The Third Day, Mud
From the guru to the Tibetan on fire, underneath the robes they both long to be naked. And rolled like a fat cigar, Jeronathon relaxed His fingers and felt once again the cold cling of cavern mud the length of His frame. He scrapes a small divot of sludge to excavate His bellybutton.
He molds vision to purify the bleary shufflings nooked in crannies of this subterranean vastness. The ceiling, being recalcitrant as ever to the floor, repelled and never returned, as if an aerial acrobat could leap alone into the celestial overhead darkness and just keep spinning… not in orbit, but decohered to the point where his axes were his own (above, left and center) so it ceased, at some point, to occur to him he was spinning. That you fail to feel your incessant momentum and get used to adjusting your processing speed to match your rotational speed. Suddenly you simultaneously start to see both people moving steadily away from the main event and the night sky ticking off millennia of generations. If we can render stereoscopic vision then how hard can it really be to see two different scenes projected “simultaneously.” [“If only you weren’t so wrapped up in your own mobility!” exclaimed the janitor, who had to sweep up after all of this.
Was he in on this?, (the janitor, mind you) I am asking you to wonder as if you were Him.
At some level, it occurs to you that he has to be. Would the caretakers trust just anyone to sweep away and thoroughly dispose of today’s detritus? How would one even accomplish the job, if they weren’t fully aware of what a day’s job consisted of, and just how messy it gets. And what clutter tomorrow may deplore. Even a twentieth-century toaster would begin to learn to ask some questions after a while.
Knives shred, but don’t remember. How much could one Man be asked to remember? Could it really be the whole world in the entire universe?
Affirmative. Affirmative. (Sorry, that’s a dad-joke, and weak at that. You know how it goes.)
[‘What’s your name, bub?’]
I have none.
[‘Heh? Cat got yer tongue? What’’s your name, buck?’]
Evidence. I am evidence. I am the evidentiary outcome of scientific rationale. I am the poetry of logic and the mystery of mathematics. I am Our whole corrupted and individually strung existences, elongated and plucked at every low frequency — and I am in search of proof, truth and reproduction. Evidence is nothing more than the precise capacity to expect what is likely to occur: In watching that sand-encrusted beach volleyball get popped into the Atlantic sky by the heel of a fist, I expect to watch it come down. Unto itself, mundane and manageable. So opening a can of gelatin worms, what else might I expect? I’d expect to witness, to evidence, to experience, either: an) act of heroic athletic ability by a toned, young body dramatically torquing itself netward as an over-extended dominant arm just manages to keep the ball alive and aloft; or a) feeble and ignoble attempt shuddering in a weak toppling of knees as the under-inflated ball collapses in a sand-showering thud, a divot in fair territory.
Evidence, and the causal daisy chain of non-simultaneity, excludes certain input by design. Only so much light can enter the eye, with a coy fancy for certain wavelengths. We sense the density in things. I’m unafraid of the void that my filter intentionally prevents: Whether a chair is mostly a fathomless void in which tiny electrons shiver in the presence of minuscule nuclei or just probably substantial most of the spacetime, my ability to sit goes unchallenged. For another instance: Fiction. I cannot literally sit here and write to tell you what I really want to tell you…
[‘What’d you wanna tell me?’]
I’m not sure, I guess, but I want to put myself into wonderful and mind-bending situations, for the author is the protagonistic star of every written word. I want to experience life suspended from time and exempted from direct temporal causality. The story may always unfold in the same way, but the universe who holds me in her hands changes me, and no one stylistic scar could predict the next. But in fiction, as in life, my book is bigger than your book, and my world is bigger than your world, and mine made more money.
But it couldn’t possibly be about that simple and inelegant, could it? It wouldn’t make any sociological sense for that to be the case, no more so than say, primate penis size. No, there’s another filter that inserts itself between you and me. The way space occludes energy, you are different to me than who you truly are inside, as a result of this veil of scrim. But, as far as conducting the business of the abstract self to another factitious abstract self, the technical and redundant abstraction of words and language are the perfect place to lay out one’s vision of their own universe. Anything goes, milady! If you can ask for it, anything goes.
But how precise does your evidentiary order need to be? The “Causal Order” of level of order required? Why not, just for an instant, let the future influence the past, not by direct and brute nuclear force, but with the coaxing along, the evocative stringing of a narrative so exciting, so in depth that it encompasses everything. A story so marvelously told over and over and again and again in a hundred billion different characters, with all their scripts happening more or less at the same time, an enormous phantasm of immediacy and anticipation. What kind of tapestry are you building in that garage? A silent radio. A screenless television. A phonograph needle that just moved up and down like a tireless piston. Like the inside of an atom. Or a hammer that smashes itself. Or a mind that rebrands and rebrains itself.
[‘What wassit you wanted to tell me, Looseyfur?’]
I wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t be any more afraid of circuitry than you are of mathematics. I know you gave up with differential calculus, but like the tartar mellowing on your enamel I would beg of you to let it become you, to wash over you. The poet who briefly lent her pen to the dentist never needed to floss again. No, that’s a glitch, if you wanted to know what a glitch felt like, it was that. No fanfare, no volleyball blinking out of existence in mid-flight type of miracle glitch (sorry I looked away for a sec), just a hapless and poorly informed non-sequitur, where the future got tongue-tied in gut of the oracle and loosed a sulphury belch… lent her quill to Newton, and the next chapter of consciousness began to be written.
Because at that moment, the priority of self, the requirement to wrap everything in your own perspective began to wane in utility. It was a dream from inside which you would readily scoff at due to its absurdity. The hall of mirrors always reflected the same two entities: Inside and out.
But once the physicist got his grubby little sausage stubs on the Language of the Cosmos — Well, then! Then you can play God. It was one thing to pile turtle atop turtle until the abyss’ climax, but now, now you can go ahead, walk right up to that popular and sexy universe you’ve been stalking all these years and demand answers: Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway?! Ignoring me for all these years! How I’ve labored and slaved under your supervisory limits, lapped at your baroque architecture, gnawed on your table scraps, thought about you day and night, and yet you never once bothered to take even passing notice of my devotion. I was too far beneath you.
Well, I’ll make you notice me now, bitch!
And she’ll rub her exposed expanded belly and coo to the life growing inside her.
— Soon, my loved one, soon. Before you know it, you’ll set sail from your final harbor, thinking you’re going to the moon, yet ending up roiling in the sun. I’ve kept you safe and nourished but scant months, though to you they must have seemed like… millennia? Oh my, I wouldn’t even know. Do you even feel me and my motion yet? It’s heartbreaking to me that I can’t share with you just how much I love you, because you don’t even understand such terms, no less emotions, at this point. All this division, cell by cell, joining together all with the ingenuity to become what you are becoming, You are the point. You are the reason. You are special, and You are unique.
And that’s ultimately what I wanted to tell you. That You, the You that is becoming the Us, We are reaching back from the other side of the future to help guide Us on Your way.
And to tell you that You are special, You are unique, and You are needed. As great are my gifts to You, Your charity to me will be a million-fold.
Thank you.
[‘What’d you say your name was again?’]
]
He took his galoshes off in the slender entryway by leaning his body against the dry wall pressing the shoulder of his London Fog into a sheaf of fading illustrated pigeons, careful to not sop any fresh mud onto the carpet by positioning himself over the boot tray. He steadies his aching and shaking elderly hands just as the second shoe plunks down inciting a pinched spinal nerve that painfully ripples through the hollow like an echo, talking to the flash storm he left outside. His eyeglasses are fogged, dense with water streaks and slide down his nose, nearly falling off entirely, he was only able to counterpoint their descent with a wicked half-smile. It occasioned him to remember the heated exchange with the pharmacist over his wife’s heart medication. It was his hand holding the flimsy disposal bag that shook, and he could hear the jostling of the small orange pills. For some, the small victories suffice, the battles waged on the lowlands, for small thumb-patches of land, or a loaf of bread. Or to fight earnestly for whatever matters, whether they be the small orange pellets his wife needs to reduce her risk of heart disease, or the fate of a nation currently besieged by violent thunderheads unleashing torrents of rain and turning the gentleman’s famer’s fields to muck. The electricity flickers, as it’s wont to do in a storm of this unseasonal magnitude. Perhaps the gridwork itself inclines towards the naturally dynamic — senses for these brief and rare moments of exposed tumult a kinship, and tries to wrest its power from its earthly capture and fly again. To arch its back and lurch to the heavens, the whist of freedom captivating its imagination.
Until it flickers back on, slightly dimmer than before.
He breathes a couple of hearty breaths. His jeans are swallowed in fresh mud; his janky left leg gave out from under him as a gut pang dropped him to the shrubbery just mulching beyond the flower garden. He was able to stop his fall with the semi-pliable shell of a boxwood, but his pants were still a god-awful mess, and he stood there in the flickering dark looking for the best answer on how to proceed.
He hears the television caster lament that being anti-vaccinations makes Italians look bad by playing to a worn stereotype. Only a ginger can call another ginger “Ginger.”
— Maybe one day we’ll have enough approximation of social justice that I can look at some dipshit-in-charge and say he makes white men look bad.
Chuckling to himself does nothing but distract and delay the inevitable. And the meanwhile quite dire as rivulets of pooling rain stream from his scraggles, and the hems of his jeans unfold like dough from a pressure tin, slowly gurgitating clumps of mud onto the linoleum.
“Honey, is that you in the TV room?” It’s clearly become time to enlist secondary aid in the disrobing adventure to limit the overall fallout to the foyer, and he waits to hear her frog-chirping voice over the humming whoosh of flowing oxygen.
He hears neither, and the lights smolder to brown and fade.
“Honey, are you there?”
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