Flow Chart, "...how trivial the music..."
Excerpt from Part II, Flow Chart (1991)
But how trivial the music. All this. Yet it is where part of the gender first starts to emerge and become a blur. The various members of both sexes never seem to get hurt: theirs is a life that drifts peacably along as on a stream and they can wave to each other like boats and join in the fun and never be forgotten. Possibly a door opens far down in the wall to admit a lover who as silently departs later. Possibly there is more to it all than this, but if we can decipher even what the fair-minded man wants us to, what about the rest, poverty and disclaimers? And who sees the mountain-mad man through goatshine and never confesses to an early blunder concealed, to having left a child in the cold once? And as they marginally edge each other, new and good truths and others, older and not so good, begin to appear along the bicycle-trail of their intimacy through space, here on earth. One was a Spanish longshoreman’s daughter, a laughing girl, who, when told the truth, deliberately spat on it. Another, young too, and in the full flower of “the devil’s beauty,” had good cause to come up and grab an arm, an elbow resting on a newspaper as it happened, and tickle the thing half to death. And in the interval of slide, or portamento, a lot of laughing does get to be heard, only it’s like you’re not doing it, it’s the boys on the other side of the ridge obeying their zeal again. The moon abruptly decides to set and kids pester their parents for more firecrackers, in the crevices, where eyes lately pecked out—O bored hero, why not return to earth for a while? We have forgiven thee what was construed as negligence rather than rancor, so in return we should be taught by thy knee. Later when she comes to throw out the table scraps there it will be, a little sliver of haven made and purposely rigged for you to come and go many times without noticing, slinging your coat over your shoulder as you go looking in the dirt for a whistle. But that day it was all roses. And it turned out that the inquiry was silenced, deliberately erased from the file. And if a man wanted this, and got it, how about the heathen rest of us who wait in silence for food as though a drug got planted in one’s abdomen? Sooner or later, boys and girls declare, there will be someone on whom a care like this could devolve, a woman made to see through, analyze, and correct the errant circuitry and in doing so bring us back to the habor of recollection from which we strayed so long ago, but it was a mistake in a dream. The formula is now reconstituted. From the awfulness of times long gone by it wrests a polite excuse, small even by its standards, but alive to us, and harsh, dry, a wrong prism. Or stand all right, lowering the teabag into the mug until something comes of it, is plumbed, but meanwhile what of zombies standing around in clinging seersucker in frigid temperatures, awaiting your decision? When the curse arrives, are you prepared to deal with it? Apologies don’t matter any more; it’s a question of biting off the end, spitting it out, and sucking the poison through a small tube if you want to go that way. Otherwise, listless years of atrophy could be your fate though there are undoubtedly worse ones. Pick a channel, explore, document it— please take all the evidence into account in your report, when you write it: you’ll find your story isn’t so different from any honest man’s, not less bizarre and compelling: was it always a savage rite? Weren’t there times in childhood when one felt neutral, a shy appraiser gazing unendangered into the reflecting globe, and when you turned back, moments later, the horrible clashes hadn’t gone away, but you were somehow separated, a person with things to do? And if the urgency thinned out in later decades, why be compromised? Because these others were waging war on things and people with words and things does it follow that your employment was slighted, that you weren’t free to clean out your desk? Sullen newsprint blows back and forth, a double sheet of it is suddenly tossed six stories high and drops back, heavy as a sinker: does this have something to do to you; more to the point, are you alive severed from it? The old ghouls will have to be derided before one faces up to the spector of the empty stadium at dusk, bare branches aquiver. How about your friend in the hospital: did you call him? How many bridges between here and the end of that journey? Over wells, along walls, silently one creeps along. Employment is difficult: I mean it’s difficult for me to hold a job long, not that I’m not efficient, it’s, well, so easy not to understand, to take full possession of one’s unawareness and then refuse to leave, a squatter in one’s own house. And so much will have happened by the time even this minor wrangle is settled. It’s impossible to keep abreast of the times, and yet we still think of wings.