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“Look, it is thus that you have so far seen yourself.”

  -Hermann Hesse

  Child of the pure unclouded brow

  And dreaming eyes of wonder!

  Though time be fleet, and I and thou

  Are half a life asunder,

  Thy loving smile will surely hail

  The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

  I have not seen thy sunny face,

  Nor heard thy silver laughter:

  No thought of me shall find a place

  In thy young life’s hereafter-

  Enough that now thou wilt not fail

  To listen to my fairy-tale.

  A tale begun in other days,

  When summer suns were glowing-

  A simple chime, that served to time

  The rhythm of our rowing-

  Though envious years would say ‘forget.’

  Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,

  With bitter tidings laden,

  Shall summon to unwelcome bed

  A melancholy maiden!

  We are but older children dear,

  Who fret to find our bedtime near.

  Without, the frost, the blinding snow,

  The storm-wind’s moody madness-

  Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,

  And childhood’s nest of gladness.

  The magic words shall hold the fast:

  Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.

  And, though the shadow of a sigh

  May tremble through the story,

  For ‘happy summer days’ gone by,

  And vanish’d summer glory-

  It shall not touch, with breath of bale,

  The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

  -from “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll

  curvature

  one

  logos

  I wonder…

  Pneuma

  Breathe in…. breathe out….

  Breathe in…

  Breathe

  Out…

  Nod

  Charlie is checking out. Lying on the bed, in the sunken dark, his fever builds.

  Charlie is dead now.

  One last long held breath… and

  exhale.

  Charlie is home.

  The room remains the container.

  Matter-of-course

  The sun burns a heat haze of white light into this morning. Alice floats through its vitreous body, this warm glaze of luminous vapor. She stops within, and gazing down into the dark geometric space between all the blank refuse Alice sticks her hand down through to grasp the edge of the slipper. It’s saturated from time and the juices of decay. She stuffs it in her pocket. She moves alongside fences, eyeing passing gateways of this back alley. Alleys remind her of a subdued vein whose many tributaries lead to a strange burgeoning wonderland.

  She twirls the ends of her hair. She likes this smoothness of the spiraling spin around and over her finger, the loose lines forming into twisted buckling nubs, puckering in to new outgrowths of contorted animation. She likes to run her fingers and thumbs over the mounds of this fractured beauty. And if she’s careful and conscientious in the twirl she can just as easy unwind it to start. But as often as not you will see Alice with many still atop her head like forgotten bird’s nests. To disrupt them would be to disrupt this new undivided whole before its time. It sooths her to be a part of it’s creative reflex. It makes her feel warm and alive.

  She stops to inhale this existence, this warm morning wind that now fills her lungs, this weighted warm immersion that sets down to the soul. These salt licks of sea on air, this swooping recline of bird bodies on thick ether, this zipped-open space through time of distant traffic’s whoosh and rumble and roll, this cackle and knock and whisper and hoot of backyard punctuation marks. This float is full, this parade deep.

  She whistles a tune, and as she does, a ripple resonates and breaks, and an incorporeal chorus of all those that had ever whistled join in. Moving destined down the alley she kicks a can at the exact flattering moment, and turns the corner to wonderland.

  I think

  “…I feel what fills the full

  I empty my whole to become one again…

  I move and persuade beyond that that is yet to come…

  What amputates itself is blankness – fissures of gaping gaps…”

  This is the place that determines. The rest ignites itself to the whole.

  I am the holding…”

  The event parade

  The keyhole shifts. A persistent gap waits. Now redundant, the door cracks and silently slides open through space. Suddenly from anywhere in the room a cloud of inevitability has entered and waiting, hangs.

  Argent steps into its center.

  Argent has reached the end of his rope.

  He watches how his mind, in symbolic gesture, creates the thought of hanging himself. He subjectively squirms with the projected effect the outcome would have of creating a Thoroughly Misunderstood Spectacle. Stuck to his forehead would be his post-it note of this truth: “At the end of this rope, this end of the line, hangs this weight, this exclamation point, of unfinished business…”

  But, oh, to be that sudden light on one’s feet, that kick away from being a part of the dizzying weightless sway, this mesmerizing spiral swing of the fulcrum back to dead center ...

  Argent wraps the emotional cord around and around its centerline in his mind, fist over axis, taut spiral closure to thirteen times.

  But now he thinks, instead, a far better solution would be that the rope be lightly twisted upon itself, and the unwind of hanging spin from the weighted body would carry the feet back to the ground in time to have the dizzying spell undone…

  The evolution lies in the unwinding of oneself to oneself.

  But this point of plunge is always the raw and unnerving, the tension before the steep spiral spin. And he is the crux of this Achilles Heel in this line of revolution. But, as is always the case, this rip and tear in the fabric of time and space has left his “I” undone and is now nowhere to be found. So, this is his moment of Now and Then Zen, his zenith of dither and hover tipping to shatter. As he stares into his looking glass he notes not an inch of recognizable reflecting back. In a world full of Image this could be disconcerting. But Argent is only interested in what image he holds onto that will now be shattered, as its contracting bend suggests. Just like the moment that the screws turned put the pressure on the mirror, and slowly the distortion starts to appear, then SNAP… it breaks and spreads into a googol of fragments. He loves that word. Ever since he’d heard that a mathematician searching for a good word to name the very big number of 10100 consulted his three year old standing by.

  Argent is only twenty, but he thinks how he is already a googol of accumulation, and at this moment of immanent transformation he believes he may very well burst into a “Googolplex” of infinitesimal particles; that is a ten raised to the power of a “googol”.

  His one room flat suddenly embodies a pressurized cabin of this immanent fission that must be rubbed against itself down to fine nothingness. And so he feels a slight motion sickness accompanied by the bends as he paces the perimeter, stopping still when the slow implode shifts on its spiral swing down from decompression.

  Looking around he vaguely recognizes his other world, this room of his living that is his accumulated reflection. He thinks how he now rarely ever leaves this space, only to go the store and the university and back. He often feels queasy and faint; this throttled California air makes him unable to breathe now without a whispered wheeze. He watches out his window, when he isn't slouched in front of the television, or buried in a book. He eats grilled cheese sandwiches, principally for that comfort thing - the communion of
warm-gooey with soft-chewy.

  He wishes now everything were the same way,

  warm-gooey with soft-chewy…

  But such was this reflected need of the struggle of this moment, and this one had elaborately grown to a Fine Size in his psyche. It had pulsed along a strange burgeoning line, fed into from tributaries that wound taut forming to this twisted buckling nub, now so intricately puckering in upon itself as to appear an animating vacuum of nothingness.

  This can leave one with an urge to kill his nothingness.

  Nothingness takes time to become something. In Argent’s case it was a slow turn of the screw to distortion. He found university life laboriously complex in an unnecessary sort of way. He’d entered on a scholarship, and it seemed as if his initial enthusiasm was not part of the process anymore. Most of the professors dismissed Argent’s ideas in an impersonal way. This imprisoned Argent. He felt he was in this place to contribute. Initially he found it disorienting and distressing, and tried harder to persuade, until he realized that they would then just seem to focus indifference on him. Most professors seem indifferent by rote. Still others meandered within the confines of limited outlines. And others seemed to want a subtle worship that would appear sincere. He focused specifically on the physics professor, physics being Argent’s erector set to the whole. But none of what he explained implied a belief in the professor’s own leanings. He needed his students’ approval, although he was adequately intelligent to understand this psychological hole. Argent had watched him lash out on unsuspecting students during seminars, firing ridicule their way, only to reissue their lost sense of self later by lavishing counterfeit attention on them, making him temporarily glutted, but altogether empty. He would rejoin this circle track anytime the stage became conformably set, waging invisible concurring wars with his Ego. But with Argent he seemed particularly determined to kill something within him. This waged a new novel need in Argent, and with it came the looking glass.

  So, as it goes, Argent tried to repeat his ideas but this only echoed back as hollow. He tried to urge, then insist, but then became embarrassed by his need. Argent tried to carefully accommodate but was then left with the feeling of being misunderstood, and this built upon him into an uncertain unevenness. He tried to pretend to forget he cared but then he felt the embarrassing type of naked. Then suddenly he found himself trying to repeat his ideas, and realized he was back at the beginning, now hearing a much louder echo and feeling even more hollow. He repeated this circle a few more times, until it filled itself in and glazed itself over, and finally nothingness appeared. So he found himself losing the desire to continue. There was at last no place left to go.

  At least now he could contend with this void, because he knew exactly what it was, having gone a long way to get to this end of nothingness.

  Nothingness always comes from Something. Which means it has a reflection.

  And reflections always tell a story.

  And so, Argent decides to forgo any further fight, and instead lay down to this dark shadow, and give in to its illusion. He prepares for this ever-widening spiral slide, a lucid light curve, and all night long he struggles with necessity, urge and deliverance, pinballing off each one to the other, buffeting back and sideways and forward off its banks, until “he” breaks, and shatters. And looking around he starts picking up new pieces of his former self, now reconstituting into this liquid reality of sequence and symmetry, and distinguishes this fresh difference:

  Forever more he will become a vortex – a spinning whirlpool with backwash and countercurrent and reflectivity.

  Existing

  Throughout this broad New York day the hand-held radio reconstitutes the weather reports, issuing an established regularity to reconvene upon when the talk becomes thin on the park bench.

  The newspaper pops open tidbits to reconcile straying moments: “The Italian Supreme Court rules any pat on the bottom that is “isolated and impulsive” is permissible.” “Recent changes to an alternately smaller hole size within Swiss cheese will reflect and accommodate the American public more specifically. This, the Cheese Council of America assures, will in no way affect the taste, or more importantly the price.” “A recent rash of suicides and attempted suicides leads authorities back to a Japanese internet site with a menu of suicide selections including, for a small fee, the option of having a hit man take the deed out of your hands.” “A rally today from the newly formed group that insists freedom means impunity from yourself. They have no designation, fearing that this would draw undue attacks thereby maligning their purpose.”

  Lines of faint voices of televisions float in and out on the breeze, carrying daytime fairytales of drama and angst and conspiracy and attractiveness. By dusk surrounding apartment windows flicker and glow from its blue fire, the evening news noting all the visible news that is the observed news. Follow-ups include Reality Television showing real people living in real life. Beyond is optioned out to panels of spinning, revolving door discussion groups offering offerings of optioned options. Some of the evening shows the stock ribbon runs throughout.

  In amongst it all people come and go, back and forth from home to work to grocery stores to video stores to toy stores to malls. They spend free brain time in CyberWorld, hungry time in fast food stands, and lonely time in any place reverberating noise back. Then vacations to get away from it all.

  Disinfectants are popular. Soaps, detergents, disposable hand towlettes, all loaded with germ-killing agents.

  Eudemonia

  Harry pulls into the truck stop. He unwraps the wax paper and lines up his lunch on his dashboard. He salts his tomato and pops it whole into his mouth.

  Harry now contemplates.

  Harry loves to contemplate.

  Contemplate about Nothing and Something.

  And especially how they blend so easily into one.

  Harry has a secret. And as secrets go, this one makes him feel weightless through-and-through. And here in his truck cab he feels at home with his secret. In his cab of his truck he is king. King of Really Something. Stuck along the dashboard are a line of plastic underwear-clad girlies that bob and weave heads and hips with the truck’s motion. Strings of beer pop-tops hanging from his mirror tinkle and plink from rattle and bump. He rocks and shifts his rump to fall exactly within the intently aligned concave depressions of the seat’s covering of thick white borg, furrowed purposely to pamper and coddle in road rumble and bump thereby minimizing side effects of secret’s itchy, scratchy skin burn. He knows the moment this centered gravity is found, and breathes a deep breath, exhaling with momentum down the highway.

  The underling

  Helios holds his hand to his head in a breathless gesture of anguished disbelief. He can't understand how the colt’s survived. The mother’s been dead for hours before he discovers her. He stands reckoning the dazed and animated form of life pressed up against its silhouette, death. Squatting now, next to the colt, he stares into that endless moment reflected in her pure brown eyes. He feeds her warm formula milk, and tonight will sleep beside her to keep her at ease. He’s always kept covenant with his animals. Never fed the cows drugs to increase their milk production, kept the pigs out of stalls and away from antibiotics, allowed plenty of space for the chickens to run free, and fed all of them natural food and given all of them lots of sunlight. He doesn't talk much about "production output". He rarely attends the auctions because it bothers him the way the other farmers look at the animals. He doesn't care about the way they look at him. He lives meagerly. He spent most of his nights reading alone, and knows what to expect by what’s all about him. He just goes about his business, and bides with his intuition.

  He had for the most part separated when he was a boy after he had watched his grandfather slaughter a pig. He couldn’t understand the lack of empathy for the pig’s suffering, watching him writhe on the ground, a pump of blood swelling about his head. But even more than that he couldn’t see any sense of recognition from the
farmer to the pig, no sense of gratitude. It was as if this living thing was inanimate. No one could bear to watch this from the city, not until it was on their plates when politely presented and long removed. Chickens, pigs and cows were now advertised like animated personalities, making it all the more ironic. It didn't matter so much that people wanted to eat meat, it was how they went about getting it. It was as if all sense of affinity was so far removed there remained only a thin thread of recognition to it that existed in “farm days” or “petting zoos”, where they were “cute”.

  "A pound of flesh" he used to think, as he'd watch his mom carefully arrange it into a meatloaf. It used to make him physically sick to eat.

  His parents had nicknamed him “Shiny Shoes”. He liked to shine his vinyl shoes to see the world reflected in them. There was something in that reflection that made everything bearable.

  His dad had taken him to the slaughterhouse when he was just five. Walking in the back door, he was holding his father's hand as he always did then. The stench was laminated solid. He hadn’t smelled it before but he recognized it immediately as old death – layers of it. While his father talked to the man in the blood-smeared coat, he looked down at his shiny vinyl shoes now splashed in glistening red beads, and watched as the blood pool slowly started to merge around them…

  But he doesn’t want to think about that anymore. It’s starting to make him feel sick. He strives to shake off his time shift. He pushes himself up off the hay-filled floor, the colt following him with her eyes. He’s wandering dragging and uneasily now down the muddy hall, and outside around the corner of the barn, his caked boots swelling inordinate bulk weights. He feels the welling up inside, the cracking choke in his throat, and the uneasiness in his legs. The same feeling he had when he ran tearing away from his father’s hands that day in the slaughterhouse, as he slipped and upended, falling with a crack. In his mind he is there again, his slipping over the line into unconsciousness, as he witnesses the blood welling around his face and into his vision.