A Few Words

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He decides one day to write something new, something perhaps just slightly unintelligible. The contemporary equivalent of a personal sign, or a rune. He maps out his possibilities, chooses the upper right-hand corner where the space of the page makes its intrusion into the real, and with a fresh .02 millimeter pen makes a tiny mark that he thinks will distinguish him, will be purely his own, even if it may go unread. But then he thinks this could be mistaken for the claw mark from a bear. And he realized his mark will climb higher even as the tree grows. It is as much an accident as I am, he thinks. It is like any number of things that have only the question of intelligence to make them different. And so the worry begins, will he be mistaken for someone else by the sign he has created but not given a name? Now he’s in a fit. What if the mark is not misread? What if its meaning is clear to any child who happens to scrutinizes it? Is it his disguise that has failed? What if the man as grown back into the bear, and what if that is his real nature? He thinks about taking up painting, or sculpture, or perhaps– construction work. His father wore a hardhat his entire life. His wife tells him there’s a job down at the post office; she saw the sign. That sets him off. There are signs and then there are signs. His was something extraordinary, even if he knew it as a droll take on the way things are really made. Would he give up emotions for an economy of signs? And once lost, would he find himself again in this kind of writing? The rune will not last, he thought, but then why should it? Will he live beyond this moment of his own creating, changed by leaving it behind, or will he live out the last syllable of it without looking back? He forgets, and then picks up his pen to begin again.

Packing

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When I first attempted to clear out this closet that was full of things I had stored for some future use, even going so far as to throw out the boxes I refused to open again, labeled Do not discard or Old photos of family or Important private papers, all, as it were, from year zero, I realized that the past itself clusters much like the dust of cosmic debris before it forms into new stars. But I was looking for a way of undoing what was done, of living on the future edge, as with an event horizon, where one moment you are who you have been your whole life and the next you are pulled into a million potential others. Looking for a sort of super nova, an explosion rather than implosion of the past, looking for that spot at the end of the road that does not have a name or a sign to identify it, I tend to dream of otherness. But then I also tend to carry a lot along, balancing bundles of forgotten things in my imagination, into the next world, a mock-up of what I hope will come when I’ve freed myself from this one, from this confusion. It’s silly, of course, to think we can escape it, strip down to nothing and enter the world again like we did at the beginning. But then the beginning is still out there, floating around in some curve of the universe, waiting perhaps for us stumble upon it. I see myself as a child only in the way I saw myself as an adult when I was a child, that is, through the wrong end of a telescope. I know it, but then knowing it becomes a part it too. Gathering together the things that go in boxes is a bit unhealthy, but we all do it. We believe the future will somehow recover the meaning of the past. But that is its danger. These lives are not inseparable. We can fashion ourselves in such a way as to end what was coming for us before, and to make what has gone already different. Throwing out the boxes of things marked in another time for another someone marking them is not regret, but an act of salvage, an act saving the world from the deadly mistakes that forced us to box it up in the first place.

Emile Nolde

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Who could say what would become of a man, if on an opaque night, the country was overrun with high stepping bullies? Water colors can only hide so much. History changes everything, or perhaps everything changes history. Even the smallest particle splitting off from the tiniest atom, if at the right speed, can cause a new universe to unfold, even one he himself could not live in. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions, scientists call it. Long before that, karma. A sense of order fools many, and perhaps that was what happened, many fooled themselves into a sense of order. He painted his way through the fissure in humanity, drawing first and then filling in with sweeping gestures the madness of color. It might have saved him to be rejected, to have the Party decide his work decadent, degenerative. It degenerated after that, the expressionism, the desire deep-rooted in what before then had never been names. Perhaps it was one night, like these others, opaque and refusing to give up its color, that he walked to the store for the morning’s milk, and discovered the bodies in the alleyway. Perhaps he thought them better off dead, forgotten, no longer full of the fire that had left him as well. Then suddenly magnificent indigo cum magenta skies boiled into a fury in the flat, watered-down landscapes of a silent countryside. Or was the country simply unpainted? Beyond his wonder lay the corpse of a child with eyes full open. How much order can be contained in a storm? Is there chaos simply in the nature of human activity? Many men make mistakes, history is rife with them. Not many can survive greatness, achievements become a weight, its dark side equal in size to the side facing the light. There was a time when a picture was worth a thousand words, a thousands unspoken words. Yet for him perhaps one single word would have done it. But you could get killed for speaking it. A purple bruise appeared in the upper right hand corner of a calm day, the fields spread toward a two-dimensional infinity, the bloodied fields seem to be welcoming in the storm.

Making Beer

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Broddi tells me brewing beer is an art like writing poems. The essential ingredient is the taste passed down from one sipper to the next, for in good beer the heart must be fed on honest grain. I listened but words keep clinging to the insider of my head. In another country, in another day, I drank late into the nights, sang rancorous songs in Munich beer halls and Irish pubs, recovered slowly my grandfather’s speech, the talk of what was, what is, and the politics of the brewer’s affinities, for life and the gifts of sleep. You see, he says, you must tap the blood of hops, the fine delicate dreams of the grains. But you always start with the quintessential secret of water. The emptiness of perfect form. And then the fire rising above a mountain stream. Draughters learn early the laurels of lagers and ales, the local brews pumped up from dank cellars, the accidents that made elixirs famous for years. This, he says turning the glass before my eyes, is the poem coming back into your mouth. A world distilled like words. But like an old crofter living on Guinness, I want darker passions that will break the glass, that set the lines of blood flowing, the frothy yeasts that push us into the sudden fulfillment of the now.