Days and Nights in step
Flowering Trees wind that breathes
Ghost Shirt paint running.
Bob was a study in modern Americanism. He lived the actual way that one might expect the image of an aging working man to look, if one bothered to ever take the time to examine it.
His physical decline was more pronounced than with some, which was to say that it made sense for him to display his knee brace beneath his shorts as he kept climbing ladders and replacing swamp cooler motors well past the time he was able.
Aging is often hard, but tall ballcap wearing Bob seemed doubly stricken, as it wasn't just his condition, but his very luck, the substance of his decisions that fell from being sensible to stupid.
I remember hitting him up for a couple 15 amp fuses, which of course he overcharged me for. Bob looked at me the way a doctor would look at his patient who just admitted he was still smoking. “ You better figure out why those fuses blew. It could be a big problem, and I can't help you with that.” Maybe he thought he was instructing, but he was just trying to pull rank. That about sums up how we interacted.
I just nodded and payed up. I knew exactly why those fuses popped. The cause was already fixed, a problem that happened from following directions too closely, while overriding that all knowing inner voice.
Bob, however, if he had an inner voice, practiced ignoring it at all costs. He saw the entire world as something that could only be addressed with the trite and unimaginative directions of society. If anything veered off that script he would stand and blink, unable to find anything to say. Of course, this in itself is very modern American, the closing down of higher faculties, and embracing crazy and conflict ridden explanations. It is the collective solution promoted today.
Bob's profession was a residential handyman. This was how I met him, and why despite our glaring differences our paths intersected more than twice. Before the events herein covered, he would show up, be buisy working and leave like the breeze for months on end. Yet the story here really begins at its close, where his lifestyle lost all viability.
Handyman, jack of all trades, he actually did have some good ideas on how to make things work, cheats and ways to make the wrong tools do the right thing to complete the project. Yet when it came to his perspective on matters outside of his profession, he would stare vacantly, eyes wide and large before reciting all the standard slogans.
The usual slow shuffle into a life where age dictates that one can no longer master their accustomed place in society, became a plummet when he returned from Florida for the last time. Florida, Bob said, was where he would reside. He had a plan, and a new mail order bride on the plane from some corporate colonial non-western country. The fifth wife in line, fulfilling the American dream of serial monogamy. He was gone for less than a year before he came back in worse shape than ever, quite alone, to became yet another identity number, faceless employee sporting the day glow vest and on occaision wearing a holstered radio.
Bob never recovered, he just slid, scooting on whatever good will he could find, helpless in the grasp of his decline. Bob cut a hole in the outside wall of the house he rented so his dog could go out without him getting the door. That got him evicted in short order. He lost his job with the big box store, finding himself a camping trailer he parked in the tiny farming community down the road. No one seems to know what happened to the Canine, but my guess was he died.
The Ghost Dance in the American West was the end of individual aboriginal nations, of ways of life that were valid from the stone age, and still are but for Abrahamic Civilization. Undead Jesus on the march for assimilation, lead by the genocidal cross-dressing victims, pinch hit by those who pray for the day the last infidel falls away.
The dancers were inspired to make special shirts, depicting their sacred visions of happy ancestors in their clean, beautiful land, so close and so real, just step into it.
Whirlwind the Whirlwind
Whirlwind the Whirlwind
Snowy Earth comes gliding
Snowy Earth comes gliding
The Otherworld is real, so very very real. One can go into it, stay for what seems like forever. The Ghost Dance did not ethnically cleanse America of the white man, that job was left for a later, taitor government run by modern zenocrats who take to this task quite seriously. Some wishes remain wishes, some dreams stay dreams, some visions don't lend themselves to those wishes.
The word went out that the vision-shirts were more powerful than bullets. It spread like a DEW driven government fire, a demolition of trade center towers, a sad desire to stop the crazy tilt and the unstoppable slide of a world going away, a life ending.
It gets cold in the desert. The cold invades one's very core. It is a bottomless cold, one that isn't stopped by rocks or caves or for that matter, camping trailers.
It was after the procession of Saint Barbara, the Goddess assimilated by the church who wields her gleaming sword. Only three stars were visible in the inky sky. The phone rang, it was late, the hushed voices, human tragedy once more.
The next day was buzzing, details coming in with how they found him, so cold he wasn't shivvering, surrounded by beer cans, unmoving. Unbeknownst to those who packed him in the ambulance he had already donned his version of the Ghost Shirt.
“He is still alive” said the hopeful ones, looking like little Vishnus in their faith for the preservation of life.
“His son is coming down from Colorado.”
“They will meet at the hospital.”
I just shrugged. Its only human to hope for the best, but no Ghost Dance shirt ever stopped a whistling bullet, that was left to the body beneathe it.
When they moved Bob to the home, people were saying he had a bright future, playing cards at a table beside a window that let in the sun, warehoused with all the others who were now useless to a society that never knows an end to its raging hunger.
The Navajo have this belief, a kind of driver to much of their society. They don't talk about it glibly, just like its not polite to stare them in the eye. They say when someone dies they separate into parts, divide. People are born with a certain quantity of life force. Its like cornmeal, where some have two hands full, and others just a little. Once its eaten the person is gone. Whence they divide they leave something behind.
Draugr.
The ancestors had hair raising recollections of those hungry Ghosts who stalked the milpaths of the living. All too often it was their own people who bore the weight of their undead anger. They would abuse the goats and sheep, harass the living all night long, stalk the fields with a baleful presence.
Draugr were not all powerful, and so the dead were often buried with a great stone placed upon them, so that they could not wander, and cause all kinds of mischief.
The pre-christian European was not some simple, rather stupid duality of body and soul. Nor were they just body, as some try to say today. The person was made up of an array of characteristics, similar to the Navajo, more of a symphony than a drum solo, where some of the magic went to others, some were reborn, and there were those that would linger.
The ancestors saw people as these amazing manifestations. They were the trees, with their own language extending into all directions, including the stars. What we think today of Draugr is horror, yet I say wait one moment and just consider. It takes the entire person to be a living expression, yet suppose the love of life, the celebration of successes is too strong for one simply to relegate into the ocean of memory?
I think it then could be that the shade that remains does not go willingly.
Thus it is love that calls, that informs the dead walking. It is love that inhabits the actions of those who have died, whose very presence creates disturbance. That love can reach to and even bless others.
Uttisetta was the Germanic visionquest, where one would seek favour from the spirits, the ancestors. It was a custom throughout northern Europe, heavily stomped upon by the christians, the deranged burners of books and witches. Thus the ways of America were not so strange to those who came before us.
Modern society, confused by its political religions, has no idea about much of any of this, but they try. The lectures are unceasing, quoting passages in the mistranslated bible. Their latest child, Scientism demands you to believe when you die there is nothing, still the Navajo insist that when one dies they leave the worst of themselves behind in this world.
One thing is certain, there is no single explanation for the measure of mankind. Most don't have any real knowledge, its just a regurgitation of what they are told. They listen to perverts like Freud, or fantasizers like Stichin, they read the fictional account of an empire that never existed, of a people they have nothing in common with and name their children after them. When the moment of truth hits they are awash in terror, because the hope always was in someone else's projection.
The currents of modern society are upending. Many are in the grasp of faceless fears they obediently assign to politicians. Love struggles in untenable conditions. The comformity, expected to be comforting only brings deeper distress.
Thus it was quite remarkable that anyone noticed when Bob died.
Bob had reworked the kitchen plumbing, and replaced the old faucet, declaring that everything was brand new. He had put a lot of himself into that effort, and was proud of it, from the forgotten times of his being a residential handyman.
On the very day of Bob's end, that same kitchen faucet developed a horrible metallic cry, a loud gnashing grinding fingers on a blackboard impossible uncooperative unwillingness to work. Its new found sound was so unsettling that the homeowners soon called in a repairman.
The repairman was very good. He had his own special understanding of how things work that was and is a cut above.
He looked at the problem and shook his head, thinking maybe he could fix it with a rebuild kit. I just smiled because I knew the truth. It was dead Bob in his Ghost Shirt.
A number of times the faucet was subject to examination and effort, all to no good outcome, as the supposedly inanimate thing just protested having to serve the living in any capacity.
The condition continued. Immune to any external effect, any threat or exasperated mutter, the sound had settled in to a routine that could not be ignored.
Until one day I couldn't shake a funny feeling.
It was the sense of the forlorn.
A feeling of almost terrified grasping. I went for a long walk on the land, to a place where I often go, now with a giant bear turd mouldering slowly away on the trail. Ever below all of the contrived destruction and poison spraying planes of the deranged dominant society the natural world flows. Despite the roar of motors and blink of milimeter waves, one looking will find the Ioten in the crags silently gazing out upon the world they are dreaming into being.
One can often sense presence there, among the hills to look upon the mountainous vertical sloping land. I waited in the wind and the silence until I could feel this presence near.
It skipped over the stones, winding to the attention it received.
“Its okay, Bob”, I said to him in the language of the heart. “It really is. I get it, the uncertainty, the clutching. Nothing in your life prepared you for this, nothing in society, nothing in religion could help you, but you can trust what I'm going to tell you, if you wish to listen, for once.”
The wind whispered along through the naked branches of chemtrail killed trees.
The clouds stretched in slow motion across the dome of the heavens.
The shadows rested in silence, contrast, so real yet so fleeting.
The expectation was a slow hope off in the distance.
The sun was filtered, soft dry touch, just being.
The night was already awakening.
In security, a listening.
Okay, tell me.
Now.
In that eternal moment I said that no manner of grasping will secure eternity, and no fervent desire to be here as yourself can make it a reality. We are candles, and we burn for a while before making space for those candles that follow. It is this way, it has always been and if you stop for a moment you know this is true. This land of the physical that seems so real is in truth nothing we can hang onto, it is just one place to live, and that if you would go on and discover others, you will find out how good that can be.
Our conversation ended, and a strong hawk took to the sky, flying close as a sign. His strong wings took him into a position where he fixed the clothes wearing animal in his vision, before dipping and disappearing as fast as he had arisen.
The walk back was more of a stroll, a circle completed, a journey made. The faucet quickly returned to its usual function, the terrible protest and terror fading into memory, relieved, released from the heavy grasping. Bob was gone at last.
Silence.
Acceptance.
Never to linger.
The human condition.
Bob will be back, again and again, until enough credits are earned, for Graduation Day.
i really wish i could articulate but I'm tired and navigating things that rob me of higher function but i can say this is a multidimensional folding together of paradox and hidden worlds, subtleties of perception and every seemingly banal thing having fluid roots in the spirit of it all piece of writing that i thoroughly enjoyed and will stay with me for some time, bravo Mike