The Rake Magazine

Good lord, the stars, the dusty, glimmering sprawl above some dark, quiet place in America, the stardust, star-scatter, the worlds stretched up there above this one.

Remember? Remember standing on a gravel road in Vermont --along a big river in a Montana valley, on a dock jutting out into a lake in the Adirondacks, at the edge of the ocean in Oregon-- watching stars shake loose and heave themselves down the sky? Remember standing in the damp country in Michigan, in Minnesota, in Iowa, in Illinois, watching fireflies wheel and tumble above the black fields?

I remember.

I also remember --where the hell was it?-- the old man wobbling aboard a bicycle who emerged like a vision through the ground fog, paused to wish us a good evening, and quoted Thucydides: "They have the numbers; we the heights."

I remember the wind whistling through open car windows and the hum-thumpa-hum of tires on the pavement of dark highways and music carrying in the darkness and the bright lights of carnival rides whirling on the horizon and days and nights so permeated with wonder that they leeched the words right out of me and left every letter of the alphabet in fuzzed and uselessly abstract isolation fluttering from a clothesline stretched across the roof of my skull while backyard sprinklers shook their maracas up and down the block of my old neighborhood and I drifted all night at the margins of sleep.

What explanation is given for the phosphorous light

That you, as boy, went out to catch

When summer dusk turned to night.

You caught the fire-flies, put them in a jar,

Careful to let in the air,

Then you fed them dandelions, unsure

Of what such small and fleeting things

Need, and when

Their light grew dim, you

Let them go.

There is no explanation for the fire

That burns in our bodies

Or the desire that grows, again and again,

So that we must move toward each other

In the dark.

We have no wings.

We are ordinary people, doing ordinary things.

The story can be told on rice paper.

There is a lantern, a mountain, whatever

We can remember.

Hiroshige's landscape is so soft.

What child, woman, would not want to go out

Into that dark, and be caught,

And caught again, by you?

Let these pictures of the floating world go on

Forever, but when

This light must flicker out, catch me,

Give me whatever a child imagines

To keep me aglow, then

Let me go.

--Siv Cedering, "Ukiyo-E"

Source materials for the project at hand, whatever it is, and whatever it might yet be: Grimm's Fairy Tales; Hans Christian Andersen; William Graham Sumner's Folkways; Frazer's The Golden Bough; Mythology (Graves, Bulfinch, Hamilton, etc.); the Icelandic Sagas and Norse myths; The Odyssey and The Iliad; The Aeneid; Ovid's Metamorphoses; The Divine Comedy; James Brown; Little Nemo in Slumberland; Goethe's Faust; Skip James; Shakespeare; the fables of La Fontaine; Tacitus; the stories of Chekhov; George Herriman's Krazy Kat; The Koran; The Bible; Jay Robert Nash's Bloodletters and Badmen; Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; Hank Williams; Butler's Lives of the Saints; Suetonius' Twelve Caesars; August Sander's People of the 20th Century; Cellarius' Atlas of the Heavens; Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; Dale Pendell's Pharmako/Poeia; Louis Charbonneau-Lassay's The Bestiary of Christ; Frans Masereel, Passionate Journey; Lempriere's Classical Dictionary; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; The Oxford Unabridged Dictionary; Aristotle; Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine; Alan Lomax's The Folk Songs of North America; The Book of Fabulous Beasts; Mad magazine; The Thousand and One Nights; Flann O'Brien; Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook; Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project; Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music; Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language; Plutarch's Lives; Jay's Journal of Anomalies; Robert Frank's The Americans; Mabille's Mirror of the Marvelous; Kafka's Complete Stories and Parables; Paracelsus; Paradise Lost; William Blake; Alberto Manguel's Dictionary of Imaginary Places; Eudora Welty; In the Night Kitchen; Tex Avery; Goodbye Babylon; The Elements of Style; William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience; Aesop's Fables; Sun Ra; Borges; Hesiod's The Works and Days; St. Clair McKelney, True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality; Carl Jung; King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; E...T...C....

Because you ask things like what the hell? and why?

Because I guess you want to know.

Because I joined up with the Amish after my dad decided it would make a man of me and it was either that or go to work at my grandfather's automobile dealership and I knew damn well that I couldn't sell cars if my soul depended on it, and I didn't want to believe that it did.

Because I got kicked out of the Amish after just eight months, ostensibly for dropping one too many F-bombs and being royally pissed about the no television rule.

Because I have to admit that my beard was pretty shitty and they were some serious customers and I was in way over my head right from the start and didn't have the slightest idea they were going to make me read the Bible all the time and work like a mule --the whack costumes, yes, I knew about those, but you don't know how ridiculous and uncomfortable that shit is until you actually have to wear it-- and let's just say I wasn't the happiest camper and so wasn't inclined to be terribly cooperative.

Because when they realized how essentially worthless I was when it came to stumbling around behind horses in fields and trying to build stuff without any power tools, etc. they made me go out to sell quilts and honey by the side of the road with the women, all of whom, I'm pretty sure, were forbidden to speak to me.

Because they didn't speak to me at any rate.

Because at that point, snubbed by a bunch of girls in widow-granny dresses and bonnets, I said, Fuck this noise, apparently a bit too forcefully, or apparently once too often.

Because getting kicked out of the Amish was the best thing that ever happened to me, although I still hold out hope that something even better than that will eventually happen to me.

Because I'm starting to read philosophy.

And because, really, what choice do I have?

That's why.

I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to say. I have absolutely no idea. I can't even begin to imagine. I'm speechless.

Seriously, words fail me.

The cat's got my tongue. I'm tongue-tied. There is nothing on the tip of my tongue. I can't explain. I have no comment. I'm at a complete loss for words. There is apparently no ax to break up the frozen sea within me, assuming there even is a frozen sea within me, and I honestly have no reason to believe this to be the case.

It's like this, do you understand? Do you understand what 'like this' means? Can you even imagine what 'this' means in the present context?

I can't. I guess I can tell you that much.

So, listen to me: I've got nothing for you. The English language has become a puzzle to me. I can't seem to find the right word, never mind the right words.

I do know that when I say 'like this,' or even just 'this,' I'm referring to a crisis. I don't, unfortunately, (as I'm trying to explain) have any words to explain this crisis.

It strikes me as some kind of miracle that I have been able to dredge up from someplace a word like 'crisis,' or a word like 'miracle' or, holy shit, 'dredge.'

At this point such words represent major discoveries. Seeing them mysteriously appear on the page beneath my pen is like watching an entirely new continent surface in the middle of the ocean.

As such, I must say (and I must say, I must say, I must, helplessly, say), they leave me dazzled. Wholly dazzled, and delighted, which is more, so much more, than I have any right to expect given my present frame of mind.