truthfront

Category: philosophy

  • We communicate

    He had to remind himself to breathe.

    Sitting there in the truck, liquid daylight leaking into the city, he couldn’t breathe unless he thought about it. Counting backwards from thirty. He reached forward to the radio and turned the station. He turned again, and then again, trying to find a balance, something to soothe him.

    “Hey asshole. Stop with the radio.”

    “I’m a little on edge, is all.”

    “Yeah, me too. Before I break it.”

    “All right, jesus.” He reached forward and turned the radio off. “That better?”

    The driver didn’t say anything. He leaned his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes.

    The guy in the passenger seat looked out the window. He didn’t care to watch the dark monotony of night slip away to another day’s luminous truth. He didn’t notice the ravens swirling stark in the rectangle of sky above the alley. He could have rolled down his window and focused his attention on the sound of morning, the crisp regeneration and cool yawning concrete. That might have calmed him. He picked up his Walther instead, slipped out the magazine and then clicked it back in. Out and in. Down and up. Click, click. Click, click. The smell of the city never changes overnight and for some men the sound and feel of a loaded gun is worth a thousand dawns.

    “You know what I was thinking?” the driver said.

    “You were thinking.”

    “We’re isolating ourselves.”

    The guy in the passenger seat stopped playing with the Walther.

    “I mean, not like, you and me. I mean all of us. The world. Americans.”

    “How’s that?” Click, click.

    “The technologically advanced.”

    “Please elaborate.”

    “There is movement toward isolation in the wake of technological advancement. This happens on a personal level, but also culturally. People shrinking from each other. Less face-to-face contact. The more technologically advanced a culture becomes, the more its parameters of communication shift. The modes change shape with each new wave of progress. Think about it.”

    “The Internet.”

    “Think about the language. Dialects. Think about means of expression. The invention of words and terms.”

    “You’re thinking about the Internet. People shop for anything from home. They don’t need to go out, spend hours in the bookstore or trying on a pair of pants.” Click, click. “They don’t have to go to the bar or to church to find a date, to sample the talent.”

    “Notice how almost everyone has a mobile phone now,” the driver said, lifting his up and looking at it. “We use these phones to communicate in a myriad of ways.”

    “Less standing in line. The Internet has made standing in line an endangered species.”

    “Text and e-mail. Voice. Video, photo. Imagine if we could see the streams of communication going on all around us. Even right now, at this hour. Imagine all the invisible voices and coded language, all the hidden data. Slender rhythm of radio and television waves. Digital binary information, little ones and zeros dictating the pulse and flow of all the world’s knowledge.”

    “The prayers.” Click, click. “Imagine if we could see all the prayers.”

    “I wonder what it would look like, if each mode of communication was a different color.”

    They looked through the windows to the alley set in cool morning shadow, the chinked and stained concrete, old brick facades of buildings left to derelicts and huddled runaways. Dumpsters ahead and behind them filled with waste matter. The driver looked up through the windshield to the sky, a snatch of cloudless pale blue emerging stridently to claim another awed human rumination.

    “The change is so gradual that we can hardly scrutinize it,” the driver said. “I mean, we go from a megabyte of technology to a gigabyte. We go from cordless phones to cellular phones.”

    “From Playstation 2 to Playstation 3.”

    “We don’t graduate straight to high-def television from shortwave radio.”

    “Self-deification takes patience.” Click, click.

    “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the transformation is dense and tangible enough to observe and study, maybe even to manipulate. Maybe this is what the guys in lab coats and power suits are thinking of next. Clustered in places called Washington. New York. Los Angeles. Cairo.”

    “Las Vegas.”

    “Sitting around a table, men wearing gleaming white ghoutras and women dressed in paramilitary fatigues, guerrilla-clad luminaries with mysterious backgrounds and red smiling faces.”

    “Calculating the science of communication in order to control it.”

    The guy in the passenger seat clicked the magazine free of the gun and clicked it back into place and he looked down to it black and reassuring in his hands and he imagined how he would react if the people in the bank mutinied or if the cops came in with their guns aloft and he tried to imagine pointing the Walther at one of them and pulling the trigger and he told himself he could do it if he had to but he wasn’t convinced. He pictured his wife of twenty-four and in his mind he saw their son with his mother’s curly blond hair and his father’s stone gray eyes and he tried to imagine how his family would survive if the action this morning went south.

    “Do they even have record stores anymore?” he said. “Are there such establishments as record stores, and are they operational? Quite frankly I haven’t seen one in at least a year.”

    “People on the subway. Most of them plugged into a music player. The others with their heads buried in a shiny magazine. Maybe there are books. I think people still read books.”

    “Nobody burns books anymore.” Click, click.

    “Nobody talks about how the ball team is doing. Nobody asks about the wife and kids.”

    “The discussion board is the new subway.”

    “People assume the wife and kids are fine. The wife and kids are healthy and plentifully drugged.”

    “People assume.” Click, click. “People shouldn’t assume.”

    The driver reached forward and flipped the radio back on. He changed the station to a news program and the two of them sat listening to the hurried headlines until the sweeping brand of day lit its distinct mark upon the world and the cellular phone buzzed in the driver’s pocket.

    “We’re on,” he said, and started the truck.

  • Our writer

    And then the dust rose, sweeping upward into the pink light of dusk, and men clad in black armor and carrying guns chased the voices in their earpieces up the stairs, shouting commands, and a mile away thousands upon thousands coalesced to hear the words of one man in the dawn of their lives, a crowd amassed and awed into rapture on a crystalline summer night. The helicopter continued to hover before him, thick whapping blades carrying mechanical wind and the chaotic heat of the day, roaring intimidation unlike anything he’d experienced. He stared up through the glass to the faces of the two pilots and he could see their mouths moving and he could see their eyes frozen upon him but he could not discern their message. He half-expected gunfire to rip him apart at the seams of his being, his own blood spraying before him in plumed mists the color of sunset. Death by chopper. He wondered if the men running up the stairs would tackle him to the ground and press their knees into his back and he grimaced with the imagined pain and he could feel the small jutting coarseness of the concrete digging into the side of his face. He stared up at the helicopter and froze. Should he wave, try to convince them he was not a terrorist? Or should he get back in the van, drive it down the ramp? Feet frozen into place by fear, the fragmented buzz in his head distorting his thoughts, bending his mind into patterned confusion and suspicion. He felt like an actor in a film and no one was watching. Already he was trying to figure out how to explain this to someone else.

    He thought of time as a snagged thread. The air he breathed. Dust whipping about him in the eye of the chopper storm. He thought of Vietnamese children dug deep in some Mekong trench where they told stories about alien aircraft and giant men with white and black skin from a place called America and he felt the vigor of their dread but nothing of their courage. He looked through the open window of the van to his book lying on the seat, face-down and spread open-winged, the interrupted message, potent talisman of knowledge, and he thought they were going to kill him or arrest him for his thoughts. That’s what this is all about. Incendiary mind, cultivator of dangerous ideas, collector of conflagrant titles. Banned on thirty-three lists worldwide. Because this is the power of ideas, the power of books. They retain the most practical and innocuous guise, glue and folded paper, lines of words on pages. Colors and privation of colors. Patterns and pattern-less. This is their danger. Because hidden inside that trite and compact geometry, books are the most resplendent of weapons. They carry and transmit the ideas of men and women and urge others toward momentous things.

    He stood before the chopper and watched the pilots talking into their headsets, he imagined them saying, Suspect is armed. Alpha-three, two-niner. Copy. Looks to be a title from a reclusive American author inside the vehicle. Proceed with caution. Use force. Shoot to kill, they say. He imagines leaden trajectories in the tens of thousands, so many bullets flying in the air they create their own cosmic roar and erase him from the planet entirely.

    He looked from the copter to the vacant roof of the parking garage about him. The sky was bleeding pink and red and orange gashes across the expanse of blue. He tried to block out the sound of the helicopter to listen for his cellular phone. Maybe they were trying to call him, the cops, the government. Let’s work something out, they say. Surrender. Negotiate with us. We know what you’re trying to do, rogue operative. Tell us who you’re not working for and what you’ve been thinking. Put your hands in the air. Hand over the book. Lie on your stomach, arms stretched out at your sides. Drop the paperback. He wished the pilots would give him some sort of message. Vacate the roof immediately. Put your hands in the air. Lie on your back, play dead. Prepare for death. Draw a target on your abdomen. Give us another reason to machine-gun you. He wanted them to either shoot him or fly off into the sun or maybe he just hoped for something else to happen because there was a helicopter whirling mad and threatening right on top of him and it was kind of freaking him out.

    He himself was a writer. His own formulated plots, the stories, the characters, assassins and provocateurs. The subversive themes. His own ideas, the ebbing flow of lonely and violent delirium. And there were always the innate checks and balances of artists, of writers in particular. The men in the helicopter were trying to read his mind. They’d been following him all these years, since before he acknowledged the value of his own thoughts. The story he wrote about Dylan García, the philosopher-revolutionary, champion of satirical American transformation, government target and agent of sedition. Or the story he wrote about the woman with the prosthetic mind, a government experiment gone awry. The story was a revelation about the power of the human intellect and the dangers inherent in meddling with it. Both stories had been written before but these were his versions, taut and reasoned experiments, both fundamentally charged by the incompetence and tyranny of government officials, and both were slung out there on the Web somewhere with all the others he’d written, messages floating into space and back, carrying their truths out to the cosmos and returning unscathed, unbroken but absorbed by government computers set to intercept dissident communication in all tongues and dialects. The data of the rebel writer. The liberated dreamer and embattled artist. The dangerous, the followed, the hunted, hijacked by the dollar, quoted and exalted in underground communiqués. Recently someone had asked him what was the most difficult thing about being a writer and he answered without thinking, The loneliness.

    He was alone now on the roof, or maybe he wasn’t completely alone but he felt alone, staring into the cockpit, two faces staring back. Patriotic sky of red and blue and violet. Frightened beyond words, panic-heightened consciousness. He raised his arms, spread them wide, a formal display to the pilots that he was not carrying any weapons, he was not a threat. He wanted nothing to do with the historic event a mile away. He was not plotting to kill or disrupt the charismatic speaker and he was not concerned with the thousands of followers, their faces glimmering, their eyes melted into a believer’s ecstasy. Our writer waved at the pilots, trying to smile, his face bent into a crooked visage of dishonesty. The buzzing in his head increased. He got back into the van and drove it down the ramp to the level below. He parked and waited for the group of officers to coagulate about him, silent footfalls, their hands on the weapons at their hips, secret tactical formations of duty, his likeness thrust out to the world through the digitized drone of the police scanner. A voice echoed for him to put his hands on the hood of the van and he complied and turned toward the stadium a mile away where the crowd was assembled and waiting to hear one man’s words, promises and declarations of grandeur in the twilight of our writer’s innocence.

  • Vigil

    I pulled the car through the winding hillside streets in the evening stillness and I thought it both strange and affecting how in that town one could scarcely peer through the thick shrouding gray to the setting sun beyond. Crooked rows of small one-story frame houses in light pastel colors, the yards manicured into taut pristine statements and the black bay water forever looming immense and threatening in the background. Anonymous joggers of dusk puffing the saline air beneath the watchful eye of antique streetlamps not yet ignited to life there in the grayest of twilight.

    I parked in front of a modest green house enclosed by a painted wrought-iron gate with RENNAY engraved into its steel nameplate. The sky sunk from gray to charcoal and I walked through the creaking gate to the house and rapped quietly on the front door and waited for the old woman to answer. It took her several minutes but she finally opened the door and the front room smelled of wilted lilac and dust and candle wax. She didn’t speak but led me to the right through a long hallway and I entered a dark room near the far end of the house where there was no indication of the neighborhood outside nor the secular bay at dusk nor the concept of space or even time as contingent upon men to decipher such things. It was dark in the room and there were jagged shadows dancing on the walls behind the molten arrhythmia of candle flames licking the air.

    “Finally you show up in this town and I can’t offer you a drink,” the old man said. He sat staring at me from a rocking chair in the corner of the room, heavy patched blankets covering his body. “I drank the last of the scotch,” he said, holding up an empty tumbler, rolling it slowly around in his thin fingers. “Eighty-four years old.”

    I stood and looked from the old man to the candles spread in divine geometric petition throughout the room.

    “Come over here and sit,” he said. “What I have isn’t contagious.”

    “I’m fine,” I said calmly. “Listen. Some men are on their way here. They’ll be here just before dawn. They have guns. They’ll threaten you and they might even kill you. They’re coming here looking for a box of papers. I believe you know which one.”

    The old man looked away from me to a candle at his left, the flame rolling and thrashing in shades of orange and red, his face illumined by the throbbing vigorous glow that had not truly come from within in many years.

    “These men,” I said. “I’m the one who sent them.”

    I turned my face to the flickering lights and the mad swaying shadows born from them and I told the man to give me the box of papers so that it would not fall into the hands of the men who were coming for it.

    The old man was silent for a long time. He looked from the candles to me and then back to the candles, forty or fifty wavering truths whipping loose and radiant about him, little eyes of fire sustaining his brooding contemplations and force-feeding his old heart.

    “I spend a lot of time in here staring at these candles,” he said. “Just thinking. Little flames swirling in the air. It comforts me. Colors and privation of colors. All the answers I’ll ever need. One of the things I often think of while sitting here is the queer relationship between time and light.”

    He looked up at me again, his dark eyes afire with strands of pooled light, pale and intractable and omniscient.

    “We were taught as children that the human brain receives visual information as the cornea intercepts it from the light spectrum. As if the light wasn’t there before. As if it needed the human brain’s sanction to exist at all. We were also taught that the mind assimilates this visual data into assorted modes of scientific and psychological assertion. Cause and effect. Theory. Association. Illusion. The mind thrusts upon itself certain varieties of light as time’s witness, as specific and inalienable proofs of time. Our vision, more than any of our other senses, acts as a placeholder for all the things we experience in this world. It is the supreme catalog of the human condition. Of course, light is synonymous with many things in the human lexicon, but the most pervasive of associations is light with the pairing of our concept of time. For those of us who are not blind, and I imagine even for some of us who are, the visible world is permanently wed to history. We cannot think of the past without trying to see it, trying to visualize it. We can’t possibly comprehend a future without looking for it, trying to see what our world will look like. But light is not time, my friend. Nor does it exist in time. Light creates its own time, it carries its own dimensions, all of which far exceed and outperform our frail human understanding. Time is a human machination, a device of logic and pragmatic substance. But light is meta-human. It operates as an instrument of the gods, as a divine right of privilege, the sole witness of soul transit and multi-dimensional communion in this, an omnisensory universe of mere human speculation.”

    He sat silent for a while and then he pointed with a long bony finger to the closet at my right where the box of papers sat small and dusty on the carpet. I looked at the man and picked up the box and began to walk out the door.

    “The light of this world does not create shadows,” the old man said to my back.

    *

    I sat on the pier and watched the gulls float high above the lapping bay tongue, darkened ghosts circling slow and listless in the gray dawn. I checked my watch and turned around just in time to see the clock tower behind me strike the top of the hour and I heard the brawny bell echo throughout the bay town and when I turned back to face the water the gulls were gone. Something was moving about in my pocket and so I pulled out the vibrating cellular phone to answer it.

    “Something’s missing.”

    “What is it?”

    “Looks like records. There’s a dimple in the carpet where a box, maybe a pile of boxes used to be.”

    I sat silent, listening to the cold water slap the wood pier at my feet, looking into the murk for some vestige of life in that bleak and dark cold mystery. I watched the foam froth against the wood and fizzle away and then repeat itself again and again as it has for a hundred years, and for another hundred years before that.

    “Maybe it means something,” I said. “Maybe it doesn’t.”

    “Yes sir.”

    “Christian.”

    “Yes sir.”

    “Let them go.”

    “Yes sir.”

    I put the little phone in my pocket and saw a steamship crawl across the water way out on the horizon. It was big and black and rumbling in ill spirit of augury and I stood up and listened to my bones creak and I felt the muscles begin their little dance of mutiny and then I turned and walked back to town, the opening of shops and emergence of sleepy-eyed buskers and myriad invisible homeless advancing from the margins of town with their ragged blankets and empty bottles and I walked beneath that old clock tower that had endured windstorm and pestilence and centuries of starless night with nothing to display but its consistent pulsing record of history and its rote totalitarian demands.

  • Somnambulist’s reckoning

    Deep in the gut of the earth a man and woman moved together through the cold darkness, wandering without diagram or any semblance of light to guide them. They staggered panting through the endless tunnel of mud and rock scratched and badly bruised and with nothing for the eye to uphold nor nourish the want of the godlike human mind.

    “Whatever you do,” the man said. “Never let go of this hand.”

    They walked and walked and there was nothing in that dark narrow world but their invisible breaths and their movement and their delicate thoughts and the understanding that they had nothing but each other, colorless and blind and hungry and frightened. The world continued to revolve about them and the hardened planet shifted in deep turbulent scars high above and the smell of earth was like cordite in that enclosed cavernous place. There was silence and there was blackness and they trudged on continuous through the tunnel, their hearts like two small bellies of fire or signals of life in an alien world reduced to its rudiments.

    The man was terrified and he often thought of stopping and holding the woman in his arms and surrendering to the giant void because he foresaw one of them dying in that dark place and the other alone and cold and hopeless. He imagined the two of them webbed together by their arms as the darkness unfolded its timeless maxim upon them and they would not speak but only sleep and dream of a consciousness with light and sight and the promise of tomorrow. The eyes make their own vision, he thought. For I am seeing things that I cannot possibly see. There are walls about me and a flat muddy ground and there are small beings with round gray eyes shrinking away from my probing hands. I can see the future in its rote black agony and I can see the errors of my past and their influence on my conscience like a nimbus of heavy gray fog hanging about my head. I can see deeply into the dark and smell my own fear and I can feel the woman’s hand though I want nothing more than to look into her eyes for I’ve long forgotten their color and shape.

    They walked clutching tiredly at the hand of the other and feeling their breath in the dampened air and they knew their world was one of cold and lightless uncertainty and that somewhere ahead the tunnel would have to end and the sudden seepage of light would overwhelm and embolden them. Somewhere behind them they heard an echoed scream neither human nor living and they froze in the darkness, clinging to each other and shivering. After a while they moved on again and they could smell flowers growing in the tunnel and they could hear water somewhere about them, a steady rushing flow like the open vein of the very earth and each of them thought in private how they could be dreaming the whole thing but which one was dreaming neither knew nor cared.

    The woman thought to speak and then refrained, for under what domain does the decree of language have in such a place? All we have is the tangible communication between us, the communion of flesh and heat, our bodies tied together by the noblest of bonds and axioms of trust. Dirt frozen still in the deep leathery ridges of our fingers. Nails and ashen skin and thin jutting hairs. This is our language, this is our life. These are our words. This link of flesh could fail us at any moment. She pictured the myriad of ways they would die, a gaping hole up ahead in the darkness swallowing them one after the other, their hands broken apart by the force of one body falling, stumbling down weightless and alone to that other unknown darkness of similar breath and sound. She imagined a creature looming up ahead in the darkness, human in proportion but lacking the probity which distinguishes humanity from other mundane life. A six-legged likeness of nightmarish wonder, viscous body mass and thin spine-like legs and throbbing cold heart and they would see it in that last flashing moment before it struck them totally blind, glimmering eyes of diamond light in the only thing they’d seen in so very long, the last light of the world known to them, and there would be a knowing in those eyes and also a familiar form of understanding for the creature had lived in the darkness all of her life and was accustomed to surviving on the flawed wanderings of others. The woman imagined the creature devouring them and slinking silently onward through the tunnel of mud with her former body in that creature’s jellied womb until the next stumbling and condemned soul strolled blind and unknowing into the nest of a frightened somnambulist’s reckoning.

    “Wait,” the woman said. “I need to catch my breath.”

    “Are you all right.”

    “Yes. I just need to stop. For a moment, is all.”

    The man was quiet. He thought he could see the woman bent at the waist, her head down and blonde hair dirty and matted and clinging to her temples. He saw her there in the dark, a shadow of light, body heaving with warm breath, angel of soft white incandescence drawn in the framework of a beating human heart. There is a light within her. There is a light within us both.

    “I can see you,” he said, and smiled. “You’re magnificent.”

  • Labrynth

    The piece of paper was a perfect white rectangle on the desk in front of me, an empty shape too intimidating to breach. I tried to think, to collapse myself into thought the way I so often do, communicate the credence of my ideas through swift and elegant pen strokes, angry letters and words, sentences and jutting symbols of association. Maybe it was the shape of the blank white sheet obstructing me, its precision so taut and unforgiving, deconstructing the creative process into pure barren silence. Or maybe it was her, the woman to whom the ideas were directed, my love for her so sightless and violent in nature that all rational language died prematurely in my mind prior to its exposure to the influence of the pen.

    My dearest Brooklynne . . .

    No, this is wrong, this is all wrong. This type of beginning is an instant showcase of hollowness. I never speak to her like this, nobody alive speaks like this. If it is practical sentiment I want to relate, defragment these complex thoughts into common meaning, I must find a practical vehicle with which to exchange them.

    Brooklynne, I cannot . . .

    A negative proposition at the forefront sets a malignant tone for the entire letter. I must begin with an authoritative propositional phrase, an affirmation of love. I must lean on the theme of our love, our history together, and push the apology aside until later in the letter, when nothing but an apology would make sense in its reinforcement of the aforementioned.

    *

    I tried to stop thinking and went to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of wine, and then another, a formal release of mental strain, drinking down the crystalline purity of deflation. Then I went back to the study and wrote the letter, discarding the burdens of message and meaning alike, diving headlong into the chasm of blank whiteness, my thoughts stretched outward in time and place until the entire letter was suddenly finished an hour later, lines and curves painted on the page exactly as I wanted them, truth without restraint, love in collusion with purpose. Then I sealed the letter in a blank white envelope and dropped it in the garbage.

    Who reads these letters, I wondered. There must be a thousand letters in this world written each day that just get thrown away, the messages sealed and signed, adoration and violence and meaninglessness perfumed upon the pages. Someone reads these letters, the evidence of our irresolution, our frail whims. The moment we dispose of our ideas and rear them to the heap, the moment we place the neat folded parchment in the trash and expel it from our conscience, someone on the other end is already waiting for it, a reader far more astute than we imagine, the sole cultivator of our discarded feelings and suspended emotions. By not delivering them to the intended recipients we feel as though we’ve rendered the meanings in the letters harmless, we’ve absolved ourselves of our reactionary blunders. But someone finds them and reads them and thrusts meaning back onto the messages. Maybe this person finds pleasure in what they read, as though each hypothetically failed correspondence is a valued discovery, an unexpected unearthing into another’s private life, a magnified examination into the social machine of our culture. The person who finds these letters and reads them keeps them for self-edification. The words on the page and the page in the envelope are raised up to semi-iconic status in their lives, brief but genuine illuminations into the world of private conversations to which they otherwise wouldn’t have been included. He or she who reads the letters finds it much more difficult to discard them than the person who wrote them. For the man or woman who finds the letters and digests their content, their subtle meanings painted in abstract and concrete idiom, these letters are the battery of their operative hopefulness. A line wrought from love and sentiment becomes their personal shining juxtaposition with disenchantment. The pain splayed across the page, the heart-shorn emotion from a love askew, the tender eulogy and the apologetic logic, these are the most vivid and tactile reflections for the reader. The letters were of course written by strangers with the intended audience as strangers and yet the reader feels as though he or she knows them both. The letters strip away the mystery and put a profile to the writers, they put a garbled and imaginary face to the name at the top of the page, the salutation at the bottom. The reader invents living people from the names because the written emotive force is too profound and real to keep them from identifying humanity with the language. These letters are at the vanguard of everything that makes humanity such a tremendous communicative current, they unite us in our solitude and mystery, these letters bind the likes of community and individual, they fully replace the very things the writer of the letters was trying to avoid, that subtle inward heartbreak of not being understood, that feeling that the words didn’t, and possibly couldn’t accurately navigate the complicated labyrinth of feelings within. For the lucky or reluctant reader, the letters are more descriptive and enlightening than the writer could have imagined. This is the only language either of them could ever possibly understand. Some will tell us to bury our pain, others will instruct us to express it. But this is really the only way to learn, the proper way to heal from our emotive wounds. If only we were instructed to recreate our pain in language, construct our meditative ailments out of idea and paper in letter form and then ceremoniously place our arrangements in the garbage rather than the mailbox, this world would be a world of deep committed understanding and empathy. It would be a world where the letter was exalted above all else save the human condition.

    *

    Back in the kitchen I finished the bottle of wine and shattered it on the linoleum floor. After careful consideration, I decided not to remove my clothes and roll around on the wreckage.

  • Crescent

    “That’s just too much to think about,” he said, waving a cigarette. “I mean, think about it. We’re young. We have our games and our bars and spars with emotion. We have our ceremonies. We have sex and pop culture. We have sex, mostly. This is what concerns us. This is how we find value in our lives, by how much sex we have. What more do we need? I mean, who wants to break all this rhythmic lovemaking to worry about elections?”

    He sucked on his cigarette, the garden light behind him breathing electricity into the white smoke, thickening it into luminous veined strands. He looked up at the deep black canvas sky, a breathing shadow silhouetted on pale light, a living penumbra of audacity. He smiled.

    “But I see what you’re saying. This stuff is important. This stuff should be important. What I’m saying to you is our priorities are confused. You and me and our whole generation. We’ve graduated into ethical destitution. We’ve been moving this way for years. Activism and social justice are irrelevant to us. History and our culture has dictated to us the ignoble farce of our own lives, it has fashioned us into gluttonous instruments of superficiality.”

    I shook my head and the woman walked toward us, slinking into our light, a slow dirge of crickets announcing her arrival. There was an empty plastic cup in one of her hands.

    “What are you boys talking about out here?”

    “Your boyfriend here was just explaining the privation of virtue common to our generation,” I said. “And I was just preparing to refute his bullshit and destroy him intellectually.”

    “Take it easy on him,” she said, her body melting into his, their arms disappearing behind one another into those ritualized human folds, those tactile zones of repetitive comfort. The small of the back. The nape of the neck. Gently rubbing and patting. A stray finger jutting somewhere below, a test of safety and assurance but also identity, the interpersonal barometer of another’s mood, the formalized suspension of leeriness, a subtle acknowledgment of partnership. This body, this strange and miraculous human shell of pulsing cells, where skin and hair entwine in the murky heat and residue of dimpled flesh, the lines of animal and operator integrating the fragments of pure behavioral essence. This is what I thought about in that brief flashing moment as I drank from my cup and waited for my friend’s predictably lowbrow retort.

    “He told me himself that he uses big words to compensate for his inability to please women.”

    “Play nice,” she said, kissing her boyfriend softly on the cheek and filling her cup from the keg of beer nestled benignly between us. Then she stepped out of the light and moved toward the house, chatter wafting lazily from its open windows, men and women laughing together over the sleek resonant drawl of cozy urbane music. These summer nights are heaven, I thought. I’m dead and this moment is the post-elegiac reality of my former life, thrust into perpetual bliss, this is what I’ve chosen to take from the succession of years of toil and reward to project upon the eternal screen of my career as a perceptive agent of experience. This is the crowning jewel of everything I ever was, my skin warm and sunburned, a warm stale beer in my hand and rivers of it in my blood, a smile on my face in the most tragically happy I’ve ever been, I’ll ever be, levity and something like ardor equally on display beneath the incandescence of history’s crescent moon.

    “I’ll tell you one thing,” I said, filling up my own cup. “There will come a night when politics is truly useless to men like you and me. It will be a dark night much like this, cicadas buzzing death chants from the trees, the moon looming large and fraudulent in a sky just as endless and inviting. It will be a night of a thousand thousand corpses, a night lit by the profane infernos of man’s destructive whims. The night politics died will be the night before men won’t be around not to talk about it the next day.”

    “You’re scaring me,” he said. “I’m trying to stand here on a beautiful summer night and drink beer and you’re concerned with politics and death and revelation. Whoever designed this god-awful scene paired me with the wrong character.”

    He filled his cup and we drank and others strolled out of the house in pairs to refill their cups. The music changed, a languid discourse of trumpet and alto over a steady athletic electric piano. The bass and drums were in there somewhere, holding down the measures, keeping everything intact, everything including the meaning of the song itself, and we bounced casual and profound ideas off one another until the dialogue approached that inevitable crescendo of laughter, the apex of the moment before we all reset and start again, shifting in our places, our skin, taking brief solitary seconds with our own thoughts before engaging in the others again, and we all realize in our own peculiar way how our scattered vignettes are somehow united out there in the lamp-lit perfection.

    “I wonder if heaven is anything like this,” someone said into the quiet.

    “Probably for some people,” I said.

  • Broken mirror

    And so they walked into the library, towering cathedral of light. Devotees in tandem surrounded on all sides by mankind’s greatest gifts to the universe. Dyed cloth and leather-bound truths stacked in neat proportion, titles and subtitles stamped and translated upon the spines of those immortal wardens of knowledge. The books filled the shelves and climbed to a rectangle skylight high above.

    “There was a time when our lives connected, you and me,” he said. “A symbol, a thread. Symbol of a thread. Two people mirroring each other, hundreds of miles apart. Shadowed beings in complicit multi-dimensional transit.”

    “It wasn’t like that, really.”

    “My actions as demands upon your actions. You, urging me onward, my movements and decisions like subconscious pullings from another realm. A voice in the night. It was like having a twin, a shared consciousness, our destinies converging at a precise gridline somewhere in the margins.”

    “I never felt that,” she said.

    They walked slowly past the As, their eyes darting upward into the soft light, registering those sacred forgotten names, a recollection of something intimate experienced long ago, some message renewed, a respect paid in rapid fire as another name crossed their periphery. Achebe, Allende, Andrzejewski, Augustine.

    “One and two, two and one,” he said. “One and the same. The same. An error in code, the single miscalculation of the universe. Me reincarnated as you but living in the same fluid scale of time, sharing the era. Past and future in mystical collision. Two autonomous minds subjected to the frailty of oneness.”

    “What does that even mean?”

    “But then love confronted us, showed us who we were. It was like a mirror set before our eyes, yours and mine, in our different places. Love convinced us we were two separate souls pointing in opposite directions. It broke our bond, broke us down, built us into distinct forces. Love is the reason we are alone.”

    “Who are you?” she said.

    The simple curve of the C, with serifs and without. Camus, Cervantes, Chekhov. The slender shape of primitive weaponry mutated and frozen into meaning by the men and women who have wielded the letters most deftly. Coetzee, Conrad, Cummings. To learn about a place and a people, they must be experienced directly, firsthand. Our next best option is to absorb their literature.

    “Disclosure has stricken us with solitude. We no longer share the same course of thought, driven into our shared plane of existence. I’m only half alive because the other part of me died when I met you. Before, you guided me. Now you aren’t even there. The voice is gone. I hear only my own voice,” he said.

    They walked past the Es, the Fs. They didn’t see each other, half-listening, vision stretched to the limits of stimulation. The books contain, among other things, concentrated thought, the stories of generations and caste struggle, individuality at its strongest, its most raw and vulnerable. The beauty of the mundane, the horror and magnitude of the sublime. Comedy and tragedy, Faulkner, France, Frost. The most important minds of their culture, the disdained, the persecuted, the exalted, the romanticized and peculiarly burdened.

    “I used to lie in bed at night and listen to my heartbeat, pretend it was footsteps,” she said. “The rhythm of my heart at rest was the pulse of a faceless man walking around the world. Black dress shoes shined to a luminous knife’s edge. He was walking around the world and when he finally got to his destination, I would die.”

    “What was his destination?”

    “It was me. He was walking to me. He still is. He’s somewhere on this planet, walking. And when he finally gets to me I’ll see his face, eyes dark and replete with revelation, calm assurance from pale nomadic death, and I’ll know that I was always right to trust my veins.”

    “We are a species that fears death more than anything,” he said. “We have created astounding myths to subvert death, to appease our fear. Death has no legs. It has no concept of time. When we die there is no big reveal, no fabricated deus ex machina. It cannot fool us. Death is a positive experience, it strips away all the negatives. It is the truest of truths, because, can you possibly think of anything more real?”

    Their voices bounced off the stacks around them and returned mostly the same but aged, withered at the edges, wiser and hardened. Their voices carried facsimiles of the stamped names on the shelves, Joyce, Kobayashi, Lawrence, the titles unfurling as they strolled, symbolic and fragmented histories, Ulysses, Tabishui, The Rainbow, horizontal and vertical, a tapestry of letters and colors emblazoned everlasting. Language as pure force. The skylight darkened high above, restless clouds stalking about. The library fell into shadow.

    “All these books,” she said, breaking the spell, uttering the heretofore unmentioned, slightly desecrating, or at least, de-mystifying the moment. “The names, the stories. Many of these books were written at such heavy consequence. People died for these words, these billion, trillion words.”

    “No,” he said. “They died for the ideas the words represent. These are history’s truest martyrs. Timeless spiritual reminders of ourselves in retrospect. We have a duty to them to uphold our own reflections, our own struggles, and relate them to progeny. We must do this not only in honor of their sacrifice but also to satisfy our own artistic impetus. Nothing is more valuable to a culture than its art. Art is the fight of the people, the revolving paradigm, the mirror of culture, idealizing human life in its confrontation with the divine.”

    Rushdie, Sartre, Stendal. Tolstoy. Twain, Voltaire, Whitman.

    They walked the entire perimeter and then turned to face the center of the room. Drowned in silent awe, an ardor for mankind and its potential, proud sentiments for the simplest of objects in concealment of the most complex ideas. In this way, literature is like humanity itself. They felt the books looking directly back at them.

    “We are still connected, you and me,” she said. “But instead of a shared drive, we strive to forge our own paths. This is the way it is supposed to be, the way it was always supposed to be. A human being is an inherently independent creature. The other people of his culture may serve a particular purpose, but a man or a woman must fundamentally feed his or her own will. This is the most basic necessity. All these books, this room full of books. It’s like a vault enshrining the battle cry of the individual.”

    “Love is the reason we are alone,” he said again, and they turned to leave.

  • Untitled

    satyagraha.jpg

    The man sat at his desk in the darkness. He listened to the reverent hum of the television in the next room, the adjoining wall whispering in tenored fuzz. He imagined the bluecast image of his wife and child spread together on the couch, their attention fixated on the hypnotic glow of the electric box. He could feel the warmth trapped deep down in the upholstery by the heat of their bodies.

    He reached to switch on the lamp above his head. Familiar objects spread before him, his typer, his papers and pens and their calculated arrangement like practiced definitions of his existence. A coffee mug half-filled with stale brown liquid, the surface slick with bean oil. He spent most of his hours thinking.

    The purpose of life, he thought, is not to become an object of someone’s understanding, though each minute that we are alive appears to be evidence that this is so, that somewhere out there someone understanding us must be tautological truth, that it is necessary for the migration of our souls and validation of our lives that we be understood in all our calculated aloofness. It seems that our lives cannot possibly be dignified without this.

    He lifted a pen and drowned the tip in the inkwell. He wrote: Sometimes when I’m writing, I feel like I’m doing it for progeny just as much as myself. If this documentation serves some overreaching purpose, it’s the enlightenment of others to the deep complexities of he or she who creates and transforms the data into language and imagery.

    The light went out in the lamp above him. The deep vibrato in the wall continued. He thought it strange how the electricity sometimes failed in this one room but continued in all the others. He put the pen down on the desk and stood to stare out the window to the darkened trees swaying with the mountain wind. Somewhere out there, he thought, an animal is alone, a breathing affirmation of what it is to be alive.

    His wife and child hardly noticed his shadowed presence slipping next to them beneath the blankets. It was a film about superheroes.