Anternoon// part two
Pardon me, but I just realized I hadn’t even introduced everyone properly. Awful silly really, that I could forget to mention the green, rolling hills where s/he sat. Masses of grass in great crowds cheered as hoppers and jumpers and climbers and marchers and other limbers of six played their parts perfectly, accentuating with grace each note be it sorrow or rejoice. The sky, oh it was the sky as you’ve seen it, I imagine. Don’t let that denounce its gloriousness, though, for I assure you it was wild…it’s just, well its the same sky all over, you know?
Same wild veil blowing on and on and on.
She’s not listening but I’m sure at least one blade of grass is. s/he’s beating on that drum of hers, the skin of which is my own. Looking at it, thinking about it, it’s making my hide red hot. I rather not bother with that… But the beat, oh that beat! Its the same pattern as always:
bom-da! ba-dom ba-dom-ba!
Her face is looking more like his face again. Invoking the Great Beast is always a burden, she tells me. Her voice a phantom floating through my mind.
Cassette tape hissing; serpentine language superfluous and swift.
“If we want ants,” she says sternly, “we must suffer. To live is to suffer, and to suffer is our gift. If we’re receptive, of course.”
I had eyed her careful cautious, as I did not believe such things then. I was an idealist.
Detecting my disbelief, she snatched a handful of my buttocks meat and ripped it from my body.
Gosh what a scene that had been! blood dumped out of my ass and I whooped and whollered and swung and spat about violently. Eventually I came down but it took some time and quite a few ants before I tired myself out sobbing. She and I spoke sparsely that evening, after she ripped me up like that, our words curt and distant. I was understandably bitter, and I knew she would not apologize. She probably wanted me to apologize actually, and I wasn’t about to do that.
Maybe I would have apologized eventually, just to get the whole thing over with, but then she said something and I forgot I was mad once I started listening.
Think of pain merely as model of life itself. A metaphor.
“We are unconscious of our being when it is well,” she coiled, “We accept it as it is. But when we are hurt, we are constantly reminded of the stinging, gnawing, pulsing bloody pain. It is unending, and we seek the means to subdue it, to silence it. Just like pain, we seek to soothe our lives. The realm of death lies beyond this awareness. It is the whole body, it is the healthy body unperturbed by sensation.”
Things have gotten better for us since then. Shadows whirl endlessly in a vacuum somewhere between my ears, and a great cooling comes over me like the first wave of a great flood. This is getting overwhelming.
She’s still banging out the beat, only I think it’s he now.
“What of pleasure?” I had asked her.
