Emissary (III)

photo by T.R. Hummer

9/8/10

When I leave the house, I register the not-unexpected fact that the pile of bundled palm fronds is still where we left it. Bulk garbage pickup arrives when it arrives, and will be no more hurried than the gods or the weather. The fronds appear unchanged, but that is a fiction arising from the limits of my powers of perception. Expressions of the landscape, they hold their piece of ground.

*

My river, when I was a boy, was called the Noxubee, a Choctaw word that means “stinking waters.” It was turgid and muddy, which may have been reason enough for its name, but the Choctaw called it that because the river had become the repository of the corpses of a rival tribe they eliminated. Our brick plant and Ford dealership grew up on the site of a genocide. Cars crowded the river bridge on holidays as people came to town to celebrate and to worship. Under the bridge, the dead flowed away, winding through fertile farmland to the Tombigbee River and the Gulf of Mexico.

*

I enter the flow of traffic on I-10. There is a spectacular display of clouds and morning sunlight in the broad vista of desert sky that is so often monotonously empty. The harmonious complexity of it is almost dangerously distracting. The light has the elegiac tone that follows storms. How many of us there are on the highway in this overpopulated place, each corpuscular automobile traveling too fast toward an uncertain destination.

*

From the religious perspective, life is inevitably binary; time, so-called, is the visible side of an axis that rotates through two hemispheres: this life and some other. In the phenomenological variant, the axis of Being rotates us toward Nonbeing. Nobody knows what these ideas actually represent. Increasingly I think and rethink such thoughts with something like nostalgia, the echo of matters already long told farewell.

*

The cat in my lap purrs and growls with a mellow passion. She is Siamese, and so she is vocal. Her tiny heart is a knot of absolute love where humans are concerned—unlike many cats, she makes it clear that she actually and literally worships people—though if I were a mouse, she would reveal other depths. She is what she is in the very purest sense. Whatever her consciousness consists of, it abides with her forever, as far as she is concerned. To her, there is killing, but there is no death. I might as well read Heidegger to her as say farewell; either way, in my lap she is content.

*

The emissary has spent an eternity waiting for the Emperor to remember he exists, though he only arrived at the palace this morning. Time for the emissary is a problem—is indeed the only problem. Infinite resignation takes a long time. Giving up all one’s worldly possessions is a major administrative feat.

*

I pick up a book and read: “In the fifth century BC, according to Herodotus, the nomad Scythians ‘put all the flesh into an animal’s paunch, mix water with it, and boil it like that over the bone-fire. The bones burn very well, and the paunch easily contains all the meat once it has been stripped off. In this way an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself’” (Rea Tannahill, Food in History). I say a special farewell to my brother the ox. I am acquainted with his situation.

*

Thinking too long about death as a problem will unhinge a human mind. There is no solution to the problem, either pragmatic (how to avoid it) or metaphysical (how to explain it). But the problem is not death: the problem is the problem. It is not necessary to make the leap of faith, or to leap off a cliff. Death is many things--a mysterium tremendum, a void in consciousness, the blind spot toward which we tend--but it is not a problem, any more than the palm tree in the back yard is a problem. Once this corner is turned, it is possible to live again. It is possible to say farewell.

*

Determined by fate. Determined by history. Determined by gods. Determined by the body. Determined by language. Determined by silence. Determined by gender. Determined by gravity. Determined by helplessness. Determined by mastery. Determined by angels. Determined by capital. Determined by belatedness. Determined by the spine. Determined by race. Determined by light. Determined by everything. Determined by nothing. Determined. Determined. Despair is obscene. Therefore, like all obscenity it must be encoded: otherwise it is pornography. Farewell to all that, eventually, though not quite yet. It is almost—almost—time to move on.