Upson Downs
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.... --Keats
Sometimes I feel transfixed, sometimes I feel free, angry.
Like a prizefighter
stepping into a boxing ring. Most people don’t get to choose
where they fight or live or love.
It chooses them. And that’s ain't right.
This is a story about you, Dianne. And, you-- Jack.
And Gaughin. Modigliani. And all the lonely people.
Where do you live? Where do you love?
You don't get to live alongside deer and finches or beer distributors, do you?
There's nowhere, nothing more isolated than a city street.
Red lights.
Crosswalks, tension.
Nowhere. Who, who do you love, Eileen?
I feel like asphalt, I feel like concrete. Angry and
sad, like an empty generic cigarette pack.
Crushed, crumpled, cranky. WALK.
DON'T WALK. Skop. Gu. Caesar Romero.
Bumper stickers on octagons.
Come on, Eileen.
Easing around a curve along Route 110, about eight miles north of Sulpur Bay, one is likely to be transfixed—wounded, almost—by the prospect that sweeps into view: a plain and weathered yet elegant New Caldeonia village undulates for half a mile along a thoroughfare, hardly wider than a couple of house lots on either side. Lining the road are manicured playing fields, a brick town hall, a century-old white frame church, a couple of Uni-Marts, a Marzipan shop, two greens, no fairways. The tall, undulating county courthouse can make you dizzy. There are stately houses of brick and wood, a little restaurant, two diners and a gas station or two. The Otis Elevator company and several large trash compactors.
Industrial size. And a newpaper stand. And, you.... Maybe me.
But, the trash has not been emptied for two months. We are drowning in trash. We are living for elevators. You’d fantasized about having sex with a hermit, going up,after the metal doors had clicked shut. An elevator and orgasm flowing seamlessly through time and space. But you never told me your stupid fantasy.
I had to read it here, in the tour of the town.
In a map on the walls in the Men's Room.
In a fancy brochure at the Conifer motel.
In a sad sunset,
in your empty eyes.
Funny, furry mountains press in on either side of the village, and arcing through its western flank is a splendid little stream. More stately houses are visible halfway up the slope of the western mountain, tucked among banyon trees
and the rain forest. This look leads to deep emotions. Strange thoughts. Like the assumption that a totalized view of the world--which usually implies a total containment of it--is possible.
Bernice, for instance, repeats this reductive and gendered view of totality of emotion when she speaks of the failure of low mimetic realism and her not so unexamined urge to find the soft emotional center of hermitage. What would Jesus do? Is love forever pure and without emotion? It is well to be detached. Yet, all around the cracker barrel, it’s like generally agreed that water can’t quench the fire of love.
To the east of Sumatra, a sandy wilderness hovers above the town, giving way at the southern edge to a nearly vertical cemetery, its oldest tombstones proudly commemorating Union dead. Yet, no one uses the trash receptacles. there is actually little civic pride. Let’s talk about you. How you regard the trash as a metaphor for caste levels.
And because I think it is so, thought Bernice. Hey, people treat me like trash. I could be a fucking hermit, or generic tabacco wrap for all they think of me. Even the Buddha thinks I’m trash. That Buddha is so horny. Species are dying, pollution is rampant, forests vanish, we are drowning in trash. The elevators might well lift us away. That’s what she thought when she was seven years old. Bernice.
The elevators might go up through the roof, rise above the green mountains and take her to a better place.
Hermits come and go, like everyone else. They were common in the middle ages, and again in the early 19th century, when the myth of the noble savage gave them a new lease of life. They’d act beatific and paint trees and breasts swinging in South sea breezes. And use a lot of umber. After the first world war, many of Britain's hermits were trench survivors suffering from shell shock; the late Richard Cobb reported that there were five living in the Tunbridge Wells of his childhood.
The backwoods of the US filled up with hippies and outlaws after Vietnam. Mount Athos, in Macedonia, was a similar magnet after the collapse of communism. In the 1960s, the average age of monks there was 80; in 1991, it was 34. She was in her 30s. She took off her leg warmers. That was nice. She felt worthy. Her legs were free.
Am I worthy, she wondered aloud. And, echoing-- apparently from the mountain-- she heard the Buddha, or a monk, say, “Let's see your mouth wrapped around a fat un-cut Black cock, your asshole being probed by said same and a big load of hot Black mans cum oozing from your mouth. Show us that and you'll be deemed worthy of exhibition.”
Whoa. O great-rooted blossomer, O hot red brahma,
is that all there is to a circus?
So she went back to the cave. She drank a
Heineken and took the next elevator.
She remembered how she felt about herself
before the buddha spoke. She
remembered how she felt about dance.
She remember her legs. She felt a twinge
remembering her leg warmers.
Splits, turns, leaps, and throws used to be creative,
rebellious, daring. Now they seem technically superb,
and empty, joyless, despairing.
She did a half-hearted plié. She glanced to the mirror,
she looked out into her new world.
The village of Tubridge, waking up, looked as it does every morning, spread-eagled, as it were, directly under an active volcano. Black buggies on the highway of love. Hot asphalt. Trashy churches, Episcopalian, of course, steeple up above it, the volcano, thumping periodically as blisters of magma burst inside its dark alcoves, and confessionals, scattering ash onto the dead plains around its base like a carbon snowfall.
On the coastal side of the village is a black sand beach running with steaming rivulets of scalding spring water, too hot to touch but ideal for washing clothes and dishes. Lost in an inland paradise. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, the frying pan and the fire. Between lost dipthongs and the great vowel shift of the 1500s, the idea and the reality hit her. Otis Elevator was only going up. New London seemed so far away. She rolled her eyes and dreamed of Amish villages, her leotard in a little puddle near the CLOSE DOOR button
Here, she thought, the palm and thatch huts are arranged quite untypically for an Amish village: not around a central barn or tall pine tree but framing a large, deserted square like a parade ground. This is because Sulphur Bay is one of a handful of villages in this part of the Dutch country where the people neither worship the Christ of the missionaries nor practice the traditional kastom. If Gaughin were here, he would want me. Paint me. Desire me.
Poor old Johnny Ray.
Sounded sad on the radio.
For real. Like being stuck in a lift with Iggy Pop, she and Paul would make beautiful music together. Yeah! All the way up. And all the way down.
--
-louis (art) aragon
 Marty Esworthy is Thinking of Ng |
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