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(6) I remember that Robert used to love roses. They were, in fact, his favorite flower. Knowing this, people would sometimes make him a present of them. I did so myself, once or twice, back during that period of time when he and I were lovers. Then, one day, I handed him a sheet of paper, upon which I had typed: A B O U Q U E T o f R O S E S I'd wanted, you see, to give him something more "meaningful"
than the usual mundane handful of flowers. It was, I suppose,
a sort of Platonic Ideal, the very "roseness" of roses,
that I'd hoped he would perceive as existing between the letters,
behind the words, which I had typed. That was my intended gift. He was not impressed. Nowadays, it is not
the ideal rose that I would wish to perceive. Nor do I
necessarily wish to "be" the rose, to "become"
it. Rather, it is the individual specimen of the rose that I
want, in all its particular, peculiar singularity; and I want to be able to
apprehend that individual specimen clearly, directly, with nothing standing
between us. I remember
once describing to a woman friend of mine how I always felt as though
some unseen barrier stood between me and everything I saw around me.
It was, I said, as if I were seeing the world through a sort of invisible
pane of glass. "We-ell . . ." she replied, "you do
wear glasses, you know." I had to laugh, for what she
said was true enough. It was not, of course, what I'd meant –
but she knew that too. She was an unusual woman. She had
some rather unusual ideas. For instance, she felt that there
existed in nature a kind of intelligence – or rather, a kind
of power, at once of nature and worked through
nature – that we humans could but obscurely comprehend. She
saw evidence of this power everywhere, and suspected that its designs
might well be malignant to human life. In the propagation of
crops, for example – soybeans, let's say; or potatoes – she saw the
signs not of our mastery over a species of plants, but the
possibility that the plants were using humans to further their own
chances of dominion over the earth. In the rolling of a cow's
eyes she saw not a dull-witted animal only dimly aware of its own
captivity and eventual slaughter, but an intimation of our own
potential doom. Our
relationship to plants and animals may, of course, be symbiotic to
varying degrees, depending upon the particular species involved.
But humans come from the earth and must someday return to it, and
foolish indeed is the man or woman who does not perceive how ready
the earth is to receive us. Our struggle is and has ever been
since we first became creatures of self-consciousness one of finding
something within – some spirit, some intelligence, some procreative
power of sex – that will allow us to survive beyond our own physical demise. But the earth
is hungry. And all it has to do is wait. Today I decided
to take another walk to the cemetery. It was late afternoon as I
started out, a cold day but windless, and bright with sun. The
snow alongside the sidewalks had melted down to a few icy clumps
spattered with mud, but the sidewalks themselves remained slick and
treacherous. The streets were busy with traffic, and I noticed
that there were a lot more people about than there are earlier in
the day, which is when I usually go out. I turned one corner,
then another, not paying attention to anything much but my own
rambling thoughts. Then I noticed an old man coming down the
street towards me. He was tall and skinny, his jowls grizzled looking,
his throat unshaven. His grungy coat hung open to reveal a
dingy plaid shirt, so worn and stained that it was hard to tell what its
original colors might have been. His chest looked sunken, his
shoulders bony; lower down, his belly protruded like a hard, round
ball. As we were about to pass he slipped on a patch of ice and leaned backwards to
catch himself; as he did so his shirt pulled open at the bottom,
revealing a glimpse of brownish, mottled skin covered with a thin
scattering of wiry black hairs. Righting himself again and
tugging at his shirt, he caught my glance and held it. His
eyes were gruesome: they looked diseased. Bloodshot
and rheumy, rimmed round with red, they bulged from their sockets
as if they were about to pop right out of his head. I nodded stiffly
in greeting. He grunted back at me and, although I was already
passing him by, I could feel him giving me a long, hard look with those
infected eyes. Resentment came off him in waves. I thought:
What does he want from me? Acceptance? Approval? Respect?
Money? Farther down
the street another, younger man was making his way along the walk that
led from his house; when he reached the end he turned out and began
coming my way. I focused my gaze on him. His khaki pants,
slung low on his hips, were smeared with long greasy streaks, as was
the flannel jacket he wore. His hair was palely red, and he had
no hat on. I could see that he was holding something in his hand,
but couldn't make out through the distance what it might be.
"Da-a-ad! Da-a-addy!" a child called out from
the doorway of the house he'd just left. "Da-a-addy!
Da-a-ad!" The man stopped, his shoulders hunched; he turned
half-round and scowled back at the house. "Whaaat!"
he hollered, his voice flat and gruff. "Whad'ya
want!" By now I had come close enough to see his
face. It was a sullen face; the ears had gone pink with cold but
the cheeks and nose were as yellow and pasty looking as old
cheese. His lips twisted sourly. I could see now what
it was he held: a can of beer.
"Da-a-ad! Da-a-addy!" the child hollered again.
The man suddenly became aware of me. He gave me a look over
his shoulder as I passed by, fixing me in place with his eyes. "Christ!"
he muttered. "Can you believe it?" I
grimaced a smile at him, trying to show that I sympathized – that I
understood. But I didn't understand, not really. The man's
eyes turned to slits. He tilted his head back and gulped greedily
at his beer. I hurried on. Turning a
corner I began to head up the incline that led to the cemetery; on
the other side of the street another man was trudging along. I
saw that he was wearing an old grey raincoat that was much too big for
him; it flapped about his legs absurdly and there was a thick coating
of mud at the bottom where it dragged about his feet. He had on a
pair of green rubber boots, thick blue mittens and a matching blue knit
hat. In one hand he held a metal lunchbox of the kind such as factory
and machine-shop workers sometimes use. He looked extremely tired.
His shoulders were sagging and his head hung so low that his nose was parallel
to the ground. Feeling my gaze upon him he slowly lifted his face.
I saw that he was a young man and that he appeared, much to my
surprise, to be almost frightened by the sight of me.
"Hello!" I called, trying to sound cheerful – or at any rate
harmless. His face slackened in response, his jaw falling open,
then just hanging there. I could see right away from the
vacuousness of his expression, the blankness in his eyes, that he was
mentally retarded. I hastened on
into the cemetery. Patches of icy snow crunched beneath my boots;
the grass where it showed through the snow was a wilted looking
yellowy-brown. The gravestones were all tilted this way and
that, as if the frozen, muddy earth were heaving them up, squeezing
them out, like loose teeth. Where flowers once stood there were
only dried-up sticks and gummy brown stumps. The branches of the
trees and bushes looked gnarled and wizened and brittle, like old, arthritic
fingers grasping with futile fury at the empty air. Yet none of
this, neither the men I had seen nor the landscape of the cemetery,
affected me adversely, though the words I have used to describe them
make it sound as if they had. The day was sunny, the air cold and
crisp; the light was of such a dry, sharp clarity that it gave to my
surroundings no dismal aspect but rather, a singular sense of
brightness. And yet, along with this – or because of it,
perhaps – everything I saw seemed to have taken on a curiously
illusory aspect. The world continued to look three dimensional;
was indisputably tangible; but it also had, to my eyes, the appearance
of a mirage – as if it was no more than a sort of canvas or skin that
could be peeled away, were it possible to find some edge with which
to grab hold and pull. I am the
dreamer; I am the dream. I am powerful; I am powerless. I
am the product of all that is and ever was; I am ever new. I
tried to understand this, to make it real. "All this before
me, right here, right now, is who and what I am: This is
what it means to be human." I am the product of nature; I am nature's
fulfillment. It did not, somehow, seem to be enough. Did
I believe then that there was something more to me than what nature
had given? Did I believe that I contained within me something
"divine"? No. Then I must believe – or rather,
I somehow sensed with a sensibility born out of the totality
of who and what I am – that I had the capacity within me, as endowed
by nature, to evolve into something greater, something more.
The capacity which most differentiates humans from the other animals is
our ability for self-reflection. Yet it was this same ability that
created a sort of gap, a gulf, a chasm, which I seemed now to perceive
as standing between me and the rest of the world. It stood
between me and myself as well. And I wondered:
This gap of emptiness, this gulf of nothingness, this chasm of void
– could it be that this was what was meant by "death"? I FOOL I SNEAK . . . I TWIST I CHASE
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