I descend the outside of the railing, on the outside of the porch; I stoop and lower myself until my legs are around the pipe on the second floor. I get my hands—abradedly—onto the floor of the upper porch; then I get one underneath to grip the pipe and, in imitation of Jass, I raise my other hand up and out like a rodeo rider and say silently to myself, Yippe-i-ay—and Fuck IT! and I slide down, heart pounding.
Then I swing out into the almost light. And then I descend again. Jass did it and another guy, Jimbo, jumped from the second floor without being hurt: I go down to the first level and jump eight feet, onto gravel, in the umbral abracadabra of an early wind in this cusp of a moment. What are the procedures of mercy?
The River
If one might try the different language of a different self, one might write that the Friday of the week of my father’s funeral, I sneaked out of the apartment we were living in on Kingsland and Kingsbury Avenues and went downstairs in one of the intricately complicated physical-password ways that I used in that year of my early adolescence to certify my courage and my willingness to live, to find if they existed; and, having already been medicated, so to speak, by being outdoors, having been enlarged and soothed inwardly by the gray air, the outdoor silence, and the immediacy the nerves take on outdoors (as if for physical emergency), treated by the sensual registry—the volitional freedom abridges, cheats, short-changes THE GRIEF by denying STILLNESS, IMPRISONMENT, THE TOMB for oneself. The amazing and companionable thing of dying partway, too, of making one’s life be still . . . I am in the next moment, outdoors—in University City—in the pretty air, the gray semi-opacity, semi-translucency without color, lightly-dark-and-moist, physically undead, unburied, unimprisoned, the self observes after my monkey descent, the earth, and the sun, and the light between them, in triple conjunction, in swift motion that seemed slow, formed first a silver-whitish tiara-shaped glow at the eastern horizon, and then—a fret of nearly unimaginable fire . . . It was a freakish moment. Along the alley, from the east, came long, horizontal rays of white light—actually white and black mixed as if the rays were zebralike. A peculiar fusillade of glare, of revolving rays—both black and white—these revealed and illuminated the nearby world so oddly—in such strong black-and-white, with such shadows everywhere and such glare, that the revealed alley with its familiar garages and ashpits was as if lit by a flashbulb—or a magnesium flare in a battle. It was in worse concealment than it had been in the dark in being whitely redrawn by glare and outlined so spinily.
In that immensely striped moment I was catapulted (silently) inside myself toward a kind of further unburial inwardly, a self-conscious thing . . . While outwardly I cleared my throat and spit—a gross maleness—to acknowledge my flight (and freedom) from parlor caution in the moist, open air. The night-renewed spaces of the giant room . . . The early-morning out-of-doors had no strong suggestion of death—or of life; it was merely an un-Jewish semi-pagan arena of odd light, a kind of crimped, glaring-blaring light—hardly useful. Squinting, one accepted one’s place as if in a mechanical model of planets, an orrery, and went whirling and clanking off among the spheres in those ellipses gilded on one side of a demonstration of gravitationally orbital order in relation to the weight of certain fires set into the cold of outer space and warming and lightening the atmosphere around here now.
In a way, this was the other half of the uncompleted masturbation. The physical world—of the out-of-doors . . . was at climax . . . one of many for it . . . An almost human skin of dew was everywhere—on metal, on macadam, on brick—and on the light-struck and shadowy black-tar pavement of the alley, small drops, themselves, glaring mightily as they dried.
And the freshness of the air, the near-silence, the amendment of suburban life, the immediacy (the nerves and senses were without porches) so set one’s self up in one’s heaviness and near-motionlessness of grief that, without warning, one’s physical self and temper felt the combat between grief and being suitable for entering the morning as irreconcilable. One grieved or lived. Going into the basement, getting one’s bike . . . do you know what it is to CHEAT on grief? To double-cross the dead? To refuse old love? The great inner hounds are baying with moodedness. All sorts of inner selfhoods are clutching at stillness. Parts of me are sitting on cushions, are motionless with grief . . . One moves in heavy and resistant air, in one’s mood, one’s own emanation. One can’t escape and move in ordinary glare-torn, dew-wet air, half-grief-stricken. I mean the grief takes its place among the committees of the self, the congress of voting and squabbling selves, dealing and bullying, vetoing, bribing . . . And it tries to regain the tyranny it lost, to reestablish the monarchy of death (and whatnot) among the committees. And some nodule (or seed or pit) of self-and-will which is allied to light—in spirit and in actual composition—the flying knot of identity-in-the-motions, one is now this particle, now this wave—is presidential; I live, heavily, reluctantly, with a stone in my belly and a certain overwhelming and crippling shadow in my spirit, a lament, and a huge, huge private force of regret, but one isn’t chained, overwhelmed, or entirely crippled. One limpingly flies along. One does not grieve openly for oneself—parentless twice now, with affections frayed, toyed with, born and torn. I slowly force the observatory to observe the real moment, the present moment with its absence in it; but I am not absent from it. And the silent birds within, the boys, the children, child-selves and school-selves, sport-selves and the like, look, they look and see the alley, the tar-paved aisle that goes past the garages and ashpits—and the glare, black-and-white, and made of revolving and perceptibly demarcated, powdery rays. The fire of the glare and the unfire of the shadows pick out bits of vines, of flowering shrubs, to make black-and-white flags under a wide gray sky without glare in it; the glare doesn’t penetrate it; it is a glareless roof for the revolving spikes and rods which change as the earth tilts—which turn into a flood of whitish light beginning to be tinted palely as normal light is, which fatten and revolve and thicken and spread into a flood in the more and more lit alley, the walls and trees and ashpits, which are ignited with glare and shadow in noiseless confrontation with light—
while the birdsong, morning song, begins, and creatures fly in gray air, or lower, where they are rent by black-and-white glare; and patches of blue begin to appear, and swathes of yellow, yellowish light; the seemingly purposeless richness of the real—
continues incrementally, maybe a little madly, almost limitlessly. Certainly theatrically. I’m not just an audience, I’m a tenant here . . . I’m a tenant under this sky. The American sky.
Then, all at once, the stuff is just light and shadow. I stop staring and go into the basement to get my bike; but by then, you see, I don’t lean up against the whitewashed wall of the basement to see if I’m going mad with pain as I had earlier in the week. I manage to live on, without remission, to carry my bike up to the alley, up whitewashed concrete stairs cut into the earth; I get on my bike a little clumsily; I swerve and sweep off . . . a little cautiously . . . since I am aware I am not in great, or tyrannical, command of myself; I am not in full command of myself; I haven’t a life-and-death say with myself, my selves, time-and-mind, time-and-flesh, whatever it is that I am.
Time itself proposes consciousness simply in the nature of its own being—in the way it is no longer itself but is itself still, split and riddled and whole, subject to will in some ways, given to fluctuation . . . I have this raw theory, quite stupid I know; but everything is a sort of flowering and receding whirlwind of nervous time at the edge of a future; everything, including me, a sort of clumsy calculating machine exploring the nature of event, of time, and of time unoccurred-as-yet, of the future. I am interested in the future, in the prettiness of morning light. Past milky stretches of morning mist, I bike. Past buildings with no lights in them, no movement in or near them. The still mostly grayish sky holds huge clouds that are partly white. Whole blocks lie in shadow. I bike over shadows that are decomposed and light-speckled whales of receding dark
—and among some, cast by apartment houses, that were as big as tinted but partly bodiless whales and dinosaurs. Through those temporary selves I pass sensibly—and like something in an image as well.
Past the lawns in a suburbanscape, grassy tablecloths, miles of repetitive, and not entirely convincing, gentryhood, a great number of front doors, not to speak of windows, I go; and then out Delmar Boulevard, a wide, empty stretch of concrete at this hour, to North and South Boulevard where countryside begins, woods and farms: the end of one NORMAL and the beginning of another. In those days, where the ground was good (for farming) farmhouses and fields and farm buildings appeared with such frequency that domestic windows and farm women and farmers watched you everywhere along the road . . . a loose extension of a network upholding respectability, a theory about virtue.
And unfertile land, wasteland, marshland, or rocky upland, was eyeless, windowless. One biked there with suspicion. And curiosity.
All in all, in both sorts of countryside, not much history ruled here. There were tales of Indian torture and of European land-grabbing and of slave raids and the like; but none of that went very far back, two centuries, three at most. Despite the tilled fields and the painted houses, you could sense the raw prairie . . . the real sky—I mean as it had been when it had been above emptiness. There were no traces of a countryside magistracy, no mansions, no castles. There was no split between free farmers and tenantry, no five dark centuries of saints and wolves—nothing redolent of the rise and fall of empires, nothing like that was here. Everything here was owned differently: grabbed-and-done—this landscape, this odd wished-for Eden—pale, glare-pierced—a pale, stuttering attempt, almost a sandbox attempt, a first version of Eden carried out this far with the wastelands and failed farms, woods, and abandoned fields and barns. I mean Eden with decrepit parts, evidence of social tactics that did not work, weedy stretches. Districts of seeming darkness, the opposite of Eden: Snakevilles, nihilism-domes of shadow entirely unlike the watched countryside, where the light often was actually brighter than here, since these darker places had more trees, untopped, unpruned; and often these places were set in dales or little valleys shaded by ridges so that there was less light and thinner light to start with. At this hour.
In those places one was watched differently. The darker places had people in them. I had a sense of different emotions, different ideas in eyes alert differently. People walked differently near the shadowy and not-well-painted farmhouses set in hollows, dampish and with lightning-struck trees, with acreages of shadowy farmland.
Biking, I got a strange taste in my mouth, my mind, really, of the strange, complex, brilliant, bitter invention of respectability and disreputability. Of poverty and some money. Of different kinds of money. Of luck, ill-luck, of character in this form.
The tide of respectability, or the pool of it, and ponds and spreading lakes of the doctrine of it really, were shallow in the countryside in some parts . . .
And, then, the dirty water and scummy foam of this shadowy other reality, local, poor, strange-looking, warehouse-barns set in crooked and blasted fields; and a loony kid here and a moron there, or mean-looking kids, angry, maybe, staring at me, while a bony dog barks and a malicious farm woman with a big face and wearing dirty clothes yells from a twisted mouth at a conceitedly proud, ignoring her, mean sort of tall, thin farmer, in farmer clothes, walking away from her across a muddy yard toward a barn.
Then you come to another sunny district—puritanical little gardens, garden beds, dry-looking rural lawns, clean ditches alongside the road, and fewer trees, and those are topped or pruned or solitary in wide spaces. Nothing is hidden. A single tractor moves at the far end of a dipping and swelling field. A moronic boy sits in a kitchen chair with a doll and near him a sad woman is peeling potatoes over a washtub . . . And nearby is a birdbath and in its raised quartz-and-mica-sparkling concrete basin are sparrows splashing, chirping, flirting in the early morning.
The highways, all of them back home then, were two-lane—some concrete, some blacktop. In Illinois, a few were made of brick or cobblestone still. I was biking in the Missouri countryside.
Where I biked, in each hamlet that I went through, the street changed into a highway when the houses stopped being so close together. The hamlet trees vanished. The road continued baldly, the major highway, narrowly among the fields. The sunlight ticklingly held its poses but not for long but altered. Shadows formed a closer tie to what cast them. The shadows shrank steadily and the glare ebbed—this was the open highway—until the shadows were like loose sacks tied to branches or eaves or tractors, or were like sheets of dark paper on weeds.
But they—the shadows—were faintly glittery in the morning light, shaped bags of less-lit portions of the air, speckled with light often; or, in the gloomier sections of the countryside, punctuated by a somberness of deeper shadow among the multitude of trees. There they gave an effect of sadness.
No one threw rocks or got into a rattletrap truck and chased me. It was as if the sun and I shared a laboring sense of things—I was in motion this early, too.
The time-inflected distances were logical in this part of the world but the specklings in the shadows were as if shadow could not bear to be shadow which was not logical. In half-okayness, one risks a kind of formality of self—one is logical among the logics of the sunlit and time-inflected distances . . . This is very tiring. The heat of the increasingly heated air was registered by committees of skin and sight, hair and lips and throat. The reports were of effort and of sweat—of the sweaty and hard-breathing condition and the comparative safety or danger of a section of the narrow highway among the fields. The heart strained beatingly and blood pushed and brushed in me. Alternately pinkish and livid, I biked along. I biked forty miles, a little more than an hour and a half’s ride. Then, at some points on the highway, far into St. Paul’s County, I could smell the Missouri River. The road was on high land, safe from some floods, not all. I am aiming toward some land we’d owned from around when. I was three or four until I was eight years old, land and a house, where we’d lived part of each summer. Back then. Now, in wartime, in 1944 when it looks like we can win the war if we don’t slacken, the old trucks that carried eggs and produce to market rattle along. Often, they had chain drive; and there weren’t many of them. And young men never drove them. Cars, well, engineers and pilots and servicemen on leave, and salesmen: there was gas rationing and no civilian cars were produced. Very few women drove, and almost none alone; and those were in Cadillacs. It was shabby in St. Paul’s County: the dissolution of a onetime promising rural world was well advanced there. The rush of the cars as they went by in that landscape, well, you could tell, sort of, who was country and who was city, and who had some sort of automotive sophistication and who hadn’t. You could tell about the frame of mind, almost the religion and social standing of the father of the driver: a Catholic speeder with a policeman father . . . A middle brother in a Lutheran family with a lot of money . . . It was partly a joke to think that, but partly it wasn’t. It was a different traffic from that in U. City. Knowing this was part of being a hick.
I mean the unabstraction, not of a field but of THAT FIELD OVER THERE, the old-time country ballast, or morbid conservatism, about destinies (not what they were worth to the people who lived them, but what they were). With drivers you could tell if the farmers had young sons in their trucks or if they didn’t by how they behaved toward you on your bike. You could almost tell who had younger brothers they didn’t like. And who had something to lose, privileges back then. (Breeding.) You could tell who was wild and who was getting heated up to compete. You can daydream as you bike about being a great baseball player—normal but famous—you can project this mental light of daydream on the landscape like my shadow on the ditch and then on the field or down the side of the steeply banked causeway. The narrow highway is crossing a bit of flood plain. Your mind can enter the shadow world and close out the real one. Illogic of that sort can do nothing but be imaginar
y. It does not dare ally itself with the real.
Daydreaming and not daydreaming form a wild pendulum-swinging in me. The drivers, well, the drivers, some of them, cut it so fine that the whoosh of the wind of their passage woke me. I’d see them leering, it seemed, behind glass in those other shadowy, fictional foot-on-the-accelerator stories of their own lives that they were working on on this road. I was scared, exhilarated, partly murdered over and over. My bike would start to keel or heel or leap or twist or swoop. I would be blown into next week—a phrase from back then and part of almost all the rural tall tales when I was a kid and part of all rural descriptions of mental states of love and luck, of revelation and of wakefulness. Me-myself-and-I on the bike were blown off the road almost half a dozen times. We went careering noisily, boundingly (bounced on rocks and tree roots) down the shoulder or bank into a field of weeds or into the clutter of tree trunks and the crazed almost churchy-Gothic light in the woods there. Angry, crazed—dangerous—some hoboes in the woods . . . Well, get your ass in gear and get out of there, hoo-haw . . . You do what you can to save yourself among the highway loonies . . . Dirty old . . . Often okay . . . Sometimes not. Alone in the woods, in the diminution of communal voices.
And back on the road, on an adrenaline sine curve, one admired the people who made hand signals, who made room for me, a kid. Near the river some of the land was really flat, and the plowed and planted fields were darkish in color, a real brown, and the stuff coming up was really green, or strongly yellowish-green, planted so geometrically that the planting looked like notation of some kind, an idea spelled out stalk by stalk, row after row; that tickled the eye and the mind.
The Runaway Soul Page 5