There is a Christian poem on the cork-board beside the refrigerator. It conveys an experience of a beach walker who finds solace from the idea of Jesus pacing beside him, who merges the two worlds and
finds companionship. He is a Buddha. I am not capable of this merger. I can not see the invisible so clearly. Jason thumb-tacked the poem to the board right before he left. He told Mary to read it when she felt lonely. She thinks of Jason when she reads it and smiles.
Jason believed that the old American steel workers had it made. They worked twelve hours, went home, ate, kicked the other guy out of bed, climbed in and slept until the cycle started over. Nothing to do with satisfaction, with fulfillment. It is these concepts which destroy us, which produce loneliness. Jason was profound, but the long-shift was no carefree life. Despair arises from no time to despair. Mary’s two uncles worked in the mills. One, blind drunk on whiskey, fell down twenty-four concrete stairs––a pebble over the falls; the other cracked his head on a low beam and pushed a broom on the night shift until he dropped off, like an apple in a windstorm, before he ripened. The ignorant are not blessed. No one is blessed. Mary disagrees.
Mother phoned me before loneliness fully enveloped me, back when enduring seemed possible, even likely. She said she needed to talk about Jason. She said she had never called a parent before, that most of her contacts were from the parentless, from the phone booths of emptiness, from the void, but that Jason was eccentric for an old man, extraordinary for an adult, unbelievable as a child. I listened to the voice in my ear, still unclear of its origin. Beth was dead. The dead have no need for phones.
They have no one to call. Yet Mother continued. Jason is a philosopher, a theologian, a metaphysician. Jason understands. He knows your struggles. He knows Mary’s struggles. He understands loneliness like a wave understands the sea. He knows that some fruit is never harvested. He knows that glaciers creep slower than the watched clock. He knows that despair is woven into Nature’s blanket. He knows why I sit here beside my phone. These intuitions his father ignores, he says. He says his father will not let go, will not drop his dukes, will not allow things to be. Jason is right, Mother told me. She said she knew it before he told her. She said she knew she would one day make such a call. She said she knew the call would be futile, in vain, but necessary, like the warm spell in January, bound to do more harm than good, yet completely right. Mary does not connect to you, she said. Mary needs a soul-mate, a kindred-spirit, she said. Mary will never live through the fighting, she said. Still I wondered who this voice belonged to, yet I could not ask, she knew me, and I knew that somewhere deep within my being, I knew her, that I once lived in her belly, in her mind, in her soul. She said Mary was fortunate to have Jason. She said I did not know Jason. She said time interferes, that she could have loved Jason, that Jason was her yang, that people are often born too many years apart to meet their missing links, that loneliness was this. Then Mother was gone.
For every gorge in the visible world, there is a mountain in the invisible world. When humans descend into canyons, they climb the mountains of the Buddha land. This is why Mount Everest is so lonely, this is why the summit is the base, why apexes are heavy. I now know this also. It was not apparent to me until many years after Mary left. Leaving me sparring in an empty ring, a flower with no petals, a mirror which does not reflect. I had to stop fighting then. I had to understand the inevitable. I had to surrender.
Grief glues us together, but the sea water soon dissolves all binding, leaving loneliness. Jason called me when Sonny died. Mary and I reunited then, but it did not last. She was higher then, but still George lived on, and our levels differed too much. We pretended for a time that we understood. We played charades in
the dark. We lit candles in every room to celebrate the sunshine. We ran naked around Walden Pond at night, and made love beside the rock pile. How silly we were. People as high as we should have known better. Yet we choose to climb down for a time, to re-create Beth and Drummer and Sonny and Lottie, to be their children once more, to forget all we understood, to pretend love was real, lasting, eternal, to forget Jason, to forget careers, lifestyles, philosophies. One can only forget for a short time. The memory is impossible to erase, and no matter how many dams are constructed, eventually the levees break, and the frolic is washed under twenty miles of loneliness.
A grown-child’s room is a museum of an age never to return. It is evolution. It is the billions of stars in the sky, all seeming to shine at once, yet a reminder of the confusion of time, the deception of
it all. In Jason's room is a baseball card collection. A music poster is thumb-tacked to the wall. A blue spread covers his mattress. In his desk drawer are remnants of papers and pencil stubs, but in the back of the bottom drawer, crinkled and dried, fragile, is a hand-written note in faded ink:
Mother is always home.
705-476-2210
Sometimes at night, I call Mother. She does not answer anymore. The phone just rings and rings. I hang up after fifteen rings and try again every thirty minutes until I am too tired to remember. Just the number, the dialing, the potential is enough sometimes. Drummer never knew that. I know that now.
George still lives. He will live on and on, he is the lama, he will never die.
No comments:
Post a Comment