Chapter-- 

Later we heard a fuller report on the bombing that had, fortunately, not hurt anyone but had blown a hole in a bank. The radio station then reported that a group claimed responsibility and blamed the bank for loaning companies money in the war effort. It made me think for awhile. To blast off a bomb you'd have to believe there was no hope and that all good had been subverted by the object of the bomb. Therefore the bombed person would, if he were to survive, seek out the bomber and bomb him. Parts of the world made more sense but it interrupted the pretty story my friend was telling me.

It was no paradise but once in a while it felt like it or seemed like one. Nothing disturbed the sense of well-being and freedom of the people. And I don't mean licentiousness either. I mean this sense that there was no resistance to a kind of inner perfection, therefore there was no need to want, therefore all was right with the world. It didn't last but it was good enough to keep people mobilized in their hopes.

In periods of darkness people either find the only ones that can help them or the only ones who can destroy them. I felt the darkness these people fled from brought them to those who could help dispel the awful closing in that bad times can initiate. After all, I was there with them. I had fled the darkness.

Invariably someone would start up the old truck and back it up so it spit dust and I would try to figure out where the truck was going in this heat and what would happen if it broke down somewhere. Like others I sat around asking myself what I could do any given day. The waterfall and its chilling pool seemed inviting.

That's when Blu Davis came around. Now Blu Davis was a poet of sorts and played guitar. I hadn't connected with him too much. He had a special place because of his talents and the women loved him. He didn't work all that much but Rasputin respected him and kept him by his side when things were going wrong.

"Hello there Blu," I said.

He gave me a little wave of his hand. Didn't even pick up his arm but sort of wiggled his hand at me.

"The anti-war man," he said. "I wanted to show you something."

He found another crate and pulled it up so we were face to face.

"I'm scribblin' all the time like a fool. And I have this dream poem goin' about the end of the earth. It's about the war to end all wars. It's about the transcendental glory hole that sucks us down to nothing. It's about the dawn of nothingness."

Blu Davis had a certain rhythm to him. He should have been on stage or television with the rap he had.

The sun was unbearably hot but I'm thinking about that time that a long poem about the end of everything would be appropriate. I made a little gesture of encouragement. I was waiting for him to take a piece of paper out but he didn't. He just sort of stared at me as if I were a mummy and started talking fast but not loud, just fast and smooth and delicate even so that I got into a trance. It was like I was a cobra and he the mongoose.

"You see, anti-war man, in my dream song sirens are knocking the bluebirds out of the sky and everyone runs to their own tomb. I appear laughing. It was getting so boring! I yell to the huddled faces. And now you have bored yourselves to oblivion. I begin dancing like a clown snorting up the thermonuclear dust of my neighbors, co-workers, friends, family, enemies, and all anonymous souls of the recent just completed history. Now! I shout. Now! I bring you to life as each ash tickles my nose. Now! Everywhere death gets deader. Bridges, girders, coat hangers, zippers, cyclotrons, glass eyes, beer cans, belts, buttons, spigots, dimes, clocks, TV sets, microscopes, cameras, coffee pots, light bulbs, wells, cymbals, clarinets, guitars, hash pipes, trucks, cities, needles, and all paraphernalia of human endeavor becomes a molten flow, flowing toward the horizon and off the surface of the globe. The earth turns delicately once and the molten things burst a trillion times over and begin to wonder, points unknown. The molten cuts a swath to girdle the middle sphere, furrows lay bare on earth mantle, cold nether zone freezes and thaws coming into or coming out of a Piscean land of no this and maybe that, upstream and downstream until it's all equal in the end. The caps close sealing everything in ice walls, reheating the tropics, Cancer and Capricorn....Bighorns and Antelopes, alligators and piranha come together, clapping each other, 'the judgment has come!' Great icicles break off the North and South and penetrate to the mid land filling it with icy rivers that sting the few vestiges of the molten flow. Arctic trees unhibernate and break the ice to trek to the mid zone skipping merrily. Ice birds descend carrying monstrous stones that turn into mountains, earth phalli, that spin like dervishes with brown coats and glistening crystals where the timberline is; a song emerges from the top of the mountain, a vibration of laser properties so everything sways and shakes and bends and twirls in fascination of the end."

He stopped and looked at me for a second.

"I still breathe the noxious gas of humanity and spit up vaporous holograms to the sky; images form and intermingle. The shapes are human. The images embrace and pass through each other like ghosts. They play and dance in lactating showers. There is great joy. Even the animals look to the sky in amazement."

He stopped and looked at me for another second.

"What do you think they'll say about that anti-war man?"

I was kind to him and said he would become famous among certain groups but that the world would not be changed. That was about the time I started thinking about things if you know what I mean. I was starting to wonder why the mind puts such thoughts into the head of young people. It does all get taken away doesn't it? Is it the hand of God? Is it the laughter of nature? I didn't think like at at that moment I was looking at Blu Davis but later on, when I left and came back to the city when I thought about that day I started to think about these things.

I had to ask him if he had any desire to write a novel or whether he'd started one. "Me? Sure, why not? Haven't Lennon and Bob Dylan written novels?"

"Did you start one up in the cabin there by the stream?"

"No. I've been in it but it didn't appeal to something in me. I need to get well-known first then I'll write a novel."

"About this place?"

"No, just a compendium of what I've seen." He paused and then got up and dusted himself off and sauntered off. Maybe, I thought, he was interpreting a dream he had had.

At any rate, the sun kept beating down all that day and at night I did not want to dream but just sleep and keep the bugs off me.

My only real pleasure all during my stay was sitting and listening to the people. They viewed me a man immanently qualified to confess to or express their worldly principles. They were not ignorant or dumb by any means but rather educated and weighed down by the ponderous earth. That was my impression. If they had only let go of the ponderous earth.........

David Eide
January 24, 2014