The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  In the nowhere inside my head—that unperpetual everywhere—the nowhere-but-there in my head kept claiming an apartness from time—but it now had a belief that what was truly out there was a papery and rustling and crumpling NOW with an unresolved arriving as well as a steadily observable moving off of it, both the old moment and the new moment, not in sequence, but eccentrically or syncopatedly overlapped, the complexly shaped n-o-w; and that this was so in me as well, and was so of my thoughts and ideas. I did believe this—but not all parts of me believed it—my mind itself, my very mind, kept insisting on being apart from the motion.

  Well, I still had my hand in the water, and then I bent my head back and opened my eyes to the air—sort of waiting for a sign, you know?—but the touch of the water on my hand touched me flickeringly; and then I was high, high up again; and it seemed to me that moments don’t move physically quite; it’s spiritual; anyway, they simply fail to pause in place even while they seem to present themselves in an almost knowable courtesy, as if they did pause.

  But they are unroofed, unfloored, even if stiffly (or stilly) present. Please-forgive-me, the air whispered . . . And the part of the mind cut off from the regular mind, the part of the mind that thought this said Please forgive me to the other part, which didn’t think it and never accepted it, the divinely unstable—and ferocious and devouring—and illusory stillness-of-other-motion of the motion of the moments.

  Dreamlike! Dreamlike! The nearer air and the farther air and a further air of a notion, and somehow the sky flittering and receding (when you look at it), the separate pieces of the softly oozing everywhere in its unresting flowering. This dwarfed me: mad, madding, maddening NATURE—and time in it . . . Big deal . . . I got mixed up: I was studying Virgil and Horace in school, and Abraham (Abe) Lincoln in history, and physics and geometry and English; and in English class, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot and Notions of Fate in the English Countryside. I was actually studying what teachers said those writers said they saw . . . I figured I wasn’t having a vision. I was trying to join some kind of band of people who didn’t have dead fathers and who had opinions about the countryside.

  I felt the humming and buzzing in my ears and legs as well as in my lips and lungs, and I felt it in my certitudes and grief, in my errors . . . the humming of time everywhere.

  In and above and around and under the shaking river—and my mind blinkingly dreaming—real time and me, I’m made of time. I take on an immediacy; I take my hand out of the water; I hear my mother’s and my sister’s and my father’s voices: You’re a fool. You sound like a fool. You were always a fool . . . I have no time for your crazy ideas . . . They and I say in separate tones, Leave me alone.

  I say it out loud to the sky . . . I say out loud, Leave me alone. I don’t believe it . . . I don’t believe it is this simple . . .

  I don’t know if I do believe it or not . . . I don’t want to think about it anymore: Incomprehensibly linked (not end-to-end but overlapping) and unstoppable moments—never a nothingness, never stillness—a universe of such restlessness that it explains everything—but if it explains EVERYTHING, what good is it?

  Come off it. What’s the Big Idea? Don’t make me laugh.

  The shuddering plenum, is it true? Don’t listen to yourself. Stay sane.

  You can’t have a nothingness in which everything buzzingly moves, can you? I think it is possible that GOD never retreats from the birth of consciousness onward, from being surrounded by, immersed in, the restless ambition of everything, all the trash tyrants hooting and hollering and going boo and whistling and singing along.

  This moment was like being blown up but not killed, partly explained instead and filled with a radiance of sorts. But it seems fatal.

  Leaning hayricks of revolving and variedly colored rays of sunlight—oblique, slanted—come through lit-up holes in the cloud cover and touch the gray, current-tickled surface of the water. Weird bird shadows move skimmingly on the lit and shadowed melted lid of the currents. The shadows slippingly skid, without sound, across the visible patterns of movements of the water. Birds, a water hawk—a river eagle, maybe—and three fish crows—bird eyes, bird feathers, whatever—chirring and sudden—their reflections are legible, are recognizably of a species. Motored with appetite and directed by habit and in the lovely and grotesque oppressions of both, they appear and vanish and then reappear as they move in the sky. They are never more than partly visible. But their reflections are legible.

  HELP ME.

  The eerie truth and lopsided song is that the gross outer shells of the world twist and gleam and darken, and I believe in nothing, not in them, not in me. Only in death and in youth for the time being. Unconcluded truth shifts in me in the varying light. Breath moves a bit kissingly in the rolling passages of the minutes . . . It is okay to be wrong. It’s part of who I am the way the shape or the movement of wings is part of a family of birds. The eyelid thing of blinking and thinking in the middle of a stinking river. Proof is different from this.

  Light and clouds and the shadows on the water, the birds overhead, their cries and skimming reflections, the boy, the reeds, the shore, the truth, the error—all of it exists here in the many-winged flutter and mutter in the moment. It flies to nowhere. It moves motionlessly into unexistencehood in actual moments where I am still, like a phonograph needle, noticing the deviations that become the course of argument of the thoughtlight in my mind. It becomes memory—usefulness—a flag, a cloudy thought. I stand in the struggling flowing rot of the river. I think (or feel) this stuff months before being willing to argue it with Remsen (a friend at school who sometimes sucks me off) and years, decades before I will be willing to write about it. Illusions of God, delusions—hallucination—confusion on confusion. I will say to Remsen: I’m not brave enough to be crazy.

  We don’t know enough about the world to speak of it conclusively so far.

  I will say to Remsen, We don’t know enough to be dogmatic, you asshole . . .

  But that’s in the future . . .

  A sense of motionlessness as proof of sanity in a peculiarly scheduled world immaculately freshened every moment isn’t where I was before. To know which lies work isn’t necessarily to have a sense of reality. But to know that ideas of timelessness don’t work visibly, but you have to use them, really, that is faith of a sort, a shrewd sort maybe.

  Does a moment have motiony walls? A real moment?

  The exquisite flutter of the present tense . . . the real . . . it is the real that is spread in front of me . . . The present tense is where I live . . . It’s the only place where life is . . .

  In the hope of affixing a modesty of meaning to the slowed rampage of mind, I, uh, took my dicker out. I would be reminded of the real every time I peed. But in this state—in solitude—screened by the reeds—I, when the thing was abruptly erect, I, being afflicted with emotion—the hateful joy and even more hateful fear in a thought—and hoping for common sense and peace, I jacked off. It was willful and fantastic, the pumping and whatnot in the riverscape . . . The boy on the river, head back, coloring and breath and posture absorbed in this, felt the sexual progression as pure time. Some guys I know are interested only in final motions, climaxes . . . Only climaxes matter.

  In the rottedly placid (moo-cow) afterwards, the grays of the muscles of the water look mutedly pale, white—almost spermlike—in the vaporous air. Browns in the air and flickering bits of blue. Motionful reality I see is the only moral reality, of course. The only existent one . . . Unwilled by us. This one where beauty is . . . the existent moment. But perhaps this one has no truth to it except scientific truth.

  After the dissatisfactions and sport of masturbation, cleaning myself in the smelly water, I feel demons move in me: my fear of being alone has a new shape.

  Then the fear of the strength of the water and of being unfooted in the wet current drove me walking and thrashing with my hands, nervously back to the shallows in the center of the reeds . . . I took off my wet shirt and pan
ts, stumbling in the muck; and putting my clothes around my neck, I waded naked for a bit and swam a little in half-shallow water there, trying to control my cowardice. My nerves.

  But when I started to swim with my clothes and shoes damply knotted around my neck, I came to the point of real terror. I could put my hands down and touch the muck or kick it if I swam the crawl, but that terrified me further. I was immersed in the muddy water.

  Quickly and, I guess contemptibly, I stood up; and the air on my muddily wet, skinny flesh unmanned me further; my fear became uncontrollable. I stumblingly walked back through the reeds to the other side facing the shore. The deep fluster of fear battered me; and the stink of the river kind of forbade thought. Cowardly and harried, in a brainy restlessness of terror, I said to myself in words, You know, in your heart, it is without exception motion. You’ve always known it. There is no timelessness.

  The fear during the attempt to swim, the ordinariness of the ejaculation, the being naked and scared now, make it minor—the thought—and make me minor, too. But as if to spite me, the sense of enclosure on this side of the reeds hints at the spreading air over my head—and the sensation is of motion again, undilute, ubiquitous.

  ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I say out loud, “SHUT UP!”

  The cowardly boy in the reeds wanted to have good ideas, ideas that would make him famous. This didn’t seem like that sort of idea . . . It seemed merely true. Still, he said out loud, “Well, I don’t know . . .” Then: “Well, shut up about it. Don’t be a martyr . . .”

  If time is everything, then everything is not geometric or symmetrical. I want to be a liar. In this framework, death happens one person at a time. Everyone disappears but we each die. Death and time do not reduce to abstractions . . . Into life and consciousness and out again—to be personal about it, to be personal about the direction of things—things—may be we—and everything else—were formed in the image of motion—like real light of any kind . . . Maybe the Bible meant to say this but got rewritten locally.

  I think of people as bunchings and bouquets of velocities; and then I try to take the thought back but the actuality sticks. What if each thing in the universe were a hypothesis about velocity—a manifestation of a hypothesis in an actuality of present-tense moments. A person is a knot of velocities of different kinds and has an overall velocity, while the velocities of the smaller parts continue in currents and branchings, magnetisms, collisions—sighs and brilliancies or dullness. It is a kind of free-for-all of free will in the magnitudes of time.

  No. That can’t be it. That’s just words. Duration is swell. The direction from creation to now is Try Again. The persistence of modification. Denying that may be the conceited origin of lying and the chief joy of living—I will not try again. To be snotty is to be honorable . . . The bitter source of violence is prideful staleness.

  It seems a denial of the actual smile of God to say God doesn’t change. But it seems a denial of everything sensible. I am the brother of everything in the universe in the sense of being, oh, a tormented sibling to it, simultaneous with others and sequential with some others, too . . . The argument is that imperfection is great . . . Very great. But how can that be?

  An eerie peace comes from my being not so bad by comparison in an unconcluded universe of unfinal experience and unfinal prophets so far. But that’s not humble . . . It’s humble to say everything is over . . .

  Be humble, Wiley . . .

  Be humble? I AM humble. Big deal.

  Still, I believe the world is hardly chaos but it is in motion.

  As a child hiding in a closet, I heard the house move, heard the moments come and go, heard distant footsteps . . . People are so fucking temperamental that if they can’t speak for the entire universe, they throw tantrums and say they’d rather live in hell. They’d rather live in hell than think clearly, my dad always said. He also said that thinking clearly led to hell.

  Some people think that the more you control, the more truth you have in you. Okay. That makes animal sense.

  Why shouldn’t I believe myself?

  Don’t you dare, Wiley. Don’t do it. Just don’t. Be smart. What I came here to do is think about death—I probably had better do it . . .

  Good old Death, common and universal—your basic COMPENDIUM of endings would have the title DEATH—DEATHS—whatever . . . But real DEATH will be indicated by a red asterisk signifying endings that preclude recurrence . . . that doesn’t mean there is no transformation, or transportation . . . Oh, what TERRIFIC solitude and fright . . . How mournfully unknowable. Each of us will die in a way specific-to-us . . . Death is undergone singly—it is KNOWABLE ONLY as specific to one person . . . to each of us. All our data comes from that. It is so much not general, even if thousands die at the same time, that the thing is that it is not knowable as a general thing; this is the chief moral fact of it and not paid much attention to; and is maybe the chief explanation of generalities having so much attraction, because they push the singular specificity of your own death around, so that you feel it as a theory and not as the whistle and whisper—and kiss—and shove and inevitability in your own actual minutes.

  Of the openmouthed quality of time and of all its edges, its cliffs, DEATH . . . DEATH is the first thing not lived through. It is not possible to say yes in it or at the edge of it to anything and have it really involve you in any further continuation of the moments . . . not a yes that means anything in the human sense of presence anyway.

  Approaching one’s absence from things is not like entering on a blink—it’s really solitary. It isn’t shared. It is an ultimate loneliness, you being separated from everything, you going into the earth while the universe goes on playing.

  It may be like a slowly forming diving bell of goodbye. Really, what a final discipline of evasion. Pain and lunacy pushed you right into it. What a correction of failure, of any failure of a sense of reality. Really, what justice. I supposed it was justice in the light of a world that was a mixed-up storm of motion.

  By its singularity in each person, it gives, I feel, someone who dies a terminal okay to take on the terrifying and awesome originality of admission of just how singular they are as creatures of consciousness. It is a correction of all the generalities one uses to avoid death—to as-if-know things and all things through false generalities. Death makes someone a genius whatever he was before. I bet we die, each one of us, an isolated genius, semi-lightless. It happens to everyone and some can bear it—that’s bravery—and some cannot: and that’s scary . . . Well, so what? It’s a universal event sooner or later but not simultaneously (so far), but it is an untransferable single thing for each of us, no matter the violence of the denials we resort to in order not to think this and no matter how simultaneously universal it ever is.

  The difference in how many moments you get matters.

  I doubt that people can comfortably move from thoughts of it as the name of a universal category to what it is inside them, inside each person, in the only real form it has. The pain of the existence of death does not undo all pretty truths. I stand naked in the river, DEATH was always here and we had pretty truths anyway. Do I believe what I am saying? Consciousness in real moments is partly mutual, so then that stops when you die. Every part of your consciousness is humanly yours and singular and perhaps clear . . . But so what? Clarity in death may not be so great. It seems to me no one can think of death honestly as an abstraction or as it is in someone else: you can only stumble onto the edge of it in someone else, and then the onward rush or creep of time deposits you in the middle of the singular death in yourself . . . You can’t see anything else but that.

  The boy says, helplessly, to himself blurredly—then he repeats it, in careful syllables—People can lie all they want but I am not sure that justice does not exist.

  What I know about real death (inflicting it, observing it in the flesh or in plants) has (a tang, a quality, a merit) a thing of (ignorant, wartime) MALE PROFESSIONALISM. Death has a great weight of prim
ary emergency in a real moment. The two human forces that are, in a way, absolute, absolute for consciousness, are giving birth and killing things. From the point of view of a woman. Fucking and killing that would be, from the point of view of a man.

  A good laugh, a little tenderness and kindness: they’re like little sparrows: anything can scare them away, S.L. said. But fucking and killing: even leaves do it—with the help of the wind and of certain principles of growth and the placement of the sun.

  Then, with solemn stupidity, or sparrowlike and mischievously, I try to think in conventional, general patterns: Death is the real case that offends fantasy.

  Particles have to move and be time itself down to the least constituent of themselves or they can’t exist as particular particles separate from other particles, which, of course, they do exist as, at least some of the time, in some circumstances, so far as I know. This branch of science isn’t popular with people . . .

  There is no unmoving mass yet that we know of. If there were and it had no date, then okay, but if it had a date, then it has direction, and direction, even when it changes, is an identity (with a boundary).

  Big deal.

  I’m trying to be reasonable: I’m showing off while standing still in the river; birds and distant observers take me to be a naked piling in the river. Or a giant egret. Or a log upendedly stuck in the mud. But when I move, they can guess at me better, that I am a wader, a skinny boy in a river. My eyes move. My chest moves blurredly with my breathing. I move a little into and out of a blurredness of attention. And I put my wet shirt and wet pants on with difficulty and with a lot of acrobatics, nearly falling into the water. I splash to get my balance when I slide in the muck. Or slip to one side. I am distended achingly with a kind of nervousness . . . It comes from trying to think. I’m glad I don’t try to think all the time. Thinking means one is akin to expanding wakefulness. I have a dim, quivering inkling that my first mother, my real mother, called Divinity The Nothing-omitted.