H) Hypergraphia habla

 

 

“If I was a sculptor…

or then again, no.”

-Sir Elton John

 

undo

 

Are creatures which are living are but a species of the dead.  Rare indeed, it may be said.  And certainly endangered.  Of the beasts of the field, be they cloven-hooved or pawed, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all the quiescent birds which never rest but to pipe and peck, and of man, standing tall as he teems amongst similarly drab multitudes at the streetcorner sidewalk between 12th and Euclid, or seated slovenly, fumbling for keys at a piano in a brick room down by the railroad tracks,  all are but the tiniest tip of a beautifully sprouted creation, and they are not long for this earth.

            As Dryden wrote in his admonition of modern floral arrangements, "first plant a seed and wait with water as well as sun, then when gloried flower is bloom'd & ripe strive not merely after the beauty'd form without reference to sincerity of substance, tear not away from root..."

 

            Pap, and pablum, my Dad spends his morning sending large quantities of memos out through his Rotary email, all scrawled in a lolling green typeface which makes me sick, since errors grammatical and lexical seem cursorily emboldened.  "This is Multiple Sclerosis Awarness Week."  he says.  Awareness, weak.  "The more people understand what this illness is, the better chance for funding, research and treatment. "

 

Ha! Treatment, as if there were a cure!  Let us frame the question differently so as to see our feeble answers in a more modest light.  Instead of 'Can we find a cure?' perhaps we should be asking, 'What is a disease?'

 

Disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, structure, or system of the body resulting from infection, poison, deficiency or imbalance, or unfavorable environmental factors; any abnormal condition that interferes with vital physiological processes.

            Isn't life itself a disorder?  Who's to say what correct function is?  Infection is just another form of life trying to survive, is it not, so why rate it beneath the infected in terms of import?  Everything living is deficient or imbalanced in proportion to something else?  Is there a favorable environmental factor here?  Favorable to whom, and to what end?  What is normal?  Death is an interference to physiological processes too, chief among them matter of fact, why isn’t  there a cure for death?  Or is life the disease, and maybe death is the cure?  Hydriotaphias United.

 

 

Fluctus quinquis

I'll tell you once more
Before I get off the floor
Don't bring me down

-ELO’s Jeff Lynn

 

Pardon the rare rush of imprecatory ramblings. (I DO NOT EXIST TO ENTERTAIN YOU)  What follows is reified recension, without any raft of quotation such as Eliot might have used only, commoner. (More Commoner, More-Come-on-er,  Moorcambe and Wise, Moonlight Bay, Junebug Moon.)

            Courting the girl is like dragging a sack half full of sticks through the Westfield Mall.  No, that’s not nice or true.  Her skinny is good skinny.  Her comportment is graceful, haughty, (HOTTY) at odds with her eyes, turbulent, lusty, darting.  Her hair is a bristled brambled curl.  Her apartment is a mess.

            In the corner under the window there is a bookshelf made of concrete blocks and 2x4s where her bridal albums sit, a testament to an event I do not wish to acknowledge.  Lots of girls take lots of pictures at their weddings or the weddings of their friends and I just cannot bear to look at them.  Who can?  Sometimes I imagine that the earliest etchings of note which have survived, the illegible scrawl on the unearthed tombs of civilizations now swept into the desert of time, (dessert of time, pie) were we to decipher them, would merely be descriptions of how Margi’s Aunt Carol got flowers on discount from Kroger, and Aunt Patty knew a guy who took all these pictures for a real good price because he’s still just a photography student at the tech school.  Oo, and did I tell you about the deal we got on the cake…

            She sat on her back playing video games while I whispered repeatedly, I wish, that you, would be my friend, (LOSER) I wish, that you, would be my friend, (GROW UP) in a low prayer-like chant, the gaming console caterwauling high above me.

            It occurred to me that I should do something noteworthy and self-destructive to get her attention.  Maybe I would punch a hole in the glass window.

            "Maybe I should punch a hole in the glass window…" I mused just loud enough for her to hear.

            "Maybe you should not," she quickly extinguished.  But I stood anyway and murmured. (Speak up!) "bum" like Larkin, walked to the window where outside the sky was grey and oppressive.  The clouds rush like a highway.  There are no turn signals, no lanes.  Following the metaphor, perhaps someday our highways will be as clouds, swift and silent and covering the earth.  I made a goitrous sound in my throat.  My fist through the glass seemed invited.  Seemed a capital idea.

            "Don't try it,” she said, a book of sewing diagrams in her lap, her fingers painted gold, the smell of Aztec ash and seaweed.

                Attention! I need attention.  Like the other night, within the purple domed vat of the moon by the estuary, when drunk and teetering I led the capricious crowd away from their hovering hovel and down to the water where the tide lapped like greedy fingers upon the stones.  “And now I shall disappear,” I announced, and took off my shirt and shoes.  Pants laid in a sandy pile, all the layers of me gone until I am a pale nothing that everyone looks at and wants not to see.  “Don’t do it,” they say, which is exactly what I want them to say, of course.  “That’s exactly what he wants you to say,” someone says, “ just don’t pay any attention to him,” but they still do, and I still walk down to the water, bare feet feeling the slip and sallow sands diminish beneath my weight.

          

            If we can only truly know ourselves then I know nothing, but count on the hopeless cheerful stupid incompetent dafts to piece myself some semblance of togetherness, a ball of inward facing mirrors, let us say, or a quilt, embroidered with mythic colour, and yet cold to the touch, hollow between all layers.

 

I wade out to critical depth, the lights on the distant shore seem both close and impossibly far.  Impossible, either way, like the plane overhead from the airport nearby, another light I reach for but will never reach.  Or there, under the murk, some sort of darkly glowing sea creature preempting my advancing footfalls and scattering.  Somewhere in the middle, up to my waist, “wasting our time,” meddles the laughtrous throng. 

 

I dive.

Do I put my fist through the glass?

  

fluctus decumanus

 

We're real

world

wide breakin all

the rules

-Sean Kingston

 

The changes wrought by time and eternity bring all to bear and all for naught.  Alteration is the only stable face of the universe.  All life is but a vaporous digression.  Creatures netted in the deep, water through the raised net, far-away clouds refracted on a rainwashed windowpane, (voices in the distance,) gone.

                "Simon Cowell hides behind no man," she said, sipping a forty.  A tattered ghost with phosphorescent hair, wearing clothes that someday fit her and oneday will fit her again.

"This show should have a gong!"

                I remember laughter.  We are all dead here, but I remember laughter.  To you, this is like the bridal albums you never looked at.   As Plath wrote of her dissimulative bloodletting, “anything/give me two children/ Two roses.”

                "Is the pale horse coming?" a sad voice asks.  He smiles but still manages to look suspicious, skeptical, plainly desperate.  I scratch at my head like a dog.  "Does scatter apply underwater?  What is a word like scatter, for when you are underwater?"