Old Silver
The pines stood high in the land of my father, in the land of the past bent and swarthy, in the land of blue night propped up on crooked stilts built by men who ultimately want to see the world fall into the glassy water surrounding us, splashing and sinking, suspended in space and frozen in an elongated moment outside of the waves of time in order to hover over the earth of our lives and finally see its mechanics for the beautiful, slow motion radiations of golden light that they are.
I found myself in a gutter laced with grass and bloody, tepid sunshine that pressed into me with an intent to accordion my bones into a flat sheet, with my heart breathing a melancholic scream upwards towards the end of the First Act, waiting for the cue from off stage that the rest of the cast had also quit and that the ambulance was here, ready to carry me off and under like a stone in a fiery lake.
I saw something in the stars then that carried me up; an old silver beacon I half-remembered that quietly spoke in static to me like a lullaby made for ghosts.
I turned in somersaults until the fear subsided.
I placed my hands over my eyes; I thought it would drown out the trumpets that screamed at me from above and the turbulent embrace of the sea below.
I flattened myself out and felt nasty, bitter drops of ancient dreams sting my heart in rhythm like some sort of violent tambourine.
The silver shadow that loomed over the gutter turned a deep purple-red and it found me.
My eyes opened to the sky and what was there shifted from looming to hovering, nearly floating, covering me with its blank and vicious color, aging and compressing me into the ground and bleaching my world uniformly.
The sound was atrocious and giant, and when it arrived I realized that I had known it was coming all along.
My heart started up, quicker but flatter; almost a steady constant beat like a hummingbird stuck in an perfect, endless loop.
I felt better.
I felt calm and directed.
I felt purpose.
And then it began to snow.
The snow covered and revealed everything within sight, taking away one blanket and replacing it with another, and in the time between, if you look quickly enough, you can see anything.
I saw a forest, very clearly, but I wasn't sure what I was looking at
I knew I could smell it as pines; they gleamed emerald in the cask of night and bled a heavy dark red when struck, fighting the oxygen.
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Night has its advantages when hunting.
It creates fear and confusion easily by way of displacement and perceived disappearance, and life, as it turns out, is punctuated by disappearances.
Life is also derailed by the unreal, the ghostly, the fallen saints and rising demons, the quiet monarch that will blare incessantly in an accent that seems familiar yet hazy and depressed.
At the crossroads of these instances, the ethereal and the vanishing, I found myself bound, and where I once took comfort in the sleepy atrophy that the close of day brought, the end of my life as described above was ultimately at the hands of this darker reality; I was hunted and ended by the night, the perpetually recurring witch of the moon.
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In the first part of my life, the ground did a lot of work to support me.
I was lifted by the air, pushed along by the wind, balanced by the moon, and scorched by the sun, all the while potentially melting into the ground, as would be easiest, despite the relentless compacted nature of the soil that constantly acted against any reasonable facsimile of that outcome which I quite lazily implored. It did so much to carry me, and although to be completely fair, it had no choice but to oblige the near-impossible slowness of the imploding nature of the world that keeps matter tacked to the globe and disallow any aspirations I had that I might simply dissipate into the layers below as a result of not giving a real shit and avoid the fluctuation of a warbling sense of anything truly positive, or negative, I may have down the line of my roads.
Life, the routine.
Actually, life is governed by the thick and the heavy; laws set in conjunction with one another at such a pace, setting, frequency, and consideration that they seem routine. In actuality, anything can go haywire at anytime. Springs can explode from the walls of the clock at eighty miles an hour, impaling us with cold silver twists; water can rush in and overwhelm the pipes, leaving us frantic and coldly soaked; the sear of the sun can die off, fading to icy blues and purples that beam back at us a violently underwhelming sonata of dull chiming frosted color; you could walk into the grocery, with its rows of boxed factory made drab dinners that sit on the exact opposite site of real estate- the furthest possible place- from the lushly colored and nutrient-rich food grown by the stars and grass, accidentally drop your keys while bending over to pick up a basket, and look up to find the other human half to your world; you could sit for hours on the bank of a cold lake, stoned by the prospect of engaging in such a routine as grocery shopping, as doing the thing equates supporting the thing, and why would you support the expected that undermines the experience of life- that these banal moments can act as highlights when with a person not yourself will not yet occur to you- never knowing that the door to the stairs that lead you to the next level is sitting right in front of the red plastic baskets at Safeway.
Life, for all its glory, I learned, was mostly a heaving plane of non-mystery tied with a finality that makes the future seem, at best, expected. Just tie me to a stone and throw me in the ocean now; I know what's waiting for me, and it's washed out and dead and cheap and pragmatic.
What has become of love of the expanse? The blank canvas used to signify life and breath and opportunity and wings and everything. Now my flight is fuzzy and my hours are waterlogged and soggy with the repeating spiral thunderstorm that plays out the same way each time, perhaps arranged differently, all the elements there, just staged in a new order that represents the most optimal and prudent path, like so many angles of yellow sprayed onto blacktop and concrete.
Let's assume for a minute that the stories are true; we are not long for this earth, and we are destined to be burned alive to death by that which we hold very dear. Would that be so bad?
Or should we try to hold onto the beauty of it all forever?
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The spiritual landscape of my childhood opened doors and laid flat towns and cities, making roads where businesses stood, and turning wild throngs of people into encyclopedias on legs. It was a heavy and milling affair, mentally, with an apex of sorts- an apex that continually, to this day, reasserts itself in new mediums every several years, mimicking the body's timeline of cumulatively sloughing the entirety of its cells in perpetual regeneration; the first instance I can recall is staring vacantly across a small expanse of sand and grass that I played in at my parents' home when I sat with the feeling of familiarity surrounding just sitting and breathing; allowing myself to be abducted by the wild clouds, the velvet blue sky and quietly screaming sun and having a feeling that this is where I am supposed to be- just sitting, breathing, and observing.
The idea that this was all I needed, that this was what I was here to do, as if I was on a mission of quiet patience and acceptance- I felt like I was supposed to lay down in the tall grass and give myself back to the sky, offer my eyes to the unavoidable softness of the clouds and my ears to the swish of the wind and be a living prayer. Everything else was transient and ending; roads that spilled onto highways and rivers that dumped into the ocean. And this moment was as well, in a sense, but this was the street I felt would go on forever, if I allowed it and if I could can it and bottle it and have it all the time and make it when I want and dump vats of the glowing peace into the world's supply of water I could slow the pace of cyclical aggression and the stampedes of inarticulate streaks of hopelessness and fervent, chiding emptiness that creeps in thru the doggy door of boredom and velleity and permeates the soils of our hearts and fields of our souls trying to ache and arch harder to reach to heaven.
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As I got older I became less certain that there was any path at all; I was waiting for a bus which would never come.
I paid for a magician to give me a dream that would help show the way, and the quiet terror that it instilled sat like a hum in my brain for the next thousand years.
In the dream I was up on a mountain and I looked down and there was a giant explosion below that blurred out
and there was only one man left standing down there and he was staring at me with hollow eyes, and quietly, peacefully, chanting a poem that spoke of scribbled love and quietly patterned hits of sound bouncing in and out of tune.
I saw flashes of a gutter, and I saw myself lying in it, with pools of sparkling, rainbow blood flutteringly tied around me, like the twine that corrals the form of a Christmas tree.
And I felt rushing beauty, beat and weathered but better for the travel, pinning me to everything and allowing me full peace.
The magician stood alone, solemn as a priest, and blessed me with his sin. He told me that what happened in my dream, what I saw, was real. He insisted. He incanted and swayed, blessing the grass beneath all of our toes, and pushed me to sit in a fountain that dealt in fire and seawater, a horizontal fountain made of clear diamonds.
"Sir", he began.
"The seat of time is not a wheel at all, but a crescent, sent from God to man and back again in an effort peel back and give way to the illusion of control."
"You have quite a ways to go."
The pines seemed to stretch themselves past the sky on that evening, almost as if they were picking stars like apples out of the purple night air.
I felt like the warmth of closure was near, like a chariot waiting to take me back home, fulfilled.
I did not yet know about the flower of red with the desert ancestry that would ply me with the light of the middle before allowing me a way into all of it, everything under the tattered sky, all at once and forever.
It occurred to me that what I had assumed was the hunter might have actually been a beacon.
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In the concert of the evening, of any evening in any where, with streets full of car-shaped anchors and human-shaped detectives with the baseball slowness of a day off jutted up against the spastic speed of a Monday after a holiday, all of us become each other; we sigh and rail and turn up and fold down and blanket our partners with comfort laden with our own issues unsolved like a tree lonely in a forest.
The rush of the stream of living is enough to make anyone doubt that the trail they are on is the right one, and especially when X or Y experience, in speeds blinding and torrid, almost always leads to confirmation bias, the punitive approach we dock ourselves into under the guise of pragmatic and prudent thinking can and will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I became a husk under these conditions, I transpired and transposed from the real world to nowhere, propped up like a scarecrow in a dusty, beautiful, hazy cornfield that stretched for miles flatly laid out under the baleful and watchful eye of a mix of god and a slowly swirling tapestry of pinks, of lavenders, of nearly translucent baby blue curtains of sky.
And it was in this second part of my life that I rolled and lapsed and rolled again, repeatedly attempting to sit up after a long sleep, trying to step off the boat that rocks
forever and onto the sacred and steady ground that normal people tread, trying to fly from a place under hell, a place free of hot or cold or dark or light; I tried violently- in as much as a person destined for everything actually tries at anything- to free myself but ended up bound more and more and impaled on the pike of the night sky; I covered myself in a thick woolen blanket of velleity and stole to the corners of the globe of my world, shutting all lights after hours, and, despite the sunny disposition of the day and my corresponding outlook, a thick mass of purple and grey cloud, streaked with a dirty, choppy and angry hits of deep blue all over and over.
I would sanctify my hours most evenings with wholesome escapism.
I would fill my mind with dreams of a future clouded in fog; pressing and fated nature obscured by circumstantial nature could surely not be my fault. It was destiny. Destiny yet to be realized, sure, but at what stage does the flame of the dream burn brighter than just before the moment of action; the moment you can absolve inaction with the perpetual, infinite stages of preparation and the mantra that there will always be the future, and in that future, where, coincidentally, everything will be Ready and Perfect and Ideal, lies the Golden Road of the Determined Divine. Where beauty and love carved out a home for itself among the tepid streams being privileged to be among life but not bought in.
Close, but not entirely there.
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The travel from that moment to the heart of it all is very subtle and sloping road; I mean to say, pinpointing the moment I switched from lazy and despondent to a lovely dripping husk of a person, wrapped up in sparkles and glitter and color a shade beyond iridescent that only I could see, was something that had always been in me, in spades. It was always real, always toxic and charming, always warm and dutifully true to the inherent nature of the functional parts of being human; it was the easiest way to live and be fulfilled.
Here was the path. It was a warp zone to a sky filled with stuffed animals and gooey heaven and slowly ebullient claps of praise and endless laughter and thermal warmth that harnessed the sun. I was the sun. I was all color. I was slowly trickling through everything and I was a part of something big, something lifeless and timeless and I was playing in the lawn of God; this land was the closest one can get to the soothing blue grey slumber of death while still keeping one foot in the lukewarm water of the living.
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The bindle the magician witch laid on me felt warm in my pocket and seemed to pulse, organically; not like the metronomic tick of an infection untreated, nor the dull throb of a muscle strained, but a slow physical glow that had no discernible tempo or remorse. It was hilarious and sweet and confident, it was a haunting royal blue light in my
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"Sir," the magician began again.
"For life to live the reign of kings and to mingle with the slime of the welt beneath the boats, the one that brays and the one that prays must pl-"
I took the bindle from his hand and rocked the plastic bag full of heaven back and forth and forth and forth and back in my hand, and then I struck him in the broadside of the head. I hit the magician hard enough to send him to the ground. I knew what he offered, and it was already mine.
So I took it.
And the first time I pushed the junk into my arm I felt my heart as a magnet, a mother, a creator that calls love sent out into the world back home to supper, a boomerang that was always meant to return, with love realized in physical form as color; brown and white and tan powder that explodes across the bridge of the heart into a thick world of glitter and shadow and soft, permanent hope. The junk was the prism of the discerning and warrior man, the one who would forgo real life for one in the reeds of purely constant love.
A weak man would say the magician was actually a witch, an old silver warlock that put a spell over the eyes of the weak, the gutterbound, the ones who want a radiant shortcut to God.
I knew better;
To give yourself over to the clouds of your heart and sky, that was true sacrifice-
To mine the night for the sea of black diamonds that lay in waiting, just beyond that silver veil-
To face the ones that hunt you and lose yourself in their arms, admitting that the game was up and that you were always theirs to lose-
The most important thing I ever learned was, as it ends up, the lesson behind it all; the one mandate that winds the clocks to spin and pushes the wind to breathe: we cannot truly give ourselves over to the beauty of the world without detaching from the functionality reality of that world;
one has to make a choice.
And the night was always so sparkly and so delicate and crushing and full of cold love, like the ending of a book that sends you to the middle of your soul and back, where you've found that what makes the scraping, churning, incessant drive of humanity seem like it was a beautiful gift all along.
I didn't mind being hunted by the night, anyway. And really, it wasn't so much hunting, I suppose, as it avoidance on my part.
Avoiding the inevitable end of the line that I always knew would be my sun.
The fork in the road, low and dusty, that would genuinely sneak up on you, although you've been staring straight at it for miles.
It only took a little spark of silver to illuminate the night, the hunter that was bound for me as I was bound for glory. I had to follow it, to give myself to the magic and to the beauty, whether it was real in its own right or whether it lived only as an ideal that pushes us along the back and forth of the regular day.
The gutter around me sang and glowed in the heavenly light, the snow fell in soft hills of old water, and the last thing I remember is a smell of pines as finally lay down on a sea of beauty; a full example of what the world could be if we finally surrendered our arms and accepted the fact that the world at large will only allow yourself inward if you abandon all hope altogether and brightly ignite the fact that the land is calling you; the world wants to envelop you and worship not who you are, but what you allow yourself to ultimately succumb to.
