They silenced a commercial grade lawnmower.
Moved families from their predestined play areas.
Forced runners to abandon their path, others to slow down and linger.
Neighbors turned their heads.
An entire deli lay in waste.
The wine gone with what was to become a trademark eagerness to consume.
Even the flies knew it: this was sweet.
Lives became secondary.
Shade, resolve, and time became this tiny new nation’s rarest resources.
This alliance, this dalliance, this brilliance.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
She kneeled over him, he on his back, the sunlight dappling through the trees, late into the afternoon
“Feel better?” she asked.
Speechless as he lay there, his hands clinched into little fists as if he were three, still reeling from the life that had shot past him at the speed of sound, he nodded in the affirmative.
Waves of emotion fought a fast moving battle of ever-changing front lines, washing over him like some sort of alternating current. Her finger still on the trigger of the now empty gun.
She smiled at him, and he smiled at her, as they both remain in their awkward stance to one another, she still leaning over him, he still flat on his back, shaking off the stun of the whole thing.
It’s this kind of near-death experience that makes you really appreciate life, he thought. And for that he thanked her, openly. He had a clarity of mind now that could only come from such an experience that she brought about (and he openly relished) on that day. He was reminded of Raymond K. Hessel.
It was a selfless act on her part. It was an awakening for him. The value of life and the precious qualities, people, interactions and experiences that make it up.
He smiled and exhaled, releasing his fists and allowing the warmth of the afternoon sun to enforce the cease fire.
When tomorrow’s teeth seem dull today
And yesterday’s lessons faded far away
Our present is the present we unwrap and play
With photo-bright smiles over countless miles
Honied prose and idle chatter clever drip with guile
Says there is no need for sundials let alone suns
Every second spent in this endeavor
Erects walls of minutes
And homes of hours
In our capitols of days
Ringing months of oceans
Charting the globe of two lives loved
Sea and shore
Inextricably linked
Evermore
With what is this level of pain on par?
So near to me yet so very far
What do I view so far and small away?
Dearly beheld, yet denied me today
A barrier without equal effectively guards
That which I long for, that which I regard
Proximity seems a devilish play
To discipline the heart that’s gone astray
All this time decompressed ever more
Becoming a vacuum I’ve learned to abhor
Unable yet desirous of freedom, of speech
Many lessons learned, now bursting to teach
To share this view, to stop this pain
From saddening anyone ever again
With what is this level of love on par?
So near to me yet so very far…
Spray bottle truth
For your eyes
Unclear stains
Now visualized
Before you
angelic blue
Iridescence
That chills to their missing bones
Tracks upon a wall
Scrubbed to a fault
Evidence of consciousness
Without conscience
Breaths taken aback
As light plays the play
All you need now is time
To tell when the lives were scrubbed away
Luminol
It’ll tell all
Spray bottle truth
The enzyme sleuth
We should all be
This chemically lucky
To be able to see
Damage hidden from us so cleanly
Lying in his third world hammock, as the slow stutter and stall of a single engine plane tracks up and away right, returning to the flight school just north, our subject types away on his laptop.
The higher layer of sound (in both pitch and altitude) of a commercial jet crawls across the sky, the muted annoyance of turbine-powered nails on a faraway blackboard, the sound takes his smile away, until he drops closer to home, lower, just to the treetops, where the white wing coos his call, and across the fence his mate echoes.
And still he types away.
A Golden Fritillary (he spent too much time in the company of insects as a child) bounces on an invisible trampoline of pollen-soaked levity across the lawn, oblivious to the man in his brightly colored third world hammock, his laptop tip-tapping away on his chest. At the pride of correctly identifying the butterfly he hadn’t seen in over thirty years, a once cold trail is relit in the darkened arboreal network of his brain.
The wind picks up, the butterfly tacks right and barrel-rolls over the fence as hundreds of thousands of leaves crash into each other on either side of the yawning man in his hammock. And the closest thing this side of a coastline emulates the sound of surf, as wave upon wave of mid-morning breeze push and pulse the spring-strong branches of the live oaks, giving his hammock an oceanic gait.
Somewhere close a window slides open. Or shut.
The two cycle belch of a lawnmower signals someone else’s intentions for this beautiful day. Our subject pretends it to be a fishing boat. The man in the hammock sighs as he takes it all in, through his ears and through his skin. Somewhere deep within his mind new synaptic pathways are being blazed by chemicals in response to what he sees and feels. A physical connection on a microscopic level, made entirely by extra-sensory input. Isn’t this what pseudo-scientists have always searched for? How through nothing but the power of the mind, an individual could move an object? And all they had to do was study neuroscience to learn this. How just thinking about a plane, a butterfly, a breeze, a coarse weave hammock, or even about your own actions, how just through that relatively benign act, a physical change has indeed been effected, deep within your own brain.
And still he types away.
Clipped wings unfold to no avail
Unable to lift, to soar, to sail
Pecking at seed on someone else’s schedule
Peeking out from the cage of someone else’s rule
Bright colors dulled by the abscence of the sun
You were once spoken too, once a lot of fun
Now you perch over yesterday’s news waiting for a change
Pretty bird in a cage, a sad sight so strange…
Hobbled at the ankles you stayed close to home
Short, broken steps, not allowed to roam
Bridled and fed, brushed and stabled
Ridden once a month, put up wet, disabled
No full out runs or loving pats on the neck
Left to the care of others, who love you for a check
Now you stare out from the stable ignoring the hay
Kicking at the boards, trying to find a way…
In your lexan aquarium you swim in circles
Unable to swim from the hand that feeds you
Your pristine environ that houses you now
With fake little reefs and artificial light
Looks so great when you’re looking in from our view
But inside out doesn’t show the pain it causes you
So you swim in circles, paddling away another day
Hoping he’d tire of you flush you away…
But feathers grow back
And broken bones heal
As you are flushed off to freedom
Your plight becomes real
Now you can fly and choose where to roost
And can hunt for yourself, flee from abuse
Now you can run and jump over your obstacles
Full galloped strides now free from shackles
It’s nowhere as pretty as the aquarium floor
But the sea gives you options you never knew before
Your feathers grew back
Your broken bones healed
As you were flushed out to freedom
You at once became real
Ginger stops, easing her hand into an unseen pocket of her skirt, she produces a tiny folded piece of paper, the edges beaten down with time, worry, and more caring than notebook paper was meant to withstand. We pore over her shoulder as she unfolds and untwists the tortured wad of devolved origami, laying it atop her deadened legs, its writing the heavy block of a draftsman desperately wanting to be understood:
Intricate words invariably lack lucidity.
Always listen, with all your senses.
Love openly.
Value everything you obtain unselfishly.
“What does it say?” someone asks. Ginger stares right through the paper, through those legs, through whatever keeps her here.
Without blinking, she smoothes the paper as a mother cleans her stillborn baby.
Tears pooling in her eyes, Ginger fights and smiles, “You just have to read it properly, if you look closely, it says: I Will Always Love You.”
There was fallout.
Not the breaking of a nuclear bond, but the obliteration of decades.
A falling out of time.
A sense of chronological dysplasia, of being in an uncomfortable era with the suddenness of a blink, or the painful length of a drawn blade, preceding the budding bleed of counter-relief that only the truly hurtdamagedthrownawaymisunderstood understand to be in actuality quite fleeting, despite the hours that the fetishization feeds upon. So whether you take this falling out as a sudden jolt or as the melting of the vodka drunk ice swans at your weddings, know that the change was marked, the time that was, the present, replaced by the sepia-toned feelings of those simpler kinder, more feral fictions we all attach to that pile-up of alpha-bits known as “nostalgia”.
Such a graphically, visually underwhelming word for such a weighty hope. Gnost Algia. Disorders, acronyms, source-code carries more dignity and frame than Gnos Tawl Jhuh. He couldn’t chew the word, he couldn’t swallow it, so he rejected it and went about forgetting about the importance of labels and the more gratifying rewards of experience, walking around in his newfound time, his blankness of pre-technological wonderment, of the simplicity in vacuum tubes and all things chain-driven and given to grid-suck. When a computer was closer to a manual transmission, and a screen was silk, and an apple was still just an apple and at once the surrogate fruit of edenic sinfulness and gran mere wholesomeness. Before the collecting of horses, but during the usage of horses. The curiosity of indoor plumbing and the space-creating impartiality of influenza. Of the quaint recall of inequality, and how we use the latest methods to polish our past. And how we can photoshop any ugly specs on our outward and historical portraits. He kept arriving at the word “fool” which was a more accurate word, and less offensive to him, but nonetheless indicting.
He wondered how life was before those damned ones and zeros Bird sang of that envelope us and our every move, our every fleeting thought, good or bad. He thought about how when you threw something away, it was gone. How nothing is deleted these days, how things can haunt you in analog despite being borne and subpoena’d in the digitalis of the era he just fled. When ink was your worst enemy, when a flame solved all. The fear of breadcrumbs. He thought of IPs and the monthly graphs of abnormal data usage and single number activity, to say nothing of “anonymous” emails of veiled concern inked with venom on the coarsest of stationary:
jealousy.
He smiled as he thought of how one would secure a telegram to use against a spouse in court. All the while he smiled into the eyes of the era he longed for, of a soul who would relish in the midnight Paris of Allen and that infernal Butterscotch Stallion. He dreamed of wormwood. He dreamed of addressed correspondence. He dreamed of the skies devoid of all spectrum, just the light of a sun and the pinpricks of a condemnatory observatory nightsky free from satellite flash and light pollution.
And he decided to damn it all, damn it all over coffee, over wine over wire overland over under and over the ether, with Fincher films and lauded books and green bottles of water. He damned it all, and wasn’t concerned about his inclusion or exclusion in his wholesale damnation of an era, of a feeling, of a thought, of a recurring dream, of a weakness.
He wondered, in his tour of damnation, if he would find refuge in anyone who would understand the intricacies of a man who had the moral courage of a four year old in a candy store, the spine of a man twice his age, and a catalog of experience that an entire tree of family would rather not care to etch upon the smooth bark of their existence. And despite his manipulation of words, his sidestepping of theology and the opium of the masses, he knew: you can’t out-Pynchon the Pynchon. And the damnation, the telescope that powers the eye to the star, can conversely magnify the power of the star to a retinal point, and blind the observer, but in the brightest, whitest, kind of blindness that leaves a permanent warmth across the forehead with the tension of ribbon muscles that only botox could release. Who will feel sorry for…
But he knew, he knew like a meridian line, like the surety of stars and their travels, of tide tables and the reliability of all things naturally cyclical – he knew in her limitless kindness, she would embrace him. She would welcome him. She would bear him under his own blindness and show him what he can no longer see, this bright white canvass blindness that he now held in high regard, this uncluttered visual acuity, not a handicap, a revelation! that he would roll in like spring grass after a penned up winter. Revel in. She would show him those colors and forms of love. Those charcoal outlines of future plans that would be built up with gesso, and matte, the blue tape that would separate the various compartments needed to build a successful love, a fruitful life, and a haven for expression and tears and portraits and reams upon reams of thoughts just spilled out alongside these forms, in their handwritten and carefully penned dimensions, not labels, not ham fisted, but the impetii (for he refused these latintudinous and languitudinal breaks from form - he dreamed of holding language to its word), the motives, the steam behind the pistons of how she felt, and how he should feel, how those now blasted away hues could return to his sight with her touch, there, flame red, there soft and inviting in that cool candlelit manner. There a blue he needed to see, but would shy away from, all the time her right there to hold him, but not to allow him to turn away, forcing him in the kindest of powers to see what needs to be seen.
And the picture becomes clearer with each day.
And he returns to the time he fell from. He returns to the fan overhead, the green glow of the banks of LEDs across the whole of the house. The weight of choices and tracks taken, the responsibility of seeing just one thing through in his life. Of being something like a wooden mannequin that would give someone else the form, without any real detail (one hopes,) of what man should look like, for in his detail one would find wood-grain and loose joints that held no pose, but that would altogether crumble on the desk at the slightest touch.
And so through all his ramblings, through it all he didn’t want The Artist to see him like this. So he hides the best way he knows: in plain sight, all those zeros and ones be damned.
The author THE OPERATORS gave up a few hours of his afternoon and we had a wonderful conversation – from The Article, to The Book, and all points in between… please read the interview in full here: http://litreactor.com/interviews/you-dont-know-michael-hastings