THE MARK

Eventually we must combine the cracked door that leads to the pigsty wherein all dreams lie awake beneath a sleeping god while, in another world–possibly far away, possibly close enough–the clock ticks impossibly backwards on Kafka’s chest of drawers, ripe to alarm.

In 1981, I died. Seven years later, my letters would begin to travel. The contents are the cerebrations and cogitations of a hallucinated man.
In a poker room, I composed, painfully, futile proclamations, two edicts,
five decrees ( “Das ist mir Wurst,” [This is sausage to me] “Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof,” [To only understand train station] “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift,” [I think my pig whistles] Ich glaub’ ich spinne,” [I believe I spider] “Bock haben,” [To have a goat] ), which owe their veracity to my literary executioners: the animus of a refrigerator and the revelations kept within
one tin box, one glass jar.

The moral force before my letters–like the horse that yokes its cart–is clearly a burden, a strength, a colossus that exhausts, feeds on, drags upon, gobbles up, devours then devours again to leave the recipient with only receipts of regret, vouchers of pain, recipes for the terror, which is never to have lived; it leaves one with ‘a buried gesture,’ ‘a buried poise,’ those which–most notably–underlie the poet of palls, veils, scarabs, scars.

I find one letter that particularly stabs at [my] memory. Its contents are literal wounds, blisters and those more opaque, fuliginous marks of resounding hurt, which faithfully reproduce not my triumph over death but, Im Tode, over life.

It proves difficult to say for any determined length why miracles, peripatetic as they are, hold privilege to exact terms, circumstances, conditions, barren limits and the most bizarre forms of the term ‘boundary’ to serve their remarkable appetites, their zaftig features, which then necessitate, call for the beneficiary (wie ich) to destroy his life.

Ten years later I cannot recall, summon, evoke (für das Leben von mir) the fine points and technicalities of the letter. What can be roused will prove incomprehensible, but nevertheless must suffice for the reader who scans back over (then back over again) the admissible episode, which will render astern, abaft, backward to most. Its advent and (deshalb) reality, predictably, duplicates and echoes so that one cannot determine, let alone establish, any formal plot, which might then aide–as with Ariadne who gifts Theseus a red ball of floss–when it comes to steering out of such labyrinths.

The first sentence reads, “The murmur of the one Tongue as it gallops over the Tryst of its mythologies.” The end words ‘its mythologies,’ marked by asterisk, is then, in a single footnote, modified so that the following claim holds: that ‘its mythologies’ is, in a language future to ours, analogous to ‘its seas.’ The opening words, ‘The murmur of the one Tongue,’ while dubious in scope, has most accurately (though this means not correctly) been interpreted for ‘the word of God,’ the supernal flow of That which in a hymn from the Vedas posits as “that which was not nonexistent nor existent, that which is neither what is nor what is not.” The following sentence (one that, if I recall, consumed the remainder of that first page) one might summarize as ‘a deep-seated mystery,’ as its content and therefore essence has been intimately extinguished by the cigarette I left clumsily to burn at the time of the letter’s composition. Only the person I was at that time of creation remembers fully its substance. Therefore, as with the flood in which Noah drifted on the waters of his faith, we are merely left drifting and thereby trembling over its erasure.

The page that follows opens “While the gods and deities’ multiplicities hamper the poet’s imagination, he, nonetheless, gathers his legion.” While ambiguous, the sentence renders sharp enough for a few readers, perhaps, to glean what I now willfully fail to admit or struggle to recall. From this perplexing point of emphasis, these few readers will, quite lamentably, be left bewildered, stemming from the second page’s generous remainder of text which, in a hysterical fit of insomnia, was scribbled out for, now in retrospect, no good reason. Unlike the cauterized content of the first page, I do remember the freight of the second, which I will neatly summarize for purpose of time as sheer madness and pure stupidity.

AFTERWARD

One night the wind will bring us the boom of the Ram roaring and the Lions in the pen will flock together with the sheep’s fear.

The essential principle for the story I am telling concerns the smooth beaker Socrates washed down one evening, the boulder Cain heaved at Abel, the skean Brutus plowed into Caesar, the slug Booth fired into Lincoln, the meteor that (für Sie sanfter Leser) is still to come. This is the only text that has been spared from the flame(s). Those who read and then reread it on the banks of the New River, at the brow of the Black Mountain will learn that the twelfth stroke of the clock has chimed at last, that the bird that is Phoenix bends throttle and speeds out of time’s own ash. On the Cold Mountain, I consult the Oracle with Prometheus’ heart; turn Thoth’s pages with the eye of Sisyphus; refute the heretics by and through the mirror that swallowed two suns, the mirror wherein their god Momus, eternally defeated, rests.

My path is Fortune’s trail that blazes and thus consumes the Witch’s limbs; intermittently, at partial intervals, by patchy degrees–reality blows back to us. The mundane we believed always to be impossibly before us untangles from the slow chords of the blue guitar. The blind man who plays will not stop.