Chapter Two: Such Awkward Creatures. Part One

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. 



T. S. Eliot 
Four Quartets, 'Burnt Norton'

I saw a war. The last war where Christ stood glorious at the center, and throngs of bodies, angels and demons, the saved and the damned burgeoned around him in battle. All amber and shadow. All movements of dread and dream. The great panopoly of forms burned the breaking sky with choruses of many lights, both violent and serene. Terror and beauty coursed and coalesced, like a great fugue in the high heavens trying to resolve itself. The mutinous Cthonic forces rose from the dust. They hurled themselves at Christ like bitter memories. The angels and saints, diaphanous and robed in light like water, burned as suns in the blackness and came to His defense. Swords broke upon each other, silver phantoms flashing in the air, fire fuming in their wakes. Death and the Devil and God raged.

And there were tears. I heard from the depths of battle everywhere a beautiful lament and threnody, threading endlessly amongst the newly accumulating ruins of the world, the old world, now but the lesser daughter of a voice long forgotten. Sonnets of heaven and earth flung themselves to the far corners of the cosmic reaches. Weapons breathed like engines. The constellations of existence moaned.

Then heaven flexed and came forth, its tesseract and teleology bursting from angles unexplored and forgotten. The tree and the bush and the mountain, the house and the cart and the road, the shops and the conversation and the handshake and the lovers embrace. Memory and moment. Suddenly, they all diagonalized and burst, lurched, sprouted, they held the horizon, everything ruptured into its true beauty, its true fullness and finality. Its true gravity and tragedy. Broke from silhouette and seen in an eternal light. As if nothing had been truly real before this. All the hidden depths like labyrinths unwound. Each finite thing suddenly bled and gust with the infinite, presupposed it, was carved from its boundlessness. And I saw it. My God. I saw it. From the ordinary God burst forth, unannounced, like the great fulcrum of the world’s form. Amplitudes and angles shunted outward, their sudden depth and weight, that glorious weight, like some unannounced dimension overflowing from flatness into gravity. Into bulk.

All the great rooms of the sky burst open.

It was night. My eyes were closed. I had been studying. We had been reading up on apocalyptic literature to get a feel for the genre, its flux and sway, its symbols and stigmata, the great conflux and colloquy of meanings embroidered into an occult tapestry, or some alchemical compound. The world was a vast architecture of semiotics, they thought, and so these texts were a hermetic treasury and storehouse of symbols. A lens through which to read reality. We had stared at Michelangelo’s depiction of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel for what seemed like hours. We learned how it enlarged slightly upward, to loom over the viewer, so the images would reach into their heart and invoke fear and piety. How St. Bartholomew, who held his own flayed skin as some offering to God, was Michelangelo himself placing his own person in the judgment, into the utmost meaning of the world. As if he saw his whole life from this perspective.

We stared at the mural for so long it felt like it had burned itself into my eyelids. Into my heart. And so now as I closed my eyes I saw the war. The last war.

But, eventually, I had to open my eyes again.

And again as they opened I saw his empty car. The reason I had closed my eyes. Held my breath. But it remained. Parked outside our house.

But still, for but a moment, I saw the phantom of the war’s form. Its spectral image lingering. The great rage of heaven and earth. Burned into my retinas. A fleeting texture of my soul. Pressed upon the line of cars marching. Upon his car. Upon the small light lit from the closed rooms of our house. As if reality was a palimpsest, the mundane hiding this original image of struggle, which still faintly peered through the veil.

It was like, for but a moment, God roared with me.

-------------------


Come on.

Darkness poured down my face like liquid. I tried again to coax myself from the fortress of my car to go up the two long flights of stairs to our apartment. My eyes darted back to the small digital clock, another minute passed. Just get out. Go upstairs. Get your things and leave. Simple in theory but apparently much more complicated in practice. I hadn’t even unbuckled myself yet, my doors were still locked, the key, though off, still sat lodged in the ignition. I sat unsure of the proper course of action. My heart was a vast kingdom of rust. Coward. You coward get out of the damn car. Come on. I envisioned my hand slowly raising, methodically removing my seatbelt from its clasp, it would wind up and I would reach for my keys, unlock the door, and go. But my arm didn’t move, the buckle didn’t retract. The key sat lifeless and undisturbed, and I watched as the windows slowly wept with rainfall. My head fell back into the headrest behind me, and I stared blankly at the ceiling. Damnit. Much to my surprise, hell turned out to be the interior of beat up Toyota Camry.

From the time I had pulled up to the house until now, night had descended. I peered outside through the blackness at the source of my hesitation. His car. You let him come to our house. I knew I should have been so angry at this, it was such a cavalier insult. I was angry. I was furious. But I had become so angry it was like I didn’t feel it anymore, like I had cauterized myself, and I was left this little sniveling thing who couldn’t even leave the confines of his own car. I hated myself for that.

“How am I not myself?” I whispered. And I wasn’t. I heard myself in my head, or somewhere, yelling, a great drumming in the deep spilling from some emptiness. But it felt so far away. That yelling, the great war parading in my chest, that was me. Not this fear. But it was like I was locked away through some door that was now shut, and I could not follow. I pictured myself like some frenzied animal, or a hero from an action movie on an unstoppable rampage, some demi-god hewing bodies with ease. All in slow motion and grandeur. But my eyes were staid, stoic. Calm.

I was still just sitting in the car.

I looked at the clock again and cursed under my breath and finally managed to unlatch the buckle, remove the key, unlock the door. The rain rewarded my escape with tiny pinpricks of cold as I lumbered up the stairs. In the distance, down the block and through the rain, I thought I felt a shadow watching me. But as I stopped up the stairs for a moment and turned, it was gone. Just my imagination.

The one good thing I remember doing was resisting the urge to call you, to let you know I was coming up. I was proud of myself. In some perverse way it gave me pleasure to know that I was going to surprise you—to surprise him. Maybe the look on your faces as I came in would throw open whatever door it is in me that is muffling the cry from the deep.

The front door was locked, almost like you were trying to keep me out of my own house. The house was dark through the window, as the jagged sound of the metal of the keys sliding into the lock of the door started, there stirred rumors of movement. It was like sliding a quarter into the pinball machine slot. Suddenly the darkness of the apparatus awoke in tremors and light. A comedy. A tragedy. A gleam of heaven and earth. It was difficult to decide the genre of our action. I saw you, hair mussed, quickly move out of our bedroom. You strategically closed the door behind you, but it was left slightly ajar in the rush. You adjusted the straps of your shirt and walked to greet me as I opened the door. Your cheeks were glowing.

If this wasn’t all so horrible I might have laughed.

“What are you doing here?” Your voice was sweet like Judas, a kiss to greet me, wavering slightly as you ran your fingers through your hair to straighten it. Such a small thing, but I remember it.

I pretended to be surprised at your question. It was a fun game that I intended to enjoy while I could.

“What do you mean what am I doing here? This is my house, I live here.”

“Well you should have called.”

A feign of shock.

“Call to come to my own house? What on earth for?”

And then the coup de grace, a little self-righteous indignation.

“Why, is he here?” Applause. I heard applause.

But I came crashing back to reality.

Your hands were shaking. I barely caught it before you crossed your arms, but they were. My eyes looked over to our bedroom door. I think I shook my head, but it was hard to tell. You tried to intercept my thoughts, I remember.

I wanted to throw up.

“Its…its not what you think.” Your lies have such a strange earnestness about them, a bright veneer trying to distract from their depthlessness. It was like the wavering rise of summer heat, the tremulous air warping the light but not really obscuring what lay behind it. You really must have thought I was an idiot.

“Whatever you say.” As I said this you almost looked offended that I didn’t believe you. Your eyes grew wide.

“Look, we were just talking, really.”

“Does it even matter at this point?”

I was a little unprepared for my own rhetorical question because of the fact that no, it really didn’t matter anymore. I spoke the words but never gave a thought to what they all could mean. But what an absurd thing it really was, to lie to me now. I took a deep breath and redirected the conversation. I wasn’t there for another argument, after all, especially not one with you telling me you didn’t just sleep with the guy you’ve been sleeping with for months. My mind wasn’t big enough to wrap itself around that monstrosity.

“I just came here for my stuff, I’m going to go stay at my Dad’s for a few days.”

Good. I had managed to say something productive. This was going better than expected. But like all good things that depend upon an element of stupidity to succeed, this fragile armistice was easily shattered. The bedroom door creaked open. None of this felt real, the game was over for me as fast as it started, it was just too absurd. The trouble with acting is that when you hold a character too close to your chest, they sometimes get in. I feigned shock while thinking myself in control. But the feint turned to existence. Bloomed. Its not so much that you become the character in some real, ontological sense. As if the real you ceases and melts away. Its more like you remain you, but it turns out that the character you were playing was pulling the strings all along. This was the nature of Greek tragedy. The actors donned masks in order to act out what freedom would be. But of course in the plays, like Oedipus and Antigone, this freedom is a feint, a fake, it rebounds and the characters are crushed for their hubris.

What is often missed however, is the true tragedy: the true distance is that of the mask and the actor. The mask is the feint of a feint: the faking of a play-acting of freedom. The actor is the one truly unfree, precisely in the imagination of freedom. Not only is their character crushed and so the idea of freedom shattered; they themselves as actor are different from the character and so there is the crushing of freedom in the character, and then there is the crushing of freedom in the very role of the actor himself, bound to lines and script, to mask and motion. The defeat of freedom is double.

And as I was playing someone ignorant, it seemed suddenly ignorance was the engine. Very disconcerting, that. Was he really going to show his face? I was insulted, but that feeling lasted only for a second. This couldn’t be happening.

His head was down slightly, out of shame or fear I don’t know. He avoided any chance of eye contacted and just kept looking at you. I wanted to tear his eyes out. He was just some nobody. But instead of that making me feel better it made me feel much, much worse.

I had built him up in my mind to be something, well, something better. Of all the things that had happened the only way I could even start to make sense of it was that I had been replaced by something better, that this travesty—that love itself!—at least followed some observable law, that it was not completely irrational, spontaneous, unpredictable. How Scholastic of me it was, that I should have expected an unpredictable and multivariable reality to be just another deduction, like the exemplar of some pristine algorithm. Every line an infinite form of flight, an endless mimesis of some origin—a fractal, a exemplar of the primal Concept in every minutia. I was in the company of Euclid, but somewhere Schrödinger laughed at us. On and on. You were unhappy with me and wanted something better, he was something better, therefore I was replaced. A closed circle. The logic of it was anesthetizing. I could live in this syllogism, at least in theory. But I was staring straight at him and to this day I cant remember what he looked like. Reality refused to be quantified. What fanciful and capricious force was this desperate bid for love? He was just some guy. Goatee. No Goatee. Blond hair. Brown. I probably picture a different face every time I try to remember—he has as many faces as I have insecurities. A great blank infinity for me to paint like whatever I hate.

Arendt was right. Evil is banal.