Death of a Ventriloquist

Four Planes of Experience

53 Four Planes of Experience 1. Reception & Contemplation Whenever I walk the dog at dusk, a certain silence of breath. Hitch-knot over an ear. My split condition: always cleaving, taking leave. The branches’ synaptic map, a wind within the wind. Two sawhorses say Fire & Rescue—how about no fire, no retinue needed? The maple that drops its green rather than submit to a long fall: preventative. At a certain age, certain slow-growth cancers occur in all patients. To consider this stand of pines is to will a screech owl who wakes at dusk to hunt its limits, the word pine a home calling in the shadow of its beak. Who hasn’t wished for greater returns from Benefits Services agents? Of course the hours proceed like this, fingers along suspicious moles, the splitting veins. Someone I know calls her hours of insomnia solving the problems of the world. 54 When I say world, I mean distance: me on one bank, you on the other, a rushing between that could be fire. When I say fire, I mean a slash and burn, ash circling in the black willows, a singing. 55 2. As It Happened Narration The dog (impatient, loafing) drops his ball and drops his ball and, sick of my staring, eats the millipedes that crawl out of the closet, where they are fucking and fucking nightly. I decide to take the dog for a walk and, as we enter the park, think, I bet this buffel grass was planted above a trove of fossils and graves, which is right about when I see the five screech owls unfurl and stretch. Long-lost cousins of the hawk, dusk hunters, they sweep through the willows, scan a field of asters and the gristle weeds. 56 3.1. Recall: Nostalgia The sun had been the perfect past of sun, before the earth was peopled and unpeopled and light coursed through its valley of hours and fell with matches and withering. From the blockhouse lookout, the ice rink sank its love songs into the hills around, and the elms, locusts, and hornbeams were listening, each grove switching, each tousled branch sifting north wind up along the paths running their tracks, cement and sand—all these songs converging on the old house of stone. Like any spring, the molting everywhere made eyewells pulse. Often nothing stayed still so I would stand until I could separate clicking squirrels from seed pods falling on slate. I recall you weren’t there and the dog was, but when I saw the owls and heard their machine whirrs, I remembered we were both early adults, two children who could talk to adults because they know that bodies (hamster, human) will stiffen— eight shushed in a year. 57 3.2. Recall: A Note on False Memories Atoms are not things, they are tendencies. Particles can be in multiple places at once—easier for a mind to fix them, say, at the park, having an epiphany. It is true at the sub-nuclear level we can be understood to be one: owls, pines, you, I. It is also true that addictions, say, to solitary revellings, are possible because we have dreamt of nothing better. 58 3.4. Recall: Gaps in the Record Around that time I was reading things like: The knights in the wood knew the moon never would cure their supersensual loneliness, and writing things like: Once in a while I let go of the brake, the late night conductor said easily. Or was that a previous spring? 59 4. Recording No logical system is free from inconsistency. If one has reeked of box wine, one knows this, or if you’ve had the woods stuck in your eye. Add to that that nothing existent is measurable except by slight collisions and flitterings imperceptible to senses, Henry Adams said, more or less. This is not to speak of facts (gilt-trimmed talons, for instance) left out. The issue with the you: she’s not the she exactly—more a sum of missing gears. In Minimalism Simplified Einstein says now depends on where you stand. Thus for the you who has a bulse of flints always on her person, the one here and not here, who listens to her old patients...