Chapter-- 

Our little seance on the past was interrupted by a disturbance by someone who had come into the little place we were in. A man had come in and sat behind an elderly couple. He suddenly got up and said in a loud voice, "I am God. I am God. And I'm going to kill you!" He was pointing to the elderlly man's wife. The husband stood up and gave the man the evil eye. "Don't mess with me punk." I later found out he was on the faculty at the University. Pehaps the crazy guy had been a student. It was completely possible, I knew that.

I will kill your wife because she takes up too much space. I will kill her because she contributes to the bad world. I will kill her because she is in a tapestry." He threw out a few more epithets before the cops arrived and took him away. He resisted at first and then relented and off he went. I always wondered where they went. The cafe had become stone quiet with frozen gestures but as soon as the man left they were chatting it up as if something exciting had finally come into their life for a brief time.

My friend seemed non-plussed about it. "You'd be amazed by how many people think they are god or a god. Many, my friend, many."

The children loved to play in the water that pooled beneath the waterfall. From huge granite rocks they jumped, laughing with glee, or took the tire tied by rope to the tallest tree to swing back and forth over the water.

There were a dozen children added to a few babies and one woman who was ready to deliver at any moment. While the men looked angry a lot and the women looked tired, the children were like God's perfect creatures and hooted and howled without a thought in their head. They often led me into the overgrown paths. "You watch yourselves now," I'd tell them. And they'd laugh or look at each other with quizzical expressions.

One time I stopped them in a clearing. It was one of those bitter hot days that seemed to leak from the earth itself. A tree had fallen from the previous winter and lay half in decay across the crude path we were following. The area was hot and dark with the stream purling in the distance with a clean sound; I could hear the old waterwheel churn in the distance.

Five of the children were with me. We caught our breath. I sat on a half-decayed log and the kids stretched out on a small meadow in front of me. I decided to tell them a story I had been saving.I had thought for a time that I would tell this story to adults but it ended up told to the kids. It was about a man who felt confident at the entrance to a foreboding wood.

"The man had been a great man in his life. He had accomplished great deeds and looked at the woods as a new obstacle to his task waiting for him on the otherside. When he entered the woods he began naming the trees to himself. They were so familiar! And when he heard the sounds of animals he knew them as well and felt buoyant at the intimation of a variety of animals hidden in the nooks and crannies of the wood. Now, he would follow the path of the sun and when the sun rose he would wake and as the sun crossed the sky he would follow its rise and fall and when the sun set he would sleep. Oh, he was so happy! He thought about the deeds he had accomplished and how free he was in the woods and how everything was familiar. Then one morning he woke up by the side of a stream and the sun was nearly above him and he was in a panic and suddenly the trees and sound of animals was unfamiliar to him and he could not remember his deeds and didn't k+ow where he was in the woods and started to run and felt the murky stare of the woods and birds and lingering, stark pressure of the trees as though now he had become the obstacle. This started another adventure which is too long to tell."

When I finished the story a kid named Jason asked me where I had heard it. Was it referring to the woods we were in? Was the man in the story lazy? Did he get eaten by a bear? Did he eat roots and leaves?

I thought for a moment and then said, "Why, I just made it up." And one of the kids asked, 'It was just in your head?" "Yes, that's how it was, it was in my head."

I didn't tell them the whole truth of the matter because I had thought about that tale and cultivated it a bit and rounded it somewhat so it would come out right when I had to tell it. I told myself, 'don't tell it until there is stillness.' So it was the right time and I didn't think twice about it.

And you're right to ask what the next phase of the story would be. Laugh with me now. It is a nasty series of ass backwardness and humiliations among the unpitying. I was trying to make the kids understand that things aren't always sweet pools of light and water. And that animals are not always warm and cuddly. It was my small way of contributing to their growth. The environment was such that things were either a lesson or starkly beautiful that needed no comment, just the presence of the things. And there was a great rivalry between the lessons! Everyone thought they knew the truth of the matter. That was a good lesson in itself.

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