Artificial Light

by James Greer

  * * *

  O Lord, I have called to Thee, hear me. I have spread out my hands toward Thy holy dwelling place. Construct my soul and do not cast it away. Put away from me the sins of my youth. Only the living thank Thee, all they whose feet totter.

  Do you know about the singing forest? In the concentration camps the Nazis erected a series of poles with hooks protruding. They would hang the Jews from the hooks and twist their bodies, too, and the howling and the screaming, horrible to relate, was inhuman and chilling and incomprehensible. And these unheard sounds mingled with the unheard screams of the burning children in fire-bombed Dresden and the unheard screams of the vaporized victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of this set in motion by one man, by a person or rather figure of world-historical import who was above natural law and thus moved the worldhistorical spirit by Hegelian directive in some direction, backwards most would say.

  I want to make sure something like this never happens again, but more importantly, I want to end all human suffering forever. And I think I know how to do this, but I’m scared, and I’m not sure that it will work. I wish I was as certain of the end of all troubles as of the authenticity of the imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.

  Kurt’s confession punched a hole in my heart: to think I hadn’t noticed or seen the signs. In retrospect I saw all the signs, as anyone would, who had even minimal experience with junkies, as I did. My only excuse is that Kurt was rich, and I am not used to drug addicts with money. You will note that none of us, who are extraordinarily attuned to the usual symptoms, had guessed that Kurt’s recent aberrant behavior was drugrelated. None of us have much skill dealing with the moneyed class, and so—even though, given the bundle of clichés concordant with rock stardom, or what we thought we knew about rock stardom (having no familiarity with that, either), you’d expect us to leap to the obvious conclusion, but nothing else about Kurt seemed clichéd, would be my excuse—as far as I know, and I think I would know if some careless whisper of heroin use attached itself to Kurt, at least in the confines of our crowd, but I pride myself on noticing what no one else notices, and I had not noticed this, I had missed it completely.

  Kurt tried to ease my self-recrimination by saying he’d gone to extreme lengths to keep his secret, using dealers on the West Side that didn’t know him, that no one from our circle would know, who turned out to be, as far as dealers go, swell people, who took care of him and let him crash in spare rooms until such time as he was ready to return. Of course they liked him, I thought but did not say, he paid in cash, probably overpaid, and was gentle and harmless and tiny.

  He explained to me that he had started using as a palliative for his intractable stomach problem; but that after a while the habit grew to monstrous proportions, and he had gone through several stretches confined to fabulously expensive rehab centers, and had managed to stay clean for reasonable periods of time, up to and including the first few months of his arrival at Albion. He’d moved back to Dayton in part as an attempt to change his environment and unmake the easy availability of drugs: wrong choice. Here you can have anything you want, if you know where to look, and a determined junkie always knows where to look, eventually. And so he began using again, sometime after Christmas, which explained the change in tenor we had all sensed, but perhaps most keenly myself.

  O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts.

  Work boots shift, or what’s becoming more.

  He pckedi one of the razors, cloplastic double blades tted with, arrranged hapat random hazardly. Have to, consideredbe careful, though, or soon the big thrift storereful, though, or soon the, which already buzzes with mispl which already buzzes with tension, will sexual collect and concentrate’s energiesjucedi and alcoholic emotion and erupt in a dangerous way. As likely a lightning rod as any.beer-fueledaggressionfuryhostility. Native is a kind of considerregarded his true slefregarded his true self ballwheelingbreakdown structurally—regarded his true self. T of identity, and tunkempt contructs chinin even in daylight, and the few thrift store lamps did little to front warehouseelectronics place, is third shift, or what’s become. But you didn’t need much to get by inou didn’t need much to get by here. Brighten the gloom, so it was lamps.

  Short walked smiling into the bar which threatened even. For instance: but I guess it doesn’t compare to the thrill of having, saring aheadt, absorbed in parallel worldsblankly. There weret of course you get used to anything after a while, including l), including the the sweet thrillkick of love, including loneliness, extreme habitual disappointment, loss of innocence, and the constant and comforting presence of death and same. Alsoyourself from the combustion process without the engine failing? But they tell you it’s wrong, wrong, stick to the. Or something like that.

  All sweatyreallysweating glasses. Humid, toostuff. Laughter is a slipped sibilant from slaughter. Odivinationpaid him much attention. Whaat this broken f my ambition. Thaman, this shell, could represent his dreams.

  See: condescension, arrogance, life on the mountaintop, airless, sterile, and lonely. See further: snowfall, a small cabin with fireplace, burning, the curl of smoke pearl-gray against the whiter sky, a history book, the end of time.

  Hate disease of intuition. Resolution No. 6: If happiness is the goal of living, then we are doomed, because we are not selfish enough by nature.

  Reflected in storefronts dim as church windows. That convenient farrago of nonsense, the Sibylline Books. Jackal-headed Annubis, Thoth, Horus, Nephthys, Set. Hut. Hike. A nice conditorium. Shattered, fuguelike, obnubilate. Anu—goddess of the dark blue night sky and the dark blue sky. Girls of Britain stained themselves blue all over with woad (Isatis tinctoria), paler than Japanese-blue and redder and duller than Peking-blue; in Ireland, at least, this was a female mystery that no male was allowed to witness. Chiliast. Still in my memory’s good ear rings the note. A victim of the vine. Salesman of intangibles. All blue is beautiful: a shy dryness, reasons of clarity and space. Broke his hand of yesterday. Sachlich. A night breeze lifts the saffron flush of the moon through a thicket of ash leaves. A blurry of bats, an escaping train. The conchoids of Nicomedes, a planar curve of the fourth order, concinnous. The ungracious duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures as ever small Hero sustained. My Heart Laid Bare. Sapiens dominabitur orbis.

  Apologies. The change has started, sooner than I thought.

  As the gray light of early dawn seeped through his tall windows, Kurt looked at me with a curious expression.

  “Would you do me a favor?” he said.

  Notebook Eighteen

  Record 5 (2:18)

  Beauty and Proportion

  Parenthesis

  Hunting Accidents

  The relevant elements of our story—like kind and dutiful children who plan a surprise party for their parents’ fiftieth anniversary, but, worried that the shock will prove too much, each independently drop heavy hints beforehand so that by the time of the party no one’s surprised, but everyone has fun anyway—have been preassembled. In other words, you know what comes next, because we worry about you.

  We dreamed about Gail. At least we think we did. We have a distinct memory of dreaming about her this morning, sometime after we finally fell asleep around 8 or 9 a.m. The substance of the dream remains elusive, because we’ve never been good at remembering our dreams, because they’re usually too boring to note: Most of our oneiric life’s spent mulling and rehashing the previous day’s events, so that lately we’ve been dreaming about smoking cigarettes and drinking bad wine and typing, endlessly. In another recent dream we’d gotten carpal tunnel syndrome so severe that we couldn’t feel our fingers on our right hand. We woke to find that we’d been sleeping on our arm. In any case, we remember Gail crying, and us crying, and her asking if we’d started drinking again. Then she asked us to forgive her, and we kept saying, “For what? For what?” but she wouldn’t stop sobbing.

  When we wok
e, our phone rang, and we unwisely answered, perhaps influenced by our disturbing dream. The caller was our editor at Enormous Publishing House, and the news was not good. He had no further information regarding Gail’s whereabouts, nor did he seem to care. He was fed up with our constant delaying tactics and was canceling our contract, part of a general housecleaning, nothing personal. Our desperate attempts to assure him that the book was all but finished, although certainly not the book he had commissioned, but a book not entirely unlike the one he had been expecting, fell on deaf ears. We were free to keep the advance we had already been paid, but we would not receive the other half, the portion due upon delivery, as there was to be no delivery. We had waited too long. The tides of rock had turned, in the ways detailed earlier, and the commercial prospects for a book sketching our life in an era of rock all but forgotten were uncertain at best.

  In book publishing this happens all the time, the editor told us, by way of softening the blow. But the blow was not soft; the blow was severe, and drove us back into the welcoming arms of demon rum. By rum we mean of course whiskey, and sometimes wine. We went on a possibly historic bender, during which time we may have tried to jump out the window of our ground-floor apartment in a suicide farce that amused no one, as no one was present. We also managed to have ourself thrown out of nearly every bar on Brown Street—so we were told later by Henry Radio, who one night picked us off the sidewalk and into his brother’s car, who drove to Henry’s house, where he piled us onto his leather couch, from which we awoke and peeled ourself with an uncomfortable sticking sound from the humid flesh of our back and bare legs as we sat up. The abstract pattern of raised swirls on the plastic were represented on our skin by corresponding incarnadine impressions, similar to those crenations produced (and often admired for long minutes at bedtime) around our waist by the elastic band of our boxers. We also proposed marriage to several girls, some of whom we knew, and at least one guy.

  Nothing rhymes anymore. Have you noticed? Our environment, or what you could call our atmosphere, has become an extended exercise in free verse, prosy and dull and susceptible to bureaucrats, and while there’s occasional correspondence, accidental assonance, poignant, momentary collusions of rhythm and color, there’s no longer—from our perspective, at least—an obvious pattern, an ABAB or what-have-you. Maybe rhyme has simply used itself up, become unfashionable, but we don’t think so. We think rhyme has gone into hiding, obscuring itself in an act of willful self-preservation behind sprawling untended hedges of meaning. In other words, we think rhyme still exists, and may one day reappear. When that day comes we intend to be surprised.

  A broken man has one advantage over an unbroken man: He knows he is broken. That knowledge is a thing, a real thing, an object you can keep in your wallet, like money, but better than money because the knowledge of brokenness has no currency. It can’t be spent. Not the brokenness itself, but the knowledge of brokenness allows you to pass freely through the artificial borders between time and place. Though these borders are real, you can, by knowing, shortcut the rules. Once transversed, the borders inevitably reveal their jewels. I won’t fail, said the blind man, to remember (in detail) your face.

  Upon recovering from our binge, we decided, ridiculously, that our life had snuck away from us while we were drunk, which made us quit drinking for exactly three days, until we realized that we could not handle the pain—of Kurt’s death, of Michael’s, of the end of our literary career—without alcohol. Though we knew Kurt was dead, we wrote him letters, after drinking all night, and although we didn’t retain copies of these letters we remember them as paradigms of the letterwriting art, effusive and eloquent where appropriate, direct and heartfelt where necessary. All lies, too, which aspire to a kind of truth that truth can’t match.

  After that comes the erection of an internal authority, and renunciation of instinct owing to fear of it—owing to fear of conscience. In this second situation bad intentions are equated with bad actions, and hence comes a sense of guilt and a need for punishment. The aggressiveness of conscience keeps up the aggressiveness of the authority. And here at last an idea comes in which belongs entirely to psychoanalysis, and which is foreign to ordinary people’s way of thinking. This is of a sort which enables us to understand why the subject matter was bound to seem so confused and obscure to us. For it tells us that conscience (or more correctly, the anxiety which later becomes conscience) is indeed the cause of instinctual renunciation to begin with, but that later the relationship is reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of conscience, and every fresh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and intolerance.

  The panic attacks that started on our first European tour did not disappear, or even lessen, once we got back to America. If anything they grew worse. What we had figured a purely Continental affliction, as we had never experienced it in the States (where the bulk of our touring took place), probably the result of cultural dislocation, turned out to be something more pervasive, and worrisome. We were crippled with anxiety while riding in the tour van, at soundcheck, while rehearsing in our Dayton practice space, in the recording studio, and eventually while sitting at home quietly reading or even lying in bed.

  Nothing seemed to help. On tour, at least, every few days the feeling would dissipate of its own accord, heedless of our own state of dissipation, and we did over time notice a correlation between the intensity of our own discomfort and the size of the stage (the larger the better), the proximity and ease of access to the dressing rooms (the closer and easier the better), and the relative “importance” of the show (while we didn’t generally think along these lines, shows in minor provincial towns tended to provoke less anxiety than shows in major capitals).

  We experimented with different methods of dealing with what we considered essentially a claustrophobic reaction: getting more drunk, getting less drunk, not drinking at all (terrible idea), but nothing seemed to work. We did not at that time consider our condition psychologically oriented, because its symptoms were so clearly physical, and we did not have health insurance, or much money, so we were not inclined to visit a doctor and discover what any fool reading this already knows: that we suffered from a general anxiety disorder, and that medications existed that would palliate but not entirely relieve this disorder, and that some of those medications we had already been taking anyway in a recreational sense. We happily purchased illegal prescriptions from friends who had smuggled them over the border from Mexico, where we are told you can walk into any pharmacy and buy anything, in any quantity.

  After several months of enduring and to some extent managing our claustrophobia, we decided to seek psychiatric help, proceeding from the theory that we might receive more plentiful and powerful drugs. The theory proved true, but had an unexpected side effect: The psychiatrist explained that our very real anxiety, or panic, extruded from a source inside our head and not necessarily dependent on environment or the self-abuse to which we had subjected ourself on a regular basis both before and after the attacks began. That source had nothing to do with being cooped up on a rock stage and everything to do with being cooped up in a rock band, he gently suggested. In other words, that even though we were under the impression that Whiskey Ships was the sole stable fact of our quicksand life, that the ability and opportunity to participate in rock music our lone salve against the slings and arrows, the psychiatrist, whose name was Dr. Wright—show us a sign!—suggested that rock was killing us, and not softly.

  Naturally we disagreed with Wright’s diagnosis, vigorously, actively, and futilely. Because Wright was right. The very thing that we loved the most was literally killing us, and our much smarter unconscious mind was patiently explaining that to our pigheaded consciousness, by way of crippling its ability to function in any useful way. It may well be true, as the hoary adage holds, that you kill what you love; but we can say for certain that what you love will kill you. That this should be so continues to puzzle and amaze us, but we are as sure of
its truth as we are sure of any truth, and we are sure of very few truths.

  His face grew suddenly solemn. “But you should not be so quick to dismiss stories. Truth, being unapproachable directly, cannot be apprehended in its pure state. If you saw it and understood what you were seeing, you would go insane, or, as the Old Testament sages colorfully put it, ‘surely die.’ Most likely, when confronted with what you call the unadorned truth, you would neither understand nor value what you have seen. There is more truth, for instance, in the slender brown hands of our—incidentally very lovely—waitress than we will ever grasp. Stories present fragments of truth in more digestible portions, like crushed pills pressed into chocolate cake.”

  We were left with no choice but to—reluctantly and with great effort—cease and desist our rock activities. We had made our decision in potential: but it’s one thing to form potential and quite another to turn form into content: for this to happen requires an inciting incident. That inciting incident took place at a rock show we played to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of a rock magazine, whose name was Popular, which had self-fulfilled its own prophecy on the strength of the very alternative revolution that had lent ballast and heft and momentum and several engineering-related terms to the continued viability of Whiskey Ships, as well as many other similarly worthy but little-known groups.

  There hung a huge cardboard replica of the Tenth Anniversary cover, with Kurt C—’s smiling face, positioned from the balcony directly in front of the band, so that we were in effect playing for Kurt, and we refused to play for Kurt. So we had to close our eyes the whole time, or stare at our shoes, or look at the kids in the front which is always a bad idea because they’re so young and good-looking and full of energy and enthusiasm it makes us ill. After that show we realized not only the truth of Dr. Wright’s diagnosis but the immediacy of the danger to ourself if we continued playing in the band. We had to quit, and soon. Even so, we found it difficult to announce our resignation in a vanful of bandmates, and resolved to take the first opportunity upon returning to Dayton the next day. Or the day after that. Or at any rate within the first couple of weeks.