A SELF-SUMMARY.

For all the deliberateness with which I have assailed the foundations of my own existence, I have yet been left dazed and wounded by its toppling. The most heartbreaking photograph I’ve ever seen was a charred little baby crying woefully for its mother, alone in a heap of bombed-out rubble. That it reminded me a little of myself is profoundly pathetic. If the baby held a detonator in its clenched little hand, the resemblance would be truer.

I was one of those revolutionaries that swallowed all my cyanide on the assumption that I’d be captured, got hooked on the taste of martyrdom, and joined the other side for the romance of looking in and counting the rounds as they knocked down my blindfolded friends. I learned to smile when they called me the “good spy.” It was a twitch, really, more than a smile. It still hits me like epilepsy every time I put the telephone down.

I’m fully domesticated, indoctrinated, and reformed. I’ve taken everything back. I go running after balls that were never actually thrown. I’ll pull the pin on my hand grenade then close my eyes and let you do the counting.

I’m a treasury of hyperbolic metaphor.

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AN INITIATE.

It’s very strange to ponder now. Awakened by the telephone, perhaps not perfectly in command of my sensibilities, I seem to have promised that I would show somebody into the woods, and help her find a demon to worship.

“No, no, this will work perfectly,” I mumbled, broadly scratching my bare chest beneath the covers. “You’re still a virgin, right?”

Standing at a payphone somewhere, shrinking from the glances of neighbors, she answered affirmatively, and the line crackled.

“Oh God, and you’re Jewish too! Perfect! Perfect!” I didn’t really know what I was saying. I thought back over the enormous books I used to read as a teenager, and was boggled by a profusion of half-resurrected details. “Anyway,” I conceded, “However perfect you might be as a candidate, we’re still going to have to take all sorts of shortcuts. I mean, this will be a pretty rugged undertaking.”

She said that was all right with her.

“The hardest part will be getting the demon to come,” I continued, “Once we have one, it’ll be largely a game of mutual exploitation and trickery. We’ll have some sort of degrading obeisance to perform. We’ll have to keep him in check with our blasting rod, which will probably have to be some harmless sprig we pick up on the way there. There’s the contract of course – the wax, the finger-prick, all of that. It’s all a lot of cheap ritual held over from the 16th Century.”

Oh, she said.

I asked her, “Do you know what you want from the demon?”

Oh, no, she said. She hadn’t thought of it. Did she have to want something specific?

“Well,” I said, “It’s good to have some kind of demand to start with – something for which your – well, your soul, I suppose – is being exchanged. Something more or less material. Hell is an old-fashioned place… it works on a bartering system – goods for services, services for goods. Without an initial transaction to establish expectations, the lines of authority are likely to get horribly construed, and the demon will turn to acts of random mischief just to keep himself occupied. You don’t want that, believe me.”

She believed me, she said.

I gave her an example. “When I conjured my first demon,” I recounted, “I made him promise that I would become a flash-in-the-pan, one-hit-wonder rock star. I didn’t want to ask for too much. Just the world on my plate for two or three years, and the chance to die young and semi-glamorously, preferably in a hotel room.”

Oh? She said.

I could read her thoughts. “Well, all right, so it never turned out that way. But I never set a time-table for the demon either: that was my mistake. I should have said, ‘And I want it to happen by the year 2004,’ or something. For all I know, the demon is just waiting around until he can wreak the maximum possible level of destruction – really milk the bargain for all it’s worth. I was just a lonely kid when I conjured him. The longer I live, the more relationships I form; the more relationships I form, the more people I drag down with me, and the more bitterness and despair I engender through my self-ruination. Bitterness and despair, that’s their bread and butter down there.”

She’d have to think about that, she said.

I yawned, “Take your time.”

(October 14, 2007)

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A DEATH SCENE.

We’ve all gone to our separate places, to brood and calculate our ruin. One goes to the roof, to suffer in the wind, wearing a borrowed hat. The other goes to the kitchen, to her electric typewriter, where she pounds her life to pieces and leaves black scabs on the back of a limp, white sheet. I go to the bathroom and pretend to electrocute myself with a hairdryer, in the bath. Nobody’s fooled. It’s the third or fourth death scene today, if the simulated murder is counted.

“Begging to die by the hand of a friend!” I rasp, a hand on her throat, a hand on her cold cheek. She bends like a lily beneath me. “He made you his lover and I never knew! Till I learned from the lips of innocent envy! Learned! From the lips! Of! Innocent! Envy!”

“What – what are you…” she stutters.

“It is written!” I hiss, “It has been sung!”

“Oh… oh yes… yes…” Now she is remembering.

“This would all make sense, if only you had been paying attention,” I chide. I swing her around and throw her at the feet of her friend. “Kill her!” I howl, “Can’t you see she’s in the way?”

“In the way?” murmurs her friend, “Is she between us?”

Both of them are shivering, their eyes bulging. I have a cigarette between my fingers, and its ashes are falling on my petrified companion’s upturned collar.

“That,” I say, “Is the bloody New York School!”

Laughter. Relief. I throw my cigarette away.

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A HYMN TO HERMES.

Darling, you are the accident of genius.

Secret of the earth, a jewel formed in darkness;

Your elements in sacerdotal tones, I sing –

“Child! shall I be your fool?

I know that you are born of gods,

And that you are but running backwards.”

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THE GOSPEL.

The gospel of our times is by necessity vulgar and expeditious. Since words have brought no effect, we have resorted instead to embraces. Life is a plague – desire a virulence. With a kiss we prove that the fire cannot quench itself. We consummate our courtship on a bed of dry kindling; our wedding guests rake out our bones and dress themselves in our ashes.

The gospel of our times is rash and calamitous. The new way to the Kingdom is a short cut through the flesh. Since the Word has brought no effect, we have exchanged our prayers for embraces. You will not have been led and I will not have been followed when, laughing and young-limbed, we awaken to Summerland – and, finally, love.

(Friday, November 16, 2007)
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SOMETHING TRANSITORY.

I was reeling drunk at a house in Mt. Tremper, in the middle of the forest, where something transitory was being celebrated. S.M. wanted me to show her how I had climbed a tree to get up onto the porch. I had sacrificed much of my senses to a bottle labeled Kentucky Gentleman, which, despite its name, had given me some fairly rough treatment. “I’m very drunk,” I told S.M., “I’ll probably fall.”

“Show me anyway,” she said, and she followed me outside, where we could watch our breath tumbling from our nostrils. S.M. is the sort of girl who can flash you two middle fingers and not lose an ounce of her puerile innocence. She had said flattering things about my face, and I owed her something for it.

I got around the back of the house, S.M. running behind me, and I never lost my footing, though through my wetted eyes the world looked like a carousel as viewed through a broken kaleidoscope. Before I could climb the tree again, though, the owner of the house came out and entreated me not to. The tree was special to him, he said, pointing out how he had built the porch specially so as to not interfere with its growing. He called it a Sour Gum tree and made a eulogy to its foliage.

So we were standing out behind the house, S.M. and I, with our arms folded, and our shoulders hunched around our necks, and our coats somewhere on the floor inside, and I was too drunk to notice time passing by, or to hear what S.M. was saying. (Your peripheral vision goes when you’re drunk, so you become a kind of camera, and your body becomes a tripod with one of its legs missing, so it wobbles.) S.M. and I peered up, and there were two figures standing up on the porch, back-lit by the party scene, and I could tell that they were N.H. and S.G.. N.H. was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and standing very still, as she always does, not feeling the cold on account of her purported Irishness. S.G. had on her yellow beret.

Some rusty mechanism inside my heart wheezed and gave out just at that moment, and I started to call up to S.G., “S.G., my dear, jump down to me! Jump and I’ll catch you – I’ll soften your fall!”

“What are you doing?” S.M. gasped, taking hold of my arm as if to pull me away somewhere.

“I’m not going to jump, Damien,” returned S.G., “Be quiet.”

“Please, please jump,” I whined, “I swear it will be all right. Give me your trust and I’ll suspend gravity for your sake. We’re growing old and dying while you tarry in your non-belief!”

“Fuck you!” S.G. shouted, her voice cracking against the cold. “Fuck you, Damien! You’re always doing this to me!”

“Getting drunk?” I said.

“Telling me to jump! Telling me to kill myself with you or for you or whatever it is! You can’t do the impossible,” S.G. cried, “You’re a fraud, Damien! You’re such a God-damned fraud!”

“No, no I’m not,” I sputtered, weaving backwards into S.M. “I’m not a fraud. S.M., tell her.”

S.G. screamed, a short wordless utterance, and turned her back to me, and went inside, her last breath hanging somewhere above me in the branches. S.M., inconceivably young and too amazed to speak, held on to my arm as I careened toward the house. I scooped up a bottle of beer on the way in, opened it in a terrifying hurry, drank down half of it, and charged upstairs, to take refuge in a closet with a vacuum cleaner and some shoes, and S.M. hung up somewhere in the crowd.

My wife found me later in the night, when I was taking hits from a clay pipe with a lawyer and an Englishman. She put me in the car and took me home. I woke up for a moment to ask what time it was, and when she said eight o’clock, I thought she meant in the morning. Jesus Christ, I said. Is it that early?

(11.19.07)

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SINGING AND DYING.

They actually said, “No thank you.” The young women at the bar, as I closed my guitar case and put on my hat, and waved copies of Always Always Ends in the air, and said “Last call for CD’s; they’re free,” – they actually said, “No thank you.” As if I were hawking bubble gum and shoelaces at the doors of a train station.

I had been playing my songs for over an hour. The wife of my nominal opening act (a man whose talents far surpassed my own) was listening rapturously for much of it, standing alone at the foot of the stage, her eyes closed, smiling. A childhood friend sat shadow-bound a few feet away, forming dark plans for later in the evening.

The rest – there were perhaps eight or ten – remained far across the room, slouching around the bar, conversing in shouts, making amorous transactions, laughing boisterously – screaming now and then. Their racket unsettled L.B., in whose car I had come. She went outside with her scarf wrapped about her head and smoked away a pack of cigarettes.

So I sang between swigs from a bottle of beer, sometimes halting a song in mid-verse to await the end of a particularly obnoxious fit of revelry rising from the front of the house.

I have never written a song for which I have not suffered. There is no difference – for me – between singing and dying.

But when I put on my hat, and closed my guitar case, and offered the young women at the bar all that I had to show for a life blown to atoms, they actually said, “No thank you.”

(SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2008)