Up Down

Up down, up down, up down. Back and forth, curve, spin, unplug, lug to next room. Sometimes I feel like a vacuum is running in my head.

Today for the first time in sixty-seven years, a new planet was formed in our universe. Nobody could tell. It will be named SDSSp J984259.96-005064.1 whence discovered regardless of when ever that comes to pass, or who does so, on account of its interstellar coordinates.

They were selling books today on astrophysics, post world war one reconstruction of Europe, heroine abuse in Scotland, and the trials and tribulation of the rich and faithless (north easterly Americans) for 2$, 6$, 9$, and 4$ respectively. Large tomes, epic and brilliantly crafted they went unpurchased as crowds raced home to their beer, television, cheese, bravado and families.

I sit on a public toilet forcing out bran through my ass in abject uncomfort, alone, bored, confused, tired, unconfident, incompetent. ‘Mama Mia(!)’ rhymes exhaustively in the corridors of my conscience, it rains, darkens, drips, oozes, reaches a counter edge and spills, spreads, hardens, draws flies, catches cat hair, dust, lint, smells like stale egotism and ineffectual masturbation: a politician’s wet dream: easily drawn by bright lights and short vague all-concurring all-encompassing tag lines to watered down childhood memories of dogmatic ideals.

Forget eat, forget sleep, forget sex, remember some other tangible anything beyond just those three and love it and don’t apologize, second guess, or down grade metaphors for similes, pets for house plants, good friends for old acquaintances for forgotten faces for vague notions and distorted memories of chance encounters in embarrassing water holes replete with face-saving white lies. Dig in with forks in each hand and all the salt it will take to make it taste as best you like it no matter how quick and brutal the stopping of your ticker, however sooner that inevitable demise, will be.

Only for the ingenuity of clock face design – an invention we ignorantly cannot attribute to some long deceased troubled but humble genius – does the stopped clock still show the right time not once but twice daily; and on a crowded planet what else could one ask for from the depths of their anonymous grave as a fate so eternal as this. Strive not to feed the thump and bang and thump and bang and thump and bang in your chest, bogging yourself short-sightedly with lowly matters of the flesh, the here, the now, the everywhere, the inherent, the ignored,the forgotten, the irrelevant, the flat, the common; strive only to pre-empt your last cardiac implosion with a dream, a place, a thought, a shifting or unshifting coalescence of anything, hammered into permanence, which for its own sake will safely rest or rove upon this mantle to beat a tick or tock longer than your own lovely beautiful heart.

[Ed. Note: The trouble at times with the type of uncoalesced prosaic poetry tangentially attempted to be transcribed above is that it is uncontextualized mush. When great authors of great writing pump out the great mush –oft referred to with great affection as ‘hoopde-doodle’ – of a great, of a Steinbeck or a Woolf or of an Emilie Rose, waxing on as such, we follow along and string their ideas up on the narrative chain afore weaved, in say, Fitzgerald’s case, that crafted scaffolding includes West Egg, some still water reflecting a colourful light, a party, a drunk man in a mansion library reading “Ode to the Athenian Society”, a drunk damsel’s mechanistic man toiling in sweaty toil at a gas station service center – and we encapsulate all these data points into the mush and mush it together until mush it is no longer but instead a solid form, which reflects the light we might shine on it, and stands, of its own will, rising with a purpose, walking to its assigned chamber in our conscience, fitting the key it got from the concierge into the lock, and as we finish the final verse, taking up residence, ready to spring to its feet in stully simulacrity whenever the context demands it. That is literature.]

{PUBLISHER’S NOTE: I append this in response to what I believe is an incomplete submission on the part of my wayward and lost in digression, though essentialy correct in spirit, Editor, as a means of justifying the inclusion of this sketch in this volume. I advise the reader to use the sketch as a concluding note at the end of any book which pleases you but is found ‘light’ or ‘populous’ by more discerning eyes...something, let me say, “Not very literary”, if you will. Just read whatever that book may be, and enjoy it as if it were, absolutely and unquestionably ‘literary’ (again – if you will) and then read this sketch as if it were the last paragraph, inserted just after whatever that tawdry work’s author wrote last and just before “THE END”, and absorb in its message all the solace your intellect is capable of absorbing in anything. Clear?

So to recap –

1. read the trash lit book you like but don’t trust because it isn’t respected by ivory tower snobs or antisocial bibliophiliacs

2. then read this sketch (on that occasion feel free to bypass the Ed. Note. and PUBLISHER’S NOTE)

3. Be happy, feel smart, and go ahead and do whatever it is you do after reading a great book. Smile, I suppose.

}

Book Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years is the tale of a flat infinite earth, covered by an unending ocean, birthing a land mass, in this case a dramatic mountain peak, bathed in soft South American sunshine, shooting up into jagged existence, at once haunting and dominating the horizon.
It rises up from the depths in fiery passion as a volcano; volatile, fertile, malleable lava bursts from the earth’s molten core hardening into an eager form, distinctly phallic in shape, rank with life, fertility, sexuality, reality, virility and femininity, sitting on an stubborn bedrock of imagination, dream and conjecture.
We are deceived at first by the darting mountain’s keen early progress, blind to the endemic deceleration dooming it from the time of its conception. Like us, the mountain begins to die, not at senility, but at birth. Teeming with busy energy, the mountain seeks to increase its bulk and so - unwise as it is to mine oneself - it compromises, fuses ambitiously with weaker, neighbouring soils, and invites foreign folk to land - by sea, by land, by air - importing different culture, different attitudes. But no amount outside of help can spare us: we all must face - must solve – our personal challenges alone, if at all. Growth and new technologies have benefits and costs, yet each are ultimately are moot in the face of time: witness a life succumbing to persistent entropy and exhaustion, the creeping encroachment of nature lays bare a mutability of complexity and unsustainability of circuitous self-reference.
This all is a metaphor for the narratives of One Hundred Years of Solitude, tales of the individual, the family, the community and the society, all superimposed, and revealed at a pitch perfect pace, resonating and culminating in a final epic, eternal chord of immaculate harmony. The brilliance of Garcia Marquez’s craft is the orchestration of these stories in symphony. So seamless is the style that both the violent vigorous creation and gradual unavoidable demise occur at a constant speed to our perception allowing the reader equal time to learn love attach to and morn both crescendo and decrescendo, inhalation and exhalation, rise and fall.
The mountain landscape created in this work is not relayed to us as definite in its meaning, never dogmatic, never brutally certain, rather it concedes to us that it is equally buoyed and burdened by being so long, big, broad and labyrinthicly intratwined to be dizzyingly beyond human comprehension. That we navigate the terrain with our own unique orienteering is both the book’s imminent weakness and its boundless strength. I admit as a reader I surely did not grasp as much - tearing through the last few hundred pages - as I could have from savouring them in calculated contemplation. So much does it strive to offer us as we pass through its covers that the capacity of my embrace was soon overwhelmed, and many a ripe treasure was unfortunately left in darkness as I turned the last page to close the book. One Hundred Years is a mountain climb, thus, depending on the angle from which it is approached, the only thing in common between any two summit-attempts is the view from the top.
Eventually, breaking from our reverie of looping intricacies in repeating patterns, we see the returning waves of the ocean batter the tired cliff and pull what remains below the surface. Somewhere in the confusion, we had lost ourselves and levitated, we hang as a spectator in mid-air, watching a diminishing island disappear below the tides. Squinting into the water in a desperate effort to see the past, what already sunken beneath, we search in vain hope it will reveal to us a prediction for the future. And just as finally the island slips under water for good we sense intuitively a wave of relief that the mountain’s mass is returning, in peaceful resignation, to the fiery molten from which it came.

Orange Pulp

I was born, grew up, went to school, married, travelled, got a job, grew old, retired, bought an orange, and sat down under a shady tree tree, peeled the orange, and then paused, to look carefully at the orange from all sides, considering its elements, geometry, structure, function, surfaces, textures, first alone, then in contact with my skin. Soft pulp sliding across my finger.

At this moment I remembered the time as a young child when, fishing, I caught small fish and ran, crying, back to the cottage, while the fish, hook in cheek, flipped and flopped on the dock. Its unending, absolute, futile efforts frightened me. It was sunny, the lake was black, the grass was green.

I peel the thin white layer of pulp off the orange and eat just that. My wife watches with contempt; she’s uncomfortable out of the house: ants crawl up her varicose skin. I split the orange in two and offer her half. She uses a hand to wipe white hair from her forehead. She declines.

I will eat the orange, go home, tire, age, slow, celebrate the birth of a grandchild, move with my wife to an apartment, seniors residence, nursing home, die, be buried, mourned, remembered, forgotten, decompose, and finally, loose the fossilized shadow of my existence as the sun expands some 500 million years from now, engulfing the earth in less time than it takes for an old man to eat an orange.

That's The End