Thomas Lowe Taylor -- LIFE IS A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

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News at eleven. The man accused as a sniper in many recent killings is acting as his own defense, apparently with the court’s blessing and with a somewhat distant relationship with his court-appointed attorneys. Now, he is denied the opportunity of introducing evidence about his own mental competency because of his refusal to submit to a psychological evaluation immediately after his capture and subsequent imprisonment. How would he question himself on the matter of his sanity, and would there not be some kind of ironic resonance to the questioning as he moved from the position of question to the status of answering questions from himself about whether or not he is mad. Would he seek to prove or disprove his sanity and in either case what would be the outcome if he were judged by his own questioning to be mad. Would his madness discredit the questioner?

Locally, the Reverend John Mann, a kind of everyman in his name, a retiree in the stages of Alzheimer’s deterioration, has died suddenly. I painted their house two months ago, and he was an energetic man, not the least incompetent in his immediacy to the task, although his wife seemed irritable with his condition over which she had been witness and caretaker during this time. He know where the ladder was and helped me retrieve it from the pegs on the wall in the garage, although he had some difficulty covering the windows with the masking tape which would not stick and old newspapers. Who wouldn’t? She spoke of how he asked the same questions over and over, but since I was there only two weeks I barely noticed. He did ask me several times if I read mysteries, since he had many volumes to share, but unfortunately I don’t read such material. Somehow the death of “the man” sits in my craw uneasily, another irony

And anecdotally, the story persists in my memory of the Carribbean sorceress who invited all of her friends to her wake. They were confused as she was still breathing walking talking and all the rest, yet they all showed up on the appointed evening to celebrate her live in death, or something like that. Oddly enough, her coffin rested on the floor in the middle of her living room. They all partied long into the night, and as the evening drew to a close, she gathered everyone together and in some manner announced that now she would leave them. She got into the coffin, lay back, crossed her arms across her chest and then died. End of story

Somehow, I am reminded of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, with its parallel plots of the madman in the neighborhood killing people at the same time as its somewhat generic hero himself descends into some kind of synchronist reprise of his own situation; as well as the unhappy moment at the end of Herman Hesse’s The Bead Game when our narrator and hero comes to a mountain pool of water as the book ends with the statement, “He dove in.” Period, end of story.

All of which sticks us on the quick and the dead, the living and the dying and the moment of capture where we evaporate into our own solipsistic nothingness, our personal ‘passing beyond’ beyond which, you might say, there is no passage and hardly any beyond to be shared, unless the vagaries of the various books of the dead incline you to imagine a passage into the anteroom of a John Edwards show on television so that you can whistle to your dog through the vanes in the ceiling where the cool air from the other world navigates itself onto the television screen in your house at eleven p.m. on the SciFi channel between commercials for organic erectile fertilizer or opportunities to refinance your home, betting against your own passing, which hardly seems to be a good bet at all. Yet the synchronists insist that the white cloud streams upward into some destiny and passage at the end of your day.

Not that I doubt that at all. If you haven’t been to the game you can’t report the score. Beyond these questions, the nagging insistence on messages from outer space becomes a gigantic folklore in the medium of the message, and the fictions from stage screen and radio as they used to say, seem to perpetuate a vast and dynamic cargo cult of bamboo airplanes, tonalities from the top of the devil’s watch tower, an aptly named erection of stone in the middle of the flat screen of the northern plains. Surely the perpetrators of these empty saddles in the old corral are selling ten pounds of shit in the three pound bag, for in the absence of any messages from outer space, as they call it, there is surely no evidence for perpetrating these frauds which only encourage us, deus ex machina, that whatever we do, the skyhook will descend from above with a bag of donuts and a hot latte. I’m not laughing.

A more responsible attitude would not cave in to the absence of any proof that becomes the proof that is not there at all. We might have some respect for the fragility of the atmosphere we breath, a fragility which becomes more apparent as we learn more of its bare reckoning. Nor would science with its statistical probabilities usurp so easily the evidence of the eye and the mind, if there is any mind there at all. The coincidence of our sacred unity might become more respected if we accepted the fact that although we’ve been going to western union for as long as we can remember, that no one has answered the call at all. At all. Thank you very much.

Nonetheless, we have taken photographs of invisible material (?) and found evidence for whatever we’ve sought to invent for the comfort of our brief spin at the controls. Everyone writes a poem in moments of abject despair, as if that were the solace at the end of the tunnel. People are even known to have read poems in moments of what is called ‘spiritual crisis.’ But to engender a life out of poetry or to dedicate one’s self to poetry is once again a state of complete depravity and waste. The rubber hand on my desk holding the hackeysack with an eyeball painted on it nonetheless becomes a leitmotif for my own doubt, in some archaic resonance which I cannot escape, though I photograph it as if it were a real hand, severed from the body of the world’s poet, designed by my ten-year-old grandson as a respectfully inspired yet somewhat mischievious imitation of my own strange preoccupation with hands and eyes in my own work. The moving hand writes and then moves on, another poet wrote. And the eye that sees is the I that seize, if you get my drift. And so I drift onto the plane of inattention to catch what’s in the space between the words, the wind blowing between my eyes where a hold in my head to let it in is.