So Abe, What Cha Been Up To?
moe: Haven't heard from you in a long while. What have you been up to?
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abe: Lately, just dyin'. You?
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moe: Whoow, that's a heavy. I've been too chicken to try dyin' so I decided to try macramé... still, I can't figure it out. How about you? Is dyin' an art or do you just fall into it?
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abe: Hard to catagorize. Seems like I'm always workin' on it. Sometimes I get too busy to remember I'm doin' it, and so then it seems like I ain't. But, lately, I've had enough time, so I noticed that my dyin' is comin' along just fine.
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moe: Did I just weird myself out or something or are you taking about batik?
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abe: Well, that would explain the different shades of blue spotting my body, but I'm actually talkin' about good old fashioned livingdying dying. Letting the dots not only remain unconnected, but fade into... For a few decades I tried to give dyin' up, taken in by the whole Hollywoody fad of eternally being all you can be. All that pretty plastic. But, you know how impossible and simply boring that is? Dyin's not about being anything. It's the door of being locked open.
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moe: I like that "good old fashioned livingdying dying," as if yer talk'n about gramma's hooch (God rest her soul). I remember up North they have ads by the military encouraging the young to be all that you can be. I suppose being dead is all that we all end up being anyway, so why not hype it? Ahhhhh, OK Abe, now I see why you said "Hollywoody" - funny, ha-ha. I'm a bit slow on the uptake on account of that yakisoba and gyoza I ate a while back *burp!*. Just one thing, how long has the door been locked?
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abe: For as long as now, my friend. And, that's beyond the long and short of the Hollywoody. The real forever. And I liked how you picked up on our famous Uncle's shout-song "encouraging" the young to climb into the back seat of HIStory of limitations. If someone tells you he has the magic to make you what you didn't even know you weren't, much less didn't know you wanted to be, check his eyes for traces of snake blood. Wasn't that the whisper of want that got our good old fashioned Mom and Pop thrown out of Eden and into the hard fields of death in the first place? "Be all you can be," basically means, "You ain't much of nothin' now." Welcome to death's long hallway of locked-closed doors. Get busy bloodying your knuckles with knocking. But, dyin' ain't death. Dyin's the gift we appreciatively give to livin'. Not a payment, rather it's like how you give gramma a bushel of the best potatoes just before it gets to be hooch season, but you don't say you expect, nor want, a gallon of White Lightning by Thanksgiving.
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moe: Ahh, gramma's hooch... I remember her rainbow coalition mash...Idaho Reds, Yukon Golds, Blue Macs, Green Mountains, Pink Pearls and Cal Whites... A panoply of wonder and hangover guarenteed! was gramma's promise. Remember her reposed on the chaise lounge smoking Gauloises and singing I can see a rainbow, see a rainbow, see my rainbow hooch? I'm getting whiskey misty recalling when Death came calling on her. She had him waiting nervously in the hallway and tap, tap, tapping his bony fingers on the boot box. When she came down all in white she took one look at him and said "Why you're nothing but skein and bones!" (Probably the only time Death busted a gut laughing - if that's what ya call that cackle.) I'll never forget her last words as we stood there not knowing whether to shit or go blind, "Don't wait up, boys."...
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Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, dyin'. So you've been watching yer numbers... what? dwindle or add up? Tell me something, when Uncle encouraged us to "be more" than what we are didn't you feel a bit insulted? I mean, I thought I was already all that I would ever be. I saw no reason to add death to my resume just yet... My glass is empty, time fer a refill. I can see a rainbow, see a rainbow, see my rainbow hooch.
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abe: Just watchin'. What you notice is that the numbers aren't sequential. An 84. A 5. A 17.
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About feeling insulted, at first, not a bit. Mostly, I just felt that usual little pinch of a needle slidin' into my vein and leaving its quickly-decaying sparkle of ambition. Like a reflex, I took to always carrying one of those mirrors you get whenever you sign your name on the dotted. On one side, a foggy and scratched reflection of what you thought you were yesterday. On the other, an accurate reflection of yourself tomorrow, but magnified. Flipping back and forth kept me on my payment schedule and impatiently hoping to get picked for my role in the movie about me.
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moe: You too? Man I have those fantasies too! But I often think who would play me. Jim Carrey is my first choice - "Smoke'n!" I also dream about about being a rock star like Neil Young or Stompin' Tom Connors ...on a Sudbury Saturday night. And sometimes when gramma's hooch really hits I pretend I'm kd lang or Mary Margaret O'Hara doing a music video. Yeah, I'd be up there on stage in sequins singing on key and...
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[Hey Moe, where the hell are you! I thought I told you to take the trash out and clean the gutters! Get off the computer and stop looking at porn!]
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Shit! I gotta go. Mom is going to hit me again if I don't get going.
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[...and I just got a call from the bank...]
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Shit, shit, shit! I missed another payment!! Looks like my number's up. Catch up with you later, hopefully.
posted by Santari Santari @ 1:15 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Moses: You know Abraham, I've been troubled lately by a term that has been batted around... troubled? well more like confused - is there a difference? And the term is this, "Moral Clarity". Now I've been around a long time, but how this term has been used... is being used drives me nuts. I mean, I feel like a ten year old trying to figure out the adults running the show. Do you know what I mean? Does this make sense?
Abraham: Makes sense to me. It's like that old "you gotta go along to get along" deal, where those who speak make you think they have something to say. But, how to judge the silent? Of course, the shouters are right; going along will get you there. And, it's even a waste of time to question them with, "Where we going?" They'll have a clearly painted landscape to explain for you, to be sure. That's why we have to continously ask ourselves, "What's wrong with me being here?"
Moses: Or perhaps more accurately, "What's wrong with me going there?" It is really disconcerting that the shouters are claiming the landscape to be some kind of New Jerusalem while billions are spent erecting giant scrims depicting post-apocalyptic lion/lamb type icons where peace reigns between the predator and prey. Meanwhile, behind the curtain poverty and despair can be found wheezing and gurgling throughout the land as if someone been shot in the chest and left to die. That, it seems to be the moral clarity the shouters are all getting on about: those sweet sticky moments before death arrives and all the unimportant stuff of living disappear leaving the one supremely clear moral - "I should have gotten along better."
Perhaps I am contradicting myself since the "there" is basically a facade placed over the "here". Time to start asking, "Where are my feet?"
Abraham: I asked that for years out there in the desert, walking in the sand. Dust blowing up to my shins each moment, it looked like I was some kind of tree of sweat. I didn't know if I was moving or staying in one place. I'd look behind myself, trying to see where I'd come from, but there were no traces of a past. No path leading to where I didn't know I was. And, through it all, I couldn't find my own feet, except to imagine that they were the dunes themself. The idea that I was moving in the dunes suddenly became hilarious. I laughed a duststorm. The desert was flowing--around me, through me, as me. Hahaha. And, in that nearly absolute lostness--when I didn't know where I ended and the dust began--the only thing I felt was a moral clarity. But, without a source. Nowhere to ask for explanation. Nowhere to smile at as authority. Nowhere to bow down towards in fear or with thanks. It was as vivid as the grit of sand in my gums. It didn't give me anything, but it was the simple ability to walk or stop, to live or die, to plung the knife towards Issac's throat or to stop it short. The freedom of will.
The memory of that feeling guides me now, but I know the only way to find it is to get lost.
Moses: Sometimes I envy you and your travels without a past, celebrations of uncertainty, and comfort at being lost; all in the pursuit/non-pursuit of arriving at some clarity. I envy because I can't go any where without my feet. I am locked into the past; where I came from has led to where I am and will take me where I will go. All that the desert sand does is blow by me obscuring the only path I can follow. While you can trust being "unfooted", I rely on my feet to know where to go - after all, isn't that what they are there for? They are hard wired to the path leading to moral clarity: my one true path. I can't really use my head because it isn't much different than this desert sand: without direction or imagination. But my feet know where we came from and know where we ought to go. I suppose it may sound like reading teas leaves to you. I mean, how can feet know where to go? I don't know, but I suppose since they were designed to move forward, they may just know the best place for the next step. Just that simple and when all those "next steps" are collected the there becomes here. The freedom of will then becomes a case of whether I accept my destination: free to stay or move on. That's my history, my present and my destiny. Even when I'm lost I know there is a beacon somewhere calling me home. And when I am confused I look down to see where my feet are pointing and there I go. Like you, I don't know the source and have no real answers why you are "unfooted" and I am, must be "footed", but in the end I reckon we'll get to where we're going. As for the Shouters, at the risk of sounding glib, there will always be those who shout. Nothing we can do to change that reality, so it's best to move on, that is, if you want to.
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