Christopher Bernard’s Amor i Kaos: Fifth installment
I see the following:
The interior of a west coast café, with seismic support beams making a graceful right-angled triangle in the middle of the room.
Numerous café chairs, a dozen tables of various shapes and sizes, most of them occupied by leisurely eating and chatting lunchers (most are in couples, with a few small groups, and several loners seriously addressing their plates; there is a common table with several loners exaggeratedly ignoring each other behind their open lap tops); two iron railings lead up to the café’s glass door through a wall of glass looking out onto the street.
Passing cars, a truck, bus, males and females bustling, pacing, stalking by at businesslike gaits (mostly adults, a few adolescents, no children), two small, abandoned-looking trees across the street, the entrance to a parking garage with a sign flashing in red (“CAR COMING”), a cat sleeping on a backpack near the curb (no sign of the owner), three, no four, pigeons pecking in the gutter a few feet from the sleeping cat, the entrance to a 7-11, the aggressively hip windows of a Banana Republic, two narrow green doors in a wall, shut except for one that seems invitingly ajar, several open laptops, three smartphones being swiped or tapped by anxious-looking teenagers, three ballpoint pens held by two students and a tourist (the pen in my hand is the fourth), a V-neck sweater and two turtlenecks, two white quilt parkas, a business suit holding a briefcase in swift passage across the view, shadowy reflections across the street, sun, clouds, sky (just barely visible if I stretch forward and look up).
I smell: coffee, cloves, cinnamon, pastry custard, bread.
I feel: the press of corduroy against my legs. The squeeze of a vest against my torso. The rub against my wrist of my new watchband.
Not every writer exploring the family drama in its more harrowing manifestations—in this case, one so horrendous it might seem like a morbid delusion yet may reflect the experiences of more families than one would like to believe—has invented an ingenious way to handle it that makes it endurable, human and even funny without softening its awfulness. But, in his first novel, poet and playwright Richard Slota has achieved this very remarkable thing.
Tales so terrible must often be cloaked in deep fantasy to be faced at all; their starkness is too hard to look at directly—like staring directly at the sun, it can make you unable to see anything else again.
Slota’s solution has been to concoct, amid a crew of intriguing eccentrics, a brilliantly imaginative fantasy, blended with a dash of dark humor and unexpected displays of lyricism, to explore his gothic family horrors.
Christopher Bernard’s novel Amor I Kaos: Installment 4
—But they are. Even beyond the last hope of imagining. For example: ecstatic redemption. Love given, love received, in mutual rhythms of thrill and calm. Freedom without despair. Youthfulness without stupidity or disintegration. A quiet doom. Those fledglings out of the pocket of whatever had been lost without any hope of being found. Though it seems to be too much to ask for. In its own demented and almost criminal heat. —Well. One always lives several lives in parallel, you slip between them, one to the other, fragments that never quite bind into a completely satisfying whole. So we lie to ourselves via the cerebral cortex, medulla, amygdala, brain stem, the requirements of grammar, and our various talents, such as they are, for story-telling, until the whole thing seems to hang together, More or less.
—Like Lincoln’s assassins.
—The truth (ignoring the cocky provocation) being too much of an appalling and humiliating mess to be borne, it’s quite beneath our dignity. Lincoln indeed.
—So I take what I can use and …?
—… and lock the rest in a back cupboard. Never throw any of it away, of course, you never know when it will become handy. But for heaven’s sake, don’t take it seriously, it will make you suicidally depressed, and what is depression but a pointless sorrow, one that does not even let you weep. And tears are sorrow’s gift, its peculiar pleasure. No. Keep truth under a strong hand and never let it forget who is the boss. You . . .
—Me?
—No. Let me repeat. Keep truth, etc., never let it, etc., who is the boss. Full stop. This side transcendence.
—And what is that, Herr Professor, she asked innocently. Not truth?
He looked at her evasively.
—Again, no. An old and terrifying yet reassuring dream of what might be if only we could shape the world’s anarchy into something like the heart’s enchantment. Though that was not what you had said.
It was almost too demeaning, she thought. To be hampered in that way despite all the options at the time. The seeming options, anyway. Because once you’ve done something, it seems as though it had always been meant to be, and so maybe the options were illusory after all. Amor fati…
—If only!
—No, really. Plus the beauty of matter, in Joubert’s lovely phrase. Because he was right, that Frenchman with the shy ambition and the small, beautiful notebook. So beautiful in its humble bravado, its bold modesty. All that clean, beautiful white space surrounding the few lovely words. No overwrought romantic windbaggery for him. But I’m drifting from the subject. Though what indeed was the subject? She looked at him with her usual skepticism. Did she love him? Maybe she did, in her peculiar way.
—My life is my hell, he told her one day. Matter-of-factly. I wish I could say I love it. I wish I could say I love you.
—Me too.
Then they parted for three days. Three weeks. Three months. Years. Decades. But not forever. They were adults. You would have thought they had learned never to be entirely sincere, that was what got young people always into so much trouble, the infatuation with “honesty,” no relationship will last five minutes of complete that.
—Apparently not.
—And so they tormented one another with their precious truth. You are my hell. A Sartrean proverb! And no one can leave hell. You see the problem.
But that meant nothing. Never even turned a hair. Minimally extant as it was. The withers unwrung, the moist appeal in the gathered vats, the wayward affront. The absolute right to one’s own life—to one’s own will. The boy who lived on the hill came to that conclusion one afternoon in the fall, as he was walking through the tall, yellowed hay at the edge of the field that bordered his family’s property. It was startlingly true. Nobody, but nobody, had a right to deprive him of his will. Nobody had a right to force him to sacrifice his will to anyone else, to a group, country, class, religion. They might have the power, the legal right, but they had no moral right. In that discovery lay his strength. His right to his will was absolute; this would become his moral compass.
—It should have turned him into a monster, acknowledged the portly man.
But no: just as no one had the right to deprive him of his will, so he had no right to deprive any other person of theirs. In his will lay his meaning, his joy. That seemed logical, right. Furthermore, the joy of other people increased his joy as long as it did not clash with it, and as long as he was happy in his will; if he wasn’t, nothing was surer to enrage him. The biggest threat to his will was, in fact, other people’s suffering, their pain, and their envy (ditto, in reversion, above). And this, which struck him like a hammer blow: the greatest source of the will’s joy, even at the core of its often deep and savage pain, was the perpetually deferred desire that is love, and not only for one but for all. The will is launched in pursuit. Life begins as desire and continues as love.
The prevailing winds, from east over the Atlantic, across gray, clammy tides, puling seagulls, their black caps and flexing, sickle-like wings, the terns’ small, quick arcs, the funny rushes and escapes along the skirt of the wave wash of the pipers hunting for small, nutlike sandcrabs. The tart briny scent, the yellow, scummy, impetigo-infecting gullies. The gray white sand grainy with tiny white and black crystals he could almost count as they separated in his palm. Clumps of salt grass covering the dunes like long green hair. The endless distant roll and crash of waves along the beach, the lulling confusion of whiteness, a serene and tranquil drama of the shore, raving and collapsing without pause from horizon to horizon.
When they met shyly in their swimsuits, the summer Christopher Pascal was sixteen and Sasha Kamenev fifteen, and their families spread their beach blankets and chairs and umbrellas under the tinkling shouts and laughter of swimmers and beachball players and sandbucket diggers and sandcastle builders not far from the lifeguard stand on the hot, white dry sand and the cool, gray wet sand along the edge of the playful lashing mindless formidable beautiful and frightening sea.
This is a novel that we’ll serialize each month until we reach the end.
Amor i Kaos
A novel
By Christopher Bernard
This novel is dedicated to the memory of the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo (1931−2017), whose example has given many the courage to follow the drive of imagination and desire wherever it leads, in fear, in fascination, and in wonder:
The Blind Rider, Count Julian in his pocket, Juan sin tierra on his eyebrow, Makbara at one ear, the Solitary Bird at the other, rides his blind horse over the blind country: a walk, at first slow, then a trot, faster, then a canter, faster, then a gallop, faster, faster, and yet faster, till the blind horse opens blind wings and lifts him on the stones of the wind into the blind sky
_________________
The wind rattling the kitchen window, wind he had hardly been aware of, was suddenly clear as the shaking of a cage.
— But you are not in love with me.
There was some satisfaction, at least, in twisting the blade with his own hand.
She continued watching him.
—Yes . . . No . . . I’m sorry . . . I can’t anymore . . . I have to . . .live past you. It’s not you, it’s . . . me . . .
She scowled at the inept cliché. Something she would usually have refused to commit, under penalty of an eternal shaming.
