Personae (4 page)

. . . by filling it with allusive arcana for eager professors. Of course he could’ve just written King Lear.

If the world is supported by a giant turtle what supports the turtle?

Don’t be silly, it’s turtle all the way down.

There’s no void to fill, it’s all void.

Blind Milton, penniless Melville, suicided Woolf and Hemingway, incarcerated Cervantes, epileptic Dostoyevsky, walking into a river your pockets full of stones, squeezing a shotgun between the floor and your forehead, wandering in the cold to your death, tuberculosis in the twentieth century right after a masterwork, but I concede nothing.

. . . an unhealthy fascination with technique and innovation to the detriment of the true and…

1. Narrative Poetry

2. Prose Fiction

3. Music

Just a cruel place, but one where the transcendental often walks alongside the cruel.

Character is foundational.

Art is a common language and commonalities combat loneliness.

‘Tis majority ruleth all.

The minor one, alone to fall.

The miner won a loan, two of all.

The mine or won, all own to fall.

The my nor won, a low an to a fall.

Them I know run, a lone two of awe.

Dumb I now run, all owe into Fall.

The my now are one, a loam too fall.

The My now are one

The mine are one

A loam too fall

I am one

All one

Too fall

A one

Alone

ONE

Because I no longer wish to be of you, I’ve tried it your way and it’s empty, I don’t want to monitor numbers or keep time like a metronome; I want the small part of life that flows through me to transmute then emerge as metaphor, clean and hard and inclusive but sharp enough to cleave the world that we the pained may digest it whole.

To justify the ways of man to God.

The remainder is either truly indecipherable for a variety of reasons or else summarily deemed irrelevant to the relevant or even just excluded because inclusion would feel weirdly violative of something like Writer’s privacy if that makes any sense.

IV

 A
n
Octogenaria
n
Beginne
r
Begin
s
Afte
r
Wonderin
g
 I
f
Beginner’
s
Luc
k
Eve
n
Applies

THE
OCEAN
[4]
^fn

This is a stop at the beach, not a beach outing. Difference is with an outing Skye will collect the girls (four, six, eight) and everything they require and these appurtenances will be assembled near the door at the appointed time so that really his role will amount to nothing more exertive than going to the beach himself and, of course, before that, giving his terse imprimatur to Skye’s idea of going to the beach
as
a
family
. So this is a mere stop and he is alone.

He is alone with Professor Stephen Tenrod, another way of saying Professor Tenrod is alone and a statement that is undeniably true and so because of a decision, really several decisions, made by the professor. And Tenrod is the kind who thinks the “p” in professor should always be uppercase even when not being used as appellation but because he does not herein control it isn’t and won’t. Back to the decisions, Professor Stephen Tenrod decides to stop at the beach on his way home from the university because, well, truth is there is no prominent reason for this decision. Instead he finds that the luxury automobile slides effortlessly, as promised, from main highway to exit to somnolent side street of forgotten seaside village. Just as easily he finds that the vehicle orients not towards its popular areas but rather is inexplicably parking in the most desolate area of what is already a fairly desolate beach.

Consequently when he removes his clothing and lays it on the damp sand there is no reason to take the universal therefore wholly ineffective precaution of wallet in shoe nor is there any problem with removing even the final sheer barrier that separates the clothed from the unclothed before entering the frigid water. And he is a distasteful task increment by increment type so this initial entry is followed by a pause and substantial exhale then ensuing steps become a demonstration of will until a partial eternity later he is in from the waist down with everything above dry as dust. From there, his body halved into pain and future pain, his hands suspended at varying levels, he is reduced to sensation and its immediate afterthoughts. The life of the mind extinguished by overflooded nerve endings.

He turns, submerging maybe another inch as a result, to look at clothes on a beach; the lumpy collection of fine garments he has placed on the sand, how they combine to form a layered mountain yet manage to retain individuated definition. So he is looking at that, taking slight backward steps, when really the first wave to register slaps his back to form a U of water around him and compel his hands into a hug. This is new pain and the body recoils from it. All the greater now that newly wet skin is beset by an insistent evil wind he had not heretofore sensed. The only solution then is to go ahead and sink up to his neck, his face the only segment still undisturbed by sea.

Now he sees that sun is reflecting off the face of his watch to form a focused line of light that reaches the one on his shaking body. The watch is on the clothes and the watch is expensive although he never really liked it until The Dean, who does like watches and therefore can speak of them intelligently, indicated without ambiguity that this specimen was tremendous; since that he loves the watch. To Skye he always loved the watch and its lyrical engraving referencing the constancy of Time even if inconstancy, in the final analysis, was really what surrounded the object.

Inconstant as in the way that increasingly Skye looked almost grievous, like something had been lost when far as he could tell it was nothing but gain for years. Gain like when he became the youngest professor to attain the
distinguished
honorific at his university or the many others he subsequently researched. Or when their primary six bedroom was paid off and they were able to rather easily purchase the shore house currently responsible for his naked immersion in the vast ocean. Or how, most recently, he had accomplished what Skye seemed most fervent about and so come fall April would in fact be attending the prestigious Walstaff, he thinks, Academy. Again, these were clear gains yet each met with a barely perceptible but undeniable sense that a diminishment had occurred and that’s the loss that somehow registered on Skye’s face until he began to maybe feel it too.

His clothes are the only thing on the beach. No, that’s an oversimplification. There are other disturbances as well. There’s been a contest on that beach. A Third Annual BallPark Frank SandSculpture Contest has been held according to a banner on the distantly brown picket fence. The contest means people, twenty-first century people, have come and built complicated structures on sand despite presumably knowing what sand is and its futile relationship to the imminent water.

Sand, he knows, is essentially finely-degraded rock. Degraded by Life plus Time and if that formula can work
this
on
that
imagine it on the less sturdy. To build on sand is to deny all that in a deluded way. To build properly and for posterity use concrete. Concrete as in The Pantheon with its eighteen hundred years and counting. No less a personage than Brunelleschi saw that and largely followed suit to create art like
Il
Duomo
that centuries later allows people like our professor to center their lives not on emulating him but on discussing exegetically what he produced.

No one will be discussing the sculpted sand in front of him but he now thinks he detects something like beauty emanating from there and so begins to make his way to the fragile creations that he may either confirm or dispel. In addition he sees that someone has unmistakably, using indentation, written on the sand and from his current angle it is impossible to discern the message. There’s a message he feels. Someone has attempted communication in the strict sense of the word. The sand letters seek to extend up into their airspace and in that manner commune with their reader.