CARGO CULT

CARGO CULT

 

 

          I had wandered the world. I had loved truly. At least, nearly stupidly enough to be whole-hearted. Enough to fall.  Enough to have found myself and lost myself, enough to be a stranger to myself in a way that seemed completely myself.

 

          We had planned our wedding. That was all we would talk about. Otherwise we were largely silent together. We planned the feast. We had nothing to say about the ritual, only the feast. We planned dozens, and dozens of dishes. We rhapsodized on each dish to be served. There would be peaches. We remembered our first peach.  We recalled later peaches that revived the first peach for us when it had been lost to experience. We tried to recover these peaches by reciting details, trying to place them on our tongues.

 

          They would return during an embrace, the peach, the plum, the garden; our senses reborn.

 

          When I had been exiled I wandered the world.  I screwed with pure pity for us all. I met the eyes of beggars, cripples and mad men. Any who made due with what we were, or were what we were in innocent completeness. All things seemed brave and tender to me then, living without anger that would have accused and so resurrected love.

 

           In Asia I saw ghosts. Flesh was parchment thin, stretched over silence and light. I saw the Vale of Kashmir. I had already dreamed it. I realized I had been dreaming all this time that I had supposed I slept without dreams, my body transported to its own empty genesis. Sleeping like a stone or the dead. In Kashmir I had remembered, like a stone or the dead.

 

          After this betrayal, I drew a bead on the theaters of illusion. Church to ashram, wherever I could find the camp operas parodying the solemn piety in living.

 

          I found myself at the foot of Mount Athos. To get to the aerie, a basket would have to be lowered. Pull the cord, a bell rings in the Abbot’s chamber. Maybe. There were rumors it was tied to a rock a hundred feet above. Like prayers, it might not be heard.

 

          I was part of a crowd. There were always new faces.  And then some disappeared, disappointed. They could not have been snuck aboard without our noticing. If the basket should ever be lowered I wondered at the scene that would follow. Certainly not holy. A stampede, I feared, like the doors opening for a holiday sale. Would the most worthy or needy win the plunge?  How would I have recognized the proper candidate?  Someone outside my ken, I thought, uncanny, archaic. Most looked like tourists. Maybe, those were the ones with the greatest need, the most in peril of a soulless existence. Or, maybe it was too late for any of us. We were curious and eager to be gulled, but this likely for its entertainment value, a spice for jaded palettes. The authentic was a fresh taste. But, that’s harsh. We, too, were souls, though we looked in our staleness, our sated hunger, hardly worth the candle for wars in heaven, hardly the spoils that launched the angels.

 

          I longed for the patient discipline in the VD clinics that agape screwing had steered me towards. I was reasonably happy in their waiting halls. They had the common dignity and gravity I associate with locker room nakedness. Meditation and skepticism reigned there equally, as did generosity and reserved judgment. There was a common reluctance to rejoin the fray along with a resignation to it, a kind regard for the human critter. Then I tried practicing that vision at Mount Athos base camp. After all, I wasn’t the one to answer if the soul had once been palpable or always this hysterical symptom.

 

          Whole families were assembled; did they really expect to be admitted to a monastery? Or had Mount Athos been converted to a theme park? Vendors sold gyros and falafel and yogurt.  And tee shirts with the mountain air-brushed on. And there were teams of women. They looked serious. I gleaned they felt a convent was for wimps, tempered for the feminine and they were ready for the real thing or to throw the bums out. Music played constantly and telephones rang, and tour buses stopped for a few hours and livid eyed seniors wobbled and hobbled around the grounds, taking photos and listening to a tour guide chatter shtick. This was us, prayers and brays, in tennis shoes and synthetic fibers, the pilgrims from the what is, the material at hand for a divine intent, the searchers for credits and punch lines, rhyme and reason, a chorus, a crescendo, a Jacuzzi, or yes, still, unchanged, unreached or spoiled, the flame that singes the moth.

 

          If we didn’t starve the monks out, they must already be picked over bones, for certainly no monk sworn to silence and gruel could walk through this crowd to gather spoils from a stony garden. So, I left. I decided to follow a drunken goat trail, not being eager to retrace my fruitless steps. I provisioned myself with goat cheese and hard bread. Goat was my ethos. What better guide to harvesting slim pickings and the implausible answer?

 

          The trail wound through barren land. Stones and low shrubs, much the substance of our globe and our life and times, much the beams and rafters to our lives. The sky was glaring bright and cloudless. Small, drought-pinched shadows, night gelled cold and heavy, stars salt-smarting the eyes. I followed the aspirations of goats to cliff flanks over the sea. Blinding clarity stretching into nothing. In my canteen water had disrobed and naked relinquished itself to me more fluent than a peach. Black bread became the pith of stones. Perhaps, if I’d followed a bird, a canopy or leafy bough would whisper; a bee then flower and honey be dulcet, but from goats comes scant comfort save snub of the vaulting atrium and a gut for fugitive graces in un-anointed acres. And a map to find miscreants with similar tactics. Namely, a monk, so habited and so easily identified, rooting under stones, a bracken wig of mussels slung across a pointed shoulder, and gaited, I found as I tried to make good on my own request to follow him back to the pen, to a flickering pace that affected aphasia in me.

 

           The eyes in him, the furtive weld we struck before he re-appeared ten feet down the road and gaining. I hadn’t asked before what I expected saints would look like-the waxy marzipan of icons, or the hallucinogenic cartoons in stained glass panels?-but somewhere lurked an expectation for luminous eyes, a bestial, stolid vapidity and avidity to bring the four elements into a zealot’s merely rhinestone sparkle. This monk nailed the unrealized expectation. Candlelight and silence might dissipate cloudiness in the eyes, and then the mussels and capsized stones-starvation lights the tabular corona in the iris while whittling a shoulder to a point.

 

          The gate into the monastery was a path between two Mediterranean cypresses. It was on a promontory, a shive poking sea and sky.

 

          I’d clung, and gimlet eyes, not able to shake me, now pointed towards a group of monks working on a large wooden contraption. Stone and light and the grand, insipid pressure of empty heavens, such was the proscenium of Athos, and his stage direction as good as I was likely to get or could be offered. After this-the intervening twenty yards-everything was tumbling into ruin. Stones toppled from walls, roof beams sagged, swallows flew in and out of the gaps, and goats and feral cats had the run of the place, along with lizards stuck to lumpy walls.

 

          The monks were working on a catapult, and obviously had no idea what they were doing. The strawboss for the crew-the abbot-scared the piss out of me; he was the most solid man I’d encountered. The abbot’s body was the nimbus of marrow. His brow ridge was a parapet, his jaw massive, he scowled, and every movement seemed to barely restrain fury. His lips were full and cushy and ruby red like an idol fed sacrifices. I believe he had walked into Athos and taken command because nobody dared oppose him. An ancient, pale figure, a white cricket, scuttled about the grounds. He had been the abbot before this usurper arrived, I assumed because of his age and his glee. He was a man now free to play the divine fool.

 

          Under the new abbot’s reign it was every man for himself. Feed on roots and berries and fish you might charm from the sea. No sense would be forthcoming, though orders freed from reason’s constraints would be plenty. Thus for long has spoken the silence save for our echoing voices. And it wasn’t in a night such ripe ruin was achieved. The old abbot had let things go. He was barely of this world. Lifting stones, even conceiving of lifting them, was more industry than he could bear. Years of silence, the body becomes a bindle sloppily knotted to the dowel. The stars, all opportunity provided, continue silent, but crickets wax into an odd sympathy. To chirp, to chirp, perhaps to hop, and leave sonorous chants to plump self-pity.

 

          The catapult would not throw the rock. I’d wondered before how they worked; what the speed materialized from, considering the claptrap jerry rigging. I knew the movies could cheat on their action. Then, just like that, I had it. The pitch was all in aggravating the tensile strength of a key log; the rest of the machine just housed and flexed this protesting log.

 

          I didn’t think I could explain my insight and I could never re-rig this machine even if they consented. And looking more closely at the catapult I decided better to butt out. It was knocked together from plunder. The frame was roof beams, whether opportunistic salvage or the spoils from demolition who knows or dared to ask?

 

          The rope lashings. I studied the ropes that tethered this rack. I looked at the blazing strength of the abbot, a conflagration of bones bound together by divine or profane edict. Best to tip-toe back between the two cypresses. The ropes had been requisitioned from the monks’ sash cinches, and the thickest, some fathom of it slick and mossy, from the single monastery well.

 

          The abbot plucked a skull-sized stone from the hurling basket, snarling at it. Then he pitched it against another in the pile they had collected to fire a broadside at…blinding blue?  When neither rock exploded, bleed, or shattered, he threw it himself against the empty loft. Incredible toss, no food or board, staunch ranged with no quarter for retreat, full rage, the stone arched, weightless, perfect parabola limned across the Euclidean void, and then down it floated, aglow and victorious, unchallenged, right for the deposed abbot’s wispy pate. Who launched himself, landing a full league-some redoubtable earth measure-from his lift-off.

 

          Then he noticed me. Several expressions wrestled with his features before each curdled with effort. He poked a nearby monk and pointed at me. He was quit. He stalked off to grind his molars.

 

          The monk assigned me was a light-footed, crafty plotter. Nimble as a weasel. Wondrous sleight-of-hand; he conjured the bread from my pocket and was nibbling at it before I recognized it as mine. We neared the shapeless pile of a ruined building. He began stalking towards it. I thought him daft. What happy madness to reminisce surprising someone in this ruin?  Or was this the brute abbot’s tutoring? A crow mocked him; he winged a pebble and it flapped to another perch, razing with the baiter’s delight at an easily goaded target.

 

          The robes and blankets were piled here, folded and arranged with straight corners. His stash. Who did he expect to surprise casing this vault?  An incontinent strategist, who else? Himself perfected and confirmed, coveting a market discerned by a select few. The brief parables squirreled in neglected objects. Maybe, such a parable had brought him here. Christ had said he would come like a thief in the night. Wasn’t that an invitation to the cabal of ferrets, magpies and other sneak thieves? Hadn’t Christ meant he was gathering discards, that things worthless to kings and tycoons were hoarded in heaven, and that the man or pack rat who collected finger-nail clippings and shaved whiskers, used coffee grounds and cigarette stubs was putting together a treasure trove with sky high value?  That a certain fellow, stooped under the weight of one humongous sack filled with blankets and robes and other junk might just drag his bony ass up the service steps to heaven with equal promise as the winged hosts?

 

          He did surprise a cat, quite droll of eye in the near afternoon, lounging in the hunching stone kiln.

 

          A wooden bowl, a wooden spoon, a robe and blanket both gay with fleas. Suddenly, a bolt. The icons. Where had he hidden the icons?

 

          The speed of these monks. Amazing. Whatever the wisdom wafting from dust and ruin, it didn’t slouch or creep. Quick as my thought, he vanished from the room. But, equally quick, my pursuit, already a full-fledged player in this catch-as-catch-can contest that pilgrimage had veered towards.

 

          He’d been in training; what is scant flickers and gutters, only the speedy may pick the pocket of its moment. Fast, cut a corner on a dime, zig-zagging like a species elected most edible, but instinctive miser, he tacked to his crèche. He stood spread-eagled to block a fissure some equation describing tumbled stone leaves open. I stood breathless, facing him, triumphant and asinine in equal measure. I absolutely would tag the fleet SOB, and used all my hypnotic powers to freeze him in place with an insane glare. Slowly, I lifted my arm, but abracadabra he was gone.

 

          Cannonading laughter and shimming a sexual violation, I entered the passage. I was several long paces farther from starvation than the ferret, and it was a tight squeeze. Several times I thought I might get stuck and end a phony relic myself.

 

          I popped out from the crimp into a chamber riven by sunlight spears. What a benighted, fugitive’s fascination he had with light. What a keen, petty thief’s eye for its winks and signs, its black market bargaining paralleling the national bourse.

 

          Not one gold candlestick, his treasure was the nearly crude paintings of saints and apostles, and one of Mary and the Infant, and on each a sunbeam trimmed to spot. This cairn so rigged, sheets to toiled winches, to sail as bird-breasted hull upon the azure dome, in its hold what claw and maw pushing brushes had rendered of the tender light torturing their savage hearts. And most fatal thrust: Mary and Infant, the sweet state when the angel suckled at a woman’s breast.

 

          For a week, the abbot’s unfortunate cadre took shifts on a sledge hammer breaking rocks. The abbot formed hunting parties to search out rocks. The standard was not some egg a statue piping within signaled to their eyes. It was something in the texture, a rough look, those chipped off the block to free a lighter form. Tailings, dull and drear, beetled and carbuncled, scab-skinned, these they hauled back to the monastery to beat to talc, these darker materials from the raw loin in the undivided dark. But, not a spark leapt from these for the gravely buried.

 

          The old abbot’s flock followed them keeping out of reach for grabbing to labor, and they sifted the hollows left by the dragooned rocks for bugs and worms.  They popped them in their mouths.

 

          A manly world. No prescription here for marrying Jesus as was open to nuns. What a shortcut that would be; carried off to his kingdom despite a warning in Genesis about such correspondent brides. And that warning in Genesis against illicit trysts, mangled to a fare-thee-well is the one active promise a monk can grasp at. These were men, foul habits, sloppiness and grumpiness, downright ornery, fragrant as dungeon cheese-the one gainful push they could make, offer to the pitch black in their reeking forms, is a mingling with the raw classes. This to draw down the fine-tempered harmonies from the rare hierarchies.

 

          With the ropes from the catapult, the abbot marked off a ring on the monastery’s grounds. Stripping his robes, he slapped his slate chest and challenged the angels to a match.

 

          Here the loins you sought to subvert or filch with finesse, gentle embrace and fine spun tunes. Since when did a woman seek tender charity in an embrace, tepid motive, conceited alms? She would lay with the lion and pull the thorn from his heart. Test your reach and your desire.

 

          Under heat and cold, the hairy-assed creature grunted and bellowed.

 

          No answer from those scattered to the sea bottom, the scuttling crab-walkers, no slapping wings, squandered daughters and broken hip bones, no angels from a younger heaven still game in the germ.

 

          The ferret was part of a loose posse federated by dynamic tension. They ate the same things and kept an eye peeled to jump in if one of them found anything to chew. Their speed resulted from their prey, locusts. These were not grasshoppers from plush paddocks; they were armored assemblies, bolted at the joints and seemingly inanimate until triggered into flight. They also ate lizards, but their favorite was frogs. They trooped out from the monastery, and following them for a full day, I found they would station themselves by a frail creek where frogs caroled shrilly.

 

          Had there been former bands of hapless refugees that had eaten such a diet?  The path to their disappearance would be unmarked by stone. And what lost or gained from lives so ghostly that their own breaching of the veil might be mistaken for wafting?  And yet, for the suspicious, skinflint lot I knew them, their patience was bottomless. How might they appear in the vast space they entered while waiting for events to bring a frog within reach? Might their patience drift above this realm of accident and longing like a white cloud?

 

    Another group never left the monastery grounds. Action was break-back to them. They were emaciated. Their cheeks were hollowed out and their temples squiggly-veined. Their eyes were huge. Closed, the globes large as walnuts in the cups, opened, all expanded pupil without an iris to ring them. Beautiful were these nearly sheer sheaths about the light distilled from desire. These sleepers-mostly they dozed-were clarifying their dreams, reducing the broth to transparency. Ultimately, dreams unstirred by desire would leave only tracings by geometry, the subtle vectors that spool images across our closed lids and lay the boulevards for migrating songbirds and stars.

 

          The first to arrive was a musician. He carried a stringed instrument, maybe a lute; it looked like a cross between a guitar and a gondola. He seemed pleased in his scruffiness, perhaps mostly in his beauty that wildness brought to the blossom, tangled locks, coal-black as were his eyes.

 

          More musicians came with instruments I had never seen before, folk instruments or improvised, and some from Asia that barely played and never adhered to a tune. Plucked, they released a fermata, and the next single note not so much followed the other as delved deeper into it.

 

          Then came soldiers, or was it a carnival? Whatever they were, tumblers or lost platoon, they spat in their hands and flexed their muscles and seemed altogether taken by their swart power. Was the abbot looking for a tussle? They had some pretty busted up looking customers in their number, blokes who were perfectly happy to take another poke in their flattened noses for the pleasure of returning it in kind. Their retorts rang out gleefully. The more rusted the throat, the more it croaked out succulent insults. This troop of brigands was all for chunk, slap and abrasion, and positively set on getting your goat. They were for the headlong toss and bouncing back against solid mass. Their rage for smells; musk and sewer were catnip to them.

 

          The new comers were eager to trade. They wanted a market. They wanted manure on the ground. They wanted children running about and hard bargaining. They wanted haggling and cart horses pissing in splattering cascades. The musicians would sing for that. There wasn’t an original verse, challenge or haggle they could muster, but as every minstrel song first heard during plague or famine is sweeter than times of plenty, there never were more impish and skipping tunes than these from such brief springs. Goat-legged Pan piped such airs. These pipes so recently slipping from the fearsome, regal chorus of church organ, these pipes pranced in the meadow.

 

          The old abbot was fleet to the chance, hawking treasures. From under his robe, the authentic, the venerable, for your eyes only, wooden spoon, wooden bowl, frayed blanket. But, that was just a line, for your discerning eye these sandals, and yes, indeed, these holes in the sole, fragrant wonders sold for a song, and just the one for his ears only, the very answer to a prayer, a fair exchange. Warmed his cockles, caught his drift, spoke the castaway, did this commerce that stokes the heavens and earth, these lovers’ dreams of lovers.