this day half way through may–the ides of may–(i’m on a train traveling north from san diego to los angeles), and one of those incredible pregnant moments has just started drawing out like a knife through the hour, or: more precisely moment after moment, sharp and contiguous like the edge of a sword cutting air, switching and… i think i may have used almost every article of punctuation there, except for perhaps: ; that.
in any case, i’ve been on a bit of a walkabout or more exactly described, a driveabout, of really quite a lot of california. i delivered a large table to berkeley and from there went out to the waterless regions of cuyama and new cuyama (the maricopa desert), and then out to l.a. and eventually to san diego. i began reading the wonderful book by j.d. salinger, “raise high the roofbeam, carpenters,” and “seymour an introduction.” these stories by this mysterious american giant of literature are such wonderful iceburgs of literature in the middle of an ever rapidly becoming stormy sea of mediocrity (?)–well, really i just feel lucky to have made it coincide with little paragraph of my life. why?…
i will paraphrase:
the beginning (of “raise high the roofbeam, carpenters”) details a scene from the youth of the author and his now deceased brother, seymour, in which they are given the company of their baby sister one night when she is put to bed with them so as to resist the infirmity that is passing through the rest of the family and, as is common with infants, begins to cry at some point in the middle of the night. the narrator, buddy, suggests to seymour some milk for the younger sister and seymour (always the wiser) divines the cause of affliction in the baby to be somewhere more metaphysical than appetite (this “paraphrasal” really is no shorter than a direct quote of this passage, but bear with me, it’s good for my brain)… so he figures on reading something to the child and so picks a story from a taoist text about duke Mu of Chin and his horse expert, Po Lo. the former (this story goes) beckons Po Lo for want of a new horse expert, as he knows that Po Lo will not be with him for long and it will be incumbent for his dukedom to find a master of the horse arts who can identify a “superlative” animal the way Po Lo can. Po Lo says that his sons can identify a “good” horse, but are not yet able to discover a horse’s more metaphysical and superlative attributes. he says he knows a man: Chiu-fang Kao, who is his (Po Lo’s) equal in all things horse. so the duke summons this man and requests a superlative horse animal be found and so this man, Chiu-fang Kao sallies out. Word is sent, some time later, that he has found the duke’s animal, a dun colored mare; several days later the horse shows up and, to the duke’s surprise, the horse is a black stallion! duke Mu of Chin summons Po Lo and tells him what a disaster this is, that his new horse whisperer is a joke!, he has confounded the simplest of attributes of the new horse in search of the superlative creature. Po Lo listens to this account and exclaims that Chiu-fang Kao, to the contrary, has surpassed even his abilities at seeing into the nature of a creature and now can look so deeply into the essential as to become oblivious to the superficial qualities of the horse (sex and color) and that the duke now has a real horse whiz on his hands. and the little narrative ends, saying that the horse truly was a superlative animal. (and i will rush to say once more that i am paraphrasing a passage from the very beginning of “raise high the roofbeam, carpenters” by j.d. salinger)… the little point of this quotation being that the narrator, since the passing of his beloved brother, cannot think of anyone better (in the precious matter of this horseology) to send in his stead.
so a great work of art begins: a chasm in one’s life that cannot be filled.
these words tumbling around in my head, riding the romantic rail medium up the southern coast of california WHICH, despite a lot of seemingly anaesthetized individuals who seem to pass an eternity at the beach, has a very literary quality to it. i don’t know quite what it is: perhaps it’s all the oxygen in this marine rich air; or little particles of extremely rich vegetal matter born on the air off the great womb, the sea. in any case, i’m with my sister and we’re talking and discussing deep things and dozing on and off and also enjoying this beautiful scenery and the train comes to a mellow standstill just north of disneyland. there’s some chatter on the intercom that passes un-interpreted, perhaps because we’re talking, and a few minutes later a portly woman comes by and says something to the effect of this: (mind you, i have no idea who this woman is):
“i can’t believe this… did you hear that? some guy just jumped out into the middle of the tracks and committed suicide. did you hear that on the announcement? god! i don’t have time for this, i have a barbeque to get to!”
i don’t know if that comes across clearly or not, but the import of what she said is that a guy jumped in front of the train and she’s (very publicly) dismayed because she’s missing a barbeque. (we’re still stopped on the tracks here and cops and BNSF dudes are swirling around the train) it appears as though this story holds water: if you really want to know, you could probably look it up on the news… i don’t imagine i’ll do any real work to verify this account and then re-post its truth on the blog here; my main concern is the attitude of this woman late for the barbeque… really almost more than i’m concerned about the man who died quickly by the swift blow of the giant steel shark of this train. because, in so saying, she placed herself in front of the train. and then where are we? i looked at her and her voice (its tone, its timbre, its import) crept through the train, this serpent of slow eyes, and i could tell her manner was infectious. (a couple asked the conductor, as she passed, whether they could go look at the man–conductor’s reply: “that a little morbid, isn’t it?–twain like in its concision, and one of the couple responding, “i work in the ER, i’ve seen a lot worse…) “oh, god!” i think to myself, these are the people who answer a phone, plug in an i.v. drip, rush to the scene of a crime, drive an ambulance, deliver our children and bake our bread, etc., etc., and this suicide, for crying out loud, is a thorn in their schedule, an inconvenience for their afternoon plans. where are we now!? i shook in my shoes for my well being, i am shaking. whom do i send in my stead here?
we are all in front of this train.