starry carpet laid on the earth. The translation to Yiddish.
Certainly they sank into the racial loam, funeral and childbirth and animals present, a gazelle and raptor, but a lot of water under the bridge, the Atlantic just one, time’s oceans as well, and as much as temple pastoral, these beauties were a lucky reapportionment, a second mortgage, for stigmatized Semitic characteristics. Loud, forward, brassy and ballsy, on them it looked good; their indelible Jewish stamp was gutsy and unapologetic. But, victory? Ok, as they are they convert the ravages a retreated will works on physique and face into an archive that records where soul up from adversity has grown bold and regal, but what’s the transformed medium? You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. This may be the human condition as we live it, but familiarity with particulars makes it particularly implausible. Is it hereditary bathos that makes her eye so deep? And her full lips, what blathering expressions of self-pity might have produced them? Sensuality will always have infantile longings mixed in it. Their beauty arose from a surfeit of feeling with all its attendant fevers and aches. Its indulgence. They were a wonderful plenty of organs functioning according to healthy instinct, but find me a kid that’s not a Kabalaist? They’re all immersed in fleshy emanations. The lanky jazzist, alert in the dream, chased Oriental women, the Asian idyll the Jewess was for Northumberland. He married his childhood sweetheart. So did the brother with the beautiful daughter. The eldest lived with his family in the parents’ house with his Jewish wife and children. The moils, eddies and ordure of beauty. The dreaming thing that music frames was here. It can bear children.
Did the eulogy have it right, kind of? How ruthless do you have to be to survive your heart rent by perceiving beauty? Are you required more than surviving? Must you foster it even though it muffles revelation in the planetary world?
I doubt I’d find many on the con side in a debate about physical karma. In a family grouping karma’s distribution into the children reveals how the destiny played out in the parents, the subtler body autopsied. Here are the exaggerated features that storehouse the family humors, but set into individuals, in solution and diluted by another autonomy.
Death only seems out of reach, the body’s dismantling, but the the body’s mantling in nine months from out of the dark is recently opened to view. Fertilization has been photographed as a stellar affair, a horny constellation on the make; the ova dances in currents. The embryo gains turgidity, and the verse becomes less supple, homilies appear, old wives’ tales and farmers’ weather predictors. Fish, gill, coiled tale and nursery rhymes cluttered with critters aloft in the night. The work of the ether seems to diminish, the implanted soul struggles back against the enveloping soul, night and death, but its critical and enduring pressure continues, its formative presence. It is obvious in childhood, the communal soul’s amniotic presence, and by nightmares that are our clairvoyance shredding, our own soul pecks it way out. And some more obviously ravaged or expected to be, a musician, porous to runes.
Possibly, his beautiful daughter shows this brother inherited the shoot still thrusting through lives towards flowering. In himself it only abrades, a debilitating charm and rupturing of effects, and he a necessary casualty. He must fail to ignite, never lodging this force but never distracting it, too wisely clever to discover it except by opaque nurturing. He is a realist, more or less, initiated into the palpable. He aspires to tannery by beauty so it could not lead him astray. From there maybe you gain the world, beauty an organic thing rather than visitation, a ripe moment possible to anything, nothing more than what’s here known but in wonderful clarity. I can see him knowing that at least until he upstaged the simplicity he had learned. Beauty earthbound digging, laboring, not grace but realization, and by no means aiming itself to a return. Sensing your separation from it, the vastness with intimacies whispering through it directed to you, leave these as a symptom that you’re waking up, which is coming down. What ever arrests you is slapping you awake entirely, for the time being. Never lull into verse.
These brothers lived in the aftermath of their parent’s death. Two of them married childhood sweethearts, the other lived in his childhood home. The suburbs can only work for children because things are new and puzzling, fearful and delightful, and later on the same things have divulged their selves and are empty save for melancholy wisps. Children have a Delphic spring; classic forms remain pregnant for them. Innocence is wisdom and in the suburbs is loaded onto the kids. The shards they recover for the grown ups: ravenous for Christmas morning, trembling at thunder, talking to animals and idols. Credulity and the defenseless gull do for faith. Giggling kids are the only ones left to risk solemnity.
The locusts mine their way out in summer. Boiler-plate,
red-eyed and insane. Egrets in the willows by the channel, a zany, a
hair-brained elegance, and a stagnant
Slouching through the suburbs, drawn into the colonized acreage, come redeemers, sacrifices and disguised gods. More and more it seems likely that beautiful music is an agony overheard that is not ours alone. Something is always in labor pains to birth itself. Why not think the entire minor key sounds fermata in the suburban soul when the deformed baby is born and composes symphonies in harmony within deaf composers, blind as Homer interpreting turmoil in the gods? We hear this music more vividly, the grief of souls saturated with emptiness struggling to grasp itself.
One day a holy man walking in a forest heard a song, and following the beautiful sound came to a tree where a beautiful woman was sitting on a branch. When he saw her he lusted for her and she beckoned him to climb the tree and join her. On the spot, he abandoned his studies and shimmied up the bole until he could grab the branch where she perched. She would not let him embrace her, but instead turned from him and offered her hind end for mounting.
Some of these stories about great teachers of the past are credited to a particular author and then their interpretations are always silly and waste a great chance to leave well enough alone. Let’s give the soul more innate wisdom than to think that any of those stories have ever taught anybody a thing. First, let it be a folk tale that has no author at all, which is to say the written is a pidgin from the spoken that is in turn a regression from its impetus that was compelled action. Now, I can say that it has as many meanings as the tellers who repeated and amended it, and that this particular version is but one of many and may be used elastically. It is convenient that way but such bounteous meanings are bluff. It has no meaning but what would be hoped is its necessary exclamation before recital. The woman, of course, was a goat. A goat in a tree is rare, but it falls short of miracle, except for those holy enough to find surprise even in the bird on the bough. Such a figure is the holy man wandering in the woods. Wonder would always strike him in the heart. He would fall in love with a mushroom. So, the usual moral drawn from the tale, resist temptation and stay on track seems a trick to stoke cowardice in the grimly pinch-hearted
A wonderful thing about anonymous folk tales is that they have no conscious author. It is best to look at them as remembered dreams. The difference between them and the secular art of today is the molding into form of this medium by a waking artist. He brings this element into time. That is essentially what form accomplishes; it segregates apperception from continuous origin.
I’ve never been much for the content in art galleries, but the grand theaters for potlatch that house them lift me by the brows: Vaulted ceilings, cascading stairways, palatial chandeliers, they make me giddy. The few times I’ve gotten cuffed by implacable physics have been negative experiences. I feel shut out, not illuminated. An ant on a picnic blanket, a beetle in a bell pepper, a butterfly on a bush, a mouse in a church, if only they could see as I can in a museum when my head floats in the funneling chambers. . Anyway, because I get dragged to exhibitions where what is shown is supposed to be the point, I had to find a way to vacate the verdict they slapped on me. (Such protest for content is disingenuous, not by me, but our age. This era has exceeded any chance for making art, and the buildings-displaying our witty, insightful, and barren triumph over soul-are the point for the city fathers. They are exhibitions of potency and engineering, along with its spoils: Culture in its female hysterics safe in dioramas.)
My method is to stand across the hall and look at the paintings as if looking out windows from a dark room. I can’t make out anything but the colors and all I get is a rush of mood that walking closer resolves itself into its vessel. It’s closer to listening to a painting than seeing it, and from that distance the paint is still fluid, saturated with light that apparently has something to say, at least, I have an organ to receive it that way and no other. It can be like the legend about falling into a well; from the deep you can see stars. I can sense how an artist may feel compelled to set up the reflecting telescope to capture what is pulling away before familiarity intervenes. Once I can see the figures on the canvas, the genii is glued up in representation, discourse and historicity. Far away, at the wrong end of the telescope, I catch in that quarter-sized glimpse the cosmos that beckoned from a model’s butt or a haystack-the house of Venus, Scorpio, the moon. The mercurial spectrum of the cosmos, the green lady astronomers look for as well as artists. The charged, moody flux.
A folk tale, a fairy tale, a dream can be looked at that way. Something is pushing, still unsettled. Nobody has been aware enough or silly enough to tie off the ends for us. You can’t really hope to be naïve, but it’s plausible, even necessary that the vocalists were and by that more faithful to what generates experience.
This tale seems to me a melody. It can be hummed or whistled. The holy man is strolling in a forest and he takes the refrain along with him. We know he’s close to home, humming with contentment as he goes through a familiar wood. In a deep forest, in deep shadowy hollows whispers would siren. Here sunlight dapples, still he hears singing molting through the mottle. He follows it. A beautiful woman who actually is a goat. Of course, the song is beautiful, we know that because it drew him, and as in every dream, what comes to us separated by our senses, entering through different doors, here is not divided. A song is a woman in a dream or a tree. It is what we love in a woman or a tree, in a dream the song reveals itself. We are all children in dreams and can hear the godhead in any old thing. We’re in the realm of the timeless where there is no hierarchy. Sad is not above glee. And so, and yet, we know what is beautiful, for no edicts are here; this is the song of the goat as surely as if we were to hear it in Classical Greece. Tragedy has pulled him through a tune he hummed or maybe whistled in a light-dappled wood and it is beautiful. And here we know the nature of tragedy to the heart: this weave of meat and spirit, math and matter.
Supposedly, the wise man, seeing the goat, drops down to the ground in the nick of time. I believe that or any other ending is tacked on. No lullaby I have heard has an ending; they are all loops taken from the celestial orbits. The heart from its inception is tuned between these two poles: ditties, limericks, cantatas, sonatas, fugues, belches and farts. Its resolution has always been divine comedy. The story ends with the woman-goat, a tail chasing farce, which, of course, never ends. Its circularity is the stuff of life and beauty. Adam is said to have rejected his first wife because she offered her ass but would not face him. However, at the tail end of life, she will return to each man, and she is never refused.
I suspect that the jewel won through osmosis is paste. You ease back, try to slow and empty the mind and wait to absorb and be absorbed by unity. The result is poses and posturing. The idea that the life force can only be witnessed seems ridiculous to me. Yet, I am reposed by still lives-nature morte as the French call them-and looking out train windows and by elevations. The time when I didn’t precedes memory. It seems instinctive to be lulled, to find revelation without joy, even to feel at times of greatest clarity that this cold-blooded feeling is as close to the original awakening as we can get. And to feel this is how the dead see. The end of the road the tiny car is crawling towards, the lake on the other side of the hill, these are clairvoyance, futures past, a quality found in art and prophesy and a goal in meditation: Tangles unraveled and brought to peace. This spying is exiled from events. What is their relation to beauty? I would say retreat or casualty. They are donning the cowl and entering the church of orphans.
Could this be the soul? Is this beauty what we want and how we cauterize it, a mordant wit that has settled with what we have failed to love at the time? Is the soul a ghost?
My mother died. Within minutes after mom had taken her last breath, my fairy sister was back from a lifetime ago. I was back, too. Mom was beautiful again, at peace, yes, maybe a window to the next world, light reflecting or so quick afterwards we caught the soul lifting out, its state of being shimmering on her as it emerged, but we more surely, startled, absolutely stunned by open space. Walls fell away. It was more open than a bell tower. You had the best part of vertigo-giddy free fall-without a quesy stomach. Halaluehah, a soul done gone, free lord, free at last. How big it had been, here’s to that, later what’s lost, but now the size, the subtraction on everything from its departure, the altitude around them its culminated agony liberated, its strength to hold them all. The clamp removed, we free-wheeled in time, beside ourselves, dancing around our middle aged bodies like maypoles.
I asked my sister to get her camera. Guts and mischief, my fairy sister; anything was possible. Mom’s beauty was the thing. I had to have it captured. General giddiness and the miracle of the moment, maybe not really ready for it naked, after all, back off behind a lens, but I think for the miracle, waking mom up, my sister hopping up on the death bed to get the angle, a morning once upon a time waking her with our anarchic energy, that spirit ambient about her death bed, a soul got away, got clean away from these last clutches and didn’t show the marks from it, as if it ended here and the body could not make a reference to its own higher purpose for itself, her tongue was not dangling out of her mouth, her eyes were not rolled back and open in the idiot’s delight I’d expected, a smashed relic from the last diminishing struggle. Oh no, completely away, unscathed, recovered her senses and equilibrium, found herself after exorcising the disease, not life at all, not banishing life, but this homunculus that had seized it. She was clean away with everything that had made life the living still held by her. I think my sister and I may each separately have danced like this around this same bed, for this very bed it was, the nights we were summoned to reenter the world, the nights we were conceived. Now we could do it together, the two kids most alike in the litter, passing as twins when cotton-candied haired toddlers, and still alike to an insulting degree in middle age, could celebrate together, couldn’t help it, the verdict was in, no choice, the whole fiasco, the ball of wax, the cosmos, up, down and in it, here’s its feeling, swept along in the flood. Halaleuhah.
Is this joy that bursts from stone and plays jigs with bones less than piety?
What form doesn’t hum with this madcap gestation?
Night became deeper to my mom. Dying, she was ingesting and being ingested by its open spaces. I don’t believe her senses dimmed instead they sharpened at the expense of the near field. The subtler ecology worked directly on her-gravity and the solar wind, starlight drizzling, squalls from the churning galaxy, subsonic tolling from the planet itself. The astral interests disrobed inside her; her bloated stomach like a planetarium where fetal light is kicking. She doesn’t want to eat, her taste for peaches where the sun folded itself into the fruit and fed her naked maidenhood to ripeness, cheek, buttock, blush and the fell, heady sweetness, unfolds outside her, savored by those waiting in the interstitial for their pregnancy with time.
I steer clear of stretching the imagination. Insistence commands respect, not in human affairs where it is panicked and shrill, but in the world where without will it shows up in re-told tales. I think what I have missed was subverted by my ambitions. Golden eagles grounded onto scrawny fence posts by a lowering sky. They surprised me by their work-a-day familiarity with loftiness in all its aspects. I had thought their bird brains were so opaque to implications that they flew without awareness. The damp wind ruffled their feathery plating and for once their scowl of offended dignity seemed personally expressive. They come back again and again. I saw their awareness was tautology. It is them. A consciousness separated from it would simply be an attempt to re-learn. Recognizing a self requires universal and then global estrangement. The self developed through rapid bailing becomes a mystery. The baby gets tossed with the bath water.
Someone should write a fairy tale about a man who was cursed with the task of making up a story that wasn’t true. I see that as the human curse, our plasticity. Our “selves” are the stuff dreams are made of, slurry that can’t fully gel. This is typical, the universe and its creatures are made from this same ‘is and isn’t’, but our additional “isn’t” dooms us to the same compelling angst that strung the gravitational harp to the starry pins.
Forms open vistas to us. Folk tales fill the heavenly pastures with goats and musicians. Light is thick up above, it surges and eddies like paddock wheat, and creatures can’t really be kept out, even sinners sneak in, and fools always fall up, too stupid to figure you’re supposed to plunge, not soar. The lowest chakra is the kundalini. It is coiled at the base of the spine, the tap root of the brain. It is a snake swallowing its own tail, eternity, what nourishes form-endless but bounded. Snakes symbolize eternity because they shed their skin and are seen as re-creating their own form. During sex, the kundalini uncoils and rises through the spine spinning the other chakras. The cosmos afflicted everything with its sexual contradiction, its both being and not being that perpetually spin in coitus and set eternity to that form, the endless emergence of everything from nothing, chasing our tails. The seasons seem to me to be the palpable circle this coupling casts over the fields.
I cleaned a perch I caught off the wharf, and a painting by Chagall and Van Gogh spilled out. I found a little fish inside that had been glazed translucent by stomach acids, but I took it for the womb. I was mistaken on both counts. It was the fish in the heavens. Behind the little fish were two sacks filled with eggs. Though the colors were dimmer, the black less evident than in the braided sky in ‘Starry Night’, the nebular constellation with nascent stars are there in both. The fish swims through the starry deep, and it seems through its lack of separation, that like the universe it is as incapable as are we of creating a lie. The fish immersed in the essence of being is an echo. Our most anguished whimsy is never less than cosmic embryology.
We are all fluent in reified silence-laughter and song-and fair to assume vertigo in heaven equal to our own dropping up to the stars when lying on our backs. We are struck dumb by the reaches in our shared loving passions.
Throwing stones on the graves dug for our fathers wishing them bon voyage, we recount goat stories and hear the flat, somber pealing from the bell collaring the Judas. His life and our own could be drawn and quartered between lovely faces and butts. All things that lance our heart are beautiful and leave us no peace. They force spring. Beauty, deformities, any flagrant enormity by raging darkness, they spin round and round. Beauty is no more related to perfection than it is to pretty. It is parchment thin like a Japanese lantern or a dying mother, brimming with the interior light that has illuminated the universe and drives us to love in every action.
A man once loved a woman he had never met. He could not forget her, but he could not remember her either. How could he know her? When could they have met? He had to find her. He travelled far and wide, and he saw many women that could nearly have been she and so he thought, she has passed this way just ahead of me and these women are her reflections. He became a farmer and he thought he saw her in ripening fruit. Maybe he had put her together from these, but no, he thought. She has passed and left these fruits behind, they are some of her but still all of her is left. Nothing that could in part be ripening itself would be depleted by leaving behind what grew. He became a soldier and he could trace her shape as if through a gown when he heard the bag pipes and flutes. When the drums beat his heart raced and he thought, I’m ready for her now. She joins us together. She is so close, only a step away. It may take death to catch her because this sweetening into regret I see in everything is still only the fragrance of her inner nectar. He built cities that would have avenues and lit windows where he would be able to spot her, and balconies where she would look into gardens where a fountain splashed. He built prisons and penal colonies and hospitals because his knowledge of her was in his flesh and written in pain. He became an astronomer and emptied each constellation as he read it until the stars should reveal what she had written on him. At last he fell asleep and he dreamed clearly of the days of his life, and now he remembered her. He will awake and everything will disappear, and they will be married. He is their child.
