The Verse About Blake

Salt for what I can't see,
Sage for the ghosts in me,
Ginger to clear my mind,
Cream almost all the time.
Bowls full of blossoms blend,
bitter then sweet again.
Peppers for a rosary.
Friend, come and sit with me.

Geoffrey Prince, Salt Lake City, Utah, January 4

Mr. _______________,



As we discussed when you called, I am not comfortable with your request to speak to these matters informally, as I believe there is too much oportunity for mischief and error in the transcription, interpretation and, possibly, in the editorial contextualization that inevitably your duties require. Therefore, I require that you publish this written statement in its entirety or not at all, as I have written it here. Of course, I will maintain a dated copy in my records and will contest any attempt to cite me except by including the complete, unaltered text of this letter.



My name is Geoffrey Fielding Prince. I resided near Kolob, Utah from March 15 of last year through the end of November. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Utah, and spent those eight and a half months in Kolob managing fieldwork on a dig near Kolob, located on Bureau of Land Management land. As is generally the case with such work, my crew and I spent nearly all of our time at the dig site. We returned to Kolob Town only to pick up our mail, send and receive e-mail, and meet our suppliers. During these brief hours in Kolob, I met only a few residents: Dotti Lyman at the gas station; Dorothea [whose last name I don't know] at the Post Office; a young farmer named Lauro, whom I picked up hitchiking on 144 on July 4; and Officer R. Lyman of the Pierce County Sheriff's Department, who gave me a speeding ticket [four miles per hour over the posted limit] on July 5. I recall two or three brief conversations and verbal acknowledgements, too, but I do not remember with whom I spoke. I never lingered in Kolob more than two hours, and spent the night there only once, the night of July 5, at the Black Bear Mesa Motel.

In our conversation yesterday, you asked about the location of the dig site. I am forbidden by the terms of my contract from providing this information. Kolob was the nearest town, and we were on Federal land.

As we discussed, I require that all future communications be in writing through the attorney advising the University on these matters. His contact information is attached.

Sincerely,

Geoffrey F. Prince,
Associate Professor of Archaeology
The University of Utah
Salt Lake City

Five Failed Sonnets, FWIW

1.



The lover wants what he does not have.

You know those squirrel-proof bird feeders?

The lover is like a squirrel: have

You seen his eyes? His focus? His ears

Cocked forward, his tiny brain mighty

In concentration, devising a way

to get those seeds? What he wants is right

There but he is confounded, stuck, may

Never figure it out. Something like

A miracle, an act of God, a

Eureka moment, a lightning strike

Is what he needs. He can't hold still, stay

away, or ask for help. This is a prize

He cannot share. He would rather die.



2.



All our desire is poised on an axis

Of paradox, lack and ownership

Its poles, lust and death its steep taxes,

Love and hate in circular orbit,

Strangeness and familiarity,

Familiarity and strangeness,

Round and round with the regularity

Of our backs' heaving under duress.

We pray, ask for help. This is the prize

We cannot share. We never arrive.



3.



In the City of God we built His house

To house His absence. And we filled the

Empty spaces of our hearts with busts

Of heroes, memorials to the

Dead, and monuments to the utterly,

Unutterably lost and insolvent.

We filled the bland domestic quarters

House by house, with grudging affection,

Needing the walls and roofs, but doubting

Their security. We checked out our

Neighbor's wife in the market counting

her coins, her skirt handprinted with flour.

Help her carry that home. Don't be shy.

You'll walk her home but never arrive.



4.



This place is a mere crossroads, a pile

Of coincidence, an eddy in

The torrent of commerce. Some square miles

Of zones of uses held in position

By regulatory agencies

Beholden to the insurance and

Underwriting industries, finance

Interests; and the soulless strip malls and

Secure compounds are from elsewhere, or,

At best, from nowhere, from some ether

Of algorithmic blind groping after

Profit, multiplying to the last sure

Decimal the civic futures sold short

For private gain, a vast edgeless space,

A res publica without a face.

5.

Around the squalid center, [a pit

of pestilential poverty, too

intractable to fix, too unfit

for investment or civic ado],

spread the compounds of the like-minded,

those whose politics are hog-tied, bought

and sold, whose speculation reminded

Pound of lost pride in good craft, whose

Neuroses play out in spas and bedrooms

and restaurants and spasms of lust in

the glow of monitors and dread and

anxiety and sadness too remote

for drugs to fix. They fill their houses,

vast and cheap, with their longing and they

turn up the volume, hold it barely together

with the tight twine of indignation.

On a Hunch at a Tangent

Dearest K.,

I am writing to ask you put your thinker to use and help me fill in the following narrative hole: I have let's say 12 characters in a small town called Kolob, Utah. It's the kind of place you have to choose to be, not the kind of place you stop to get gas or take a telemarketing job. People are drawn here by what draws people along, but these are mostly people who are more powerfully drawn than others, or who are such fuckups out there in the culture that they go looking for something else. What draws them is a sense that things could be better, that something is missing, etc. Some find some satisfaction for a while in religion, or sex, or love, or alcohol, or working with their hands, or leading wayward under-age thugs around the desert, or some combination of these things, but they are still drawn on, always with the sense that they might get to the center of things. So how do I dramatize this unseen-but-sensed center? I've had the vague idea that these people end up in the canyon, but what is the story that propels them there? I mean, I don't think I can have all of them, especially the rancher Ferral Young, just up and follow their hunches until they end up in the canyon. Maybe the hippies would do that. There's got to be some kind of backbone or direction, or something going on that organizes what would otherwise be a bunch of first-person ramblings about feelings, which I can't abide writing. Bolano has the quest of the Savage Detectives for Cesarea Tinajero, which almost seems like an excuse of a plot, the real action being in the daily scrapes along the way; Mathiessen has the overwhelming fact of E.J.Watson's tragedy, to which everything points like to Achilles' death. Tolkien has that Wagner rip-off ring squeezing through the chinks in the ramparts of evil. I gotta have something, even though what I suspect is at the center is nothing except our human nature that can't abide stasis or a vacuum.

Ferral Young, Young Ranch, Pierce County, Utah, January 2.

I never had no trouble with them boys from down at the yurts. They's always been respectful and mostly we don't see them when they come through. First time they come up to the house I stayed half behind the door because not often do people come this far in and with their buckskins and beards and darned sandals and big knives I had no idea what to expect. I always got the .30-30 leaning there and I wanted it in reach when them four come knocking, but pretty soon they put me at ease -not so much as I invited them in, but so's I took a step out on the porch and we talked ok. They introduced themselves all by first name, which here we do not do to strangers, so I made a point of calling myself Mr. Young, being older and unacquainted. Anyways, they was real polite, and all they wanted was my permission to walk through to the tanks at the top of the canyon. Unless you got a helicopter, you're not getting there except through my land, less you walk maybe five days off of 144 around back of Black Bear Mesa, which they was hoping to avoid. I told them to watch for my one grumpy angus bull out there in the junipers and big cats at the tanks and let them go. I never been all the way out there without a rifle and horseback, but if they wanted to walk in sandals and carry just the knives that was their business and not mine.

Irregardless, it blew hard that night so's I had to get up and wire down the cowshed roof and out there in the wind and cold I got to thinking about them boys and headed out after breakfast to see where they'd got to and if they was ok. I go to church most Sundays, but tell you what: riding out in the pines of a clear morning sipping coffee, seeing that there's maybe enough grass to get the cattle through the winter is where I most feel the Holy Ghost. Coffee's not what the bishop wants me drinking, but it sure helps put me in the mood for winter riding.

I rode out maybe two hours, out to where the pines stop, and the whole way I was flushing mulies and cows. Cows looked pretty good for January. Out at the first spring I found where they camped, up on the ledge away from the cow mess. They had swept up their fire, which I appreciated, and left the place as it was except for a stack of juniper. I figured they was ok. I don't know what motivates them boys to sleep on the ground in winter. Me, I had to when I was cowboying before 144 was paved, but I couldn't wait to get out of that line of work and back in a warm bed. The way I see it, some people grow up with all the comforts and later need to prove they can put up with the hardship. If you lived in hardship when you was young, you grew a taste for comfort later, not having to prove nothing to yourself or others. Or maybe they like being out of a sunny morning as much as I do, but they don't have neither horse nor coffee.

Right after they paved 144 is when them two New Yorkers bought the upper half of the Wilson ranch and put up the first yurt. They was the first new arrivals except Vermillion brides in Kolob in our whole history, going back 140 years. All these years we been swapping young Kolob girls for young Vermillion girls, so's these two towns have a look all our own, like one big family. Old Lyman, Radar's daddy, brought home a French girl after the war, but she didn't last long and took the baby, so it's been pretty much just Kolob and Vermillion out here below the mountain swapping brides. Then along come the New Yorkers with their money and their yurt, and Wilsons unload that good-for-nothing scrubland for cash, and suddenly we have some new blood, but as outsider as they come: them long-haired boys had no place here, really, though we was ready enough for them so long's they behaved. We joked that the only people's ever moved into Kolob since Brigham Young sent us here way back is long-haired: all them Vermillion brides and now these two pansies. But face to face most of us was cordial, and mostly let them alone.

When them boys first really got a good welcome here was when we had one of our big blizzards, maybe in '90 or so and the Lymans were out doing late roundup and two of their boys got snowed in out to Flat Top. It got so my pond froze to the bottom, only time it ever did that, so it was cold as sin, too cold for skinny boys out all night. We got about a dozen of us together and rode out when the moon came up, and it wasn't ten minutes before my feet was frozen past pain and I was shivering like a aspen. That's when them two New Yorkers jogged by us in the snow looking like old-time Piutes in their skins and blankets. We all thought we'd have to rescure them, too, after finding the Lyman boys, but what happened later that night corrected some miscomprehensions of ours: them two tracked the boys down to a wash we never went in because a ledge kept the cows out, got a big fire going, blanketed their horses, and then jogged right back out and found us and led us back to the boys, who were warm and asleep when we got there. We are a self-taking-care-of people and we take some real unspoken pride in not needing help, but we had to admit these long-haired New Yorkers was tough and smart and knew how to move in the woods and weather, and from then on I kept them in high regard though I did wish they'd stop play-acting the Piute and join the rest of us white ranchers where they belonged. Anyways, it was a good introduction for us to people not from below the mountain, and I think we'll get along fine even though they look like Piute hippies and live in yurts and talk like goddamned college boys, excuse my French.

The Ballad of Bacchus Rosenberg: The Movie

First of all, I want to honor Mr. Rosenberg who is our first reader who isn't family. You are reading this stuff, yeah? We've both read Infinite Jest and gotten tanked up and weepy and recited the last few lines about how the tide was way out, so we're on the level. And nearly come to blows about the relative tragedy (yes, they can so) of authorial suicides and whether Bolano counts or not. Let's don't get me started, shall we?

At any rate. This is just a place-holder for now but I think I can interest some big names in recording various versions of this. It would be a sort of history of 20th C American music. I want Brian Wilson and Richard Simons to do a dreamy surf version (a la "In My Room") and I'm pretty sure Jagger will want to do the disco version.

And if when the time comes to seal this venture, we can all three--you, me and V. (and James Wood can come if you think he can manage not to be a prima donna)--we'll (I'm pioneering this form of recursive long-sentence grammar that assumes short term memory problems in the reader, by which I don't mean you, although you're our only one of those) engage, to seal the venture, in some sort of ad hoc New Age ritual that involves us being reborn from the desert of David Foster Wallace's something-or-other, which even if we can't figure out what it is, we'll be in an actual desert (V. has one) and so that'll pretty much cover the bases, in terms of ineluctable-concept-trumping-brute-physical-reality wise. That is, the half-assedness (sometimes, alleged) of my thinking will be neither here nor there once we're in the desert. Be assured of this.

We're going to need your input (and your John Hancock on a few pro-forma forms) re: the movie trailer. I'm excited.

[Image: John Bellushi as Bacchus in Bob Guccione's quixotic made-for-TV children's version of the classic holiday story. I still have the lunch box.]

Not Tonight, Sweety

I had grand plans for today's post, but while I was cutting firewood I spilled a gallon of gasoline and 2-stroke oil in my backpack, and then I got home and a deer was stuck in the chicken fence and when I freed her she kicked my arm with her pointy little hoof so's I can barely type, and then Bret came over and we drank large glasses of his latest vodka contraption, and now we're going to take my gasoline-smelling one-armed self up to the restaurant for a pork shop. That's all I have to say about the state of my soul and our democracy today. Thank heaven we live in such a place as will give a man the chance to smell like this, get injured like this, and end the day like this, is all I can say. Thankee!