Silent Avowals

Bread for the Stick Man

Sleeping Woman, photo, Artists Collection, copyright MK’26

Out upon his way, Nomad, the lone traveler traversed the heavens. In the ancient way of seeing this great expanse was Night herself, yet in the modern sense it would be described as space.

The expanse of Night herself gave birth to the luminaries, and the line of cloud and tiny lights which is no longer visible due to the plethora of enslaved electrical glows was the river of milk from the Cosmic Cow that nourished the very first sound, the root vibration that would eventually become a place for people.

It was through this vastness, the ocean, that Nomad the lone traveler moved, not with struggle, nor with protest, simply naturally. Right side up, and up side down were not a feature of the journey, for everything experienced, everything perceived was oriented according to his own sensibility.

Striving was not in the motion. Effort was not in the vocabulary. Neither size or speed entered the equation. Everything was present. Everything immanent arose so sweetly, so spontaneously from the feminine expanse who was Night.

Without time, or sense of self, Nomad the lone traveler experienced the truth of the present as the only window of observation of the unity of the observed and the observer, as a fullness and an expression of the universe.

Off in the distance, somewhere on the left, a slightly less dark nebula coalesced in the deeper darkness, coming into the form as the head of a dog. Dog head it was, then clearly delineated against the soft glow of a bank of stars. The head turned, or so it seemed, to cast a gaze in the lone traveler's direction…or was it beyond him? Was there something he did not perceive moving behind him?

The question grew, and with it a sense of wonder. What else, what significant other could be occupying this lonely expanse of space?

A thought then crossed his consciousness. It was not the chatter that builds the stressed out human world from the great Thought Beam, the one everyone connects to like a grid. It was a deeper and more meaningful sense of center.

In the modern world where guilt is weapon, religion pins it victims, and politics are force fed lies, there is very little change of position. You are the gibbering center as soon as you can be made to exchange genuine experience for word based concepts that are bought and sold. You are then through black magic sewn into the description that you and you alone are your own eternal, unique, Descartes derived center.

Non-transferable

Doomed forever to one point of view

Where try as you might you will be forced

To pay taxes to support your own demise.

Nott here, she whispers in the lone traveler's ear, wordless and silent yet pregnant with promise. The lone traveler too was her son, and so how could She do aught but give him suggestions that break his suppositions and move his definitions beyond the cold levers of control?

“Listen!”

“Listen!”

“Listen!”

The waves of the cosmic ocean became the firmament from which everything sprang. It was a dance of shadows, of clouds, wind and rain. The lone traveler discovered the nebulous Doberman head, became him, and waited to see what he would perceive.

They said to the stick man who was made from the refuse of trees that the sticks were his identity and to never try to question this declaration.

Ever.

Yet here, flowing through the no up or down place with only the swirling lights of stars and nebulae to break up the depths of Mother Nights’ embrace, here there were no sticks to find. No form with which to build a body. No wish for it, either, only the flow without temperature, without desire.

The ties to center are never released through violence. It was simply the notion, purely the motion for the lone traveler to allow a larger perspective. His single figure in the long dark coat seemed to stand in the corner of a very wide vision. Within was the recognition that the darkly clad stick figure had once housed his essential nature.

No breath was taken.

No imagination happened.

His focus just traveled across immensity to where the dog head arose from the cosmic cloud, the one that beheld him. The lone traveler became the dog head, only with a start to realize all of a sudden, that it had no eyes with which to see. The dog head was only a wave upon a vast horizon. All stretched before and around in every direction. As a center the dog head was only a point that could be taken, a form convenient, an apparition.

Nomad the lone traveler savored his loss of identity, his surrender of his fascination with things. A strange sorrow suddenly took him over, a melancholy that echoes beyond the sadness of realization.

The land that stretches between the Nueces River and the Central Mountains has a long and especially violent history, even for America. The Comanches drove their slaves over the windblown grama grass plain, those whom they didn't torture and kill with all kinds of creative and inhuman innovations. Empires fought and died over its control. Archaeologists have declared it ground zero for the development of a new weapon, and biologists have grudgingly concluded that it was this innovation, the Clovis point, that drove a number of great American creatures into extinction, including the Mammoth, long before Europeans arrived. There are stories of huge rattlesnakes, ghosts of buffalo, tinted with a distant memory of stone and adobe towers built for defense against enemies seen and imagined. It was never a welcoming land for agriculture, nor will it ever be, but for a while it was home for the barons of animal husbandry and the prototypical cowboy.

No one living there now seems to remember, or even much care about the wide, vast landscape of time that invisibly stretches across the arid expanses of this once hotly contested territory. The noise and blinding flashes of modern life, the fiction woven by artificial events too far removed from common sense, asymmetrically presented by the media have seen to that quite nicely.

Yet when the Dust Devils settle upon their haunches, and the Prairie Wolves fall silent, beyond the lights of city borders there is almost a feeling, a personality here of hard struggle, where the modern world is revealed as a thin veneer, fragile and untenable, an all too temporary condition that no matter how hard modern people wish, is inescapable. Here in the extreme conditions where towns stand as islands in the harsh desert ocean, there is little to no sense of transcendence. Rather, it is the raw force of the land itself, and its endless patience, that promises to modernity the same fate as the Comanches.

The Barons came from the class of the Patrones. They wore their fine clothes and fielded the best equipment. Yet it was rarely they who took to tending to the brutal dangerous work of running the herd. That work, the hard work under the raging sun was done by men who were paid all too little, lived long hours in the saddle, their blood thinned by relentless heat and clouded water.

Perhaps it could be said that the spirit of the land infected the souls of the ferocious bovines that made the long journey from Spain. They quickly learned to use their curved horns against wildcat and man alike. Few could stand against them. Even fewer would ever try.

Franco and Javier were not their actual names. No one remembers what their parents dubbed them. Their stories, like so many, are told by those who never knew them, and soon enough will fade away entirely. Already the old ways of living are only somewhat preserved in museums. It is always this way on the implacable desert plain. The land gets a notion, wants to play with different toys, and calls to different people to fulfill its tendencies.

Perched on horseback, they rode up to a hacienda one day, wearing the pale dust of the road that clung to their faces and their horses. It was one of the Patrones’ daughters who met them. She like so many high born Spanish women was unafraid of strangers, even those who carried rifles in scabbards and moved like they knew how to use them.

The stars aligned that day. Destiny was set. The words of the daughter convinced her father that two more hands would be welcome to drive the herd to the pasture where the cull would be made, and beef would be harvested for the winter.

It soon became clear however, that the new hires were round pegs in square sockets. Javier was thin, and his calloused hands were far too big, almost comical upon his stick like arms. Fast, yes, he was very fast, so fast that the Castellan dialect he spoke sounded arrogant, lisping to their untrained ears. His taciturn nature would prevent him from explaining most anything. He was quiet, bordering on silent, answering questions, when he bothered to, with nods and gestures.

Franco was a Mestizo, most likely his mother was of Los Indios, and his father, the men would joke, took a fast ship back to Europe as soon as he saw him. Franco’s eyes were black as coal, and beady, staring out from caverns hidden by round cheeks and over a mustache that made him look like he was eternally sneering.

The men at first were hazing them, but a group kept on long after such rituals served any purpose. It became a habit, a show of rooster feathers, a routine. The spirit of the land was infectious. Spirit has no patience with delicacy. It wants a hard, brutal struggle. It laughs at the stars in the night sky who work to bring it civilization.

Together Franco and Javier, despite differences, made an excellent team. They could break the steers threatening crazy stampedes and horn charges that could be deadly. Their ropes never entangled and the comical hands of Javier were always there with a fast loop around the haunches of any steer that escaped Franco's clutches.

No one, no matter how cruel their taunts, doubted for a moment that they were anything but good at what they were doing. At night though the gang had gotten used to their sport of taunting. Javier and Franco would sit further away from the fire, their drinks clutched in their hands, their heads down, sombreros covering everything above their worn, once colourful jackets, unmoving, unanswering.

Javier, despite being an excellent horseman, had his number come up one dry, hot afternoon. Spirit of the land that raises poisonous snakes and barbed cactus grew bored with the unanswered nightly cruelty. Javier was thrown entirely clear of his mount, which somehow stepped wrongly and crashed to the earth, landing hard and at speed. His horse proved unable to stand thereafter, and for Javier as well it just was over. He died there, in a broken pile, the spirit of the land guzzling down the loose life force. A gunshot rang out, echoing over the land and his horse followed him. Lives taken once again in violence, no transfiguration, no resurrection.

Franco saw him buried, and as for his saddle and his rifle they were sent back to the Patrone and his daughters. Perhaps they could find a relative for his few belongings.

It may be that one would think that the gang would perhaps relent, give Franco at least a moment to mourn his best and only friend, but if anything with only one target left, they doubled down on their mocking. Abusers rarely can make any accurate call regarding when too far is too far, and ‘compassion' in the sunburnt land where torture and disfigurement were entertainment…why that word simply didn’t exist. Regardless Franco worked alone, and while his roping was competent, it often missed a step without the anchor of Javier to bolster him.

One fine day the herd was moving along the river, less than a weekend away from the culling pasture. It was a bit of a surprise, requiring some fancy equestrian skills to get away from him. In a muddy bottom a great black bull had set up territory. His charge was barely avoided. He was huge and feral and so the decision was made to drive the herd away from him. It would be a longer jaunt, but far safer than having to take on the angry giant in his enclosure. Franco was given the task of guarding the flank of the herd closest to the fearsome beast’s lair.

The detour involved broken land, boulders and defiles and all kinds of places steers would scatter into. In the demanding work of the day, no one noticed that Franco was missing. With the herd finally in open pasture, the exhausted hands gathered for a meal, only then to discover their favourite target wasn’t with them.

Three men who rarely took part in the taunting volunteered to look for him. The one in the lead had that sickening feeling, and headed to the dread giants lair, his rifle loaded and at the ready.

They found Franco fixed in his saddle, his head bobbing brokenly upon his shoulders. The braided serpent, Franco's signature rope had somehow coiled around his neck, and in the battle, had snapped it cleanly. The rope led to the black giant, who had a tip broken off from one of his deadly horns. The giants right foreleg was held fast in the coils. Blowing through mud caked nostrils, mostly immobilized by Franco’s toss, his ferocious stare was baleful and unrelenting, until the rifle shot caught him and dropped him into the dirt that had already seen so much pain and blood, always eager for more.

No one thinks about the cattle Barons of the Nueces any longer, and certainly no one remembers the hard and cruel men who made their fortunes possible. Certainly amongst them, no one remembers Javier and Franco. Their bones have long since become the earth, and the mystery of all existence neither judges or condemns them.

I woke up from oblivion suddenly. I've done this quadrillion times, and it no longer bothers me, to be in another world with no memory. Pete was standing there, in his usual way, hoodie beneathe a beat up jeans jacket. We both knew he was dead, and he appeared to be significantly younger than on the day he left for good.

We were in his place, sort of. It felt like his place, dark as night, but with a bizarre luminescence. He was telling me, as a friend, that his estate was soon moving into the final phase of liquidation and it wouldn't be his place for much longer. The world of the living was moving on, yet he was still here.

I really wasn't sure how to think about any of this, although what he told me about his estate later proved to be spot on. I figured that maybe since death had ended our longish friendship, he was here to offer a summation of that experience.

Pete, when he was alive, was always rail thin. His hands complemented his profile, in perfect proportion, which was telling, because it carried over into everything he did. He was one of the very few people I knew who was genuinely eccentric, doing extremely odd things so naturally that he never had to try.

At one point Pete had come upon a stash of ceramic tiles and paints. He hit upon the idea of doing demos at the local studio tour. The only hitch was that to set the paint required heat. No problem, Pete had his own propane torch that shot out an 8” long blue flame and worked like a charm.

Of course, Pete didn’t waste breath explaining the process to any curious would be participants. They could figure it out. I was standing next to him at his makeshift table when one unsuspecting victim had completed their piece. As quick as lightning, Pete had his torch out, bathing the tile in flesh searing heat. The would be artist jumped back in terror, obviously shaken. Pete’s only response was to offer deadpan instruction to let the piece cool before taking it home.

Of course Pete didn’t think any of it was odd or strange, which maybe was one reason we were friends. Hindsight always being perfectly clear, I probably should have asked him a few questions, or at least wished him well on his journey, or something, but when he was telling me I was a good friend I just left. I couldn’t take it.

Bread for the stick man, he won’t need much to maintain his thin measure. Built of sticks woven together it doesn’t seem that he has what it takes to withstand the forces of this cosmos, yet he endures, not so much individually, but certainly as a type, an expression of something greater.

Perhaps in those moments when the silence finally emerges beyond the buzzing of endless thinking it becomes a solid proposition to propose that people are as emergent as the waves in the ocean, and as fleeting.

So much in this modern society is a weird kind of sickness, the twisted games of power. The ideologues still want you convinced that their version of things is going to bring the world to some kind of wondrous state, when it never has, not in anyone’s memory, and certainly not since the arrival of abrahamism.

So I wonder, how anyone who has no idea about the depths of reality , the mysteries of being and not being, of the endless expanse of silence, or the slightest sense of the flow of life can pretend to put their finger on anything that ails us.

The cure for the modern illness doesn’t lie in more manipulation, more injections, more interventions, more surveillance, more rare earth minerals, or more religion. If any of this actually helped, things would be getting better, not worse.

If there is any antidote at all, which is very much an open question, it lies in embracing the mystery of who we are.