curvature

by Monkey Leap

  That’s the first time Helios felt it, the other finding.

  Supporting himself now with one hand against the foundation wall, his knees slowly give way, finally folding under the weight of his ungoverned body, his last phantom recognition of consciousness experiencing his slow motion descent to the manure mud, embedding half his vision, until he finally softly slips over.

  Plentitude

  Alice is absorbed from a huge lump rock on the beach, a mass black hole in the scene. She’s more at ease now then ever before, except for her own brain’s sometimes-momentary idle buzzing. Brains are like that sometimes. They just go about their business of computing, annotating and footnoting. Times like that she laughs at her cerebral matter speed-dialing through options she has no involved interest in, and waits on the sideline until it is finished.

  She could sit here all day, watching the water level change. She takes out her silver slipper, lies flat down on the rock and dangles it in the water. The purifying begins, the oozing haze constituting the holding water. At the exact instant this germinating organism reaches its peak she vigorously shakes the slipper and as quick pulls it above the surface of the water into this baptized first moment of eternal.

  The water sits in beads atop its consummated surface, their refracted light from the sun now doubly mirrored by the sequins. She looks inside each drop and finds within three reflected miniature worlds. In this moment she doesn’t breathe.

  Sutra

  Morpheus has been in the business for nearly forty years now. He’s gotten to its boundary as far as he’s concerned. He laughs quietly at himself. He knows that people that say "As far as I'm concerned…" are often more concerned about themselves then what they’re saying. There seems so little availing for people to grab onto anymore. So they grab onto strings of things. And the ends of strings of things. And then they tie another version or a newer diversion on to keep it going.

  ‘An emblem to the classic Working Man,’ he thinks of himself, ‘dealing in a sure string thing.’

  When the final string finally runs out he’s waiting at the end, to pick it up and hand it over to the family, so they can tie on another to keep it all going. It’s hard for most people to comprehend living. Consequently it’s hard for most people to comprehend dying. You give “yourself” away. So this added purposeful embellishment’s the welcome stand-in ghost host when it comes to going out. Just like life - you embellish the memories, because you’ve resigned to the rest. He understands that it’s the collective’s attempt to relate to existing.

  He also understands that it’s the collective’s need to relate to existing that sells those Strings of Things. This is perpetual.

  This is why most all authors are sure string things.

  By tying together a thread of referential inference, you can have a String of Thing story that usually results in cash success. Most people nowadays want to see the underbelly of existing – the soft spot that reimburses having lived. Most market books do that for you. You can jump right in and float to the other side without ever sinking. Even the old classics and ancient histories carried a string, floating through the eyes of the dead. They carry along existing in one form or another.

  And so beyond all this quiet clutter of observable, Morpheus is thinking about the nights writing his book, above the mortuary. During the day he takes pauses, like this one out back, and thinks about the next segment in-between funerary duties and services. He regards the step by step process. That and paying wide-awake attention.

  He wants to tell them what he sees in dead bodies. But he’s just a bit shy. And he lacks the testimonials to be believed. He figures he’ll wait it out, here on the back steps, and in there, with all those passing through that know too - the still ones witnessing.

  Ambrosia

  She dangles her leg to let it become a swinging pendulant of gravity off the pier’s edge. Ambrosia carries an innate, impassioned harmony that resonates to any necessity. Now in her early teens her body reflects this in full fleshiness. She sees the men stare at her, and she thinks how unusual it would seem to really talk to one of them, to be able go beyond the glazed countenance in their eyes when she looks at them. She has been an instant invite on sailboats in this curve of the Texas Gulf more times then she could remember. She goes for the wind and the water. Whatever happens in their minds is not in hers. She moves past the offered openings as if they were animated cartoon doors in a game show that you knew you would never need to choose. They always wriggle in sudden discontent upon their mind’s slightest indication of her pure design. But soon enough they settle into the boat’s motion and once again stare longingly at her in her private province from their distant world. They feel that if they could just get close enough to touch her they would be okay again. Those that linger in hope offer to brush her hair, or hold her hands when they’re cold, flustered in their generosity that is some method of mirroring comfort. They always feel a sense of rejection when she declines, not realizing she does it to keep them comfortable. And she needs nothing, because she appreciates everything. But that’s too hard to explain, and much harder to come to understand.

  Her friends affectionately nickname her “Butter”.

  Anopia

  He floats distant and opposite the girl on the pier.

  He hangs his head quietly, watching his feet dangle over the side of his boat. He notices that his do not swing. They hang like dead weights. There is no gravity left, no push and pull of momentum. He leans over to look into the water for his reflection, and identifies only a crude moving shadow, an indefinable choppy liquid blur. With outstretched arm he bends his cup and resolutely pours a trickling line of milky coffee into it, opening a hole and filling it up with an incipient muddy gloom.

  He can’t even remember what it is he came here to get away from.

  He’s been here all day.

  Shadows are collapsing now.

  It’s not dark yet.

  But it’s getting there.

  “Adumbratio”

  “…I whisper only… I haven’t seen the absolute light … I turn myself towards the sun… and inward I light the flame…”

  parting the seas

  Helios is concerned with himself. He had slipped away again and hadn’t been able to retrieve his sense of the complete metamorphosis after enfolding this time. This worries him. He pushes himself through the microcosmic level easily, until only shades of him exist. Shadows in the air. Mists of light. He can watch his lifeless body, in empathy, insight and compassion. The same as he sees anything else in this state. It’s rare, otherwise, to experience it so unreservedly. Only in moments of Perfect Simple. Like when he stands on the edge of the stairway from the upper floor of the farmhouse in the early morning; the rectangular cutout blazes vaporous light as good as the pure lucid void. He spends a long open moment just staring into it, and sometimes he sits hours on the top step just watching it, watching the gestures within it.

  Sometimes while sitting there, there is no longer any of “him”. “He” is it. And he’s no longer in a delineated world of five senses. That’s too limited and complicated. His senses suddenly become large and interchangeable. He tries to compare the sensation with his episodes. The closest in likeness is open-ended orgasm, although that doesn’t near do it justice. It’s more like a continuous peak, a large full breath in without ever quite getting to breathing out. You can’t give it fair play within this world of substance and matter. It never comes quite close enough. You can sense it as a funny kind of understood, and you can always recognize it in quiet. Other times it is an ecstasy, an over-the-edge astonishment at the multi-leveled connectedness within a non-time non-space.

  This is the thing he knows is the paradigm of drugs.

  But when he slips over he just is it. It doesn’t need a catalyst. It transcends partitions. It already is the whole experience.

  In this Helios was no more, but then he was the whole.

  This time his body had
lain in the manure mud for four hours before he decided to come back in. The sun was setting, which made it all the harder to return. It was too easy to become involved in apperceiving the curve of refracted color. The vibrancy of form was so easily embraced then. Each shift and spin in the medium made him giddy. Within its mutability was a multitude of complex leveling of heart. His empathy and insight ran highest at times like these. He felt such a strong need to confer to and offer up anything.

  leftovers

  Morpheus understands that birth and death are simultaneous within every moment and all things. And that all could evolve and grow forward, or remain forever repeating the aggregate of ownership, secular and organized into neat and tidy reinforced knots of drawn divisions on the imaginary line that just keeps on going…

  The Final Hold, the Last Grasp Gasp – that’s what most everyone wants before they let go the rope. That imaginary cut on the imaginary lifeline, between imaginary before and after, imaginary here and there and now and then. These imaginary lifelines of purposeful poignancy; and hidden within their cerebral webbing lay peaks and valleys laced together with exhaustive losses and gains and intertwined with ins and outs of flowering fancies and declaring discrepancies. Last Will and Testaments can often give a summary standing of drawn, sliced and quartered lifelines. They usually involve the transaction of “family”. Family implies an aggregate of “place” on the collective lifeline. Morpheus chuckles at the exaggerated extensions of “family”. Like the Cosa Nostra. A larger extended family contract based on an over-the-top sense of self-continuity. The entertainment industry had help expand that particular lifeline to its widest girth and fullest spacious content. A reputation of charming family intrigue based on “tough love” family rules, stretched and extended and desperately exaggerated … then, when “necessary” squeezed, shaken, turned upside-down, and gutted. As dead an analogy of loving nucleus as the hearts in cadavers. But indeed, sometimes none of it differed in its rolling ride of “family” reflection. It seemed that the ride was the same in most cases, just varying by degrees, carrying a baseline of choices that determined the reflected outcome. For the most part “Family” carried a load line made of converging and interchanging weights – archives, expectations, reverberations, and unopened envelopes. Each carried its own potential knot in the line.

  In the back entrance, he sits in his chair propped inclined against the doorjamb and breaths the sweet dusk into his lungs as full as he can, cleaving himself to it.

  He has no drawn Last Will and Testament.

  The idea seems preposterous.

  He has little to give up, a few volumes of notes, and clothes that on occasion necessitate being replaced with a newer version. The house and business belong to his father and mother, who have long since moved to another life of purpose, on the other side of the world. This “position” helps to hold his purpose.

  He clings to nothing, so he has nothing to give up.

  The quiet he lives by is the quiet between breaths, the quiet from contrast, the quiet of death.

  He doesn’t have any children of his own. This is his contribution to the world at large – the acknowledged purposeful deficit from his corner. Too many have a child as a rite of personal passage and an extension of ones self. This always seems to him an act of misguided appropriation. He can understand their drive to extent on themselves. But so little of this is ever considered or reflected upon. You can tell by how many sweat and bank on the science of fertility. Only as a last struggling thought do they choose adopting, and then choose only those still within baby range, just a skip away from birth, still shadowy enough to melt into “mine”. And so the leftovers sit, their minds viewing within the empty spaces of the gaps of the aggregate. But few would see this glaring distinction. So he rarely discusses it with anyone. Because he knows they won’t understand, and then they’ll get defensive, and make claim to it as a natural process of evolution, personal or otherwise, or an outcome of interest due on the string of the evolutionary ladder, personal or otherwise. As if evolution weren’t the whole, personal or otherwise. Some will mirror argue he’s selfish, to their fearful theory string clinging. Some will even use his occupation as a means of justifying their stake. ‘Morbid thoughts brought about by the quiet of too much death’, they’ll say. ‘Good thing he won’t have children. What kind of a life would that be for a child, growing up around death?’

  zoon

  The hotel manager calls her with the news of Charlie, her voice on the other end suddenly generating on the line a running series of effervescent static pops within large deep gaps of holding space. Skirting through this interplay into the open moments between she asks that they not remove the body until she arrives. She clarifies she’s twenty minutes away by bus, and is leaving immediately, covering the manager’s ambivalence before its spoken. She’s always been able to predetermine peoples’ thoughts, and cover practically any hole they’re about to fall in because of social anxieties. She helps them glide over it. “Grace” is her name. She’s earned its definition: “a virtue or excellence of divine origin”. She’s only enough time to put on her sun hat, and although it’s a little worse for wear, she feels it constitutes enough formality for the occasion to warrant appreciation from Charlie. She’s packed Charlie’s request in well-used tissue paper, and lain it in an emptied shoebox, the previous contents of which are now scattered in chaos on the floor, a necessary upheaval created by the decisive needs of incisive love. She has her birdseed in her purse for the way back.

  She’d known the moment Charlie left his body. She recalls their conversation a week earlier, when, while playing with the edges of the shoebox, pulling the top layer of paper away from one corner, he says that he knows her so well that she would not recognize herself if he could show her. He also says that he will never leave her. He tells her that the top of his head is burning, and he feels as if he can’t stop it. He says he feels as if everything is pouring out of him, from this place, and he’s happier than he’s ever been. She listens with a great calm. She feels something deeply significant about Charlie. She always has.

  Now as she looks out the window of the city bus, she becomes the mirror of his reflecting. The billboard winks “Come to the Balance Hotel – good for the body and soul!” A car drives by with the personalized license plates “Hi Mom”. A woman in conversation says the only one line loud enough for Grace to hear. “It won’t be long Charlie will be graduating.” Grace holds the shoebox over her heart.

  gest

  “…I am undeniably full. I am overstuffed, abundantly brimming over with passion, tenderness, and oblivion. My back is fortified with affliction…”

  the trail of dreams

  Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

  Alice moving under skies

  Never seen by waking eyes.

  Alice has lain on the rocks for close to five hours now. No one approaches her. No one sees her. She just isn’t noticed from all those self-referential standpoints.

  This is invisibility. Know the self and become the whole.

  The stories play themselves out in their own reflection. You just have to recognize the waves and echoes. But she knows this is beyond the general level of sentience. Soon perhaps, it will be different. Then she so much wants to entertain the experience of the added perceptual layers and referential reflections with others. Just for mood. Like in the movies – the trick of the thin, flat celluloid strip producing a life of layers through light and depth and the illusion of time. Layers and layers every which way, from this reflecting. Choirs upon choirs of long-held expressions from the stratum. It only needs to be called up. She rises from the warm rock, slowly curling her spine up and away from its surface, as if separating from her own flesh. She lays her hand on, and holds it there in recognition of its long continuing frame of existing. She jumps down, in quick frame, and moves back into the picture, dissolving into the scene, fading into the crowd, becoming invisible again.

  Holy smoke
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br />   “It’s all an interchanging moment”

  No period, no exclamation mark.

  He scrawls the remark on his wall in black crayon.

  This sums up Argent’s outlook on the moment’s experience. Most would accuse him of not being real, or suffering from a psychological anomaly of long-overdue maturity. But he’s always aware of how important observation in the moment is. Being awake and open has the cloaked appearance of naiveté from its opposite.

  He sits in the middle of the room, in front of the mirror, with a pad of paper on his lap, and draws the image reflected back. They’re always different, just subsequent personifications, but increasingly numinous and less anthropomorphic. He’s seen many artists that see only themselves, and repeat and repeat their moment of themselves, and their “outrage” at the moment “outside” of themselves, and then they boomerang forever off the perpetual motion.

  Argent sees the whole, and in doing so releases the whole into the moment, providing clarity to the reflection.