Christopher Bernard’s “AMOR i KAOS”: Sixth Installment

Love had nothing to do with it, as the song said. It was all about something in her eyes. They never let you in, and yet they didn’t shut you out completely either. Like the prayers that were her hands. No one knew who knew her, because no one really did. Yet everyone was drawn to her. She became for many of us a craving, like a drug. Her beauty was the heroic kind that turned strong men into bumbling adolescents, whimpering children, and just confused everyone else. She resented her own beauty (he could feel it). It kept lying to other people: it said I love you when she felt no love for them and I hate you when she felt no hatred. It crowded her, turned the silence she craved into a long shouting match, the darkness she loved into a display of fireworks that wore her out with their continual, compulsive brilliance.

—I know you love me but leave me alone for a while, a year, a lifetime.

She learned the hard way that beauty comes at a penalty: stares like a constant punishment.

—Everyone loves me, she said once in despair.

—No, he said, everyone wants you. I love you. And so I shall go away. Even though losing your company breaks my heart and makes me moan in the night. You will probably not believe this, but I’m going to say it anyway. You were the one who introduced me to happiness. You taught me the meaning of joy. I thought I had known before. But I hadn’t, not the ghost of it. Happiness comes with loving you and knowing I am loved by you. Joy is being in the same room with you, in your arms, in the air that surrounds you. But I can give up joy. I don’t really need to see you. Seeing you is a joy that almost intimidates me. I never need to see you, if that is what you want. Loving you is all the happiness I need. I can go on living if I have that – that is what I mean. I will have a reason to live. I can give up that joy if I can keep that happiness.

But she had already gratefully closed the door. And, for safe measure, locked it.

—And I thought you said love had nothing to do with it! Liar, she smiled, hidden in the silence and the dark.

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Noël in the Sierra

By Christopher Bernard

They’d been traveling all day, since before the sun rose,

and now it was cold and dark and snowing,

then the car broke down and now this cracker . . .

“You just got bad timing,” the burly man had said.

“Nobody around here’s got any rooms tonight. Sorry.”

“Damn all . . .!” That was the last straw.

It was Christmas Eve, man! . . . “It’s all right, Jay.”

The girl, her small heart pounding,

looked the motel owner straight in the eye.

Sheesh! the man thought. How old are these kids?

Him, skinny, rasta hair, bitter eyes, eighteen maybe,

her, tiny, cornrows, more in control than her dude,

sixteen—less!

And what are they doing in Red Bluff?

The nearest ghetto’s in Oakland . . .

Oh no . . .   He sees the problem: the little swollen body,

the perfect little sphere at her tummy

peeking through a tatty coat. . .

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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.

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WITH MOM AND DAD, IN HELL

Stray Son

A novel

by Richard Slota

Rainbowdash Publishers

A review by Christopher Bernard

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.

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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.

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Christopher Bernard’s Amor i Kaos (part 3)

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.

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Christopher Bernard’s Amor i Kaos (part 2)

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.

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