All our life till now I could live easy, breath in easy — swallow easy — loving you. It was as though you’d taken room in me. . And when I came to you with my arms before me like a present of flowers? And when I said sweet heart, dear love. . do you remember? Never a foolish name. Dear heart, I said, dear love—8
Just as Israbestis is a wealth, a world of stories, Omensetter, “his hands as quick as cats,”9 is himself a miracle. Dionysius, he holds “out his nature. . like an offering of fruit, his hands add themselves to what they touch enlarging them as rivers meet and magnify their streams.”10
“Sweetly merciful God,” says Henry Pimber upon meeting him for the first time, “what has struck me?”11 Striking the world like a fallen star, Omensetter is Enkidu, his testicles “furry like a tiger’s,”12 he is “what they call the magnetic kind.”13 Like Enkidu, “no better than an animal himself”14 and “as inhuman as a tree,”15 he is the perfect stranger. The stranger who causes some to awaken, some to lose balance, some to catch fire. Dionysius. Feared for infecting those who see him with the fever of Trance. He is a “dream you might enter,”16 and his smile is a “terrible wound.”17
Such is his miraculousness, Henry Pimber, “obedient to some overwhelming impulse, astonished and bewildered by it though it filled him with the sweetest pleasure. . secretly thrust[s] one of [Omensetter’s] tin spoons into his mouth.”18 And this in a failed attempt to heal his own split tongue, his heart broken again and again on the wheel of self-betrayal. Poor Henry Pimber! A man who, if he names the trees, hates the days. His jaw will seize up, a mirror of his soul, and if Brackett’s poultice of beets will loosen it and briefly save his life, the beets will stain Lucy Pimber’s temper as badly as her countertop. Having lived “little and low,”19 “as a stone with eyes,”20 when he falls it will be from a tree, “like an unseen leaf.”21
But back to Israbestis, whose voice is “quieter than paws,”22 his words like the eyes of foxes, “burning the bark from trees.”23 Burning, too, like Aladdin’s lamp, the eyes of Mossteller’s cat, Yorrick’s skull. Agitating like worms under saucers. Word tides, fairy lights, lunar words, solar words. A god housed under every stone, every tongue. Word rivers of mutabilities, the very ones that tumbled us here — you and I — in the first place. The first word that opens Omensetter’s book is now: a feline word, round as the first egg. Recall how things in eggs, like things in the mind, are all emanations of the initial impulse and so look alike: fish, lizard, fox, chick, Kick’s cat, and every human child. Each child is Eros if given the chance, if allowed to grow up “in good excitement.”24 Eros: the firstborn, the one who makes things shine, the revelation, the one for whom all stories begin. Such a child: “There’s no time to him.”25 Such a one as this: “Time goes through the funnel of his fingers — click, click, click, click — like water over stones.”26 Such a one as this binds the world together, our world rent asunder time and time again by Quarrel.
The secret of Omensetter’s Luck is rooted in that intangible thing so unlike Lucy Pimber’s dead crockery: adoration. As when Brackett and Lucy stand together in time’s river, their flesh like lanterns, hotter even than the sun.
In this moment, and despite Furber’s titanic envy — an envy that will boil and roast and devour and spit them back out very much the worse for wear — Lucy and Brackett are the children of paradise. They offer a glimpse of a universe (could it possibly be our own?) in which adoration of the other embodies all that is divine. The mutable, finite body in all its moods and poses — divine.
The sun was cool. And she like an after image still, a scar of light, a sailor’s deep tattoo. She stepped from a pool of underclothing. . Then they kissed like needles. And he has a member, gentlemen, you might envy. It looked. . infinite. Beneath it. . a heap of thunderous cloud. It had risen with her rubbing as they shambled in the water. By its measure it might have been the massive ram and hammer of the gods. . Then — listen — then, so full herself, she spilled his seed, and they both laughed like gulls.27
A witness of this kiss, this laughter, this prick, this needling of light, one wants the story to go on forever, “to be a long one.”
I want it to be a long story.
It is a long story.
Put everything in it.
I always put everything in it.28
How can we thank you enough, dearest William, for putting everything in it? And this over and over again! All those blue books that like loving looks extend their objects into the surrounding space; books one thirsts for as one thirsts for “deep well water drunk from a cup.”29
Of Omensetter, Henry Pimber says:
The Man was more than a model. He was a dream you might enter. From the well, in such a dream, you could easily swing two brimming buckets. In such water an image of the strength of your arms would fly up like the lark to its stinging. Such birds, in such a dream, would speed with the speed of your spirit through its body, where, in imitation of the air, flesh has turned itself to meadow.30
One puts down Omensetter’s Luck and thinks, here is such a dream, such a bird, such a water, such a writer; its author: William Gass.
Witchcraft by a Picture
Near the conclusion of Lost Highway’s first sequence, the horn player sprawls beneath hell’s hot eye like an astronaut lost in space. This restless and excremental eye — both a firebox and the force that dissolves and reshapes the horn player’s already compromised identity — is the absolute axis of demonic intention. The compaction of Fred’s soul, so palpable from the start, is now mirrored by the astriction of his body — a collapse anticipated by the recurrent implosion and resurgence of the Devil’s cabin. Awash in estrangement, the enchanted horn player is suppressed, sucked in, and spat out as a fresh object of cosmical foul play. It is no accident that the doubled hero assumes the roles of musician and mechanic: Fred’s horn and Peter’s tool will damn him.
If the mechanic’s name is Peter “Ray,” his spirit is not spirited enough to save him. Reduced to a prick, he peters out — a defeat he shares with Fred and Mr. Eddie too, and that is conjured at the film’s beginning and confirmed at the end by the words Dick Laurent is dead. And if Dick is a dead dick from the outset, so Peter too is quickly undone, his cock replaced by a gun: “Stick this in your pants,” says Alice.
Lost Highway proposes a radically gnostic universe, one in which the material world is “some spooky stuff,” overseen by an envious and envenomed deity — androgynous, fond of boasting, and whose intentions are tirelessly malicious. In gnostic terms, the body is a vampire, a prison, and a tomb; reincarnation is a highway to hell, and time and space, “this magic moment,” the illusions of a fallen and deficient world, a world that is the gravity-bound sediment of a more luminous universe not given to the perfidious deceptions of space-time. The possibility of redemption explored in Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart is here entirely abandoned. In the world’s “Deep Dell,” everyone implodes. Even Evil’s henchmen cruise the Lost Highway on a collision course.