Charles Freeland


The Modigliani is on Loan

Which villain warrants more attention, the man at the gate with faux orchids in hand and an accent we can’t place? Or the demiurge come fully formed from the pages of Timaeus and the silty floor of the sea disturbed lately by the drifting of the continents and the debris from shrimp boats damaged and then unceremoniously scuttled?

I suspect the answer is lying about in pieces with jagged edges and a guidebook that will be translated when someone competent can be located in the halls of the local college. Or, more likely, the aisles of the feed store where the floor has been scuffed by generations of boots made from exotic animal skins. Where the prostitutes aren’t as easy to spot as they are, say, in Boise. But they are available just the same, so long as you know how to ask.

Leave off any trace of nerves or that treacly condescension that works so well in the pews and on the sidelines of the soccer fields, and replace it, however briefly, with the gibberish one expects in institutions for the profoundly insane. A sound rising each morning to a crescendo and then falling each evening into a low and intimate murmur, a purring like an ocelot kitten’s. When the staff puts on its production of Measure for Measure. When the medications kick in and the little brown bats circle the gingko tree in the courtyard outside in what can only be described as an unprovable moonlight.

*

The territorial charter mentions neither fences nor names of rivers nor why there should be a territory here at all as opposed to simply a grouping of homes constructed of brick and boasting indoor plumbing as well as outside breezes fragrant with persimmon.

Few read the charter but if you do, notice the lines pre-authorizing the creation of an art institute, as if someone knew before a single road had been paved or foundation laid that the territory should exist for purposes more important — dare we say it? sublime — than any that preceded it.

I stand at the far end of the portico and turn my nose up at pretty much anyone who walks in, whether I recognize them or not. It is just the sort of thing that gets one a reputation and mine develops so quickly some have accused me of creating it ahead of time. Of lifting salient details from the characters in the better-known medieval mystery plays.

We all have our crosses to — if not bear — then erect around the premises as if they were mere decoration. When someone points out the pathology at the heart of this endeavor, we can’t help but become a little obsessed with how unfairly we have been treated. We can’t help but pout like children informed they will receive no cake until they cease threatening to physically injure their siblings.

I often feel as though I am not really a single thing moving through time intact, but a series of merely exterior sensations following one upon another without interruption but with little to tie them together either, thematically or aesthetically. Like bacteria that divide and continue to divide until something noxious comes along and shuts the whole process down.

Practically speaking, our membranes have gone missing, each pre-existing demarcation having somehow merged with its neighbor until the whole edifice appears blurry, something out of a poorly executed daguerreotype. Or the brain of a child suffering a pronounced fever.

I suspect the culprit is history itself, a four-letter word in these parts apt to conjure grown men walking about in iron clothing.

Maybe the real problem is best illustrated by the anchors and the anvils that keep popping up in unexpected corners of the subterranean hallways and janitors’ closets. Their locations suggest they were never really intended to be part of the collections proper, but were instead dropped off randomly here and there by visitors who just happened to come into possession of implements that otherwise serve a completely ordinary purpose.

The lengths we go to are hardly surprising, but they are lengths just the same and ought to make us consider, even just briefly, why we should go to them in the first place. We could go to the flea market just as easily and be better satisfied with the outcome.

None of which is meant to suggest existing alternatives have more to offer than the anchors and the anvils. Just take a closer look when you stumble upon one in the future and admire the workmanship! The throbbing sensation it creates when you thump it with your fist!

*

Sometimes we have to admit that familiarity is a too-rapid thing. It approaches with the velocity of a locomotive, but without all the noise, and when you find yourself in its grasp, you only really have three options. Two of them are not very promising and the third is very like the other two in its tendency to remind you of nights spent tossing and turning as the result of general despair. Or a very particular lobster dish.

The simplest route to the institute takes us through an alley that has been given a poor reputation by those who congregate there in the glow of the streetlight, though you can tell these people are mostly harmless by the outdated tunes they whistle and the pomade in their hair.

Luckily, I do not have to leave the premises. I live on the second floor and keep an ear peeled for the arrival of out-of-town relatives who have the habit of ringing the bell at the front entrance long after close in the evening. It helps that I can’t see the entrance from the balcony of my room, but I can hear most anything that occurs on the grounds when the sliding door is open and the nearby freeway traffic has let up a bit after rush hour.

Sometimes the conversations are so intense I have trouble ignoring them and I am tempted to wander downstairs and unlock the front entrance and let everyone in. But I am usually able to avoid this temptation by shooting bottle rockets off the balcony instead and watching them explode at such height and in such variated colors as would charm even the simplest idiot.

Funny how the systema nervosum isn’t really a system at all but a web of random and accidental connections originating in a primordial swamp and illuminated by lightning.

When you treat it that way, when you admit that you have no more control over it or understanding of what it consists of than you do the vagaries of Welsh syntax, it rewards you with constant gifts of immunity. Of days spent with little or no care for the vicissitudes that might bring others to their knees. The talk of divorce and the tax codes and the tendency of the heavens to unleash themselves in murderous torrents.

You can always knock at the doors of the few supposedly unused rooms and listen for the reactions inside. The terrified screaming, I suppose. The whispers of coming calamity and renewal like that which was visited upon the heroes from the clay tablets, from a time when deities walked the Earth, or at least floated above it, just out of reach.

I hear all the same rumors even now, filtering up from unknown reservoirs and spreading out in what can best be described as simple capillary action. I pour cups of palm wine and attempt to share them with the shadowy collaborators I imagine lurking in the corners. I ask them with each additional swallow whether the universe is, in fact, expanding. Or if this is just an optical illusion caused by our central placement within it.

By morning, I am completely incapable of recall. It feels as if I have been conjured in a glass tube from an admixture of elemental particles and old spells handed down from one generation to the next so that, invariably, mistakes occur. Mutations infect the process with accretion, and the final outcome can no more be predicted than rationalized after the fact.

Close inspection of the tablets hung on the wall by the south windows overlooking the river and sharing space with the Russian futurists reveals an odd admixture of technical terms and metaphysical speculation completely inconsistent with itself, as if four or more pagan cosmologists had been applying their talents at once without bothering to communicate, without bothering to so much as learn the proper way to hold their utensils!

This, says the director, a woman with a Latin American accent and eyes split green and brown down the middle, will lead to little short of ruin. A reputation for wanting to have our cake and auction it off too.

Disagreements like ours seem sometimes to arise from the ether itself, the fifth element of the quintessence (or is it the sixth?). The only way to avoid the resultant catastrophe is to act as if it had been your idea all along. Something you had been actively working toward with the single-minded devotion of an airline pilot suddenly facing the prospect of coming back to earth again without the assistance of his electronic instrumentation. Or a shepherd so thoroughly sick of smelling like his flock, he lets it drift further and further out of sight, just as the stars are beginning to show and the leopardess stirs, stretches, and yawns wide to expose her wet and fleshy maw.




Charles Freeland lives in Dayton, Ohio. His website is The Fossil Record (charlesfreelandpoetry@ blogspot.com).

 
 

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