ampersands in the air

from the aviation museum in Ottawa:

onset / continue

{this is a companion piece to The Wild Lands}

The group by the river moved in tandem, a mass of chaos demonstrating the order of infinite possibility, slowly gathering into distinct subgroups, nothing reminiscent of a line or roll call, but the sense of purposefully being in one place as opposed to another. The strange perspective of looking westward down a hill at dusk obscured the vanishing point, made it difficult to triangulate if there were large people far away or small people quite close by, but something in the restless energy implied the presence of children: the buzzing activity of small bodies enlivened by constant movement.

If they were children, they might be perfectly harmless, a gathering by the river for an afternoon picnic, they might be affiliated with adults who could provide helpful insight into where this place was, and how best to get elsewhere. Yet groups of children may be feral as well as tame: they may be in revolt from the order of the adult universe, and just as eager to send one on a detour through a vast desert, or towards an alligator nesting ground or a military test site. Or they may be cherubic emblems of innocence personified: they may listen quietly while adults confer on directions, only to guilelessly share information about a stranger with their parents at dinnertime.

And there are so many ways to experience the treachery of adults, the unwelcome trespass of strangers upon their lands. One can be escorted out by bullets or dogs, or a particularly vengeful group may decide to hunt for the interlopers under cover of darkness, all inadvertently revealed by a child's tale of a school picnic. For that was what it seemed to be, more than any other potential gathering, and while it would undoubtedly be a safer group than the same number of adults, the chance of misfortune was still too high to risk.

Walking along the ridge of the hill provided light and orientation in the late afternoon, but it was also likely to provide one or two particularly observant children with a story of dark travelers silhouetted on the hilltop; and there was always a dangerous chance that these reports would be believed. So we moved further into the shadow of the far side of the hill, as eager to not be seen as to not become lost, and set to make a fire, make tea while we waited for the group below us to return to their homes.

Our travels had not progressed badly, in that none of our number had become ill, or left us; we had not been attacked by any wild creature, although the questioning suspicion in the eyes of fellow men made us hesitate. Was it always the lot of the pilgrim to be feared, almost despised, by those non-pilgrims encountered upon the way? We had no way of knowing; we had never before been in these lands, we had never undertaken such a journey. We wondered if they feared we brought plague, or war, or coveted their lands for ourselves, and in their eyes we saw the desperate hold of the hopeless upon that which they have been given. None offered us apples from their orchard or lodging in their barns; but we could see their fear and their poverty, and we did not begrudge them this inhospitality.

The days continued to shorten, and if we hoped to arrive as we had planned, then our travel must take place not only under the thin winter skies but also in the embrace of the night, although we had no lanterns and the moon was an unreliable companion. Yet in deference to the fears of the tenant farmers we stayed well clear of their fields, and when we saw the outlines of towns on the horizon, we wound ever more cautiously around the outskirts. The towns were few in number, at unexpected intervals, at least in relation to the path we kept. Without getting dangerously close, it was impossible to tell what manner of establishment lurked beyond the town gates, or over the bridge so proudly graced with statues and carvings.

It was tempting, sorely tempting, to wait until an approaching market day and enter the towns with all of the tradesmen and farmers, but we knew no good could come of such a plan. We were so numerous, so obviously outsiders, clothed all in black robes and possessing none of whatever currency they traded, with nothing to barter in stead. We did not juggle or tumble or perform theatricals or play any type of musical themes that could be considered entertainment: we were only notable as a curiosity, as not being part of them, and without anything to offer in turn we could only inspire fear. To this was added the importance of our pilgrimage, the primacy of continuing on to our destination and our promised future, yet even the constant fire in our souls felt the waverings of curiosity. 

For we had seen the animals in this strange land, and the animals welcomed us, guided us with their paths and their footprints, and we could not comprehend the difference of welcome from the human inhabitants, whose lives seemed so desperate. When we looked upon one another, we did not see wild animals, we did not see invaders or pillagers or thieves: we saw sincere and simple travelers, clothed in black, but without weapons or ill-intent. For weeks, thus, we walked on the outskirts of society, following the trail of deer and bears and mountain lions, feasting when we could fish or found crops in the forest, remaining distant from humankind.

It was growing more difficult, though, this aloofness, as the nights lengthened, the towns seemed ever closer together; as we traveled, our purpose and resolve wavered with the curiosity and homesickness when society grew close. The children by the river were a sign of where we could not go: and if this was something which we remained too pious to mention to our fellows, it was still keenly felt in our souls. The magic of the place we had entered was growing thinner, weaker, and while we still felt the expectation of purpose, it was not as strong a pull away from all we had left behind. If spring were to arrive, the warm breezes with the scent of the future, the dandelions in their brightly textured glory, the songs of the butterflies able to be heard in the silence between footfalls: these would have fed our hearts, and our hopes, seduced us into remaining faithful to our journey.

Instead, the nights lengthened, the Milky Way grew brighter, the daytime sun seemed ever dimmer in its efforts, and we wavered, as does every believer who has ever followed the path of righteousness. Yet as we wavered in our belief, the landscape around us grew dimmer, danker, less fertile; the wild animals less populous, the humans ever less welcoming. There were soon two opposing viewpoints where before there had been only camaraderie: that our lack of faith was dimming the landscape, that as we lost our own inherent sense of purpose the land would grow ever more unwelcoming; and that our spirits only reflected the darkness of the geology, that through maintaining our journey, all would be right in the end.

Between the metaphysical creators and the perseverers was a third group, who, as the days wore on, became braver, more vocal, in seeking to escape from the pilgrimage. If going home was truly impossible, the least we could do to save our health and sanity was to establish a new home, here. As these arguments grew more heated, I began to look in the eyes of the settlers we encountered, to see if in each suspicious and closed gaze was the broken spirit of a failed pilgrim, and if it was not that they feared we would harm them, but that they feared becoming wanderers again, in an unending winter in an inhospitable land.

Where, I wondered, were we to meet the Black Queen who had summoned us here; how, with all the detours and circumnavigations of our travels, was our destination to become apparent? In my faith in the Black Queen to end the waxing winter I did not waver, but I could adopt neither the philosophy nor the fatalism of my fellow travelers. That night, after the final campfire was dampened, I became the first deserter, the first breaker of ranks, determined to meet the dangers of the pilgrimage alone, regardless of threats of death or insanity. That I would now be shunned by both my fellow pilgrims and by the natives did not worry me, nor could I take responsibility for causing a mass desertion amongst the other travelers. Each of us was responsible for our own soul, and as I traveled deeper into the wilderness I felt only the promise of the resumed journey, and none of the fear.

reading
The Big Roads : the untold story of the engineers, visionaries, and trailblazers who created the American superhighways / Earl Swift

weather
yet more and more and more and more and more rain

matter / antimatter

The bag contained no more than was absolutely necessary.

There was a map, which was unfortunately later determined to be a map of the wrong place and from the wrong time, but it was nice to have the map for reference, regardless.

There was a pen, and the pen almost always wrote, although sometimes to get it to start it had to be scratched quickly back and forth on some rough paper, even though I never really understood why that was.

There was a little notebook with a flexible spine and a nifty elastic band holding it closed, and I had bought the little notebook in a fit of inspirational passion -- here was a place for all of my ideas to go, jotted together at odd moments, jumbled elegantly for future access. The little notebook with its nifty elastic remained stubbornly blank, my name on the flyleaf the only mark, pages cannibalized from it to write out notes to give to strangers, but it was never a repository, only a source for sending things away. My moments of universal insight and truth continued to be recorded at random on the backs of envelopes, electric bills, and documents that I had intended to shred, and then inevitably lost, the universe claiming its truths back to itself.

The bag held currency in small change matching the legal tender of several countries, and even though I never sorted, counted, or organized the money, there always seemed to be just enough of whatever was required to procure an emergency cup of coffee in transit.

There was a driver's license and a passport, neither with flattering photographs and both still valid for the better part of a decade, and there was the in-case-of-emergency-only business card with a special direct line phone number that I had never called, knew I would never call, and yet could not bring myself to throw away.

The other bits of essential elements were neither noteworthy or extraordinary, although the essentials that the bag was somehow missing were just as notable as those it contained. Since they were conspicuous by their absence in the bag, they do not need to be gathered here; suffice to note that a corkscrew, a compass, and a box of Band-Aids should all three belong part and parcel with any collection of necessary items, or all is lost at the start.

When the journey began, we knew none of this. What we knew was that it was not to be a long undertaking, a day-trip at the most, that all details would be attended to and that directions would be provided. This was the usual remit, and after almost five years working for this courier service, there was no need to anticipate any unusual situation. Rule number one was ask no questions. Rule number two was pack light. There were no further rules.

I was happy with this arrangement; we traveled in pairs, but as I never inquired why, I had assumed it was for safety, or high value items requiring additional eyes, but thought no more of it. My regular partner had been with the company from the start, or so he claimed, but I didn't particularly care one way or another and soon he stopped trying to tell me stories of back in the day. None of my business, none of my responsibility. I had taken the job because it left a lot of free time, those millions of moments left idle in transit could be reduced down, compacted, and really mean something, and I valued moments more than any earthly good. My little notebook may have stayed empty and my salvaged envelopes may have disappeared back into the bowels of the universe, but I knew those moments were gathering together in my gut, and that they were coalescing into something astounding.

So this job didn't seem like it would be any different, full of empty moments and missing any further details, except when I showed up to get the directions and find my partner, things weren't as they had been. My partner wasn't there. That was fine; I hadn't liked the guy, but I hadn't needed to like the guy, either. It's easier to do a job and guard empty moments if a partner just takes up physical space, doesn't demand any mental presence. The replacement partner, though, I could tell was going to be a problem. I know rule number one as well as any employee, but it took all my self control not to hurtle into the manager's office and ask some very pointed questions.

My new partner was neither more nor less than a brain in a jar, and at first I thought it was some preserved Victorian relic that belonged on the shelf between the phrenology skull and the pickled cucumbers. Then I realized that it wasn't in formaldehyde, but in some super-brain electrolyte juice, and there was a lithium battery attached to the base of the jar, and it was bubbling away in some type of hyped-up carbonated Gatorade. There are plenty of uses for Mason jars and lithium batteries, but that wasn't one I was particularly keen on, especially if it was to be my partner. Thankfully, I had, as always, obeyed rule number two and packed light, so I stuck the brain out of the way in my bag, picked up the directives for the job, and found the delivery neatly wrapped in brown paper, assuming that the only variation in the routine was the change in partner, to a type of non-partner.

Maybe they were cutting back, times being what they were, and I could just carry on as I always had. Except as I drove, reveling in all the generous empty space of my uninterrupted moments owing to the non-physical presence of my partner, I realized something was happening. It was hard to describe, at first, how it felt like something was knocking on my mind, because there was no actual, external sound. It felt like being poked just above the ears, a tapping, tapping, but there was no real noise to match it. There was no external feeling of being touched, and I had a momentary panic of driving along in a car and having a stroke or seizure and not being able to control the car, losing my life and failing with the delivery, too.

If I had had a real partner with me, we could have pulled over, him taking over the driving while I found some industrial strength pain killers to help out; then suddenly there was a voice. It was in my head, and whether it was loud on purpose to make a point or loud on accident on account of not knowing the acoustics of the mind was of no account, because now to stroke and / or seizure I could add schizophrenia, even though my family had been sound of mind and body for generations, no loonies in our attics.

Then I realized that it was the voice of my old partner; it didn't sound like him, without vocal cords or a chest cavity to sound like anyone, but the words were his words, that was how he was in a conversation. Except now he had invaded my mental moments, and if there was one thing I valued as dearly as life or sanity, it was those idle moments that I was gathering together and were now being taken from me. I thought about what I could do, what management would pass a blind eye over or what they would send me to purgatory for, and then I decided it didn't matter, I didn't care, and I pulled off at one of those roadside scenic vistas and hurled that jar as hard as I could down the hillside.  Maybe it would have been kinder to disconnect the lithium battery first, like putting a sick animal to sleep at the vet's, but I didn't want to be kind, I wanted that brain to feel every rock and every bump  until the Mason jar cracked and exploded on the rocks below.

A few miles down the road I picked up a hitchhiker, since every courier needs a partner, and he didn't say much and I didn't say much, but when I dropped him off at a bus station two hundred miles further down the road, I realized the neatly wrapped package in brown paper had somehow disappeared, in that space between having a partner and having a hitchhiker and arriving in the city. The directions for the job were still there, printed as they had been before, taped to the dashboard of the car, but the text started to move and change before my eyes, and I didn't like what it was going to tell me.

I left the car, parked illegally by a highway overpass, and ran to catch a bus in this city I had never been in before, know that all I could do was get away, disappear. That my bag contained only what was absolutely necessary made the escape more efficient, but in the labyrinth of my journey away from my fate, I realized just how much I had forgotten to pack.

weather
Indian summer followed by storms

reading
great article on gender expectations and norms in the Atlantic

Valley News

(1) Currently in debate in the Senate, the casino bill that just won't die. The area senators support it, but perhaps you could let them know their opinions are misguided.

http://gazettenet.com/2011/10/05/casino-in-valley-could-prove-039a-local-disaster039
"It is inconceivable that the short-term tax benefits of making a change on this scale, which would provide a minimum of three destination casinos throughout Massachusetts, can possibly be justified in terms of their much greater social, economic, and environmental costs. That such a creation could happen, quite literally, in our backyard, with no community feedback or input, can only be described as horrifying."
http://www.malegislature.gov/People/CityList

(2) In happier news, I'm in an upcoming group show at  Paper City:

all things in time

The last place I saw him, things weren't going so well. He had had one or five too many and had found an old banjo behind the bar, and next thing you know he's standing on that bar, strumming that banjo with a wail that could skin a cat. You've never seen anything like it, him so obviously out of his mind with drink and at a total separation from every last one of his inhibitions, but there on that bar he's totally unaware that one slip in a puddle of beer and his head could open clean as a ripe cantaloupe.

Now most people were thinking the worst when he went and found that banjo and gave us an impromptu concert there with our beers and whiskey sours, and you'd be thinking that ain't Julliard up there on the bar, but here's the thing: that was Julliard. Sure, he couldn't sing worth a damn, his voice was all scratched and raw and he couldn't match a tune if it sat on his head, but, man, that was some banjo playing like I haven't heard since my grandpa died forty-five years ago now. So if you could just ignore the hideous screeching of his voice and pay attention to what he did with the instrument, your mind reeled. I'd known him for a good twenty years and had never heard him so much as play chopsticks on the piano, but after that event at the bar I got to talking to his old lady and found out that he was conservatory trained with all the performance halls in Europe back in the day, and who would've thought it of him, the guy with the perpetual three day beard and shirts that were missing a few buttons?

Hell, I remember when he brought in a ten dollar roll of quarters and filled up the juke box to the gills and set it to playing nothing but Unchained Melody for the rest of the night, nothing the bartender could do about it, though it round about killed business by nine that evening. There are only so many plucked chords even the ignorant can stomach, and you would think that a real honest to god musician would never bother pulling such a cheap trick. But he stayed there all night, listening to the song loop and loop, and staring down at the condensation rings on the bar. If he ever thought to look for that recording again, he would have had a good long search, because it was thrown out first thing the next morning.

I wasn't sure about the events leading up to the Unchained Melody incident -- some things are best not to ask about -- and the truth is I'm not too sure about the events leading up to the banjo on the bar incident, either. Hell, I've lived here my whole life and I didn't even know there was a banjo behind the bar, so my knowledge of the situation can best be described as unreliable.

He hadn't been looking any worse that usual, lately; his three days of beard didn't seem either more unkempt or more tidy, his shirts didn't seem either more crumpled or less distressed. With a guy like that you can't really tell if you talk to him if he just hasn't had his coffee yet or if his dog just got hit by a truck. The general consensus was that he had been born on a day when the sun didn't rise and he had never learned how to smile. Not anything you could blame him for, him not being a Pollyanna isn't anybody's fault, but it made it right near impossible to puzzle out if he was about to put a pistol to his forehead or if he was reading the Sunday funnies.

That week hadn't been much different, he had just been his usual reliably downtrodden self, and had kept to his usual haunts and destinations. There didn't seem any likelihood of any type of noteworthy event. That night nothing out of the ordinary happened, no weird political or global economic shit, no gossip around town other than the usual two bits about how the editor at the paper was having an affair with the chair of the planning board, some questions about if the new high school was really going to be built on an EPA brownfield site, a possibly wholly fictitious piece of news that involved the mayor and the town auditor in a money laundering scheme, but none of this was the type of stuff that would cause a man to drown his sorrows and then sing as if the hounds of hell were on his tail.

The only thing I heard was that his ex-wife had just got out of maximum security and was hunting him down, and that was just ridiculous. Given his age and his particulars he must have married some rising diva at his own ripe Romeo and Juliet age of sixteen, tops, and she must have been all of nineteen or twenty when they put her away for delusional schizophrenia, and I just don't buy it. Him being a fancy pants musician, sure, we all did stuff back when we were young and didn't know any better. But that batshit crazy ex-wife story is all a little too Victorian Gothic for my taste. It was absolutely absurd with the Brontë sisters and it doesn't make any more sense now that they've got all sorts of pharmaceutical hocus pocus, and what kid gets married these days when it's all fine and dandy to shack up?

But whatever happened it must have been something, because it was just a Tuesday evening and we were waiting for autumn to start and talking about finally putting together a competitive season for darts, given how much practice we were all getting, anyway, we might as well keep official score and maybe pitch in to buy the league winner a drink at the end of three months of something. Next thing you know he's starting off with a bluegrass heavy Amazing Grace, and his voice could crack mirrors but he damn well knew all four verses, there was no humming along to feel out the melody, even though he has never been seen to even attend a roast beef dinner at the church. He just kept going, too, from Gospel spirituals through drinking songs with a couple of labor protest numbers thrown in, in the grand folk tradition, before heading into some of the soggiest ballads that have ever been written.

Round about an hour into this involuntary concert he threw in a few Rogers and Hart numbers, before settling back in for the strangest blend of torch songs and a back catalog of spirituals that would put the combined states of Dixie to shame. His voice kept getting worse and worse, even though he seemed to be trying harder and harder to sing the right notes, but his work on the finger board was nothing short of extraordinary. I've said it as often as anyone, that all it takes to play the banjo is two teeth and a thumb, but this guy could make that thing fly.

We were all entranced, equally pained and astounded by an event that was preposterous, horrifying, and gorgeous; and we must have all been paralyzed or hypnotized or something, because when he all of a sudden threw the banjo back towards the dishwasher and catapulted himself off the bar and out the door, none of us said a word. No one tried to restrain him or follow him, and no one could think of anything to say to break the silence for a long few minutes. Then someone knocked over a glass, and the shattering of it on the floor woke us out of our stupor, but that's the last we've seen of him.

He disappeared without a trace, and even though we found his old beat up car just where he always parked it and we searched the woods near town and we thought about dredging the river but who has the money for that these days, but no footprint or sighting ever came our way. I don't know what happened, if he hitchhiked out on the interstate or if some secret woman was waiting for him with a car or if he's gone into hiding somewhere that we just haven't looked, but there's all sorts of stories about town these days. Myself, well, we haven't seen the last of him, I don't think, but it might be a month of Sundays maybe before he returns.

reading
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children / Ransom Riggs

weather
first frost