XV. Glendale Cemeteryfn1. Houston
Brady's Island.
1. The evidence of the senses says, "Meaningless!" Says,
"Mechanistic!" Says, "Finite!"
–Wild Man
* * *
2. Occam's Razor sometimes cuts too fine.
–Celia Celia
* * *
3. Tyrant ego reigns on the just and the unjust.
–Horny Teen
* * *
4. What, tyrant, do your beloved senses make of your and your ancestor's waffling about
the "size" of the universe? One age measures it in miles, the next, in light
years, the next, in parsecs.
–Mahalia
* * *
5. You hate nudity, tyrant, because you yourself, in the best fairy-tale tradition,
have no clothes. You reign naked but demand we pretend otherwise. You know nothing. You
taste nothing. If nothing lived, and died, and smelled, what a stench you would bring to
paradise.
–Hyundai Hunk
* * *
6. You consider the withered and withering body when you must, as often as you must.
Then immediately it's back to pretending death does not exist, which is truly the only
art, the only skill of which you are the perfect master.
–Wild Man
* * *
7. The earth round? The universe infinite? Something more to me than you? Of course
not. So you weave your infinite finite clothes, this fine fabric called culture, called
civilization, this natty net in which to catch and, for a while, hold us all, mostly
unsuspecting. And the few who suspect, unless they're very clever, meet the usual brutish
end of tyrant-enemies.
–Wild Man
* * *
8. How you fear the clothes-less states: dreams, sex, death.
–Wild Man
* * *
9. You, my broken mirror, the "God" of all cultures, are the true virus, the
one true filicidal parent, for you catch and then create and mold us all as children.
Where, exactly, are you? Within, under the earth perhaps? Lurking always, milking, sucking
dry, contented in your unchallenged tyranny? Or beyond beyond, an unprincipled puppet
master pulling unseen strings from unseen flies not even of this dimension?
–Wild Man
* * *
10. Is that why we were everywhere drawn to great, dark holes–the Sacred Well at
Chichen Itza, Delphos, and so on? Are you the light-fearing creature sliming about under
all rocks?
–Mr. Camp
* * *
11. Labels ever ready, your toadies scream, "Paranoia!" and get out the
hemlock, or the cross, or the iron maiden, or the courts, or the electrodes, or the pills.
Bulls. Capons. Who do not even know they have been castrated, so well-rewarded are they
with money or fame or power.
–Wild Man
* * *
12. The earth round?! No! Such insanity! Some unseen Other survive that withered and
stinking flesh after the end of breathing? No! Unless... you follow the strictures of the
Great Toady in the Sky, creation of lesser toadies below, he who says, "Come to me
all ye who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you peace as long as you give me ten
percent." A blood-sucking agent by any other name...
–Horny Teen
* * *
13. We are witnessed, we are helped, but not by little tin gods of little tin men in
shiny tin robes and tiny tin tabernacles, temples, tent, mosques, shrines, synagogues,
churches, cathedrals... O, we are helped wondrously if we but watch, listen, and learn to
wait.
–Wild Man
* * *
14. What comes, radically, is a taxonomy of events. Things are not what they seem.
Events are malleables–past, present, future. Some are hard, some soft. Some light,
some heavy. First we classify, then we develop the tools to move them about the chronic
landscape.
–Wild Man
* * *
15. What comes, radically, is a taxonomy of causality and retribution. A balance is
always struck. The final measure of maturity is the degree of awareness of that fact, and
the level of ability to act out of such awareness. The rest is silence.
–Wild Man
* * *
16. All art, all science, all religion is travel reportage. Handel and Caravaggio and
Moses and Jesus and Newton and Mohammad and Buddha all saw the same mountain.
–Mahalia
* * *
17. The great behavioral paradox: By learning to control the autonomic breath, we enter
the grander realm of cosmic playfulness.
–Wild Man
* * *
18. The gates of paradise do open for the occasional explorer.fn2 A glimpse, a visit gives solace and more. But we are
still here then, faced with the same on-going series of choices: to create or to destroy.
–Mahalia
* * *
19. As in the pasture, so on the road.
–Mud Flap.
* * *
20. To drive or not to drive. That is the question.
–Sugar Britches.
* * *
Glendale Notes
1The jokes stop here. The meaning
of Mailer's primitive necrophilia ("the naked and the dead") becomes clearer in
the New World's most magical spots.
2Later that night, in a
personal encounter on the Gulf Freeway, Mahalia admitted that she had been reading Emanuel
Swedenborg. As she climbed back in her cab-over, she looked down at me and said,
"It's surely no accident that he and Handel were contemporaries, or that Swedenborg
often visited London."