Ylide 'na Car Ride

 the snow falls

too fast from the clouds,
and night is dropped and

 snatched back
like a huge joke

-Dennis Johnson

 Wherever you are is a country. 

- Mikko Harvey

Ylide* 'na Car Ride
*Ylide- a compound with opposite charges 

But of course I was cursed by beauty.  Some writers are hideous.  These learn easily and quickly that just saying something doesn't make it true because no one wants to listen to you, feo, but some of us are cursed by beauty and so most everyone naturally believes us because to see us is to be in our trance and it's only as our beauty fades that we realize that we were deluding ourselves and must ever be wary of doing so again.  Some are seated at birth just inches closer to the column of truth, which is to say, hideous to behold, like my friend John.

Easy to ignore, with that execrable visage of his, the lazy eye, curlew nose, that turkey throat, his slump and uneven mosey. We've been friends since school, close at first, then not so much, then tenuously at best, and now moreso.  I appreciate John's perspective, and how, tied to our shared history, it means that we can argue without it being personal, it's refreshing.  Especially when compared with the ongoing battle that is my current living arrangment, which, despite a promising start has not been going well.  So when John asked me to drive him to Reno to visit his niece I agreed. 

A stiff south wind had kicked up Thursday morning, just enough to put people into their perpetual jackets, mine's green corduroy, John's is navy blue.  That's not important, just checking to ensure you're listening.  On Thursday afternoon, one of those mid-December early dusks, I seal up shop with my yucca plant and three tiny window cacti and head out to pick up John (he lives about an hour away) in my tiny two seater Ford Fiasco, a dark and rapid thwapping under the hood, feeling freaking cold. An acquired taste; the depression that is wintery weather, or winter, starved of color, that unmitigated cold embrasure of eigengrau, the night's air nothing but distant stars, promises of warmth too distant to realize. Although, some still reach for them.  John opened the passenger door and plopped down "This is my favorite time of year," he said.  I was worried he would smell the exhaustion in my breath after we were all nestled-in snug for the long haul with the heater on low, but he only said thanks and fiddled pointedly with the radio knob until he found the news, so we listened to that in silence.  

The realization comes slowly that this is the closest we've been in a long time— gazing outwards at the same listless road, giving nothing away, making our way up into the mountains, over the pass, watching in the sideview mirrors as the glow of the chilly western horizon presses firmly against our backs.  So long world!  I remembered the bond I'd long felt with John, the closeness, an epiphany both lovely and fleeting, and it has charged my observations of the trip looking back on it now.

"Have you read anything I've written lately," I ask.
"I read the one about the chicken," John proffers.
"Myrta?"
"Yeah, Myrta- the fortune-telling chicken. It was good.  You should publish."
"I should.  But yet..."
"But yet..." he echoes dreamily, "but yet what?"
I change the subject. "How're things going for you?"
"Same ole same ole.  I'm tired a lot. Late nights. Early mornings."
"Still at the plant?"
"Still. Always. It's what I was put here to do.  I'll be honest though, after most 10-hour third-shifts I lay my middle-aged white-collar body on the couch and extinguish what spark of life I'vein the Stream, then the Streaming takes over and leads me to a net where all the stupid fish are caught."
"You probably go through lotsa coffee."
"NO" he shoots me an ugly look that means how could you forget this important fact about me and I remember that he doesn't drink coffee.  The not-drinking-coffee I don't mind, of course, but what annoys me is this holier than thou rationale he affects every time it comes up —How he insists on explaining his caffeine intolerance in posh British accent with phrases like 'it ill-befits my health,' or 'this wretched bean! It does not become me.'  This annoys me.  John says, "Rememberest thou, I canst not bedrink of it."
  "Lest ye die," I retort, and the conversation wanes, idles down.

Into the foothills my thoughts drift off to my time in the Uttarakhand, how the mountains seemed to never end, and they filled up everything, even the sky, and filled me in the beholding.  Now there's sky to see, but when I look up I see nothing.  Clouds. Vaporous, perhaps but empty, as am I, everyone sees right through me. Cars pass me on the freeway, my life.

John clears his throat. "So tell me, friend, why are things going so poorly on the old love front?" 
"It must be her fault." This is what I say when I'm not thinking clearly. John, of course, believes me because I am cursed by beauty so when I say it's not my fault there's never any second guessing.  Why blame beauty?
"Who among you, or is it whom, first said 'I love you' first?"
"I think it's whomsoever."
"Fine. Whomsoever betwixt the two your first declareth love?"
"I don't know.  Probably me.  Must have been."
"But who truly meant it first?"

That's a stumper.  Last autumn I heard a voice telling me that God wanted me to believe that I wasn't alone. This, I should have interpreted, in retrospect, as an admonition toward self-reliance but instead I went out to carouse. My buddy's band Bonerchai was playing at the gallery.  What are the words, post-mud-grunge, perhaps. Don't judge.  There she was, being introduced, the edges of the world disappear.  What are the words? Lithe and supple? Fair haired and wide-eyed?  Too good for me?  She assumed I was what she was looking for because, well look at me, and I assumed that she was what I was looking for because guys as a rule are paid the slightest bit of attention and go giddy as fawns.  What felt like thaumaturgy was actually astigmatism.

"Take a deep breath," says John, "and as your breast rises and falls, feel the blood course to your extremities.  Now feel it retreat, like the tide." He can see the anguish on my face and suggests "How about stopping at the Love's?" and my mind goes all sappy with the implications until I see the roadsign for the truckstop and pull over. He gets out to take a leak and grab some yummies.  I adjust my handsome mug in the rearview, but of course being cursed by beauty, there isn't much to do so I get out to fill up the tank and leave it filling while I pop into the truckstop as well. 

Inside the man in the tie tells the kid in the paper hat to go home, "service levels are down. "
    "Can I go home early boss?" another paper hat asks.
    "Me too?" chimes a another.
    "Me three?" chimes another.

"I probably meant it first," I say when we are flopping back into the car.  "What did I know? About what love means, I mean?"
"It means you're willing to put up with a lot of bullshit sure in the knowledge that it leads to great reward," explains John while munching on a pita wrap that smells like plastic.  "Life is better when shared with a partner. We know this.  The divine sparks within each of us, once rocked together, kindle a fire."
"But there's also divine truth to be meted out from isolation, and beauty too!  I could've pursued the eremetic tradition.  The desert fathers.  Written the next great American novel, a long great screed about individualism, Plymouth Rock, Walden Pond, yada yada."
"Who wants that?  It's as self-serving as masturbation."
"Readers want conformity and communal equilibrium."
"Sure they do.  Why not abdictate control of the narrative, of life, and become a unit in a grander scheme?  All ego-less and crayon-colored! That's what you did, hm?"  

 God wanted me to believe that I wasn't alone but that belief turned me just another dog in the kennel, happy you're home master, pleased to show you this old dirty bone.  I look at John. God he's ugly.  I love him, but gosh!  Taking off for Reno to visit his nieces, as gestures go it's as noble an endeavor as any, and it takes my mind off of the old chestnut, or, like Julian's disappearing hazelnut, the whole enchilada.  Would that I could go back to that night at the gallery and look like John in that moment, so she could see through the mask to what I am, what I was, what I will become.  We all become who we are.

"Last month we went to the planetarium.  And sitting there watching her text her ex as the laser lights shot every which way the blue light shone on her hair and I realized that it's transparent.  I could look through to her skull practically."
"What did you see?"
"I saw emptiness.  I saw our flotillas of time together and I couldn't place any of my standard narrative around any of it.  I saw scores of regrets and I saw the rotten core of all earthly efforts. I saw buildings burned and mountains laid waste and out in a space a fiery comet gone cold, caught up in the orbit of a sun that hadn't yet ignited, or a moon that only reflects the light of a distant star."
"So your girl's cheating on you and you're headed out with your old friend John to escape all that, eh? Off to the biggest little city in the world!  Swing out into the darkness dark comet, and leave her spinning behind in an indifferent blaze!"
"Something like that."
"I would offer you some corn nuts," says John, holding out the bag, "but I don't want to sound too corny."  Cars pass us on the freeway.  "Why didn't you reach out?"
"I — because it's hard.  Because — because everything seems to stand against the idea that — the enormity of the pain she has — that I felt like — I felt like it was mine to carry. Despite everything— and this is how art my remains possible, holding on to it."
"You and your idiotic attachment to sadness.  Loss is inevitable.  Change is inevitable.  Get over it. Stop living under it. Make art from sunshine."
"What if I can't?"
"Then you can't.  Do something else.  You've identified the problem, now change it up.  Take off the mask and take the stage again."
"I hope you're right."
"Hope is too passive.  I know I'm right."

John says he can't wait to see his niece, his sister.  I've seen them before.  Don't judge. But of course, I was blessed by beauty, so it's okay for me to point out that they hit every branch face first while falling out of the ugly tree.  Kidding, kidding.  

"It's good you've got them so close, relatively.  It's good to not be alone.  I've been  — I've been feeling pretty alone lately."
"To be less alone you need to be less alone!  Love someone back. Lots of people like you." Then he adds, "Not me of course.  I think you're a pompous ass.  A really fucking arrogant son-of-a-bitch."
"Thanks buddy."
"Fuck you, pal."
"John?"
"Hm?"
"How do you start? Being... less alone?"
"You just start."

  We stop for the night at our motel.  The wind had really picked up and we clutch our bags and waddle to reception.  I think about guarding my divine spark, somewhere deep in my chest.  Like candles lit in a hurricane, we can't be responsible for keeping our lights bright for long, nor blamed for letting the light go out completely. The world is brutal and invective.  

Later, John was asleep – it was late, probably about 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning — and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town.  It's sad western lights on into the middle distance.  Whence is one, cursed by the shallowness of beauty, such as I, encouraged to stew and ponder the depths? I could hear the trains mournfully passing through, that wholly winsome wail and my thoughts mixed with John's steady breathing I felt carried off by the throttle of his dreams, the man there still, and just inside he's the ignored little boy, abandoned to embrace some raw elemental vision or other, all while pursuing the boundless shelves of desire, hope, all just out of reach and yet reaching. That's hope.  It's in reaching. 

Dreams Before Dreamers

In dreams we go back to a time before time. Before we saw faces and recognized the flaws in ourselves, before the lucubration of solid bodies. When spirits reigned in a sea of mystery alone, and they weren't confined to dreaming of that sea while coiled into the tragic forms we now pass on the highways slipping into infinity where it all will end.

Harold made a symbol for everything. His stack of papers threatened to crush him. His symbol for his work was "End it All" and within it were the fractions of other symbols like "Man floats into space" and "Dogtags= individuality".

HIs project was a semiotic history of the future, and each day he would brush away the sand and compile a new set of symbols for everything that defined us, and each day he journeyed further into the truth he found himself further from it.

The inherent paradox of progress.

When it rained he would stop and laugh until the rain stopped. Dry silence at the heart of the watery roar.
He would write poems when he tired of drawing new symbols. Poems that splatter-painted everything into very small boxes of information, because he was alone.

A publisher expressed interest and put out the first volume, taking it away from him. You can't have the thing you put your love into. Harold made a symbol for that too, and housed it in a large pictogram for "Fear". "Rain turns into Snow" was only partially visible within "Everything you can see is already lost" and "Factories shipping soldiers off to War" made up nearly a million pages representing "The Limitations of Love's Geometry"

At night he would dream as the rains come. "Rain on me." His heart would rush and never heal. He would laugh in his sleep and his laugh would bounce like an echo from the future, dreaming of a laugh before time.

In dreams we go back to a time before dreaming. Before ambition or the requisite need for more. Slipping into the firmament of happiness where there is food that has been eaten and sex that has been pounded. Leather hides beat against an earthen floor. When clouds were solid and content, not so much floating across the sky amorphus but stable like ripened fruit, filled and succulent like juicy stones declaring themselves in loud voices. Not empty with promises we have today.

Yan laid stones at sunup. One stone on top of the other as the sun pulsed down, slithering his slow creation up the hollow solar throat. In the morning his senses were dull and each stone was merely a stone. Bricks, dull in their stoic stance casting sharply hemmed angles against the brilliance of the light-blue canvas. By midday the rhythm of the masonry was infectious and his body acted of its own accord in time with the narrative of the song. One rough-hewn stone, one slathering of mortar, a wall emerging where once there was none, sturdy in its stance and marching indomitable until dusk, when the stones became his spirit. The spirit of his son. One grandfather stone. One enshrined soul after another. A wall of ancesters slipping slowly up into the concave kingdom of the hereafter.

His stones were part of a temple. He was one of many and they worked for the glory of something greater than themselves. Adding stones in a line, their otherwise unpunctuated lives strung out day-by-day like the side-by-side bricks they laid, pausing for darkness and traversing the gravel roads back to simple homes where their wives and children waited.

Each day was a new stone, slathered with wet earth and pressed to the rest. He recieved small payment for his efforts. He thought of little else. He thought very little at all. One stone, and then another. THe past piling up in an ordered row of labor, towering architecture of time that never moved while the sun spun round and round.

Yan kept his head down like all the rest. The sun was dishonored by the glaring of human eyes. But at night when the sun had gone and the stones were left for another day, there were times when he would cast his eyes up past the coil of rock and stone, and the stars would shine down on him like flashing grains of sand along a distant ocean shore. Never just one star, a universe of stars. Others looked too. Who had placed those stars there? One star after another. And were they, too, slowly erecting a pyramid into the space between, a bridge toward the infinite where one day all will meet?

He dreamed of man hoisting stones along a rigging. He dreamed of so many stones they could not be lifted or heft, but simply rolled into place, until not one was left over. Until the tower stretched higher than the eye could see and still there was more space to fill. He dreamed of removing the stones from the corners of the lower foundation and carting them off to the top, unbuilding the building until the structure was built on nothing but air, floating higher and constantly stretched further in an endless recycling space, but still there was no end in sight, the higher it went the thinner the stones, and when they were one on top of the other, every stone in what was once the world left far behind, man chipped each stone in two, then in three, until a chain of sand was all that he had made, and then he spread each grain of sand apart, farther and farther until it was reaching across the sky and saw that he had made the stars.

In the morning he awoke before the sun and followed the narrow road with all the rest. Grabbing a stone he placed it lovingly among the rest, a little bit higher, and pressed it down. Then reached for another.

In dreaming we cease to be the dreamers, since before the first dreamer there was a dream. Before the chicken there was an egg, laid by the chicken which was borne of an egg in a formula that spirals back on itself until it can never end, but the formula exists. So too with dreams. Immune to gravity and time, the dreamer follows them into the dark caverns of nothingness where all interceptions of reality break apart, and yet the dream overlaps with the dreamer and he wakes, knowing no such dreamed thing can exist, and yet it does.

Julie danced with numbers. She planted them in her mind and they germinated vast equations that could explain anything and everything. As the fruit is in the seed, so too with numbers, but Julie was the neccessary intermediary. The tree uponwhich they blossomed.

She imagined graphs with an x and y axis, and the x was all ordinary numbers in succession and the y was imaginary numbers. Any point on the graph, as with any graph, connected the two axis together, only half of that point or any point was imaginary. Except for two. One was zero, and the other she could never find. It was that quest which kept her going, among many others. The point that would define the infinite. The point where sleeping birds took flight in the air or lovers came so close together that they would never be apart.

There were whole days when she would see nothing but zeros, real and imagined, in everything she did. In the row of houses along the trainride to work, in the crests of mountains in the distance and the tiny bulbs that make up each stoplight at every intersection. Maybe all the zeros together made up one enormous formula which correlated to a single point in the divine equation. Maybe if you had enough zeros you could find the crucial secret.

Julie recapped her life as a function in manifold to a set of known digits, longing for their unknown counterparts. Other mathemeticians sold their numbers to big firms with big paychecks, settling for a constant existence void without deviation. Numerals affixed sensibly to dollar signs which bettered a few and faded just as quickly into shredders and ash, a scribbled set of gibberish figures piled on the blackboard and illegible to anyone, meaningless to all. Zeros. Julie was after them and above them. A point on a mean line that curved into her dreams at night where she was a little girl at the start and being chased by a monsterous circumference, threatening to swallow everything affixed with faulty precision to the interception of angle and line.

There was perfection in her methods. She looked at integars which were real, the square root of one, the lengths of her hair in the mirror, the geography of freckles in her dying eyes, and was divided by their unique correspondence to that which was unreal. The square root of negative one, hair that was always growing even after death, and her eyes were alive. If she couldn't get it right she would do it again. Each endeavor rooted in the last, long strings of digits stretching back to the second she was born and reaching out until the day she died. Or was she thinking before she was born? Would she solve it before she was dead. Who knew how long any of this had been going on? Who knew how long it would last?

Julie twirled the numbers around in her mind, neurons firing gracefully into nuerons as the sun burns up its precious fires of gas as we spin around and around at 93 million miles away, falling symettrically into oblivion, wiling away the days and years in orbit until the inevitable collision of night that awaits us all.

As a paranthesis of routine guarded her primary functions, she watched as economies rose and fell, the train tracks slipped into the horizon, her eyes weakened and hair grew light, and the possibilities of chaos delineated themselves into the cold compositional waves of history.

Her dreams were tangential. No longer was she a woman being chased or a little girl being told to stand in a line which was only half there. She was part of a much larger numeric array, not merely a number in an equation but a fraction of a number, a divisor, multiplied with many others to equal the whole. The idea of a solid state, the exactness of cracks within an imperfect painting called Beauty. At night she would dream, and her dream would be of day, dreaming of night dreaming, of everything before it was divided into parts and knowing that one day all will come together again and be one, and be zero, and be equal.