So says Apemantus, the bitter misanthropic philosopher in Timon of Athens. He says this while observing an elaborate mask that Timon puts on for his guests at a feast, part of an ongoing pattern of overspending that eventually bankrupts Timon and leads his friends to desert him. So Apemantus’ line describes both the mask and Timon’s own life, as Timon exhausts the contents of his purse.
Thin as bees’ wings, this boundary between madness and life. We can feel it, less than our skin away, and all of us walking, dancing, somewhere in between. Between all the things. Madness takes many forms, sometimes masquerading as life, sometimes beginning in the simple, or with becoming convinced of a single thing that seems like truth above all other things (and perhaps it is):
You desire me to give myself up to my duty, and to be wholly God’s, to whom I am consecrated. How can I do that, when you frighten me with apprehensions that continually possess my mind both day and night?
(Heloise to Abelard, c. 1128, translated from the Latin in 1722)*
Heloise terrified for her love, and at the thought of losing him. Love, at once both river and monument, even as their tomb marker stands in Pere Lachaise cemetery today. Love the conflagration or the journey. As Nizami expressed it:
Unleash upon me the saga
of being in love
o friend, be my layla
for i am majnun **
Indeed. The saga. Love leads us eventually back to the sea. Waves blossoming like long reaching petals across the sand, sinking into it. Dissolving warm day toes. Our own gull reaches us like no others, that single cry amongst many, and we know that it is ours, unlikely as that may be. The Red Queen tells us, “Why sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ***
For the sea leads us places, and that characteristic air, the salty air that we tend to believe smells of the sea, really smells of the land. Ask a sailor. Out on the waves, the fresh wind tangs not so much of wild brine. Beneath us deepening layers of green to dark, above us heaving sometimes empty sky, our feet rooting us to some world we cannot see. We stew in reality, our flavours blending with others, pot constantly simmering.
Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house – still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out.
The book you mention, I have not met. Thank you for tenderness.
The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the tree.
You mentioned spring’s delaying – I blamed her for the opposite. I would eat evanescence slowly.
(Emily Dickinson, letter to Elizabeth Holland, May 1886)
The red in our minds. We eat of many things. Cupcakes, sponges, mops, and twinges. The stuff of feasts and scrub. Forests brushed clean by wayward winds. King Vikram, we travel with a vampire, a demon captured along the way, and it tells us tales. Fruit on low hanging branches that we cannot eat. We cannot even pick. Only gazing. Proverbial wonder. Trigorin writing stories to catch Nina’s attention. Seagulls wheeling. Herring in the waves.
You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the dead winter time.****
We do see him there. We are all there, always, even in the dead of summer. Washed against the cold, hung out before spring, our own Mayday letters delayed by circuses. Crocuses? No. The squirrels moved those long ago.
The Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region, tell of natural spirits of great power–the Manitou, who roam the great boreal forest, some with limbs like lightning, some with listening powers that speed across the earth. Sources of strange light and shadow. Each leather of them varying as it does for us, with bright Yang evaporating, coalescing into sinking Yin. So for Manitou. For also walks, on those wild winter nights, the Wendigo, alternately stalking and howling, its blizzard breath untempered by its gaze, the killing frost. Always hungry. Preferring the taste of children, but seeking anything. Hungry. Like the human heart.
Good King Peshawbes, look out on the feast and save us.
And we tell stories. To be together. To stay apart. To wall up our existence. To ourselves. Sometimes to others. Our feet root into the sand and wash away when the tide comes in, barnacling our tempests into air and clay until the day is gone. Fashioning our dwelling out of not what we see or touch, but what we think we see. What we think we touch. The long barkwood crafted lintel swirling around. Bees at noon. Taxes. Maui. Moana.
But there is no new Texas. Only so old the dinosaurs have turned to changing seas. Dark seas crushed beneath the rock. Fireflies consume us. Not now, but from our past. Those nights behind the low brick house upon the hill. Trees and wonder. Phobia. Distinction. Dereliction. The ceremonial sword of duty laid aside and all our thoughts plopping asunder, cut by our own days into cubes of jello.
Monsters there beside the road. And out on the sea. Untold monsters. Huge. Huge I tell you. And very bad and unfair. Like constitutions or restrictive regulation. And I alone am left to tell you to build a damned wall against them. Oh, please don’t let those ghosts walk from castle ramparts into my dreams. Please don’t let them find me. I only just found this bottle of port that I was given for my birthday. Birthright. Righteous.
Did you see the snow this winter? Global warming? I think not! Climate change come to kill us, a skeleton in armour wielding a flaming broadsword, sweeping swathes across the landscapes of the world. Burying us. Country matters and a scarecrow shivering in a stubbled field. Barney Rubbled field. Springfield. Wakefield. Sleep field. Think it into a cornfield when it’s gone because it has bad thoughts. Jerome Bixby come to tell us.
No date. The day had no date.—I went for a walk incognito on the Nevski Prospect. I avoided every appearance of being the king of Spain. I felt it below my dignity to let myself be recognised by the whole world, since I must first present myself at court. And I was also restrained by the fact that I have at present no Spanish national costume. If I could only get a cloak! I tried to have a consultation with a tailor, but these people are real asses! Moreover, they neglect their business, dabble in speculation, and have become loafers. I will have a cloak made out of my new official uniform which I have only worn twice. But to prevent this botcher of a tailor spoiling it, I will make it myself with closed doors, so that no one sees me. Since the cut must be altogether altered, I have used the scissors myself. (Gogol, Diary of a Madman)*****
We have all used the scissors. Amazing technicolor dream coats flapping in the wind. Freely. Sometimes expertly. Sometimes way too too too much. Hair trimmed too short. Nick the skin. Snip the lip. Even drawing blood. Throw a little more light over here, please. We’re casting spells. Making pies. Four and twenty blackbirds calling in the morning. Raucous as snowy egrets in a fire.
We are these margins, lights reaching out to us, finding us huddled in the dark, shivering in a letter because we can think of nothing else. We breathe that hunger. Taste that evanescence. Button hooks torn asunder by desire. Bodice open. Bosom heaving. Breathing. Enso interruptus.
Who can really tease out simple madness from our lives? That this or that is ‘right’ behaviour wrong. Those old telephones built to last forever, outlasted themselves. They don’t make motion pictures like that anymore. Motion pictures. River in a tree. Marshmallow in the bonfire, sizzling into blue fire song.
Oh hem. We ist der mosses and der bulbs. We eeeek livings by the ebb and flow. The tide that shapes the affairs of men. Birthmark canoes carry us across the voices and into that realm where sleep becomes electrum. Eleanthus. Days wearing into long days journeys into snow. No warming here. None. No ma’am. Not one drop.
Ypsilanti, Ypsilanti, I call out to ya, supplianti. Two damned houses. Two. No dignity I tell ya. And they need a wall between them. Capulets. Montagues. Hatfields. McCoys. Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River or not, it’s gotten Verona into the trees, and just the water ain’t enough.
Hot summer. All standing on a tin roof. Old songs ringing in the hills.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My, oh my, what a wonderful day
Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay******
Glory like madness. Very like madness indeed.
—–
*Abélard, Pierre, and Heloise. The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Ed. Israel Gollancz. London: J.M. Dent and, 1904.
**Nizami was the pen name of Abû Muhammad Ilyas ibn Yusuf ibn Zaki Mu’aggad (c. 1141-1209) His work, The Story of Layla and Majnun tells the story of the famous lovers and is one of the great works of Sufi literature.
***Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: & Through the Looking-glass. Illustrated by Sir John Tenniel. NY, NY: Puffin Books, 2017.
****Dickens, Charles. The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain. London: Cassell &, 1891.
*****Gogol, Nicholas. “THE MANTLE AND OTHER STORIES.” The Mantle and Other Stories. May 27, 2011. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36238/36238-h/36238-h.htm#Page_107.
******Music by Allie Wrubel, Lyrics by Ray Gilbert, Performed by James Baskett
© 1945 Walt Disney Music Company, for the 1946 motion picture, Song of the South.
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