A Salad for DFW

This afternoon, I looked at the planet where I live.
There was a nice park, there, that some nice people made for me to sit in.
I went to take a piss in the woods, and I thought of DFW, and how he'd killed himself.

I could talk some more about the darkness of the woods.
I could relate it all to that ridiculous building they have at the UIUC: FLB.
Earthquake proof, they say.

But, there in the middle of that dark wood, where I had lost my way, in the middle of life's journey,
I met you, DFW.
And I think that maybe you took me for a ride.

Maybe, jest maybe, I'll read that book you wrote.
Maybe this summer.

And maybe, jest maybe, I'll write one back to you, on the other side of that wall.

In the meantime, I made you a salad.
Here are the ingredients:

Spinach.
Honey roasted peanuts.
Dried cranberries.
Granola.
Feta cheese.
Paul Newman's Own Olive Oil & Vinegar.
Cinnamon.
Honey.

All nicely arranged, in proportion.

El ó Him

For García-Márquez

Gabriel is the name of an angel. In America, women who are born with this name pronounce it the same way the mexicanos do. In Mexico, women who are born with this name pronounce it with the letter a at the end, so it sounds more beautiful and feminine.  In America, if you are a boy and you have this name, it means that your name is pronounced with a long a sound in the first syllable. The name is Hebrew. It means man of God. According to Wiktionary.com, it comes from the Hebrew word géver, which means, man (an adult human male being). The second part is El, the name of God.

Géver-El
Géber-El
Gébre-El,
Gabre-El
Gabri-El

When the very old man with enormous wings fell from the sky, he was greeted by those who hid their faces and would not receive the message El had sent him to deliver. He returned to heaven in order to tell El that the people would not receive the message that he was supposed to have delivered, but he was fearful that El would be unhappy that his adult human male being was unable to communicate with the people to whom he was sent, so Gabriel invented a plan to convince El that the people were wicked because they had sinned.

"Have you considered your servant?" Gabriel asked El. 

"I have," El replied.

"Have you considered his faithfulness to you?" Gabriel asked El.

"I have," El replied.

"Have you considered that his faithfulness to you is dependent upon your faithfulness to him?" Gabriel asked El.

"I have," El replied.

"Then I suggest you should not be faithful to him," Gabriel suggested.

"I cannot be unfaithful," El replied. "I am faithful. I cannot be otherwise."

Gabriel considered this problem carefully for many eternities, for the sun had not yet come into existence in those days, and the ocean rose and fell one hundred hundred times, for the moon pulled eternally on the face of water for ageless ages before the sun came into being. At last, Gabriel discovered in his mind a satisfactory solution to the problem and approached the throne of El again.

"Have you considered yourself?" Gabriel asked El.

"I have," El replied.

"Have you considered your faithfulness to yourself?" Gabriel asked El.

"I have," El replied. 

"Then I suggest that you consider your servant as you consider yourself, then you will know if he is faithful to you," Gabriel declared.

So, El planted a garden in the East and formed man from the clay to work in it. In the garden El planted two trees. One tree was called The Tree of Life and the other tree was called The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. El told the man whom he had formed from the dust of the ground and the wind of his breath to enjoy the fruits of any tree in the garden, but not to eat the fruit of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for if he did, he would surely be forgotten.

Then El created a companion for the man and called it "companion of man" for it was a companion to man. So man and companion of man dwelled together in the garden, eating fruits of many trees, and wearing no clothes.

Then, the very old man with enormous wings awakened the serpent (who was asleep) and said to the serpent: "Awake! There is a man and a companion of man inside your gardens!"

The serpent, who was dreaming, stood and hissed, for it had great fear of man. 

Then, the very old man with enormous wings said to the serpent, "You should not tolerate a man in your garden. Look! He reaches to take fruit from your trees! Watch! He shares your fruits with his companion!"

The serpent saw that the companion of man was naked, and he desired to take the companion of man for himself. So he came to where the companion of man was standing and seduced it, saying, "Eat of this fruit, for you are beautiful, and I am giving you this fruit to eat."

"Which fruit shall I eat?" the companion of man asked the serpent.

"This good fruit, which grows where my belly crawls," the serpent replied.

The companion of man looked down and saw the serpent among vines that sprawled along the floor of the garden path. A large, round fruit grew from white and yellow flowers that bloomed among the vines, and the companion of man reached down to pluck and eat it, for the serpent had offered it to eat and said that it was good. 

The seed of that fruit grew within the belly of the companion of man, and the companion of man became a woman and gave birth to two sons: Forethought and Afterthought, and Time began.

Then there was morning, and there was evening, and that was the first day.

Then the woman tempted the man, who was still innocent of guilt, and the woman seduced the man, who had been innocent of guilt up to that very moment.

When the man understood what the woman had done to him, he saw that she was naked and beautiful, so he made her bear his sins upon her back for nine months, and he cursed El for sending him such a companion.

"What have you done?" he asked the woman. "Why have you eaten the fruit that is forbidden to eat?"

"I have not eaten fruit that is forbidden to eat," the woman replied. "I have eaten only the fruit that was offered for me to eat."

"Fool!" the man cried. "We are destroyed! We have been undone! You have made me guilty! I have seen my nakedness! Let us hide our skin beneath skin! Let us bear children in pain! Let us plant our own gardens!"

Then, the man drove the serpent and all the serpent's children from the garden and killed an ox, whose skin he stretched across olive branches to provide shelter from sun and rain and hailstones. 

In the morning, Afterthought offered sacrifices of meat to El in thanksgiving for delivering them from the sinful nature of the serpent, and El believed that man still was faithful to him, so El gave Afterthought a beautiful woman named Venus to be his wife. But when Forethought saw Venus bathing as he watched her from his balcony, he became jealous and killed his brother to take the woman for his own.

When Forethought took Venus into his bedchamber, she would not receive him, for she was still in mourning over the death of her beloved. Forethought wrestled her to the ground, and she cried out for help, but no one answered, for her husband was dead. Nine months later she gave birth to a son and named him Ishmael, for she had cried out but no one answered. After this, Forethought wrestled her 12 more times, and she bore for him twelve more sons.

When Ishmael grew old, he vowed to take revenge upon the aggression of the man who had fathered him against his mother's will. "I will destroy all of your works!" he declared. "I will wipe your memory from the face of earth so the world will no longer bear your sin!" Then, Ishmael set out to destroy his father and his brothers, but his father could see into Ishmael's intentions, for he could see the future, so he transformed his children into diamonds and rubies and sapphires and threw them into the sky, where they hid among the planets and the stars, and because they are the children of Forethought, they hold the secrets of the future.

When Gabriel looked down upon the earth, he saw Ishmael roaming from village to village, seeking out his brothers to destroy them, but they could not be found anywhere. Gabriel took pity upon Ishmael and appeared to him, saying, "Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy! You will give birth to a son, and through him you will rule over all generations!" 

Ishmael did not believe this, for he had no woman to bear him children, so he mocked the very old man with enormous wings, saying, "Can a man enter the womb again and be reborn a second time?"

"Yes!" the man from El replied.

So Ishmael was received by Venus, and she gave birth to a son, who was named Oedipus, for he was born when a son entered his mother's womb to be born a second time. Oedipus became a mighty king and conquered many nations, and Venus ruled beside him, a righteous judge and lawgiver.

When Gabriel looked down from the heavens, he saw that his plan to fool El had worked, for he had never been asked to give account of the message he had been sent to deliver, and which he could not remember after so many years. So again he approached the throne of El and asked, "Have you considered the faithfulness your servant?"

But El rebuked the angel for his wickedness, demanding an accounting for his actions. "Why have you forgotten the message I entrusted to you?" El demanded, and Gabriel, unable to reply, was cast down among the crabs, where he was discovered by a poor farmer and locked up with the hens.

The Man in the Wilderness

There was once a group of people who lived in a village in the middle of a wilderness. As the number of people in the village increased, men and women of the community worked together to clear out more space to breathe.

In the middle of the village, the women would plant flowers. On the outskirts of the village, men would pave roadways. And on the frontier, adventurous young boys would leave the village and enter the thick of the wilderness, clearing trees and undergrowth to make new spaces for their grandchildren.

Jonathan was a frontiersboy who spent all of his days in the woodlands outside the village. While the other young boys his age spent their days slashing and burning the great oak trees on the borderlands of the village, he made long, narrow pathways that stretched deeper and deeper into the darkness of the forest.

Every morning when he awoke, he drank a cup of coffee and ate a banana. After breakfast, he kissed his mother on the lips and told her that he would return at the setting of the sun. Then he grabbed a machete and ventured onto the path he had made, which each day stretched farther into the woods.

As the path grew longer, so did his days. It became more and more difficult for the boy to walk the length of his path, clear more bushes, and return the long way home before the sun set. So he awoke earlier, before his mother awakened, took his coffee and banana with him, and worked until the sun set. When he returned home, his mother was already sleeping in her bed, and he kissed her on the forehead.

Eventually, the boy asked himself why he spent so much time walking along the path, and as the light from the full moon shone down upon him as he slashed his pathway deeper and deeper into the jungle, he decided to lay his head down upon a rock to rest a while.

In the morning birds awakened him, and he felt the dew on his clothing. He had slept through the night. No matter, he thought. This accident had given him an opportunity to make even more progress on his path. Getting an early start, he was able to drive more deeply into the wasteland than he had ever traveled before.

He continued in the same manner for days, weeks, and years, until he reached finally reached his destination on the outskirts of oblivion. The only person who ever missed him was his mother, who wondered where her son had gone, and why he had never returned.

Centuries later, the great-great-great-grandchildren of the village found the remains of a solitary man as they were burning the stumps of oak trees.  The skeleton rested just a few hundred feet from the outskirts of their village. The skull lay on a rock, and there was a rusted machete nearby.

The Ass's Tale

The ass was an investment banker with connections. He wanted to change the rules so that the sows only got to keep two of her piglets instead of three that had been guaranteed to her grandmother under the Bartlett administration. The ass could only say that the rules had changed and that one more of her sons would be required to help keep the motors of government operating smoothly and efficiently.

Previously, the ass had worked for the Jewish Sanhedrin. He had been hired out by a small lobbying group who needed a rental for the day. Someone down in Livestock didn't check the paperwork very closely, so when Judas Iscariot came paying with a silver coin bearing the face-stamp of their beloved emperor, his suspicions were impossible to raise.

The problem with the ass is that he never took anyone's side too seriously, at least nobody's but his own, and once an ass stops taking sides, it's a helluvalot easier to see the other guy more clearly. The other problem is, the other guy is usually an ass, too. Then the ass has to make a decision: Do I stop being an ass because that way I get to win, or do I keep being an ass because I make a whole lot better one than that guy over there?

So, the ass just kept delivering messages from the gods to the people, peacefully satisfying them all in various denominations of ones and zeros.

The Cat's Tale

Once upon a time, there was a kitten, who was dropped off at our house after being located in a box in the rafters of a garage, and mother having become exterminated was left to die unweaned before you bottle fed human infant baby formula. I named it Wallace Stevens.

The cat died. It died approximately 24 hours after I said to my wife these words: "I'm going to go ahead and say out loud that I think that this cat might be one of my favorite animals I have ever had."

It scurried outdoors one night, which was normal. We often let our cats out since we live in the country, and our house is a purposeful walk from the nearest neighbor. The next morning I got a call from my wife as I pulled from our driveway on the way to work.

"Turn around," she said.

What she had seen, and what she had wanted to deny, was that our cat Wallace Stevens had been struck by a car in the road near our front yard.

And you know, when I sat down to write this story I thought to myself, "Self, you ought to feel something important about yourself because you named that cat Wallace Stevens, and then it died, and then you coped with that by reading 'The Emperor of Ice Cream' aloud to your daughters at the hasty funeral we had for it in the month of December or January (January, likely, since that is the month of my birth.)"

I remember coming home from school one day when I was about the age of my daughter Evelyn who is in the fourth grade. Or perhaps I was the age of my daughter Emmalee who is seven years old. In either case, my cat, which was a yellow tiger-striped cat to whom I owed no particularly strong sentiment, was flattened in the road before our driveway. I m sure that I had loved the cat in some of those moments, but overwhelmingly, I was curious to know about the nature of death. Here had been a cat that I had known, and now it is dead.

Schroedinger.

In the case of the 20th1st Centurians, like me ---

WHOAH.

Do you realize that if you are able to read this, there is a very good chance that you are someone who was alive in both of those centuries? You are the same as Frank Lloyd Wright?

In 1867,
   In January,
      African-American men were granted the right to vote in the Capital of our Country.
   In February,
      The first ship passed through the Suez Canal.
   In March,
      The University of Illinois was established*
   In April,
      Alaskans enjoyed their first full month of American citizenry.
   In May,
      Canada was born.
   In June,
      Frank Lloyd Wright was born.
   In July,
      The missionary Thomas Baker was cannibalized.
   In August,
      A Negro man voted for the first time in a southern election.
   In September,
      Robert Freeman graduated from Harvard.
   In October,
      The natives agreed to relocate to western Oklahoma.
   In November,
      The Rose was born in France, Marie Curie in Poland, and Das Kapital in Germany.
   In December,
      Charles Dickens read a book to a crowd in New York City.

Wallace Stevens was born in 1879. I was born in 1977. I hope you are understanding the connection.

(I also wrote a poem about Haiti on

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2010

POSTED BY BENNY AT 6:49 PM 

*Okay, folks: the new post-post-modern period everyone is thinking about. Here is what it is called: The Age of Self. In the popomo culture, the story only matters in that it intersects with the Self. There it is. The Self and the Story: 

Duly defined.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English with a Minor in Comparative Literature (English).

Then, there was Jerome, who disappeared. I must have ridden my bike through the neighborhood streets a hundred and ninety-two times looking for that cat.

The Raccoon's Tale

Once there was a raccoon named Dale. Dale lived in a tree with his mother, Sonja, and his mother's sister Dorothy. Together, the three were company.

Early one autumn, Dale was irritated at the thought of spending a seventh winter cooped-up with his mother and aunt, so he climbed down the trunk of the tree to the forest floor below. When he arrived on the ground, he was greeted instantly by a young human boy of about 10, who, armed with a crossbow, made short work of Dale and procured for himself material for his first coon-skinned cap.

Incidentally, the hunter, whose name was Jerry Kocher, lived to be an old, old man, and he wore the cap made from Dale's skin each day during the cold winter months of January and February in Southern Illinois, and occasionally, on cool mornings in early June.

The Hen's Tale

Once there was a white chicken. Because she was a female, the farmer called her a hen. This hen seldom had thoughts, but instead poked her head about all day looking for things to peck at.

One day, she noticed that she had been sitting upon an egg, and she became quite broody about it all.

This continued for a time until Farmer Benny, delighting in the Miracle of Providence, cooked her in a stew of noodles and served her upon a heaping mound of real mashed potatoes and instant stuffing for Thanksgiving Dinner.

The Pig's Tale

Once upon a time there was a fat triple-chinned pig named Jake who lived in a pigpen on Farmer Benny's farm. Jake lived happily in his small pen where each morning he awoke to find a mound of fresh corn in the corner of his pen. The kernels were quite delicious, and more than filling, but Jake spent all of three minutes ingesting his breakfast before there was no more food to be found inside the enclosure where he spent each day of his life.

After his morning meal, Jake napped in the sunshine when it was sunny, and he dozed in his straw-filled hog house when it rained. But with little else to do in such a small world of experience, Jake felt himself grow more and more slothful with each passing day.

One morning, after finishing his breakfast, Jake found that the gate to his enclosure was left unlatched, almost certainly by accident. With his snout, Jake pushed open the gate and seeing no sign of Farmer Benny or his dogs, scurried hurriedly to the cover of a patch of woods just a few paces from the farm.

Compared to Jake's 20-foot by 20-foot cage, the 400-acre woods seemed an eternally expansive universe. Jake spent hours and hours each day rooting through the soft detritus, slurping on beetle larvae, crunching roots, and chomping mushrooms growing from the soft ground.

At night Jake would nuzzle into a patch of tall grass or crispy leaves and snore lazily until dawn, when he would awake once again to feast upon the forest floor.

As weeks passed, Jake felt more energized. Losing much of the extra weight he had gained on Farmer Benny's farm, he had become leaner, more svelte. He could burst in sudden sprints for up to 100 yards without stopping, and he had lost his triple-chin.

Meandering from grove to grove along the river bottom that flowed through the woods, Jake chanced to enter into a clearing, which turned out to be the farm from which he had escaped. Having grown unaccustomed to the burden of captivity and feeling more sprightly and adventuresome than he had in earlier times, Jake followed his snout into the barn where he sensed the most delicious aroma of sweet corn. Indeed, Farmer Benny had harvested the first batch of "Peaches and Cream" corn cobs from the summer garden, which were lying in a pile on the barn floor while Farmer Benny had gone inside the house to fetch his paring knife and bowl. When he returned to the barn, imagine his surprise to find Jake, a hog that he had given up hope to retrieve, filling himself with corn.

Occupied with his meal, Jake paid no attention as Farmer Benny fetched a length of rope and tied it around the barrow's neck. Suddenly interrupted from his meal, Jake felt himself being led back into the pigpen he had escaped so many months ago.

The next morning, Jake awoke to a mound of fresh corn in the corner of his pigpen, which he promptly ate before napping for several hours. This routine continued for some number of days until Farmer Benny slaughtered him and placed in the freezer various pieces of him wrapped in wax butcher's paper. Farmer Benny's wife remarked that she could not remember tasting such a wonderful pork tenderloin, and Farmer Benny said he had to agree.

The Rabbit's Tale

There was a rabbit named Bruce, who wanted to live.

New to this enterprise, and quite unsure of the expectations one might indulge under such circumstances, Bruce busied himself in the study of those surrounding him who, from time to time, provided reasonable expositions upon the subject.

Take the dog, for instance, his faithful friend as far back as he can remember. As a youngster Bruce was captivated by the teachings of the dog: a bone for a bone and a tail for a tail, and love thyself as thy master.

The fox, on the other hand, suggested that some of the dog's teachings, though completely just, were slightly harsh, and upon those grounds offered a more useful framework in which no dog nor fox offered resistance to any other dog or fox, and that bones saved were earned, and that stealing was preferable to borrowing.

Canine (and vulpine) ethics proved to be a useful framework for the educable mind, yet when the science proved that dogs had been once the masters of men, Bruce found it difficult to take anything they reported seriously, so he looked elsewhere for philosophy.

Then he (the rabbit) happened upon a forked-tongue snake, who told him that truth and falseness require one another.

The owl, who was eavesdropping on the conversation as het roosted in an Elm tree interrupted, There is no truth and falseness, only oneness.

All of these philosophies seemed quite reasonable to the rabbit named Bruce. Till one day when Bruce happened to stop to listen to the teachings of a blind naked mole rat. His advice was that we should all begin to bury ourselves under the ground and to hide from the dogs, the foxes, the snakes, and the owls, a lesson that seemed quite reasonable, too, especially from a rabbit's perspective.

In the end, Bruce (who was a rabbit) spent his days frittering from thatch to thatch, nibbling a bit of clover here and there until late one evening a spotted hawk swooped on him as as he mounched on a stalk of soy bean, a little too far out in the field as the sun set in late November.