Mother

In my last entry I mentioned my mother and I think I can address this subject now. I never in her entire life was she able to be captured on film with any articulation. It was almost divinely anomalous; her face would blur, shadows would suppress, and I remember a distinct series wherein the camera never captured her directly even though she had been facing the lens and vice versa, and when the pictures developed there was always this amazing white light as if the photographer were shooting directly into the afternoon sun and it always blinded the camera to all or part of her face. Her only visual document that ever existed was an oil portrait that melted in the attic, reminding one of one of De Kooning’s hideous women.

She was always fond of the Blue Jay to the point she maintained an aviary specifically for her collection of them. Consequently she always complained of blues music demeaning the color of sea and heaven. She spent a lot of time in her aviary. Father, when he was around, always thought it too much. One day he went in, drunk, with a Winchester, and shot every bird dead. She was in there at the time and some of the little bodies exploded all over her face. She could only sit in catatonic shock. Realizing what he’d done, father filed for divorce and promptly left. I haven’t seen him since. But in the weeks before he left I remember our house always being completely silent. They never played records and they never spoke. I was four years old at the time, and I remember my mother putting me to bed in complete silence, sometimes cradling my head and sometimes merely stroking my forehead. I was silent, too.

Before he left my father cleaned out the aviary, all the leaves and branches, and all the body remnants spread about like rotten tomatoes. He took it all in several bags to the front lawn to be collected by the garbage men. Before they were taken, I snuck into those bags and collected as many of the feathers as I could, many stained with blood and stuck together, and kept them in a treasure chest. When I was a twelve I took the feathers and made a collage of them, still soiled from that day in the aviary, and I have that, framed, still today.

I was 22 when she died. I had moved out on my own four years prior, and I was coming over to bring a cake one summer afternoon—carrot cake was her favorite—, and I saw her sitting in her chair with that same catatonic expression as the day father killed her birds. She wasn’t breathing, and I just sat there and stared into her eyes. I didn’t move for two hours.

The dreams and the dance

I have been having dreams most distressing lately. Four nights ago I dreamed I was a candy wrapper. Yes, not truly living and of no substance or purpose but to contain a saccharine piece of processed, flavored sugar--I believe it was strawberry. And it kept melting inside of me--I felt myself start to cave in, and it started seeping out of my top and bottom as I became untwisted. I tried with every muscle I thought I had (but didn't as all I was was a piece of cheap foil to be discarded amongst insufferable human filth.). I felt hotter and hotter still, like I was in a preheating oven, and I couldn't contain anything. When I woke up I had embraced my pillow with such force it had split at one end and the artificial dove's feathers with which I had them stuffed coated me and I thought I may have been trapped in an aviary. What cruel tricks one's mind plays on one's self when one is most vulnerable. Several philosophers argue that mind and body are connected but I think I disagree--I don't think the mind could be so masochistic. No, the mind must be separate from the body and the brain.

Two nights ago I dreamed I was sitting Indian style in a black room that seemed to have no defined ends of any kind--floor, ceiling, walls, even though I was sure I felt secured on a surface--and I was staring at myself! I was staring straight into the eyes of a figure sitting just as I was, who looked just like me. I knew it was me, and we just stared at each other as if our eyes were powerful magnets holding each other's in place. I thought, "something must happen soon. What are you DOING?!?! Move, damn you, move!" I couldn't divert my gaze and neither could he (I), until he tipped over. He tipped over like a wooden doll and made a hollow 'clunk' as his head hit the ground, frozen in his sitting position and still staring straight ahead, though no longer into my eyes. I swear he was alive just a moment before--I could feel his intensity, his challenge, his mocking and malevolence willing me to look away. His eyes were a threat, a threat to reveal to me perhaps images of (God, do forbid it) my/our dead mother, hanging from a leafless apple tree at dusk in the chiseling winter morning. And he enjoyed this thought and how he could use it to break me. But I didn't, and he just toppled. I should have felt victorious, but I felt as though I had a hot gun in my hands and the police were almost to my door (confound those hideous firemen!!!). I felt like Raskolnikov, as much as I tried to rationalize that my doppleganger's demise was both necessary and inevitable. But what did that mean for me? Did I overcome some heretofore unassailable obstacle, or did I kill an essential part of my being?

I mentioned my mother. The trauma of these recent dreams keeps me from being able to write about her at this time though I know I should...she was so tragically lovely.

I was in the park this morning feeding the ducks and trying to mimic their calls in an effort to understand them better when the most anomalous and miraculous display of earthly brilliance I had ever seen happened just two feet in front of me. I was holding out some bread, and one of the ducks approached a little too aggressively for my taste and I rescinded the gift, shaking my head, clicking my tongue and looking him directly in the eye so he knew I was serious. He opened his beak and flexed his throat slightly, then, while keeping his eyes fixated on me as though obsessed, almost like the eyes of my doppleganger, he opened his wings and beat them while turning his body to and fro like a tango of the avians. His rhythm was impeccable, and he called to me twice in precisely punctuated rhythms, paused, for some more turning, and the called again at the same relative moment in the same rhythm. Two more ducks joined in, passing behind him, facing each other, their heads bobbing in the same rhythm and movement as our little tango dancer's, pacing back and forth, crossing paths in the middle, always the same precise spot. And two more landed on far sides of all this, spread out as though on a stage choreographed to perfect symmetry with the lead taking center stage. The two bookends opened their wings and turned their heads towards each other. When someone else approached they scattered quickly as though it never happened. Fine, I said, it can be our secret (though I don't find anything wrong with sharing with you folks). I will hold that image with me until death or extreme dementia severs the limbs of rational thought. Of course, Spurlock will know, too. He knows everything.

The Firemen, the poem, the Meaning of Things

I awoke today as I do most everyday, taking three deep breaths after planting my rejuvenated feet firmly and authoritatively on my hardwood floors and coolly walking to my refrigerator to have marmalade on a scone and morning tea. I heard sirens of a fire engine coming my direction and stop at my building and wondered if miss Brixton left her gas on again. I heard the feet pounding the stairs--there seemed to be a lot of them (feet, not stairs)--and I was getting a little nervous. They stopped in front of my door--I didn't know what they were doing. I went to my door to watch from the keyhole when suddenly they screamed "ONE, TWO-" and my door exploded towards me like a bomb went off!!! I threw myself to the floor covering my face and one of the firemen yelled, through a gas mask, "Don't worry, sir, we'll get you out of here safe!" Two of them grabbed me under my arms and I cried, "What the devil is the meaning of THIS?!?!" Suddenly one of them gave me an oxygen mask and I felt much calmer. I regained my wits and again cried, "What is the meaning of this?!" Once outside one of them replied, "What do you mean? We got a call--said you were in trouble?"

"A call? A call from where?"

"That's confidential."

"I can't know who called the firemen on me?"

The truck driver yelled out, "It came from this building--apartment 511!"

Flabbergasted, I retorted, "That's MY apartment!"

"Then we came to the right place!" the driver shot back.

"But I never called anyone--I just woke up! When did this 'call' come in?"

"It came in two hours ago--said a fire was starting and you were pinned under your refrigerator."

"Joe, quit giving away goddamn confidential information. You'll fuck up our POSITION!!!"

"That's ABSURD!!! THERE WAS NEVER A FIRE!!! Did you say it took you two hours to respond?"

"Yes, sir."

"How could it take so long--you're 6 blocks away."

"Why? It's not like you had a fire or anything."

"But you didn't know that!"

"You did. That's good enough for us."

Another one piped in like a harlequin in a Chinese POW camp, "Why would you call if there was never a fire."

"I never called."

"It says here we got the call from this address."

"STOP GIVING AWAY CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION!"

"It says that where?"

"Nowhere you can see. Is there a fire or not."

"Yeah, we got a call from here," that mongoloid Joe interrupted again, "from a guy with a strange British accent--kinda sounded like a pussy." He chuckled.

"Joe, I'll have your ass suspended-"

"I never called anyone. I don't even have a working phone!"

"Yeah, what happened to it? Burned up in the fire?" They all started laughing.

"No--I--"

"Yeah, right. Come on, you guys. Let's get outta here." They muttered more profanities as they walked away, no doubt aimed at my meddling. It's so infuriating. I was shamed, I was angered. All I could do was stand there shaking like a mouse in the tundra.

"What about my door?" I called meekly.

"Burn it!"

"Yeah, so we can come back and fuck up the rest of your house, dumbshit." They were all getting into the truck, laughing, as I, innocent as the day I was born, stood degraded and terribly alone. I wanted to tell them I didn't appreciate their knife-like insults, their obscenity. I wanted to call the station, the mayor, anyone who might reprimand these thugs who blow up human decency like a delinquent destroys the frog with a firecracker. I wanted to, but it felt so futile--I felt futile. I walked despondently up to my door-less apartment where Parphit was waiting outside with that dopey grin on his face and ridiculous "Bull Shirt." "Maybe my place get so hot, you thought there was FIRE!!! Haha, you silly man." I walked right by him a laid down on my bed, face down, thinking I might pass out and suffocate myself accidentally. I turned over and looked at my phone. I picked up the receiver and still no semblance of a signal as there hadn't been for days.

----------------------


Later that evening Spurlock came over with his new pet, a gaily colored parrot on his shoulder. That made me feel a little better. "And what is your name," I inquired.

"Awwk, I am free from form, awwk. Labels negate, awwk."

"I call him 'Life'." Spurlock said with that deft coolness that defies all natural chaos.

"Awwk, I am all things, awwk."

"Your poem IS essence. It is what everything is about. Every empire, every struggle, every criminally desperate act of the desperate criminal. It reminds me of every woman I ever made love to. Every one that has broken my heart, every one I've left deserted on an island when I knew they could never come with me. Ah, Lucia..." a solitary tear dropped from his eye and he smiled. "Your poem is life. That's why I him that." He never talked too much of Lucia. That was the one subject that always disrupted his otherwise river-like flow through life.

And I asked him, "What is the meaning of things?"

He replied, "Things define further what we never knew and blur the things we did know into obscurity. Yet they have no sense of otherness. That thing is what it is. It's form follows function, and function follows mind. It is the paradox of manifest thought that obscures true knowledge."

"I am depressed."

Fever, sugar, Oprah

I couldn't stand it any longer--the near inhuman sounds eminating from my next-door neighbor's escapades with my ex-fiance--so I bought a new television. It doesn't help that I've been rather ill as of late, with fever and delusions and remembrances of horrors seen and unseen (hence the delay in writing more). I even copped for cable. What lachrymose times they are when a man has to buy artificial stimulants to drown out the sound of murder most foul--the murder of human dignity.

I fell asleep last night watching Oprah's 'Book of the Month Club' where they discussed with unqualified praise a useless piece of tripe about a negro woman who rises above opression and poverty to become the greatest funeral home director in the world or some rubbish like that. I woke up to grotesquely shaved apes in shiny underwear (why bother shaving them just to cover them up again?) throwing each other around a SQUARE ring (just like us to say something is what isn't) and screaming about how they're going to throw each other around said ring or feeling up some trollop who could spread her legs to someone MUCH better than these man-beasts. Pardon my obscenity, I get quite upset at such prevalent and decadent debauchery.

The news media is useless as well. It's interesting that as we have access to so-called information, both through the internet and through television that we learn more without learning anything. Any information is only as good as the informer, and for the most part our 'informers' are more akin to novelists than historians.

The other night, Parphit came knocked on my door requesting the borrowing of a small amount of sugar. When I answered his hair was disheveled and he was wearing the grotesque outfit of a t-shirt that looked like it had been dragged through the Australian Outback with the charming epithet "Bull Shirt" and a pair of boxer shorts with an open window...of opportunity. One is often ill-equipped to remove his gaze from the foulest sights of human existence.

"Just what do you mean by calling at this hour?" I interrogated

"This hour? It's 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I heard your TV on."

"I am ill disposed to receive anyone right now." He looked at me like a smiling child who doesn't understand that we adults are actually angry--not play angry, but really ANGRY, like we're just playmates or frat-house brothers hazing one another. He is a vacuum into which all love and goodness within a 10 meter radius is sucked in and then excreted, destroyed and transformed into a cloud of carcinogenic waste.

"Can I borrow sugar?" he asked with that same revealing coffee-stained teeth that reminds one of a communist neighborhood.

"Is she over there?"

"Who?"

"You know who."

"Oh, your ex-woman? No, I think I tire her out. She said she had to go lie in bed for three days and drink nothing but protein shakes consisting of bananas, prime rib and cocaine. I like prime rib, now!!! In India I would be outcaste if I ate any meat but now I'm in America and I say, 'slaughter away' and now some TV guy wants to give me money to say that on TV."

"Do you have no taste?!"

"Yes--that's why I like sugar."

"Well I shan't...this isn't..." and I knew that in order to be rid of him I had to give in. I gave him the sugar and told him to rid himself from my jaundiced sight and he replied: "Thank you very much. I see you on flip side, but not in my bed--hee hee."

I wrote a poem about it all today, which Spurlock is currently criticizing. I hope someone on here finds it worthwhile:

The nightingale cannont sing for the nodes
on its throat just brings
a cry like an axe in the forest
gored by a taurus
the matador bleeds the ground
the color of his cape
a red sun ten-feet around
like the flag of the kamikaze
and a spider that survived
to be killed in a whore's brassiere

The last unicorn will saw off its horn
to avoid the scorn and will silently morn
the sun rises apocalyptically
as bodiless voices echo cryptically
nonsense through prison cell teeth
that bequeath of me the dowry of my
of the last shred of innocence that buoys me
on the sea of melting flesh mixing together
to become a toxic ocean
of vile, gray, indistinguishable motion
I offer the horn, promptly ground to dust
and I see the face for the first time
it laughs and taunts, 'you're with the rest of us'

I have noticed that this was 'posted' on the same day as my last post. This is a bald-faced lie. In order to avoid confusion I published this the morning of January 16th, 2007. I had started to type my poem on January 1st and, in this web of cyber-'perfection', this site (such a disgusting distortion of the language) calls it 'posted' as of that day 15 days ago, before the illness...

A conflict of interest

I have not slept well as of late. I feel like my bed is full of ants--often red, but sometimes black. Some large, some tinier than can be seen. Dolores, whose promise I once kept in the fortress of my bosum, has acquainted herself with my next-door neighbor, Parphit. He is a Hindu, though I'm not sure where his name comes from--I spent some time in East India, surveying the scars left by the Company, dined with Brahmins and meditated in dank quarters whose smell only affirmed the life of the Divine, so much so that I became nauseous and had to take my leave.

Both the Brahmins and the Italian mafia utilize thread, and in both cases it remains a sacrosanct object. Yet they use it for two completely different objectives. To the Brahmins it shows them to be holy men, and in the mafia it is a close-quatered execution device. The same object means different things to everyone. Where is the certainty in life? When I was a child I was sure--sure that I was standing on my own two feet when I was, when I was in pain when I was in pain. I never questioned whether it was good or bad. It either felt good or bad, and so it was. But seem is not often truth.

I hear them making love every night (Parphit and Dolores). Parphit is a capitalistic, opportunistic, immoral mound of despicable flesh. I daresay I do hate him. I hate him so much that it flushes my face like a drunkard whenever I think about him. Their heathen expression of animal lust shaking the foundations of my soul and my stucco walls. That's when the ants come crawling over me, biting me, trying to make a hill of the flesh of my belly.

I just realized I jumped into this 'blogging' without any introduction. I'm sorry to be so rude. My mother gave me the name Arvel Brushward, and I have honored her by keeping it in spite of much I long for the name Drevi--Drevi Sans-Luphor. This is my first foray into this internet super biway or whatever the youth calls it. Sometimes it makes me feel like a Pelican waiting for fish on an evaporated lake.

I spent last night with my good friend Spurlock drinking Ardbeg on the rocks and listening to him tell his stories and play his trumpet. He sits in a golden ball of central existence, never seeming afflicted in the way most of us are. Wearing his checked trilby and tweed sportcoat, drawing from a cigarette held erect and distanced in an ivory cigarette holder, he told me this story:

"I've had a lot of pets in my life but none more important to me than my pet gibbon Franz, who died in '85. He would sit at the fireplace with me and I would feed him crackers and read to him the poems of Rilke or play my trumpet. If I played something lively like 'Donna Lee' he would raise his hands above his head, start jumping and screaming along with the tune, but I could silence him like a mourner when I played 'Blue in Green.' People say animals don't think like us but they do. Within the first two chapters of the Notebooks of Maltes Laurids Brigges I could see a solitary tear like a diamond fall slightly then be swallowed into his fur like it was a treasure never to be lost or touched by another being. One night he fell asleep in my bed as I stroked his handsome brow, breathing the short shallow breaths that always made him seem like a child, and then it stopped suddenly, like a traveler who had just realized he had been going the wrong way for 12 years and thousands of miles and didn't know where he was, crumpling to the ground in despondency and becoming petrified as a monument to man's folly, never realizing that even though it was not where he meant to go, it still must have been the right way, and that was the right spot to end."

"Oh, Spurlock," I replied, "I think we are all submerged in an endless vat of pudding and the only way out is to eat, but our stomachs will never expand enough."

"That's OK."

The essence of things

So I asked my good friend Spurlock, "What is the essence of things?"
And he replied, "All things are ejaculates of thought, and as I think of ejaculate, I think of all things."
I replied, "I am depressed..."

The boulangerie where I take my afternoon coffee (sometimes spiked with Ardbeg, of course!) has been shut down as of this morning. I remember a boy there who served my bread pudding thrice a week as his schedule allowed him. Always fair and quiet--pallid, perhaps...was he afflicted? I once spoke to him of field mice-they were a subject of great importance to me at the time-and their tails. Tails like whips, like demented rudders that taunt the air and the oar, disturbing the soil from whence we all must have sprung and to which we owe everything we ever borrowed and still borrow. I admire their oil-drop eyes, the color reminiscent of an eight-ball hemmorage. They can only see the world for what it is--one true color, and it is very dark indeed.

The boy brushed aside his wild and wispy hair that defied his eyes like a Ghandi of dead cells and he recited:

"I once loved a girl so bright that daytime appeared as night
and my plight was her flights of fancy
she entranced me romanced me and her fingers
brought about in me all the ghosts that I had known
for her fingers were the fingers of our ecstasies and laments
that linger, her voice of a singer with thread that stitched
everything I had ever lost back to my essence and in the
sensation of revelation I offered the universe my repentance"

So moved was I that I touched his face ever so slightly and told him, "My dear boy, son of every man and woman whose eyes have kissed your eyes, you never lost anything. Because you feel the lack their presence still entombs you. Only when we forget everything do we truly lose anything."

He nodded in silent understanding, left my bread pudding for me and from that moment on we each knew that we were the two ends of the Ouroboros.