Carrion, p.5
Carrion, page 5
Ravens are black. And they exist just fine. Despite lack of camouflage.
It is not that Orpheus stopped honoring but that Orpheus disdained the honoring of the rest. There is only one. The singular. One person, is it.
And I am told that there cannot be just one. I am asked to allow for plurality. But I cannot allow for plurality. I am not plural. I have one story and only it to tell and to create. One story, one word. And it seems safe to only be singular, to be as singular, as momentary, as right-now, as here as possible. To conflate and overlap and become concentric, but then reduced.
It frightens me when we are more than two, when two bodies possess a third. Attention is divided and split, and it means that one body receives less attention than it would have singularly. 1/1 or 1/2 (or is it 1/1 or 1/3). To share is to give less care. To care less.
They killed Orpheus for disdaining the honoring of any god other than Apollo.
The Maenads killed Orpheus for vowing to never love another woman.
Eurydice died. She left. To the Underworld. Orpheus failed to get her back. I would have done better. He looked. He looked back, so she remained dead. I would have torn out my eyes so that I would not look back, so that I may be with you, be with you even without seeing you. I want to see you, but I would do anything to be with you. I would sing and dismember myself. For you. So he vowed to never love another woman, to never have sex with another woman. So if you died, I would vow to never love another woman, I would vow to never have sex with a woman. He did not vow to never love another man, to never have sex with another man. And love is not in this part of the story, but sex is, and he had it, but not with Eurydice, and not with any other woman.
Orpheus, the first sodomite.
So the Maenads killed him. They eviscerated him. The Maenads shredded his flesh around his joints, and they pulled knob from socket and knob from socket and knob from socket and they suckled on those garnet protrusions. They spread him open by their nails and they used their nails to cut him open, anything but clean, but pouring mildew and saliva and blood and salt down the open wound, and they removed each organ, and they wrapped their tongues around his teeth and testes and pulled and pulled until the tissues finally gave, and there were roots and strings attached, and they fell to the ground, where they accrued grass and dirt. The Maenads sawed off his head. They left it intact, aside from the teeth. Unmarred. Beautiful. Mouth agape and wagging tongue.
Carrion
A cat could not have done it, not in such a manner: she’d have had plumes stuck between her pointy, yellowed, newly rounded teeth and bird matter matted to her yellow fur and paws. Her claws would have penetrated the bird too deeply and too frequently, from trying desperately to hold onto this thing she loved. Instead of holding, drowning—suffocating. Her curved sewing needle nails would have eviscerated, making a mess of all this. This, however, was too clean of an operation.
On the train, there was a pale man with a mustache. It wasn’t until much later that I recognized his pallor. I watched him put away the newspaper he had been reading, close his eyes, and stretch his knitted cap over his head. He stood up between stations, which seemed odd to me at the time, not yet accustomed to Chicago public transit. He folded himself into a ninety-degree angle, torso parallel to floor, and vomited at the door of the train. He was ashamed, I presume, hanging his head low so as not to allow others to see. But the index was there, slowly crawling along into the aisle.
Birds are oil and rubber and grease and shrapnel. They rock themselves along sidewalks and perch themselves perfectly atop anything, over anything dead. But their movement is mechanical, too organized. Birds do not seem to lose balance, they do not seem to become sick, they do not fall; they know heat patterns and weather patterns and all kinds of patterns, and they follow these unnamed, undetermined things as if programmed to do so. They are computer chips and matrix, not blood. Not really.
So there would have been none for a cat to spill, and this fact was reflected, perhaps, by the pristine sidewalk. Birds are not humans, and I know this, because when a cat drags her nails across our chests, slowly enough to deceive us of depth, blood pools at our sternums, if only afterward.
Two men in soiled T-shirts and trucker caps destroyed cement steps with a jackhammer. Right near them was an old man, dressed to stay out in this fall weather for more than a few hours. Cardigan, earmuffs, possibly a hat, comfortable shoes. Many layers. He swept dust from the cracked, uneven sidewalk between his house and theirs. And I imagine that he would be at it all day, Möbiusly sweeping as more dust accrued.
The wings were somehow seemingly preserved. They were intact and pulled taught, choreographed to mimic life, flight—stickstraight and childlike. But they were beautiful, opalescent and changing color enough to signify movement, as if they could have been attached to something still, albeit something made immobile. Concrete-filled. Iron and wood and carbon. Trojan.
They were unsurprising, those wings, lying on the sidewalk. They were exactly what I would have thought of—indeed, what I likely have thought of—when I imagine bodiless wings. Except for those two bulbous protrusions, those cartilageless balls. Wings are clipped, and they are flat. When I think of the anatomy of a bird, I do not think of joints or sockets: the bird is always either whole or already completely ravaged.
The man stopped moving the broom only long enough to look up and smile at me. The noise his broom no longer made in the early dawn told me the whole story: he had no idea of what was on my mind:
Could I do it. How much force must be used to tear off the wings of a bird, and is that force different if you pluck one from one side and then the other from the other; or, if you use opposing forces, is that number smaller. Is dismantling an animal, making it its component parts, a matter of strength or of guts. Is it firm grasp and pinching, muscle, bone, and immediate shredding. Facing me or away. Alive or already dead. Or is it more similar to watching a snuff film or those beheading videos released a few years back. You sit at your computer, press play, then just don’t stop it. You can. But you don’t. You wait it out—a painfully slow process from initial slash, blood beginning to pump out through the hole in the vein and then out through the newly made end of the vein, pumping out beat after beat and falling down his torso, to sawing of vertebrae—eventually, but it just takes so long—until only the head is held by its hair, blue eyes staring at you, slack-jawed and wagging tongue. Just to see it through. Just to say you have.
Those five or six slabs of cement were, I saw the next day, turned to ash. To say rubble does nothing to convey that it was dust, that it was four pounds of carbon and calcium. And of course, I thought of the sweeping old man. And where was he now, now that the work was done, the cleaning now necessary and able to be completed without having to start over. And where did he sweep it to. And how long would it take to clean up these remains.
And just how long does it take to—to what. To build new steps or to clean. Or to adjust to there no longer being steps at all. I don’t know which, and, regardless, I do not yet know the answer.
But I imagine that ripping off the arms of an animal would be like pulling out a tooth. Your own, a loose one, only a little gum partially adhered; only sinew and skin keeping it in that socket, covered in feathers. Perhaps frightening, especially that first time, if you do it yourself and it doesn’t just fall out, but at some point, you gather the strength to just do it. Then the rubies are exposed, moist and round and polluted with the fiber and tissue that did not separate. And you salivate and tongue the wound.
Mother
I used to resent my mother’s advice—all those responses to prove that things are manageable when that is not how they seem. I used to think it was a product of being rural, a sign that we were a family who wasn’t smart enough to seriously, intellectually, rationally consider real-life matters; that the only thing we had at our disposal was country wisdom, not book smarts, not science, not being cultured. I resented how it felt like a belittling or a sweeping simplification. But now that I am two states away from her and speaking to her at length only once a week and seeing her maybe three or four times a year, I have grown to appreciate the colloquial, the folk wisdom.
I assume she has thought herself able to summarize a dilemma or trauma or question into a prepackaged sentiment, a formulated phrase, because these are the same she heard from her own mother for similar circumstances. As a family, growing up and, it seems, through generations, this is what we had: hand-me-downs.
Wes, I wish you wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket.
The trouble I have with her advice is that it is actually neither insensitive nor an oversimplification. My trouble is that I’m coming to terms with the reality of my situation, as others see it. That is to say, she is right: I do put all my eggs in one basket. She says this, and I cry the next day, only now able to see that she has indexed something that has always been true about me: I have always placed all of my eggs in one basket. My trouble, then, is not knowing how not to do this.
Before now, I’ve not considered what it means. Instead, I have just always already known, instinctually. But I don’t really know: placing all of one’s eggs in one basket could be bad, because if something happens to that single basket, all of those eggs are lost or, what might be worse, broken. These eggs are our food, our finances, our well-being and valuables, and they are our relationships. We are walking along a dirt road or through the woods alongside a dirt road, and we trip. And the eggs fall. And they are all lost to us. So we must learn—the lesson of this proverb is—to separate our eggs: place one in my left pants pocket, one in my left hand, one nested on my tongue, and the basket, now with fewer eggs, may be carried between right hip and right hand. If I trip, I would hold up the egg in my hand to save it. Both arms thus occupied, my face would slap against the small broken twigs and leaves and dirt previously underfoot, and my torso would crush the basketed eggs. Perhaps the egg in my mouth could resist the force of impact—my own fat wagging tongue.
But saying one basket as opposed to the basket sounds like we are to separate our eggs into multiple wicker baskets: keep a basket on your head, another between right hand and hip, another between left hand and hip, one more slung over shoulder. But if I trip, they are all still lost to me. I do not have enough hands to monitor the uprightness of more than one basket.
The proverb does not hold. It cannot hold. Because I cannot. I don’t know that I can find a logical explanation for having more eggs in more baskets. And, frankly, I do not understand how anyone could. It is unwise, as one would be spread too thin: each egg would receive less attention. The likelihood of breaking becomes greater, the chances of hatching, smaller. With more objects, we are more divided.
What I know is that I have always only wanted one basket—or, more likely, only one egg. A mythically large egg. The appropriate proverb or command would be to only have one egg in which you can invest all your energies, that you can protect, to which you can give all your attention. It is, I think, the same biological logic for carrying so few fetuses at once: we are not kangaroos and do not have the ability to eject (abort) that which we know will not survive the drought. We can only carry so many things to term.
But this is that thinking: only having one egg is equivalent to placing all of my eggs in one basket. As if many robin eggs have been pressed together, transformed into a single roc egg. I am sure there is a mathematical explanation for this equivalency, but I don’t know what that might be—but I know that only having one egg is the same as having all one’s eggs in one, centralized place. So even as I recognize that she is right, I approach the very words my mother provides with the logic she is warning against. Yes, if I have more eggs, there is the possibility for more to survive, but there is also, mathematically, the possibility for more to be lost. But this is all only possible.
Despite the distortion of echo or memory, vibrating and shortening, I know one thing clearly: how I typed it, Wes, I wish you wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, is not accurate. That comma makes it seem like an address immediately preceding the proverb. But it was not. It was not a comma, it was an ellipsis, silence. Her saying my name had little to do with what came after.
When she said my name, she was acknowledging that I was upset, saying my name so I could hear it. Because, while those closest to us use our names the least, hearing it is not only comforting because it reminds us that we are someone, suddenly already being and no longer becoming.
Or she was disappointed. The vowel of my name was not upturned, as it would be for an address, but rather fell into that sibilant which lingered perhaps longer than it normally would have. And the silence—there was no silence there: I just couldn’t hear that she was sighing. Had I been there, looking at her, recumbent on that dark green couch, facing the television, I know I would have seen her chest lift itself then fall again and her small lips purse immediately after, just before opening again to speak. Wes.
I wish you wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, then, might have been an afterthought.
I have said to those around me, Tell me what it is like to have more than one friend. What is it like to have more than one person text you. What is like to pay for a phone you use to call more than only three people. I am curious, because it is an experience I have never had. I thought I was unlikable, not social. But this is not the case.
In my adolescence, there was only one nonfamilial person I ever spent time with. And I was so wholly invested in her as my friend. Until she wasn’t anymore. I began to live without a friend—that is, I began to live with no friends other than the goats and ducks and chickens in the backyard, the dog on the couch, and my own family. I didn’t search, because I didn’t know or remember how to. But as soon as a friendly hand was offered, I clung, fearing there may be no other, fearing if I offered mine in the future, it would be refused. And my hand, under the force of this new friend, was meant to touch, reach out to, hold others’. It was in that way that I realized I needed both hands to hold one, preferably two—that I could not hold, touch, embrace as many hands as others.
And this is exactly what my mother said troubled her: I can hold that one hand only, only if that one hand is holding only mine. But devotion, it seems, is so infrequently equal.
I made only three friends in high school: the only openly gay boy to pass through that damned school system in ten years (my sister graduated with Francis, ten years before; my brother, five years between us, didn’t know any gay people—and, when that school is only filled with six hundred bodies, you would know) became friends with the obese girl, the goth girl, and the too-bubbly girl with a skin condition. We were friends because we were already outcast and bitter and socially deviant. And that is how my friendships have been: I don’t seek friends; I befriend those with whom I am forced into proximity. This is how friendship happens in youth: a parent wants to see another parent down the road, so they let their two kids play together, and those two kids only play together because they have to, because their parents want to play together. Friendship, the byproduct of circumstance. Our friendships are all by proxy, in one way or another.
I don’t understand, then, the idea of best friend, as I’ve only ever had one true friend with perhaps one or two secondary friends, though the divide between primary and secondary, best and not-best, is always vast. It is simply easier for me to have fewer close relationships: fewer obligations, more intimacy, better understanding. I don’t know how to divide myself.
More than one pattern exists here: all this, and that all of my friends, the close ones, the egg ones, are women—which certainly has something to do with my mother.
She was intolerably close to her mother, which had a lot to do with control. But this closeness was still passed on to her children, only with the power and control corrected for, replaced with support and encouragement. This closeness has created a bond with my mother that I can only describe as a friendship. So it’s easy to say that all of my closest friends have been women because my first and closest, most intimate relationship—created, of course, by proximity (what would be the chance of my meeting or seeking out my mother were I not her son)—was with a woman.
But I resist using that easy explanation, because while it may be true, it is not entire. There is more to all of this than that: because I don’t know how else to say it—and I fear losing meaning with rhetorical gymnastics—my mother was the only parent I knew.
Or, my mother was the only parent I knew.
Or, my mother was the only parent I knew.
But the tense of the statement: it’s true, my mother was the only parent I knew, but she is still the only parent I know: she did not remarry, and I have kept my father so distant that I don’t know that I have yet come to know him.
He left when I was four, I think. He never lived far away from the family, and I saw him every other weekend until I was in my teens. I remember how my mother and father would argue—always about whether or not money was enough to be a parent and how much money and how much caretaking makes you a good parent. Always about kinds of distances. My father seemed largely absent from my life: he always had the proclivity for emotionally vacating before physically vacating as soon as I was eighteen and his legal financial obligations were over. Of course, I had a lot to do with another kind of distance: I shut him out, because he hurt my mother. He cheated on her. At least twice. Long affairs. And I still don’t know if I have or know how to forgive him.
She taught me how to be a friend, and she taught me to stretch myself thinner than possible for anyone—bend over backward, as she would say. Even though she had two other children, she treated me as if I was the only other person in the world. And I didn’t know how to do anything other than reciprocate. I was her one egg, or I was treated as such (that seems to be the power of the love of a mother), and she was mine for a very long time.
