Exerpts from my novella, Fireflies of the Dusk:
You’ve reached a respectable age when nostalgia becomes history. When memories are like curious pictures in a book. I can see myself in my striped pull-over and short-pants, sitting quietly in the spacious backseat of a green car, freckle-faced and somewhat grim looking, as if I already knew what life held in store for me. I was the diplomatic middle-child, my place the hump in the center of the bench. These were the California days, stucco and starfish, squat, single-storied houses, colossal emptiness of potential stretching into invisibility behind the house of the kid with too much breakfast cereal. Chalk on the pavement denoted yard-lines. I was fast, I was good at catching and throwing. But I was too small. I spat like paper from a straw, greased monkey with pigskin bundle, my talisman. Up north was a bay I remember so dimly the memory has taken on the quality of fiction. Hitchcock. Birds all over the pealing buildings: firehouse, library, post office. These are birds of pure abstraction, or animate ghosts trapped in film. The colors are washed out, my ordinary shit-brown eyes are nearly a sexy gray. I was not a bad looking kid. Always so damned serious. Torn from the viscera, covered in blood, designed to suffocate in amniotic fluid, a mistake. Now that I’ve said that how can I convince you, mon frere, that I believe joy to be our natural state, that most of our pain is artifice, a crude and pathetic facade wrought of our own weakness and self-deception. You won’t believe me because you have been trained like a sea lion to balance the ball of good faith on your nose, to sit still and take it like a good reader, to let the grand lies filter down through the top of your head where they proceed to bully the blithe emotions, kick them out through your sucker-punched ears. The heroes of sword and pen have buried your birthright of happiness. They have christened you under a noisome deluge of blood and history, piled atop your innocent head the worshiped banalities of neurosis, complaint, vacuous philosophical pontification, the messy and stupid struggle toward Socialization. The shores of well-being, those pink and pungent curtains, drift away behind you. You lose the smell, the sensation of birth and welcome, the cold, bright light of the first morning. The poets fit you in chains and fatuous critics polish the tearing cuffs. O Christ, our wrists bleed. The sea of humanity is throbbing red, an emergency.
***
I’m going to state my case outright, even if that means throwing shadows on the wall to amuse myself. Someone had it all worked out a long time ago. It’s true - and don’t presume to doubt it for one moment - a man is capable of recognizing himself for the walking corpse that he is. When this happens the logical result is madness, inevitable self-destruction. You might take the poet’s advice and change your life, change it absolutely, though very few have done it. Usually it is too late, you have loitered far beyond the middle of life’s road, and there is no sage to guide you. You will slog through Hell, and the golden bough will elude you in perpetuity. You will abandon all hope. No Orphean lute will flutter its melancholic lament. You will march inexorably on and on into the darkness. Tragically, there are those who are forced to remain among the quick, being unable to participate willingly in the destruction of another. For these wretched souls there is Purgatory, life as a means of preserving life in another and nothing more. But this middle ground, this grayish interim between life and death, can be nothing if not mercifully brief. In this limbo, music squats like an old maid in the whorl of your ear, poetry incants with the insouciance of an undertaker, and love sits like a ghastly bird inside your head, an intolerable pressure, a thing of beauty once now utterly changed, an absurdity. In this half-life grief turns concrete, takes on weight, stands on your shoulders and screws its thumbs into your eyes. You do not mourn for the dead, but for the living. A child laughs and you grieve for the child, intimate as you are with the separation that has already begun, that has put leagues of desolation between the child and yourself. Its ebullient laughter comes as if across a barren sea of still water. In the child’s embrace you step away from yourself, ashamed and incompetent, your arms broken, love perched fat in the hollow of your skull like a black swan. You waken, stung with drought, and words patter on the obscene light like raindrops. Some are white raindrops, impossible and invisible raindrops, some are black, filthy, or clumsy. Grief has crawled in through your mouth and you can barely contain it. Your skin stretches, your throat is stuffed full with it. Grief shines through your skin. Curled and black, it moves like a giant fetus.
***
