The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.
He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness.
They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded.
But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse.
They had no curiousity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.
In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.
The room smelled of old cigarsmoke. He leaned and turned off the little brass lamp and sat in the dark. Through the front window he could see the starlit prairie falling away to the north. The black crosses of the old telegraph poles yoked across the constellations passing east to west.
I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.
Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.
She patted his hand. Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There God's plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world.
Glass flowers exploding. Slow trail of colors down the sky like stains dispersing in the sea, candescent polyps extinguished in the depths.
Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
There is no God and we are his prophets.
All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.
No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.
Ever's a long time.
If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around.
One thing about me, when I'm wrong I'll admit it. Well. That's a good trait to have.
Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
No one spoke. There was none to curse and none to pray, we just watched.
The faint light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot.
There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all.
That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.
The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.
Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.
Do you think horses understand what people say? I aint sure most people do.
He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death.
Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
He sat leaning forward in the seat with his elbows on the empty seatback in front of him and his chin on his forearms and he watched the play with great intensity. He'd notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not. There was nothing in it at all.
Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.
How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry (of life) will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge of the world that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Your kinda weirded out, ain't ya?
He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.
He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.
You either stick or you quit. And I wouldnt quit you I dont care what you done.
You are either born a writer or you are not.
His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it.
The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin.
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.
She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.
He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing.
This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?
Men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent's flesh for its bite.
The truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?
The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein convinced that it's all that good a thing.
Most people'll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They cant wait to see him.
They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps of love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans.
