: CROSS

CROSS

CROSS EXAMINATION OF AN EPITATH

You should have heeded the warnings, my wife tells me. I’m afraid I laughed right in her face, self-incrimination if there ever was any, but “Heeded”? That archaic usage; what religiosity lards discussion when suicide titillates gossip. Later on I would recall its Gothic echoes as the first line from the script Jed prepared for us, but at that moment her self-righteousness over finally having one in her multitude of gloomy forecasts be fulfilled struck me as ridiculous. We’ve been married for thirty years but she can still surprise me with her latest mating of world calamity and dirty laundry. If my tally were right, Jed’s battered corpse would make the fourth piece of evidence against me for this day alone. I had not washed the car. I had not retrieved the garbage bins from the street, and if leaving egg to gel on the plate were not enough, I had killed my friend.

His letter asked me to retrieve his belongings from a motel downtown and dispose of them any way I saw fit. He was not leaving them behind out of futility or vengeance and therefore could not just toss them away or destroy them, leaving him no choice but to pass that decision onto someone else. He could leave them for the cleaning lady but that would be, de facto, a decision to erase them. The address of the motel was included on a scrap of yellow paper wrapped around the door key. Scribbled on the crinkled sheet was a reminder that I had once visited him there.

What else could explain all this except suicide? The reason he was dead was because he had left our house and that was because I had made him feel unwelcome, and that by benign neglect typical of my heartlessness, my wife said. If I had not made him feel like an exile, could there be any question that a man who had never sent us a letter in over thirty years would have just dropped by? One look at him and she would have had the sense to put fresh linen on his old bed and make him stay. Pointing out that before this latest exit Jed had already left our house for almost thirty years could not even convince me. Such a formally composed farewell coming from Jed was odd enough to be eerie. Laying in my palm the key had the dead weight of an affect. I have not made it almost to sixty without experiencing the anti-climactic climax of life, and though within three days I would be in the motel room following Jed’s advice to get there before next month’s rent fell due, and would see then that the formality of the letter was another step to enlist me in his plot to splice time, that evening standing in the kitchen next to the table with its usual pile of newspapers and bills, the otherwise echoless “pfft” of Jed’s disappearance convincingly said death to me. Against that nonchalant but total finality, the last visit I had with him when he seemed a long way from dying had the tinny ring of a cliché. Now his excitements seemed ominous, and thrown on one side of the scale together with everything else that seems solid in the living could not balance this one actual key.

I knew Jed for years before I met my wife. I live in the sea- side community where I was an undergraduate. Forty years ago it had the reputation for being a traveler’s Camelot. It was the sixties, it had recently become a college town with all the license for experimentation and eccentricity students visit on a small, otherwise economically stressed town, and it rests on the beautiful Monterey Bay with beaches and forest to throw down a sleeping bag. Jed was one of those transients of student age and he came looking for a friend of his who was a roommate of mine at the time and that is how I met him. He quickly earned notoriety as a professional guest, and through a series of events all having to do with his zany and vigorous passivity, I inherited him and he became part of the package when I got married. Over the decades he has adopted and been adopted by the next generation of my family, evolving naturally from baby sitter to house guest as they began households of their own. Since on any given morning of their lives they could expect to find him sleeping on the living room couch, the furnishings would seem a little incomplete without him. If there is blame for this it must be shared by my wife, a lucky choice for Jed, because no foundling has ever been thrown off her stoop, although the manifestly sane and successful meet a cold stare.

Although I could come up with a dozen alternative explanations including default, after reading his notebooks and listening to his tapes, I believe it is because I am a lawyer that Jed chose me to inherit his belongings. One of the themes in his collection is the sacred content of language, and I believe Jed thought that even the finagling that is at the center of law is an attempted synthesis of word and world, and that all the Latin running through it represents a preservation of a religious ideal. Jed intended to lead me into an etymological unveiling of the law recanting its purpose. I also think he factored into his choice my talent for math and physics that had originally pointed me to a career in what are known as the hard sciences. He wanted someone constrained by logic to vet his theories.

Three days passed and the afternoon of the fourth was already turning to evening before I could find the time to visit Jed’s motel. Small as our town is, there are sections of it I have not even driven through for years, and except for the one night about a month before when I visited him for a few hours in his cabin, this neighborhood of scruffy bungalows and ramshackle motels in the flats near the boardwalk was one of them, although the junkies and pushers who flounder there make up the lion’s share of my clients. My firm has the county’s contract for public defense. For the last three days I had been preparing a brief in my head to defend Jed’s presumed act, really just jotting mental notes for use in an opening statement I would never make. Locating Jed’s motel in the Yoknapatawpha County of my legal fables seemed to confirm this approach for him.

If Jed had simply run away, the cases closet to his “crime” that I had argued would be failure to pay child support or insurance fraud. Since Jed had no wife or children and no business partners or insurance, no breach of contract or judgment applied. The nearest the law could approach to a relevant involvement might have been a sincere but frivolous suit brought against him by his friends claiming mental torture or withdrawal of affection. The actual crux of this case still awaited me in his cabin, and it was metaphysical rather than legal. What was the nature of Jed’s disappearance?

The law does not treat suicide as a self-murder. It asserts itself only in the realm of contracts in which accidental death appears as a clause or where financial obligations agreed to before death may still be met by distribution of remaining assets. The agency of death does not affect the laws dealing with inheritance. I found no cases where someone who had failed in an attempt to kill himself was charged with attempted murder or reckless endangerment, although a person with a change of heart who fled the burning building he had intended for his pyre, would face charges of arson and related crimes. Wisely or timidly, the law elbows suicide into the wards dedicated to psychological disorders. That was where I found it, and over the last three days banged around in all the highly charged empty space I had entered.

The law seems less prepared to deal with insanity than the layman, keeping those depths at arm’s length by limiting its interest to the small window where the presumed mad commit an act on the sane, and that window is narrowly framed to include only the question of weather the accused knew at the time the implications of his actions. Good lawyers have managed to squeeze many tears and terrors through that hole, but all of us in the profession have to be careful not to topple the entire edifice of the law with those misdemeanors. The moment the reasonable man who is the law’s architect opens his heart to those rages and raptures the structure was assembled to contain, its pillared halls begin to quake. I was soon to discover how far Jed’s studies had gone in trying to read the pentimento beneath all structures of communication and cohesion, and if I were to borrow some of his language to describe my three days at liberty in the law’s outback, I would describe it as research into the physiology of the church. Jed believed in the reverberations in language, psychology being a harmonic to physiology which itself was a transcription of the psychology of physics, and he would have seen the law with its Latin canons as echoing the Catholic Church. If the law is the Father, the accused is the Son, and calling upon extra-legal interpretations is the spirit elevated by mystery into the Holy Ghost.

My speculations on Jed soon re-awakened my original nearly epistemological fascination with the law. I started re-asking the same questions I had asked over thirty years ago. Much of the grace in the law comes from its absurd and heroic charge into human affairs carrying the lantern of reason. The law student gets his first sight at the spectacle of the law as straight man in the class on Torts watching it try to equitably redress folly, greed, superstition, carelessness, ignorance, clumsiness, absent-mindedness, and the deletions of dumb chance-in short all the venal errors to which flesh is inevitably heir-within its self imposed limits of tone deaf gravity. But, criminal law, the realm of mortal sins, is where the law reveals its full debt to the church. The Occam’s razor for the law is motive, the secular term for free will. No matter that a mother’s slaughter of her children might seem to rip the fabric of our sanity, if the state can prove a minimally erotic drifter in the wings, the law will turn a blind eye on the mother who smothered her infants after tucking them cozily into their beds and try her as sane. Suicide with its contradictory and tangled motivations is treated as prudishly as insanity. With few exception suicide turns motive topsy-turvy, and becomes the non-secular heresy lurking in the law; everything about it that the law is forced to disregard is ecclesiastical, and its great vacancy echoing in the courtroom is the corpus delecti of the soul. This disparity between what is admissible and the majesty of legal language that inherited its resonance from what is elided, struck Jed as the definition of perversion: beauty separated from truth.

When I entered Jed’s cabin I found that he had anticipated my train of thought and more than that, had intentionally sent it off from the station. All of his work could be interpreted as an effort to retro-engineer the mind into its origin in the elements of soul. In relation to the law, Jed’s studies could be used for restoring motivation-the anguish of the individual in the world-to its place as the axis of the law. To put it another way, the law should be tuned so that we could again hear that first beautiful note out of which came symmetry and our longing for justice.

In an abandoned blacksmith’s shop the hammer and tongs, the furnace and billows, the anvil and unfitted shoes must implode with the clap of work abandoned, and entering Jed’s cabin I was hit by a similar concussion of silence. What had been summoned as tool and material to forge, weave, compose and author into the keel for voyage still hummed with his departure, but part of his work would prove to be making this cabin into a wharf and leaving it posed for new travelers of a particular kind. These travelers would find when they got here all the equipment they had left behind waiting for them. The journey being the naked migration of the soul, what I found were the distractions and missed cues sown over a lifetime triggered to open to their original far-sighted instinct.

People’s Exhibit A: The motel sited at the dead end of a fraying ribbon of tarmac. A cluster of tiny, run-down cabins whose sooty, red-shingled roofs had eaves no higher than my head. The key from the envelope fit a vestigial lock on a warped door with a greasy window sadly dressed in dirty, checkered curtains. Inside a single room with buckling floors and walls with blistered paint, a Formica topped card table, one wooden kitchen chair, metal frame with bare mattress on it, yolky-colored semen and urine stains bleeding together over almost the entire top, bare bulb dangling from the ceiling at eye level, revived to shinning by a half turn. The People offer these as objects from the ends of the earth, one of those places where the road peters out. Such places are sensed as doldrums, they abut nothing or the cosmos as we have made it, but the defense contends that the evidence will show that the defendant acted as if the proper twist given to events, like the twirl to whoever is “it” in blind man’s bluff, can bump you against them around any corner. For those threaded that way, preparing for the inevitable could be exculpable. On the Formica table, notebooks, left open and soon discovered to be dog-eared or marked in other ways to lead my study, and the beginnings of tingling, the slightest chill like a fifth sense for the approaching fog or for the ghosts of past clients who must have bottomed out here before the law gave definition to their lives by throwing the book at them, and also the ghost of the young lawyer who once interviewed these prisoners with a wish to meet Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Gandhi, Thoreau, Lenin, Thomas Moore, Galileo, Socrates, the Marquis de Sade, Jesus or anyone else who had broken the law to redress crimes. Ghosts invited by Jed to tag me.

I am not the boy I was forty years ago. I’ve become a family man, a lawyer with a house on the hill. Time passing makes an optical illusion out of everything I've known. The things that have remained unchanged have become untouchable, time has settled over them like water; they are as perfect as a sunken stone. The experience of finding such an object can unsettle me. I am made into the ghost whose hand passes through them. Returning to my old neighborhood in L.A. was a preview of what was to come. I remember thinking, so this is why they call former places your old haunts, but when I turned fifty the same water began settling over my town. Popping out of the railway tunnel that had been dormant for thirty years were four undergraduates in search of donuts fleeing the headlight of an express train which was really a car’s headlight refracted though their stoned brains. After their first appearance following a lapse of thirty years, the tunnel has remained a well, and one night I jogged to Light House Point where I had placed my first kiss on Ann’s lips two years before meeting my wife.

I am a year younger than Jed, not enough to make him my Kit Carson scouting this strange territory, but of an age that assures me he has experienced this fraying of the membrane between past and present. Furthermore, Jed is well traveled, and journeying, true journeying, not a vacation, but travel that lasts for years until it merges into life itself, the kind of vagabonding Jed did, folds time in ways both eerie and elegiac, the same pleating in time I feel jogging along the trails I have chosen just because they have not changed in forty years. I do not get tired on these trails; while I am inside these seams of amber ore, I will never need to stop. It feels that way, and it is only responsibility for my wife and children and clients that pulls me back, but at some turn in the trail after some thousands of heartbeats, the tug ebbs as the distance back or forward through time to reach those appointments is impossibly lengthened. It was out where I could no longer feel that friction at all, when I knew it would take an act of will to re-imagine bickering with my wife and looming financial ruin as durable ties, that I bumped into Jed nearly a year after he had left our house, descending a path through the darkening redwoods and saying to me with no sign of surprise, as if he were adding another sentence to a conversation we had been engaged in for the last half hour, that he was looking for his cat.

The six hundred acres of reserved wilderness abutting the college campus where I run has become not only a preserve for coyotes, deer, ground squirrels, owls, hawks, bobcats and the transient mountain lion, but for the mentally deranged as well who take advantage of this area being left under the looser jurisdiction of park rangers and university police instead of city cops. These madmen often fancy themselves spokesmen for wildlife, and it seemed a bad sign to find Jed out there as absorbed in animal politics as those ratty-haired ambassadors.

I now know that I had stumbled into one of Jed’s exercises or etudes, as he sometimes called them; and “stumbling” is a poor choice of words as I had been as much expected and prepared for as I would be in his cabin.

I must depend on Jed's studies of "the palpable immaterial" and "the synesthesia of dimensions" to describe the feelings in what followed. I am painting with his palette. He describes the hours of sunrise and sunset. He is up before sunrise wherever he lives and goes outdoors to experience the changing light. He has done this in Alexandria and New York, and in my small town. In New Mexico, he witnessed the distillation of the world from a thickening blue. Near Lake Cayuga in upstate New York, a flock of birds the size of morning doves but coasting on the wind like raptors, imbibed the sheer, nearly transparent blue of the predawn into their breasts; their breasts began showing blue like a filling cup. I follow the course of his associations. Right there he has written "photo-synesthesia”-Yes. Felt the fusion-the metabolic forms to distill the mortal pith from light.” That "mortal pith" is the night, if I am reading him correctly, and night being the ether proven by gravity, nakedly revealed. As near as I can tell, he thinks that biology is variation and fugue on the theme "slowing of light" and that slowing being the embodiment of its longing into living forms. His studies of the form of musical instruments, deep-sea creatures, and internal organs are about deeper octaves of this progress/retardation. The absence of actual light during their distillation means these objects take form within light’s soul or essence, which our souls trace through metaphor and metamorphosis, through grief, memory, love, and joy. With proper clarification or composing, which is the auditing of one's own revelations and thus following the tune of disembodied light ambient all around and through us, we can witness the creation that is light unveiling its desire from darkness.

"Darkness dilates light,” he writes. That quote can be read as the bases of his astronomy. To Jed, the privilege of entering the atomic minute given by the observable movement of the hand of a tower clock between its numbers was a wonder, and he applied this principle to the cosmos, where the duration of the original moment when everything was wrung from the “emptiness”-a state of feeling-is extended and continued through eternity.

From summer to early autumn, the evenings in the temperate zones have been more productive to his research than mornings. They are reverberations and so actively return with the energy or song of creation but slowed to the range audible to someone passing through the temporal. He makes special notes of meadows at this hour "paddock prisms". He has turned back physics to its origins in theology. He seems to me an example of what the new physics and astronomy could do to a lonely man who is trying to make some meaning out of his loneliness in the autumn of his life. He is trying to put the message back into light, which has devolved from revelation into data. He believes in an intimate astronomy, a continuous, naive impulse extending from the big bang to a sunset played on the stops of a pine needle.

This was one of those late summer evenings.

We fell into step together, cutting my run short by a little more than a mile. The trail Jed had been descending passes close to a small cistern or cement trough built at the falls of a thin creek. Students leaving their dorms for vacations free the only pets they have been allowed to keep, gold fish, into the cistern so they will not starve, soothing their consciences by sparing their pampered charges a dumping in the San Lorenzo River where they would be washed into the sea or eaten by gulls. The result is a two-foot by four-foot koi pond, which Jed had once described as a miner’s sluice. I suppose it would be a good place to look for a cat whose eyes are practiced at prospecting at night. Within a hundred yards of that trail’s juncture with the one I had been running on, a fire road makes a steep descent that will take it past the boarded-up Pogonip Lodge and on to the ranger station. We turned down that road, Jed asking me if I ever worried about the mountain lions warned against by signs posted at the entrances to the park. I had never seen one and suspected that sightings were reserved for those who thought they deserved it. He asked me what I had in my head when I was running. A typical conversation with Jed. I remembered him once discoursing on a cat’s recognizing us by our voices and not by sight, and I thought that in complete blackness I would know Jed by the content of his speech. I couldn’t remember what was in my head when I ran, that was the beauty of it, but agreed with him there was usually something there just before my second wind. It was probably as idiotic as a jingo, but its virtue would be that no other thought could exist in the same space. I could never remember what it was, if I could, maybe it would be useful clearing the decks for meditation. Since he walked, he said, he could remember his song and he hoped I wouldn’t find it idiotic. He started singing a gentle tune I later heard on one of his tapes: ”Oh how lovely is the evening, when the bells are sweetly ringing”. It was his evening vespers, and from a mile down the hill I heard the mission bell tolling the hour, and when he was done he said something to the effect that cats answering to this song were probably content to remain tabby-sized.

The road passes under a row of shaggy eucalyptus trees. Their small, hard nuts which are strewn on the ground beneath them are nearly as treacherous to walk over as ball bearings, and we were slip-sliding on them when Jed turned off the road into knee-high laurel. This laurel has flooded over the tumbled stones where a mansion once stood. We hiked past it following what looked like a deer trail.

We broke from under some runty live oaks and madrones into Pogonip meadow. The sun was setting, already hidden from us by the hill overlooking the meadow, bathing everything in rich color. Jed offered me a water bottle and bag of nuts from his backpack, and a jacket to replace my sweat-soaked running shirt. A few hundred yards from the woods in the middle of the tall yellow grass, Jed had trampled down the stalks to make a circle and we sat down on the soft bed. This detour from schedule is out of character for me. Not that I am a stranger to procrastination, but my method is to push the distasteful action into the future by filling my time with endless chores. I never just take time out. Vicki was visiting her father in Los Angeles which meant I could return to the house when I chose, but still it is only after having read Jed’s notebooks that I can explain my suggestible passivity or Jed’s self-effacing charisma.

“My cat used to build a raft like this out of Calla Lilly stalks in the backyard. Kind of fauvist art if you remember how simple those flowers are. Easy mark for heat, but she must have practically been blind out there. She was Siamese; I don’t think their eyes are made for bright light. I was in love with her. Slipped right into that blue horizon.”

We stayed there long enough for the stars to come out and then be bleached by a late moonrise. I had been a boy the last time I floated in such an eddy of time talking lightly about nothing more pressing than life and death. Because of his back, Jed said, he never slept on his stomach anymore, but wondered how many adults do. He could not think of a culture that buried its dead face down, and wondered if our present free fall upward never was fully disbelieved and after years of worrying about dissolution, and holding tight to the mattress, it didn’t return as the only hope. Look at one star, he told me, see it start to move? A guy told me, his dad told him, that’s your personnel star. I believe that’s the only peace of good news he ever got from his old man. Day his pop dies, he gets a free ride to heaven to arrange the constellations for my friend, and it’s a good idea to look up from time to time so you’re aimed right to catch your star on the way up. That’s the way the Lutheran booby-trapped the stars with the Christmas story for his apostate kid.”

The mosquitoes had business elsewhere and we were left alone to hear crickets chirping, a strange and otherworldly note as perfect and untouchable as silk, and I think now of Jed’s writings on moth wings as dream nets, on animal sounds, and on Gaelic as he imagines it might be from the little he has sounded it out in place names, that it might be too sheer clothed a breath to rest short of song.

Nothing or everything that happened that night could lead me to believe that Jed was preparing himself for suicide. Someone resolved on killing themselves may enjoy a last week or so of contentment, and Jed seemed calmer than I can ever remember him being, but after that night it is as easy for me to imagine him successful in his studies or at least imagine a happier conclusion then despair or insanity. Jed’s efforts to re-create moments that were invested with the magic of first discovery, moments we had lost by too much repetition, do not seem to me guaranteed to fail. More than one killer has pled a fragmented theology to explain his crimes, and my town is brimming with the mutations of excess nostalgia, but that night in the meadow laying out under the stars talking randomly through our lives with first loves weighing little more than lost pets or an old song in the free fall of memories drifting towards the stars, it seemed to me that no further effort or step was needed, no riskier or darker rite to be performed than what Jed had already achieved in steadying wonder for the road.

I insisted on driving Jed home, and that is when I first learned about his studies, but I will use the privileges of executor and editor, along with those of hindsight, to insert some passages I would only read much later but more correctly fit here. This is closer to the way things unfolded for Jed, or better, this is closer to the route he followed in arranging those events in which I was later to play a part. I did not know it at the time, but Jed’s method was to import himself into dreams and works of art, or export them into events, and that meant working completely in reverse, inside a four dimensional reflection, relying on prophesy and amnesia, the manifestations in the conscious mind of the upside-down extraction of a dream from memory. For Jed, the cricket’s note is the pricking of the actual needlepoint as it is sewing together these two worlds, and in my case-led sleep walking into the meadow-it is the touch of his pen’s tip as it writes the page. He intended to prove both art and dreams ride the prevailing current of the larger creation.

He did not believe in pre-existing form as Plato did, but in an inevitable symmetry of emotion throughout time which resulted in forms only partially temporal. His is a kind of teleological evolution, if you take the complimentary directions of light and gravity to be the guiding principles, and the principle of those principles to be understood as feelings. The synthesis of these antimonies means that he can perceive the essence of this creative impulse, its continuing longing in coincidence, deja vu, errant musical refrains, photos, poems, hypnosis, rapture, love, travel, grief, boredom, dreams, words, mirrors, water, whatever frames or dilates the flow of time revealing this tense sinew of light running through it.

He writes:

Awoke at the center of a song and rode its waves outward. It may have been crickets harping their single chord that fished me out of sleep. Within the song's shimmering transparency every doorway of my senses was opened, and I saw within its widening circle of clarity that animals had gathered around my bed, and it carried me out of my room, its passage polishing each detail, and that heightened resolution continued as the circle expanded to the horizons, and everything was clear to itself, brimming with its fulfillment. They were as they had always been, pinpointed in the unfolding moment, but for once I was abreast of them before time had thickened between us. Beginner's luck, I was working for this but knew this glimpse was a gift. Be encouraged. Might take me years to find again, but confirms my preparations. Navigation in dreams may have brought me back to their point of emergence from formless sleep, and I heard the Veda of my own creation.

What will preserve me if I hear the lyrics of all the world’s things whose pronunciation sustains them, only the steadying touch of beauty whose heart is longing?

Jed’s science was intended to gain entrance to the soul at its moment of crisis when it surrenders itself to its substance. Could that have cost him his life or sanity? I think the record he left behind at least shows that he did not plan it that way, and that every study he made was of those events and phenomenon newly emerged from that doorway or rehearsed in returns.

Here are more notes:

Practiced mirror diving, building on success of inhabiting the eyes of my self portrait, which followed my success in placing the pentimento flowing over this portrait inside his head, thus inside my own and so making them my waking consciousness on the other side. These glyphs or palimpsest share water's infinity of possible shapes, and it was my studies of the stroboscopic reflections of light on wavelets that enabled me to slow them enough to read. These glyphs are visible in mirrors as moving ribbons on the objectified self. They are seditious when denied, but attention lets them be read as biological ideation. I believe they are the origin of pictorial art and its offspring, pictographic writing.

Movement behind the mirror familiar from flying in dreams. My practice in increasing elevation and extending reach of those dream flights translated well into movement in the more gelid time I found. My intention is to work back to sources, but knew after escape of desire into forms its major conduits of expression would repel all but my wonder. May the stalled realm of adoration permit some bargaining? Studies of etymology enabled me to follow words through their adaptive incarnations as they draw father and farther from fount of initial utterance. Adoration is already hobbled by intent while wonder is nearly as swift as the impulses that have seized it. Believed from beginning I should soon reach the altitude where the ardor of words had yet to cool into speech, and out there would need shape and the migratory sense of birds that have coalesced before grammar for my flight technology. Dolphins should take me through the more sluggish realms of my baptism.

PASSAGE BY SONG: Song is the form of our migratory instinct; form, the manifest migratory instinct of light. Steps for conversion: Present tense, verb refolded into noun, noun into note. Careful language in all respects, leading to necessary origins-laconic, integral words-leading to their transcription of world song by echo of silence. Remember pilgrim, the words of the song attach to the transportation in its feeling.

Harmonizing echoes:

"But, we'll rise from the shadows"

"Un Canadian errant, loin de ces paye"

"Flute upon the lips, fingers held just so"

"Sulirum, rum , rum, soo-oo-oo li rum"

"Rozinkehs mit mandlin”

Leaving tape of these five remembered verses. Two return from exile, one describes a physical form transcribing melody; two are lullabies and near to crystallization of first language. Lullaby: composed by spontaneous auditing of emanations from an inter-tidal zone. Syllables panned from streambed, even German rounded. Their sense is only of direction inside the underlying sound, the rest is words unraveling into syllables’ amniotic of breath.

Medley recalls a purer grief, summoning the inherited forms of biological tragedy.

Song of partisan: sanctified warrior. Stripped of waking world. Begins original quest of soul expelled from its nativity. Dirge-elegy, reifying experience on shores of Styx. Song fills with silence and darkness.

Un Canadian errant: song of an exile sending word by river to his native land already submerged in fathoms. Water is time's worldly form, and the composer of psalms. This is an asana for opening the portals to ode and agape balance on the edge of disappearance.

Purple bamboo flute: simple lesson on materialization of song (Vedas). Singer transformed into instrument of the song when simile dissolves in the tune. Substantiates form as echo of music and music as potter of metamorphosis.

Sulirum: Indonesian lullaby. Not translated. Syllables distill the world’s waking dream of trade winds, mother, nursing child, and bay of turquoise silk, as light had previously infused itself in song and become the material world. A passage between octaves (states of being), led through stages of acquiescence to the release of longing fulfilled necessity that aims time’s arrow.

Bach mein kindelah’s viegeleh, Shtait a clor visse tzegeleh: Yiddish lullaby. By my child’s cradle, stands a pure white kid. This kid that would only serve in a dream is set to do a business in raisins and almonds, which is to be the child’s calling as well, linked together inevitably by their rhyming diminutives that will spin the dream once again. Without knowing Yiddish, the melody distilled the commerce of orphans in dreams, and finally learning the translation only chaffed on the lyrical world floating into conjugations by empathy in their syllables. A grammar for the emerging soul to write itself into light.

Braiding myself into this medley of verses tuning themselves into the original inspiration, I am disgorged in Pogonip. Not for nothing, thinks I, is this six hundred acres left with an Indian name which in English is a junk vendor’s wooden wheeled, peg-fastened cart.

I walk along the rutted, stony path in the classic age of sunset. It's a stone's throw in the burnished iron light, and I step over the Chinese arch of them suspended in chorus. I thought I had a mortal power over stones when I culled the few finely honed ones to skip into the underworld at the lake bottom. Thin skinned as an egg, with a light in them shinning through the parchment, they lent me the fulcrum in the design which launched the moon. There's a rubble of them along this path, and in the gullies rain has excavated great, tawny-colored ones like terrapin fossils waiting a bigger hand to skitter them on the tide. I know these live oaks, they cosset a puddle it takes a week without rain to dry, their branches interlace across the trail. Past this gateway the hillside can be caught dozing, breathing droughts of color. A hawk has chosen the tall dead tree for lookout, and behind are the woods veined with the ore of madrone trunks. Here take the right angled path down the hill, pushing the hawk into moth winged flight, and down between dwarfed oaks to drop into shadowy hollows beneath the redwoods' masts. All this route is known to me, the floating chambers in the moss, the spongy sink into pine needle of my muffled step, a cool regard fixed on the back of my neck from out the draped pillars. But I can't hear the song that once fitted silence to the heart of my ear, it has gone transparent, and no longer drops heavy light echoing down the well. This then is what it is to outlast the end of solitude. Three crimes and three insults have lost their footing and nothing remains to mark minutes, and a rose that taught me about thorns, still tipping, pours wine onto a silent cloth. Too hard to move through revelations which will not finish, metal sunlight bends my back and dust motes chaff like hale. Joy is waterlogged as tears by sacred tallies. I am swept into the meadow by the trampling flood of light soaking the yellow stalks.

These heavy bottomed words can't be lifted, I must wait the surge tide of song to float them, and meanwhile the sun stirs its spokes through the paddock kicking up verses where I might smuggle a homespun cloth across the border. What would not be an elegy, has cast itself into substance and muscled pitiless joy over grief. Already my thoughts blister on the sheets that lash the hull to ode. Caramel, windswept, lambent, morphine, meadow, moon, their fragrance of oranges and lemons returns to them. I take this literacy from the echo: Thread one memory into happenstance. Borrow the spider web to recall the basement, a tune to secure love when parting; this was always the cargo in the bony hold.

On the margins where spirits dwell, I will insinuate myself into a wishful lapse narrower than a clock's tick and soon corrected.

In the interval between tick and tock is where I bumped into Jed.

“There’s a nerd in me”, Jed said soon after we arrived at his cabin at the motel. “A book worm, really. Nerds are too up to date. I’m one of those guys let the novel fall open at its broken back to tremble with the inspiring bolt. Still get the shock when I peel the cover. I haven’t grown past the shock yet.” He was introducing me to his library and through his collection of books to his work. I am not able to perfectly reconstruct these conversations, but when I read the titles of the volumes he left on his kitchen table, I can do a far more faithful job than I might otherwise, and once again the reader is warned that as his designated editor I have taken the privilege of splicing paragraphs from his notes into our conversations when I thought it would facilitate understanding. Jed often delivered long raps and it was my usual practice to enjoy or tolerate my friend as he was, enthusiastic and a little madcap, while ignoring the content, but that night there was nothing giddy or headlong in the way he spoke. Maybe Jed’s sudden maturity should have been a warning, but instead, his calm, premeditated approach had the effect of spotlighting his message rather than his personality, and I remember much of what he said.

Insanity at its most flagrant presents itself as the most robotic. Whatever the glory of the chaos inside, its servants are drafted into lock-step regiments. For what must have been the nearly six hours I spent with Jed that night a lunar month before receiving his letter, he seemed quietly content, fluent and limber. I had never seen him so cohesive, but who would judge that to be dangerous? His insanity, if that is what we would have to call his state of mind if it lulled him into suicide, has its publicly acclaimed and ratified counterparts in any unified cosmology. It might seem odd it did not advertise itself with the usual lividness of its hierophants, but the law with its belief in a “rational man” whose metabolism and experience of the world can not be distinguished from an angel’s, is in no position to point a finger at a possible casualty of overly coherent thought founded on a single item of faith or my wife to accuse me of negligence for not taking action against it.

Jed went on to tell me, “I have a book worm’s love of narrative and purple prose, those opiates, and fight against my character to find proofs that I am not just dreaming of lucidity.”

He took a book off a kitchen shelf where it was stacked on top of several others next to cans of sardines and tomato sauce. It was sturdily bound for public library use, and when I opened its green cover to the title page I flipped past the pocket where the check out card had once sat. The title was "Black Lightning".

“Finding this wasn’t easy. Got it from a woman in New Jersey who’d bought a hundred books at a library fund-raiser and was unloading them for a few bucks profit on the inter net. I needed it for a control in my research. I wanted to measure the disparity between the perfected realism of the panther that appeared in my dream and what had been read to me as a fable. That disparity might prove to be my species inheritance, and perturbations in it might mark where and how the acquired and personnel meld. Movies and TV cloud the field, but I was sure this book was read to me before we owned a TV and before I had seen many movies, and hopefully I could look through it like a telescope orbiting in space and subtract later occlusions.”

“I didn’t need to go past the title page. Look, a drawing of that little black cub trying to catch a butterfly. I was around six when my mom read that book to me, it's a kid's book and it's got more than one drawing in it, and what got me is that I can't remember any of them though you would think their superior craft to anything I could do would have imposed them on me. The truth is, the images I created out of my mother's voice are the ones that have remained vivid and reviewing them now I see they were already perfect and realistic. And all from the inside, not just of my head, before I had ever seen a black panther, but from inside Black Lightening who I inhabited while she was reading, his own body image. And that body image is his name that the author chose as a description of him based on his color and speed, and totemic because it brands him with a destiny inherited with identity. ‘Black Lightening’ is a perfect, if inadvertent choice for describing the creation of consciousness out of blackness, and image from print. The name is still humming and sizzling, forged in the original black smithy whose metal is amalgamated paradox, steel made from ringing nothingness that reflects in language as an oxymoron, and reflects in our lives as separation, a reversed rewriting by the conscious creature that looks back at itself from outside.

That ink block print on the title page seduces with the promise of changing into princely adulthood, of fitting the name after starting out as a kid. And the promise is fulfilled by the spellbound time in literature. Kids are especially susceptible to it, the race in its childhood was, considered it sacred and magic and later the written word prolonged the spell by reification. Time’s a touchable element for a kid, as real as the other four. You feel its current. But, this book has a particular charge, the name, the panther, and so during the time when you’re open to it, you’re given this glimpse of time unfolding in its given direction and you’re set on that course yourself, waiting for things to spring into light from the dark.“

Here is the Book “Black Lightning” on top of a short stack of volumes. A three by five index card is stuck between cover and front piece of the book, and flipping back the cover to see the ink plate picture of the panther cub on his hind legs reaching for a butterfly, I remember Jed saying nostalgia is just another form of pain. What was once most vivid returns at last as ghosts, and reveals itself to have always been a premonition of parting. Sadness squeezed my chest and throat. Could a soul that completely forgives ever return from its place of embarkation? And there prompting me is the note reading: They built the foghorn to declare sovereignty over la mer, the dreadnaught plated gullet set to croak orders to the void, but possessed by the holy ghost, in the tragic voice of the goat, bleated Gaelic prayers in the vapor to offing, gull, fathom and leviathan resting in the deep.’

I learned the term at parties when suddenly all conversation paused; it was known as `angels passing’. I had never noticed that the same cascade of coincidence might occur for the ambient racket of traffic and commotion, but just at the moment I finished reading the note this Sabbath from sound blanketed the cabin and passing unimpeded through this corridor of silence came the lonely moan of the foghorn as if speaking directly in my ear.

Jed mentions labyrinths of illusion. Some of his exercises resemble Zen koans whose purpose is to free the mind of illusion. At the culmination of his studies Jed hoped the contradictions in the koans would solve themselves and he would find the lucidity that binds the actual to the literal and the simultaneous to time. It was not until I heard the foghorn fit my waiting ear and the hairs stood on the back of my neck that I believed he might have succeeded.

These are some notes Jed wrote to himself that I first thought were preliminary musings. They have an adolescent quality and I was going to exclude them when I remembered how carefully Jed had arranged an order for my reading, and decided they are not preliminary at all, but are in fact added to the note books afterwards. They are transcriptions of conversations we had during our last evening together, and they were left to show me how the spell of plot was cast over events that included me so that I might report back objectively on the success of translating artistic processes into the larger creation. They retrace the preparatory jottings of an author about to launch characters into action, and they are meant to alert those characters to the presence of the author.

“I have a lot of thoughts. It might be better if my mind worked slower, but I don't think that is actually the goal. The faster the mind perceives, the slower time moves. The goal might be that it makes less junk in hopes that it might witness its own emergence. But, you have to be careful that what you concentrate on continues to have autonomy and mystery, or it becomes a dogma for self-preservation. Meditation seems a good beginning, I never had the patience for it as it was taught in the Asian style, but I agreed with the aim of erasing static and imagery to clear the decks for a universal subjectivity whose illusions are real. I needed a more compatible approach, and thought since all actions must contain a kernel of that original intent, it was only necessary to notice it, and my effort should be to position myself for uninterrupted auditing.

I expected to recognize this voice by its prophecies. I tried to expand my perception of it emerging in other forms and to lead myself with these instruments towards its timeless tones. I was sure language itself contained that original trajectory. Insanity is the Satin in such hopes, the liar and conjurer who offers ever more illusions in place of the world. Which meant I was on the watch for rhetoric, for the messianic. I could find no record of a seer who was not poor. Though these may be creations of a popular wish fulfillment, I extracted a principle from this common theme that I believe is free of morality and the jealousy joined to it. The principle: Be terse in all things. The common mistake is to find a moral in this "reject the world", but summations add illusion to the actual. Simplicity is not necessarily proud or a desecration. My hope is that it will leave me with only the inspiration of the heart that dreams the world.”

Here is Jed’s copy of “Lost Horizons”, and beside the book, his notes or transcripts of the conversation about it we had on the last evening. Once again, more distinctly, he is writing the prologue for my entrance into his de-personalized text.

“Some books should rest at the title. I've never gotten through this, but the beginning, the first twenty pages or so, wonderful. A storyteller, telling a story inside a story; I was born listening to that, the seashell murmuring of this immaterial form which augers into eternity. I knew I couldn't just make a leap into it, so I took all the familiar details of the genre for an incantation or treasure map. They were all necessary to conjure the portal. While learning, it helps to read books where the author blew it, you don't get sucked into the vortex and you can study the steps to its lip.

Though it doesn't seem so at first, the Meta technique of these stories is to be ushered directly into the middle of the story. You are amidst a reverberation: both the given structure and the structure that sustains it oscillate, so that they are alternately visible. The story is being told, soon you will lose sight of that, the described narrator soon expands into the omnipotent writer, but in the beginning through the tested method of dialogue which is the most intimate form writing can use, you are acquainted with a character who is soon speaking to you as if you have become alive in the book. The spell is working. At first you have been given portage through the narrator who meets the man with the story, but quite soon this intermediary is dispensed with and you are immediately involved, you have fallen through the lens and into the image.

For the author and reader, the story coalesces around a coincidence. It is by sheer and almost impossible chance that the first narrator meets the second. Often, historical calamities are the deus ex machina that throws these pieces of flotsam together in a port in Indonesia after thirty years separation. Such coincidences are as near to life as writing gets. Coincidences make life into meta-fiction. The more unlikely the coincidence in life, the more likely we are to see a divine pen stroke. Suddenly, mystery and destiny have been written into the aborted reality that before had seemed imperative. Gifts have been added to life, as they are in a dream. Because things begin to arrange themselves to deliver this message-stepping out the door and deciding on a biscuit put you in the bakery at the right time- they now appear to have been riddles and clues, an encrypted text. You love her immediately, you are made dizzy by the astronomical odds against finding her; astrology becomes certain. Now I’m living. The rest was a doze. You can read the text and it has brought you to life.

The novel has been given the structure of our own consciousnesses; it has an interior of its own. It is close to our soul. Along with us the book rests in the amniotic of a living moment, the point of arrival and embarkation. There's the magic, the mirror opened, the book actively looming us into time.”

Once again, a paper clip with a three by five card, and once again the sharp point of Jed’s pen darning coincidence into the present, directing me towards the slow evening we had spent in Pogonip, and with it the feeling of him looking over my shoulder as I read, “What the unborn infant sees with closed eyes floating in the well, it promises to me on starry summer nights.”

In the same somewhat top-heavy pile where I found “Black Lightning” and “Lost Horizons”, he had left “The Island of Doctor Moreau”, “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” “Frankenstein”, and “Pride and Prejudice”

“I've always been fascinated by old tools. It's the exposed logic and the abstraction of the human form in them. Refinements and fine tuning, summary, reduction of essence to purpose, these all varnish over the tendons of the heart. Before the camera and tape recorder these old books had more to do and enlarged their forms to breast the labor. The collaboration between reader and author was more intense. Literature was an article of faith; it had yet to seal itself in self-reflective conventions. These Brit writers don’t wilt. They’re never at a loss for words. Nothing is ineffable. They lash together experience with this geometrical grammar, a diamond hitch of syntax to pack the unruly bags. I use these prose engineers’ wonderful contraptions to catch language in the act. I can't do this with a completely foreign tongue, because I don’t look out through it, but Victorian English taps the focus just enough to lift the superimposed structure from perception.”

This is one of Jed's papers from his study of segues-stitches or joints he names them-and in them he tries to separate what he considers their urgent suturing to observe the finer stuff of dreams within. Victorian English was one of those impositions he could lift. He respected its gallantry and believed it a prerequisite for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution which he considered the great clarion for unification in human thought-the “is” that calls back to consciousness all that is fleeing our attention, while the genetic code is the composer’s staff, wind chimes or vocal cords through which creation sings-but his efforts were to enlarge that theory to include the inanimate and the ethereal, and to do that he had to uncouple cause and effect to release the music or vibrant physic inside it. To break the tone deaf arithmetic of falling dominoes, he would even tilt against the sequences that had brought him to his revelations, risking himself to a void which would only be distinguished into clarity by the free passage of harmony.

He wanted to disenchant himself. He began with the most evolved forms and would then attempt through exercises to retro engineer structures, and once beyond that, to back breed the biological underpinnings to their origin in-and I read this in a margin note on a landscape calendar-"four dimensional light.” Four dimensional light is light relinquishing itself into form, I gather from his jottings and a grouping of objects I found: A crystal ball, a prism, a few round river stones, a split rock with its core polished, a seashell, photos of landscapes. A unification that is attainable in the state of simultaneity. And this unification would reproduce or reveal the origin of subjectivity, the inner light which illuminates our sense of self and our dreams, showing it as another aspect of the necessity-the compulsion-of physical creation.

He has a brief note here under Victorian English about rock climbing with ropes and pitons, and driving across sand dunes by laying out metal runners and driving over them, building your road as you go and then folding it up. I think this symbolized to him both the quixotic nature of that language and the hypnotically slowed view of reality given by such a process. Right beneath this is a drawing of Victorians promenading around a beached whale. The men have canes and derbies, the women umbrellas and bonnets. Like their language, they are heroically and inappropriately well dressed. The whale is, as they say, very dead. This is an ink block print, made at the time and inside the vanity and censorship of the era, so how the people are dressed is how they would like to be seen and are required to be seen, and there is the whale, an adult baleen, drawn to Jed's elation, with all the sublimated and repressed sexuality that made prurient every field of Victorian science. Jed loved this alternative to arithmetical science because it brought story to nature rather than mechanics, specifically by attributing motivation to it. Inevitable to follow is all the species of drama and comedy. The whale is still the Old Testament’s Leviathan. There he is, more or less lying in the gutter, his eight-foot penis completely unfurled and ladies in bonnets and bloomers stepping nimbly past, disgorged from the abyss where he had been cast when creation separated light from the dark.

Photos here of musical instruments pasted beside pictures of creatures from the abyssal depths and also compared to plates from Grey's anatomy. A note: evolution in complete blackness. An angler fish beside a bagpipe; a French Horn filed near the intestines and brain. Photos of the demon-like heads of bats and the heads of whales. More notes: Transport of light. Cosmological constant=conversion of photons to matter?

Suddenly, I was fed up. Too much of too much. If not delusional, then this was at least lousy science, or not even science but a melodramatic style meant to be science. A hodgepodge of Aristotle, Christianity, and superstition, all beyond the reach of verification. Hopefully, this scatter of speculations had never coalesced for him or he would have lost his senses. He includes the Vedas and the 72-lettered name of god, practice at unraveling the light contained in photographs, considering sonnets as matrixes, songs as prisms for silence, auditing coincidences, meta-dreams, hypnosis, bag pipes along with spiders and crickets as editing the tragic impulse, and about then I heard myself snorting. It was a relief. I had been feeling the tongs of his obsessions on my temples. I started flipping through his notebook with that card shark virtuosity we reserve for worthless pages, but had raked over only a few when I decided I needed a break. I walked out the door of the cabin and took a couple of breaths of damp sea air before returning inside; the evening fog was settling in, the bare bulbs that faintly lit the compound were covered by fuzzy halos that looked like mold. It was time for me to decide what to do with these notebooks, and whether I put them someplace where I would never see them again or decided instead to read them through would be my verdict on Jed. The crucial moment having arrived, of course I began checking out the contents of the kitchen cabinet (a few cans of sardines) and was proceeding towards a crooked chest of drawers when the front door was rattled by rapping. Sooty checkered curtains hung across a small square of plastic in the door, and a ramshackle tumble of thoughts and feelings, some tender, some pleasingly ludicrous, had me expecting to pull them apart and see Jed's face. Jed had a daffy, slapstick humor. It was self-deprecating but self-aware enough and conscious enough of its audience to veer back from self-pity. I could not remember a time when it left him alone. Most sentences ended with a laughing disclaimer. The most remarkable thing about all the affects he left behind was their lack of humor. Not just the notebooks, but also the greasy mirror, the lumpy mattress, the one fork for the daily diet of sardines. The sad clown is nothing new, but Jed's humor had an endless appetite for his life. Where were its teeth marks at the end? And then, this knocking to knock the seriousness, to give it a punch line. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Jed. Jed, who? Nope, Jed Boo.

Why couldn’t this be a new kind of suicide note, a scavenger hunt which projected the deceased into the present: a gadget, a three dimensional book, a word game with puns continuing to fire that would give his spirit body and voice? Loopy, madcap to think it, but wasn’t that the point? Cast a winking eye at life, at death, attorney pass out.

I was chuckling when I went to the door. Desperate for readers, aren’t you? I thought of saying. Maybe, it will be a messenger with a letter directing me somewhere else, and there I’ll find a receipt for a plane ticket. Will it mean he actually got on a plane? Not really, it will just be another way of keeping him alive indefinitely, for inheriting the immortality of a fictional character. I congratulated him; he had worked things out so carefully that I was prepared to actually see him. I was alive inside his looking glass creation and subject to its opposite laws of motion and optics. Most of all, I congratulated him on his generosity. As a result of his handicraft any of his despair at the end was diluted for us, and with it our sense of blame. How much despair does a man have who a month before he disappears engineers the coincidence that will ensnare me in his plot and includes in his plan a revelation of his technique so that deconstructing the Victorian novel into which I have been written the veil is lifted and I will see the author and share the laugh with him?

On the other side of the plastic pane was a homeless bum, his face as bruised as a prizefighter’s.

"Uh-huh, saw you outside. Got another smoke? Fellow lived here always gave me one”

I told him I didn’t smoke and neither did Jed.

"Saw you out there, thought you was smoking. He’d let me shower here, sometimes."

"He's not here anymore."

"No, but you are. You don't suppose he left any sardines, do you? He’d give me some of them.”

I gave him the cans, and told him he could come back tomorrow to shower. Jed’s legacy, I thought, sardines for a bum with cloudy eyes. This was his company at the end. My house of cards collapsed.

The bum had pushed the decision and I was closing the notebook I had been reading, lifting the cover to shut it forever, when an image, as clear as a slide projection, fell on the sheet. It was Jed’s Siamese cat. For an indeterminate amount of time I looked into her serene blue eyes, the color yogis seek, and then even as I watched, she turned her quiet gaze aside and disappeared.

I would have said that ghosts resorting to Rube Goldberg semaphoring is wishful thinking by the living; the more outlandish the contraption the more desperate the wish. How negotiable are the weights of fog or twilight, I have no idea, but the impossible needle of last light that had pierced the fog now penned a gold dime on the floor, having moved one tick past a blue crystal Jed had hung at the window during his days of heavy lifting. CROSS EXAMINATION OF AN EPITATH