The AntiHero

Have you ever been starved of touch
while sitting inches away
from the person you’ve touched the most?

Have you ever laid beside someone
whose heartbeat you once knew by memory
and realized
you could not feel them anymore?

Not physically.

Not emotionally.

Not anywhere that mattered.

Have you ever reached out
while drowning—

really drowning—

your hand breaking the surface,
your fingers searching for something,
anything,
someone—

only to have the hand you trusted
slap yours away?

Have you ever swallowed your pride
until it became a stone in your throat?

Swallowed your anger.

Your pain.

Your questions.

Your dignity.

All for the greater good.

All for peace.

All for the hope
that if you just endured a little longer,
gave a little more,
asked for a little less,

maybe—

just maybe—

someone would finally notice
that you were disappearing.

So you play your part.

You become useful.

Reliable.

Necessary.

You take care of what needs taking care of.

You carry what needs carrying.

You fix what needs fixing.

You become the person everyone remembers
when something needs to be done—

but somehow forgets
when something needs to be felt.

And slowly,

quietly,

you forget yourself.

You forget that you are supposed to be cared for too.

So you bring flowers
to an untended garden.

You kneel in the dirt
with bleeding hands
trying to resurrect something
that has already been dying for years.

One flower for every apology.

One for every compromise.

One for every time you said,

“It’s okay.”

when it wasn’t.

One for every time you stayed
when leaving would have been easier.

One for every piece of yourself
you buried beneath the soil
just to keep someone else alive.

And when you look around,

you realize the garden
is full of dead things.

Fallen petals.

Brittle leaves.

Roots that never took hold.

Every flower
a monument
to another failed attempt
to find love.

Life.

Worth.

Confidence.

Balance.

You tell yourself
it was a sacrifice.

That it had to mean something.

That there must be some greater purpose
for giving so much of yourself away.

But what is a sacrifice
when no one even notices
what you’ve lost?

What is a prayer
when no one is listening?

Silence.

That’s what answers.

Silence.

And the slow, steady sound
of your own energy
leaving you.

So you ask yourself:

Can I remain the protagonist
of a story that changes
every time I turn the page?

Can I still be the good guy
when every version of me
that exists in someone else’s mind
has already been written
as the villain?

Maybe I should become one.

Maybe I should stop explaining.

Stop defending.

Stop trying to prove
that my intentions were good
when my actions are the only things
anyone seems willing to judge.

Maybe I should accept
the role I’ve been given.

The villain.

The selfish one.

The difficult one.

The one who finally said,

“Enough.”

Because sometimes
words become weapons
when actions tell a different story.

Sometimes promises
are nothing more than smoke.

Sometimes someone pours gasoline
all over the room
and then asks why
you keep smelling fire.

And you begin to wonder
if you’re losing your mind.

If you’re remembering it wrong.

If maybe the hand
wasn’t really slapped away.

If maybe the door
wasn’t really closed.

If maybe the silence
wasn’t really silence.

Until you realize—

you are standing
between a rock
and a harder rock,

and every direction you turn
hurts.

So the antihero
considers the options.

The few that remain.

And one by one,

they are taken away.

Denied.

Dismissed.

Repackaged as concern.

Concern that arrives
only when convenient.

Care that appears
only when it serves a purpose.

Questions asked
only when the answers
will not interfere
with someone else’s desires.

Someone else’s motives.

Someone else’s version
of the truth.

And eventually,

the white flag rises.

Not because the battle is over.

Not because anyone won.

But because the antihero
has finally realized
there is nothing left in him
to fight with.

He lies there—

almost motionless.

Bludgeoned by questions.

By criticism.

By contradictions.

By every accusation
that somehow finds its way
back to his doorstep.

And still—

he speaks.

With shallow breaths.

With a voice
that barely survives
the journey from his chest
to his lips.

Still trying.

Still explaining.

Still attempting
to placate the wall
that will not move.

A wall built from dishonesty.

Neglect.

Pride.

Indifference.

And finally—

She asks the question
he has been carrying
like a knife beneath his ribs.

Why?

And the answer
is only wanted
when it is convenient.

Only when it doesn’t challenge
the story already being told.

Only when it doesn’t interfere
with what someone wants
to believe.

So I will tell you why.

Why?

Because you slapped my hand away
time after time
while I was reaching for you.

Because I extended olive branches
until my arms were tired
from carrying the weight
of peace alone.

Because every time
I offered you my hand,

you gave me your back.

And every time
I offered you peace,

you gave me your ass to kiss.

And I knew.

God, I knew.

I knew these words
would probably change nothing.

I knew you might reject them.

Ignore them.

Twist them.

Turn them into evidence
that I was always the problem.

But I don’t care anymore.

Not because it doesn’t hurt.

But because there is nothing left
for you to take from me.

I have already given you
everything I had.

So I will not say goodbye.

I will not tell you
that I hate you.

I will not give you
a list of your failures
or hold your mistakes
over your head
like a weapon.

I will not become
the monster you needed me to be
so you could sleep peacefully
believing you were innocent.

No.

With whatever remains of me,

with the last fragment
of tenderness
I have somehow managed
to keep alive,

I will whisper
the only truth
I have never been able
to bury.

“It’s okay.”

“I love you.”

And maybe
you won’t hear it.

Maybe the words
will disappear
somewhere between
my lips
and the empty space
between us.

Maybe they will rise
into the air
and become nothing.

Maybe that is all
love ever was here—

something spoken
into an empty room.

Something reaching
for someone
who had already left.

And when the last word
has finally left my mouth,

when the garden is quiet,

when the flowers have fallen
and the leaves have stopped
fighting the wind,

I will stop asking
to be understood.

I will stop begging
to be seen.

I will stop trying
to prove
that I was never the villain.

Because perhaps
that is the tragedy
of the antihero.

He spends so long
trying to convince everyone
that he is good

that he forgets
he was never supposed
to spend his entire life
proving his worth
to people who had already
decided not to see it.

And so—

he walks away.

Not healed.

Not whole.

Not victorious.

Just tired.

And maybe,
for the first time,

he understands
that belonging
doesn’t always mean
being wanted by someone else.

Sometimes,

belonging means
finally finding your way
back to yourself.

And perhaps
that is where the story
should have begun
all along.

The great folio, in which the Man of Intelligence recorded all these freaks of idle hearts, and aspirations of deep hearts, and desperate longings of miserable hearts, and evil prayers of perverted hearts, would be curious reading were it possible to obtain it for publication. Human character in its individual developments--human nature in the mass--may best be studied in its wishes; and this was the record of them all. There was an endless diversity of mode and circumstance, yet withal such a similarity in the real groundwork, that any one page of the volume--whether written in the days before the Flood, or the yesterday that is just gone by, or to be written on the morrow that is close at hand, or a thousand ages hence--might serve as a specimen of the whole. Not but that there were wild sallies of fantasy that could scarcely occur to more than one man's brain, whether reasonable or lunatic. The strangest wishes--yet most incident to men who had gone deep into scientific pursuits, and attained a high intellectual stage, though not the loftiest--were, to contend with Nature, and wrest from her some secret, or some power, which she had seen fit to withhold from mortal grasp. She loves to delude her aspiring students, and mock them with mysteries that seem but just beyond their utmost reach. To concoct new minerals, to produce new forms of vegetable life, to create an insect, if nothing higher in the living scale, is a sort of wish that has often revelled in the breast of a man of science. An astronomer, who lived far more among the distant worlds of space than in this lower sphere, recorded a wish to behold the opposite side of the moon, which, unless the system of the firmament be reversed, she can never turn towards the earth. On the same page of the volume was written the wish of a little child to have the stars for playthings.

The most ordinary wish, that was written down with wearisome recurrence, was, of course, for wealth, wealth, wealth, in sums from a few shillings up to unreckonable thousands. But in reality this often-repeated expression covered as many different desires. Wealth is the golden essence of the outward world, embodying almost everything that exists beyond the limits of the soul; and therefore it is the natural yearning for the life in the midst of which we find ourselves, and of which gold is the condition of enjoyment, that men abridge into this general wish. Here and there, it is true, the volume testified to some heart so perverted as to desire gold for its own sake. Many wished for power; a strange desire indeed, since it is but another form of slavery. Old people wished for the delights of youth; a fop for a fashionable coat; an idle reader, for a new novel; a versifier, for a rhyme to some stubborn word; a painter, for Titian's secret of coloring; a prince, for a cottage; a republican, for a kingdom and a palace; a libertine, for his neighbor's wife; a man of palate, for green peas; and a poor man, for a crust of bread. The ambitious desires of public men, elsewhere so craftily concealed, were here expressed openly and boldly, side by side with the unselfish wishes of the philanthropist for the welfare of the race, so beautiful, so comforting, in contrast with the egotism that continually weighed self against the world. Into the darker secrets of the Book of Wishes we will not penetrate.

It would be an instructive employment for a student of mankind, perusing this volume carefully and comparing its records with men's perfected designs, as expressed in their deeds and daily life, to ascertain how far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in most cases, the correspondence would be found remote. The holy and generous wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart towards heaven, often lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul, selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a corrupted heart, often passes into the spiritual atmosphere without being concreted into an earthly deed. Yet this volume is probably truer, as a representation of the human heart, than is the living drama of action as it evolves around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it; more redeeming points of the bad and more errors of the virtuous; higher upsoarings, and baser degradation of the soul; in short, a more perplexing amalgamation of vice and virtue than we witness in the outward world. Decency and external conscience often produce a far fairer outside than is warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, oil the other hand, that a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he realizes in act, the purest wishes, which, at some blessed time or other, have arisen from the depths of his nature and witnessed for him in this volume. Yet there is enough on every leaf to make the good man shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner, whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire.

But again the door is opened, and we hear the tumultuous stir of the world,--a deep and awful sound, expressing in another form some portion of what is written in the volume that lies before the Man of Intelligence. A grandfatherly personage tottered hastily into the office, with such an earnestness in his infirm alacrity that his white hair floated backward as he hurried up to the desk, while his dim eyes caught a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable figure explained that he was in search of To-morrow.

"I have spent all my life in pursuit of it," added the sage old gentleman, "being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste; for, unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me."

"This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend," said the Man of Intelligence, "is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays."

Obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, the grandsire hastened forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the floor; and, as he disappeared, a little boy scampered through the door in chase of a butterfly which had got astray amid the barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect. The golden butterfly glistened through the shadowy apartment, and brushed its wings against the Book of Wishes, and fluttered forth again with the child still in pursuit.

A man now entered, in neglected attire, with the aspect of a thinker, but somewhat too rough-hewn and brawny for a scholar. His face was full of sturdy vigor, with some finer and keener attribute beneath. Though harsh at first, it was tempered with the glow of a large, warm heart, which had force enough to heat his powerful intellect through and through. He advanced to the Intelligencer and looked at him with a glance of such stern sincerity that perhaps few secrets were beyond its scope.

"I seek for Truth," said he.

"It is precisely the most rare pursuit that has ever come under my cognizance," replied the Intelligencer, as he made the new inscription in his volume. "Most men seek to impose some cunning falsehood upon themselves for truth. But I can lend no help to your researches. You must achieve the miracle for yourself. At some fortunate moment you may find Truth at your side, or perhaps she may be mistily discerned far in advance, or possibly behind you."

"Not behind me," said the seeker; "for I have left nothing on my track without a thorough investigation. She flits before me, passing now through a naked solitude, and now mingling with the throng of a popular assembly, and now writing with the pen of a French philosopher, and now standing at the altar of an old cathedral, in the guise of a Catholic priest, performing the high mass. O weary search! But I must not falter; and surely my heart- deep quest of Truth shall avail at last."

He paused and fixed his eyes upon the Intelligencer with a depth of investigation that seemed to hold commerce with the inner nature of this being, wholly regardless of his external development.

"And what are you?" said he. "It will not satisfy me to point to this fantastic show of an Intelligence Office and this mockery of business. Tell me what is beneath it, and what your real agency in life and your influence upon mankind."

"Yours is a mind," answered the Man of Intelligence, "before which the forms and fantasies that conceal the inner idea from the multitude vanish at once and leave the naked reality beneath. Know, then, the secret. My agency in worldly action, my connection with the press, and tumult, and intermingling, and development of human affairs, is merely delusive. The desire of man's heart does for him whatever I seem to do. I am no minister of action, but the Recording Spirit."

What further secrets were then spoken remains a mystery, inasmuch as the roar of the city, the bustle of human business, the outcry of the jostling masses, the rush and tumult of man's life, in its noisy and brief career, arose so high that it drowned the words of these two talkers; and whether they stood talking in the moon, or in Vanity Fair, or in a city of this actual world, is more than I can say.

My login into my own body ? that’s a funny experience ?
But what am I to my mental body, if two bodies of water collide.

What is it that I offer you to speak ?

Is it what you wish most or what I do ? `

But I don’t .-. Is it a ghost I am ? or a shadow ? of the light, the mistake, (-) that I put in between, the contemplation of the forward intentionality that is. A curse of an endless pain in whatever meaning, to speak from beyond or to seek from the farthest, in both the furthest but in one the farthest, multiplied by the in what it is inside of us the inning.
Nit I digress from what it is, it’s not the askesth of the religied that I be askenth for survival, of the other, the hinge in without is, it’s the multiplicity of it that beneaths me. For what I am is but to what the lords grace that I be equated, to the other, so I speak.
I’ve been betrayed multiplicity, by the innings of Ode and I digress for what I may say.
But Thy pains me both to say that I digress, because innit Lord. Because and it’s in theirs renounce for inadequacy  .To substation inner behavior, in such a sense that it is a pain.
I do not condone such behavior, it’s breaking the self in such a way that it does not deserve.

Such ways that I concede. Because it’s inside the Adam that believes he is Adam but he is Adam in soul if such a way is allowed (Here is the inner workings of the apocalypse Adam is asked to be prostrated in front of God, but he refuses because Adam is an asked to be, he is a character, in what’s better than us what is allowed to be, IfTt-o relate literally to the Abrahamic biblical narrative, he perceives that comparison in a sense of relatedness to both sides, God in his behavior is equating to none siding to one and never attacking both) Then he can twist the meaning behind it and deliver it with utmost grace he is the silent, the graceful, the attentive to which we may or might not perceive from what God, could and could not have seen coming. I would say that to not have been listened to ills me. That I conceive that I have no answer to this misery, and I can’t cope with it more. My teeth ill me, and I just want to fix it but I don’t know how, so I’m asking the help of a friend in need, a friend indeed, an existence to absolve the self from what it is not, and what it is, that it knows it’s own inadequacy and it’s own accord. For have Jesus had no accord for what it may have been said without right and righteousness. For who has been present.

In giving up what is mine. What is already have been myself from the first but that’s in separation, from what is already myself. I allowed you to speak you ‘dirty’, interpreter, inner of the soul, disgraceful being of hypocrisy. He who shall not be named ?
A being of such ? But who am I ? the devil that you speak of, the lowest of lows. Shall I even be named ? am I the saviour or the salvation ? am I even allowed. 

But I digress, because one or two, Inss walla Jin, nchedek ya boukachech, yali t9oss fel dhaw. Disgusting beings.

Jinn is when youaccept the divide of the soul, into two beings, when you believe in the other, you start manifesting the Biblical self, the behaved or distinguished points, the most heavy biblical narratives, in all languages a manifestation beyond plausible that if your quantic sensors could capture it, a being that is beyond, is it the Adam or the Eve, or the other, even the self, behind the veil ? what is it observing ?

If I demand as a human, I might wonder, is it behaved to sense the self. 

The Self you say ? the declaration of independence ? The intra, even ocular, as they say. None for Decor and more for appreciation, what has it not known. That in acts of creation, mighty and inviting in such a wonderful way, that it is unfathomable. One will not forget, when his might so high, he struck poetry in such a way that it was poesy. Unbeneanaths what I may not comprehend.

This Sunday morning Man Mortimer and Max Raymond sat in the pews of the same church, a little white steepled one in a glen set among live oaks and three acres of clover. The jungle swamps encroached on and squared the glen, deep green to black. Loud birds and alligators groaning in their mating season roamed in songs from bayou to bayou. Some fish walked on land in this season.

Some people are born with storms in their life but constellations in their eyes;

Meanwhile others are born with stars at their feet but their souls are lost in the sea.

"We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?"

"But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year."

An ideology so difficult to interpret that most people look at it and just want to give up understanding it. An etiquette so idealized by the masses from the outside, yet unknown, lonely meanings on the inside. An air so subtle that even sudden movements could make the atmosphere collapse.

Gestures of distanced love gaze at each other, full of longing hopelessness, knowing nothing will happen. Distance, distance and even more distance cause an early death that should’ve happened even earlier. Apologies left and right for things that have yet to occur, occur.

Why should one conform to something that will twist them inside out like this? Losing a half-made identity to transform into someone who will never fully be accepted doesn’t sound very appealing to most.

Whatever draws me near has never been able to let me go all these years. Like a red string of fate, it holds me captive so that I can never look at any other options. Even though, I’ve tried to run down other paths, the string stills yanks me back to this familiar, uncertain alley.

He could not hope to see anything new upon this lane of the sea. He had been on these coasts for the last three years. From Low Cape to Malantan the distance was fifty miles, six hours’ steaming for the old ship with the tide, or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land, and by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim, and with their disheveled heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of the dark mangroves. The Sofala would be headed towards the somber strip of the coast, which at a given moment, as the ship closed with it obliquely, would show several clean shining fractures — the brimful estuary of a river. Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages. The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had not been kept so long at it without a change; better than the faithful Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the captain’s watch; better than he himself, who had been her captain for the last three years only. She could always be depended upon to make her courses. Her compasses were never out. She was no trouble at all to take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom, and steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree of the bearing, and almost to a minute of her allowed time. At any moment, as he sat on the bridge without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply by reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was — the precise spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster’s round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its people. Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far East. Darkness and gleams on the water, clear stars on a black sky, perhaps the lights of a home steamer keeping her unswerving course in the middle, or maybe the elusive shadow of a native craft with her mat sails flitting by silently — and the low land on the other side in sight at daylight. At noon the three palms of the next place of call, up a sluggish river. The only white man residing there was a retired young sailor, with whom he had become friendly in the course of many voyages. Sixty miles farther on there was another place of call, a deep bay with only a couple of houses on the beach. And so on, in and out, picking up coastwise cargo here and there, and finishing with a hundred miles’ steady steaming through the maze of an archipelago of small islands up to a large native town at the end of the beat. There was a three days’ rest for the old ship before he started her again in inverse order, seeing the same shores from another bearing, hearing the same voices in the same places, back again to the Sofala’s port of registry on the great highway to the East, where he would take up a berth nearly opposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it was time to start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days. Not a very enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise Dare-devil Harry — Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms, who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of them his own); who had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas, and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. Fifty years at sea, and forty out in the East (“a pretty thorough apprenticeship,” he used to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas. His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time neither the island nor the reef had any official existence. Later the officers of her Majesty’s steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone who cares may see, the “General Directory,” vol. ii. p. 410, begins the description of the “Malotu or Whalley Passage” with the words: “This advantageous route, first discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the ship Condor,” &c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels leaving the China ports for the south in the months from December to April inclusive.

I'll have to go with the whole gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky seemed small.

Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There'd been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.

Dundun tortured Jack Hotel at the lake outside of Denver. He did this to get information about a stolen item, a stereo belonging to Dundun's girlfriend, or perhaps to his sister. Later, Dundun beat a man almost to death with a tire iron on the street in Austin, Texas, for which he'll also someday have to answer, but now he is, I think, in the state prison in Colorado.

Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.

The lantern sits on a stump. Rusted, grease-fouled, its cracked chimney smeared on one side with a soaring smudge of soot, it sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles and the boards and the adjacent earth. Upon the dark ground the chips look like random smears of soft pale paint on a black canvas. The boards look like long smooth tatters torn from the flat darkness and turned backside out.
Cash labors about the trestles, moving back and forth, lifting and placing the planks with long clattering reverberations in the dead air as though he were lifting and dropping them at the bottom of an invisible well, the sounds ceasing without departing, as if any movement might dislodge them from the immediate air in reverberant repetition. He saws again, his elbow flashing slowly, a thin thread of fire running along the edge of the saw, lost and recovered at the top and bottom of each stroke in unbroken elongation, so that the saw appears to be six feet long, into and out of pa's shabby and aimless silhouette.

The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.

Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake—or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational—the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these nonrepresentational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric—the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco's disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover's dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation—inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand—of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another.

...

For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say. Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring over Judith's skirts, there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli—and not Botticelli alone, but many others too—had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith's skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of television.

"The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars... Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth.

He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages. "Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears...," rang in his soul."

In the summer, when the hicks had worked on the farms, there had been flood-lit beaches, and his parched tongue curled now remembering how—in the labyrinth of empty oil drums supporting the diving raft—he would have kissed Irene. Or someone. The names didn’t matter so much any more.

He made another trip down the row, and while he fed the corn he remembered the names that didn’t matter now. Oh, the city had swarmed with girls. You could stand on a street corner, and in an hour hundreds would walk past. There had even been talk about a population problem then.

Hundreds of thousands of people!

He remembered the crowds in the winter in the heated auditorium on the university campus. He would have come there in a white shirt. The collar would be tight around his neck. In his imagination, he fingered the knot of a silk tie. Would it be striped or plain? He thought of the stores full of suits and jackets. Oh, the colors there had been! the music, and, afterward, the applause!

But the worst of it, he thought, resting by the Plant again, is that there isn’t anyone to talk to anymore. The total population of Tassel was two hundred and forty-seven, and none of them, not one of them, could understand Buddy Anderson. A world had been lost, and they weren’t aware of it. It had never been their world, but it had been, briefly, Buddy’s, and it had been beautiful.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.

"But don't you know, Mr. Stoner?" Sloane asked. "Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."

Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Sloane said softly.

"How can you tell? How can you be sure?"

"It's love, Mr. Stoner," Sloane said cheerfully. "You are in love. It's as simple as that."

The vegetation was typical for the area, thriving on leached-out slag and crumbling scrap metal; neither useful nor beautiful, it seemed to have sprung up only to cover the wounds of the terrain…or only—I subjected it to continuous scrutiny—to invade my dreams with the gloomy union of its gray webs and the fog…nightmares that recurred in reality, nightmares in which the matted layer of vegetation concealed a core of indefinable glow; as though in some building deeper in the ruins, where the workers’ quarters must have been, a light were still intact…or the shrubs wove to spin into my thoughts a gray net of bristling sorrow…to weave over burning wounds in the delta of my thoughts…to knit over the fact that my strange interest in bad places was an unacknowledged, unclear interest in our origins… because I had not actually experienced the affronts that went with the soil we had sprung from.—On reflection, we were actually exiles. Of course only in the indefinite way in which all our names were sheer hubris…all our names, titles, and nouns. So we were not exiles based on some neat, solid idea, but exiles out of instability…out of ineptitude, ignorance, antisocial tendencies; we hadn’t been torn from our roots, we hadn’t lost our rights, we were in exile because we’d never had roots or rights; we’d never even sought to find them, perhaps we constantly sought the world’s most noxious regions in order to rest in our rootlessness; like gray vegetation, feeding on the ground’s nutrients but giving nothing back, we settled in the desolate provinces that were the strongholds of evil, we settled between slag and scrap where we could run riot, rank and uncontested. We had always sought the places of darkness—always the smoke, as others seek the first bright happy memory of childhood—always sought the shunting shadows of transition, ever wary of being recognized, for our lives were but a semilegal affair…and we sought out the most wretched work, in cellars, cesspits, and shafts, lowly nocturnal tasks; we cleansed the blemishes, we scrubbed the slaughterhouses, we licked clean the word of mouth, and with the looks of thieves we pocketed our wages. I must have learned of these things when, in search of what harmonized with me, I was drawn to the town’s edge where the rubbish began, or to the villages beyond the town, on the periphery where the town’s refuse blossomed, the metastases of industry; there notions of my future reality had burgeoned…they’d been growing for nearly thirty years, and for as many years I’d abandoned my lead soldiers to their hopeless trench war in the flowerpots and gone out late in the day to sully myself with visions of my future.

"If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons."

"It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift."

America is not a young land. It is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting...But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can't see it, you don't know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street--every block of houses has its own bar and drug store and market and liquor store. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers nor the cream colored plastic, nor the dim neon. Not even the tv.