Breathless Overtures
( … once I staged a photograph of Adam being hanged from a tree ,, and I would have sent it to his mother [at the convent of St Barbarella in Venusberg] but I dislike rhapsodic and deifying symphonic biographies that begin with the death (even if simulated) of the subject, or worse, with an account of the lives of the saints (and their disappearances!!) what I desire are tattling tales ,, complicated delusions of an immensely convoluted conceptual puzzle undulating like three [count them!!!] copulating snakes across the yellowing pages of dust-covered volumes stored away on cobwebbed shelves in the attic for years and years waiting for a reader ,,, the reader in short : you, you, you !! / Do you still weep tears for what children have always forgotten?
Adam was intimate with fairies … take that in any way that suits you : and you will need a suit (even if only a birthday one) to operate on this plane of existence. The apostle said that children think and speak as the plants and animals and the rain. Adam made up stories for the boys on the school bus … fairy tales. and for the girls : The two most important elements of the Story are (1) the House/Library and (A) the Garden (in the center of which … witch?) and (aleph) the Forest and (zzyzx) the Desert : “full of invisible darkling forces” .:. ding! (ah yes, the ringing of a bell) … and the River, yes, don’t forget the River. and the Twin Cities. (have I forgotten anything ??)
Baudelaire wrote, children are interpreters of flowers’ speech and the voice of silent things! But what do they know about the pitiless white sun and the rumble of earth-mocking thunder? Have you dared yet to tame the fox? Get to the meat and bleat, I’d say, to that true roar of the hungry mountain lion, the stillbirth of the moment where the subject takes the first honeycomb out of their own sun-baked skeleton spread prone across the smooth desert sand / for want of a proper well. Why is the desert so beautiful? Does it not hide the airships of lost aviators? Why be so impatient to grow up, to leapfrog over the slow meandering oceanward journey of that drop of water born in the clouds only to merge with the rapids and the mad, concentrated rush towards the Fall? Have you ever wondered what the characters in a book are doing when you aren’t reading? Do they wait as patiently as I do?
FACT #206: Dorothy Ga(y)le arrived in Manhattan, Kansas on a train inbound from St. Louis on Friday, the 15th of September 1876, carrying in her arms a little white dog named Toto.
the Fall or the Falls? are we talking Niagara? painted by Frederick Church before he dissolved into a vaporous fog. Bedford? Númenor? In order to protect them, children are apt to make rings around roses and fill their pockets with poppies : what does this signify in the context of one’s biography? We are but factors set ablaze? A perpetual-motion machine needs no reader : this is my secret engine. Childhood is the sharpened edge of an enormous prism. If I seem like a fool it is because I am an alien, a resident of another world whose memory has been erased to make room for a sensible machine with teeth and two Is made out of clay. When the child arrives, we don’t understand its ways, nor they ours. Children climb up through the ruins because they know the only thing better than being a writer is being a character.
PROBLEM #827: How to escape the infinite prison? (Ask a friendly snake.)
from one world into the next / j’arrive ! — once he squeezed through that hollow tree stump in the enchanted emerald forest (feral child that he was) there was no going back and forth … oh, but there was ! and is to come (read on intrepid sailor crosswordery awaits!) : those pathways to and from Faerie : sealed off to ,, no adults allowed. Who closed the roads? by what program have we blinded ourselves? why have “we” closed our ears to the Orphic voice? … voices? There are a few things you’ll need for this journey and a portable copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses belongs in your rucksack. Such questions are reasonable, but not for the usual reasons. Allow me to indulge in an illustrative analogy: imagine a city divided in two (similar to Paris) by a river (like the Seine). there is a right bank and a left bank. there you will find booksellers and one will have a rugged paperback pocket edition of Ovid waiting just for you / it’s the river that gives life to the city. the river is both air and blood to the city. things are brought into the city. things are brought out. / The geometry of the city can be made more complex : any geographer could explain the topography of New York, Manhattan Island hanging down in the middle and a river on each side! two rivers, now there’s a truly fresh metaphor. / We all know where the river is going : to the ocean blue. (add “the Ocean” to the list) ,,, but who can explain the topography of Manhattan Kansas? … only the Kansaws, to be sure [now extinct, their language obliterated]
A bedtime story [the first of many] :: Once upon a time … there was a magical land atop a soaring plateau (only 999 to go!) the size of a continent : this continent has had many names, but the boy first knew it as Maradria (because of the Joons). This magical land is at the heart of a great desert : a green land in a sea of sand. And a river ran through this land dividing its western reaches into two provinces or countries. Before exiting the high plateau the river swells into a giant lake then empties through a stone gate, the water cascading tens of thousands of feet to the searing hot desert below. The inhabitants of Maradria would make the long journey across their land to stand at the top of these falls and look down, out, and across. And they would see the sun setting behind a horizon that seemed light years away and many were tempted to follow that path through the desert. A clever wizard invented travel capsules so that a few could go down and follow the course of the river as it wound its way across the desert. Everyone who flew out that chute never bothered to climb back up. Perhaps they spent the rest of their lives as desertwalkers always following the path of the sun thinking that one day they would arrive at another land, a Promised Land, though who promised and why has been long forgotten. Certain speech patterns once familiar on the high plateau of Maradria have become nonsense to the ears of the desertwalkers who see with two eyes and who believe that if you walk West for long enough you’ll reach the East, or baring that, certainly you’ll reach THE END. What they find, these desertwalkers, is the edge of the world, another cliff, and this one is Abysmal. No waterfall to carry you through this time, just a thin flat line beyond which is the dark Abyss into which you can’t help but toss yourself kicking and screaming into the dark night of eternity in pursuit of the ever receding sun. But there is another way : it’s the Way and it’s no secret. Some call this Way, the Lost Road. Others call it the Forgotten Road. and to some, it is known as the Endless Road. It’s the Way which runs contrary to the drift and pull of the unexamined life. The Way leads another direction entirely : it’s the Way Out, escape if you can. / There’s another kind of Fall. This one isn’t a discontinuity in the flow of water, but in the flow of Time itself. This other Fall doesn’t give way to winter, but comes in March, the springtime of life which must be lived in the summer of bondage. And if you and I are lucky, we might (if you agree to travel along ,,, here take my hand) we just might enjoy one more glimpse of the road into Faerie and we can hope that when November comes, we’ll come to the edge of the forest where the river is and we’ll find our little sailboat waiting and ready.