Pan in the Cloister

This weekend I decided to embrace my inner Pan, who breaks free of his provincial bonds every summer and fall, and return to the waters that sated and bathed me, those earliest years of my new life in Minnesota. I saw a faerie there (yeah, really) and the energy of that place helped ease the turbulent transition from my old life in TN to my new one so far north. It is a certain spot on the Mississippi, just west of where it joins the Minnesota. This space is a sacred cloister for me, a place to recharge the soul batteries and get perspective from the daily grind. It would be fifteen more years before I would discover that this area is also sacred to someone else, the local Dakota who consider the place where the two rivers join, the Bdote, nothing short of the center of the universe. The place of Dakota genesis. I'm telling you; you feel something here.

My spot is waiting for me, though the weather has transformed it from a hidden sanctuary to a pit stop on a well traveled path. I feel I have traveled sideways through time. Enormous puppets and madrigaled beauty surround me. Ren Fest made real. People of all ages in some kind of celebration. Seems like something to be imagined, but it is only good timing. Lovers holding hands. Feudal love, requited. How wonderful. I am passed without a glance, shielded by indifference or native glamour. The old driftwood tree, which has always centered my visits here, has somehow escaped the spring floods and glows in the afternoon sun. It is more beautiful in how less it has become. Once imposing, now a stark piece of art Zen against all thought it could be so. Its protective skin long gone, smooth grooves hardened perfectly by everything it has weathered.

There are still nymphs about. I can't see their ethereal curves; I feel them. They approach me, whisper in enticing breeze, giggle out of nostalgia. They ask me where the hell I've been. I try to respond, but have nothing. One pulls on my shirt and I smile. Pan, the wrong time, always the right place. And the old Pan simmers here in the light between the trees. Visions. Primordial drive and open sky. Earths moved by desire alone. I am shone fires that still burn beyond the day. A silent proposition. The sun laughs. Pan, too. He miles at the newness of everything. He wants to make long love to the modern world. Remind it through coarse sweat what it keeps leaving behind. He wants it to call him in the morning.


As I prepare to leave the modern self begins to take over. "Where am I?" The sand just laughs. It wonders why the question is always the same. A day trip to Fey, I tell myself. The rumored madness not a fear, but a blessing that prepares me for the return. The timeless clearing seems at odds with the world that waits. Come here at you become the thing that does not fit. Join them both inside you. Tighten the bands while opening the soul. Rectify infinity with the stone ticking of the clock.

~

Friday in America

It is a very good morning

And all I want is more

A woman buys coffee she won’t drink
And somewhere a platoon of names
are suddenly homeless

As a blonde walks byA boy's brains

Leave his head
Like his last memory of spring


And here we sit worried
We can’t finish
More than names are lost


It is a very good morning
The sun is here
And all I want is more

Water and the Setting Sun

Will you be my daisy passing, or be the grave I dig?

Bad questions fill the air until the night.

Ekphrasis: Real Man Retroscope

Coffee and Cigarettes

 
The final scene of Coffee and Cigarettes with Taylor Meade and Bill Rice just might be the best cinematic moment I've seen yet. I won't link to the scene, because it is more poignant if you watch the whole film.

On "A View of the Woods"

"A View of the Woods" by Flannery O'Connor is perfectly typical for that author's style. The loved child, defiant - subtle but certain proof that the world is not aligned the way it should be, that this world is tainted with injustice fashioned by God for sins a life has worked itself against and, unknowingly, for.

Some have commented on a reflexive Oedipal-Elektra complex between the old man and the girl. (http://thistosay.blogspot.com/2004/12/view-of-woods-by-flannery-oconnor.html). It doesn't strike me as something intentional. This kind of relationship is reminiscent of the one between Francis Marion Tarwater and his great uncle in The Violent Bear it Away, O'Connor's great second and final novel. It is not about sex but about old and new, the past and the future's death grip on the present. I would contend that this is the same dynamic we find in "Woods." The blog above also mentions things such as how the natural world in the story is described in human terms, while people are done so in those more animalistic. The businessman's serpentine features fit cleanly into O'Connor's Christian ethos, and the clay motif also instills in the story a realism you can almost smell.

The ending is quintessential O'Connor, the imagery vague and haunting, recalling O'Connor's story "The River" and, to a lesser degree for me, "The Turkey." When I read "Woods" it did not matter to me the actual fate of the girl at the end. The author's deft craft conveys what the reader needs to know, that she has crossed to the other side, has left this world, entirely -- tainted and scarred as it is -- all chances for redemption, but Fortune's dream.

Transmission #260

A woman enters the courtyard glances around in her subtle confusion. In distressed spandex, she knows what she hates body first, the rest of the world when she has time. She admires the strong, wide denim of a man to her left. Military. Sewn patches. Biker. She veers toward and sits at the table next to him. In space, a tepid light approaches a rock, which bends it so very slightly in its favor. Race.

Teens at the next table try to talk like adults. Their voices like two long poles in a crowded room.

The woman has switched seats now, the one watching the man. She's moved so she can better view of him. He now has a woman sitting with him. She effuses a spousal aroma. But that doesn't stop the other woman from watching intently. Some are to be admired for the tenacity of their hunger. Survivor

The servers across the court are having to gossip more quickly now with a steady increase of patrons. Loud cheers from down the block grow in timbre. I watch their allure, which seems to grow and darken like areolas. I take a deep draw and envelope my head in a concealing haze. That's when I hear the thing that ties it all together. Cancer

Suddenly. I'm aware. Runners slowing to a walk at the end of the courtyard, their matching pink shirts, the common goal. The no longer unconscious shifting in my chair. My smoking takes on an apologetic air, for no discernible reason. I find myself rehearsing answers to questions I will not be asked.

The runners end their trek and file into the other bar in spasms. Swarms of tanned arms taken up in solidarity. Cropped hair and looks of dogged gratitude. Hope against corrugated time. "Juicy's Juggs" on their shirts call forth no sexuality, but rays of sunshine and a clean bill. Families trundle by like nuclear caravans, wives smiling at the open display of womanhood. Children confused. Husbands adjust themselves in pastel Polos.

Servers are in high gear now, unsure how to temper their typical sexuality in this singular context of what is just beyond their lives. Till the end of their shift, they will pace the gray zone between them. Race.

Within the gathering crowd of runners, a teenage girl plays with her phone, looking up now and again to half-smile at the positive energy around her. It is the exact same look as the server orbiting her. The one with the Eastern Bloc lips and Allied hips. She maintains her pace, her eyes darting to the growing fervor of the crowd. Fleeting glimpses of a verified future, a road not yet traveled. She is drawn and repulsed. It's a conflict now a part of each fake smile she flashes.  

The woman across the way gets up. She stands right in front of the man and his companion. She looks at them both likes she wants to speak, looks back at the runners instead, and absently walks away. Survivor.