by Steven Sills
Chapter 21
To Early Adolescence
I remember that sojourn undertaken with my childhood friend, both of us ten year olds at the time. It was several years before that exquisite and consummate day of cliff diving with a different version of him into the waters of a quarry, deliberately taking the risk of death in an expression of the full union of the friendship right before attitudes changed and the relationship like all relationships, no matter how much the two friends might feel that they are extensions of each other, eventually evaporating as any dew in the heat of the sun. Seeking experience, a novel dimension of self, as all rebellions do in going beyond demarcated provincial limitations, we abandoned our respective farm chores and embarked on a 30 kilometer odyssey to his grandparents’ house down less traveled highways and remote farm roads, which meandered up and down steep hills and sometimes in that elaborate intricacy of the shadow of the leaves of a tight network of trees in light and dark patchwork that made the sun seem as diamonds that were being crushed at our bicycle wheels, or when we were resting, stationary but glimmering impalpably at our feet. In retrospect, this nondescript outing seems hardly worth mentioning and yet a life is smelted in such triviality; and a being in society, so constrained in the yoke of labor, relishes these times wistfully, and reminisces about past occurrences, irreverent as they may seem, when he was a natural and free entity—man forever ambivalent whether to come to a quick brutish death in a time of absolute freedom in nature, or indentured to society as a pampered servant, and so often mixing the two in promiscuity and high risk thrills whenever they can be obtained.
Sometimes natural splendor, at least as human animals perceive it to be (a color, as with a smell, of course, not being of the object perceived, but of being emitted or discarded from the object, and thus what we perceive as often merely that which was and is not, so our existences often replete with certainties that are lies, which are nonetheless indispensable for our protection) is the quintessence of love and adoration of life. Lie that it is, it is the greatest of all human experiences , especially when shared, to which only the procurement of a pencil and use of the alphabet to convey a thought for the first time or the novelty of a crayon to render color and form are in any way comparable.
After being given a meal, and in their pleasant enough company shown the premises of their farm—boyhood, if anything, an exploration of one’s physical body, and how it can encroach onto other bodies or environments and the contours of those bodies-- they were insistent on calling each of our parents to which we temporized by saying that they would not be in their homes and we would soon be returning to Changrai anyhow. Hot from the intensity of the sun on the ride back, we skinny dipped in a large creek, and later, partially clothed, sat along weeds and brambles, staring at the flow of the gurgling waters sloshing against the rocks under the rustling leaves of the trees. But in the flow of eternity there was the roiling of the anticipation of ensuing punishment; but attempting to be brave, we sought to define the exact nature of that punishment stoically before exaggerating the ensuing beatings and how obtainment of scarred stripes was the rite of passage to manhood. And from talk of manhood came talk of sexuality
Then, with his hand muffling my mouth for the placement of his lips upon the back of his hand, he got on top of me to give a G-rated illustration of the fruition of life--its violent thrusts far removed from any rarefied ideal of love. This position with a woman, he told me, brought about offspring, when one was enraptured in frenzy that extruded a white secretion similar to the pollen of a flower but as liquid instead of powder. Laughing as much as could be done when anxious about the punishment that awaited us, me aching and sordid, and neither of us neophytes to the actions of dogs and farm animals, nor that having children in family was anything other than a cheap means to obtain human farm animals, the only rarefied idea was the initiation that would take place in being beaten severely with a belt. Thus, there is “no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, or without fear, no more than without sense.”111