keep the wild inside

a correspondence about wilderness and art

Shark on Lava

Shark on Lava
from The American
a novel about Love & Murder by Seanie Blue

(This novel is Blue's current project, and something he actually hopes to finish. "God Died in Hiroshima" elsewhere on this site is also part of "The American." The story is more linear than presented here, and parts will be withheld to make the book more interesting and valuable to people who have read only parts of it. If you are on Blue's mailing list, you'll get a free copy of the novel. Soon!)

(This chapter is illustrated with recent pictures taken in the locations of the story-telling, and you can click on the thin pieces of the pictures shown below to see a fullsize version of the image.)

The bombs have dropped. I cannot go back to Beirut. Everyone knew it would happen, but 500 Hiroshimas are still much smaller than several restless American volcanoes, and the disappearance of a few cities and several million people will not do anything to mortgages and school loans; the police fraternities still call on Thursday evening looking for donations. Solar power will be the next Starbucks, and the yuppies will cash in as they did at the end of the century when they sold the Earth as stocks and bonds. But there are more bombs to spend. Who else hates enough to pull a trigger in the name of justice and morality? I cannot go backward, and I see no escape in the annihilation in front of me. Even the vast American landscape, opening endlessly in our minds, has no exit for me. We are living in the same trap, you and I, and cannot claim to be free. And if the bombs do not fall on us, the volcanoes will. I cannot show you how to pierce an atom, but I can take you to a volcano.

_______________________ San Francisco, Saturday

In an alleyway in the Mission I try to explain myself to my sister. The urge to escape goes back to our childhood. My mother ran away with a history professor and left us in Beirut with our father, who was then a spy in trouble with his employers, who he called The Company. We took off and lived for two years in a red station wagon, fleeing from the advertisements in the Herald Tribune placed by my mother, desperately looking for her children. Everything in my life circles back to this childhood experience. And my identification with women hinges on this abandonment, when my mother left me looking for something better in her life. It turns out she had nothing better in her life than her children, and she would be crushed by this realization, but that’s another story. In an alley named Balmy I tell my sister that I am always looking for stories from powerful women, and in exchange I offer them stories from faraway places. I can tell you the secrets of supernovas, the intentions of volcanoes, the ambitions of the ocean floor, and I will happily translate the talk of elephants and hummingbirds, if I can listen to a woman admitting what she wants.

My sister smiles as I talk since she knows the words I emit by the million are the inexact ravings of somebody trying to distill the whole human experience into a single, loud and perfectly understandable slogan. She knows I am racing against death to say this thing, this compression of myself and the mystery of existence. She knows, because she is a mother.


_______________________ Santa Cruz, last Thursday

The scuba diver meets me at the boardwalk for another interview for our book, Scuba Diving in Beirut. She tells me about a fish which came up from the Red Sea and invaded Lebanon’s coast. Without predators, the fish flourished. It was the only healthy species she saw in five years of cataloguing the conditions of the Eastern Mediterranean. Every shellfish, mollusk, octopus, shark or fish was stained with mercury, toluene, pesticides or paint. The scuba diver and I bonded in particular over sea turtles. It brings the scuba diver from Santa Cruz to tears to admit the turtles off the coast of Lebanon weren’t going to make it even before the bombs fell. The turtles were dying not because of the toluene or the speeding water-skiers, but because nobody had the cash to repair the trash dump north of Tyre, from which thousands of plastic bags floated out to sea every day to become mistaken for the turtles’ favorite jellyfish meal. How does nature make an animal so stupid it can confuse a plastic shopping bag with a jellyfish? I don’t say this to the scuba diver. I continue the interviews without my opinions, since these interviews have been conducted for years, ever since I met her in the Paris of the Middle East.

_______________________ Beirut, Four Weeks Ago

I am asking about the young dudes from Saudi Arabia who came to the clubs where the scuba diver worked as a bartender and asked her for marriage. They would joke about it: twenty thousand bucks, thirty thousand and a stereo, forty thousand and a Beemer, until they’d leave a tip of $200 and then wait for the scuba diver to get off work, when they’d demand sex for the two hundred. She always had the cash in the coin pocket of her jeans to give back before the princes would think she owed them anything. In four years working behind the bars in Beirut, the scuba diver never got a dime in tips from a Saudi prince. She was asked for marriages of convenience hundreds of times. She was asked for sex in exchange for cash hundreds of times.

And then I ask her if she’s been attacked, that question which stuns every woman, even the Americans, whose liberated gaits also stumble over the shock of being groped: When she was a virginal 17 she was waiting for a wave south of Santa Cruz when she was punched in the chest by a cannonball. Launched into the air she was aware of two things: her lack of breath from the hit and her surfboard following her above the surf, or rather half her surfboard. Descending back into the water, she was aware of another two things: the great white already moving away in confusion at the plastic when there should have been seal flesh, and the half a surfboard tethered to her ankle which would now be a drag to her effort to break Olympic swimming records back to shore. And what did you do after that, Renee? Chick delivered pizza until she could buy another board, and went right back out, eyes open, blood pounding, to wait for that moment when you see a perfectly good ride.

_______________________ Chinatown, Two Years Ago

There are canisters of battlefield smoke, used to make civil war movies, which you can drop like grenades after pulling a pin and at Charlie’s Chinese at Canal and Lafayette I pulled seven pins and found Mister Lu standing in the kitchen doorway with a polite grin and a bowl of shark’s fin soup on a tray in his hands.

“Whazmoke?” he asked.
“You got shark’s fin, Mister Lu?” I asked.

He lifted the tray a few inches but was looking past me at the billowing grey cloud in his restaurant. Smoke is something more sinister than fire to New Yorkers now, and he was still looking at the billows when my bullets tore through the tray and the soup and into his guts and propelled him backwards into the other cooks, his family probably, and against his stove. Soup and shouts spilled from the kitchen, but no more shots, as I ran from the smoking restaurant yelling “Fire” like the other customers.

You can get away with anything on Canal Street. You’ve got a million people within a hundred yards, all of them busy, hardly any of them likely to be aware of seven fake civil war cannon shells popping into thin, harmless clouds of grey smoke. A cop at the corner of Broadway watches me approach and laughs when I ask him if he ever thinks about what happens in Manhattan at eight o’clock in the morning when 11 million people take a shit at the same time. Where does it all go? Another kook, he thinks, and sprints off toward Lafayette when I point out the smoke and commotion still billowing out of Charlie’s Famous Chinese, soon to be closed for repairs.


_______________________ Shasta Mountain, Thursday

The mountain is full of goblins and fairies. Or peopled with aliens from unseen UFOs. The rocks glint blue and lavender and sell for $3 or more in the souvenir shops for hippies with money. The author of “Lost Horizons” had his vision of Shangri-La when he visited Shasta. The word Shasta has been credited to the local indigenous people, but also to the Sanskrit “sishta”, which refers to an enlightened past age which bore the seeds of the peace and harmony coming in the future. The word indirectly refers to what starry-eyed hipsters call the “new Shambhala,” a mythical place of love and harmony somewhere in ancient Asia but more probably located in modern America, at least in the minds of people struggling to survive their air-conditioned materialism. Shasta as the Sanskrit “Shasta” means a person who lives divinely, purely, and the French trappers who most likely coined the mountain’s name as “chaste” in their own tongue also ascribed purity to the volcano.

I buy a piece of dendrite in one of the souvenir shops. Its fractals and cooling patterns make the rock look like an ancient oriental artwork. It weighs ten pounds. A beautiful rock, patterned by water. On every corner of downtown Shasta you can drink the famous water, untreated. The place is four hours from San Francisco, just far enough not to be ruined by the exhausted yups searching for nirvana on the weekend. It is a secret place, filled equally with hermits and the kooks who hope after goblins and fairies. I should not reveal more, since the mountain – a volcano – does not need interpretation. It looms over the puny civilization. It coughed two hundred years ago, and is one of a few American volcanoes listed as ‘restless’ by the authorities; it could detonate the equivalent of twenty-five thousand Hiroshimas in a matter of minutes. I drive to its eastern slopes, determined to walk up to the summer snow line.


_______________________ Avalanche Gulch, Thursday

I am not chaste. I am not pure. I admit imperfection as a gambler admits his vice; without shame. My sordid life is an amalgamation of error and lust, and I do not see Shasta as a symbol of purity or as a harbinger of the peace and harmony to come. A tousle-headed hippie walks off the slopes to the parking lot where the tourists are gathered, and loudly says, “I’ve seen the new Shambhala!”

Not me. I see a volcano. Baking energy fermenting into a killer force, a sort of melanoma of the Earth’s skin, except her sunshine burns within and not from 92 million miles away. The core of my being swells with the same frictions of the planet. The rigid plates of prejudice and hope shift against each other and create ruptures in my attitude, and when these ruptures explode with longing or fear, the landscape of my personality is altered by new protrusions of character. Sometimes the new addition is pretty or profound, but often I have nothing but a new scar or caldera to decorate my profile. A sort of moral acne spreads over my contours, I guess I should say, and in the pleasant slopes of the usual Me I see plainly these boulders of rage and pain.

I ask myself in the metal brightness of mid-day at mid-summer on Shasta’s flank whether it is right that I should wish to end the lives of so many people working in the oil industry. How can I nurture this hatred, and still be the very very very nice person that I am? The goblins and the fairies shout in unison “Go go go go go go,” and Shasta itself quivers just enough to roll rocks down its slopes, past where I am sitting on the edge of a small snowpond. These signs tell me that I should proceed, with haste. I trot down the mountain, whistling off-key, plotting another killing.

And when I get to the parking lot set up by the park service I find a small commotion. A modest avalanche of shale and stone has dented the two dozen cars. “Came out of nowhere,” exclaims the hippie who found the new Shambhala. “Just a whoosh of rocks, didn’t hurt nobody, but . . . Look at all our cars, scratched up! Damn, look at my truck.” I pocket a few glinting shards of Shasta and find my car untouched. “Hey, it’s his car that didn’t get tagged,” says the hippie from Shambhala as I unlock my door. “We wuz wondering who had the car that got no dent, and I told everybody it was probably the only person still up on the mountain instead of down here in the parking lot. Make sure to play the Lotto, today!” My car, indeed, is shiny and sleek, untouched by Shasta’s little joke; but there are lawyers and stockbrokers who come here by the dozens, and the volcano does nothing, when obviously it could. Why won’t the Earth take more action against the guilty? I look at the mountain as I drive down back to the highway, but Shasta says nothing, just sits solemn and alone in the middle of everyone’s summer vacations.


_______________________ Bend, Morning

This town is the number one real estate investment opportunity in the country. It is filled with attorneys and doctors and bicycles and trendy Pacific eateries. Hollywood is up here, trolling around, since the landscape is often golden in the long shadows of high latitude.

“But we don’t get the good sunsets here,” says the anthropologist. “Not polluted enough.” I agree with her. New York City lately has been blazing in tints of van Gogh as the Sun drips into Jersey. The burn-off of the refineries and flavoring smelts and plastic molders and the emissions from ten million commuters dapple Gotham in pink and lavender and chartreuse.

I am in Bend to make a cine-poem with the anthropologist and poet who I will call Gisele Godspeed. We met while investigating a matriarchy in Mexico, about which more later, critically, and during the process she read in some review that I was “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body,” and determined to prove me wrong. But now she doesn’t care about my social inclinations, and taps me as an electrical source. I am power, a battery or a switch, for morphing artistic impulse into tactile presentation. Images and words I am to turn into a story somebody can touch or play on the computer or show on TV. But there is always uncertainty for any artist to transform ideas into concrete or plastic. What if what you have to say is silly? What if what you see is dross in another person’s view? Why not keep the sublime firmly pocketed as your very own personal treasure?

“Why not let your movie define you and not the other way around? This is a great reward for trying to be an author of anything,” I say to Gisele.

“The words don’t make sense!”

“A word that makes no sense on its own will be changed by introducing an image. That’s the geology of an artwork. Blend materials and press with time. You should see this rock I bought in Shasta. It’s a better painting of small boats on a river in China than any actual Chinese paintings of boats on a river. It took that rock a lot of work to become such a cool piece of art.”

“Listen, Blue, I’ve known you a long time and you think you can make ‘Gone With the Wind’ in three days in Oregon, and no geologist will agree with you. We have to shoot this dragon, shoot the dragonfruit, and link my idea of hybrid vocations to basic every-day rush hour life. In three days. In Bend. There is no rush hour here.”

“Wherever there are yuppies there are rush hours.”

“Ha ha. You’re not going to snap your fingers and say Voila and produce a rush hour in Bend. But . . . I have patience, Blue, especially where your experiments in arty alchemy are concerned. We’re filming a saddle-maker, a leather-worker, an artisan, and I want those images to build into a sense of endless industry.”

“I promise not to yak to the artisan about anything off topic, Gisele. This is your poem, your rush hour. Your images will build into a movie as you’ve anticipated, I promise. Every image will be a brick. Your poems will be the mortar, we’ll get the Taj Mahal out of Bend, trust me.”

Gisele laughs and we race off in her car of three working cylinders, pausing only at one of the 1,758 espresso drive-thrus which declare Bend, Oregon the epitome of the new yuppie domain, where the residents search for personal space under a sky of no limits while enjoying a locally-grown chai. We leave the sushi and the smoothies behind for Redmond, Oregon, twenty minutes away, where supposedly angry mestizo and indigenite cowboys mumbling revolt skirt the city limits on their tired mules. But of course Redmond is also besotted with its own drive-thru espressos advertising Oregon chai. I see no cowboys. I see no mule. But I am drinking chai frappucinos in bliss, unmindful of the calcium kidney stones I will have to pass because of the dairy and the caffeine.
 

_______________________ Redmond, Afternoon

I set up my cameras and interview the saddle-maker. He starts to pound a piece of hide while explaining to me how important the compression of leather is to the finished saddle or boot or coat. The moisture must come out, or the piece will rot after the first rain. Tanq, tanq, tanq goes his rounded hammer as he talks. I don’t suppose you’ve ever taken the hide off a cow or a deer? This question of his startles me; he is looking at me over his glasses, hunched like a dentist over business. The saddle-maker thinks I am an urban yuppie.

“Sir. I will buy a horsehide coat in San Sebastian and brag about the bullet hole in the middle of its back, as though it was I shot in the Spanish plains. I am Quixotic, and that coat will be my armor in airports and sports bars. The bullet hole will show that I chase the possibilities, since I grew up that way. Some children are lucky enough to have mobiles tacked above their cribs so they grow learning to reach. My crib was overturned and smashed by people too eager to taste the entire world to pay attention to the devilish details of being my parents. Me, yuppie? I have never cut the fat off a deer hide or off a cow hide, so I can’t protest.”

We smile. I get on with the interview, and upstairs afterwards the saddle-maker’s wife talks to me about how important it is to have a life which isn’t greedy; they give away as many saddles locally as they sell to the Hollywood cowboys, and they’re quite willing to do all the hard hours necessary to produce a beautiful product even if they know they could get apprentices and cheapen their wares, as Rembrandt did, as Çhihuly does. I interrupt her: “Destiny has no shortcuts.” She laughs and agrees that this line of mine would make a good bumper sticker.

Destiny has no shortcuts.
 

_______________________ Grant’s Pass, Saturday

Hot. The old people here are different from the old people in Florida, These have come together to live. In Florida, they come together to die. I feel mild melancholy as I walk around the diners and the health clinics; perhaps I would have eventually come to a place like this with my peers if I hadn’t become attracted to murder, if I didn’t have these ticking bombs swelling my lymph nodes, if I wasn’t cursed always to chase if not be chased. I make a phone call on a corner near a bench where five frail, skeletal people dressed in light blue watch me like falcons, tuned to every syllable. I talk loudly.

“Scuba girl, I just filmed a documentary about a guy making a saddle decorated with shark skin.”
“You’re not gonna kill him, too?”

“No, of course not. But listen, here’s how he got the skin. A bunch of fratboys in La Jolla were catching makos and then putting lit dynamite into the sharks’ mouths. Let the shark go, and then cheer and yell at every whoosh of cartilage and blood.”
“Don’t tell me these things --”

“But, look, one shark swims around under the boat and blows up and the fratboys have to call mayday and the owner of the boat gets arrested by the coast guard and actually gets sentenced to two weeks in jail.”
Scuba girl laughs and laughs. “Cool, cool.”

“But the kid, his name is something Stevensville, has a lawyer and so he doesn’t do the time, but I’m going to pay him a visit. I promise you I will find him and bite hard with three sets of a thousand sharp and poisoned teeth.”

Scuba girl cheers all the way from Beirut. “Do it! And get the guy from the National Marine Fisheries Service who recommended silver thresher for yuppies, too, don’t forget him.”
“What did you want me to tell him? That it takes a silver thresher 30 years to have pups?”
“Yes. His name is Martin. He’s in San Diego. I’ll look for him in the newspapers. Maybe he can fall in front of a train?”
“Say hello to Beirut, Scuba Girl.”

I hang up and smile for the five elders in light blue sitting together on a green metal bench bolted into the grey pavement. They are looking at me like groupers, mouths agape, unblinking. This would be a nice place to retire, I think again, if I were the retiring type; sit on a corner and watch people call Lebanon to plot the revenge of the sleek and pretty silver-tipped thresher shark, made extinct by gourmet. But I’m not the retiring type. I am rotting from within, anger genes lit, unless or until the FBI and the CIA and the NSA get me first.


_______________________ Passing Shasta, Sunday

When my ancestors left East Africa to walk into Asia 50,000 years ago, they were just grasping at language. Grooming was the way they spoke until words were formed. Grooming formed connections between modern humans before language, as grooming does today for chimps and gorillas. The group that walked from Africa to Asia numbered around 150, the ideal troop size for hunter-gatherers. Grooming in such a troop would take up almost half the time of any member in the group. Language evolved as a way to make the modern humans more efficient socially and more likely to survive. Language replaced grooming, and the Neanderthals who did not make this transition efficiently lost out to a slimmer, smaller human whose tricks of the tongue could lead to settlements, and then to agriculture, and then, unfortunately, to religion. Your uncle is dead in the cave, and he begins to smell badly. You have to come up with something, and the real tongue twisters came up with ways to explain death. But burying the stinking uncle was a good idea, even if the symbolic hokum attached to the ritual was not.

Sex without language, without words, is little different from grooming. I am trying to put into words the sexual connection which helped me evolve from artist to assassin. And as I pass Shasta southward I cannot ignore her proximity; every volcano burns with instant destruction, without schedule, and the language of our sex drips from me in the poems and prose I create to describe what happened to Ananda Shields and me.
 
I call her and say I wish to tell her something about grooming, and how it became language, and how touch becomes a dream, and that the way we spoke while fused in sex was how we created the dreamscape that almost killed both of us, but she is too tired to listen. She agrees to meet me at a motel, in room 202. This is not what I wanted to hear.

Abbi Hendrix as Ananda Shields in the landscape that almost killed us.

_______________________ Silicon Valley, Monday

Ananda Shields has a family. She has no room for me in her secret life. I am not surprised. Desire cancels everything from a lover’s schedule, and where once I was the schedule I now find myself canceled. We make small talk, but the words are not glazed by intimacy’s cauldron; she treats me as if I am a neutered family friend, while a million Romeos are strangled in my throat.

I want her to say to me: “It would be so easy to say that I wanted you more than anyone else because you were an invention of my own.
But if you were really an invention of my own, would I really have wanted you so much? If love was truly to blossom between us, you would have to be every bit as much of your own invention as you were of mine. Or I would have to be an invention of yours.”

So instead I say: “The fact that we want what we cannot have was a magnet between us, but I think without being trite I can say that we were crushed together by having what cannot be wanted.”

The days in the countryside in Spain, when we sat with three very old cats in the shade of olives and plums, and cried like third-graders about ever ever being separate, now seem not so much an escape from reality, but an escape made of reality. We were actually there. We escaped. Just a few years ago. And look how much we talk about escape now, in the lives we live separated from each other!

“What are you thinking?”

She doesn’t ask me this, because she doesn’t want to know. But she says something, and this is what I hear, so I respond instinctively about how I saw death and hope in her eyes in Katmandu, and that I cannot forget how we ran away to the Congo with the gorillas and how we chased the aurora borealis, and how the fires we started turned to ashes as the world, incredibly, changed in front of our eyes . . . But I don’t say any of this since she’s heard it and written it and read it and spoken it a million times.

“I’m still planning on telling this story, Ananda, since it melts people. Maybe because of your baby your audience wants circumspection from you, but this is not the case for me. As I tell this story, people warm up. They sweat. They flush with desire since they are attracted to danger and affection simultaneously. They want to be clutched by a keening so hot and desperate almost any foolish impulse can be allowed. They listen to me because people censor themselves from their desires every day, every hour, every sentence --”

She is almost asleep. There are no more blinding curves on our straight paths to separate destinies. I still feel feral delight when looking at her skin, but to become boring to the object of your desires is a sort of suicide by passion. Is it possible that I was so recently the celestial gravity in her hot orbit, and now I am reduced to a boring chunk of stone on the outer limits of her attention span?

The men in a woman’s life fall from favor without scarring her with even a small crater of longing. Or they become a fantasy, excelled by distance, as the crushing chores of motherhood bring a woman in love slowly down to Earth. Enswirled in fantastic haze, caged like dead Shakespeare in the carnival of memory, isn’t this how every love affair ends? No, it isn’t.


_______________________ Big Sur, Monday afternoon

I have you on video in the mirror, putting on your make-up, talking about how desperate you feel because you know already that things are not going to end as they normally do, and of course you are compelling in your nude beauty, but the audience keeps watching only because your words are so warm, because your skin glows with concern. The audience is waiting for me to tell them how it felt to lose myself in your caress, to deny humdrum routine in your smell, to taste your dreams in a kiss, to live forever in your quick, fawning glance.

If all of this were so easy to conjure up as Hollywood believes, we'd all be poets. But the real work is what you've chosen, making a baby, and I admire it but cannot aspire the same because my poems are my babies, and I want to keep singing them. What's the harm if I see you, still, as a song?

(I am thinking these things as I drive. Dramatic opera of the imagination. I have made a movie of this collision between Ananda Shields and me. It is 93% unfinished but already brilliant, believe me. I won’t say it’s saleable or commercial or even any good, but it is brilliant because it’s the truth about how a man will throw his life into the trash if it means he can build the Taj Mahal. And the woman in the center of this romance will think he’s in love with the story, in love with his own imaginary version of the story, and maybe this turns out to be true, and in this movie of mine about me and Ananda and the gorillas in the Congo, my own imaginary romance is eclipsed by the betrayal and repulsion required by every love story of the last five thousand years. Living happily ever after, making love to the same person for the next 55 years, growing a family and improving the community in the only life you’re ever going to have; this isn’t a myth, it’s a nightmare! Terror isn’t being strip-searched before boarding an airplane; terror is two weeks of vacation every year. That’s the kind of movie I’m referring to: A romance, endless, impossible, caustic and fatal. If I expire in a shootout or rot in a cell, I authorize my literary executors to get you a copy of this unfinished movie if you can produce a receipt for the purchase of this very book in your hands. Wait. Never mind the receipt. Just say “Gorillas don’t have vacations” to the literary executors and they’ll get you a bootlegged copy of my movie.)


_______________________ Big Sur, Monday night

Only the road from Holmavik to Djupavik in northernmost Iceland can compare to the PCH as it winds the serrated edges of California’s coast. I turn off the music and the air conditioning and breeze over the roads, careful for the police cruisers trolling for tourists. My thoughts drift pell-mell as they seem to do only in driving long distances in America, and I find myself wondering how long I can get away with murder before I wind up on the cover of the supermarket tabloids with the Kennedys and Jessica Simpson. But nature intervenes: An eagle screes overhead and then is next to the car, leading me, as the sun drips into a column of gold flakes on the frothy ocean. There is black and gold, a duotone of contrast and glint, and nothing else, even in my rearview mirrors. The eagle cartwheels away from the cliffs and into the murky shadows of young nightfall, but not before its long scree asks me who I am. What do I have to think? 

That self-expression, the artistic impulse, is simply a tool used to accomplish some kind of self-definition? That how we perceive ourselves depends on our ability to overcome our existential autism? We cannot say why we are what we are. The words do not exist. The vocabulary of self-definition cannot be made. We can't break the molds into which society presses our personalities. Every person who thinks himself original and is willing to declare it ends up sounding like nothing more than an improved version of the Dalai Lama or Deepak Chopra or Tony Robbins and other vultures like these. Isn't it important to define our selves as distinct? Perhaps not so others see us this way, but so we don't end up making art or falling in love or exploring the universe in the same fashion of every other jackass before us? Isn't that the pleasure we deny ourselves? By tackling a million important chores before allowing ourselves the utter luxury of imagining who we are, and what we might be, and for what purpose our astonishing singularity can be used? Aren’t we meant to answer the riddle of the existence of existence?

Why aren’t we angrier with ourselves when we admit to being successfully mediocre rather than imperfectly distinct?


_______________________ Ojai, Tuesday

Terese Margaux shows me her engagement ring. Terese changes the subject from marriage to teaching, and then to art: She wants to make a book out of the drawings by her autistic students. She wants to make a documentary about one of her autistic boys and his devoted father. She tells me a scene where the boy wants something but the father is in a rush and tells his son repeatedly. No, no you can’t have it, we have to go, and then Terese acts out the boy’s expression, “I just want that, why can’t I have it?” and she clasps her face imitation of the boy and looks suddenly like the fear in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Terese tells me she also wants to start a nonprofit. I could not conceive of Terese Margaux when I was 25. She is more evolved than me.

I want to ask her if she has dreams of being pregnant and in labor while her dying father watches or waits for the birth. When my father died in a cancer clinic in Denmark five minutes after I walked into the room, both of my sisters fell on the floor howling about how he "now would never see what I could do." They were 22 and 20, neither of them pregnant. Why don't I see this scene in a movie? Because men are directing?

Australopithecines roamed for 800,000 years without changing anything about themselves. They had no language except for a sort of autism of self, which must have bred perpetual violence and fear. For 800,000 years. Humankind has had agriculture for less than 15,000 years, clothing and a modern hairless body for less than 75,000 years, and a written record of itself of less than 5,000 years. Australopithecus had the run of the lot for 800,000 years, every year the same. Maybe I have been around for eight hundred thousand years more than Terese Margaux, but my vocabulary is tiny compared to hers. I will not make a book about autistic art, or a documentary about an autistic child and his father, and I will not start a nonprofit to help autistic children.

I might not be able to understand what I am, but I do know I am too late. Can I ever be like Terese Margaux, speaking a new language of repair and compassion? She can say so much more about the world than our conversation about marriage, pregnancy, death and the inability of Australopithecus to say, Hello, how are you feeling today? She is the new human paradigm, crowding a brute like me to an end. Profit and productivity are already fossils. 


_______________________ Laurel Canyon, September

My landlady calls to tell me to look at the Moon. “It’s trapped in the clouds and it looks gorgeous and sad, like a lion in a cage.” I wonder why she doesn’t say lioness. As I am looking at the caught Moon and listening to my landlady talk about melanoma on the phone, I hear a yipping choir and I tell the landlady I will call her back. I record the yips and yowls of a gang of coyotes in the canyon, celebrating another catch, the Pomeranian yapper on Wonderland Avenue, I hope, and I take pictures of the sorry Moon, trapped in clouds.

My skin tingles: The last time I did this, capturing the Moon under howls, Ananda Shields lay in a motel room next to the supervolcano at Yellowstone with a stroke searing her mind and paralyzing half her body in scalding pain, from the toes of her left foot to the scalp above her left ear. And yet it was she who was concerned in the aftermath of that seizure that we should exercise more effort in having me make her pregnant. As if by simply trying we could deny what the radiation had done to my testicles.

The Moon might always be full, but I will never again know its tides. I am barren, a dusty rock, lifeless despite the heart in me which screeches otherwise.

Click here to see the gallery of Seanie Blue's pictures taken on his visits to the volcanoes. There are more than 20 images collected in this gallery.