So Louise became something
more profound than tormented: she became haunted. Having traficked in the sort
of memories people had spent thousands of years trying to forget, and the sort
of dreams they had spent thousands of years trying to awake from,she had wandered
at will and without accountability on the apocalyptic landscape of the imagination.
Now a stain spread from the darkest center of the unaccountable imagination, becoming
only more confounding and unbearable with every moment, the question of when and
where the imagination becomes accountable by and to whom, beginning with the one
who imagines a nightmare simply for the thrill of its imagining, moving to the
one who renders it an artifact to be experienced in common by others, eventually
to the collective audiencethat chooses to watch, for the thrill of watching, a
girl actually being murdered in a movie, to the individual man or woman who, before
suppressing it in horror, entertains a fleeting curiosity, dallying with the temptation
to look, then finally conforming to whatever sick social chic compels everyone
at a cocktail party to watch, like they would watch the home movie of a summer
vacation or a child getting his first bike. At what point, if any, in the exchange
betweenthe one whpo bears the fruitof the imagination and the one who devours
it, does it all stop short of being beyond the pale, at what point is everyone
complicit, at what point can one consider himself unaccountable for what the imagination
has wrought, right up until the moment that he is damned by it?
I blew two notes down, then shrill.
I started to clap my hands, a hard, slow rhythm. Imade the melody with my feet
alone. The kids thought that was pretty funny too. I rocked on the table edge,
closed my eyes, and clapped and played. In theback, somebody began to clap with
me. I grinned into the flut (difficult) and the sound brightened. I remembered
the music I'd gotten from Spider. So I tried something I'd never done before.
I let one melody go on without my playing it, and played another instead. Tones
tugged each other into harmonyas they swooped from clap to clap.I let those
two continue and threaded a third above them. I pushed the music into a body
swayer, a foot shaker, till fingers upon the tablecloth pounced on the pattern.
I played, looking hard at them, weighing the weight of music in them, and when
there was enough, I danced. Movements repeated themselves: making dances is
the opposite of taking them. I danced on the table. Hard. I whipped them with
music. Sounds peeled from sounds. Chords fell open like sated flowers. People
called out. I shrilled my rhythms at them down the hollow knife, gougedsounds
down their spines the way you pith a frog. They shook in their seats. I put
into the music a fourth line, dissonant to lots and lots of other notes. Three
people had started dancing with me. I made the music make them. Rhythm buoyed
their jerking. The old man was shaking his shoulders at the blue eyed girl.
Clap. The youngster shook shoulder-Clap-to shoulder. The older couple held hands
very tightly. Clap. Sound banked behin-Clap-itself. Silence a moment. Clap.
Then loosed throught the room; like dragons in the gorse, wild they moaned together,
beat their thighs and bellies to four melodies.
There were three pieces of
dingy ivory furniture in the room, a bed a bureau, a chair.Over the bed was a
remarkably bad religious painting, a very effeminate head of Christ with teardrops
visible just below the eyes.The charm of the room was was produced by my sister's
collection of glass. She loved colores glassand had covered the walls with shelves
of little glass articles, all of them light and delicate in color. These she washed
and polished with endless care. When you entered the room there was always this
soft, trnsparent radiencein it which came from the glass absorbing whatever faint
light came through the shades on Death Valley. I have no idea how many articles
there were of this delicate glass. There must have been hundreds of them. But
Laura could tell you exactly. She loved each one.
MARY: You sure you don't want
to try a couple of tokes? You're missing something.
TC: You twisted my arm
(Man and boy, I've dragged some powerful grass, never enough to have
acquired a habit, but enough to judge quality and know the difference between
ordinary Mexican weed and luxorious contraband like Thai-sticks and the supreme
Maui-Wowiee. But after smoking the whole of one of Mary's roaches, and while halfway
through another, I felt as though seized by a delicious demon, embraced by a mad
marvelous merriment: the demon tickled my toes, scratched my itchy head, kissed
me hotly with his red sugary lips, shoved his fiery tongue down my throat. Everything
sparkled; my eyes were like zoom lenses; I could read the titles of books on the
highest shelves: The Neurotic Personality of Our Times by Karen Horney; Eimi
by e.e. cummings; Four Quartets; The Collected Poems of Robert Frost)
I don't know how it will be
in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces
shaping a future whose faces we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to
us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other
things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one
man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread
from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and
housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound
to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass
or collective production has entered our economics, our politics and even our
religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea
God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension
toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
They say that February
is the shortest month, but you they could be wrong.
Compared, calender page against calender page, it looks to be the shortest month,
all right. Spread between January and March, like lard on bread, it fails to
reach the crust on either side. In its galoshes - and you'kk never see February
in stocking feet - it's a full head shrter than December, although in leap year,
when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose.
However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer
than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because
it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip
off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face,
behavior that grows qickly old.
February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page
add up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what
kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of of
February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's
day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frgid, antsy
Februaryhas cause for celebration, indeed.
The silhouette of the fire
among the black trees changed like a kaleidoscope, and the dance of the flames
was tireless and relentless. Here a large red bear of fire rolls out on the
meadow, jumping clumsily and turning somersaults; losing tufts of his flaming
hair, he crawls along the trunk to gather honey, and reachingthe top of the
tree, hugs the branches in the hairy embrace of his crimson paws, balances on
them, strewing pink needles in a rain of golden sparks. Now he heaves himself
lightly across to the next ree, while on the one which he has left numerous
blue candles light up on the bare, black branches;purple mice rush up and down
the boughs, and by their rapid movements one can see how capriciously the blue
ringlets of smoke dance; hundred of fiery ants climb up and down the bark of
the tree.