Indiana Jones and the Abyss: A Fragment

The Cast:

Harrison Ford: Professor Henry (Indiana) Jones, 38, archaeologist, adventurer, lover, our hero.

Karen Allen:    Miss Marion Ravenwood, 30, Indy’s love interest, us.
Paul Freeman: Dr. René Emile Belloq, 45, Indy’s nemesis, a villainous Frenchie, Time.
Musclemen and Mummies: The arms of clocks everywhere.

Marion! Marion. Listen to me.

Start anywhere. Pick anything. Random

paragraphs. Find one. Just read it. “He

reached the inner chamber of the tomb.

‘Osiris curses he—’ He? Whom? The key

cartouche was missing. A granite wound

grinned grotesquely at him. Hacked away.

Deliberately. And recently. René.

The stale aroma of a cigarette—

Gauloises—suggested the Frenchman.

His rival. Vandal. Yet. Amentophet

still lay in his sarcophagus—still band-

aged tightly; the mask the six bald priests had set

on Pharaoh’s face almost four thousand

years ago rested on the young king’s brow—

still glittering, still golden. Nothing stolen. Now,

Why? Stubble growing through a scar

irritated Indiana’s chin.

He scratched it with his flashlight. On the far

wall there appeared a royal procession:

Four horses led a chariot. War.

Conquest. Famine. Death. He was certain

this predated the Apocalypse

of St. John. A whistle passed his lips...”

No! Try again. Wrong episode.

If we weren’t busy over an abyss

I would explain it all. It’s hard to hold

a lecture swinging on a whip like this.

Trust me. Just trust me. Somewhere—down the road—

we will get back to Pharaoh and Osiris.

Look, Honey, if you wanted to know more,

you really should have read the script before

you took the part. So, try to focus. Try.

We’re clinging to existence by a thread.

Everybody knows we’re going to die

before we are finished. So, skip ahead,

past where René will ask me, “Why?

Why do you waste your life among the dead,

Professor, excavating legends—stones—

to sit in some Museum? Doctor Jones,

exactly what do you get out of it?

An evening in Byzantium? A tan?

Americans. Tourists. Buffoons. You love it:

how love runs through your lives just like this sand

runs through my fingers. Shall I prove it?

How useful love is to a dying man?

Look. Two identical canteens. One full

of water. This one—empty—love. All

you have to do—untie his mouth—is choose.

Choose one canteen and then we seal you in.

If you select the water, you will lose.

If you pick love, then, I will see you win.

I guarantee a postcard marked ‘Toulouse’

conveying your—affection—for Marion

will be arriving in Nepal next week.

Choose wisely, Indiana. Let him speak…”

 

 

 

 

The Cashier

Before I go any further, I have a Statement to make to that cute Cashier, which may also be of some interest to the general Reader. I freely acknowledge a Self-Interested Motive in turning philosophickal here. One turns thoughtful toward the End of Life. Sometimes at the Beginning. Occasionally, too, in medias res, while buying Condoms at Duane-Reade, one looks forward toward the End. Sometimes, also, the Register closes, and the cute Cashier suddenly steps out for a Smoke, or a Trip to Taco Bell, and one is forced—along with hundreds of other Customers—into another Line—the only Line now open—the one manned by a nymphomaniac Gorgon—and a Return to the Beginning. This last Circumstance is what the bony Indian Fakir regards as his Reward for a Life of patient Self-Destruction, Reincarnation. This is what we in the more corpulent Lands of Christendom presently call, Hell. It is this Hellacious Present that I am most concerned with Here. The Present is what makes me think that my Fifteen Seconds of Fame at Duane-Reade might be the ideal Juncture in Time to interject a Detail—relate an Anecdote—tell a Story—that will illuminate—I hope not as an Epitaph—one or two Aspects of the Chaos which orders Human Life. From one Angle, I know, the following Remarks will read like a Fruit Salad. From another, they will appear as clear as Clotted Cream. I am coming to Terms with my Limitations. I am over 40, and the Truth of the Situation is hard to bear. As Mr. Eliot suggests, we cannot endure too much Reality. And the Reality for me is that I cannot endure too much Mr. Eliot. I know that eventually I will reach the Cash Register. Despite the best Efforts of Mr. Pound, “The Wasteland” will forever remain mired in the miserable muck of Passchendaele, a hopeless Mess. So, we shall pass over “The Wasteland”, as we pass over the Twentieth Century, as the Fragrance of Mountain Sage passes over a Prairie Cowpat. How do I justify this Journey? Easily. Time passes. Or, in the later and more learned Words of Mr. Eliot, “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future…” They are indeed, Sir. Because, you see, that Cute Cashier only popped out for a Pee. He actually returned from the Toilet to this Poem about 150 Words ago, not long after the Gorgon arrived. They are now standing side by side and things are moving in parallel very fast. I would have told you earlier, but I had to finish my Thought: all parallel Lines converge at Infinity. And the next lucky Customer in one of those Lines is you. Or me.

Light

Light is like cement:

Light really doesn’t care

About the sky’s intent.

Light is simply there.

Powdery as talcum,

Or piled high like snow,

At Herculaneum,

We watch it overflow

Empires and forts,

Footprints in the bath,

Leaving knowledge, of sorts.

Light is all we have.

Performance Piece

As you might have noticed, I am writing a sort of autobiographical novella called, A Child’s Encyclopedia, in real time. I say “sort of” because I cannot completely vouch for the veracity of all of the events depicted here. Some may have been tinted by time. The story is about the house I grew up in North Tonawanda, NY and how I came to lose it.

Now and then disconnected sentences or paragraphs from it pop-up on Facebook. For reasons too complicated to go into here, I have no personal research materials (no interviews, no photos, no diaries, no letters, no newspaper clippings, no scrapbooks, no et ceteras) from which to reconstruct the first few years of my life. Everyone depicted is dead in one way or another. Including me. In a way. I am relying entirely on my own memories and occasional trips to Google to research obituary dates.

Why am I doing this? For fun, mostly. I am sure you have heard of those peculiar people (mostly men) who memorize baseball statistics and who are able to reconstruct whole games in their heads based entirely on numbers. I like to do something similar with images in my life: remembering a helicopter seed whirling down from a maple during a solar eclipse in 1973, the amount of force I used to crush a cigarette during a tense telephone conversation, the cloudy gray binding of a translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils I happened to glance over and see—spread open like a dead moth the floor—just at the point of climax one delirious afternoon in Harlem. This is how I waste my time waiting for trains.

But since it seems a tragedy to let all of this imaginative exercise go to waste, I thought I would start writing these things down.

What I noticed when I began to jot them down is that these odd images began to tell a story that I had not noticed at the time I was living through the events themselves, only in retrospect. I then asked myself the question: was I imposing some kind of order on the past or was the past imposing some kind of order on me? What actually was going on in my surroundings during that eclipse? How come I didn’t close my eyes in Harlem and lose myself utterly in the experience? Is there any coherent explanation for what is going on?

Yes and no.

I think the fundamental problem here is one of perspective—how events appear in isolation and broadly and collectively over time. What we mistake for the foreground in one era dissolves into the background of another. Comedy and Tragedy can occupy the exactly the same place in space and time, it seems to me, without the fabric of reality being torn apart in a gigantic anti-matter explosion.

The only variable I can perceive is the lighting. Some days are grainier and rainier than others. We are always in different places when the Sun and Earth collide. Comedy and Tragedy are not. They are wherever we are. In a way, I think that it is in the eyes of a child that we can see reality reflected the best. Not for sentimental reasons, of course—not because childhood is some golden land of innocence and opportunity—it isn’t for most us—only because childhood is the period in our lives least structured by experience. Everything seems so vivid and fresh.

For evolutionary reasons relating to survival, memories are laid down on multiple tracks in the brain at this time: skinned knees hurt more, the movement of slugs is mesmerizing and moss is a million times more emerald than emeralds. We do not yet know how to discriminate what is useful knowledge and what is not. Sometimes I am not sure I ever really learned to discriminate. Everything seems pretty important to me even at 43. Though paler. A scintilla more ghostly.

So, I have decided to compress my entire life—the most intense extremes of color and experience I have ever known—into the narrow space of a few years and test my theory about Comedy and Tragedy, space and time.

I intend to revel in my metaphorical isolation and reach out with prose simultaneously. I want to do something different in this book. I am writing it for a little girl who just recently turned 5. Right now the words I write are meaningless to her. A rainbow pair of socks made in China means more to her, I suspect, than the collective works of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare combined. As they should. Forever may they do so.

I will not always be here to send her pairs of socks and discuss the inhabitants, flora and fauna of Mars, unfortunately. She may have to settle for Shakespeare eventually. Or some good-hearted but misguided astronomer like Percival Lowell, the man who mapped the extensive network of non-existent canals on Mars. She may do something unexpected entirely. One could do worse, I suppose, than wake up a dreamer. We all learn to make do.

Even now, she is beginning to doubt that Santa has transferred his operations to Mars from the North Pole. She has been talking up Saturn, which worries me enormously. Eventually, I fear, Santa will move out of the solar system completely and effectively cease to exist. As will her crazy uncle. These things happen.

But the socks will remain, I trust, for a year or so, until they wear out. Memories of the texture of their threads will intertwine with this book. How she looks at those socks and how she reads my face later, she will compare to the younger person she talked to on Skype, the hat she tried on at a diner, a vacation we will take with her parents. I will look different, she will look different, the socks will fit differently, everything will be different. In fact, you might say that everything is already in flux and has been since I picked up my pen. Everything is already happening right now: the past is becoming the future the future the past with every word I write. That is the funny thing about time.

When I am finished, I am going to copy everything out in long hand in a Moleskine notebook (probably two) and give it to her as a present, with another pair of mismatched socks. I hope to do this in time for her 6th birthday, next year.

The book will still be unreadable, of course. Mismatched socks may well be out of fashion by next year. She may make a face at my gift. If she does, I will make a face back at her: because I know for a fact that those socks are going to be popular again. I have seen it happen over and over in the fashion industry. Things always come back into into style, even if only for a season. There is no reason for it. These things just happen.

Some are very lovely.

Henry A. Norris

Horologist
1906-1970

Maybe the best relationships
are based on little lies.
I know you had a shop,
I know you repaired watches,
dad showed me your workbench:

a bright light up above,
below, a field of felt—
—Elysian fields, maybe—
a million little drawers
full of tiny, shiny parts

that would keep better time.
I see this all quite vividly—
down to the oil atomizer
wearing chain mail.
I told him I remembered

sharing cookies with you.
I was 2 the year you died.
I lied. It would have killed him
to hear the truth. So, I shared
cookies with my grandfather.

I think you’d understand
the great necessity of lies
in love. In art. The spring,
the perfect movement, moment,
the whole idea of time.

So, let this be our secret.
I have no memory of
your cookies or your face.
But every line I write
today contains your name.

I saw it on your workbench.
There it shall remain.

How To Write A Romance: Backwards

For Gavin


Time is non-linear. Cause and effect
Reflect a thoughtless habit. There’s no law
Which says when you or I begin a book
We can’t start writing it from the rear-end.

True, there are Physicists who may object;
They might suggest that we have stacked the deck
In favor of a certain outcome. Well,
Perhaps we have. But what is wrong with that?

We’re poets, not professors, you and me,
A pair of horny homosexuals, crazed
With lust. We were not born to gather dust
Or chew up books in basements, like a rat.

I’m glad you started munching on my butt—
By butt, I mean those photographs I sent—
Instead of slowly plodding through my whole
Biography to understand me. Now,

The poetry awaits discovery:
The scent of citrus soap combined with sweat,
The tangy taste of something on your tongue
Implicit in those naked pictures. No,

Nothing is pre-ordained. You take that chance.
You asked me to remove my underpants.
I did. Then we continued writing, knowing
Exactly how the story would turn out.

Terra Incognita

Today is one of those days of...

I am not sure what. You run the vacuum, you mop the floor, you fold the laundry, perhaps you boil seven large eggs, and three of them burst, frothing the pot all over the stove, but you never quite get to making the egg salad for your sandwiches for the week.

Perhaps you try hanging the new calendar you got for Christmas, and in some fashion acknowledge the passage of time. It looks lovely. Ancient maps of the world. You flip through it: months and months, pregnant with interesting possibilities. June 9th, for instance. That's a Monday, in 2008. Who knows what will happen then? Perhaps it is the day your lottery numbers come up. Perhaps it will just be warm and beautiful.

And, look here, closer to home: your trip to Houston on February 1st. You have never been to Houston. Nice. Something new. Barbecue. And yet...

The light doesn't seem quite right. The sun is too orange today. The angle is wrong. It is still setting too early. And then there is work tomorrow. The train. Emerging at 1:30 for luncheon. You will have the poached salmon, for a change. Emerging at 5:30 to exercise. 2 hours, and 1000 calories later, you spend 10 minutes in the steam room. The 8:07 home.

All of the elements of satisfaction are there. All arranged neatly into rows, and columns: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.. And yet, looking out over the kitchen sink, into the back yard, how gray and neglected the bowl of the birdbath looks this afternoon. Even that cardinal in the dogwood, cocking his head querelously at you, looks gray in this light!

...

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.