Images

He turns, he is tired, he no longer likes it, he say. It’s too easy for Parker’s voice to turn from understanding to snobbery, as if it’s his right to take something when he is incapable of appraising its true value. He’s too lost in the latest formation of how pot grows to fathom what the books he reads mean anymore. He won’t turn on the Fox channel to watch the best show of the season because he says Fox is evil. If I ask him how he will contribute to the evil by turning on its channel, he doesn’t answer because there is no answer to such a stupid question. When I show him the beauty of the girls vision within a story of subjugation, love, and strength, he doesn’t seem to understand how a person can make mistakes and be intelligent. “They must be two different people” he loiters on demanding. “Her inner monologue was intelligent, but her life was stupid.” Doesn’t he look at his own life? “You still live with your parents at the age of forty, surely your monologue is more intelligent than your life.” “My father threw me through a window once.”

Read me your writing, I ask.

“I’ve departed from imagistic school. But there was one image that used to preoccupy me yet.”

“There was this big white globular colony of maggots in a hayloft of a farm. When I was six or seven I remember the day it climbed up. I remember the sunlight coming through and I saw the blob, the halo of maggots, and I started thinking about how it was alive; it put a chill through me insomuch as I don’t know how it weaseled it’s way onto the farm. The thing that sort of brought me back to life was how I could see the beating of a man’s heart in his chest.”

Read me another, I say. I want images. Give me images. What haunts you?

“Ideas running into the framework of a conversation. I thought I told you how preoccupied I was with heaven emptying, and images of rivers spanning the world, cats eyes, things inside of things, but I am much more concerned with trying to communicate simple ideas with fidelity.”

Images, I ask.

“Diamond cut diamond; heaviness of snow and rain set out over the land
heart aches over people losing land for the first time. Fiction has you. ”

“I kill a rat: I find its leavings in the bedroom: its wet circle of urine on the blue counter pane. I kill it with a pool cube with all my weight grinding against the floor and it makes little cries for a long time. Years ago Mark and I hunted a mouse in the same room.”

A marked room, I think. Why do English majors insist on this dangerous separation as they try to take imagery from language? Even this imagery is stilted, like somebody afraid to write. Each word barely written for fear that it is not good enough. As if emotion cannot be felt through writing, as if it can be hidden if you make the depths cryptic enough. No, Parker, I can feel the the beady eyes of somebody peering out only looking at the beads of sweat forming underneath his brow. You said you saved shards of glass from the window because your father, your mother, and your brother would deny that it ever happened. You sound so sure of their denouncement, and yet you say you are pleased by your life now. Pleased is not the word you used, but I feel I know you well enough to put words in your mouth. After all, most words aren’t good enough, so perhaps you would be pleased that I took the time to decide for you.

“I was in the spirit of the lords day walking in the likeness of a man as he instructed me of a fear. I must have you for a time you and me together: we’ll accomplish this errand: it’s a matter of will, of volition: only you and your decisiveness can finish the job. How am i supposed to get out of here, I asked? Don’t fret as machines will carry us through. The inhumanely difficult lies with you.”

“It crawls with fevers, brain toxins- the minds electric chair and the beggars in my skin. The beastly man I became in my place, this abomination. The feelings twisting in the most itchy antichrist epilogue for their attack upon government- 8 million children on Ritalin- nothing exists that is easily reckoned. Nothing fenced is the single engraved drive; that sensuality of nothing is the zodiac seen through gargoyles reigned; transpired. Sandpaper with demented eyes. Purgatory can be known through the known exited links of the demarcated. This insailed huddled sanctuary. The night is the ball; a slight octupus of light with herded capsules. The tongue of this land is painful to hear. The disclosure fruit of abortive gun-making, the failed suicide repeated. ”

“The sweat of the father of men is a badger laughing without count. There is a father of man and he is laughing, he is a random cog for his pressured laughing are games of combination of ironies and diagnols and veins. The new values are outside, the combination knowing all things in that perfect information- talent touched by his talent of revolution with palimpsests looked here for small irony. People dwelt here in their antiquity counting money passed by amid new styles that laminate his games, all worlds and times and men within his days. Dream time passages brought about that palindromes wearingly will expose.”