Tag: fiction

LoVe

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

The craving sets in; a consuming desire to sate the insatiate.

I lash at the sky, biting the very wind scoring my heart.

It tells me that what I have, I shall forever hold dear.

I have love: she who holds me in darkest night.

I who hold her, in sleeping wakefulness.

I feel it radiate, this yearning so deep.

The ineffable.

The inexpressible.

As lonely as a train call pealing forth in the wilderness.

Stark eyed in midnight lightning.

Yet how do I describe?

I love her. She reaches to me. Lips lush soft rain dropping on my skin.

She lifts me outside of myself, holding a mirror gesturing lovingly – entering inhabiting the cold stranger peering back.

Tendrils of hair, earth on bare feet.

The heat of thunder drumming the summer dark.

This feeling is here.

Everywhere.

I taste it on my lips, succored like electric honey.

My tongue, washing as nectar down a desert throat.

I long to tell it to the world.

I long to share its glory – gospel leaves falling everywhere.

The theatre of my mind applauds its just reward.

I love her.

I love.

Her.

On Melville’s Pierre

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I have been rereading Hershel Parker’s foreword to his “Kraken” edition of Pierre. There is a compelling story of a man (Melville) driven to the brink of pure unmitigated creation on the heels of Moby-Dick, but also he is in near servitude having to pay back debts.

The letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne spills out the purity of his intent, where his mind was at and how it ultimately clashed with the marketplace.

His June 1851 letter to Hawthorne is premonitious of where the direction of his life and art were going… nowhere, at least in his lifetime:


“I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now. My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”

Melville is writing for himself here . . . his horse-out-of-the-stall barnstorm of prose assaults the unsuspecting mid-19th century reader and baffles the critics. They label him “crazy.”

Melville’s rendering of a bucolic setting is at once unsettling and calming:

“Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly becomes conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.”

It conjures Ralph Waldo Emerson, or some such transcendentalist-type with tree-stump for a pulpit musings all a-prayer under a Concord canopy of firs and pines.

No sooner than the Emersonian vibes subside than Shakespeare is roused:

“The verdant trance lay far and wide; and through it nothing came but the brindled kine, dreamily wandering to their pastures, followed, not driven, by ruddy-cheeked, white-footed boys.”

It’s Melvillean prose poetic in its import, elucidated with certainty:

The verdant trance
lay far and wide;
and through it nothing came
but the brindled kine,
dreamily wandering to their pastures,
followed, not driven,
by ruddy-cheeked,
white-footed
boys.

For me, if the book made no sense at all, its the reality-TV thrill of Melville throwing caution to the four winds in an act of intellectual rebellion. Its Melville pissing on the marketplace. Moby-Dick was his catharsis, expelling the whirlwinds of grief and hate and proclaiming to Nathaniel Hawthorne that he was now “spotless as a lamb” after having written a “wicked book.” If only we could all undergo such radical self-therapy! Melville, self-medicated by the tempestuous whims of his artistry! Begone Valium and Paxil! Open the mind and your ass will follow… the mad earnest scribbles at the end of his beard, page after page with his door locked against domestic disturbances.

In light of this, Melville sensed with a third-eye approach the encroaching clouds of “annihilation.” Visionaries like him were not long for this world and are typically doomed to obscurity or death, or both. Certainly Melville the square peg did not fit in a country hell-bent to spearhead the world in its brick-by-brick construct of industrialism. So, in 1856, he is blunt, honest and forthright to literary comrade, Nathaniel Hawthorne: “I have pretty much made up my mind to be annihilated.”

It is an annihilation long overdue, stemming from an inflexible personal moral conflict (the same that haunted Jack Kerouac, and who saw comfort in Melville’s mindset during the writing of Pierre in the disastrous critical aftermath of Moby-Dick, when Kerouac came to his own creative crossroads sitting in a VA bed in Brooklyn, hiding from an ex-wife seeking a paternal blood test and after having written his long-scroll version of On the Road in April ’51 and now on the verge of cresting his creative solution in “sketching” resulting in his masterpiece, Visions of Cody).

What am I writing then in this blog missive? A fan letter to Herman Melville?

This is the loin-rushing thrill of a young man (or woman) excitedly extolling the aesthetic merits of a new beau . . . this is the same thrill Kerouac found in Melville’s staunch selfishness in writing for his own mind and not for the book stalls of the Victorian marketplace. This is relief and calm, that it all makes sense now after the Dostoyevskian bloodletting resulting in the kind of writing best suited for absinthe hangovers. Melville finds solace in Shakespeare and takes him in both arms as he plunges deep where only “krakens” dare to swim, in the unblinking dark of the hell-hound depths.

There is a back history that I could never hope to relay as eloquently and fresh-eyed as Hershel Parker does in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (I can’t recommend a book highly enough and that he has my name in his acknowledgments only binds me evermore to greatness!). Chapter 3’s “Entangled By Pierre” says it all.

Parker is entranced as a young man in the greatness of Pierre, not at a polished mahogany desk in a stifling hot classroom, but on the “naked polished linoleum kitchen floor.” The passage reminds us of finding that one book in your youth that cracked open our consciousness and released the thrill of personal discovery into our youthful spillways.

Parker is sustained by a “rapturous state” during his 1959 Christmas break. And isn’t that what we all cherish and secretly attain once more, that sustained nighttime reading marathon where there is no responsibility tomorrow, but that of personal indulgence? He had followed Moby-Dick with Pierre hoping for a similar experience, not expecting Pierre to surpass its greatness. Parker had been reading Shakespeare, much as Melville did preceding the composition of Pierre and was thereafter “hyperalert” to Shakespeare’s characters and language. Upon reading Pierre, Parker, in his own words, became “obsessed,” much as we are within the hormonal throes of a new love, when the whole world opens up and the possibilities become infinite.

Startled Mirror

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Once I was a child I looked upon the world as an eyeflash of hope – shatters of stars thrown across the night sky, I said to myself that that is where I will be someday.

that is where I’ll be someday

And that I wondered about those stars, and wrote on papers, multiplying my age by tens and wondering where I would be at each point, who would I be? who would I love? who would love me? and I wondered if I would be rich? well-liked? Poor? Scorned?

I had no fears. I loved the world, even when I felt they did not love me back.

But then the first of those decades struck me – a strange ruffling wind tossing me over the sea under a night sky born anew and still there was hope because hope had yet to be born, writhing in its placenta, rueing a fierce-eyed tenacious grip, clinging to a vestige of what I felt to be the right path.

However, that path was but illusion. I walked it fearlessly, regardless of destiny. I had youth on my side, and in youth there are days to burn like tinder, one twig after another until the pile becomes depleted and we scrounge for more to keep the fire burning.

And then the people came, because I had never noticed them before. They had faces that all looked alike, as they do now, not any of significance, but rejoicing in their commonality, the pale fish-eyed thin-lipped galley slaves rowing to the rhythm of commerce, to each wanting the glimmering sheaf of light on the other shore, the other shore not their freedom, or their salvation, but what they can own, what they can have, driving picket fences into the earth to shut others out and bloat flatulently under rich fruit trees regarded itself as a bounty of the earth, and not the property of a tenant. And the ripe fruit drops and decays into the earth.

The dreams of the child become the dashed hope of the ogre-spector of adulthood. Eyes are grim, skin turns to gray, wrinkles crease a riverbed of woes across the astonished face and others, and even others still, use that frightened disbelief as another peg for commerce. Ah! With those fears, like many others, I can capitalize on vanity, insecurity and old age. I eat greed with my lust, eat lust with my greed. On Sundays I pray to be a better person, so that I can step back into the poisoned river and begin my workweek anew.

The child that wondered stands at the precipe of decades later, astonished still at his reflection, that of the startled mirror unmitigating in its refusal to reflect what we want to see. We have allowed ourselves to become slaves to numbers.

Age is our whipping post.

It has become the monster at the end of our youthful dreams. The Hegira from child to adult is but a trail of glass-shattered tears.

He turns. Lights off. Dreams no longer a melodious cargo, but an embargo on our past, taxed and regulated for the blank-face masses. We drag our feet to the grave and stand looking down into an open stinking pit. The moneymakers are waiting to push you in and take more. We have allowed ourselves to be vessels for others to capitalize on, from the individual to that Hydra called government.

Astonished we have no other recourse but to step in.

Let Me Show You …

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Let me show you, she said.

She sat on the bed and opened a shoe box and removed a handful of photographs, dustwiping two and offered them smiling: a little girl on a horse; a woman seafoamed and glittering sprinting in the hot sand. ‘These are me,’ she said in a cloud of yellow morning, breathing in hot rushes an infold of warm colors and darkness and light.

She was so there she was so there … ‘these are me,’ and she knowing already that was once was, now was no more except what was captured photographically, almost a betrayal, to defy the past.

Silhouetted she entered. I smelled her before seeing her felt her before I knew her – perfume hangs the air aura-like.

I entered and saw her before I smelled her and knowing it was her and so I closed the door to her closed the door to her…

Fred accosts me on the street and asks about real estate prospects. I cannot entertain his earthly offers, your head must be in the sun, my friend, and I tell him of her, and that she is not here, she is there, across the way standing at the coastline where the picture was taken, and so I look across to a sea rush roar seducing a chain of broken islands and she is waving in the high dark where the foghorn soaks a somber deathblow bellow….

I wade to follow through a street of strangers, a sea of strangers an irrepressible tide of unkindly strangers amassed in colors and hostile energy, billowing folds of a cloth stirred by wafts of dirty hot air rushing toward me, through me searching through this world.

Is she here?

excerptus

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

the fetus beats eternal; the cage of a restless ova bursts into dimorphism, implanting the seed of all knowledge, truth and desire into the womb to emerge from the navel of the cosmos.

A sun glints grounded beach mica, shining in one step, disappearing at the next, unable to signify itself from a vista of churning sands, broken by the indentations of bare feet, cool and quiet, a restive from a meditation of rolling cold waves, trailing off to where horizon and sea are broken by the long beckoning finger of a getty.

This is twenty-two years ago: a New England town perched at the edge of the continent, where the land itself is a toppling of boulders formed from a long glacial sweep into victorious oblivion. The distant sweeping of a lighthouse beacons over the cold mystery of the shallow seas luring myth and magic, budding romance and allure, a matchmaker of eternity desirous to render memory into oblivion. How many beating hearts sealed their union on such a night, now no longer with us (the dead do not linger), shining, bright, eradicated in a flash, as sudden as a lighthouse beacon.

The rain had already fallen twice the previous night, broken at intervals by a shock of calm. A fleet of clouds had left the land and sailed onward east over the ocean, before a new flotilla arrived from the west soaking the town all over again. Unceasingly the sea sent a charge of waves to soak the shore and aerate the charged humid atmosphere. The stars burned through the clouds, a floral spray of pinpointed tears in the ink-wash of night. Some houses of Boar’s Head stayed dark, its residents having left the shores for the season to settle south in more agreeable climes.