Resurrections

Neurons under stress http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/the-pulse/71186-what-neuronal-connections-in-your-brain-say-about-your-stress-response

“He had tasted something or seen or heard something which filled him with the purest pain, which had in some grim and unspeakable way frightened him beyond belief.”

—Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary

You wonder what is lying beneath the surface of your discontent, what is derailing all good intentions with regularity. Are you weak or slovenly; many things counter this notion as false. What gnaws relentlessly at the spirit, in the intestines, over the works of the day, making you mute or immobile? The things you have seen or heard stay within the memory, some below the surface, others in the frontal lobe. Persistent they are since some realities tend to repeat themselves, allowing renewed belief in their existence. An epiphany of cruelty close to home; the ease of the murderer, the rapist, your own darkness. Once you have seen such things, you may see more. Some never experience such truths, or illusions as they may be. But you have and they are often unforgettable. They lie in wait in the thin veil between consciousness and submersion. They color many days and nights of the oppressed. Some never let such disadvantages get to them though. They roar in self-aggrandizement and rise to the top of their skill set. Witnessing this can be uplifting.

To rid oneself of the melancholy addiction, make resolution after identification. Shall you stay imprisoned for an eternity? It does not matter the date at which you may find yourself engulfed in its grips. What matters is the awareness of its power. And the desire to move out of victimhood, the one-song litany of resentment, the overriding of all benefits in your life. You may step to the edge, almost teetering into the abyss of your own making, with vile acts at your backside. You may topple all you made with one bad night. It is no matter. You get up and begin again. More have done this than you expect. More have faced insurmountable odds and got back in the game. Some have succumbed. You do not want to be that part of the population. You want to strive, climbing the steep, slippery way to the summit. You keep on against all actions, finding the good often can outlive the bad. Yes, you have seen such things to make the doctor cry. Yes, you have had reruns of the violent sort. Must you stay there recreating all that has gone before? Why not take that special knowledge of your survival to the bank. Go to the gradient of rejuvenation for a dive into the deep blue. It does not matter you cannot swim, for drowning in grievances surely does not suffice.

All this is wonderfully optimistic. There may be times when you do not want to be. You cannot because events weigh you down. The roots of abomination dig far into the soil. You have grown there. You have matured there. It is as part of your composition as is the world turning. I understand. You will perish if you stay festering in a pit you feel you cannot get out of. Drowned. Deadened. Numb. Mute or screaming, come to oxygenated relief. Shall you stay under the frozen river’s center, live at a distance? Telescopic visions fascinate. Remoteness invites, it calls your name. Stay if you must.

Pop the key, break the safe instead. Be a burglar of your own persuasion. Invade the corners of your mind with an alternative of some creative effort. Channel your marketable talents. Open the door. Live better.

Segway

Our Vikki

By Celeste Regal

We stepped out of her enormous forehead onto snow barreling in from Canada. Our boots cracked wafers of Nordic whiteness sixty-seven miles out of Minneapolis. Vikki, a communal affair in life, connected thought waves in death, remained an undigested piece of frostbite. Stinging winds told of unrequited fortunes and the desire for closure. None of us could move on completely without resolution. None of us could continue with her ever present memory nagging. The conundrum had a long shelf life. The truck door shut. Silence returned to the tundra.

Brad sat on a tree stump. His frozen eyelashes filled with icy mascara. The rest of us stood in a circle, undaunted by the journey, intent on our conviction that if we could forfeit our notions of what happened, we would be well again. Four hawks circled the tree tops. The sun softened the landscape. Echoes from other worlds held us in a trance.

“Is she here now?”

“Ask Tony,” I said. “Is she here now?”

Morning mist traveled from our mouths like drunken Polar bears.

“Is she ever not here, Mark? Is she ever, ever not here? Did we not come back, since she is never, ever not here?”

That silence again. It scorched us.

We never thought the problem was anything but her own. Vikki was a force of nature jumping between celestial effervescence and hellish unattainability. She was the kind of woman who traveled between the left and right hemisphere without warning, remaining unreachable in her perch above the corpus collasum. Her beauty famous, her fierceness even more so. No sins were forgiven. No trespasses forgotten. She hated the way her looks lead men to her without regard for themselves or others. She hated the constant requests for her body at the denigration of her mind and person. Sometimes, those who were refused, took anyway. Largely, Vikki hated the time wasted on such trivial occasions. She disliked that she succumbed to it all. She disliked that she could not shut it off; find funding for a good university and forget about carnal knowledge and the need for justice. She wished she was smarter, had academic connections, knew how to navigate the world better. All she seemed to know, though, was how to wrap you around her body in eternal longing. A magic trick none of us could divest of its impact.

When we first met her, she was a face from blue-collar lineage with mesmerizing powers. That was all. A miniscule speck of humanity wedged in back woods glassiness waiting to be dislodged. In Vikki’s way of thinking, what happened was humiliating; to our minds, she made us pay for the hole it burned in her aspirations. Although the consensus varied, she was never far from our minds. Buried and ready to be resurrected at a moment’s notice, at the slightest glimmer of the past.

“Hey.”

We held fast in front of Brad’s purple Jeep Renegade. A small avalanche of icicles fell from a branch. The hovering mist gathered momentarily to suggest a gangly figure. We did not have an explanation for the poltergeist emerging before us. The image pressed itself against us with the swiftness of a three-card Monty dealer.

“She breeches.”

Her frosty outline left an ice pick in our backs. Purposefulness filled the loitering air. Brad got to his feet. Stared hard. Looked at us, then back at the tree line. He wobbled like a shack on fire about to decay into a heap of spent wood. Facing the row of pines did not dissipate our incredulity. Nothing but the wind whispering and a figure appearing. I suppose people used to gather in the mist and stare at things, wondering what went wrong with their lives, looking for an answer. It’s not like you can stand and ponder on a busy street corner, listening the horns honking and people chattering away on their phones. Back when people gathered in the fields or plains there was something miraculous to their missteps, or events as they unfolded in the expanse of nature. Tough times called for extreme exterior summonses. 

Perhaps it is the violence of an event that gives it precision when recounted. Those were harsh days. Our Vikki, she knew such harshness. Repeated violence and difficult obstacles. We did not. Not much anyway. It is the violence that held her to us, that kept us thinking, in between the lines of guiltlessness, that maybe it could have been prevented, that she could have had a better end and not been penalized by her physical presence.

“Hey, you going to stay or continue the powwow?

A large person in tall boots stomped up the hill without notice. We opened our mouths to speak but all that came out was more mist. He stared a while longer then, turned swiftly pointing with two fingers at the cabins below the clearing.

“All right then. Sign up at office before bedding down or leave before dark. Right down there or head out.”

His hard padding broke the train of thought. The interjection left us looking at a row of pines and some hawks above. Nothing more.

“Try again later?”

Brad, still stunned, let out a slight moan.

“This is never going to change. We’ll get this idea to do something, come up here, and nothing will change.”

“The past never does,” Tom said. “What are we here for anyhow? And what was that by the pines?”

No one replied. We didn’t know exactly. It was a bit like a holiday. It happened every year. The expectation was great but over too soon. Maybe we wanted our youth back. After all, Vikki represented our youth. She was still something we could pin the blame on, or color so splendidly that we forgot everything but how beguiling she was, how marvelous our youth. We all had families, businesses, some were about to retire but Vikki pulled us together as an ensemble. Past our persevering friendship, past the ordinary, into desire. She rolled out occasionally to ignite the fire we lost. She rolled out to remind us that a face from a blue collar background burned in our memory, even after marriages, births and deaths. She rolled out because in the end justice was never had, we never could pin her down, and we longed for whatever she inspired in us that would not let her go, whether out of love or accusation. She was out of our hands. We could no longer touch her. Losing that thrill welded the thought, no matter how misrepresented, that Vikki was here, and she was as unattainable as ever.

River of No Return

Aries (12 Women)

You did not ask to come but were unraveled in a cavern somewhat unwelcome. The walls housed an expectation of life beyond the anatomical, beyond the biological. Fierce determination, or complete comfortability with the space of more than living. Always present it is, often without question. Systems hold nothing you can grab on to. Fitting is not a useful word.  At the horizon you will see yourself clearly. Nothing travels that cannot be understood or endured. Platitudes are pointless compasses leading to a fetid concrete wall. Stear to the left of them. The space is invaded by non consequential reverberations that will only force an eviction. Your quest lays in unquantifiable currency little understood by the general public although you may find an audience there. Forget signposts. They will revel nothing but how fresh the paint is. Trust the fear of falling. It is the gauge you must live by only because that is what was allotted.

On the street corner, the ghost of the beggar boy reminds you of your origins. He has disappeared into corporate living but essences can never be liquidated. He is replaceable no matter where in the world you are. Meaning transcends current fashion. This sentence will not sell but shall the sold soul bring comfort or gain in the end? Understand who you are. The price is stolen, the balance sheet a disaster. Forget this reality. Stay in the realm of who you must be. To be the other wastes time. In the end the profit will disappear anyway. When everyone leaves the table, do not think you are alone. Do not feel forsaken. This is your natural habitat.

When rivers burst from the north, all of life washed away in a cascade so deadly, all thought the end was inevitable. But still this held no truth–the prediction had no consequence. The light and sound, ethereal and tormenting, could never be reported accurately by the media. Poets had the day straight. The dawn almost missed, the possibilities almost lost. The small voice, almost buried in the thunder moved past the catastrophe, past its own death, and is still heard millenniums later. Still revered regularly. Who remembers the winner at roulette? They change by the second. Beware the instant minute. It’s eternity that counts. When the rainbow of existence splays across a fetid landscape, it will be missed by the objective makers. Radiance is fleeting. Only the watchers perceive this thing so unmarketable, so disregarded that is barely exists but in the heart of the seer. Even if only one sees it, it will live on. The herd never carries water in the desert. They are too busy at the gaming table. One must pick a side, true to their nature, and take what comes of it.

You may shout from the rooftops of your displeasure and loneliness. As long as you go back to the keyboard, the pencil, the wax, the paint, the needle and thread, all will be worthy at the opening of the river when the water turns red, the iridescence astounds, the day goes on and retribution may or may not be acquired. The sight is all that matters.

Author thanks the photographer of ram retrieved from internet search 9/15/16. (wordpainter81)