I know a man named Gerard the Hand Me Down who drowned in a ditch they dug, and time filled the ditch to the grass brim with blood. Blood in the mouth and it tastes like history, like time, drowning the tooth in the waters of forefathers, and don’t it taste just like you do? Don’t it taste just like me? Like mother’s milk, and graves.
I know a man named Gerard, a man, flesh and bone equipped with external genitals. They help keep the fig leaf from looking flat and dead. Just a man. Little atomic dervishes whirling to the oldest rhythm, giving form to his arms and his legs, which are called extremities, and these atoms don’t care for him one way or the other, same as you. Gerard came from a womb, which is the pensive cavern mulling over life and death, or soft folds of tissue which are atoms that don’t care. He found his way out of the pensive cavern, through the soft folds of tissue, and then found many reasons to become serious and severe. He is trying to find a new set of eyes. He makes stringed instruments like his father. The wood speaks to him as he works, but seriousness and severity have made his ears incapable of receiving such dialogue. He is me. His ears will open. He will get his new eyes. I am Gerard.
I know a man named Randolph, another man with the same relative equipment. Little atomic dervishes whirling for the sake of his form, whirling in slightly different arrangements, weaving the particular, weaving the universal, weaving Randolph’s own unique, elemental body, corporeal matter that’s called, and those atoms don’t really care much about him either. Put enough of these atoms together in a mass, which is flesh, and something starts to care. This fact begets a mystery, one which we try to solve with how and why and star and sky.
Randolph came from a womb, but he can’t see it as one womb, not one but hundreds. Yes, the wombs are pensive caverns in the bellies of women, women with internal genitals and all that, which can make the fig leaf look flat and dead, but the wombs are also the shared origin of his tribe. The wombs of so many women, wombs of men, wombs of the Dead, wombs of the shared mind, wombs in a river of shared blood, a womb in the fertile eye of god. His finger is searching wildly in the air for the pulse of all things. He will find the pulse. He makes speeches. He is Randolph.
I know a man named Randolph who chases the ecstatic joy of pure being, who leaps from pulpit to pulpit in faded jeans and dirty white shirts with a thousand words to spare by sunset, unfettered by ambitions, history, religion, unaware of self-consciousness, chasing with each moment the waning shadow of a garden he sees in the distance. I have known him since we were children, when we played in that garden. He is mostly Catholic, and mainly Jewish, predominantly Buddhist, every inch an Atomist, and boy he loves the simplicity of Muslim funerals. He believes in witches and angels, prophets and cow worshipping, animal sacrifice, stoicism, dark faeries, Tantric sex, the meditative walks of the Sufis, the cleansing power of sage brush as it burns. He thinks we live in a non-mechanical universe shaped like a thought, that the soul and the unsayable god principle are co-creators of reality, that whistling at night attracts demonic energies. He bows his head on the Celtic new year, Christmas, Ramadan, Passover, his dead mother’s birthday, the winter solstice, and the day the towers fell down the road in New York. He prays to Apollo. He prays to weather spirits, and the moon.
A voice from very far away found my ear and told me to write this story, the voice of an ancient man. Maybe it was my own voice. I don’t think so.
I am only doing what I was told to do.
I was told to weave together history and the present, wisdom and conjecture, the internal and external worlds, weave it all, bind it all, craft from the raw materials fingers and toes, veins, a brain, a torso, a throat, and I was told to look upon it as a blueprint of our divinity.
I was told to forge from madness the great image of Randolph Hoyt, and explore through him the spiritual plight of the nonintellectual human genius as he observes Time and Event in the supermarket of America. America. My home. My supermarket. A motherland avoiding the delicate lateral motions of the soul to focus on the manic north with a fire stretching high underneath.
I was told to breathe life into Gerard Bohm, this sad and taciturn self of mine, this culturally homeless descendent of the wandering tribes Germanic, to give him a target toward which he can direct his honest and continuous prayers.
I was told to save him, to remind him of the blueprint. I was told to connect Gerard to an ancient dead man with a similar name, to create through the dead man an expression of true wisdom, to write of the lessons he imparted from a resting place deep in my own mind.
I was told to examine the inner illumination chapel, which is often called “soul.”
I know a man named Gerard the Hand Me Down who drowned in a ditch they dug, and time filled the ditch to the grass brim with blood. Blood in the mouth and it tastes like history, like time, drowning the tooth in the waters of forefathers, and don’t it taste just like you do? Don’t it taste just like me? Like mother’s milk, and graves.
I know a man named Gerard, a man, flesh and bone equipped with external genitals. They help keep the fig leaf from looking flat and dead. Just a man. Little atomic dervishes whirling to the oldest rhythm, giving form to his arms and his legs, which are called extremities, and these atoms don’t care for him one way or the other, same as you. Gerard came from a womb, which is the pensive cavern mulling over life and death, or soft folds of tissue which are atoms that don’t care. He found his way out of the pensive cavern, through the soft folds of tissue, and then found many reasons to become serious and severe. He is trying to find a new set of eyes. He makes stringed instruments like his father. The wood speaks to him as he works, but seriousness and severity have made his ears incapable of receiving such dialogue. He is me. His ears will open. He will get his new eyes. I am Gerard.
I know a man named Randolph, another man with the same relative equipment. Little atomic dervishes whirling for the sake of his form, whirling in slightly different arrangements, weaving the particular, weaving the universal, weaving Randolph’s own unique, elemental body, corporeal matter that’s called, and those atoms don’t really care much about him either. Put enough of these atoms together in a mass, which is flesh, and something starts to care. This fact begets a mystery, one which we try to solve with how and why and star and sky.
Randolph came from a womb, but he can’t see it as one womb, not one but hundreds. Yes, the wombs are pensive caverns in the bellies of women, women with internal genitals and all that, which can make the fig leaf look flat and dead, but the wombs are also the shared origin of his tribe. The wombs of so many women, wombs of men, wombs of the Dead, wombs of the shared mind, wombs in a river of shared blood, a womb in the fertile eye of god. His finger is searching wildly in the air for the pulse of all things. He will find the pulse. He makes speeches. He is Randolph.
I know a man named Randolph who chases the ecstatic joy of pure being, who leaps from pulpit to pulpit in faded jeans and dirty white shirts with a thousand words to spare by sunset, unfettered by ambitions, history, religion, unaware of self-consciousness, chasing with each moment the waning shadow of a garden he sees in the distance. I have known him since we were children, when we played in that garden. He is mostly Catholic, and mainly Jewish, predominantly Buddhist, every inch an Atomist, and boy he loves the simplicity of Muslim funerals. He believes in witches and angels, prophets and cow worshipping, animal sacrifice, stoicism, dark faeries, Tantric sex, the meditative walks of the Sufis, the cleansing power of sage brush as it burns. He thinks we live in a non-mechanical universe shaped like a thought, that the soul and the unsayable god principle are co-creators of reality, that whistling at night attracts demonic energies. He bows his head on the Celtic new year, Christmas, Ramadan, Passover, his dead mother’s birthday, the winter solstice, and the day the towers fell down the road in New York. He prays to Apollo. He prays to weather spirits, and the moon.
A voice from very far away found my ear and told me to write this story, the voice of an ancient man. Maybe it was my own voice. I don’t think so.
I am only doing what I was told to do.
I was told to weave together history and the present, wisdom and conjecture, the internal and external worlds, weave it all, bind it all, craft from the raw materials fingers and toes, veins, a brain, a torso, a throat, and I was told to look upon it as a blueprint of our divinity.
I was told to forge from madness the great image of Randolph Hoyt, and explore through him the spiritual plight of the nonintellectual human genius as he observes Time and Event in the supermarket of America. America. My home. My supermarket. A motherland avoiding the delicate lateral motions of the soul to focus on the manic north with a fire stretching high underneath.
I was told to breathe life into Gerard Bohm, this sad and taciturn self of mine, this culturally homeless descendent of the wandering tribes Germanic, to give him a target toward which he can direct his honest and continuous prayers.
I was told to save him, to remind him of the blueprint. I was told to connect Gerard to an ancient dead man with a similar name, to create through the dead man an expression of true wisdom, to write of the lessons he imparted from a resting place deep in my own mind.
I was told to examine the inner illumination chapel, which is often called “soul.”