#277

In fact, this was written some years ago, but I deem it requires little if no tinkering.

*

I was very excited to see real live horses. It would be my first time, and the pitch of my equine fever sustained me all the unbelievable span of the drive from Caracas to Los Llanos. My parents had arranged a stay at a finca out somewhere in the flat vastness, I don’t quite remember, but far from home, way out — not as far as going to the Andes, a reasonable ten-hour westward shot to Merida, or the truly long drive southeast to Canaima, past El Tigre, past Ciudad Bolívar, fourteen hours at least out to the realms of cloud and cascade— but long, especially for a little kid that had just gotten really into some kind of horse-racing cartoon and was writhing with constant anticipation to meet and ride one straight into a glorious, lifelong friendship marked by gallant adventures and dramatic triumphs.

Horses are phenomenal organisms, but they are not cartoons, and I was somewhat disappointed that there was no unbreakable bond secured upon eye contact, no profound and immediate understanding between fated partner-souls. I was very deeply, existentially disappointed, but I played it stoic; or, a three-year old’s version of stoic: wandering the hallways in unsmiling silence, running my fingers wistfully along the walls, and staring deeply into the liquid emerald of the half-full, algae-choked swimming tank by the side of the house, shadowed by low trees with long, waxy dark leaves that would drop heavily into the thick water.

Sometimes I see a very young person evincing a very particular solemnity, bathed in a ghostly, personal prevailing light, something ancient showing in their youthful features, and I remember how strange and quiet and terrible it was — those first few times reality had its graceless way with a powerful fantasy.

Each time I had to, I walked about ten feet away from the tails of the line of horses, tied to their long hitch, for I had been warned of their propensity for kicking, should they sense me within range, and been assured with due intensity that this was likely to result in my gruesome death. I felt ashamed of myself for my childishness. I looked down the row and pictured their skeletons, remembered the pages in our Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Ancient Creatures devoted to their ancestors, pictured my head smashed open and my blood spattering the fine yellow dust over the hard earth.

Pretended I liked the white-gray dappled horse best, because it was the closest in appearance to the white horse in the cartoon I liked. I gave it the same name as the cartoon horse, because it was something I had planned and was following through with in order to punish and console myself in one stroke.

Red howler monkeys would be calling, sonorous and mournful and immediate, long before the roosters engaged their gravelly shrills. They had me up before dawn each morning, and I began to go out onto the porch to try to get a glimpse of the monkeys, who sounded as though they were calling from the nearest branches of the copse of trees a hundred feet from the door. The old rancher told me they were calling from far away, that they were too shy to come so near to where men and horses lived. His son was old too. I do not remember what we ate. I was at an age when I would, given the choice, make a cheese sandwich or buttered noodles my meal three instances out of three; perhaps I even still partook of some formula with the nipple on the bottle.

The younger old man, the son, led me to the horse and placed me on the saddle. I felt unreal, emotionless — there was a kind of huge, reptilian fear at being suspended, twice, thrice, over and over, saddle over cloth over hide over muscle over bone, the nearness of an alien will with whom there had been no communication. I forced it down and followed directions carefully. I wanted it to stop, but I stayed silent. I had come this far expressly to ride a horse. To turn back would be babyish; worse, it would be rude, or, that most cardinal of all sins, ungrateful.

Relinquishing control of a situation has been a core part of my survival skillset for so long that it has assumed the sort of reflexive pride that constant use lends certain tools; one forgets that one ever existed without the tool, the incorrect and frustrating episodes before the tool came into one’s life seeming to have occurred to some other hapless caricature. It becomes embarrassing and feels unnecessary to remember a version of one’s self which was at any time unprepared to devise an exit strategy, unable to sauteé minced garlic and onion in shimmering fat from muscle memory, or daunted by the challenge of building a structure to safeguard the structural integrity of a raw egg, using only toothpicks and bonding agent.

Discernment! The mark of the civilized animal. I could not tell, at the time, how the old man could know that the monkeys were not nearby, invisible in the darkness, the density of the foliage. I had not heard one up close.

Stars at night, out there on the equator, hundreds of kilometers from any city — they made the world like a dark postage stamp, my body a distant little stem, the stars and my head fusing and swirling, a boiling explosion of blooming light, frothing hypercolor sailing, chorused roaring. Sometimes my mom would have to clap hard and scream my name to call me back to the world. Even years later.

Drank a draft of milk fresh from the cow, watched the hand coax it from the udder, watched it squirt into the pail. Tilted my head back and felt the warm slide down into me and set off a firework in my brain.

Out there, folks ride huge white oxen where the cracked hard land turns into a swamp, beasts with huge, backwards-sweeping humps on their backs, above the shoulders. Like riding a rolling marble mountain, your hands on the foothills, your head the eagle in a tight gyre.

Out there, what was fictional and expected, constructed, mythologized and made digestible, retreated in the face of what was real and incomprehensible, inconstructible, indigestible, irreducible, asymbolic, and therefore, protomythological. The cartoons had lied to me, yes; but the contradiction was far more unreal than the false premise. There were more dimensions than I had processing power to grapple with; the suggestion of more than stars hiding behind the vault of the night sky. A mystery that would overpower any myths that would make it soluble and finite; I sensed this, but could not process it. Put simply, I wondered, without language, what lay beyond heaven, and sealed my fate.

Out there I learned to begin learning the difference between what is learnable and what is true. I got to where I was able to ride a horse all by myself. Time morphed and split and shivered, and I thought about Orpheus and Eurydice as I spilled a little water in the dust and followed the trickle to see how it ran.

It was dismemberment, and it was reintegration. I saw my dead body on the ground, watched the standing water hold the rot, felt my living body with my fingertips, set water free upon the thirsty plain, amused the grownups with my good appetite and odd questions, pretended I was a ghost, stood more alone than I had ever been in my life and was penetrated by the Void.

Told the old men about how thin little Old Man Lightning shamed the Jaguar, proved he was stronger than the roaring, mighty jungle cat. They had heard the story before, of course, but laughed and praised my telling.

What matters is the telling. Fake, real; it’s all in the story. Lightning does not make noise. What sounds across the plain is the air superheating and exploding, not the lightning itself. No power can be greater than that which cannot be fought, that which exercises no will, that which desires nothing, cannot be prevented, foreseen precisely, touched.

Yes — true power is to be nothing, yet greater than all power. Immediate as death and as remote as heaven.

Only energy obeying itself unto entropy. A flash in the darkness, then nothing.

What does the flash illuminate? That’s the question, and the answer to it.

Of course, we cannot but be both, in most cases; the flesh and claw and panicked mortality of Jaguar and the inviolability and supernal prowess of Lightning, that Promethean Flame which illuminates and destroys.

When we got back to the city, back to our apartment on the ninth floor, back to my little playskool table with my little playskool chairs, I fell into the habit of sitting and looking out the window at the mountain that rose above the city to the north. I could stare out the window from my bed, as well, and began sleeping badly. I would concentrate as hard as I could on how it would feel to not exist, to “be” the sum of the components and materials that made up a car, or a fence, or a pane of glass; how it would feel to have your engine fire and to be the oil that ran through the mechanism, to have light pierce your molecular structure nigh-undisturbed, to be the photon slightly jostled by the glass, the pebble rolling down the mountain path, the shoe on a horse, the lightning rod.

To possess something other than my own body.

To eventually wear away to nothing.

*

Some style issues abound here that I prefer not to allow into my work these days, but there you have it. 

--JL