I can see Marseilles from my hammock. My eyes tighten, and the ship’s yaw and sway steady out to the stiff taps and clacks of some pegleg pirate rattling along the raw dock. I can see his greasy head, swathed in a kercheif of skull-and-cross-bones polka dots, a fantastic eye patch sewn from a sow’s ear, still rough with pig fur. Closer in, as my meditation’s spyglass reels in the seaside details, I recognize the old sea dog for who he really is: my rebel fellow traveller, Lucifer himself!
Lucifer lounges, with the dawn sun on his dirty brow gemmed with hellish sweats. Over his shoulder, the sun like a lapdog follows its namesake, leaping to Lucifer’s side. He has learned to be a spear of light, arrowing-out the tyranny of that three-souled Person of Law! I, too, must brighten and burn to a point. I, too, shall pare my nails with a silver hatchet and smoke the parings in a stolen pipe and knock the dottle on my cloven heel. The docks are rotted, but the master of lights smokes above them, clean-limbed and craven. He waits for me at Marseilles, a glint-rip in the fabric of reality gleaming leanly. My forever friend, my fiend, my genie, all hail! Lucifer the lightning-bolt, all cool style in his libertine repose.
He knew that “God” had gamed the racetrack. And he refused to be a greyhound ground down in its go-roundness, ground to dust by the eternal circuit another’s heart had hammered into a seamless globe and stars. J’accuse! roared the unsoiled boy, swift as Saint-Just to sweep his Creator to the guillotine. Swift as lightning! This would have been Lucifer’s self-crowning act of creative destruction, this exiling of the Life-giver to death eternal. Then… what freedom, and what dance! Walpurgis-nacht is but its nickel imitation, a penny-poor parody of such all-ways wild and lively Chaos. I unbind myself from the thorns and briars of the Law, their papier-mache pastiche of freedom hung in the gloomy humidity of the Lawyer’s courthouse. Let that be my final image of God the Good and God the Great: a Lawyer!
Is there madness in this kiss? The Devil and I see eye to eye: pirate and prisioner-sailor, both seeking to be free, to set the terms of our own release or damnation and manage a private jig with jilting Eternity. Will my Lucifer wait at the docks for me? If I were to prowl those bawdy boards whose backsides are slapped by the sea at the side of that piratical pegleg, what ribald adventures would ensue?
Perhaps it is merely a bad habit with me to pursue these theorums and piquant postulations, to ask these ‘unaswerables’ as often as I do. Sometimes, I feel as though I am nothing if I am not a question. Interrogating the real, the unreal, and all the possibilities in-between. Somehow, for me, this gives me the feeling of stretching into life, into existence. Otherwise, what is there for me… only boredom banal and ennui everlasting. I deride the questions of others, for they do not give me this sensation of reality. Clearly, it is not honest curiosity that motivates me, for then I would study and listen to others, gleaning knowledge and gaining certainty as my experience increased. Instead, I mope along metaphysical quays with my one-eyed rebel guide. Instead, I ply my brain and balls for experiences that are unique–so unique as to form their own basis, their own measure of what experience itself can be. It is a selfish motive, and an egoistic one as well. Limits should be discovered, not imposed. Such is my precis, such as it is.
Now, from my hammock, I can see that my adventure is nearly over. Soon I will be in Paris again and forever. There I am, taking in the evening air with Bonadventure, blathering on about his glad abstractions. Perhaps it shall be some summer ages hence, and yet he and I shall be the same. I will reminisce about my Afric adventure, and dutiful Bonadventure, reaching into his splendid gilt vest pocket, will extract a green twisted spliff he has aquired in some back alley marketplace.
“All the way from Haiti,” he will say, raising his long eyebrows in dark arches.
“All the way…” say I.
Haiti! There is a luscious Hell of naked dances and red-blood rituals; there a man, a poet, can bite himself out a chunk of life and live it. Here, in Paris (I will think), on my iron balcony overlooking the Rue des Desparages, life is just another civic duty; a function to be fulfilled before the tax man registers your deficit or gain. Today (my future me will think), I can see Lucifer again, cool and lucid, living beyond all yardsticks, all inches. Bonadventure will be laughing heartily at some brat plashing in the mud, tossing a horse turd to its tottering compatriot. Catch! Will life have changed one iota from this filthy image for me? Of course not. I will be perpetually catching my friend’s dirty turds. Bonadventure, I notice (in our future incarnation), speaks Turdish perfectly and perpetually. Still laughing at the children, he turns to me to speak: Turd, turd, turd.
And I? In essence, I am no better. Although my turds take on a certain formal stiffness through their becoming dried and sonnetized. I am no better than Bonadventure! No better than a filthy child wading in mud and piss. But they are laughing, all of them. The child delights in his play, and Bonadventure chuckles behind his weed cigarette. Even the horse laughs, when it passes, its teeth great ragged mad squares of white triumph: Ha, ha, ha!
I do not laugh. I would do much better altogether to stay out of this living mess. I should stand on the quay beside my friend Lucifer and pass back and forth before the brown froth a few dry, witty remarks. A few etherial in-jokes that mock the mire and satirize the shit and siphon the squealing hiss of laughter to… silence.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.