I’m at poolside now, late into dusk. In the distance an immense cloud is above the Catalinas. It’s as if a big fist gave a shiner to the sky. A covey of birds, new to me, strut linearly about the pool, mother and chicks. Offbeat bird sounds punctuate the lambent air, now warmly cool. It is quiet now, a stillness, except for outdoor compressors kicking in to cool the interiors. Machine hum. A bird spits across the sky like a thrown lance. Swallows are above, or are they bats? In any case the Jew is out of here.
Safely ensconced, I’ll continue. I can’t wait to meet up with my first scorpion. Woody Allen, I am not. But why is it that Jewish stars never ward off vampire bats, and why did a Hungarian Jew, Bela Lugosi, become the bloodsucker par excellence? What I love about the movies are often unintended subtexts. The bi-sexuality of Garbo and Dietrich, Randolph Scott and Cary Grant, and Tallulah Bankhead. Delights. Only in America can a gorilla climb the Empire State Building in search of cross-species sex and have his balls and cock air brushed out. No wonder he was furious with those bi-planes. And I don’t want too get started on Pinnochio’s nose, Aladdin warming up his lamp, and a transvestite wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. Most of all, most of everything, reduced to barest essentials are openings, holes, entries — from Alice in Wonderland to Italian arias to Martin Luther’s chronic constipation. Shit or sing, that’s what I say. We are primitives, and that is all right. It is reductive, I agree, but so endlessly interesting to contemplate and consider, so on target. Leave it to American science to label the creation of the universe as the Big Bang, oh, the market economy lives. We even popularize creation, tacky, tacky.
Hard to sleep tonight. The Catalinas are cooking throughout the night. And then life in Pima County begins anew. I am not prepared for anything, nor do I have any expectations. I will die here, that much is sure. From Brooklyn to Queens to Arizona. What befalls us in life is a blatant mystery. Right before our eyes, life changes, switches, permutates. It is not even a roller coaster; it is a fucking mobius strip, every corner turns in and away from itself. It is like Escher on acid. I look back on my years and there is no spine to it, some decades relatively sane, other years vicious, and some heartbreakingly unkind — unwarranted, much undeserved.
In Bayside we had a woman neighbor who had never worked in her life. Few responsibilites coursed through her life; aimless, she stutters and bumbles in her life, unaware, not conscious of her appalling emptiness. And yet, in the insane riddling of the universe she’ll live long and prosper, die in bed with a $55 manicure. I seek no justice, no fairness, no equity from a universe, a life that mostly is a scrim, background to our individual skits. Job appealed to god. He went to the wrong entity. The inner fits and turns of his anguish sought easement, comfort by an appeal to an extra-sensory perception, an idol of the mind — a god. What if he ranted and raved not at himself, but the inanimateness of an indifferent universe, what if he used his tortured sensibilities, his exquisite sense of injustice, his knife-sharpened questions at air, at the spaces between things, at volumes, at spatial relationships, he would get no answer. What if in the Hebrew Bible Job was brought to a higher level, dismissing god, the answerer, and falling back upon the corrosive reality of having no answer, no remedy, no redemption, no understanding, and thus no forgiveness. I am alone in this experience and it moves grossly beyond Thoreau’s quiet desperation.
As I walked to the hospital morgue to see my wife a day after the accident, I was shaken and had asked for someone to come with me. A woman clergy member accompanied me and she tried to help, to be silent, to wait for my cries. i appreciated that. She was not of my faith, but that was irrelevant. Emerson said that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, statesmen and divines.” She asked me if I would like to pray with her, sensitively and caringly, spoken. I was very conflicted. I refused!
I just wanted to talk to my wife through the glass window, share my loss, spill out all agony and anguish. I could not pray to a god because god had nothing to do with all these events; I needed to succor myself or with another close friend. I could not make a Job-like appeal to a religious extrapolation that was as much shadow, if that, as Plato’s cave reflections. It may be a foolish consistency, but I would not cave in, not now. In fact, I was devastated by the limitless pain I was feeling. I did not say fuck god. Oh, no, I wanted to fuck awareness, consciousness, intelligence, all the states that made me aware of my wife’s death. I wanted to fuck being that had brought me so low. I will not accept or abide the religious caress; I find it to be a very tender trap — and immaterial if not irrelevant.
In fact, maybe I like life the way it is. Atomistic, coldly severe, heart-breaking, heart rendering, purposeless — meaningless, random, accident propagating more accident, there, but without compassion or cognition, like Mt. Lemmon, just there. It is chilling, it is very hard, but at least, my mind is made clearer by its indifference and I fall back upon whatever strengths I do have. The viper has its fangs, the lion its teeth. We all make do in this low valley of indifference. A god makes us blind, and we garner our strengths from dogma, doctrine, myths, saints, the whole panoply that distracts from truly seeing the world as it is. The only hope for me is the other, although to connect is as hard as anything else in this world.
It is very hard to warm one self, but sometimes we need begin there. Human kindness, what there is of it, emanates from within; it is not the aurora borealis that comes from above in beatitudes and commandments. Life has made me strong, not necessarily wiser; it has brought out the sinews in me psychologically and emotionally. What I am I have not chosen to be, much like a sculptor chisels off marble until the essence is unearthed. I associate to the last statue that Michelangelo made before he died. It looks incomplete to the eye, rough cut, almost modern, it hints, it doesn’t define; the statue looks as if a self is emerging, a pupae. It is as if working one side of the see-saw for most of his life, the great master sped to the other end, dropping one way of creating to start another, all at the end of his life. If I were in fantasy to come back after death, let me return as that emergence, that crude evolutionary stance, that effort.
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