for Donald Barthelme
I.
“Here I go!”
He brought the axe down on the log and split it in twain. Then he took the two pieces and put them on the pile. Then he did this again and again and again. He did this all afternoon. And each of the split pieces was entirely itself, and each was just like all the others. And we sat there and watched him as he worked, and sometimes we flicked our lighters in our hands or chewed on chips of bark that landed on the ground near us, and that night we had a bonfire, big enough that there was room enough for everyone, and it was very warm, and the night was very dark, and we caught glimpses sometimes of strange shadows moving in the trees, right at the edge of where the light could reach.
II.
Recently, I had occasion to walk a few blocks along Park Avenue. It isn’t something I would recommend for pleasure, but I can’t deny it was instructive. Everything is so quiet there, so peaceful and clean. But one can’t shake the feeling that this peacefulness is false somehow, that its mechanism seems one of suppression and displacement, not born of true serenity. In this sense, there is something narcotic about it, something dangerous. Everything is elegant, and nothing is sublime. There’s ample greenery, and no signs of life. Every townhouse on every cross street, I noticed, seemed to have its shutters closed, its curtains drawn – the doors, sometimes, appear to open right onto the sidewalk, but in practice they might as well be on the surface of the moon. I saw a brass plaque in one particular window, leaned up against the glass in front of (of course) tightly-shut venetian blinds: “A Gentle Solution,” it said, with no further explanation. Things like this don’t mean anything, which is, I expect, much of why they so unnerve me.
III.
We have to stay alert. What we’re looking for has a habit of turning one way, then the other. We can be looking right at it, and suddenly it’s not there anymore, suddenly it’s something else entirely. We stand on our fortifications and try to make ourselves open to it. Slowly, we become accustomed to the idea of something other than the flicker of the torch light. We dream that the pictures we painted on the cave walls could really move.