Tag: Fiction

Ask yourself why you love literature, he said to the students in the room. Ask yourself why you’re devoted, what’s brought you here, to this room.

He paced. The room was silent.

I love literature more than any other form of art because it is most often the tale of the Everyman, he said. It is language, yes. It is storytelling in its purest form, yes. I love it for these things. But most of all I love it because of the Everyman.

What do you mean by Everyman, a woman asked.

The Everyman, said the man in front of the room, is you. It is me. It is the man or woman who lives in extraordinary times. Just like us. The Everyman is the character in the work, moving through it, making decisions, performing routine tasks, assigning obligations to him or herself. But the Everyman is also the composer of the work. Man must have firsthand knowledge of the Everyman in order to narrate him. The Everyman is also the translator of the work. Man must speak the language of the Everyman in order to translate him. The Everyman is also the great liberator of the work. Man must have a notion of the Everyman’s captivity in order to free him.

The room was silent. The students watched the man pace slowly in front of them, back and forth.

It was also in that third year that the rearing mother in her kindness and eagerness to communicate with the holy child read to it passages from the sacred text, she taught the child the phonetic genesis of their language by telling it stories and speaking the alphabet to the child very slowly, clearly enunciating each sound and asking the child if it understood her, Do you hear, she would ask it, and the child would nod and smile that yes, it understood, and so she took the child’s hand in hers and traced the shape of each sound in correspondence with the letter in her alphabet, slowly, repeatedly, snaking their fingers in tandem across the book in the child’s lap, and she asked the child, Do you understand, and again the child would nod and smile. The child had no desire to communicate, it was more or less puzzled by the world and could make no sense of it, confounded as he was without his sense of sight. The world to the child was a baffling mixture of sounds and smells and physical sensations that it struggled to understand or fit into any type of normative pattern. But once the child began to learn language from the rearing mother it finally found a pattern, it found measurement and mathematics, it found light and consistency where before there was nothing but chaos, darkness. By the beginning of the fourth year the child began writing on paper unaided by the rearing mother, the child wrote with a stubbed pencil the way it was taught. The handwriting was erratic and sloppy but still the sight of the child writing was a miracle to the rearing mother, a miracle considering the child was blind and unable to speak, and soon the child could write out its alphabet of letters and spell coherent strains of words and the rearing mother could hardly contain herself for the opportunity to finally communicate with the child, but before she could ask it a question the child wrote upon the paper to her, What do I look like? The rearing mother paused, both excited and anxious and said, You’re very pale. Then the child wrote onto the paper very slowly and deliberately, What do you look like?, as if to confirm that all humans are not just principally concerned about what we look like to others, but also with how we differ from them, what separates us, what is it about our skin, our muscular and skeletal constitution that makes us unique, proving that even at a very young age we understand how intimately connected are identity and appearance. I’m much different from you, the rearing mother told the child. But we’re still very much the same. And as the child wrote on the paper again the rearing mother felt closer to the child than she ever had, for the first time she genuinely considered the child her blood and her heart, her future and past, she temporarily forgot all about the child’s divine nature, and in its strange puerile scrawl the child wrote to her, I love you.

Riding through the morning fog a few months after joining the guild, the waves crashed and split at the shore on my right and I saw a body lying upon a wide mesa to my left. The mesa was composed of rock and short grass and I left my bike and walked over toward the body, expecting it to be a dead person, it was too odd a place for a person to rest without a blanket. When I got close I saw that it was a man about my age and that he was not moving. There was no one else around and I kneeled down to look closely at the face of the man, his chest slowly rising and falling. I wondered who he was, why he was lying there. He didn’t appear to be sick or wounded, but it was cold and the mesa was fogged over and when I reached down to touch the man his eyes opened wide and he grabbed my arm tightly with both hands, biting hard into my wrist. I shouted and tried to jerk the arm back from him but he was too strong, his grip was too tight. I hit him twice in the nose with my other hand and he let go of the arm, rolling over onto his stomach and folding upon himself. I was alarmed and hurt and I stood up, blood draining from my wrist. I looked around and there was no one on the mesa, no one down the road or behind me in the fog, and so I stood over the man and hit him in the head twice with closed fists, five times, then kicked him in the ribs and the back, the rage uncontrollable. I beat the man with my club, pounding him in the head and the torso, my senses heightened and focused, a ringing in my ears. I tried to imagine the man as the one who’d nearly killed me with his sword, the one responsible for my pain and chronic nightmares and I beat the man until he stopped moving, until he stopped breathing. I walked back to the bicycle and pedaled into the growing fog, the world silent. I can still remember the way the man’s head felt as my fists pounded it, his face mashed blood and flesh, a sack full of mud.

I read the words of thinkers and sometimes I read Shakespeare’s tragedies, namely Hamlet, I’ve read Hamlet thirty or forty times when in need of a break from the words of thinkers, I don’t read fiction or the histories, which are largely the same thing, both make-believe, I’d rather read the words of the pure thinkers because thought is a condition of itself and only itself whereas fiction and history are a condition of the surrounding narrative, the surrounding narrative that outlives them. Stories may live forever in one form or another but pure thought is fleeting and must be captured. Descartes, for example, Descartes sat in his room staring at the confluence between two bedroom walls and his bedroom ceiling, stricken at once was he, by candlelight, with an idea he simply had to capture, an idea that had nothing to do with narrative, nothing whatever to do with the world he lived in, the political and religious turmoil, his chronic pain, no, his walls and his ceiling spoke to him in coded heresy and mathematical jargon and he rose, wraithlike, and hobbled to his desk by candlelight to compose an unprecedented system of geometric coordinates, timeless and omni-universal, not to mention incredibly practical, thanks to his capturing of it. It simply had to be done. This is of course not to say there’s no merit in narrative or fiction or history, especially the great works, no, but I prefer to cultivate the garden in my mind with the purest of the pure, the foundations of all thought, which of course leads to culture, innovation, social hierarchy, paradigm, transcendence, what have you. Ideas that form building blocks of all culture and sociography, and Shakespeare is different, I am constantly haunted by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though for reasons I know not, I’m connected to the text without having seen the great tragedy performed, without having any friend like Horatio, without any father living or dead to honor. Hamlet and I are unique,

The voice speaks to me, it is a deep voice. At times I understand the language, two or three words per ten-second interval, I understand certain words that my mind fashions into a particular pattern, for this is the essence of mankind’s relationship to its languages. Sound from the mouth, boorish and vulgar. The human mouth hot and rank and moist spews forth sounds shaped by the lips and tongue, spit cascading outward in a shower of repugnance and we form patterns, this is how we begin to understand each other, if such a thing is possible. Words on pages written by hands skilled at constructing symbols, again, in patterns, much less offensive and disgusting, much more worthy of veneration, the written word. Anyone can speak. A person just born begins speaking immediately, incomprehensibly. But how long until that person can write legibly, coherently, construct a diagram of cogent thought? How long until we realize just how gifted this person is? How long until we realize that he or she says nothing of merit, that he or she never will? How long until we realize this person will have nothing of value to contribute to its culture? How long until we realize that we would much rather prefer this person to be silent, forever, wishing they would relegate all communication to the written form, if only he or she had the brainpower, if only he or she could muster some legitimate thought? Is it not the duty of man and woman to other men and women to think and apply the mind toward some ideal? Is it not the duty of a human being to wish to improve the life (and thereby, the ideas) of its fellow human beings? If so, doesn’t this require the human being to suspend the sick motion of its diseased mouth until it has properly prepared what exactly it is to share? Is this not a common notion? Is there no morality in keeping silent?

The man looked over at Corine and then up at the television. He looked at the people around him. Children stood and walked around. A blonde kid in a white hat ran down the aisle chasing a paper airplane fashioned from a table mat and the mother scolded him, told him not to run, where were his manners, and then she laughed, another mother nearby laughing with her, both women shaking their heads. The atmosphere in the diner was festive, even gay. A teenaged couple cuddled in a booth near the window. A man and woman nearby commented on the television’s image of the volcano, how big, oh my dear, have you ever seen anything like it. The din in the room was quite pronounced and laughter rose from the corners, enveloping the patrons like descending ash. He wondered if what was happening was some type of theater, artifice, not real. He wondered if he was part of some large joke or maybe a test, the subject in a diagram, that maybe the quake and the volcano weren’t real at all but were elaborately staged to observe the reactions of the American people. The diner was alive with gaiety and a strange sense of adventure and he didn’t care for it, it wasn’t real. How could it be real? He looked outside to find his anchor to the world and saw cars in the dusty lot gleaming in the noon heat, shimmering with light, unreal and staged just as the scene inside, the girl across the table from him whom was just another actor, the girl whom had not spoken except to order since they’d come inside, the girl he didn’t know and whom was likely going to take advantage of him, wait for him to fall asleep or walk away and then take him for everything. The older couple behind him laughed and people everywhere in the diner laughed, food particles flying from their mouths, and he wondered if the people were in some type of severe denial, they didn’t want to accept the situation or the fact that many people had died and many more were in serious danger, they chose levity over responsibility, or perhaps the horror of it was too much for them to process, their minds simply couldn’t handle the thought of it, the reality that they might all be dead by sundown. But then maybe it was him. Perhaps he was thinking about it all wrong, he should lighten up, take it easy, everything was going to be fine, just as he said to Corine thirty minutes ago, he had lived alone for too long and had lost touch with the world, no longer recognized its ornate veneer. No, he thought, it couldn’t be, he knew something imperative had changed, something terrible in the world had happened and it was only as he sat there so close to other people and observed their interactions, it was only after he acknowledged their plight as pilgrims, refugees, just like him, that something fundamental had changed within himself in an instant, as if he’d decided while looking at the others around him that the world was now forever changed and many more people were going to die, only those with resolve would deserve to survive. He made a tacit promise that it was either going to be them or him, and he watched them laughing and blowing their noses and imagined them reading while sitting on the toilet and watched them with their heads down fumbling at their mobile devices and he decided that it was going to be him that survived, it was going to be him. His wife would have demanded it of him. He looked around and understood that people just like them, people just like himself were dying terrible deaths just three hundred miles to the west and to the north, people suffocating and drowning and immolating, killing themselves for lack of a better option.

Finally the food came out of the kitchen and it looked nothing like what he ordered. He didn’t remember what he ordered, but the food didn’t resemble food at all, it was something arranged on a plate for him or others to look at, to regard as food, just a prop in the overall production, and it was almost too much, the window and the world outside, the girl next to him looking up at him, her face blank and pale as if something were wrong with her, or maybe her face a reflection of what was inside himself, the horror she must see while watching his face change, but still all of it a replica, simulacra of life rather than life, and at that precise moment he understood and believed wholeheartedly that the worst was indeed yet to come.

Madness is a sign of illumination. We yearn for the answers and yet fail to ask the proper questions. Illumination like insects on the skin, clearing out the pores. Water boiling in the next room, filling our heads and lungs with curative vapor. The advantages of madness include overall physical and spiritual clarity, seeing objects and phenomena when physically blind, telepathy, telekinesis, extrasensory perception, intense cerebral musicality, meditation, levitation, lucid problem solving, pronounced physical strength, a sense of weightlessness, fearlessness, penetrating spiritual guidance, complex and thoroughly explicating dream activity, intensive linguistic capacity, immortality, total loss of time and place, perpetual wakefulness, if desired, varied revelations of the eschaton, complete loss of spiritual inhibition, and more. The advantages of madness are not wholly revealed to the mad, just as not all youth are without wisdom. True madness and illumination touches only those who are prone, who are willing, who reach out to it so as to benefit from it. Madness is a spiritual state.

I often feel that I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t recognize the guy walking into work while he thinks of his tobacco pipe, he flinches at his aching hip and thinks of his tobacco pipe and walks into work this morning chilled with the light of dawn and the headlights of other vehicles sweeping past him, irritating him but enabling him to feel alive in the pale glow, he woke this morning into a haze of sleepiness as if birthed from a subconscious womb but feeling somewhat rested lying in the darkness while his lover stirred next to him. The winter is going to be cold, he thought, not recognizing the voice nor its source, and can it be that we’re all not who we think we are in this strange world of wind and porous skin cells and grotesquery and kindness. We don’t recognize ourselves and that’s why we move through so slowly, so silently, adjacent to our true selves, invisible, that selfsame creature whom we would recognize if only we could see.