Jorge: The Other World

*

So that other world people talk about -- it's not other -- it's right here -- I can kick it like a stone. It kicks right back. It's not a hypothesis or something you have to visualize. Here it is.

You know that guy who fell or was pushed off my ship? I saw him on the street just yesterday. But I don't care too much about him. I mean -- if transcendence is available -- then I'm going to focus on what is important. The one who has spread it between visible things --that One just has my heart. In awe -- speechless. So that's why I bump into things.

*

Jorge would wake from dreams and know he had just been there. In that "other" world that made the mesh of this one. And how he knew wasn't that the dreams gave him access -- no, not at all -- dreams were shallow tokens mostly -- but they just didn't have all the blocks and careful denials that waking life put up -- as if to prevent itself from feeling the closeness to heaven that simply was -- that pervaded this "closed" world of ours.

It wasn't "other", people just wished it to be.

*

Looking back at my childhood I'd thought of it as a Garden of Orthodoxy but that was wrong -- anyway thinking wasn't the mose of access to it -- although thinking took place there. It was more a matter of releasing breath -- thanksgiving and gratitude its open door. This was a door that had no frame.

People willed the door to be closed. A question of simplification. Easier to live and not to wonder.

*

Jorge stood at the door to the noisy gym. An odd kind of worship happened inside there, comparatively involute, very intense but somewhat futile. In the back corner -- where they stowed the free weights for die hards -- the Zen warrior lifted and lifted his million billion ziggity thousand kilograms of transcendent pain -- grunting with the sublimity of the effort -- and up the heavy structure went. Iron in the air, lifted with praise and joy. Nearby, the Nazi's wife on her treadmill sorrowing. . Everywhere half-naked models and ancient near-dead beings toggled past each other without touching. There were scenes of terrible blood on all the TVs. When J tried to move through the corridor a hand touched his shoulder -- the hand was "ice cold" like a Coke. He turned to face his dead godmom, his beloved stepmother -- Estelle.

Whispering.

You must believe me, boy, I am so sorry. I didn't have a clue what he was doing to you.

Not knowing something is the worst of the involuntary sins and those sins are the worst anyway, the worst of all, not knowing, with no way to repair -- there is nothing you can do. Except to have listened -- except to wait. To say: no matter how happy I am I must be missing something important to have. Then to look around.

Dying to rectify the injustice.

Jorge, I didn't look around. I didn't notice what was there.

And I can't seem to shake this off. The feeling of no way to fix this now.

*

A philosophical question: where does the "other" world touch this one? Surely they touch within this feeling of queasiness, of vertigo and unease. Wrongness swirling through the halls. Jorge felt the familiar bottomless clamp seize him and take him utterly. It reached from the bottom of the bowels up to the heart then the head. There was an elevator falling through space that had no floor. He fell in cartwheels or cornrows -- like poor Quasimodo -- yet he didn't move.

You must say something. You must try to speak.

Estelle, he said. You did nothing wrong. I loved you and still do. Estelle, he said.

I was just the way I was, Estelle. All he did, that man, was to bring it to the surface. It was there already. You were a perfect mom. I had no complaints.

Estelle.

Estelle, he said. Dry throat trying to speak. Air that wouldn't come into the lungs. Estelle, he said. He turned to say more but she wasn't there. She was dead of course, had been for many years. What remained hanging in the sterile air was perhaps nothing but unresolved guilt, first hers, now his.

He continued his trajectory now into the lockers. The college boys strutting -- their pubic furs held aloft like a flag -- shuffling behind them the old warriors aching inside every step, their balls clacking when they walked -- ancient memories condensed in the steam -- loose ugly hairs crawling on the floor -- history everywhere, clogging everything. The room almost unbearably concentrated -- and in the very near the ever so near distance, the sound of the water falling -- stroking the air like a giant guitar.

*

Poem frag: The faith of a donkey

*

My fear was without privilege --
my fear was simply fear, no longer was
the sign of my having been singled out
as special, spiritual -- fear was just fear --
a shiver in this matter beings were --
one more vibration that gray flesh
gave off -- a shiver -- nothing more.
But faith reduced grew stranger than before.

*

The preacher's reversal

*

In early times, when Paul tried to exercise behavior control, he did so in order to promote faith in God. At this moment, when a Southern Baptist preacher works to promote faith in God, he does so only in order to exercise behavior control. This for them is what faith is for.

The sin is huge. Preacher, if this is not true of you, then prove it by your deeds.

*

Fire prayer

*

The fire was to test and try him but didn't seek to kill him.

One day the Zen warrior walked into a centering prayer service in the middle of town. The people didn't know him but they didn't say anything. The leader struck a chime and the people closed their eyes all as one. Time passed silently.

One was alone but not alone. On the inhale the rich suburban air came into the belly. it was different from the air in the town next door. Safer, slightly less mixed. No taste of gunpowder.

In the warrior's belly it turned into fire.

Could the other people hear it crackling?

Was it burning only him?

Why did it make this noise? why so much noise?

Where the peace? the contemplative calm?

Could he even remain sitting in this chair?


Fire fire fire. A thing shaped like a word. Consuming the stomach, eating whatever it found there.

He exhaled it with a rough unruly noise.

Lord, find the way to make me more chaste. Just a little more chaste.

And the fire in its fiery manner said nothing in reply -- nothing clearly. It continued to burn. It and time passed simultaneously, one harrowing thing.

The warrior took another breath. Silence. Darkness.

What were the other people doing?

There was an Audenesque cough in the distance. A second one.

A car passed a million miles away, slipping through the charred space.

Darkness. Eyes closed and thus open.

What were the others doing?

Where was God in the fire -- the fire the fire?

God was the fire but was also not absent in the thing that was burning. He was patient as the warrior was not.

Another cough and then a very loud sigh. The warrior heard a sort of shifting as though somebody was moving.

Had the others climbed out of their chairs? Were they moving around?

There was motion in the inhale and then in the exhale. Something stirring.

If he opened his eyes would he find all the others crouched around his chair staring at him and wondering who let this queer into the room?

The inhale was tense and suspended and important. Insistent. The fire burned the fire.

The warrior opened his eyes. God stood in front of him watching him. There was no one else in the room. The stare was nothing but fire.

Who are you now? the vision asked. Are you indeed one of mine?

Speak to me now, instantly. Do you wish to be one of mine?

*

Jorge: Amor amor

*

You know, it's amazing (J's friend R said -- they were sitting in a wine bar with a crowd of acquaintances) but there's a whole community existing now that is cut loose from its homeland and completely fine with that fact. They come perhaps from Southeast Asia, they make their way into the west, they speak a language that would have been inaccessible to their parents' parents if not to their parents. Not just the nouns, not the verbs but even the basic thoughts (and whatever well they come out of) would have been "Greek" to their progenitors. And that's all fine with them. They have no problem with that. They smile about it.

They are comfortable here. Now. In this very strange and placeless place. Asians. Yes, J said in response, and that ease of theirs is beautiful. Nevertheless.

What about, let's say, the things very similar that the shrewd monde used to say about Jews in oh, let's say the 20s. The critics liked to say: international. Brows would rise. The critics liked to say: without a home. They would then say: comfortable. Trotting out the epithets. Then moustaches would be stroked and the hurtful word would finally come out: deracinated. Homeless. Then historically there was the whole thing that happened next. And after that: Israel.

So is being free from a place, or seeming to be free, something like passing through freefall? Is it like that neutral space between gears, the "dead" space of the French? Like a grand, expansive "awkward age"?

*

No one surely can survive long without place. Without a place, yes, but without place. No. that would be between gears. The car wouldn't move.

*

Not having a place is like being underwater. If you are a mammal, it is just a fact that you will eventually surface.

There was a boy at the university who had almost pure Venusian DNA. He walked like a man, talked like others. What then was the distinguishing sign? Perhaps only at first look the stubs on the shoulder blades. 2 wings covered with soft afterimages of feathers. They were like appendages snapped off -- he was winged.

All the others in his lineage had been put to the ban, immolated. Even Venus was said to be no more -- and looking around the world you felt this to be true. He was as the last survivor of a reprobate old tradition. The girls decided to call him Eros. Jorge would just call him E and leave it at that. Did he blush at the name? His skin blushed all the time so it was impossible to tell.

E's form of havoc lacked arrows or any form of release. His victims reported his claim to be unable either to achieve orgasm or cease trying. (Though something was transmitted all the same, as they said later.) He ached constantly with this painful craving for God knows what, something indefinable. Perhaps it was this aching to entregar, to give himself completely to another. Through the dorms he flew like wind, but one should not say "flew", no one saw him fly. Maybe despite the wings he was nothing but an unhappy human, after all.

But Jorge was sure that he was not human. One day he followed the stranger into the cemetery and watched him give an offering to his mother, was it his mother? -- fruits, wine, crushed flowers, the bodies of little bees -- it was not a dream, though surely felt like one. There was a Jewish grave by the trellis, upon which someone had marked a swastika with a black marker or evil spraycan, one of the kids from town -- or maybe, God protect us, another college student had done this, "one of us" -- and Jorge was suddenly too scared to move. Behind the grave was a garden of fussy statuary -- caryatids eroding back into their stone -- their shoulders and backs just a saddle shape in crude rock, and behind them hidden was the statue of the mother, Jorge felt sure that was who it was. The boy lay upon it. When J went back a few hours later, the demon was still there -- one could clearly see the humps under his t-shirt. And dogs were prowling on the gravel. This was not just a boy.

*

All study ceased in the dorm when he was there. After the half-year, when he left, in the first weeks -- before the illness -- an empty feeling churned inside his friends, something like a vacuum -- preoccupying, an involute shape with "can't live without you" carved out of its middle. Off the chart and with no notes for survivors, the suicides of 3 or 4 young ones, plunged from buildings or swept under trains, because life is not worth living without you. The mere pressures of studying couldn't have caused so many deaths. That was the act of a placeless one, to take away your place too, without even occupying it, just taking it. Around him, the solidest people seemed to lose their center.

Love deracinated.

Eros, can't you rest? Can't you settle down? Jorge asked. It was a terrible year, rationally unsupportable, insoportable, no soporto, no soporto. The itch to make love consumed the dorm.

Rumblings of wild behavior everywhere.

Remember we are not -- we cannot and will not act -- in loco parentis, the school said. The authorities backed away.

Everywhere sexual looseness took on the primness of a norm. We are treated as unclean, the virgins cried. Treated as unclean, outcast, something to be sprayed with room spray. We were the handful of girls who refused to play. The word shun wrapped us like a satin wrapping. The virgins were isolated, demonized. They were not to be touched in any way if not to be touched in that way. It was because they seemed so strange to everyone else. Their reserve was treated as a disease.

At midnight the football team captain would stand in the dorm hall screaming: Please have sex with me -- anyone! anyone!

The classrooms had a plaguey smell. Eros would huddle for hours in the maid's closet trembling. Then he would come out and prowl.

Jorge too had his history of love -- then suddenly none at all. Love unrequited, an ancient story. When amor went sour he retreated to his room -- a single with a soft and useless lock. He tried to nestle inside Psalm 139, prayed in the broken way that a person prays in the center of aporia:

You know Lord and I don't. You know me more intimately than I know myself. All the disgusting stuff inside me, you stand inside it somehow. You can bear it I can't. When I don't know why I do what I do, you know. So won't you at least give me a clue? Oh please oh please. Tell me why I always feel so sick.

Love music came from a distance out of somebody's speakers, an old Robert Bridges song updated: "Why is there nothing in your eyes?" Jorge fell asleep and dreamed of deity descending into the world -- a soft larval shape, white and vulnerable, deliberately exposed to trouble in utter tenderness, its openness a model for humans, a rule for behavior: do not spend all your time defending yourself and hurting others. You want to be like God? Be abundant and expose yourself to woe. Try it -- take off the carapace. That was what the music said to him. When he awoke Eros was lying at his side, having picked the rubbery lock.

With nothing in his eyes?

A pagan baby to scare us all? Just a ghoul with tight abs?

Jorge put his hands over his flaming genitals and said: Do not touch me. Don't. Don't.

And Cupid asked: Are you ashamed to be seen to be with me? or are you ashamed to be with me? Which is it?

Neither one but I am terrified of you.

Amor amor you have all the power. Everyone fears you and craves your blessing. Even though we all know you are a fake -- we know but play the game of not knowing and so do you. We are afraid to entregar -- to give ourselves up -- to the real God.

When we don't have you we feel worthless and despicable. But it is not your love I want but God's, the real God, I mean -- but I'm afraid he despises me for being queer -- even though I know he knows the why of my being and therefore understands and therefore forgives or even feels no need to.

In any case -- don't touch me because I might give into you if you do. And then I would kill you.

Love lay on its back with shoulder blades flattened and the wings compressed like coals. Its nipples stuck through the cheap t-shirt and provoked the heart they punctured. Jorge closed his eyes and felt the bed almost capsize. The other one was dry-heave sobbing, no sound, no water -- a sorrow with no issue or purpose.

I'm diseased, I'm infected, the god said. I have AIDS now -- my cells are damaged.

Please let me lie here and float through the night. The cost to you is nothing.

So they floated together without touching, chaste as two old-time Christians. And every time the pagan god shifted on the bed, everything seemed to turn upside down in the room, so that Jorge felt, "yet once more", the almost gymnastic weight of what was basically his own complete solitude. The feeling of another as dead weight.

*

Fantastically good-looking, astoundingly beautiful, don't look don't look. For the rest of his life J would wonder if he'd just been a fool not to turn, not to turn his face. Not just to give in.

One evening he woke from a lesser nightmare and felt an appendage crossing his legs, its tip on his groin. It was the stinger of a giant scorpion, resting outside attack mode, limp and hideous. The carapace scraped the sheet as the creature snored. If I don't move, nothing will happen. Jorge let his breathing take him into a distance from the one visiting, the pagan revenant, the ever recurring marea. He prayed as fervently as the legendary atheist in his foxhole. There was a divine release as he sank back into his own dreams.

In the morning the beautiful beast was gone, had even left town. That same day the reports from the student health center began. Everyone, almost everyone, was ill. Only the Asian students and a few Latinos had somehow -- mostly -- managed to avoid what the more hysterical students and administrators insisted on calling a "plague".

And we want to know who is responsible! Jorge stood in the center of the turmoil, feeling painfully well -- as though some menacing and (do not lie) bracing phenomenon had backed away from him suddenly. The sudden opening of the lion's jaw. Where is your friend? the administrators cried. We can't find even a forwarding address!

No no, Jorge said. You can't just demonize him. You have to fear and respect him and find out why he was here.

Look at all those young women in the hospital! they cried. That is Love's work!

But I don't think so, Jorge said.

*

When you offer up your entregar that's the whole point. You can't know if you'll get anything back or if so what it will be.

You have to give it to the right Person. That's how serious it is.

And if you give it you can't just ask for it back.

He was not the right one but that wasn't his fault.

*

The seasons passed irreversible. The missing person couldn't be found. A war started and young people were sent (or offered to go) overseas. You could say that life went on but in a sense it didn't. Not for everyone -- what a mystery! It moved in stops and starts and for some the stops lasted forever. Meanwhile the demon took on a legendary status on the campus but Jorge -- perverse to the end -- continued to defend him.

In a way Love had never touched anyone. His whole being had been abstract, a sort of myth-shaped hole. And there's no way he could have infected all those people they attributed to him. He had different DNA, remember?

He was Amor, he was really from Venus, not here. They are different and do things differently there.

*

Poem: Time the "Already"

*

Of time, the "already", there already were
substantial quantities -- for some too much --
they stood along the curb, nothing to do --
others had none at all, or couldn't seem
to tap into the place where it was stored.
Not enough, not enough, and so they swerved
in their big trucklike cars, doomed to be late
no matter what -- and for those at the curb
and for those at the wheel -- one single time,
there was one time, not two --
stretching to cover whatever there was,
only the distribution seemed bizarre:
jagged and somehow discontinuous,
jerking and pulling sideways like a bus.

*

Poem: The game

*

It was the time of solemn games when God --
the God even of those who didn't want
a God -- God would withdraw -- the God
of winter closed his mouth and subject words
were put back into assigned slots --
in a box of polished wood -- were put away --
nobody used the words, nobody could.

The way to play was to pretend
nobody played -- nor were there rules --
nor could you find the board nor were there turns
to take or not to take
nor was there anything at stake
nor any game but winter played alone
till our inertia woke us up again.

*

Poem: The wind

*

There was, outside, intention roving
that wasn't yours -- you neither knew, nor had,
the will whose shivering embodiment
was these curved weeds. It wasn't just applied
from the outside. It was and was the weeds
bicycling through. You scarcely moved.

You were like paint on a transparency.
You only moved as it moved. You were pinned
to this invisible breast of wind
heaving with its brief consciousness of you,

whose surplus, yours reluctantly,
made your own brief ability
to feel available -- and its intent
held like a hostage your complete consent.

*

Stepping into the decal

*

When I was a young child about 6, I happened to see a TV program that gave me a virtual orgasm, I don't know why. It was a live children's program, there was a decal or transparency filling the picture frame with the outline of a person, and then a man stepped into the decal. Nothing more than that and yet shots of joy inside me. Like a mule filling in for a horse, my groin did the work of my heart for me.

And this had little to do with sex or with the mirage object that people call "art", art as a thing to be studied. But had more to do with the way the soul places its consciousness over, under and inside things in order to tease out the reality that is there.

It was the outerness that thrilled me and pleased me. I didn't put that there -- the world is stylized, it just "objectively" is.

In John 12, Mary pours burial balm for a death that hasn't happened but is still present in the room (as Lazarus looks on) and then the people of the story step into the hosanna of Psalm 118 as though the words made the physical shape of the world they live in -- which they do, despite the hesitation of that "as though".

A good, penetrating and sorrowful translation of John could be made by substituting the word "the Christians" every time the given text says "the Jews". That means that the story -- its history, its art, its meaning -- isn't finished but continues to boil, recur and churn. Stepping inside it is exciting and dangerous, because nothing is settled. A word like "art" dodges what is happening.

*

That business of stepping in and into. One isn't a person of faith -- no such luck, one is just a person but standing in a place and in that place faith is there, like a color or a garment. At one moment the person is inside wearing the faith and "having" it, the next moment no one and nothing has moved but somehow the person is naked, and yet the realization of nakedness is itself like putting on clothes. So call it art if you want but the realization is the core, no more art than not art.

*

The Zen warrior went hunting

*

When the Zen warrior went hunting he traveled alone. Broke the basic rule of safety that was: have someone else know. Or accompany. Let them be told. But instead alone. Carried his equipment without help. Traveled far. Took very little food. He hunted his own lack of appetite among the animals. He would bring a prize home if he could manage to eat the small amount that he only wanted to. Not more. He hunted this strange thing.

He set his stand in the woods. Bare and skeletal as was everything. The snow upon the oak. The oak the oak another oak. Snow on each. Snow above them the warrior below. In the air a chill no words for, there weren't words. Below a given temperature all words froze. Only what was in the pocket, only those words could be said at all.

Raccoon tracks, a deer trail. Down that trail they were bound to come. That was tradition. And crows overhead, then no crows, at least no sound of them. An hour then an hour then another hour. Each one colder than the other somehow. So in essence they were like what? The feel of them went deeper then deeper into -- but there the pocket lacked a word. Didn't have it handy.

The hunter looked around. The looking did not make a sound. He raised his weapon. Nonexistent! Air between his hands. Air held steady by his fingers. That was all. He aimed, carefully aimed. A shot in this air, the shot made of air -- that was the entirety of the shot. No animal either fell from this shot or evaded this shot. There was no shot. Here we are -- free at last -- in a world so quiet that there is simply no animal that shoots, or has ever shot, any other animal, not today, not ever. Neither simply nor entirely nor in any other way. Here it doesn't happen. And so the hunter sort of chewed on this fact. And his pockets were empty.

*

Useless poems - 11

*

A certain path

This twisting pain must be the path,
what other path for one like you,
insensible to all sensible things?
Your path to God is this hooked thread of breath.

Is sun aflame? horizon blue?
Anyone else would know but you when you
notice at all think it's a sign you do.
So pain is needed, mindful pain
to wake you into mindfulness again,
a hooked blood painterly and horrible
whose spatter must not clot till even you
feel the things clearing in you, even you
feel the you hooked and reeled into
this ultimate you're blindly walking through.

*

J -- The Cruise

*

You mustn't profit from acts of violence committed by yourself. J had had a friend named Arthur, a "pillar" of the gay community (a pillar with no building!) and Arthur had fallen in love with a hustler from P Street. Arthur died, the hustler inherited, no one questioned. The ex-wife grieved and wrung her hands -- no one paid attention to her. Then the hustler took on a name and an identity: Johnny People. Johnny disappeared from the community, money lets you do that. Then about a year later J took an exotic cruise to a semi-imaginary country far away from all probability. No pillars here, my Lord. Johnny was also on the cruise with yet a new name and a new persona for him to "people". And Johnny developed a sexual fixation on the elusive J but that didn't matter too much, as it turned out.

They stood in their life jackets. I feel I know you, Johnny said. My name is Kevin.

I don't know you, J said. You are a total stranger.

Maybe, Kevin said, but still... it's the strangeness that feels so familiar. Flowers in windows. The all-clear whistle.

The rocking of the boat made it difficult to think. Strangers were "exchanging the peace" in the so-called library, filled with best-sellers and out-of-date travelogues. How I am missing my daily dose of the Times, Kevin said. Also of course the Internet. One needs these things.

Did you know that I am 14 years old and horny as hell on the Internet? Kevin asked. That's the role I play there, that's my "space". My list of dear friends goes scrolling for ages. It's all just a lovely fantasy perhaps. I have this beautiful sense of freedom.

His clothes were vulgar and at the same time very drab. Without Arthur he seemed loose, directionless.

The boat had a daily wine-tasting yet it always seemed to be the same wine. Something from California with a screw top.

A midnight costume party. Many didn't have much costume to speak of and didn't speak anyway. J would haunt the library hoping someone would return a new "sensation novel". Most of the sensations one knew of had been flogged to death.

The cruise ship had filled the ship's chapel with sound equipment. You couldn't move or see the altar. A blasphemy but no one said anything. People averted their eyes. Down the corridor, Kevin won Bingo hands down and grabbed J in the crush on the way out. I want you to come celebrate with me. Thank God for J that Tina was there. Tina pushed with that amazing pectoral strength, pushed and exerted her will. Get lost, you loser. Pulsing bystanders with their shoulder-hair a-bristle. We run a polite ship here. There will be none of this, there will be none of that. Slap slap. Push the blighter to the deck's edge, push a little farther. They say he murdered Arthur. No no, Tina, it's all right. Vacationers lifted their parasols as they strolled up and down the passage, and it was up and down, such was the naughtiness of the waves. Then the parasols fell like missiles. Kevin's knocked an old man down from his walker. No. No. There will be none of that, my good man.

Tina asked: What do you think? Should I push this asshole overboard?

Relax Tina, J said.

Arthur would not have wanted such a thing. Dear gentle Arthur.

There were open sores all over Kevin's back and he was "peopled" with bruises worse than Johnny's were in his street days. When the boat lurched, his cocktail would spill and the syrup would linger in the pocked spaces. The sky was purple but not a bruisy purple, more a livid color like a piece of carbon paper that had gotten wet. There was nothing left in his glass. Kevin, you just threw it overboard. That's a crime of the sea.

The glass was just glass, Kevin said. You are what I'd call litter, man. Leave me alone.

You left him suffocated in an alley, J said. Gay people were the only family he still had. We don't do that to each other.

J said all this but kept his mouth closed. Kevin rocked into the wee hours. Disco had been resuscitated for the 100th time. When the man disappeared overboard not even the purser said anything. It isn't as though these were ties that broke down. All ties were broken. The thing about "you mustn't profit" was really more structural. That is, the person who broke human laws had then to submit to different ones, to animal ones. And then it didn't matter. Nobody notices say a dead seagull when its body disappears. Or a dead squirrel. Gurus say that the right to be human is precious, has to be attained -- not earned exactly but at least not spurned exactly. Money is so beside the point, sex is so irrelevant. Anyway it had taken this orgiastic cruise to turn J into a quasi monk. He ended up hardly leaving his stateroom. The purple light poured into the window and thickened like glue. It was hard to read by. Lots of time for thinking. No hangover, he didn't drink. No pain, no nothing. So what is this nada nada, where is your faith? He tried to pray, managed a little, but couldn't shake the hatred in his heart, not completely. This was just one more piece of damage that Johnny had done to things. The kid had maybe just been scrambling for security but but. But to let a person die. How did you pray around that? The truth is that evil is suffocating. It exists. It exists. Or if it's an illusion then equally so are the people who give into it. Surely they are the ones who don't exist. Can we just forget about them? Why not, why not? When the ship docked at some wretched unknown port, J got off and then refused to get back on. Let the world be my monastery. What I renounce is having any preference. So he turned his back on the cruise. Because he never went back, he also never heard that a man had gone overboard.

*

Thoughts about a Place

*

You looked for your destiny -- or your salvation -- at the bottom of time, you pawed through time like a famished little dachshund, but you never thought to ransack place, or even tried to learn how. So you chose time over place, why? Why time not place? Would a place properly understood be your more vivid form of salvation?

*

One was careful to say place not space. Because space might perhaps be empty, defined that way -- but a place was always occupied.

*

Jane Austen fainted when they told her that her family would move. Wise lady! When one moves not everything moves and then how can you be in two places at once? Which part of you is where, and at the end where are *you*? Or put it this way: place isn't transferable. It is what it is. There is no substitute for a given place and no place substitutes for another. So if you have it you have what is not comparable or expendable, nothing you can just give away without thinking. Because you are wedged in it so far that the wedging is you. And there you stand, completely happy. Enclosed.

*

And a place cannot be ransacked either. Its meaning is not hidden at the bottom of it or hidden behind what is there or in any way extractable. Because what is there? What would that "there" be? That was what you wanted, after all. You thought you were searching for a meaning but the meaning and the search were in a place and the place was what you wanted, not the lesser things it contained. It was "already", it was, it was not hidden unless in plain sight, which only hid itself from people who didn't look at it -- oh, if they only knew! "Plain sight" was paradise!

*

What would it mean for one actually to be where one was? Would salvation have a piece of this, in its not grasping so much at an elsewhere? I mean to say, I think the transcendence is real and the imminence is real but they are just about the same. In the sense that both are intense or both are weak. When you feel them you then don't have to do so much walking, or else the walking is itself right *there*, itself placed and not really moving. Because what if time could be seen as no longer breaking down one place to reach another, but instead simply the deepening of your being in a place? Time would be the act of understanding a place. It wouldn't exactly go anywhere. Or the going somewhere would be very calm.

*

Understanding would be mindfulness with nothing reductive about it.

*

You could walk away from those aesthetic cliches -- death in a vacuum, meaningless death, meaningless life -- all those wearisome monologues that try to presuppose existence without a place. As though even absolute freedom didn't have its placement, its being placed, a place that itself is perhaps not free, or a place that is neither free nor unfree but something else. This whole bliss is "already" set down and the only part of it that is "not yet" is your relation to it. Maybe you are not "virtual" but just confused. Maybe unhappiness is not really where you are.

*

Otherwise you would be just like today's affluent ones (inwardly so very poor) who endlessly move from place to place and from address to address, starting over each time and somehow remaining quite the same -- with that "same" never quite defined or confronted or even effectively evaded.

*

If you harp on God's absence so much, is that because God's presence would be too much to bear? And because it might provide a sort of jewel shaped hollow for your own presence or absence?

*

Jorge - The shack

*

Cast your memory back, let the shell of denial crack open, remember. Remember how it was with you as a child. How vulnerable and weak you were.

No thinking. Estelle sick, and soon thereafter dead. School a nightmare because the meaner kids sensed your weakness after what Max had done (or did they sense your *own* sense of having consented?). Sweet sister Una away at school with the Swiss to be finished and turned into a stranger. A stranger! And so the boys in the schoolyard said, What are you a coward? No. So you went out with them. Then when you backed down they used force. It is like some clerks' compulsion to tidiness, the bully's need to take weakness and make it weaker, as though trying to blot it out like a clerical error in God's copybook. Sad mean fools. Cast your memory back, recall how it was.

Jorge's life: blessed but so bad-feeling. Yet even the suffering came as if wrapped in God's own cotton wool -- joy itself never that far away. To suffer at all, first you have had this gift: existence. And memory is a form it takes.

They ragged you and harassed you first at school, they scented blood. Pretty boy for a greaser. Leave me alone, won't you leave me alone? Am I supposed to hit you? I don't want to hit you.

You looked soft because that's what you were. You were not the hard person you are now. You hadn't been taught to hit others to win their respect. None of that in the garden. It had been assumed that violence was a perversion.

One afternoon the two worst bullies dragged you through the weeds. There was the shack where the caretaker's son lived. The caretaker's son. Now the caretaker's son had been maybe a bit brain damaged from the war, everybody said, some invisible headwound, but that was only the start, it got much worse, he became abandoned by his friends because he couldn't find a way to do things in balance. For instance, if you lie then lie in a hesitant way so as to be believed. But he didn't lie at all. His wife said he'd lost the knack to make love with passion but not overmuch passion, not insistent, now he couldn't find the sweet spot before it bothered her. He tried so hard that she grew irritated. His emotions were not a show. When they were there they just came out -- in honesty, in fact. He'd become a bit of a Christian, the type that people find so boring.

So soon after his father refused to see him, his wife left him. One two. Then he moved into the shack in the woods, squatting on the campus land that hadn't been reclaimed yet. The place was a garden if you looked at it that way. To the shack of the caretaker's son the 2 boys dragged their prey. They pushed then dragged you through the weeds. Jorge, they took you by the shack. And you let them.

Memory does not take you to a different place, it is not an exotic locale, it is right here. All of this is here -- it is both in you and itself is you. You excavate your own present self and find, to your surprise, the past. Still living, still in fact occurring, and still in need of resolution.

They fed you with dope, which just made you feel sleepy and congested, dull and useless. Then they gave you something else and you began to hallucinate. Even the pounding felt like a hallucination. And it was like having a weakness tying you at every articulate point, at every edge. Your tongue, your throat, your brain. The parts of your body all felt depressed by a single weight. Then the things happened to you that were like what your uncle had done and the desolating thought began to hit you that you were somehow willing it on. You lay collapsed in the weeds when the caretaker's son came home. Hardly a person at all. A worm and not a man. Somehow cocooned by joy. Existing, still existing.

Now as for the caretaker's son. His dog had 3 legs. Sometimes she stood as though balancing on the missing leg. As though it was there. She was a stray, wouldn't leave, clung to her chosen master, whose name Kyle sounded like a bark. She would cross a street to follow and follow. Shouldn't have. You're not really mine. That same day a car hit her leg and drove away. From that point we were inseparable.

It was said that some boys had tried to stone the dog. (The weak hitting the weaker, our planet's Darwinian zone, place of God's abandonment, neither "here" nor "there".) When the stone hit, the dog didn't even whimper but master fell down -- 50 feet away. There was a bruise on master's belly, one on his hip, transferred, taken on. The boys dropped their stones and ran away. The caretaker's son, Kyle, he lay in front of the hut. Dog ran up and licked him, crying, Hey what's up? Hey what's up?

I love you, darling. You are my human.

*

It's not the victims barred from heaven. But for their abuser perhaps no hope? At least little hope. The "holiness of the heart's affections", you'd better cling to that. Hold fast to it with what soul you have.

The whole idea of Darwin just disintegrates when 2 hands touch. It's not scientific but just so.

*

A year or 2 later -- as experiences transfer from person to person, shifting meaning ever so slightly -- you lay where the caretaker's son once was sprawled. There were stains on your pants. Blood and shame. Your self-esteem felt squeezed like a tadpole, between fingers, till it burst. I am a worm and not a man. The one thing I know. A comforting misery. Both at once.

When the caretaker's son got back from his job -- he subbed as a bagger of groceries -- the first thing he did, he stumbled and fell down. Tripped on the stranger. Oh yeah, I remember this. He went into his shack, then the crippled dog bounced out. Bounced. Licked with fervor. You might say you were me almost, Kyle said. He poured his last bottle of sparkling water on the boy's face. A bare teen, it seemed.

I love you, Jorge said. No I mean, I really appreciate this.

Yes, said the caretaker's son. I am affirmed, that's good.

One grows ugly, trashy, bald, smelly, now fat, misshapen, stupid, feet planted wrong. The essence shines out now without superficial things covering me up. I am quite good. At least I'm adequate now.

Now to the meal. The sacred meal. Inside the shack, the caretaker's son opened the soup can, Italian wedding. Bless this lovely container we share, all food is good that you provide -- and now enough of these lovely mushy words. While the caretaker's son "cooked", you leaned on the recycled bean bag with the showy gash. There was an ornate decaled skateboard on the floor with a picture of Jesus on it. The 3-legged dog lay on her towel and licked herself. The hot plate became hot. Sacred meal. Fellowship. The holiness of the heart's affections. We slopped food on the skateboard's face -- that was the kind of meal it was. And the caretaker's son was exactly the sort of person you would instinctively have ignored or looked down on, he was gross and misshapen, a soul irreversibly scarred. For that very reason, this man was part of the cotton joy that wrapped our suffering. It was a wonderful feast and even the dog sat "agape" as an apostle would have said. Cast your memory back. Remember.

*

Jorge - Flashafter

*

Important to specify the crime -- not one of hands -- the crime was not (just) of hands fumbling with a child's belt. What the men did was worse. The meaning was inside, a hot expanse of pavement in one's inside, boiling, hot enough to fry an egg on - that was the soul, burning scaps of itself - here was the crime scene, but no it still has not been said, the whole thing has not been sufficiently said.

The cracked pavement under a bum in a worn out town. Infrastructure bombed and damaged. What are you trying to say?

The crime lay in the response, that it was a response without freedom now. A child internalizes what happens to it. That is the definition of a child, that porosity. The creature that lets abuse just run off its side into the gutter, that is the adult, the very definition of an adult. Hardened. Horrible, you're already practically in the grave, to be like that. Hardened.

The crime came after the hand and lay in the response. It was the little curled up horrible thing in the midst of abuse that said: there is something enjoyable in that, after all. There is something of me in what happened. As though that was what had been supposed to be.

It was a string on a bass that was not supposed to be plucked, at least not plucked in that cavalier manner. The men plucked it, they broke it, and childhood was over in a hurry -- all in one afternoon. And that was the crime at the root of the crime.

*

Jorge - The Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 3

*

The problem was the way children felt among adults -- so small, so limited, so vulnerable. So much the worm on the ground, to be either stepped on or saved -- or held in suspense, for years and years. It was like the way of the family dog, sitting in the living room. The dog may in some sense think he's human but never imagines he's on the same level as the other humans. The humans have mysterious powers for bad and for good. They can open things, do things. They open the cans of food and shut them again. They have great powers to caress and to hurt.

One needs them and yet wishes they were gone.

The sinister Max would follow the boy around. And he wouldn't go away. He stayed day after day, for a reason. Not even Estelle seemed to know what it was.

On the back porch, there he sat, every part of him far away except his eyes. Those eyes were always placed upon you. They were wet and moist and yet tight as a clamp. And it was not he who went away but Una, one's soulmate. A week away at a distant Y camp.

So make the horrible part go quickly. Tell it at a distance if you can.

The boy went into the garden by himself. The absence of his sister stood by his side. The flowers all seemed dusty and hairy. there was a rotting smell by the pond. Not just the smell of decay but of new growth too. But he didn't want either one.

He looked behind him and the back porch was empty.

Now he went past the edge of the garden, beyond where he and his sister had ever gone. And there was a cabin there or the shell of one.

The three legged dog stood in front of it and barked. A robust deep sound. Go away! Go away!

The protected space had shrunk to a square, a rectangle. At one edge the dog, at one edge the battered and maimed trees. The nymphs fled from the trees like birds, perhaps they were birds.

Behind was his home. In front of him the cabin. A hermit lived there, a young man with a beard, oh crazy one, perhaps the caretaker's son, brain-damaged, squatting on the campus grounds, I guard the creek from terrorists. We used to see him across the field, always smiling. Everything is all right now, everything is good. He stood in the fog wearing nothing. When Jorge turned around to face home he saw his uncle standing in his path blocking it.

No, I am not going to go on. You have to write with a purpose, a purpose that serves, that offers service to someone but who is served? Cast your memory back like a fishing rod but the fish in this creek are dead now. Move on, move on. Something has happened to you, something bad, Estelle said. Why won't you tell me? And Una sat next to you at night in the TV room, with the TV off, she was so careful not to look at you, she waited for you to speak. And waited. And waited. Auntie's health so bad and the fear the fear of -- no not of being orphaned but worse. Someone else as your guardian. Do not say the name, do not even breathe it.

And Jorge lay on his stomach on the bed, fingering the little Canterbury cross that Estelle had given him. It was a cross without a person on it but the locus of a person. If you spoke to it in a sense it spoke back. And Jorge would ask, over and over:

Why didn't you protect me? Why didn't you protect me better?

*

Jorge - The Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 2

*

The caretaker professed to be an atheist, which was a sort of lie or evasion -- no one in the remote land called America was fully able to disbelieve in God, the belief was so to speak in the blood -- not via thinking, it was not a bypath of mentation, rather lay in the sheer act or ambience of whatever harbored thinking, it was impregnated, as all things in that country were and as any Martian would have instantly seen, with the abiding sense of intention underlying everything. Everything possible had first been made possible. There was God (named or sometimes better not) and God underlay everything. So the caretaker was in this sense a bit of a poseur but in any case he called himself an atheist. Enough of that. He was one of those people who would not answer the door. Did not answer the phone. So care was not taken, the garden had no caretaker, and it needed none. It was beautiful without any human touch. But enough of that. The garden thrived on its own.

Jorge remembered the exact day that the Garden of Orthodoxy shut its gate on him -- like a blossom snapping shut at the tap of dusk -- leaving the insects without access or escape and all the happier stories replaced by more somber ones.

Aunt Estelle was in the kitchen rubbing her hands. Una would stare at her and look away. Uncle Max is coming back from his travels, isn't he?

I supose we need to tell the caretaker to get the place ready, Estelle said. But the caretaker wouldn't answer his door.

One day the caretaker's son went off to war. It was either Korea or Vietnam or Iraq, there were so many wars, there was pretty much always a war rustling that far off kingdom. The caretaker received notice by mistake that his son was dead. The authorities had confused 2 recruits. When the caretaker received the news, all of the blood quite visiblly drained from his face and it never returned. You saw a sort of death before your eyes. No God would have done this to me, he said. Then he closed his door. Functions continued but the main thing had been blocked.

Meanwhile the son, the real son, recovered from his injuries, which were sizable, and knit the heart back together. The college paper proclaimed his return. The son came back and knocked on his father's door but the caretaker wouldn't open.

My son is dead, the man cried. I don't know who you are.

Go away!

*

Meanwhile Estelle tried to keep the children out of the way of these adult happenings but she was very distracted because Max had returned. Her husband had a wandering kind of job and a wandering spirit. He was not there when he was there. Una and Jorge hardly knew him, perhaps only had learned from him the strange lesson that male adults were remote, always preoccupied and "far", as though a species not related to -- what? To the heart's affection as it was understood. As though he was not really family. His handsomeness and darkness suggested another way of being. Adulthood for men was something you would grow up into against your will. It was a path out of here.

At the dinner table, in the living room, his eyes followed the boy everywhere and wouldn't let go. How big and strong you have suddenly become.

Now where do you go in that big garden? What do you do all day?

It's just a big place, Jorge said. We just hang out. Nothing interesting.

But I like things that aren't interesting, Uncle said.

Well, when it's hot we submerge ourselves in the trees.

I would like to do that with you, Uncle said. I would enjoy that so.

Away from adult worries.

One feels so free inside nature. Away from society's eyes. One can do whatever one wants. It's nobody's business, just your own assunto. So you can just be yourself, you know?

Then Estelle came in with her hot pad and cloudy casserole, wondering why everyone was so quiet.

Always his eyes followed you. They were like something clinging to your legs and arms, something you tried to brush away but couldn't. One's hair thickened with fear. Responses became complex, and what wasn't painful turned painful simply because it wasn't. This congested state of being was your future. The heart wished to look away, the heart muscle twisted. The loins lingered and looked back. Then the heart really began to beat strangely, so completely off the beat. Why oh why did this man have to be here?

END OF PART 2

*

Useless poems - 10

*

There was a hand in the sun. It was my hand
yet not my hand. It touched me like a hand
and made me warm. Its substance was the sun.
Or else the person of the sun -- because
I felt intention in that hand -- but not
my own because at that time I had none.
I wanted badly not to block the sun
with my ephemeral trauma. To be healed
I knew I had to slow down, had to yield
and do this not in such a willful way
that the sun became only appliqué.
I had to let the outside enter me
with its most inexplicable caress
to unkink and de-stress my deep distress.

*

Jorge: Flashforward

*

And after his innocence was lost -- or exploded as nonexistent -- Jorge would walk the garden of orthodoxy and watch the birds explode too, as if all the leaves had blown away in a sphere of chatter. So the fall surrounded his fall.

They were not birds but nymphs, the lost nymphs of poetry. They blew out of the trees.

They flew in a burst out of the trees, all the nymphs, all the exiled nymphs. They were too delicate to protect.

You bad man! You bad man! they chattered, as Jorge walked under them and all the roving ones stared after him. You have chased us away! the nymphs cried.

Not me, Jorge answered. I want you here. I love to watch you flashing your little skirts and flying over my head. Or hiding in the trees, which are your abode and possession, after all. Every tree to its nymph.

I have not exiled you. But his heart sank as the nymphs deserted their milieu. And the campus developers scouted yet another piece of land, hungry for dorms, hungry for labs, needing something to fill what they saw as empty absent space.

All this was well after Jorge was defiled. The birds left long ago.

*

Thoughts on place

*

A place is enclosed, unlike space. It might be enclosed by sky but still it is closed. Otherwise how could one even be there? All this nonsense of being somewhere virtually -- forget it!

Perhaps this is why poetry of all the arts captures "place" so well. The lovely click-I'm-closed of end rhyme like the border of one's spiritual dwelling, yours precisely because it doesn't contain or even acknowledge all that space beyond that is *not* yours.

I have never seen a "place" captured in a photograph. Never the buzzing balmy edge of things, that gaseous outline that permeates it and permeates you and makes it yours as it binds you to it. Rarely in a painting, never in a photograph -- except maybe in a black and white photo of old architecture? maybe. Also in sepia stuff and old Civil War hallucinations. And Hitchcock's "The Birds" is full of a specific place.

*