Ghosts

In Albania a friend told me a story. As it was told, his friend came to visit in the north from Tirana, during communism, when it was dangerous to speak out against the government and nearly impossible to get out where they had enjoyed a good night of reading and discussing the fate of their work. Albania had become, in this man’s world, a dangerous place to continue the writing and as happens with contained talent, a place he felt impossibly constrained to. My friend had endured similar threats for tapestry works he had made. He was in a bad way, though with a good friend and this brought some relief. The night progressed into morning, drinking Raki, making what they could of the situation. Increasingly the friend became agitated, losing at first his sense of place and wanting some kind of release that was not or could not be present with talk just among the friends. In a drunken state the friend stood and pissed there on the floor of the café, lost now to delusion. Concerned, he took control and insisted they leave, get rest and talk maybe again in the morning, displacing the madness perhaps for another day. What happened next both in the telling and the story took a strange turn. His friend, being drunk, began insisting on the impossible, that the flat was in a different building, across a different distance and that the way home was quite opposite the actual way. My friend insisted and prodded his mate in the direction of the flat in the late dark hours before morning. Now again as it was told, the friend sometimes took to fantasy of flight, sometimes hanging from the building’s edge or from the balcony insisting on the reality of flight and disappearance to better pasture over the waters or the mountain lands, anywhere. On the streets his friend quite insisted that home was another way though my friend continued to insist. On arrival he lead the way up the stairwell to his first floor apartment, wanting to get the door open first and to set his friend to rest. Somewhere on the way up however the friend lost his way, made it to the escape entrance, dangled and dropped, onto his head from the 3rd story. He survived in a vegetative state for three days and passed.

That same night my friend told a second story; this one about his sister. Sometime in her early years, before the age of six she had found her father’s pistol under the bed. The gun was loaded. Thinking it a toy she began playing with it, searching the mechanisms that made it work. The gun fired and blasted a hole through her heart. My friend found the body. As he put it, saw her falling as he entered the room. The girl died, his mother’s only daughter. Now after half a lifetime she is attached to my friend’s daughter seeing the soul of hers alive again. This is how it played out. The family is strong from what I could see from the few weekends we’ve spent together and they maintain an ordered balance. A good family I think, as it is told to you.

These ghosts.

Frozen North

I sat to read again the last correspondence Ana had written, then Buttercup, then in searching for a lost transmission somewhere in the blog I found this account of a confessional written some 3 and half years ago. Not so long ago. Ana says, I was in the Turkish islands with my family at that time, and wonders why I would even reminisce at such a thing. Though Ana knows – it (it) being all too much. When I first met you she adds, my mother had just passed and I was looking for something for myself and only for myself. I thought of you as naïve and was angry with your way. But when we met, I recall, we had touched often, we were holding hands behind a pillow where no one would see and there was a connection. So when Ana made the connection after eight years she called me back to her place after placing my hands on her hips. I remember the moment. And now we will never forget. We are both at present in different movies screaming across divides from France to Serbia to Kosovo and echoing through the American plight; for this I think of the frozen winters of Rochester and gray asphalt of Iowa. I will likely never hear from any of them again; these ghosts. Lord Byron did the impossible, not realizing (or realizing all too well) the meaning of our connection and chose to be the victim. After several months of connection and trying I lost patience and called off our courting. Her response remains brutal, at first ignoring any attempt at connection then accusations of abuse, even rape. Rape. This being flung from the quiet din of her parent’s protective home in the quiet of the basement. The weakness of it making me ill beyond reason, the faithlessness of the projection a bold, clear and present lie to what it means to be called to action and left. To give in to ultimate selfishness from the utter center of self focused existence which we had been living. Which we all mostly live. Stupidity frees you from any responsibility. Buttercup at this moment lay dying, her cancer having spread so rapidly as to astound even the most conservative accounts of the disease’ progress. I sent what I could and awaited a response which came as a brief and beautifully written email. This will be the final correspondence and a good one though I think, each day, I will look for something more as I had always looked. Still the finality of her fate and the real and sustained connection we had will drive its beating heart into the soil with the rest to the river. There is nothing more to be said though I think at any moment I will be on a plane to Detroit and in a car up through the frozen north along Huron. If only there were unlimited resources. If only there were more choices.

Confessionals, Un Altro

When I think of the situation in the Balkans what I feel most now is stupidity. I’m an outsider, a foreigner and will remain so. Even stating something, anything about this “situation in the Balkans,” remains a prime example of just how foreign I will remain. This is true also in the States however there are ways through it region by region, to be American or the other. People test each other continually and even a glimpse at a slight of hand here or there reveals too much, maybe reveals all. What it takes is a bit of time or a battering ram of failure to sort it out. To determine if you are who you claim to be and/or why you’ve come. I’m continually finding it more difficult to understand the difference between hero and villain. Even the echo of this mindset is disturbing. Us and them. At the Bughouse life was clear, fight hard or perish inside of it. Friends were often enemies and enemies could be known and unknown. Most, well mostly those who became opposed to my way, morphed somehow consciously into the second of the latter, the unknown enemy. But what could force my mind into such a paranoid state? Pain, likely. Or defeat. Or worse, success, success at finding an answer even though I don’t like its result or consequence either to my body or soul which, in recent years, I’ve fancied merging into one. That mind/body conglomerate that coughs and pukes and twists its ugliness forward through the deep swampy bogs of desire and release. For weeks now I’ve awoken to fear of death. That’s saying something, from here in the world of vampires. But it’s not my own death I think of but the death of Buttercup. Her death specifically because somewhere in my code of the new mind/body I feel I’ve done something wrong in giving death open season in a time of great strain. However stupid, I feel responsible for letting the anxiety hold me down or change my path in any way and let go of being strong or open or a casualty in any way. And now because I lost a battle with demons, death will come to take her away and open bare a sustained pit of horror from which one has no hope of release. That and because, even after these years, I remember her softness and our soft, drunken conversations, in a time where I needed something soft and she needed some kind of cowboy to fulfill each others myths. And we did this well, even through the first phase and the diagnosis and the subsequent realization that this will not get better, that she would not be my girl even in the best of times, for very long. When I called, first we spoke for hours and it was good to hear her voice and to believe in something sustained and good. She is now on a constant drip for pain as the tumor on her brain stem blocks out the remaining life – first taking her ability to move, and then slowly growing deeper into the brain until it blocks her lungs and heart. My impulse is to lie close to her and put my fingers in her cunt. To deny the beast with soft touches and orgasms and warm hands over soft breasts. But being half a world away I just listened and spoke of our superficial experience and sent a package the next week from Kosovo. Buttercup responded with a polite letter, the kind of American politeness that Ana, when she senses it in me, wants to eat up and spit out as dribbles of waste. But from here, for my part, her gracious response was the kind act of a strong soul in a dying body. And I listen and wait in exile from the closed land of vampires hoping for some possible change of fate which has been assured will not arrive. Be strong little boy, find God's song.

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