In the gauzy memory of my childhood bedroom there is the
specter of a lion. The lint from two decades ago floats listlessly through the
air, collecting on the screen of the wood panel television, and glinting in the
ripened light from the window of my reverie, after billowing from the corduroy
beanbag chair. In the mess of checkered sheets suggesting ancient geographies
there is a creature who slumbers regally upon the phantom of my trundle bed,
wearing the lofty beatitudes as a crown and dreaming of vast empathies in the
harbors of night. And lost in the ether of remote acquisitions, he can never
sense the sharpness in an interval of time; the transient butterflies have
returned to their steads. And with such a multifarious drama to swarm above his
crystalline head, he has forgotten his volatile physical form and the gravid
sorrows of watery faces.
You couldn’t help dying any more than you could accept the
draconian terms that the industry offered, the meaningless trinkets on
spray-painted altars and the shame in the hearts of the mannequin martyrs; the
cloying devices of sainted directors who could not love the candor of your
skillful incisions. You were meant to wear medals for obscure acts of valor and
be fabled in reverent listening sessions.
In the almost twenty years since you left in a sunburst you
have grown to encompass an entire dimension, which is more than the legacy of
your brooding persona and can never be mimicked or otherwise cheapened, where
dinosaurs catechize Sunday school teachers and bury their riddles in the Garden
of Eden, where the bloodthirsty elephants are all on the run and the lizard
people no longer worship the sun.
Where we never had to bring another fireworks show to a
peasantry armed with conventional guns, but we shocked them with lines of attritional
prose for increasing the sadness of their reticent slums. So they had no choice
but to offer a truce. And the waffle waitresses were studying Proust. And I
wonder whose gum they were chewing that day, when the flying saucers came down
to take you away.
Honestly, Bill, I don’t know whether I’m sadder at the fact
that the frauds still thrive while Fascisti attack, that cubic zirconium is
touted as gold, or that genuine diamonds get weary and old, and abscond with
their brilliance in a flourish of gray, to the deep dark waters of Arizona Bay.
And sadly, I don’t believe for a second that you are somehow
able to hear a word I say, but nothing really ends in this big blooming
universe, or begins for that matter, and we meet in the middle, and at least I
can take some comfort in the fact that in the grand scheme of things I know
very little. I know what compels me to wear the regalia of an artist or someone
with valid pretensions, to cut through the cumbersome Gordian knots and defeat
the guerillas of cherished opinion, so I’m keeping your spirit right here in my
workspace and I won’t give you up to divine apparitions, or the litanies sung
by anonymous clerics who live in the grandeur of faraway steeples.
Posts
