The Cure. The Hired Hand. We Were Talking About the Space Between Us All. Angels.

…I’m well enough to write as if the sickness is over.

And thanks to Holly, and thanks to Cheryl. Good advice I tried to follow, and it tried to work.

All that whiskey and near-honey and lemon.

…Last night I watched The Hired Hand. One of the most beautifully shot films I’ve ever seen. People call it a hippie-Western, but that is only because they have to call it something and don’t know how to pretend they understand it without a definition.

Maybe it was the whiskey. Or the sugar water in the whiskey. Or the sleeping pills I took half way through so that I’d go to sleep right after. Maybe it was the fever or the hangover of the fever or the hangover of the sleeping pills and whiskey and sugar waters from the day before, but the movie really got to me.

Nearly wet eyed, not because of the bond between the two men nor the triangle it creates with the once abandoned woman, these figments of someone’s imagination made visible with the bone and flesh of performers; not because of the sacrifice one character will make for another and so on.

But because I’ve never had a friend like that, where you go to die in the dust for whatever it is that cleaves you together; because I’ve never had a woman like that, where she’d wait for you to come back no matter what--and you’d actually come.

Christ, I’m making it sound like a typical Western and me a typical male who wants to weep at sentimentalized vision of the desperado in him.

In any case, I don’t do the film justice that way.
But I can’t let myself so easily off that or any hook.

The Hired Hand, it offers the most realistic and disturbing death scene I’ve ever watched.

…I think about this week of sickness.
Gray night after gray night.
And that one red one.

If anything cemented me to the full fall it was the demon lover.

…She’s not really a succubus, just as opposite; demon would imply that she materializes from hell—and that’s not true of her, though it sounds nice.

You can say she came from Never Never Land
or Oz
or the place where angels sleep and sometimes wake restless and alone.
You could say she popped out of a rabbit hole.

You could say anything that implied more magic than I’m due.

…But the hell, it exists.
That is the space between you and her, those hours implied by miles.
Those inches implied by seconds.

You think: all space is hell.

That only through space is violence possible, an area into which to swing a fist, fire a missile or bullet, strike a knife or match, the hell of pain, that which we inflict and that which is inflicted upon us and that to which we are witness.

And that only through space do we know that which is not us, be aware of the other, that hell of separation even when we embrace.

You think of the idea of some Eastern and Native American religions that Heaven is a state in which the essence of all thing bleed together and form a whole, perhaps a shattered god re-formed, a benevolent consciousness finally repairing from its shattering mental crisis, that cosmic split that gave birth to me and you and all these imperfect creatures.

And you think about how pain can only be created when there are miles between us.

This greed to possess you, though I never will.
This greed to be inside of you, though it will only be by inches and imagination.

Your veins alone laid end to end would reach around the world.
And I mean to know you?
I mean to explore you?

And end to space, and end to distance: you can only be perfectly bonded.
It is all that is left.

But I am not a mystic.
I don’t know better.
I know worse.

…And yet this day, it rains as if it Spring, and I walk out in my long jacket and my thick sweater ready to shiver but the sun is coming down through the rain.

What can not be made clean by all this water and all this light?

…Department meeting.
One hour and a half. I’m bored. I’m coughing still. I’m tired. My mind is soft.
I don’t know what I’m doodling.
And then I see.
It is a series of angels.