Yes. When you see a Gila monster emerge like a bizarre beaded purse you will love him as if he is your own mother. You will imprint on him as does a gosling on the first thing that it sees move and you will have a mother and not be sore afraid as you were even though they say your mother can kill you if you let her chew on you.
Or a sidewinder! I was born to love a sidewinder. Do you remember Studio Becalmed?
I will never not remember Studio Becalmed.
Nor I.
What is your point?
I believe that Studio Becalmed had a sidewinder in his pants.
That is vulgar and senseless and juvenile and almost funny. God, in His infinite wisdom, has seen to it that our mothers do not chew on us when we are infants but wait until we are older and can take it.
Or at least can resist it and issue poisons of our own.
What if Studio Becalmed in the Final Alps of Heaven repudiated Jayne Mansfield and took up with Jejune Longing?
It disturbs me to think of that, even if by that point Jayne is headless, as I suppose she would be, even in the final alps of heaven.
You don’t think that things would be restored to some kind of corporeal pristinity in heaven, or perhaps be noncorporeal?
I cannot say. If things are noncorporeal will it be meaningful that Studio “repudiates” one woman for another? Do we not mean by saying “repudiate” that he would eschew Jayne and lie down with Jejune Longing? In your view will there be no intercourse in heaven? Is it worth going then?
You have a point. Somehow I do not see rutting and grunting in heaven. Nor can I see it allowed exactly in hell. This very prospect is somewhat like the desert to us. Will rutting and grunting be allowed in the afterlife?
What would happen in heaven were Studio to say, “Jayne, be okay if Jejune Longing came over?” and Jayne were to say, “Sure, babe”?
A sidewinder touches the ground with only ten percent of himself, if that. He does not get burnt and he does not bog down in all that sand.
He knows the desert.
He knows no fear and no disgust.
Do you ever have a longing for a good, fast car?
Sometimes. I like the restored hot rod.
I saw a man on television presented with the surprise gift of his junk car fully restored. He wept before it. The mechanics who did the work laughed, gratified and sympathetic, to see this man weep before his new hot rod. All he could say was, “It’s everything,” and sniffle. He opened the hood and beheld the specialness under there and fell back in a whole new paroxysm of ecstasy.
He’s an idiot. I envy him.
I regard him a larger idiot than you do and I envy him more.
He is a kind of sidewinder, is he not?
Well, that seems a bit of a stretch, metaphorically, but I will call the weeping idiot we admire a sidewinder if you will. What harm could lie in that?
I am particularly drawn to advanced technology in spark-plug wires and to the arresting colors they now make them in. They are not black now. They are orange, chartreuse.
Wires the color of liquor!
People the color of dogs!
Why did you say that?
I don’t know.
&
In what environments should a man have it together? In a chamber of surgery, with a scalpel in his hand?
Yes. There he should have it together in the extreme.
Are there other venues where he should really have it together?
No. Let us say he is holding on to the back of a garbage truck and stepping off it as cans of garbage on the curb are approached and swinging these cans of garbage into the truck and setting them down empty, or tossing them any old way, and stepping back on the truck (which has not come to a real stop) as it progresses toward the hundreds or thousands of cans remaining on the route — he does not need to have it together for this, and this is essentially not unlike any other human endeavor on earth just now, except for surgery.
By “just now” do I detect that you believe that at one time more men had it together?
You do detect that suspicion. I cannot call it a full-on belief. I just think that given the near total dissolution upon us now that it, our dissolution, could not have ever been greater, not even when we were crawling from the cave, and that to have survived this far we must have had it together more back then than now. People did not always eat sugar and talk all day on cell phones and go to war simply because they were told they were unpatriotic if they did not.
I am not unsympathetic to your position. I wonder though if the case may not be made that people would have always eaten sugar and talked on cell phones had they had access, and that what has alarmed you is the novel number of idiots now upon us. The base percentage of crackpottage remains the same but the absolute numbers have shot through the roof. For example: you can wrestle yourself to the ground weighing solicitations for you to contribute funds either to save an endangered paucity of animals or to feed an endangering surplus of starving people, who are the primary endangerment to the animals, but nowhere does anyone solicit funds from you to limit the numbers of the starving people.
That’s an example, exactly, of what?
I don’t know. I do not have it together well enough to have any idea.
I thought so.
Here’s another example: I heard recently of a bear eating cherries off a suburban cherry tree, who, the bear, then killed the tree.
And this news serves us how?
It serves my thesis: In earlier times the bear never would have wrecked the tree. A bear is no less survival-savvy than a man, and is as smart, etc., as anyone who has ever seen one ride a bike in the circus without killing everyone concerned can attest. Were this bear not subject to the same forces that have made men the trivial fat loose cannons they are today, he would never have harmed the tree that feeds him. He is a symbol of modern man in modern times.
He’ll eat anything?
He’ll do anything.
I myself am frequently visited by an odd vision which is possibly not germane to whatever you are talking about. I see myself drinking tepid and not very satisfying water from a tangerine-colored aluminum tumbler in extreme ambient heat, I see a water moccasin, and I hear the noise of cicadas or some other leg-sawing racket-specializing insects in pine trees, or at least in the bush all about, a noise that rises and falls in volume and possibly pitch in a way that seems to resonate with my very head at moments, or within my head, I don’t know precisely how one speaks of resonance but think I grasp it, physically speaking. It is possible that this noise even gets the rather yellowy orange tumbler I am drinking the hot water from to vibrating in a way that shocks my teeth and makes the water taste bitter. The water moccasin is a benign, sturdy, calm presence in all this, not, as it were, holding his ears or calling for ice water. The water moccasin alone, I now realize, has it together.
It is germane to whatever I am talking about.
It would appear to be.
That surprises me.
Me too.
I did not think even what I was talking about was germane.
To what?
Well, to anything at all in general and specifically to what I was talking about.
Can one talk about something and have it be not germane to itself?
Well, yes, I think this may be the quintessence of not having it together.
Talk that is not germane to its intention — in other words, the nattering of the mad.
Yes, if the mad have an intention.
They probably do. They have just lost it.
I wonder if your water moccasin would allow himself be petted?
I could put my hand inside the otherwise useless metal tumbler and stroke his neck and find out. My sense is that he would not mind.