So he looked in the mirror and saw some residue still there; a leftover of that mask of attractiveness a woman had seen one minute ago. It was fading fast; a freckled tan in September. He talked to himself when he pee'd. He muttered to himself that it wasn't the type of person he wanted to be. He looked at his flaccid penis, and he was reminded of a pubescent dream, one where he was orally copulated by a woman while standing at a urinal. Unlike players in some other dreams, this woman was actually an acquaintance, but up to then hadn't contemplated her in a sexual way. She looked him in the eyes as she slowly, moistly took him into her mouth. It soothed him for 20 years. When he saw her again in the halls of the synagogue, she didn't known of any dreams, and he didn't see anything in her eyes. His dreams were like an annoying cancer trying to take hold of his thoughts. It was really too bad, he thought, that he was so emotionally resilient. It would have been much easier to break like a twig, and ask her to follow him into a bathroom and risk the consequences. He felt informed by some vague or distantly understood set of values. So what good were the values, he thought, if he couldn't even articulate them. Again it came to mind; that's just not the type of person he wanted to be. It wasn't enough that he wanted some sort of earthly reward for his propriety and restraint. No. He wanted a trophy for his silence, for his good heart. The goodness of his heart had after all prevented a toothy and reprehensible, smiling, fat, groaning monster from taking him away into fantasies realized. A tincture of goodness was all that was left. And it ripped away the curse of smoothness and likeability - that thing, melting away in the mirror.
How can the thing which makes you likable be the source of your folly at once. It's just cruel. A cruel mistake of the creator. Pleasing proportions, everything arranged nicely, not even perfectly, but even pleasing was so much better than the dog-faced ugly creatures who roamed the world. With their horsy smiles, sharky noses - nostrils lifted upward revealing the awful dank cilia inside - and the mother fuckers all smile. He wanted to snap their heads off. Strangle them. Why did they get the gift of blissful ignorance? Ah, their ugliness was his reward. Better now that he remembered all the fine balance in creation. His silence had become an armor and their lies bounced off him. His goodness was both his enemy and the very sword that would slay his nemesis. Cruel God.
There was a third person inside him - the one that could see both. It floated detached, sucking on a mint, observing and commenting, wincing at its choice of the wrong words to describe the absurd scene unfolding before it. It too had the potential to metastasize yet another thousand voices. It was getting pretty crowded in there. The first thing he thought of was the plaza around the grand Temple in Jerusalem - with all of the pilgrims of Israel who had come to supplicate before God on the holiest day of the year. Voice upon voice. Some uttered in unison - God full of compassion - compassion the lengths of exponential infinity and favoring compassion and truth. At other times just personal screams to save an ox, a harvest blighted, a son deformed, a spouse strayed. The marble below their feet polished and trodden from centuries of feet. And behind a curtain in front of them stands a man praying for himself.
Anyone who doesn't believe in God must have some solid explanation for the cruel joke that this whole thing presents. It was true, he thought, what the sages had understood and distilled into one single shot of deep and eternal wisdom; that axiom which sees each person as a universe. Not only of the families upon families and friends, students, enemies, cashiers and lovers which encircle the individual. But did they also reference in their exalted moment of clarity about the nature of humans, the eternal and ceaseless cast looming inside every mind - the casual game of host that each of us plays, doubting one voice not so popular while giving reinforcement to another. Sometimes like a cheap talk show; the moderator with a wireless microphone running from the black woman in the fluffy sweater to the college guy in flip flops, soliciting views, opinions and passions from his audience. At other times cranking some knob to spice it up with canned laughter or applause - the audience has gone home, to give voice to their own galaxies of bit players.
The man remembered - he once thought of the word respect. In some pedantic moment of revelation years ago, that it, the word respect, had multiple meanings and therefore needed to be recorded in the annals of some disheveled diary or collection of sugar potent stupidity. Respect in fact had to do with time. Seeing the surface and not rushing to note the adjoining facet, but rather forcing oneself to be at one side, to observe it until it was fully or at least adequately understood. Yes, perhaps this realization wasn't of the same quality of the majority of flotsam which he had uncovered in all his other years. After all, it might hold the key to unlocking the serenity which he so desperately sought. Respect. No, it's not a Hebrew word, but still English does have its moments. Again, one can respect an opinion, for instance. But in order to have that capacity or knowledge, one must first have the patience to sit and hear the alternate view expressed. Or one could say, from this respect I understand thus and such in a different way. Angles, like facets of a jewel, often adjoin not at perfect opposing directions, but instead in very subtle divisions. Like roads diverging at not exacting rectangular intersections, rather splitting off, with the original path slowly diverging for miles before it sways off into its own distant sequence. He wondered what it would have been to stay on that road. He agonizes whether or not to tease himself into yet another rage, or instead to quietly regret. And yet one must still turn the precious stone in order to respect each side - to allow the light to shine from it - to have its due in the sun, under a lamp - to serve as a mirror. Even if it is the wrong side.
How can the thing which makes you likable be the source of your folly at once. It's just cruel. A cruel mistake of the creator. Pleasing proportions, everything arranged nicely, not even perfectly, but even pleasing was so much better than the dog-faced ugly creatures who roamed the world. With their horsy smiles, sharky noses - nostrils lifted upward revealing the awful dank cilia inside - and the mother fuckers all smile. He wanted to snap their heads off. Strangle them. Why did they get the gift of blissful ignorance? Ah, their ugliness was his reward. Better now that he remembered all the fine balance in creation. His silence had become an armor and their lies bounced off him. His goodness was both his enemy and the very sword that would slay his nemesis. Cruel God.
There was a third person inside him - the one that could see both. It floated detached, sucking on a mint, observing and commenting, wincing at its choice of the wrong words to describe the absurd scene unfolding before it. It too had the potential to metastasize yet another thousand voices. It was getting pretty crowded in there. The first thing he thought of was the plaza around the grand Temple in Jerusalem - with all of the pilgrims of Israel who had come to supplicate before God on the holiest day of the year. Voice upon voice. Some uttered in unison - God full of compassion - compassion the lengths of exponential infinity and favoring compassion and truth. At other times just personal screams to save an ox, a harvest blighted, a son deformed, a spouse strayed. The marble below their feet polished and trodden from centuries of feet. And behind a curtain in front of them stands a man praying for himself.
Anyone who doesn't believe in God must have some solid explanation for the cruel joke that this whole thing presents. It was true, he thought, what the sages had understood and distilled into one single shot of deep and eternal wisdom; that axiom which sees each person as a universe. Not only of the families upon families and friends, students, enemies, cashiers and lovers which encircle the individual. But did they also reference in their exalted moment of clarity about the nature of humans, the eternal and ceaseless cast looming inside every mind - the casual game of host that each of us plays, doubting one voice not so popular while giving reinforcement to another. Sometimes like a cheap talk show; the moderator with a wireless microphone running from the black woman in the fluffy sweater to the college guy in flip flops, soliciting views, opinions and passions from his audience. At other times cranking some knob to spice it up with canned laughter or applause - the audience has gone home, to give voice to their own galaxies of bit players.
The man remembered - he once thought of the word respect. In some pedantic moment of revelation years ago, that it, the word respect, had multiple meanings and therefore needed to be recorded in the annals of some disheveled diary or collection of sugar potent stupidity. Respect in fact had to do with time. Seeing the surface and not rushing to note the adjoining facet, but rather forcing oneself to be at one side, to observe it until it was fully or at least adequately understood. Yes, perhaps this realization wasn't of the same quality of the majority of flotsam which he had uncovered in all his other years. After all, it might hold the key to unlocking the serenity which he so desperately sought. Respect. No, it's not a Hebrew word, but still English does have its moments. Again, one can respect an opinion, for instance. But in order to have that capacity or knowledge, one must first have the patience to sit and hear the alternate view expressed. Or one could say, from this respect I understand thus and such in a different way. Angles, like facets of a jewel, often adjoin not at perfect opposing directions, but instead in very subtle divisions. Like roads diverging at not exacting rectangular intersections, rather splitting off, with the original path slowly diverging for miles before it sways off into its own distant sequence. He wondered what it would have been to stay on that road. He agonizes whether or not to tease himself into yet another rage, or instead to quietly regret. And yet one must still turn the precious stone in order to respect each side - to allow the light to shine from it - to have its due in the sun, under a lamp - to serve as a mirror. Even if it is the wrong side.
2 comments:
Hello Chaim.
My favorite line from this story: He wanted a trophy for his silence, for his good heart. You do trail a philisophical journey, and that's usually the idea in short fiction--don't go from a to b to c, go from a to x to d to n. Someone, a visiting writer to my program back in the day, had said that. Thing is, I lose track of the woman. Maybe, if I were to see her--does she wear a coat, shoes, her hair longish and is it brown, fingernails painted, lips--initially, then you could play around with her pieces of image (if you follow) sewn into the, e.g., Pilgrims of Israel, in the Angles, like facets of a jewel--so readers would get a better idea of what the woman actually means to you versus what she had meant to you in the dream. She could serve to magnify the internal struggle, in other words.
Finally, I've said something. I hope what I've said makes sense. Miss you on TBWHM.
-ginab
Thanks Chaim for saying hello. I'm glad my comments were interesting to you. I'm glad too you'd surfaced on TBWHM. Everyone needs to hear more from you.
Hello to the family.
-ginab
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