Coming to Grips with White Knuckles Part 4

You said happiness was a bird --a hand extended could bend its perch.

span the perfect wings.

I spoke of swallows.

lived off flies ebbed when flying.

seldom came to rest.

TUSSAUD'S

In the wax museum with Attila and Genghis and Tamerlane all so close in spirit with our century.

At Madame Tussaud's in London: Neill Cream. Burke and Hare. It's hard to keep the legitimate heroes straight from the villains. I expect Houdini to make this Niagara Falls and appear at midnight Halloween.

With so many real and picturesque notables in abundance, I plan the idea of creating my own arch criminal wax museum a.s.sembled from the hallways and stairwells of my own life.

I imagine employment counsellors from across the years with sardonic laughs and strings tripping off records to make them authentic.

Then busts of fiendish ex-teachers and hatchet fanatics that pa.s.s as librarians giving me advanced nausea because my card has technically expired. Think the occasional gesture at remembering a swine or two from freeway driving might not be entirely out of place or that mindless clerks administering my life from afar and costing a future deserve an enshrining.

"A nickel short," droned the bureaucrat, "no transfer," secures him pa.s.sage to my waxworks.

"Sorry," and "we'll certainly keep you in mind," as a litany of woe with its users made to memorize and make good all promises ever made.

Wish the mind and her memories could be enlarged; I would recreate my own historic scenes to stand alongside Nelson's Death, the Little Princes in the Tower. Detail Israeli n.a.z.i-hunters to track down my Adolf Eichmanns.

Instead of samples from Jack the Ripper's handwriting in the waxworks, rejection slips and the stylized, flowery "we'll keep your application on file," would be served up as horror epics.

Dunces that compose form letters made to live out the threadbare future promises. Each human roadblock making decisions out of ignorance would have his statement dutifully recorded before entering a world of his own design.

Ad agency types made to explain in effortless detail to packed houses why their ketchup commercial should stand up.

Crooked garage operators made to oil and grease the cha.s.sis of every car owner hoodwinked since the automobile began.

Football made a crime punishable by fate.

Shyster store owners too cheap to bag my newspaper made to launder all the soiled white pants across a lifetime.

Tailors that mistakenly think they are being shortchanged and become vocal made to attend Sartre courses where "h.e.l.l is other people," doctrines predominate.

The huckster, the con-man, those who prey on the mult.i.tude transposed from whatever city of origin then made to tramp the streets of Toronto where every wrong syllable or misbegotten accent costs them a dollar of their savings.

My whole museum a living aviary, a subway at rush hour where snotty, telephone receptionists are fed a steady diet of the Biblical injunction "by words they shall be known."

Well meaning but ignorant people endlessly poking with the "you should smile more," placed in a house of mirrors with durable ca.s.settes of Laugh-In.

Belligerent restaurant owners telling kids they can't use the washroom then made to mop up the waste they helped create.

The world, a stand-up comic throwing away his happy face then coming to sit in disgust at the unchronicled petty evil of our times.

VULCANS

Adder toothed flowers snake the broken ground where molten tongues cremated the twisted, bunker forms-- a Latin cross of green jubilation lies matted atop a sweating road, calligraphy in broken stone.

As trembling shale collapses into thin hills, light fuels to cross the Pale.

A little exploratory weeding droops this lava rain.

A long, dove fence comprised of stones & rattled by ancient slaves winds its distance along the gully borne in fire, percussion caps, cretin growth lobbed under creeping wire.

Shafts of pioneer light delight in coral baskets, empty twilight darts the agave swords' mauve pitcher plants.

The 1692 Tremens decimated Port Royal[1]

--moved a ravine from florid to mossy shadow where antler shoots today announce temperate plants, eclipse by-gone tropic flowers.

[1] An earthquake destroyed in the seventeenth century not only the stronghold of Jamaica's pirates but also changed the topography of the North Sh.o.r.e creating Fern Gully.

DRY GUILLOTINE

In my childhood, "Verdun," meant madness.

Bars on the windows, cages around the intellect.

Time was a poor keeper of souls, it seems, wore out all but a fragment of my memories. Musical, poetic. The sounds of clay china being dropped on the floor. Fierce Celts with a gift for the muse in keeping with their love of lyricism and war.

Driving by 999 Queen in Toronto accompanies a lot of the above.

A cuckoo bin by any calculation and a reference not meant to be pejorative. A subject so clothed in solemnity only irreverent "kidding," can hope to disarm its grasp. Still, the truth must be told.

In university, no one shrinked from whispering the ultimate fate-- a stint in Sydenham or a trip down the road to Cedar Springs.

Delightful euphemisms, the names reminiscent of sonorous rivers, tree lined groves, peach blossoms across Georgia springs. Or Ophelia's funeral oration wherein Polonius rightfully alludes to her sudden falling away amid laughing brooks.

I am reminded of Charriere's desperate attempt to stay sane on Ile du Diable, the cutting edge of his dry guillotine--his mind's fabric giving way to the slightest irritation. In the present, the chant of a crowd's "jump, jump," to the would be suicide. Then there is the most foreboding type of all dementia, the collective sort. A strength through joy movement of the Hitler camp with society's many inst.i.tutions set up along the spit and polish order of the Reich.

Indeed, if we think of it, we all have a deep knowledge of madness; days when the centre is about to break alongside the pit. Days when wars on the periphery take hold, colours appear different.

As a child, madness was watching Ichabod Crane in cartoon form outrace the Headless Horseman. In Sleepy Hollow trying to put down the panic in himself. Ichabod, the peaceful school master, driven to the edge. At war with himself but trying to rea.s.sure that same self the plodding sound of approaching hooves was only dried, bullrush stems. .h.i.tting against his head.

Madness is more than Van Gogh offering an ear; Druid priests garnishing oak trees in a British forest or plaintive Gauguin abandoning his family at 34, mid-stream in a successful career. It probably stands behind half the men on skid row, beckons like a welcome friend before turning fiend and consuming impulse to a bag lady.

The close relation between the creative impulse and "letting go."

Between the arts and wide eyed eccentricity. Between wanting to be free. And knowing. Hearing if you go on like that you'll end up on the Lakesh.o.r.e. Another pretty euphemism. A dangerous truth left like an upturned rock for someone to trip on in another garden.

The farthest away anyone can be.

MANGROVES

How do you survive in the mangrove swamps-- amid the twitchings of fetid water & water lice thick as baby tears?

How, with all the wallow of thick muck making suction noises and the teams in relays searching nightly with baited hounds, do you pull free?