The Last Week (short fiction by Eliot Cardinaux)

Today I took a walk.  Back behind my house there is a woods, with trails that lead back further in to where there is a pond.  I had been working all day, setting things up for my life to keep moving along, filing papers, writing forms, making lists of things to do before I got started on a job I had just been hired to do, and a place I was looking to check out.  My thoughts were huddled up inside my brain so that, whenever I stopped working, or ran the course to its end, I was left alone, unmoving and in search of something that would keep my mind afloat.  After a few minutes I lay down on the couch.  A book lay on the table, and barely glancing at the title, I picked it up and started reading.  The book, which was about a magician who had gone in search of others in his field and ended up with tribal sorcerers and healers, learning about their magic and the like, I read with a feeling of the utmost contentment.  At times though, with an incomprehensible sense of discontent and agitation.  I could remember feeling this way about a lot of books.  Well, in fact, I didn’t have to remember feeling like this.  Sometimes books open gateways to pain or pleasure whose existence I can be otherwise unaware of.  I’m not suggesting they’re the only avenues for revealing these sensations, only I remarked on it for some reason.  I read on.  The author was outlining a thesis I had heard before: that in the modern world, we become more and more detached from the reality of what he called the non-human world around us – what he meant by this were animals, plants, winds, rains and the like.  And he went on to assert that, because of our detachment from these forces, in a way we often replace our surroundings with our thoughts, so that these non-human entities are holed up inside our very skulls.  This is what disconcerted me.   

.           .            .            .            .            .

A military helicopter flew overhead.  The music bore my thoughts into the ground like a self that had cast off, a mixture of fear and wonder scattered about my head so that all that I heard was the drone of the chopper and above it, a chorus of tree frogs in the distance.  It reminded me of the song my mother used to sing to me as a child – an eerie ethereal calliope-like melody.  To me, as a kid, it was like noticing my own mortality and at the same time feeling like everything was going to be ok.  I looked down at the tulips and daffodils in the garden.  It didn’t seem fair that American choppers were killing civilians in Libya.  But the garden was beautiful.  It felt like a privilege, and yet it felt like something I had to be ashamed of.  The night sky was gray, and the sound of the chopper faded into the distance, leaving only the soft ocean-like voice of the tree frogs and the silhouettes of trees, waving like shadows in the night air.

.           .            .            .            .            .

That night I sat inside and read a few lines.   For all this time, I thought, art has been social in origins, and what of the time I’ve felt stuck inside, dreaming that someday people would read my poems and commune under their stars.  An undertaking, I thought as I read on, since no one really cares for poetry beyond the poets, and the time of the poem that caused social change has been dead for over fifty years.  No, that time I read one of my poems at a Jewish friend’s house at Passover, I had felt a sincere gladness in the room on the hearing of my poem.  Even amidst all that painful history I had felt another’s ailments transformed in my own voice.  That seems silly to say.  Like a poem could do all that.  It mattered more to the Greeks what the tribe felt than what the poet/artist himself was feeling.  I stepped off the porch to smoke a cigarette.  Maybe it didn’t matter at all. 

            For a time I’ve lived in a house not too far from the city, and a fog surrounding the house lay thick in the woods, dampening the sound of trains and traffic, causing a stillness that the birds would occasionally break.  I’d gotten started on a novel, but I didn’t feel that ambitious.  Probably I’d lose the thread somewhere in the middle, and drop the manuscript in the recycling bin.  Better that it be turned into office paper than end up in a garbage heap.  I resolved I’d finish something at least, one chapter, one page, one good paragraph a day before the sun set.  I’ve always liked watching the sky turn colors just before twilight, but tonight the fog and clouds were yellowed by industrial light.  I thought of getting in the car and turning on the radio, going for a drive into the city, but then I remembered that it wouldn’t tune.  The antenna was always the first to go.  I stubbed out my cigarette and watched a bird slowly hopping through the wet grass.

.           .            .            .            .            .

            I have this friend.  He whistles.  Not that whistling in itself is that uncommon, but he whistles in a particular way.  Every Saturday he comes over and we watch the news, eat dinner and sit for a while at the kitchen table, talking about the state of things.  He’s not particularly politically inclined, but he knows what’s going on in the world.  We talk for a while, and when I stand up to do the dishes, he takes his leave and steps out onto the porch.  This is an unspoken ritual between us, every week, the same routine.  The porch is an outdoor porch, so it’s screened in.  No glass to keep out the sound.  I’ve always thought of putting in windows, but on this particular night, the air was cool and damp and made a nice covering for the sounds in the woods; an eerie undercurrent of voices that was softened to a quiet mezzo-piano.  As I start doing the dishes, the sound of my friend’s whistling hits my ears.  Always, it’s like awakening to a dream, the opposite of what people call objective reality.  He has a way of commanding someone’s listening; not to the sounds coming from his own lips, but he seems to hold you in a state of acute awareness as to the sounds that surround you.  When you watch him, he’ll pause, and put his hand up to his ear, as if compelling some unknown audience to listen.  But you have to know my friend to understand this.  He is compulsively joyous, and infectious in his way of greeting things as they come.    

            The thing was, I hadn’t seen my friend in over two months.  I had lost my job, and the littlest things had started bothering me.  I knew my friend had nothing to do with this, I just couldn’t force myself to call him, or to head over to his house on a spontaneous whim like I used to.  Occasionally I would hum a tune and realize, it was his whistling, that bright, melodious and ethereal bell-like quality, suspended in the air around me.  One day when this happened, I found a bright white moth lying on the ground at my feet.  Its dead form seemed to reverberate with a touch of life, as if some secret had come to it in death, that its dead body was somehow truer, more delicate than its living form itself.  That night I dreamt of forest fires that consumed the house.  Only one bright white moth escaped, fluttering its wings and winding into the sky.   

.           .            .            .            .            .

Torrential rains fell on the roof of the house the day before I was scheduled to start work.  Everything seemed to be waiting for the rain, and now that it fell, there was a cease in the sounds of the woods.  The street was empty of cars, the people were all in their homes, and I stood alone on the porch, watching the rain pour down.

            I had come to love this place, and in a few days, I would be gone.  This realization dawned on me more and more as the rain subsided.  The silence of the woods around me broke into a subdued chatter, at the heart of which one hermit thrush began to sing.  From his post in the uppermost branches at the middle of the wood came a laughing, warbling trill.  A car splashed by on the street passing the house.  “How little reverence people have,” I spoke aloud.  Partly I was shocked by the sound of the my own voice.  I hadn’t spoken to anyone in three days.  A group of birds fluttered noisily up onto the branches of the low brown oak across the lawn.  They went on chirping as the car passed, and I stood in silence, listening, watching the haze of the clouds grow fainter. Sunlight glinted on the drops of rain suspended on the tips of the branches.

Eliot Cardinaux

May, 2011

A Furious Devil - Eliot Cardinaux

  A Furious Devil

And carelessness rolls across hills, it does not see.  Forgiving, and forgiving what,

that name, that doesn’t know it’s sadness!  Like a myriad of pictograms, its sly,

shadowless verse is that of a nuptial grace, wise as it is fool, and captures devils in its praise.  It will seize its own heart, as if a crime had been its own, and stupefy the mind of even chaos, that would have its reign.  And it produces poetry, pure and simple, Alas! – to which it could never lay its claim.

4/4  '11

Memory

(EC 2/20 '11)

it is when feeling some life not my own, a view from a moment in the past and into the future, like a dream is, or a memory that brings say, with a glass of wine a fear, that is not to say -    what?  that the future is made up of past moments?  That a dream is never life because a dream is neither succeeding nor failing but simply is, a dream - thread out of what was.

And value is put on this dream.  Why?

    simply put it has no value
    but is valuable,
    just like it is to say
    when two sides to a given
    motion are unveiled,
    we sit beneath it,
    neither bowed to it
    nor standing over,
    that is the dream
    and so I think
    is dreaming.

"you need a form to dream"  - Bei Dao

hence, the necessity for poetry, music, etc.

good night. 

2/20  '11.

René Char - "Seuil" ("Threshold")

Seuil (Threshold)

          When it gave way, the barrage of man, sucked in by the great rift of the abandonment of god, of the divine, words in the distance, words that wished themselves not to be lost, tried to resist the exorbitant push.  There was decided the dynasty of their meaning.
          I have run to the very end of this diluvian night.  Planted in the trembling dawn, my belt full of seasons -my friends, I wait for you.  Already I can make you out behind the horizon's black.  My hearth never tires of wishing your houses well, and my cypress stick laughs, for you, with all its heart.


                        from Fureur et Mystère
                           Trans.  Eliot Cardinaux

The Story of Abian - Daniel Levine

Abian Sacks was born in 1761 in a farm outside of Geneva, Switzerland at the height of the Calvinist era where skilled tradesmen– watchmakers, blacksmiths, printers made their livings in the humble Puritan way. Abian's father was a watchmaker, who was apparently rarely on time for anything, in spite of his trade. Journals discovered in the twentieth century that had been kept by Abian's brother, Bartholemew Sacks, reveal that their father devoted much of his time to hobby architecture– secretly of course, because the strict Calvinist doctrines governing work in Geneva at the time would never have allowed such a diversion from one's vocation. Nonetheless, Mr. Sacks, whose name is not known and is referred to in Bartholemew's journals only as "father", attempted to design museums, city squares, homes, a church and even a prototype of a peculiar flying machine. It is safe to say that the sacks boys grew up well-to-do for their time, although when speaking of Calvinist Geneva, well-to-do is a relative concept. The boys never wanted for food on account of their mother's distinguished garden in which she planted a number of vegetables and herbs. And it was right there in their mother's garden that Abian and Bartholemew first discovered the mystical herb known as dagahnj. Little Barty had found a patch growing wild in a far corner of the property, beyond some foreboding, thorny shrubbery that concealed it from all but the bravest. Barty was attracted by the dank scent of the flowers and fetched his brother, who set out to make a potion with the mysterious, redolent plant.

    Abian and Bartholemew surmised that dahganj might have acute medicinal properties and it was Abian's idea to brew it in butter, which could then be lathered on toast or used in the baking of sweets. The effects were sublime. Their father's clocks (hundreds of them about the house, always ticking, often a great source of anxiety) suddenly seemed to be playing together in a fantastic symphony. Where before they had seemed at times to Abian to be counting down the seconds of his life with heartless indifference, now they echoed their blithely satisfied tick-ticks in cavernous dimensions, and Abian became aware of how each clock with another clock, having been set off at different times created an endless parallelism, and how other mechanical ticking objects that moved at different speeds (the hand powered ceiling fan they had helped their father build for instance) created repeating loops of ticks that came together and went apart, expressing in circular form some fundamental difference– a sonic relativity. And it was when the boys were playing with their father's metronome and the mechanical fan and all the clocks after having eaten some dagahnj toast that it first occurred to Bartholemew to compose music. He soon asked his father for a cello and instead was given a lute, which he practiced for some time before winning an apprenticeship to an orchestra in Lucern, where he eventually did pick up the cello and become a distinguished soloist.

    The Sacks boys were approaching their teenage years and they knew that with dagahnj, they had something very special. But their wild patch was going to run out soon and they needed to find a way of getting more. They would have to bring their parents into the know on this one, they decided, and so first they told their father, thinking that he would be impressed by the plants wild effects. But this was not necessarily prudent, because once Mr. Sacks had tasted dagahnj toast, it was just like another Sacks boy with an equal appetite for the plant had appeared and now the supplies were dwindling. Mr. Sacks was such a devotee of the dagahnj that by his first week on board with the boys, their supply was dwindling twice as fast. They had to talk to their mother. She knew how to grow things. Only she had the ability to renew their supply of the splendid herb, but would she do it? The boys knew that the experience of eating dagahnj toast was a distinctly un-Calvinist one, and they wondered if their mother would not be so appalled as to end the fun decidedly. So with the help of their father, they set out to feed her some toast covertly, so as to watch her reaction. It was fantastic.  "Abian, Bartholemew, have you listened these clocks lately??" she called as she walked languidly about the house. Needless to say, once the boys were able to explain to her that dagahnj was responsible for her euphoria that night, she set out to salvage the remaining plant from the garden and grow more, much more.

    It was lucky that this occured in Switzerland, for Mr. Sacks new a man in the chocolate trade (that perfect Swiss chocolate that even today has the power to conjure all the coziest sensations and sentiments of an alpine village in ski season) and before long the Sacks boys were manufacturing little dagahnj chocolates that would revolutionize Geneva. The clock makers stopped being on time, the architects  started foreshadowing cubism in their designs for houses and city buildings, the printers were printing words all out of order and in groovy new fonts. It was an upheaval, and needless to say it was shut down by authorities before long.

    But Abian earned enough money to go to Paris to study and it was there that he made two lasting friendships, predicated on a mutual love of dagahnj, and the fact that Abian's heightened sensibilities concerning aesthetics impressed many, but none so much as young Jean-Jaques Rousseau, and the man known only as Athos.

    Athos you may know from his famous exploits with the musketeers Porthos, Aramis and young D'Artagnan. But shortly before meeting those auspicious characters he had been a prolific wino, a romantic, wandering the streets of Paris, living in a little flat, mingling with artists, scientists, whoever he found interesting, who he could engage in a little chat, always drinking, and often making a fine impression on distinguished members of society, so that he had cultivated a sort of bohemian fame. He and Abian first met in a cafe, aptly enough, where Athos was sipping a hot chocolate, and Abian, drawn to Athos' wistful manner, offered him a little helping from his basket of toast. It was not long before Athos was persuaded to leave the bottle behind and take up dagahnj as a healthier substitute. He and Abian would go on long walks in the countryside around Paris looking for a new wild stash, and to pass the time they would look at the birds too. Athos' father had been an ornithologist as a hobby and Athos seemed to know everything there was to know about the creatures, from distinctive markings to migration and mating habits right down to the birdcalls, and Abian took note of all of it.

    Now, although Abian met Jean-Jaques Rousseau quite accidently, (in the same cafe where he first met Athos) Rousseau had been an absolute devotee of dagahnj chocolate in Geneva. He said it helped him to think, to throw off the shackles of oppression in the mind and be at one with his creator and with the object of his desire. He wrote the Social Contract under the influence of a generous supply of toast from Abian. Together they would discuss politics and women and music, but mostly Jean-Jaques would talk, as he was prone to doing at length.

     It was during the Revolution that Abian decided to get out of Paris and he chose England as his next destination. He'd heard great things about the birdwatching there and decided he might make a book, cataloguing the taxonomy of birds. He was there for two decades, receiving packets of toast from Bartholemew in the mail, and cataloguing his many birds. Bartholemew was in Germany apprenticing in the studio of Johannes Brahms.

    It was around this time that a young American upstart named John James Audoban travelled to England seeking culture and adventure and didn't care how he got what he wanted as long as he got it. When their paths collided one fateful day, Abian was birdwatching and John James was hunting game-bird and it made for an awkward beginning but Abian offered the man some toast and they soon met again and had a congenial friendship for a while. But cunning Auduban, always looking for a leg-up, got it in his mind to invade Abian's flat one night and steal the recipe for this magical toast that, by the way, greatly heightened his shooting abilities on the hunt. Abian was out at the cafe drinking hot chocolate and going over some notes when Audoban snuck into his flat, but he did not find any recipe, nor any considerable stash of dagahnj, which Abian only had in a small portion (whatever Barty could send him) on account of the scarcity of good growing conditions that time of year in Great Britain. Instead, the scoundrel Auduban found volumes and volumes of detailed notes and sketches pertaining to ornithology, and so he took what he could get. The volumes were intended to be published under the title "Hawkee-boos". Bartholemew had persuaded his brother to title the work "Abian's Book of Birds" but, now Abian's book became Auduban's book, and the scoundrel had great success. Perhaps it was for the best, for Auduban would return to America and begin birdwatching in earnest, finally publishing his seminal work, "Birds of America", but Abian would never be able to publish "Hawkeeboos" and for a time after the loss of his work he was depressed and so he decided to seek new surroundings.

If he had known that John James Audoban had gone back to America, Abian never would have gone there, but it is good that he didn't for many adventures and riches lay ahead for him there. It merely seemed the only step forward– the New World– a place where surely adventure must be waiting, where surely there were new ideas at play and things to be done. Well, Abian settled just north of New York City and it was not long before he realized that dagahnj grew in the New World in great abundance. He had come to the right place. And with the help of an Iriquois man he met on the birdwatch one day, a man named Winocki, Abian learned things about the plant he hadn't ever realized. For one thing, apparently it could be smoked.

    Some years passed and Abian spent some time marketing a new dagahnj  chocolate with Winocki called Hawkeeboos. They were shaped like little birds and packed with dagahnj, which Winocki called "Cheebers". The pioneer boys loved them. They were used during the civil war to treat a variety of injuries and ailments. And they were popular among a certain social crust in Manhattan– artists, writers, socialites. He had always been incredibly disciplined where it came to marketing his chocolates or the study of birds. And he maintained a boutique character in his business, refusing to take investments from outsiders, to have his company swallowed by the new titans of America, the corporations. He had offers from men who represented men who represented the gas company, the railroad, General Mills, toy companies, the company that made little instruments for dentists– it seemed everyone had been visited by a little bird who whispered something about a mystical flower and a man in the Bronx who could make into candy.

    But Abian kept a low profile, in fact he scoffed at the attention and when it finally became too uncomfortable, he closed his business and looked for a new trade. He was 120 years old.

He decided to try sports and found he was rather good at it. He learned of a new game called baseball and quickly got into it, playing for a while on the New York Giants alongside Honus Wagner. When he retired from the game Willie Mays was on the team. Dagahnj has been connected to longevity in scientific studies especially when cooked in butter and lathered on delicious toast. The Sacks boys must be living proof. In the later part of the century, Abian became friends with a Soviet born painter and an old ex-hippy atheist debater, and the three of them collaborated on a number of stop-action animation films explaining some of the early flying machines designed by the senior Mr. Sacks, which were apparently quite functional and could be used in a new sport called urban handgliding. As for Bartholemew, he had long since changed his name to Charles Mingus and moved to LA. Abian still resides in the Bronx where he lives by the 5 train. 

Suzerain (Lord) by René Char - translated by Eliot Cardinaux

Suzerain (Lord)

We begin our lives always in an admirable dusk.  All that will help rescue us later assembles around our first footfall.

          The behavior of men in my childhood was always like a smile of the sky, addressed to the charity of earth.  One treated evil like a prank of evening, the fall of a meteor moved us to tenderness.  I can account for the child I was, prone to love, prone to be hurt, and in all this I had so much luck.  I walked on the mirror of a river filled with coiling snakes, with dances of butterflies.  I played in orchards in which robust old age bore fruit, crouching in the reeds under the care of beings strong as oaks and sensitive as birds.


                              René Char, from Fureur et Mystère
                              Translated by Eliot Cardinaux, 12/19, ’10

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