Men Are Planets

There she goes just, uh, walking down the street
Singing, of all things, of the sweet, sweet love her
Lord shows her.  In his infinite mercy.  It's a hymn
She learned in Sunday school and on her lips it is
Hot, like: febrile and white, like: incandescent.
Because this is what the mind of man does with
Sublimity: it blinds itself to it like: looking into the sun.
And this explains the power of lithe coltish girlyouth
Which rises on us like a sun just heedlessly making
Its flawless circle, never really knowing how it
Leaves the world cracked and smoking and the
Black timber laid out radially in the cauterized waste.

Fox Talking With Lou Finkel, Kolob, Utah, January, 2012

We were up at the museum getting amused. I think it was a slideshow, or maybe it was the latest impassioned exegesis of the mysteries of composting toilets.  One of those things we do in a very small town in the solstice frigid dark when we've tired of watching the woodstove.  The usual earnest types: old hippies, some conspiracy theorists, a few ex-Mormons, all of us here more or less stranded in the deadwinter because we've run here from something, or everything. No old Mormons, of course, because this is tribal.  The earnest proselytizing for very special interests, the earnest listening, the tatters of old almost-abandoned idealisms almost visible in the fluorescent-lit meeting room.  The show, then questions and answers.

And after we talked in the hall, and we agreed to head down to Spade's for drinks and that lightened the mood.  Fifteen minutes later I'm pre-loading on boxwine, and half a glass shuts off my social anxiety and up the hill we walk to Spade's.  The dogs are all over in the black, back and forth, breathing the news.  Spade's is lit yellow.  There are at least five dogs on the porch in a nimbus of dogbreath.  Our three go through the sniffing formalities, the door opens, and we and the eight dogs crash through the door and Spade is nonplussed and there is mulled wine and popcorn.  I head to the corner, where I can be out of direct light, and where I cannot be so easily accosted by people I barely know, and from there into the back of the house where Finkel is sitting alone with his smirk, arms crossed because that's what non-drinkers do at parties.  He does not want me to sit with him, and I do not want to sit with him, but sit I do, because I am a bit tipsy, and because he looks less crazy with his mustache off and store-bought shoes, etc.

Howdy, Finkel!
Hi, Fox.
Howzit?
Ok.  How are you?
Cannot complain.  One hundred and eight percent.  What have you been up to?
Well, writing, the um, the book.  Taking notes.
The book?
On the gold.  The gold mines.
Gold mines?  I play dumb.  I know all about the non-existent gold mines Finkel believes are in the desert nearby.
The Aztec [he says this all Spanish-sounding] had immense treasuries full of gold.  The Spaniards learned their secret source and followed the traders here, to southern Utah.  Aztlan.  I am writing the history of the ancient goldmines that the Spanish did not live long enough to discover.  Finkel doesn't like conversation.  He lectures.
I see.  So, like, the Spanish Trail and all that?
Exactly.  Precisely.

We talked about his book for a while.  I am not usually much of a listener, but I did a great wine-fueled job of letting Finkel lecture.  It's an interesting topic, but Finkel's such a dork and weirdo that it took several mason jars of wine and considerable effort to follow his rambling monotone.  Then one of the dogs squatted by Finkel's weirdly over-big feet and shat almost explosively.  The subsequent uproar seemed a little dim, because I was seriously drunk by then, but Finkel proceeded without noticing despite not drinking in a decade.  Somehow the topic had turned to Ireland and faeries.

Where there is moss and running water, and a glade of trees there are faeries, and their language is utterly unlike the language of the djinn.  Where there is blank rock and sand and canyons, the djinn speak, and I cannot understand their words.  They rush up and down the canyons and hardly notice me.  They say: "Al heddah bin Dzerulsalem".  He says this in a harsh and guttural accent, complete with throat-clearings and abstruse finger gestures.

Uh huh.  I urge him on with my attentive and apparently enraptured gaze.  I wish I had a secret recorder.
There is a flurry of activity as Spade and this girl with enormous braids who's been chasing him around clean up the dogshit.  It smells incredibly awful and people are retching.  I excuse myself and meander outside with some dogs to piss on Spade's woodpile.  Midstream I hear giggles and see that Spade's roommate Allie and some guy who's pressing her into the crotch of a cottonwood are laughing at me because I am standing in the porch light peeing and it is making lots of steam.  We chat for a minute and smoke a bowl and then I notice I have bare feet and it's maybe ten degrees so I go back in after biting Allie's ear.

Finkel starts right back up, and after a minute I manage to steer the conversation to the Nefarious Government, my favorite Finkel topic.  Secret weapons, chemical mind-control agents in the drinking water, the gold standard, lots of the usual stuff, but in Finkel's special wide-eyed, un-self-conscious monotone.  This guy is a hoot.  He really absolutely believes all this stuff.  Now he is talking about news sources, and about how all of them are controlled by an elite cabal, and that the New York Times is the worst of the lot, full of insidious propaganda in the guise of reportage.

Bro, I apologize, Finkel man.  Gotta piss again.  I went outside again and saw through the window that Finkel was sitting alone, holding his nose.

I found my sandals and got in my sheepskin and stumbled home.  There were coyotes all around and the smell of woodsmoke, and a baby cried over at the yurts.

The Divorce Turns Out Well

Silence six months while I pressed, to be true,
for something other than her truth, which she,
anyway, could not speak to me, thief, in
the house I made, but blurted in shrugs and
chokes and halftones and quavered cussions
but not sobbing, as I'd imagined her,
in the public place she chose.

Trusting my weakness she chose to keep me
quiet. Trusting the superiority
of my weapon she shut me up so she
could speak, choke it out in her hated bland
and artless way, like a CPA, knowing
I and my weapon are dead.  Hoping,
anyway.  Now five years on

My kids come to me and say "Dad, she wont
let me talk."  Each one, all three, carry in
their half-mine mouths the words I gave them.
Their words are mine.  They speak.  They know nothing
less.  They speak one perfect word after
another, on and on, of bright colors,
of full flavors, of their music

Of what they love and hate,
And every word vindicates.

"Stretching the Rubber Band of the Self and Becoming One With the World"

There is an interpolable center where the pin of habit fixes one end of the rubber band of self.  That's what we call it.  And what we do at any moment is the other end of the rubber band, which is of course stretchy. So with little tug we tend to stay right by the pin of habit, where there is no movement and when events leave us more or less alone we can stay there at the center in a state of motionless apparent stasis doing as little as possible thinking our undistracted thoughts and doing the slovenly minimum.  But when events or will get tired of this squalid center we move out some distance and tug on the rubber band and approach our edge and that's where we meet the world and all that.

This is the gist of my new self-help series "Stretching the Rubber Band of the Self and Becoming One With the World", which I will promote with a lecture tour and follow with a corporate consultancy.  What do you think?

I'm actually not sure the rubber band is the self or if it's the habit.  Ditto the pin.  But I'm working on it.