Years the Locust Have Eaten

By Benajah CC Joseph

 

 

“And so we may arrive by Talmud skill
And profane Greek to raise the building up
Of Helen’s house against the Ismaelite,
King of Thogarma, and his habergeons
Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force
Of King A baddon, and the beast of Cittim;
Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos,
And A ben Ezra do interpret Rome. ”
-THE ALCHEMIST.

 

 

Lazy Susan

He sat in no place of honor, for none existed.  They had long ago decided that to sit in a circle would be most appropriate.  Not Marxist but Christian.  Not King Arthurs knights but bound by some arcane code akin to Lord Mallory’s thoughts.

He couldn’t talk as of yet.  It would be any day his mother thought.  His father secretly hoped that he would not.  A strange whiff of sourness, acrimony and sin surrounded the boy, his firstborn.  From whence it came he knew but spoke of it in blimps and shadowy glimpses.  Blue eyes betrayed both of them, the fathers for a secret heart, sons for blood and time-not yet hatched.  It was coming, that raincloud on the Oklahoma prairie plains, he smelled it like ozone and fecund fear.  His own.

The Lazy Susan was a relic but functional in its simplicity.  The boy liked to reach his fat little arm and spin it.  There had been a time when the college aged boys would spin him very carefully, to his delight.  The delight was a hazy, purple, dizzy moment caught in time, for the feeling he loved would be quick to depart.  He looked for ways to crawl about that would envelop him in that impression but the closest thing he could find was falling.  When his little brother came unannounced and unwanted, the boy crawled to the carpeted stairs, of an approximation of what was once regal.  A two-story sorority house saddened with neglect but laden still with memories.  Like a deposed queen in her waning years, abroad from her own, crippled by poverty and expectations.  The stairs sat still, grand aspirations of the now dead now stained into the beige carpet, that had of a time been red.  The boy knew nothing of this yet, though he would and in that nostalgia to come he would find the creative volition to hang himself slowly.  His band would be called The Irony of Slow-Motion-Suicide Project or ISMSP.  The actual fiber of the rope that won the game of chance to kill him for real, would be literary, but for now it sat idly lachrymose picking its teeth in the glow of the Palantír.  Its day would come.

 

 

Tonight, the round table of red pine shellacked over with glossy worn off glaze sat eight college aged men with the boy and his father and mother.  The Messianic Jew sat closest to the boy and would always until the boy no longer found favor with him.  In the years to come the boy would learn to read at a ferociously young age and sit for hours with the Jew, going over lines as it were.  The lines always came from one book and the boy would remember fondly, always the Book of Romans.  The young man would live on protected and under the wing of the great house and in time return to mark it again, but the Jew never did, living our his days in Boulder Colorado as the Zen Drummer, a necessary legal name change.

 

Cerulean blue to match his eyes, his mother thought as she watched him not eat his baby food, looking most greedily at the totally Kosher-less meal surrounded by Christian but poor young men.   The boy would watch the young men eat with joy but filled with a type of neediness that his mother would never recognize.

The prayer that had lasted several minutes as the boy looked on, gripping the hard-slick sides of his baby seat as if he could will it to disappear or be transformed into some sort of space locomotive, was false that night.  Small red and green and blippy pieces of light sat in the middle of the spinning instrument, unseen but for the lad.  In times of weak protection, he would often see them and wonder if they saw him too.  In time he would learn many secrets of their power, power to forget, to erase, to destroy, to summon wittiness, to envision, to exert control over lesser being, to help him see the things he grew to love, but for now it was but a side-show while the big persons talked in turns with eyes closed.

 

Choice your words carefully brother.

How do it do that? You mean to say compose with a purpose?

There always seemed to Daikon that there was a low threshold of campus college morality in that house.  Everyone had to bow down to this ideology of one ideal of God.  The Ministry of the Closing Age.  Daikon was pretty sure that every single one of those men who sat around the table were just as bad as he was.  Cigarette smoke blew blue out of his mind’s eye as the prayer ended.  Without cologne on the woman would probably smell him and then tell her husband who was the boss-man.  Daikon hated that phrase boss man but used it in introspective reflection and open debate that held sway in his cognition, like some sort of monkey court.  To him it seemed that once you know the fundamental truth then the rest of the time people just walked around in some form of mental masturbation.  He did.  Yeah sure he learned all the Physiology and Chemistry but it was only so he could be rich.  He knew that his life was already mapped out, that no matter what he did or what level he achieved or sank into, that he would be a part of the constituency of heaven.  He was pretty sure what it looked like.  Not some Renaissance fags glazed cracking dream where everyone good had beards and wore white, gold and willowy greys.  He thought of it more in terms of looking out over a city, not quantitatively but in a qualitative arrangement.  He liked very much Hieronymus Bosch and Pei Wei Wei  and thought their dark visions of Hell-scapes and Oriental shenanigans were in fact more palatable and probably closer to the center and circumference of the Abrahams bosom than an androgynous host in white. Daikon often wondered who the Enlightenment coterie actually were.  Rebels, ideologues, demagogues, strict disciplinarian’s surely but somehow making their rebellion out to be the right one.  Like their brand of rebellion is the only right thing in the world.  Somewhere in the back of his mind he would always group them together under the subtitle Rebellions as Witchcraft from Jere and He looks and talks and writes just like we do.  We being the operative word.  In such an inclusive and truth filled environment he knew what he did or did not do was of little import.  If any at all.  Perhaps, he imagined with pressure in his britches, when he went to the communal facilities later that he would find his reflection looking back at him with the assurance that today was the day.  Today my son it is ok to eat some high-powered rat poison.

They all perhaps seemed not to care that the reason none of them liked go sit next to the Jew was that he was Jewish.  The baby boy felt largely the same way but had very little choice for the Jew sat next to him at every meal.  After they had opened their eyes the conversation picked back up.

On top of the piano in the Tent of Meeting room sat a pyramid with a removable face.  Smooth sides and latches and hard pointy juxtapositional angles seemed like a triune fun to the boy but his momma disagreed.

Why he always wants to fiddle with the metronome I may never know, bless his little heart but he does enjoy that thing.

A view of the little pyramid was enough to get his mind set to a pace that he would relax in.   The relaxation that he felt then was only because when the big people talked, which seemed to be incessantly to the small human, if he could set his mind right, if he could muster the fortitude to hold that thought of the sound of the little thing in action….then….then he could drown out all the blabbering, snortling, trippy, rollicking, gratuitous, fecund, blasphemy that seemed to pour out of everyone’s mouth.  Words.   He knew they were words and held meaning.  He’d know that all his life.  It wasn’t the words per say.  Essentially it wasn’t the words or even the noise.  It was the lack of intrinsic meaning.  If and when he could talk (which he had not decided on doing just yet) he would make the world snap to attention.  The fragrance that his words would give off would be that wonderful smell of a new diaper and apricot.  His little nostrils searching the air for a hope that some may have been lingering on him yet.  Nope.  The metronome ticed forward and the conversation continued.

 

Well the way Dr. Henry would have us write about it is more formal and less constrained by what would have been considered Puritanical.

But what is his view of Puritanical?  Most academicians are godless men who linger about riding the wave of individualism and self-promotion until Hashem calls them home.

The Jew still felt very uncomfortable when people would openly use the Hebrew name of God.  He wouldn’t and couldn’t.  Pen scratching before him would pause at the word Elohim…just before the o. Jesus was cool…it only seemed to apply to Hebrew.  It couldn’t be helped and frankly he was pretty sure there would be some stern letters from Hashem to some of these very men gathered before him. They would resist, he knew they would ressit and like Jonah, things would not go well in the end.  It is not a light thing to be under the hand of God.  Their time would come.  These precious precious goyim he loved so much.  A lull in the conversation allowed for a slight breach in the noise.  One of those rarified occasions when of an instant, of a existential pause in the continuity of time and sound when the world would be completely silent.  He loved those blips, prayed for more of them.  Felt in his little chest that god was only found in those moment and not in all the other times that people thought He was.  The world slowed and he knew that one was coming, in that microsecond before actuation.

 

James had been speaking in hushed tones to the diminutive Persian boy next to him.

I just don’t understand why Crane is demonized by the less progressive.   In 1919, the novelist and critic Waldo Frank published “Our America,” a manifesto for a new generation of American artists. Surveying the cultural situation of the United States, on the brink of what already looked to be the American century, Frank saw “an untracked wilderness but dimly blazed by the heroic ax of Whitman.” Yet a new generation of trailblazers, he thought, was about to emerge from the complacent materialism of postwar America. Writers like Sherwood Anderson and Van Wyck Brooks—along with masters of new genres like Alfred Stieglitz and even Charlie Chaplin—promised not simply to create a modern art but to renew the spirit of the country: “In this infancy of our adventure, America is a mystic Word. We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her.”

 

You don’t have to exposit on whatever you are studying in your freshman lit class, the Jew said to to him.  But if you insist then please regale the table with one of his finer works.

Conversation picked up, no one really wanted to hear Hart Crane but the Jews eyes stayed firmly affixed to the eyes of James.

 

He began high-pitched and nasally.

 

“Be with me, Luis de San Angel, now —
Witness before the tides can wrest away
The word I bring, O you who reined my suit
Into the Queen’s great heart that doubtful day;
For I have seen now what no perjured breath
Of clown nor sage can riddle or gainsay; —
To you, too, Juan Perez, whose counsel fear
And greed adjourned, — I bring you back Cathay!

Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail;
Invisible valves of the sea, — locks, tendons
Crested and creeping, troughing corridors
That fall back yawning to another plunge.
Slowly the sun’s red caravel drops light
Once more behind us. … It is morning there —
O where our Indian emperies lie revealed,
Yet lost, all, let this keel one instant yield!

I thought of Genoa; and this truth, now proved,
That made me exile in her streets, stood me
More absolute than ever — biding the moon
Till dawn should clear that dim frontier, first seen
— The Chan’s great continent. … Then faith, not fear
Nigh surged me witless. … Hearing the surf near —
I, wonder-breathing, kept the watch, — saw
The first palm chevron the first lighted hill.

And lowered. And they came out to us crying,
” The Great White Birds! ” (O Madre Maria, still
One ship of these thou grantest safe returning;
Assure us through thy mantle’s ageless blue!)
And record of more, floating in a casque,
Was tumbled from us under bare poles scudding;
And later hurricanes may claim more pawn. …
For here between two worlds, another, harsh,

This third, of water, tests the word; lo, here
Bewilderment and mutiny heap whelming
Laughter, and shadow cuts sleep from the heart
Almost as though the Moor’s flung scimitar
Found more than flesh to fathom in its fall.
Yet under tempest-lash and surfeitings
Some inmost sob, half-heard, dissuades the abyss,
Merges the wind in measure to the waves,

Series on series, infinite, — till eyes
Starved wide on blackened tides, accrete — enclose
This turning rondure whole, this crescent ring
Sun-cusped and zoned with modulated fire
Like pearls that whisper through the Doge’s hands
— Yet no delirium of jewels! O Fernando,
Take of that eastern shore, this western sea,
Yet yield thy God’s, thy Virgin’s charity!

— Rush down the plenitude, and you shall see
Isaiah counting famine on this lee!
. . .
An herb, a stray branch among salty teeth,
The jellied weeds that drag the shore, — perhaps
Tomorrow’s moon will grant us Saltes Bar —
Palos again, — a land cleared of long war.
Some Angelus environs the cordage tree;
Dark waters onward shake the dark prow free.
. . .

O Thou who sleepest on Thyself, apart
Like ocean athwart lanes of death and birth,
And all the eddying breath between dost search
Cruelly with love thy parable of man, —
Inquisitor! incognizable Word
Of Eden and the enchained Sepulchre,
Into thy steep savannahs, burning blue,
Utter to loneliness the sail is true.

Who grindest oar, and arguing the mast
Subscribest holocaust of ships, O Thou
Within whose primal scan consummately
The glistening seignories of Ganges swim; —
Who sendest greeting by the corposant,
And Teneriffe’s garnet — flamed it in a cloud,
Urging through night our passage to the Chan; —
Te Deum laudamus, for thy teeming span!

Of all that amplitude that time explores,
A needle in the sight, suspended north, —
Yielding by inference and discard, faith
And true appointment from the hidden shoal:
This disposition that thy night relates
From Moon to Saturn in one sapphire wheel:
The orbic wake of thy once whirling feet,
Elohim, still I hear thy sounding heel!

White toil of heaven’s cordons, mustering
In holy rings all sails charged to the far
Hushed gleaming fields and pendant seething wheat
Of knowledge, — round thy brows unhooded now
— The kindled Crown! acceded of the poles
And biassed by full sails, meridians reel
Thy purpose — still one shore beyond desire!
The sea’s green crying towers a-sway, Beyond

And kingdoms
naked in the
trembling heart —
Te Deum laudamus
O Thou Hand of Fire”

 

NAKED the boy screamed rippling and furious with emphasis, he knew he had to get this right.  His timing had to be perfect.  He would take gods spotlight but for a second.  In that silent moment when the wind refused, and the clock hand was shifting aimlessly, and human noise held its breath.  In gods allotted portion of 1 microsecond of every cycle, he would announce himself to the world and they would all understand his importance his seminal singular place in the world of men.

NAKED NAKED NAKED NAKED NAKED NAKED NAKED NAKED.

As expected the authorial and authoritarian tone of his first word coupled with the depth of the those following had signaled to the men gathered before him, that an alien presence of greater intellect and import had arrived. He thought, it’s nice to have all eyes on me.  I’ll have some more please.