I had decided that inspiration could not strike me of its own accord.  That I might access it only through quest, at my peril, at my frequent failure.  And so I chucked my spiral-bound Cambridge notebook, yellow pages, thick paper, alternating graph and rule print, as an optimist’s debris.

            And then I was struck, on the bus, while in the curve of a sweaty armpit of nausea, by a solid sentence.  Inspiration as evanescent as pen to paper.  Sure, I had a spotty ink pen and a crumpled receipt, but once expunged the information just decayed at the bottom of my bag. 

            I am not an organized person.  A notebook is my system.

            It’s not good versus evil, what I want versus what I don’t.  Maybe wise versus willful.  Patience is readiness.  Listening is the truth, mainly tacitly, as it turns out.

Are we doing this now?

            Strolling up the street, iPodless, three men are walking toward me.  They leap up in formation like a comic book still, arms out in triumph, legs kicking karate.  Their feet hit the street, and they are normal again.

            It’s time to pass each other.  I attempt eye contact as if that’s the way to explanation, coughing back my laughter.  As they file past, the middle one starts bobbing his head like a pigeon, and squeaks out a beat.  “Megaman!” he punctuates his song.  I’m a spigot of giggles, but nobody talks to me.

            Did I just get dance-stepped to?  Because if so, I would have given each one the chance on principle alone.

When the American economy has fallen like Rome, and the ruins are being parsed for the reason, more astute analysts than I will be able to fully catalogue the causal relationship between penance foregone, and the end of an empire.  There is a need for blood.  If the economic elites don’t placate the populist fervor with some platelets, all our necks will meet the slit. 

Massive bonuses at Goldman Sachs, and the gold-plated hookers to follow, are blood-boiling and symptomatic, and they are ours to own.  We have allowed (if we were duped, it is still our disinterest and exceptionalism that left the fine print unread) our system to run on atavistic excess without an equally primitive leveling system, like the guillotine.  Evolution would entail a surge in humility, humility with which the 21^st century has yet to flirt.  We have, however, been stealing some tender afternoons in a motel room with hubris.

Our access to humility seems stymied by a convenient, catch-as-catch-can version of morality in which riches received are, de facto, earned.  While it takes a wealth of skill to orchestrate the combination of bundled mortgages, bailout money, and short-selling that leave the stockbrokers’ pocket’s well-lined, every dollar gained on definitively extinguishing some delinquent’s hope also gives its owner a percentage of the rot to his soul. 

Our current economy is a feast of venality and relativism for the rich and poor alike.  Soon, maybe in my lifetime, the poor will run out of money to pay, and blood will cease to be a metaphor.  The same Everyone’s Doing It equivocation one banker invokes to siphon off another man’s subsistence will give the broke man no pause before flaying that banker and drinking from his skull. 

Eye for an eye is a paltry binary, and vengeance absolves no one. Repentance isn’t found in the refuge of moral equivalence.  This is your chance bankers: take back the image of white collar workers leaping out of high rises from Al Qaeda like black people took back the n-word.  Your penance will be drastic, to mirror your sins, if it has any hope of salvation.  So jump you sons of the American Dream.  If you want to live.

            In an uncertain life, guidance is adored.  If that guidance comes with dubious credibility, it only seems more apt. (Because you shouldn’t really expect advice to work.  That’s not what it’s for.)  Nevertheless, it is true:

            “BBC reported on the growing number of ‘spiritual tourists’ who shop around in their search for inner peace.  ‘We are entering a world,’ said one expert, ‘where people aren’t interested in whether something is true or not, or whether they believe it or not, but whether it works.’  That would be a good prescription for you in the coming months, Scorpio.  I recommend that you reject any idea or practice unless it has the practical value of making you feel more at home in the world and more accepting of yourself.”

            But that was three weeks ago.  And nothing else has come to me unless sought out.  And even then it was wrong.

It’s a bodily compulsion, and meditation too. An eroding habit and a secret store of strength. Because a smoker takes reason with her when she paces outside caught up in imaginary conversations. The cigarette gives a purpose to her muttering.

And yet five minutes. To be aware of your breath as it enters and leaves your body. It would be a worthy thing to do without the cigarette. I haven’t tried it. I’m afraid I’ll look crazy.

Do cars have faces? Are the windows of a house its eyes? Yes, but we made it so. We made them in our own image as the gods of stone and steel and toil (which means we are not gods at all). We cannot pretend we made the trees. Some don’t even strike notable resemblance.

The problem is the outside of the body. Branches and arms can sway in kind, but an arm can’t fork off into infinite smaller versions of itself. Then there is the question of will, though one doubts the arms possess it by themselves.

The analog is the insides. Veins and capillaries that split off like sticks. Nerves bundling up to the encompassing canopy. The miracle of geometry aligns to impress life into a sturdy thing, as frail as it may be. But in that case, no, they shouldn’t really look like people.

]]> http://www.penandpaperblog.com/?feed=rss2&p=38 http://www.penandpaperblog.com/?p=33 http://www.penandpaperblog.com/?p=33#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:16:23 +0000 admin http://www.penandpaperblog.com/?p=33  

The smoke comes into the subway station like solid city perfume.  No barbecue harmony to it.  I can tell this blaze roasts no meat.  I climb the stairs hesitantly, imagining apocalypse maundering on my street corner.  And I had to pay to get here.

Up top I can see from where the fire stems.  It’s opening a tunnel through a cardboard mountain.  Acrid embers shoot out from the nexus of paper fed flame.  Cool ash disseminates through the neighborhood.  The fire builds.

I think of all the lit cigarettes slipped out of my fingers.  The apathy to search the ground and stomp.

 A metal walker idles at the box flap foothills.  My mind moves rapidly over my options, one of which is to just walk away.  I can’t stand the stink.  I hobble the walker over to the seething orange puddle; stamp the legs into the pooling flame.  I throw my understated weight into the walker.

A man with a fake diamond earring and a Yankees cap watches me from a pay phone cubicle.  He’s trying not to look at me but his eyes instinctively angle toward the glow.

I tap the edges of the cardboard into muddled ash.  I neglect the center.  One flame ascends serpentine to my hand.  I crush it like a tyrant crushes an uprising.  With all the willful arrogance of the one who holds the power.  I hold a filthy walker.  I grind the coals into the cement until the street is as black as the sky.

I walk away from the heap of ash and the burnt walker, feeling a little like drunk, being very much like drunk.  As I turn the corner, I realize that the fire could’ve been lit to warm up the homeless and out of doors.  But all the heat you need is in the air tonight.  I’ll come to consider the cardboard lightning-struck.  Though there is no rain or thunder.  I’ll want to think of it as the rare boost of fate that turns tiny women into heroes.  Like the city’s invisible savior.  Funny how quickly that feeling evaporated.  And putting out a random fire on First Avenue at four in the morning becomes a joke.

 

“It’s okay, pigeon.  I love you!”

            The pigeon teeters up the stone pathway in the park.  He is missing a foot, and several toes on the remaining one.  His wings cleave to his body like heavy things.  He is coated in oil, cooking half his feathers black.  When he opens his mouth, only an intemperate bird wheeze rattles out.

            “Nobody else loves you!”

            The man staggers behind the pigeon on the pathway, giving the bird room.  He half-uses a crutch under one arm, and over the other is slung a plastic bag of worldly possessions.  His limbs dangle from his body like relinquished things.  He is steeped in grease, carrying his odor like a real live aura.  When he opens his mouth, a scratchy bellow rings.

            “Nobody else loves you, pigeon, but I do!”

I watched 8 hours of America’s Next Top Model yesterday.  I feel bad about myself, but actually I feel great about myself.  Because I so deeply out-specimen those tender-headed hustles of humanity.  From the vantage inside my eyes it makes perfect sense.  It doesn’t feel wrong, it feels like a warm homing of self-worth.  And it makes me a comparative shopper at the well of well-being.  Willing to be just a less bruised lemon.

            I don’t think superiority works.  Equivalence isn’t exactly a measure.  That’s why a part of you feels dirty even though it’s clear shame lives for the other side of the screen.  Truth is, that intellectual deadweight?  Has accomplished more than I ever have: for all her love of TV, she has gotten herself the fuck on it.  What do I love, have I laid my flickering image on it?

            Reality TV is the cheeseburger of psychic fixes.  A step back really, for the way it so readily invites distillation of us and them.  I couldn’t promise to acquit myself anymore amiably, if a TV camera were to cling to my everyday epiphanies.  But I wouldn’t go on TV, because I know better.