I have lost the capacity to make a fist with my head, is what I mean. It is a matter of mental muscle tone, and I’ve gone as slack as pudding. I need to drink me some brain Jell-O, get some pearls growing in that oyster. At the very least I’ve got to wash my glasses and shut up.
Dusk
At dusk, the girls visit. We ride out to meet them on our horses, with our guitars. Our guitars are made of boxwood.
The girls are of flesh and they are agreeable to our every suggestion profane and genteel. They come at dusk. By dawn they are gone wherever they go. We live in a valley of cattle and history. Conditions are dry but there is water in the wells. All in all it is Spanishey.
The boxwood is a small hedge in my experience, and that my guitar is made of boxwood troubles me. The girls are taken with the tunes from our guitars, withal.
In history there has been force and badness and an eking along of goodness. There are broken guitars, but also new guitars. The girls are broken, but whole and trying. We too. We meet them when they come at dusk, at the gates of the ranch, a good place to meet. The cattle, the air, the past, etc. is there to enrich the moment. We are there with our boxwood guitars. The girls smile every night. They smile just the same way.
We will not be able to hold this moment forever, though we will try rabidly. A rogue boxwood plant on the impossibly long drive to the gate to meet the girls holds us in thin regard.
In history, before this moment and after this moment, some powerful men will drive this impossibly long drive with Mercedeses and it will be possible, the drive. The girls they meet will not be coming to them on foot, however, and will not be smiling. In a Mercedes, in fact, the drive will look practical. There will be no guitars, not of boxwood or anything else, then. Their girls will not be wearing colorful handmade skirts as ours do. The skirts are so folksy and authentic you couldn’t take it if they were not on genuine girls who have come to see you. The men of Mercedes history, before this and after this, will have to drive far to procure their women, and the women will wear basic black and be expensive. That kind of woman is not for us, indubitably not for us.
Our names are so common we have forgotten to use them for some time. It has not mattered. We probably have not actually forgotten what they are, our names, but it might be close. We would abjure a test. We remember our girls at dusk and our guitars. I remember the boxwood holding me in its shrinking regard. How is there enough wood in the plant of a boxwood, or in many of them, to make a guitar? Does my guitar speak to the plant? Does the plant weep, or mourn, to see us pass with our guitars of itself? If you think this way, you are compelled to drive the impossible drive on a horse, not in a Mercedes. The horse has some non-Mercedes thoughts of its own. The girls are not about to be seen getting into Mercedeses either. We have all gone the other way. We are not powerful, except in our disregard for power, which is a weak form of powerfulness, we are not under delusions here. We are clear-headed, clear-voiced, clear-intended to our girls, who come at dusk.
Their skirts are a sunset under their smiles, and a sunset is behind their smiles, the same every night. Our guitars speak to the girls, to history, to the boxwood who disapproves of us. We inhale the history in the air, the past, present, and future. Too much of that will give you a headache so we do not do too much of that. Too much of that will accelerate your forgetting your name also. One girl is named Angelique. One is browner than the others and looks chewier, if to say that would not give offense. We deem, now that we have said it, that it would, so we retract it. Shall we say that the browner girl appears sturdier than the lighter girls, that her smile in the dusk appears brighter because her white teeth flash in greater contrast to her face than the teeth of the lighter girls flash, etc., and so the possibly very fraudulent conclusion may be drawn that the browner girl is happier and therefore readier for the rough handling that men with boxwood guitars and no car are going to mete out? And that these men who regard men in Mercedeses as caciques in history, even if they are but heavily mortgaged realtors, are the kind who would formulate that a girl looks chewier not with an eye to offending but merely with an eye to avoiding blather? Yes. She looks chewier then. Very chewy and she gives us a good feeling just being around her, as do equally the other girls, the less chewy-looking ones in the dusk. They are every bit as chewy-looking in the full day and in the full night. The browner girl has this advantage only for a few minutes per day. That does not seem unfair.
The guitar is easy to tune, the Mercedes not. As men of the weak powerful sort, who abjure the test of name recall, our own, we abjure also the notion of fairness, we know better, but it creeps into our thoughts sometimes, like bilge water. It obtains, pitch all you want. No craft does not leak. The thin boxwood holding us in thin regard was eaten by a bull. Or an antelope for all we know. We do know we had to run, guitars and girls bouncing a lovely discordant concerto across the present frame of history, from a shorthorn bull as wide as three Mercedeses and half as fast, but not for an impossibly long distance. The girls were happier and chewier all after that, our guitars sounded more splendid than usual, and all of us but me had failed to notice the missing boxwood.
Letter from France
I have, I think, two apartments in France and so seldom use one of them that I somewhat forget I have it or where it is when I do recall, alarmed, that I have it. In this respect it is like the course exam you are scheduled to take in dreams for a course you have not attended and do not comprehend your enrollment in. My second apartment, or first if you will, is somewhat more on the map of consciousness — to say, I have a clearer idea of what it looks like and where it is (it is airy and on the front of a building; the other is dark and in the high dank rear of a building) — and I believe I have spent time in it, but not much. This must leave me actually living yet somewhere else. I am in general very nervous in France.
My brain and my heart are as small as a songbird’s. I tweet a little, flit, do not overthink. My emotions are a green and purple sorbet.
I wear a corset and a codpiece under my clothes. Whenever I am tempted to act, rare, I step back and secretly tighten the undergarments to further restrict motion, and thereby the temptation to act. A life of action is a wasted life.
Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen is coming over for some covert sex that I may not appear to be very interested in lest it put her off that I am a typical male. The fact is that I am not up for appearing uninterested in sex, whether that is typical male or not, and I am not up for the sex with Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen itself, whether that is typical male or not. I am not altogether up for a visit by Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen except insofar as she can give me some inadvertent clues about my apartments. Sometimes I think I am living in her apartment and she is coming not to visit me but to discover me in her place, at which point she might legitimately expect to govern how I act with respect to sex or anything else. I wish I could get some claritude on some of these issues. The weather outside has shifted from a pleasant balm to some kind of typhoon-acting thing that has the walls heaving in and out visibly, audibly straining. I have wedged a towel into the front-door sill to stop the seepage of water. I have activated a small electric teakettle and I plan to drink tea if I find some. I will hold a warm crockery cup in my hands and take comfort in the warmth. The tea would soothe my nerves were my nerves unsoothed. My nerves are soothed in direct proportion to the force of wind around them. I feel as calm and serene as a dead man.