elsewhere

THE DARK HALF

7 March, 1999—Kuta, Bali—

I swam for an hour beneath a sky half dark as death, half burning blue—then flinched, and fled at last for shelter, the dark half nipping at my heels all the way home.  And though I felt always only one step ahead of the storm, it seems I have outpaced it after all.  I‘m back in my room now, I’ve already showered all trace of sand and salt from my skin, and the only thing that has fallen from the sky are these shadows.  I settle down protected on my porch to face the threat of thunder in the distance, convinced that there’ll be violence yet—.

4:36 AM

4 October, 2009—Puri Asri, Petulu, Bali—

For René

8 March, 2000—Petulu, Bali—

Although my smoothly tiled porch is considerably less dramatic than the slopes of Etna on which Chateaubriand’s René is perched in perpetual romantic anguish—nevertheless I recognize the view. 

“A young man full of passion, sitting at the mouth of a volcano and weeping over mortal men whose dwellings he can barely distinguish far off below him—”

Mount Agung is quiet this morning, almost stealthy as it emerges from a bank of lavender cloud and a shadowplay of palm.  I am far from its fires which have been quiescent for some years now.  Nor am I young.  And if it is true that I am passion-filled, such ardors seem to have been at least temporarily eclipsed.  My heart is nowhere near my sleeve, my dick is in my pants, my eyes are dry—and my skull is on my shoulders, not in my hand.  Such incongruent details need to be dispensed with summarily if am to recalibrate the moment.  On the other hand, it can’t be denied that I am far from the ‘dwellings’ of ‘mortal men’.  I haven’t spoken with a soul in days.

Think of it this way. Fellow travelers, this René and I—yet total strangers—we pass one another on a road somewhere between Natchez and Singapore.  And that brief moment of tangency proves sufficient for the transfusion of certain images.  That is to say, we indulge in a moment of personal collage—which proves, once all is said and then said again, far larger than ourselves.  On these squares of paper, these pages we carry so many of, we sketch our maps under the sign of the Alembic, adding the mysterious symbols and colors—Gunung Agung, Etna, Petulu, even Pompeii if we like, even Camelot or Roanoke—with a smudge of gray pastel for distance and dwelling, with a blue for the heights, and with gold in the depths.  And then we tear our paper squares to bits, we let the pieces catch the breeze, and we vow to meet again someday, elsewhere. 

“Throughout my life, I have had before my eyes an immense creation whichI could barely discern, while a chasm yawned at my side.” 

That bottomless furnace has never seemed closer than it does tonight, when the violence of the thunder startles me awake—and in the darkness the world recedes further and further, as the booming voice of the storm shudders through me with true intimacy.

EDEN WITH PLUMBING

3 October, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

DISTANT FIGURE

24 April, 2001—Kuta, Bali—

He’s left his sons ashore countless times—cresting the beachfront breakers in his outrigger, then paddling out to the fringe of surf that marks the shallows of the distant reef.  Yet for me it is happening for the first time.  At the water’s edge the youngest boys are naked and splashing, trawling tide pools with a rag of a net, chasing the shadows of shrimp.  A little further out, two older boys are swimming with a dog.  Another has abandoned his bicycle in the sand and is crouched at the end of the jetty on a pile of slippery stones.  There is no wind, yet I can feel it in his hair.  What he sees is a father gather shellfish, racing the incoming tide.  But what I see is a father walking on distant waters, leaning like a blind man on the long tilting pole he leads with—his empty boat behind him, anchored on the swell. 

I find myself looking down at my feet as I turn to leave.  They seem to be planted firmly on this stretch of sand littered with discarded shoreside offerings to the gods—a colorful confetti of torn petals and saffron rice kaleidoscoped anew by each receding wave.  I feel suddenly as if it is I that am being watched.  I raise my head in the direction of the walker on the water, but a shout from ashore distracts me.  A sun-bronzed boy in his underwear, soaked to the skin, has kicked his soccer ball in my direction.  He dares me with youthful bravado, then just shrugs as I decline to return his serve, and goes on playing exuberant solitaire.   Should he glance up now and again, he will see my figure grow smaller and smaller in the distance.  By the time father has rejoined all of his many sons on shore, I will have vanished completely.

(for Robert Stevens Hill)

CHEMICAL EXPERIMENT #36

NEW YEAR

1 January, 2012—New York City—

SHIP OF LIFE

9 October, 2011—San Francisco, California—

LIBERTY TUG

5 December, 2011—Staten Island Ferry, New York City—

SUFFERING CHANGE

15 November, 2011—on The Hypertexts—

Which reminds me of a gentle debunking I once received from a dear departed Buddhist friend of mine, Don Iocca. To my blithely professed embrace of suffering, desire, change, all those things one ought to wish to escape from—he responded, with a twinkle in his eye, by reminding me that suffering, change, desire, etc, had no need of my permission to act upon me. “Why not try,” he implied, “to do something more challenging than suffer change?” Ah, what a beautiful smile he had! Several years after his death I had a profound feeling that he was near me while I was circumnavigating the principal stupa of the Shwedagon Pagoda on my second visit to Rangoon, Burma. I sat right down on the warm tiles, beneath an adjacent banyan, and tried “to do something more challenging than suffer change.” But it was so terribly hot, even in the shade of the tree, and my discipline melted away.

(Read my conversation with poet Tom Merrill here, on The Hypertexts.)