{Not by Needs nor Nature}

Not by Needs is moving

2010-03-07T21:51:00.004-04:00

Greetings,

After weighing my options, and having witnessed how well its been treated my friend over at The Starry Messenger, Not by Needs not Nature will be moving over to the WordPress formate. Below is a small, modest screen shot of the site.

The entirety of the site will be up there in time.

The final installment of The Split will be the first post on the new blog: http://notbyneeds.wordpress.com/. See you there.

Cheers,

Jesse

The Split - Part V of VI

2010-03-07T17:11:00.012-04:00

Don't forget to read the first four installments of

The Split

by Jesse P. Hiltz

Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

Part V

{When the end is coming, how will we recognize the time that remains?}

Then the packages began arriving, addressed to my dorm. No return address. After cutting the thread, and unwrapping the brown paper, I look inside.

Nothing. Always nothing.

They began to arrive three weeks after I left the hospital. Small cardboard boxes. One box every three or four days, for two weeks.

Is this the way the game will be played?

These gifts were the only welcoming I received after leaving the hospital. On the drive home, my eyes glazed over the stone buildings. The stone was darkened and stained by the rain. It looked as cold and clammy as my skin. My eyes felt as if my brain were sucking them into itself. For nourishment, or clawing and grasping, trying to get out. I had already forgotten what comfort felt like.

Lynn rode with me but we not speak.

The sky was a dark grey, the clouds black. Inky. I had once saw a photograph of the fire cloud that hung over Halifax after the explosion in 1917. It loomed, lumbering away from the city, as the citizens ran, their windows melted, the iron bend, bones snapped, bodies were rubbed into the landscape, the buildings that housed trembled and melted away with them. Hell had risen from the water and masticated a terrified people.

Once home, I was alone. I walked around my dorm room like a shade. I sat on my bed and stared at the tower of empty shipping boxes. I would often look in the boxes, over and over, in case I had missed something. But there was nothing. I willed and wished that I might find a fibre or catch a waft of scent: a familiar thread that could run through everything I have encountered, came up against. To create a tight bundle of ideas and intuitions.

If certainty is the result of causes followed by effects, then everything is a clue, pointing back, beyond itself, to its origin, to another clue. We are all detectives in this sense. Yet, when we finish our work, if ever, we find that when we approach the origin, it too has evaded us yet again. So what have we found when we have no origins, but only further clues to hope for? Not ourselves, that’s for certain. We find something else though, something that’s not a presence, not a final state as with machines, not an appearance, but an aura. A side-ways glance.

When the hell fire too Halifax, where was the origin of this event? Was at the location of the SS Mont-Blanc, the munitions ship, or the Norwegian ship Imo that hit it? Was it with their captains? Captain Le Medec, who sent his ship into the centre of the shipping channel to avoid a collision? When Captain Haakon From ordered ‘reverse engines’, but instead of stopping, the fluid dynamics of the changing propellers alters their course and their intentions, sending them into the SS Mont-Blanc? Was it when the Imo struck and became lodged in the Mont-Blanc, igniting sparks? Or, was it when they attempted to pull back, lighting more fires? Was it when the Mont-Blanc’s crew abandoned the ship, and without a crew, it drifted toward the hapless city? Was it when the crew abandoned the ship without opening the seacocks? Would they have drowned the fire and saved the city? Was it when the English speaking Halifax men didn’t understand the French warnings? Would a translator have saved the people? Was it when the drifting rogue, Mont-Blanc, reached Pier 6 and lit the munitions cargo stored on land? Was it at 9:04 am, that moment of paranuclear rupture? Or, was it long before, when Compagnie Générale Transatlantique purchased the Mont-Blanc to carry munitions to France? Was it then?

Is it all of these things or none of them? No, it something that cuts through them all, a diagonal line that intersects them all. But why can’t I speak of this thing? How do I speak of this diagonal line that cuts through the constellation. What of my constellation? What of my diagonal line? What of the leviathan?

I find it’s aura everywhere within these mysterious and anonymous gifts: the packages, Cornelius’s story, in Furlong’s very identity, in the churning waters of the Split.

Perhaps one needs to take the diagonal look at the angular events? How does one do this? Sherlock Homes’ morphine, opium, heroin... something near the margins. Is this the signature that activates these signs? Are we all detectives in this way?

Thus, I began my investigation anew. Certainty can only take you so far. There is a leap that takes you from regarding the constellation into its fabric. It is then you see that it was neither points, nor stars, drawn into relations with each other – but rather, it is a membrane, it lives along this diagonal plane.

How will I know myself when I find myself there?

But the packages stopped arriving and with them, life seemed to stop altogether.

There was nothing to determine the passing of time but the rising and falling of the sun. Daniel came by to chat and didn’t stay long. I’m not sure what we spoke of, or if we spoke at all. I stopped waiting for Lynn’s visits. “How should I react to this?” She cried. “I can’t see you like this?”

She walked out the door. I tried to follow her. Perhaps if I had followed, thing would have turned out differently. Is this a passing glance of redemption? But I could not move. The morphine sat on my chest like a dwarf.

How did I not notice her absence?

Even now, even in this correspondence, I cannot focus on Lynn. My mind does not allow it. Lynn, how have you been taken from me? I did not known that I would never see her again.

Redemption through words – what could I have said to here at that point? Words would not hold water, or ferry meaning. They were all vessels, yes, but ships without home ports, marooned without hope. Or worse, they are secretly ablaze in a harbour about to erupt.

Will they blow?, the Halifax spectators must have thought. I heard them pass by me, these dangerous words, in an echoed parade. How does one have courage?

Vince Coleman sends his last telegraph: “Stop trains. Munitions ship on fire. Approaching Pier 6. Goodbye.”

On a Sunday, I lost the ability to sleep. On a Tuesday, I bought a ferry ticket to the United States. To Boston. To follow the trail back to Furlong; the only clue I had. My only first move. So I leapt....

***

Leaning over the railing on the ferry, I was mesmerized by the rolling of the grey Atlantic waters. That shared waters of the Split. My attention was stretched already. There is a liquidity to travel, a flowing from place to place. It is explicit when traveling by water; the water tipped its hat to me with ever wave, silently and rhythmically. My own reflection reminded me that I hadn’t eaten or slept. I stared at that image of my self unable to pull it up into the ferry with me. Such a sad wretch, lying in the water, unable to drown.

***

My God. What have I done?

The sky was a soft white, like powered sugar. Small. Singularities. Delicate flakes of snow began to float down. I had lost track of the days in Boston. Have I been here that long? Fall, the season of dying, had ended long ago, and the season of sleep was upon me. It snowed long after my arrival in Boston. For days and days it lightly snowed. It was ankle deep, and it was laborious to walk in the lonely snow greased streets.

After my meeting with Furlong, I could not leave Boston. I needed to remain hidden in it somehow. For how long, I didn’t know.

My black wool overcoat and satchel was decorated with the fragile white. I could not brush them off. The thought of damaging them was unbearable; they was so natural and safe. I roamed along Boston's streets until the day ended, and the farther I walked, the more the buildings began decay - as if the day of reckoning began earlier there than else where. The building looked black, like coal. Do they not have street lights here?

Exhausted and freezing, I found myself on the water front. My side ached with each breath. A broken a rib? My leg is so sore. It was so dark, I was had to sit down. I spotted a bench beside the water, in a small, unkept park. Is it safe here? Each route I took in this damned city, felt like a mistake. I tucked my chin deeper into my jacket. My cheek felt tender against my collar. My face. Am I marked?

The night was silent. Moon was a murmur in the snowy sky. Sound of the streets grit under my feet was deafening. Is it safe here? How could I stay hidden when everything announced my presence. I must rest. I moved down a path between to great buildings. Does anyone live here? Are like dead monuments? I heard what could have been a rat, a cat, or a man. It would not make itself seen. I want to be like you. I want to be unseen.

I entered the garden. The silhouettes of weed husks, clusters of tall grasses. Is that a man shirt? I stepped on some glass. It crackle thundered. Is darkness thinker than the light? Like water, sound travels faster here. The land was raised slightly above the still water. Is this a berth of some kind? Not frozen but suspended.

I reached down to situate the location of the bench. In the dark, objects seem to move on their own. The relief of rest was haunted by vulnerability. Is it safe here? Safety is the feeling of being enclosed, this is the embrace. But safety is only understandable when exposure is own ultimate fear. A hug is safe because it limits our exposure to the Outside. Within an embrace, whatever there is to fear, remains outside of it. But what one feels when one sits on the outside, fully exposed, easily taken, easily hunted. Animals never allow themselves to be put in this state. If forced into exposure, an animal will fight as though it were death. As though - why does man make such an artificial distinction? It is death.

Fatigue, however, confuses exposure for embrace. It mistakes the darkness for cover. Is this why man foolishly sleep at night?

Then, the moon’s light flickered, far out, on the water. A tiny glimmer. Then another. A movement in the water. A sweat broke and the air never felt so cold. The space around expanded around me. Then a sound, a whispering of the motion that disrupted waters glass. There it was, where the glimmer shone, a rippling stole out from the dancing light and began to creep toward the shore, toward me. Closer, the aberration moved toward me, almost delicate, must it purposive. I tried to stand but was fixed to my place, my limbs fixed to there position. I am exposed. And worse, hunted.

The swell reached out and touched the stone wall of the water front – then nothing. Silence again. Stillness. But I felt it. I felt its aura.

I shook with even attempt to move. What holds me here? God damn you!

The break of a twig, the scuff of a foot, a dragging, a rustle, a flutter – the dead, black space around me began to stir. Out of side and never in the same place. They move, but always towards me.

Something touches my back. My body wants to jump, to react but I remain restrained. The tension wracks my body. The scream catches in my throat, bloated my laughs, they burst.

The water heaves again, scattering the sounds back into the night. They wait, but they fear what’s in the water. They fear.

Words escape my lips: “Why... do you come to me now?”

Recognized, the whole of the black water, as far I could see, yielded as the slick, black skin of the beast broke its surface. Coiled and knotted, it claimed the entire world. Before me surfaced milky dead eyes. The water glided off its oily skin as it came over the embankment for me. I want to run. I need to run!

But I stood, took two long strides, and with bursting lungs, leapt into it gapping maw. Pain streaked my side as I jumped up from the bench. Groggy, my eye shot around the water. Stillness. My God. My God. Disregarding the dangers of the dark alleys and streets, I wrapped my coat around my aching ribs and limped way from the water, into the darkness.

Hours later, I saw a wore wooden sign, on a darkened brick building, written in faint Chinese. I have found you at last. A dark place. A secret den. One of that last in the Eastern United States.

I entered a old wooden door and then through another, locked and heavy. The interior was dimly lit, and smelled sweet and exotic. I walked lamely through a common lounge. Oil lamps, tapestries. Each step reminded me of terrible pain in my leg. Black silk traps, soft carpets with embedded histories. Men lay on thick cushions, outside of their lives, escaping, exhaling thick plumes of fragrant smoke. With every breath the room grows dimmer, pushing the light out.

I was lead by a man. I did not ask his name. He did not ask mine. We are not friends, nor did even do business. He provides a haven, a survive, and I required sanctuary. Once I entered his door, I was freeman paying to be a slave.

We entered a hallway of dark, stained wood and many heavy, black curtains that hid the shamelessness of the room’s interior. The man drew one of them back and I entered like a boy into a bordello.

There was a burrow, with a lock, for my belongings, but I had none. There was a lovely worn black velvet couch, a small engraved side-table, and an opium pipe with lamp.

“You need food?” The man asked.

“No.” I could not eat, but I did change my clothes. I had to. The Chinaman didn’t ask about the blood.

As if on cue, the man returned with a small decorated wooden box. Red with golden ornamentation. I reclined gingery on the couch and he opened the box and placed it on the table to my right. He lit the opium lamp and left.

I gazed down at the small box at three small, dark pea-shaped spheres, and thought of my visit Hymel, and what brought me to this last point.

Return soon for the final installment of The Split.

The Split - Part IV of VI

2010-03-04T01:30:00.005-04:00

I walked down the yellowed, beach grass path toward the beach. The sun began to rise, and the fog was lifting. My breathing was heavy and my head ached from the effects of Cornelius’ liquor. The clack of smooth stones underfoot rang like gun shots as my feet uneasily trod the beach. The sunrise was beauty though. Its rays reached through the large pine trees, lightly touching the siding of the small houses lining the beach. I could see the lights turning off in the kitchens as the sun began to pour in their windows, signaling the end of breakfast; another day for those practical folk of the bay. What did it mean for a stranger?

We packed up our gear and food, and set to the road for the city. Hymel and I chatted about the victories and failures of the trip, and he promptly invited me back again for the next surveying mission. The date of which, if it was to be, would be determined by the decision of the Nova Scotia Government. He expected to hear a reply concerning his proposal in a month or so. If the project was approved, he would be returning with a full crew in about two months; if the project was rejected, it was likely we would never return to the Bay.

I didn't look at the contents of the Cornelius’ bag anymore until I returned to the university. I arranged the contents out in my small study. The notes and the papers were stacked neatly on one edge of my desk, the book was filed away in the bookshelf, and the photos and wallet were hidden in a cigar box under my bed. The wooden box that Wilcox had left proved to be an interesting mantel piece. It was beautifully and carefully crafted mahogany.

I had nearly convinced myself that Cornelius’ words were empty threats, made to force his own guilt upon me. He had killed Wilcox, not me. This is the sovereignty in the choices we make. This is a simple fact, so all guilt belongs to him alone and he may do with it what he wishes. It was he who must live with that shame of deeds done. I should feel neither guilt nor shame in scrutinizing the events that occurred at Scott’s Bay, I thought. In fact, I was thinking that it would give me the kind of story the fellows at the Lovecraft group where looking for. Indeed, I had not a care. I assure you. None at all.

After a few days, I collected my thoughts and I relayed my tale Lynn. Her reaction was not as I had expected. What was at first disbelief, changed to outright infuriation, even disgust, with my story. Her dark eye brows furrowed and those dark eyes of hers, darted by my own, never meeting them. She sat on my bed and grabbed a fist full of quilt, flexing and relaxing her tense fingers.

“Lynn…?” She wouldn’t look at me.

“Raymond,” she whispered. “I hope you’re having me on because this is…” She was silent.

“This is what?” I asked.

“Raymond, are you honestly telling me that a man has confessed to you that he’s killed someone and… You were sitting, getting drunk with a murderer and all you have to say is ‘it’s a fine tale?’ Well, no Raymond. It’s not a fine tale. It’s murder! People aren’t just characters to exaggerate and kill off for effect. They have blood and flesh. Do you not know this? Blood and flesh!”

She began to weep. I reached out to her but she pulled away: “Don’t touch me, please!”

I couldn’t accuse her of complete lunacy. Granted, the murder was not my fault, the tale was grisly. Any ethics would dictate I go to the police, but they would not have believed a word of such a story. I barely did myself. Taken as it was, it was simple ravings, authored by a madman, a conspirator.

“No truth can live in such a story, Lynn,” I tried to explain. “I told you this story because it feels so real but pressed to prove it, of course I could not. It’s insane.”

The nature of this beast was in the experience of it. Without seeing the leviathan, this tale, these words, were only ominous and unsettling.

“Lynn,” I repeated. “I’m sorry to have upset you. You see, what I’ve told you… No one will believe it. I have no proof. There is no logic in these events. They’ll think me mad.”

“Perhaps you are mad.” She said lowly.
“Me? Come now.”

“Why do you get such pleasure from telling this horrible story to me?”

“Pleasure? Lynn… Its… Its just such a strange tale…”

“I’m leaving,” she turned.

“Imagine you were a writer…”

“I will imagine nothing!”

She left, and I did not hear from her for three days. That first night she was gone, I sat in the very same chair I sat in when I had relayed my tale. I just remained sitting, alone, facing the bed where she had wept. The blankets were gathered where she had clinched her fists, and the room still had the gesture of her scent. Lilac.

I did not sleep that night. Nor did I speak to anyone else about my story. How alienating the experience with Lynn had been. Perspective. It was a matter of perspective. Not of relativism, but of the angle - where you stand in relation to an action. Even though things seem obscured when they are far, their details are so intimate when they are near.

Those three days I did not leave my dormitory. I did not attend lecture, nor did I eat in the hall. I was drowned, wrenched with guilt, and self-estranged. Another days passed, and I took cool water for purification. A holy cleanse. But how deep does the stain penetrate? How many ties did I baptise myself? How many times was I damned? My hands and my hair always felt oily and caked with sand.

Around the room I had arranged the Scott’s Bay fragments - the photos and clippings tacked on cork-board and to walls. Organized chronologically, and by persons involved, in subject or by creative force. My room became thick with pipe smoke and my wall and sheets smelled of its rank - my rank. Is this what it smelled like when they burned the damned?

After those four days, a soft, cautious knock came to my door. It opened. It was Lynn. She found me half-sleeping, or perhaps in a daze, at my desk. I had become absorbed into those fragments. While I could make no more sense of them, they had developed an aura, and insinuation, a sideways glance that proposed their meaning. Yet this meaning was only a murmur, spoken through closed lips. The fragments where an elaborate constellation my very ego, like a churning abyss, a leviathan twisting through the black waves.

“Raymond,” Lynn said softly. “Raymond, they say you’ve not come out of your room for days. Are you sick? You look so pale.”

I didn’t say anything. I could not respond. This constellation, it took me days to discern its shape but what was its zodiac? What story did it represent? How could I communicate this to her? Yet it was all I thought. Insisting one’s sanity, only makes one more mad. Sanity is only something you claim when you can’t be sure you already own it.

“Raymond,” she said again. “Raymond please speak to me.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and I leaned into it. Her touched was so stabilizing. And, her Lilac scent seemed to quiet the room; settle the dust. A little clarity.

“I’m not mad,” I said quietly.

“Mad? I don’t understand. Who said you were mad?

“I’m not sure,” I said, then realizing how mad I sounded even to myself. “When answers started to come, more questions follow them. Half-questions, actually, have started to reveal themselves. You show really read these notes I’ve been writing. They are so distant somehow, these words, like stars. Its like there’s a examination, a test, in this room, that I’m a part of but no one is asking any questions. Its only me. I’ve posed it to myself somehow. I’m the one asking and no one is answering. I’m invigilating. But I am no third person....”

But something more striking was....

“Cornelius,” I said. “He lives alone, but his house had a woman living there. You can tell. But she wasn’t there when I was. Where was she? That late at night? He never mentioned her. She left or dead, you see? And he keeps it just like she had it. I don’t know where she went. Perhaps he drove her away. Perhaps, he drove her to leave him and he’s just staying there waiting for her. Could that be? Does he know she’s gone for good or is a test for him? Is he also invigilating?”

“Raymond,” Lynn said. Sweetie. What are you talking about? These aren’t things you could know... My God. You’re really a fever.”

“Lynn, what if I drive you away? I never wanted that.”

She was right. I hadn’t realized how warm it was.

She helped my to my bed. The feeling of the soft mattress, the sinking in, I was so tired.

Lynne began to carefully take the papers off the corkboard.

“It’s only been a few days,” she said coolly. “That’s it. I wouldn’t worry about this.”

“But the other day you were so upset.” I was so tied. I upset you so much...”

“This,” she pointed to the walls and the desks, their contents. “This upsets me.”

She was like an astronomer, the way she pointed at the constellations.

I slept for a whole day. Lynn packed up the papers into a cardboard box. I bathed and Lynn tidied my room. We walked outside. The day was cloudy but it seemed bright to my sheltered eyes. We ate down by the water front and visited the shops by the harbour. The outing anchored me. In conversation, Lynn had avoided talk both of our argument and of my hermitage. Yet, there was still an ache, and slight uneasiness. An aura. Something remained that could not be focused nor upon ignored.

***

The following week, a Monday I think, I met with a fellow from the Lovecraft group for lunch. Daniel Doucette. He was a well to-do business student. While his studies were of no interest to me, he had a real knack for storytelling. He met often with overseas businessmen and traders, all who break the best stories with them. Some of the most bizarre stories would come from businessmen who served in the Great Wars. Some served in dark places, money can buy almost anything. Their yarns, true or not, could cause shivers, yes – but were never to be believed, not even the storyteller. Superstition, foolery, exploit. Good for a chuckle at the expense of some poor old Indian or African usually. Daniel was charming though. Wealthy and charismatic. He was of French decent. He wasn’t a pure Frenchman, but his father was. Daniel’s father was an wealthy immigrant to Quebec.

I hadn’t looked through the contents of the box since Lynn had packed them. I went to far as to give the box to her to keep. I did not know where it was and was gladder for it. However, its aura remained. My doctor had believed that my bad nerves had conjured up ulcers. I could no longer drink strong beers or an spirits, no coffee, only weak tea. Anything more and the ulcers churned my guts.

Daniel and I sat at a small table in the same lounge where I first met Hymel. I tried to ignore that fact. We were surrounded by portly businessmen. Daniel had asked about my trip to Scott’s Bay. I told him that it had been very charming but that was all. I said that the whole affir must have made me ill because I hadn’t feel well since.

“And the shark?” He asked.

I paused: “Pardon me?”

Had I mentioned that to him? I’d guess I must have told him the story in its infancy, long before I left.

“Just a shark unfortunately.” I looked into my tea cup. “Just as Furlong said.”
“That’s unfortunate, I suppose,” Daniel said. “By the way, funny thing about that Furlong fellow, just after you came back from you trip, his name appeared up in the Harold again.”

My stomach tossed. I could taste bile.

“Oh?” I asked quickly sipping tea. “I can’t imagine what for.”

“Your friend Hymel will be pretty upset, I imagine.” He laughed.

“He will?”

“I should think,” Daniel began. “Furlong is in the middle of quite a lucrative deal with the provincial government concerning a certain hydroelectric power sight that you are acquainted with. With Hicks and the liberals split and out of office, Stanfield looking to make some reforms. This power deal looks as good as done. It hasn’t really been finalized yet, but it looks well in the bag.”

Now that didn’t make any sense to me at all.

“Furlong is a marine biologist, not an engineer. But... Furlong isn’t interested in… he’s dead.”

“Apparently not.” Daniel grinned.

“Ah...” I didn’t know what to say. Furlong had only existed to me as a name. Cornelius had told me he was dead. As far as I knew, he never really existed as a man. Now... Now of all times, Hymel’s hydroelectric project was being stolen by the faceless Furlong.

“Are you feeling well Raymond?”

“Pardon me?”

“You’re looking a little green. Are you alright?”

“Oh,” I was suddenly feeling quite nauseous. My stomach felt quite raw. “I have ulcers. So doctors say. Do you have a copy of that paper per chance?”

“Me? No. But… I saw one... yes,” Daniel waved to the waiter, a young man, but no much younger than we were. “Excuse me, you have yesterday’s paper, yes?”

“Probably, sir...”

“Could we borrow it?” I asked interrupting him.

“Yes, sir.”

He disappeared and then returned with a wrinkled paper.

“Excuse the quality.”

“Thank you.” Daniel tipped him. After rummaging around through the articles, he paused and read silently for a moment.

“There,” he said, flattening out the paper. He point at a photograph. “He’s a real happy looking fellow, eh?”

I looked down at the image. It showed several government officials, Stanfield, and other men shacking hands. My eyes franticly darted around the photo. I could not spot him. I did not know what to look for to identify this faceless man. But, then, like a dart, I saw something much more unsettling. A familiarity among the strange faces. My God.

I closed my eyes. In the darkness I saw the leviathan rolling and coiling in the oily bilge, deep in my guts, creeping up... Hymel.

“Excuse me…” I stood quickly and ran to the men’s room, nearly knocking over our poor waiter. The room seemed to be rushing by me. At once, the bitter taste of vomit and then darkness.

Daniel found me on the floor of the hallway to the men’s room and taken me back to my dorm. When I awoke, I felt violated by the thought that after all this time, the man without a face was right there in front of me, eating with me, smoking with me, sleeping in the same room as me.

Hymel and Furlong – two stars, made one, within my constellation.
Lynn was there. I still had that terrible pain in my stomach, much worse than before.

“Raymond,” Lynn said sternly. “There’s something wrong with you. You’re ill or something. We need to go to the hospital.”

“Lynn…” I whispered. “Furlong. The scientist… do you remember the story?”

“Yes, I remember.” Disappointed. I know it now: it must have seemed like such a reversion to her. A move backward, away from the future. Back toward my obsession, short and sweet, and even packed away in a box, hidden from me, it came back. Of course it did. It had been fed. They say animal’s can’t think futurity but this isn’t true. A stray animal never leaves once you start feeding it. It will just wait: days, months, starving for the possibility. And once it sees food, that nourishment, you realize it was never truly gone.

“Furlong… is Hymel. He lied to me. Why would he say his name was Hymel? Furlong… I think he saw the monster…”

“Raymond,” Lynn yelled, trying to put her hand over my mouth. “Stop this. This has got to stop. All this madness about the Split need to stop. You’re emaciated. You’re rambling.”

“I have to talk to Furlong. Lynn…”

My vision left me again and I felt my body drop. So Heavy.

I awoke. I felt so heavy. What time was it – what day? Darkness again.

Again. My eyes open.

I was surrounded by blue tile and white curtain. The lights made my eyes ache. Is this a hospital? I could barely move. I felt so tired. I heard Lynn’s voice: “Nurse, I think he’s awake again.”

Two days I was unconscious. While I lay in that bed, I didn’t speak of Furlong. I didn’t say much. The nurses gave me medicine to settle my stomach. There was a intravenous in my arm.

“The blackouts are for curtain stress related,” the doctor said. He looked at me over his tiny glasses. “You must take it easy, son. These ulcers are worse than last time.”

I just listened. This is what the mad feel like. They remain silent so as to guard others from the semblance of madness. This antisocial silence, they feel, is the better choice. I was unsure if Lynn had said anything to the doctor concerning her theories about my stress. I presumed not. Any mention of Furlong, Cornelius or the murder would bring about a multitude of questions pertaining to more then my ailment. She too shares the madman’s silence.

She would visit me in the day. We took a light tea and lunch in my hospital room. She was gracious even though her worry marked her face deeply. She was moved. She did not leave me. But she too was pale. I am also straining her.

Lynn left in the afternoons and I tried to rest, but it was impossible to relax. The fragments, the constellation… uncomfortable to recall yet plan as day when I imagine it.

What does Furlong known about me?

Did he know I would find the clippings at the library? Did he put the clippings there? If he did, why would he? What gain would I be, and what could I offer? Why would he lie about his name? But most importantly, what did he expect to do when I found out?

Have I been playing the blind role in some scheme. Not a test but a game?

If I am not an invigilator, then I am a player.

The Split - Part III of VI

2009-10-13T22:47:00.003-03:00

III

The second morning I rose earlier, before even Hymel. After last night’s discussion on Cornelius, I was becoming more attentive to my actions and their interpretable intentions. Intentions of what? I also thought. Was it to know something? Yes. What I wanted to know... Yes, but then, I could not yet tell. When I had thought of what grabbed my curiosity about this location, the Split, I could recall nothing of solidity, just fragments of themes, none of which cohered. A gap in design lurked everywhere in this place. It drew itself together in the actions of the others and, lacing itself up, flirted whorishly with the knowable.

I ate smoked bacon and hard boiled eggs with boiled tea and milk. The tea was charcoal grey, like dark water, not the amber hue of Earl Grey. This was bitter, but on that second day I learned to like the tea. I would have never complained in Hymel’s presence.

That day we were to go to the Split itself. I had been anticipating the opportunity to see that great scar in the cliff. It was sunny so we packed for the long hike - three and a half hours out and three and half hours to return, all on foot. I had once walked in the Scottish Highlands when I was younger. The lush green hills roll for kilometres and would disappear into thick evergreen forest. So too the Cape looked, like a thin slice of Scotland laid out in the sea.

We drove to the wharf again and parked the truck there. Bib loaded up his massive shoulders with the gear and we approached the forest. A small path sliced in the thick branches marked the way. And slowly, I entered after Hymel and Bib.

And we hiked.

Every step and every turn, twist, and foot hill seem to pull me, an internal magnetism that draws the soul. The path dodged in and out of hugs fur trees and thick alder bush. The longer we walked, the colder and more moist the air became. On and on. The air seemed to get substantially weighty and thick to breath and when I exhaled, I felt like the substance, the fog, stayed within in lungs making them heavy. I thought myself ill. Perhaps catching a cold.

The sun had all but disappeared during the walk. Afters hours, the forest gave way to a great clearing which was surrounded on all side by the white walls of the sky. It gave it the illusion of floating there in air. I approached the edge of the grassy edge and my sinews and joints stiffened upon seeing that I stood on the edge of the cape, looking down forty meters to the mud and mammoth rocks.

For a moment, a flash nothing more, I felt pluralized; another person had an impulse, a thought, that wasn’t my own. This thought was, yes, obviously mine, I thought it, but then there must have been someone listening to the thought. But that was me too. I heard the whisper: jump. It was the articulation of a want... No. Not the want but the elation of not flying, but being unheld by any sort of foundation, ground, suspension. That was what I both thought and heard – Yes, there were two of me – one thought and the other, in horror, felt the beads of sweat push through his skin. And flash, the moment ended and I stepped away, reformed, in subdued terror.

Only metres away, Hymel and Bib set about their surveying ritual, setting up the equipment and locating position flags. I wiped my forehead and looked out over plans of red mud - the water was again just a silver trim on the horizon, somewhere on another coast.

I walk out to the tip of the cape again, where the high cliff was sheared off. And there, after gap stood the Split. It was huge, dark tooth that jutted out of the mud. My eyes traced its outline, trying to somehow circumscribe its image but I could not keep it all in my sight. There was always something outside my sight, a remainder. I could not understand the Split or its power over me. I had viewed such geological displays before. What is rock to a man? I thought. But, I did not believe myself. There was a sublime presence to the Split. It was defined and marked out by the ocean’s violent of unconscious nature. I watched the Split for many minutes, perhaps an hour, trying to understand its presence.

The water returned and with it, a dense fog. It engulfed everything. Sound and sight were dampened and the Split seemed to back away from me, into it. The water rose and not being able to see its base, I felt like the Split could watch me from the fog.

The silence was gradually replaced by the muffled roar of the waves.

Hymel’s voice faintly sounded through the whiteness: “You’d better back away from the edge of account of the fog.”

“Indeed,” I yelled and stepped away from the tip, moving through the fog toward the centre of the clearing. The air was thick, milky, so I had to walk with care. I could have easily walked form one side to the other and over the edge without even knowing until the end. I could make out Hymel and Bib’s silhouette in he fog, they were packing up their gear.

I was halted when my foot scuffed on something rough in the grass. The thick, moist blades were blackened. I knelt down and made out, a little further away, a scorched patch at least two metres in diameter. I had then recalled seeing a fire on the cape that first night but could not recollect seeing the scorch marks before the fog. I inspected the ash. There were several partially burnt logs, but it was mostly ash from coal. I stirred up the ash with a stick and unearthed hard unburned lumps of coal. Someone had been burning something at a very high heat, perhaps, I thought, it was a camping fire by some folks on a hike. I dismissed that idea. It seemed unlikely anyone would use coal for a camp fire: the stench and smoke would be terrible. I stood up to continue on, toward Hymel, but something else caught my eye in the ash. There was a clump of yellow stone, and as its vial smell hit me, I determined it had to be sulphur.

“Raymond,” Hymel yelled through the fog. “You be careful lad, I don’t want you going over the edge.”

“I'm fine,” I responded, finally reaching them.

We ate. Hymel insisted that the fog would lift but it did not. It remained thick for hours until, nearing late afternoon, Hymel decided we should leave. He said it was better to hike in the fog then spend the night on the Cape. The fog had fallen so quickly that he had little to no time for measurement. He seemed to be silent with disappointment on the walk back.

Though the path was well marked, it was proving hard to follow. Again, I followed behind, Hymel and Bib, not trusting myself to find my way otherwise. While I was trying to keep pace, my mind kept roaming back to the fire spot and the sulphur. I snapped awake after stubbing my foot on an old root. I could barely see my own feet and the path was littered with knurls.

We walked silently for sometime. Hymel and Bib were barely visible a head of me. My mind drifted back again. Perhaps it was a blacksmithing project of some kind? One uses coal for that. Yet the sulphur? What of that? There was a snapping in the forest. A tree branch breaking. I turned toward the sound and my foot caught on another blasted root and was thrust face-first into a small thicket of alders. I landed softly in the shrubbery; the shear surprise made me want to both laugh and scream. I floated there awkwardly, suspended above the ground. I reached toward the forest floor to push myself up and among the wet leaves and soil, my hand touched something unnatural. It was smooth and leathery. Square and stitched. I picked it up: a wallet.

After struggling to my feet, I opened it and quickly searched through its contents. There were a couple bills, scraps of paper, a key and identification: Donald Wilcox. He was forty or so, from the University of Boston - Furlong’s university - dark hair and fat cheeks. He must have accompanied Furlong when the shark was found. But that didn’t seen like it could be so. Why would they be on the cape? That would have been six years earlier; this wallet looked relatively intact, probably only lost from a month at most. The only explanation was fairly dull: there was no reason to think that this person had anything to do with Furlong. He was probably just a tourist, a traveler, like I was. Maybe just here looking for rocks.

The key had a small green tag tied to it. The lettering was faded but were still legible. It was a key for a room in the “Department of Biology” in Boston.

I heard footsteps coming toward me. I tuned and I slipped the wallet into my jacket pocket and brushed myself off. It was Bib.

“What’s going on here?” He asked gruffly.

“Nothing,” I replied. “I fell. I’ve two left feet, no good at dancing either.”

He examined me quietly before turning. Without knowing, I had just played my turn in this little game we were playing. While he looked at me, I felt the same urge I had felt on the edge of the cliff; a splitting of self. He played his - he again said nothing. His silent inquisition was a guillotine. When we locked his eyes, I thought to strike him, or spit in his face, tear at his face. Why? Even now, I shrink in horror at my own impulses. I break a sweat. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then my face will deceive me, I thought. He will, with his own eyes, see through my own, and into my secret searching for that which I cannot name.

We returned to the cabin as darkness fell. The fog remained. We supped and retired for the night. Hymel regained a bit of his chatting demeanour, and thus I listened to his ramblings on hydroelectric engineering late into the night. Bib reached into a woollen sack and retrieved a pouch of pipe tobacco and we smoked in bed until sleep found us.

I was swept, or rather, pulled into a dreaming state. As the fractured images became clear to me, the cubist landscape formed to the shape of deep woods: the path to the Split. The images swirled around me; I must have been turning, looking, searching. I then seemed to be in the heart of the woods. The trees rushed by me, perhaps I was running, perhaps being transported. I turned toward my back, and saw a fire there. It was contained but explosive.

I sensed something coming behind, or along side me, I couldn’t tell. What was it? Who perhaps… Who indeed. Yes. There was a figure running. With me or for me? My instinct is to run faster. But I couldn’t see what is ahead, I was still looking behind me, keeping an eye, a fix, on the figure. I rushed out of the woods and the trees disappeared behind me. The figure froze there and paced just within the tree line.

I turned and found myself on the cutting edge of the cape. My feet stood on only an inch of light grass. Only the physics of dreams kept me from falling. I hung in the air half on the ground, half over the abyss.

The ocean was black and rolling, the sky was a mirror of this turmoil. The foams of the pounding waves, mimed the thunder cloud, both enveloped and churned into each other. In the horizon, the water and the sky became one terror. And within the rolling water’s violence, a sleek, glassy body rose and dove, churning in its watery element. Its long slender body stretched through the whole of the water, stretching forever, winding through the churn as if it were stitching it. It lifted its great head above the cape gazing down at me. It flashed deep eyes of onyx and shredded teeth of glass. Form what depths did this leviathan come? What God could create the fiend? No devil would create a beast to rival his own power. This dark thing must be of God; only a divine creature could be so terrible and not claim the earth as its own.

From its lungs swelled a great bellow sending tremors through the ground and stirring up the oily water and skies. There was a flash from behind me. The figure and the fire now set upon the clearing. I stood trapped between the beast and this mysterious man. There was no direction to choose. No choice to run.

The figure, with a swift gesture, cast something into fire making it roared with flame. Then and I saw the figure’s face. Jump. Suddenly I was him, standing by the fire facing the leviathan. The fire was a weapon. I casted my element against its own. The beast thrashed in the water, casting the black water up onto the cape. My hand.... I grabbed at the fire and casted into the see. The beast coiled and thrusting itself on the tooth of the Split, made it stutter. It encircled it and from that ghastly stone mass, it thrust its massive head toward me. In its soulless, blacks eyes, I saw my reflection grow ever larger. Then I was the beast, and the fire went out.

I woke in a start. The must have been late, for only the moon shown through the fog. I parted the drapes by my bunk and peered out into the night’s dark. The features of the night were softened by the fog’s blur. My eyes strained.

Movement differentiated a shape. A man carried two buckets, traveling toward a stairway that lead down the bank to the rocky beach. I dressed myself silently and left the cabin. I followed him down the stairs. My boots squeaked on the wet wooden stairs, startling me.

“Are you going to say hello or just follow me the whole way?” the figure asked.

It was Cornelius. He stood in the mist waiting for me.

“I thought, I might follow.” I laughed nervously. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure why I’m here.”

“Well, you’re here now.” He said. “I might as well put you to work.”

“What does that imply?”

“We’re picking the herring nets. That interest you, Bale?”

I nodded and we walked down the foggy beach. The giant flat stone rolled under my feet and made it hard to stride. Cornelius wore a thick pair of rubber fishing boots and stomped through the stones. The silence between us reached out to fill the beach. Our last conversation hung in my memory: I couldn’t tell if he was waiting for me to ask, or hoping I wouldn’t. I couldn’t help but rationalize that with his invitation to come, Cornelius wanted me to.

Our steps lead us out onto the mud. The tide had just receded and the ground was pepper with small crab remains. The mud’s ribs looked like tiny sand dunes, all slightly different. In the fog, I saw the silver flickers of the herring bellies. Cornelius began picking up the modest sized fish and dropped them into the bucket. I followed suit and, having never touched the slimy body of a fish before, I seemed to perform the duty with enthusiasm.

We worked in silence.

When the last herring was picked and the buckets full, Cornelius throw me a rag and I wiped my hands of the sandy slime. I tossed it back, but he simply wiped his huge hands on his trousers.

“Are you going to ask or what?” He asked. “I can’t tell if you’re scared or just too damn polite.”

“A bit of both, I suppose. I just don’t know what I’m asking, or what anyone is referring to.”

“Then what are you on about? What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

He looked at me, fiercely. Not like Bib, but he was trying to peer through the very fog I had been looking through; my fragmented impulses and misdirected thoughts stewing like the waters in my dream. I was sure that I was catching some fever. I was starting to feel a little light headed.

“Follow me,” Cornelius said and walked toward the shore. Instead of walking up the stairs where Hymel’s cabin sat, he started up a small path through coarse shore grass. He carried both of the full, fish buckets with little effort and I followed. In little time, I saw a small one-story house. A thin wisp of wood smoke drooled out of a tin chimney.

“Is this your house?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. He took the buckets into a side building and yelled out: “Go on in. The door is unbolted.”

I removed my boots and entered the small home. It was not much larger than Hymel’s cabin. Lightly coloured hardwood planks on the floors and white wash on the walls. I sat at the kitchen table. It was planted in the center of the room. Flower embroidered tablecloth. A sugar bowl on a doily. The curtains where lavender. Plates adorned roses and gold edging. This place had the tender touch of a loving wife, though I did not see any trace of her presence: no clothing, no smell, no person.

Cornelius entered the house carefully placed his boots on a boot tray.

“Drink?” He took a jug out of the ice box and set in on the table.

“Sure. What are we drinking?”

“I don’t know.” He chirped. “Haven’t named it yet.”

He poured and I sipped the mysterious clear liquid. It was strong, but chilled and crisp.

And then he spoke, as I do now, in confession.

“Mr. Bale, this thing has sat on my mind, and often too. I feel as if I were cursed with it. That it clings to me and when you spoke to me the other day, I felt it lighten, like it was lessened somehow.”

I could understand what he meant. Yet, when he spoke to me I would feel heavier. The question suddenly to mind, how heavy is his burden, and will it become mine? But this didn’t bear any weight of its own. His need to confess was as strong as my need to receive it. I must know. That was all I could think. Tell me anything.

He began: “On the beach, what I saw – it was surprising but what I found was no shark, yet it was not a monster either. It was just a great smear, a mass of some kind of substance with a living form; an animal no doubt, but nothing with shape. No kind of thing that I’ve ever seen. It just was, and was dead.”

He sipped his drink.

“Do you know what I mean?” I asked.

“It was alive at one time,” he continued. “That’s for sure. But how it was alive, I don’t know that.”

“What did Furlong say it was?” The liquor was working; my ears were getting hot and my eyes floated a little.

“Furlong?” he laughed. “I never saw him. I was kicked off the beach when he got there. He came in, cleaned up the thing, and shipped it off. When the papers got there, the beach was clean and I was the only witness. That ask me what it was. So I say, I don’t know. ‘It’s not like anything I ever seen,’ I say. Without the body it’s not much of a scoop, you know. So, they leave after taking pictures of the beach and what not.

“Furlong talked to the papers on the phone and it was just a shark. You’d think I’d recognize something that that, don’t ya! Well that mades me look pretty damn crazy.

“I looked into it. ‘Went to the city and did a little looking. And you know what I found?”

I shook my head.

“In 1896,” he said raising his voice. “There was something like it buried in the sand on a beach in Florida. A big corpse, the same as I found: no organs, no real parts, just a glob of something. The papers said it was an octopus, but there wasn’t any legs, no tentacles. They called in the St. Augustine Monster. Monster, eh? They say its lots of things but can’t prove anything of it.

“Another, just a couple years ago, ten or so, washes up in Dunk Island in Australia. That’s no where near close to here. So what? Are they everywhere? More, in Querverille, France. Three years after I found mine, one washes up in Scotland. You know that? Most of those were called basking sharks too, but you know what? There is no proof of that.”

I was unsure how to respond to this. This man is mad, I thought. I poured another glass of the spirits.

“And then, after a good amount of time, Furlong comes back to the Bay,” Cornelius began again. “I thought it was odd, him showing up out of the blue, considering I’d never met the man before. He starting asking me about what I found. But he didn’t call it a shark.”

“What did he call it?”

“He called it the body. ‘That’s strange, calling it that,’ I say to myself. He asked if there was a place near the cove with gems and the like. ‘You mean gold’ I say to him. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Or anything else.’

“I thought that was a strange question. ‘There is,’ I say to him. The Spilt is full of amethyst; lots of folks have died trying to climb for to get it. He wanted me to take him there, to the Split, for a look. He said he’d pay, so I took him.

“When we reached the clearing there at the tip, he seemed to get really excited.”

I nodded. The liquor was starting to make me feel ill. His words, now more drunken, stumbled out between his whiskered lips, I felt myself sinking into my clothes.

“He began to act real strange,” he slurred. “He wondered around the clearing, pulling a book from a sack. He opened it up and read it for a bit and then showed me a diagram. I remember him wearing this great big cross around his neck.

“He keeps running around, doing this and that. So, I kept watching him. He inspected the clearing; poking and prodding the ground; picking and taken stones and soil in his hands and feeling it. ‘What is it that you’re looking for?’ I ask him. ‘The perfect place,’ he says. I so I say, “Place for what?’ ‘Sometimes a place holds significant, real presence. Where things exists in more potent ways than in others.’ Hat do you think of that?

He paused and drank.

“I could agree with that.” Cornelius continued. “People have always felt that there was something about that place. You can really feel nature, you know. You can feel the strength in nature. She takes care of her own. And don’t you think she doesn’t.”

“Did Furlong ever say what he was looking for? ...beside amethyst?” I struggled to pour another drink. “It seems to me, that he would have to give you some reason for his bizarre behaviour. He was acting queer, right? What of this?”

“He said a great deal!” Cornelius shouted. “He was dealing with dark deeds, if you ask me. The way he jabbed and poked at the earth... that book of his. I seemed like some sort of violation. I mean I fish, I take from the sea, and I hunt and take from the land, but his was indifferent. There was sometime odd about the way he touched the ground. Yeah, it was all mighty queer if you ask me. So I say to him again, ‘What are you doing here?’

Cornelius: “He said, ‘Nature is a mixing for four elements, and four qualities.’”

I recognized that as Aristotelian physics from my philosophy course in first year.

Cornelius: “Atoms...’ he says, ‘Earth, water, fire, air were all just atoms.’ He said that on the Split the presence of things, the way that things stood out, were riper there. ‘Ripe,’ do you hear that?

“‘Ripe for what?’ I asked. I was starting to get a little startled. This story was impossible to believe.

“Ripe,” he said. “‘...for completion,’ he says. ‘For purification.’”

He looked at me a second. These words seemed to disturb him for that the others.

“That’s strange,” Cornelius sighed. “He was going to purify nature. What does that mean? I started to get... I don’t know... I just got so angry. It was like I was watching myself become wild or something. I just watch myself. I…”

“What did he say? Did he see your anger?” I stopped and tried to center my thoughts. This story wasn’t making any sense to me.

“Cornelius?” I said slowly and clearly. “Why is this man telling you this? What is he explaining? This doesn’t make sense. People don’t talk like this.”

“That’s right,” he stood a drink and looked at me. “They don’t. But he wasn’t just talking. He was incanting, praying, and confessing... all at once. He said that ‘the purification of nature mirrors the purification in man.’ It brings you closer to God. The universe was the human. Nature and man are a mirror of each other. The presence of nature, the potency of the Split, was the potency in him.” He was quiet.

“Right,” I said to myself. This was clear. The appearance of gems, amethyst, meant that it was a place of refinement. If man mirrors nature, his soul, like the earth, would be distilled into a purity, like the gems.

“And then,” Cornelius said. “He said that he returned because of the monster.”

“The monster,” I repeated. “On the beach?”

“Yes,” he replied. “He said that it visited him in a dream. The sea beast is a symbol for the turmoil that happens during the purification of the soul and the elements. You got to be torn a part before you can be put together purely....” He sipped his liquor. “And then he said he could show me.”

We were both silent for a moment.

This was a moment which hung over me. He said he could show me, I repeated in my head. The authority in those words scared me; the confidence to say, I will show you the monster. I can appeal to the beast. I can call the leviathan.

This was a decisive moment. I could know the answer. But a doubt was also pressing on me. Doubt, this scared me the most. You can only doubt when you already believe and I was not sure if I wanted to believe this story. Yet the doubt told me that I was already caught in it. This story, if it were true, was too much to take as true.

What is of science, what is of art, what is of nature and beyond, if it can be caved in under the weigh of some unnamed being that no one can explain to me.

“What did you say?” My voice was a whisper.

“I said, I wanted to see,” he said with shame.

And became to speak. Now though, all I can recall are swirl of images, dream-like, for their description was dream-like: hunting, smooth and without boarders. I can now see it all, as if I saw it myself:

A roaring fire on the cape

The waves lap a the rocks face

Sharps, cold, wet, salty

Instruments and vials in Furlong’s sack

Cornelius lying there, eyes strained and stretched open

Fear, or perhaps wonder, perhaps neither

The book, worn and dog-eared

Stained with colours and smells of coal

Sulphur, quick-silver

Vapours, warm ears, boiling and spitting

Black smoke, choking, burning and splitting

The heavens, the starts are blinding, turning

The grass, cool and damp, heavy head

Inhaul, burning lungs, soothed, free-breathing

The high follows

Exhale to sound of air currents flapping, whistling

The hush of the grass under foot, so soft, unnameable

The sound of fire snap and the water pound like fists

The earth moves

Furlong walks to the edge and Cornelius stands up

His back is wet from the grass

He follows Furlong to the edge

The water is raging, the sky is black

Oily, pitch, the smoke, heaving are scotched

The sea foams, like the mouths of rabid dogs

The leviathan rolls in the waves

Tossing and thrashing in its violence

The soul thrashing in own

It tears at its own fabric

“Both called to me,” Cornelius says. “Commanding me. Demanding.”

The Soul, the Beast, The Split.

“It lifted its head from the waves and called for his body. It called to me. It demanded his body.”

With a thrust

A silent act

Furlong falls into the churning basin

Into the water

Into the Beast.

“I can’t believe it,” Cornelius began to weep. “I did it. I pushed him... I pushed him over the edge. I killed him.”

“What of the Beast?” I shouted. “Tell me of the Beast! Is that what could have washed up on the beach? Is it the same thing?”

He looked at me shocked: “It was just gone. I don’t even know if it was really there to begin with. This monster, it was the greatest things I’ve even seen. What washed up on the beach could not compare.”

“Is it a derivative of some kind? A kin of the beat? What is the body? I have to know!”

“Stop!” He wept with such intensity. Heaving. But I could not empathize, I could only think of the beast. And Furlong, the faceless name, had been killed by the man that sat before me. A murderer. The severity of this fact too escaped me then. I could only focus on that image: the black sea and the rolling brute within it.

“What happened next, Cornelius? What did you do?”

“I turned to run, but his stuff was everywhere. His books, his other belongings, were strewn about. I tried to pick them up but I felt like I was being watched. I panicked and gathered what I could from the grass, and threw it into the fire. Some things, however, I could not burn. I could not, burn his bag. It seemed to contain his most prized possessions: the book, a diary, wallet, some photos. I didn’t really dig around; I just took it and ran.

“I still have it, but I’ve never looked in it. I can’t bear it.”

I had never seen Furlong. Not a photo or any likeness. He had only been a name. He might as well have never existed for me. Now that he was dead, Furlong was erased.

“What did he look like?” I said. “Furlong, I mean.”

“He... ” he sighed. “I don’t know.”

“Try,” I insisted, as caringly as I could.

“Ah... He was younger than me, by twenty years or so.”

“Making him, what, forty, forty-five?”

“Forties, yeah. With a fattish face. Dark hair. He wasn’t heavy set, his face was, but he was shortish. Relatively plain. I think he may have been greying.”

Then it came to me: the sham.

“This him?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the leather wallet from the trail. I removed the identification card and handed it to Cornelius.

He turned white and nodded slowly: “That’s him. Sure as day, this is him.”

He examined the card and pawed around in his shirt pocket and removed a pair of spectacles, placing them on his face. “This says Donald Wilcox? What is this? Where did you get this?”

“I found it on the trail to the Split. It looks like it was lost; it was in the bush.”

He stood up hastily and left the room. After rummaging through a coat closet, he returned with a leather side-bag which, I could only assume, belonged the dead man. Cornelius sat it heavily on the table and dumped its contents out. There was a book, black and leather bound, a stack of photos, a small wooden box, some papers, but no wallet.

“I…” Cornelius grasped at words. “I… he said his name was Furlong…”

I began to examine the contents. The papers especially caught my attention. I flipped through the pages. They were notes. To my surprise, I found that the handwriting matched the notes I had found at the library. It seemed I had been following Wilcox’ lead this whole time. The problem was learning the author’s identity only also to find out that he was dead.

I was overwhelmed.

I sat the papers down and picked up the book. The leather cover bore gold lettering: The Book of Materials by Albertus Magnus. The pages were well read, and oil stained, with blackened finger prints. I flipped through the pages and the pungent scents of sulphur, coal and musk swirled in my nostrils, lightening my head. The book binding was cracked in many places one of which caused the book to flip open to its ninth chapter. The words were underlined and fine neat notes crowded its margins. It read:

We see the powers of the stars influencing the powers in the powers in the material so as to produce something for which it is suitable. And alchemy also proceeds in this way, that is, destroying one substance by removing its specific form, and with the help of what is in the material producing the specific form of another. And this is because, of all the operations of alchemy, the best is that which begins in the same way as nature, for instance with the cleansing of sulphur by boiling and sublimation, and the cleansing of quicksilver, and the thorough mixing of these with the material of metal; for in these, by their powers, the specific form of every metal is induced…

The words continued and the theme was specific. Alchemy, the beast, Wilcox... The scope of these circumstances was ridiculous, out of control. I could not keep in mind all these pieces of the puzzle. Many of those pieces turned out to be wrong anyhow. Furlong, was not dead, as far as I knew. Cornelius was a murderer, whose motives were far from understandable or even expressible. At this point he just sat in silence. He did not drink. He did not speak. He only gazed at the identification card on the table. His understanding, his confession was tainted, because he did not then understand, until then, what he had done. He began his confession with the understanding that he had killed Furlong, but now Furlong was just as faceless to us both.

“Cornelius,” I felt like I was speaking into an empty room.

“Cornelius,” I said more sternly.

He lifted his head.

“Can I take this stuff with me to the city?”

He just stared at me: “Why would you want these things? These things are tainted with death. Why take it with you?”

“You don’t want it do you? Why don’t I take it with me?” I said.

“What?,” he shouted. “My God boy, this is murder. I’ve killed a man! The time for interest is long gone. I should be in prison. Jesus. Don’t you know, I’m going to Hell for this?”

“You’re a God fearing man...”

“This beast, this Hell, is not something sanctioned by God.” He slammed his fist on the table.

“I should take it,” I said, gathering the items into the bag. “You don’t want these things hunting you? I mean this could have been an accident. We can’t tell form the story, so...”

“Accident,” he said quietly. “That was no accident. I pushed him.”

He paused for a moment: “I can see now what it was. All those around here know what I’ve done. They know I’ve done something. Those friends of yours, Hymel and the other one, they know. I’m sure of it. They cut my traps, they steal my livestock, and they all know I won’t say a word. They know that I won’t say a damn thing because if I do... Well, we know what can throw back at me, don’t we?

“If you want that stuff, take it,” he grabbed the bag from my hands and swept the contents into the bag with one sweep. “Take it all, I don’t need it anymore. I can see already that whatever has hunting me found a much better host in you, my boy.”

He shoved the bag into my chest. His accusations infuriated me. I headed for the door.

“It’s so clear to me now, Mr. Bale. I’m free. It is you who have been trapped.”

He began to yell as I slammed the door.

“It’s got you now to keep it company. It’s got you!”

The Split - Part II of VI

2009-10-08T02:46:00.013-03:00

The road through to Windsor was worn. I had never traveled this far in land, and as the buildings gave way to forest, I was starting to feel the way only traveling can bring. A soft tingling in the small of the back, a slight tension in the shoulders accompanied by the arrest of somewhere new and the whispering sublimity of it all. When I was younger, traveling had always been in the safest and predictable conditions – as vacations or going with my father on his business trip.

Hymel and I were crammed in a large surveying truck driven by whom, I guessed, was a large labourer. I can’t recall his name at the moment, or if we were even introduced. He did not speak in the truck. Hymel attempted to make conversion with me several times during the journey but to be quit honest, I’m not one for polite conversation in automobiles. I find it necessarily overextended and I’m distracted by the terrible noise and constant jostling.

The trip took us most of the day. It was coming to be the early evening when we reached the Annapolis Valley. The dense fir forest had given way to a flat countryside that once was marshland. There were deep dykes of red mud veining across the green fielded valley, and behind them, the landscape was rowed with small apple trees. My eyes followed the road out toward the horizon. My eye glazed along the gravel, to a barbed wire fence, beside it, to a blue and rust tractor and a cow with a white face. It gazed above to a sweeping, weeping willow tree and beyond that, a green North Mountain.

It was a kin of the Appalachian Mountain line that veined up Eastern Canada and Cape Split, where the ocean claimed it. I wasn’t sure how we would make it up such a slope but the labourer seemed to know the route well and we wound our way slower up the mountain road.

Once at the top, we stopped at a clearing by the road, and peered between the trees, out over the great valley. It looked so far away; like a great painting – not because of aesthetics but because of the way the details blur away from a far. As I panned the landscape, the valley looked a great chessboard with the various colours of grains and agriculture. The Manus Basin framed this image; its own boarders vanished of to the East of me

“It’s amazing,” I whispered.

“Indeed,” Hymel replied. “Wait until you see the Split. You’ll never forget it.”

The road led down, across the top of the mountain, winding between small houses and modest farms. I never noticed the decline, yet after twenty or so minutes I saw the Bay of Fundy, auburn under the setting sun. My eye followed the lapping water. As it traced the beach, that motion was a caress in the world of the picturesque.

“Oh my,” I was at a loss for words.

“Yeah, it’s nice.” The labourer broke his silence.

“Indeed,” Hymel responded.

We entered an off road that took us down toward the shoreline the sky had grown dark and the stars shown out. The road was bordered by think alder bushes as tall as the truck. They hugged the road tightly and offered us nothing but the dark.

The head lights finally stopped on a small, white cottage at the end of the road, in a space cut from the looming pin trees and bush. From the outside it seemed too small to house two men, let alone the three of us. There was no electricity and the landscape was black, untouched by civilization’s artificial light. It was hard for me to imagine that this was how people once lived and how some still do.

I stepped from the truck in the moist cool air. I could smell the ocean.

The labourer started to unpack our luggage. Bib, his name was Bib - I don’t know what his real name is, but that was what Hymel told me to call him.

“What do you think?” Hymel said slapping my back.

“Oh, it’s nice.” I said. “I can’t wait to see the inside.”

“You’re not a very good liar, are you Raymond?” Bib scoffed as he passed behind me. I’d be damned if I was going to bow to his crude understanding of me. I grabbed my bags from the hairy fists.

“Actually, I got these.”

Hymel’s silhouette was fumbling in the shadow of the cottage. The ringing of keys and the rasping of his boots against the wooden doorstep. I remember these sounds vividly. He drug his feet when he walked. The door creaked open and his shadow disappeared inside. Bib followed with the bags, and I watched overwhelmed by the sudden realisation that the night was not truly dark but not truly light. The moon, almost full, cast a heavy hue down on the earth. Everything glowed in a dark tone, and looked away from the cabin out over the water and in the crispness of the moonlight in the distance, I saw the foreboding barb of the Split. On it, there was a tiny flicker in the dark - flame, perhaps a fire, all with a strange blue hue.

The next morning we rose early. When I woke, Hymel was already outside tending to his surveying gear. Bib, who turned out to be more than a labourer, was preparing breakfast: ham, potato-hash, and boiled tea.

The cottage had but a single room that served as kitchen, bedroom and parlour. The latrine was outside in a shack which also housed the firewood. We slept on wall mounted bunks with woollen sheets and checkered quilts. It managed little sleep for the ocean’s lapping waves seemed to thrash in my ears all night. I dressed with Bib’s back turned to me. He didn’t say a word. I slipped into my boots and joined Hymel outside.

“Raymond, how did you sleep?” Hymel asked. He was digging under a think tarp on the back of the truck; there must have been hundreds of pounds of equipment.

“I slept fine.” I lied. “I found the waves to be quite soothing.”

“As do I.” Hymel said. “If your government accepts my proposal, I’ll be spending many of my days here and that would be no downfall.”

“Indeed,” I relied. The grass and air was still cool. I turned toward the water to better see what my eyes could only infer the night before. But what lie before shocked me. I saw no water at all, only red mud as far as I could see. The mud was rippled and was devoid of all life.

“That’s the mud flats of the Bay of Fundy.” Hymel said probably noting my gaping jaw. “It’s low tide right now, and all the water is gone, drained away.”

“Where is it?”

“Across the bay, in Parsburough.”

That was the key to Hymel’s project, the shear awe that I felt knowing that all the water in sight could be pulled away must have struck Hymel the same way. Yet while he thought to profit from it, I could only stare, mouth open. And through it all, like Apollo, the Split watched the whole scene, seeing things that I could not.

The goal for the day was to go to the local wharf and take some surveying measurements. The art of this craft was, and is still, completely unknown to me. All I learned from Hymel was that it was monotonous and scrupulous. It was certainly not the manner of work for me.

After breakfast the three of us set out for the wharf. We drove along the end of the cliffs to come here, rock face was toothed and cut from the land with deep gouges. While Hymel and Bib set to measuring, I walked about the place, looking for, well, anything interesting.

The wharf was nestled in a shallow cove, carved into the forty foot basalt clefts – dark, rough and black in the moisture of the shore fog. The dock itself was located at the bottom of a steep paved road smoothed in the rocky landscape, for bringing the boats in and out of the water. It was littered with wooden lobster traps and netting. Small lobster boats lined the wharf, all setting on tires, in the red mud. Beached, so to speak, by the recess of the tide. Hymel and Bib set up on the high point of a hill, down the road, where they had planted a metal post.

I wondered down the cement roadway toward the boats. I tilted my body back as I walked, to compensate for the incline.

There were bins upon bins of nets stacked upon stacks of traps. I saw one collection of traps painted orange, with “DC” painted on their buoys.. The majority of them looked to be completely out of order. These seemed to be the only traps to be ruined.

I jumped when someone yelled behind me form the road.

I turned to see a short, stout man, in rubber boots and a woollen jacket. He had salt and pepper hair that extended down his hardened face around a bushy moustache. The rest of his face formed a cleanly shaved scowl.

“Get away from those.” He yelled waving an arm. “Who the hell are you and what to you think you’re doing to my traps?”

I back away from the pile, not knowing if I was truly being accused of vandalism or not.

“I’m sorry sir.” I stammered. “I just noticed that these traps were broken and I was just having a look. ‘Just callous curiosity, sir. I suppose I should know to be wondering around. But I can assure you…”

“Jesus, son. Calm down” He sighed. “Your words are just running down you chin.”

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“I had to call at you at least to see it were. You see what’s happened to my traps already so when I see someone poking around on the dock when were ain’t no tide, I figured I’d better come and see. When you didn’t run, I figured it wasn’t you. You don’t look the type to.”

“Indeed,” I agree turning back toward the traps.

“Is your name Dale Cornelius?”

“Hm.” He groaned. “Why? You’re not government, that’s for sure.”

“And why is that?”

“Because for one, you’re foreign, a Chap or Irishmen…”

“England.”

“Fine…and for two, you’re with here with that Yank, Hymel and his ‘goon.”

He examined his broken traps with pursed lips. There was a silence.

“Vandalism?” I asked, pointed toward to traps.

“You could say that,” he coughed. “Someone around here ain’t to keen on me, it seems.”

“My name is Raymond Bale,” I extended my hand. “I’m sorry that I appeared so suspicious but actually it’s quit strange that I’ve run into you.”

He shook my hand as he crouched there.

“Is that so?” He stood up and began to sort out some of the salvageable traps out of the bin and stacked them on the dock. “And why is that?”

“I was actually hoping to find you. I read of you in the paper.”

“The paper…” He trailed off in his work. “Look at this mess.”

“Yes... The claimed that you found the shark here, in your herring nets. That’s not really the reason I’m here. I went…”

He stopped his work and looked over at me. I could not read his squinted face. It was a part anger, maybe confusion. Something alarming? I’m so tempted to attribute to his character all I know now, after the fact. This account can only be a post-script to the events. I can only speak of him as past. I want to feel confident in knowing that he was concerned - to have it not simply be my concern now for what was about to rust against me. Yet, his face was only puzzling to me – like a signal with no message then and now.

“Is something wrong?” I asked and turned, looking up toward Hymel. I was afraid I may have started some sort of scandal with the fisherman. It would not have been favourable in Hymel were I to come all the way up there, just to bicker with the locals.

Cornelius traced my gaze to the hill where Hymel and Bid worked. With a crooked look, he began to walk away up the hill, leaving his traps.

“Mr. Cornelius,” I called after him. He was silent.

“Wait sir.” I followed. “Have I done something to offend you? Mr. Cornelius.... please slow down.”

“Listen, Mr. Bale.” He barked as he climbed the cemented slop. “I don’t know why you’re here, but I do know that you’re not in good company. No sir. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll deal with that mess latter,” he pointed to the traps. “And say farewell to ya.”

We were reaching the road.

“Do you know Dr. Furlong?” I asked.

“Furlong,” Cornelius turned back. “Furlong’s dead.”

“What?”

He stopped: “He’s dead boy. So, you ain’t going learn nothing from him.”

“Really? Well, how’d that happen?”

“If I was you, I’d go home.” He stepped on the road where his blue Ford pick-up was parted.

Hymel and Bib had begun to walk down the road towards us and the truck.

“Go home?”

“That what I said,” Cornelius stepped into the truck.

“I’m not I understand, sir. Am I being threatened here?” I said.

Cornelius leaned out his window and stuck his thick finger in my face. I thought he may strike me, or shove me into the bushes. He lowered his finger, and signed heavily – his breath was smelt of rum and boiled eggs.

“The Split took him,” he gestured toward the woods. “There’s a leads in there that goes all the way to the split. It’s the only one. He going along there, wondered to close to edge, and…” he paused, “well, he fell. Coast guards found him in New Brunswick four days later, swollen, just bobbing along in the tide.”

“That’s come at a surprise,” I said. I had questions but no real direction. I looked at him like a mute. After a moment, he reached up and turned the ignition.

“The shark...” I whispered.

“Yea,” he said. He seemed to speak past me.

“34 feet long, 17 feet across.” I said.

“Is that what they said?” he smiled.

“Basking sharks don’t grow that big. Do they?”

“No, not usually.” He looked in my eyes, like we had just made an agreement.

“So? What do you make of that?” I asked.

There was a silence. At last I spoke: “So, not a shark.”

Another silence....

“... it came here in the body of a shark.” Cornelius said at last. “And, Mr. Bale, it doesn’t need you to disturb it.”

And he drove away, disappearing on the road as it laced amongst the scattered white houses.

I was chilled those last words: It came in here in the body of a shark. And the events with Furlong... I looked out at the Split and wondered what kind of secret was being kept when he fell over its edge. The fragments, the notes, – “origin unknown” – this was, naively intriguing. I don’t know what feelings I had now. Perhaps, a slight pain to my stomach, a tension in my spine?

Over that next hour the urge grew. Those blank spots occupying the corpse on the beach and Furlong - well he had studies the damn thing! I had to know what happened. Yet, there was also a sullenness to his voice, something that pollutes.

“Raymond!” Hymel’s call broke my trance; he waved me up to the survey point with some excitement. “The tides coming back in. Come see from this hill, here.”

The red mud, stretch out like velvety sweeps - a scarlet desert, a barren plane. As if drawn with a single horsehair, the horizon was trimmed with silver, glistening in the sun. It slowly grow larger, advancing, like an army of polished tin soldiers marching home. What was caked mud, was now lapped, and then swallowed up, by the waves. And then I was standing there, looking out that an ocean.

***

That night, in the cabin, Hymel discussed the importance of the measurements they’d taken that day. Most of what he said, if not all of it, was in engineering terms, far beyond my understanding. Bib, as per usual, kept silent. The night was chilled. The moon was approaching full and the breeze of the water was crisp.

We talked, lying in our bunks, each with a mug of black, stove boiled coffee. At first, I found the taste abhorred, acidic, but after some reflection, it seemed that bitter, stove boiled tea and coffee were best drank under such frigid conditions. It complemented the salty pork stew we ate for dinner. Through it all, I could hear the steady pounding of the waves outside. It throbbed through me but kept my heart steady.

“I saw you talking with that fisherman, Cornelius.” Hymel said after a several soundless sips of coffee.

“Yes,” I responded quickly. “He’s an odd duck…” I trailed off into my mug. I would have preferred not to discuss Cornelius. To be honest, I was trying to keep him off my mind. The very thought of our conversation makes my stomach ache.

“You know,” Hymel said. “You should be careful interacting with him.”

“Is that so?” I said into my mug.

“There’s a reason why his traps had been vandalized.”

I was surprised he would have known that detail.

“You’re astute,” I said and then I lied: “I didn’t really know those were his.”

“People around here aren’t too fond of him. They blame him for a lot of things. None of which are good.”

“It sounds like you’re demonizing him,” I said cheerfully.

“He’s dangerous.” It was Bib who spoke, after not speaking for hours.

To put it plainly, I was confused. I thought, hadn’t Cornelius warned about Hymel, and just then, Hymel was warning me about Cornelius.

“What did people say he’s done?” I asked.

It was Bib again who answered. Slowly and curtly.

“He’s sick. Sees things and scares people with his recollections. He used to be a good man, hard working, honest, but last going off, he’s not been speaking other than to trouble folks...”

“Essentially,” Hymel interrupted. “He’s delusional. Now, I don’t know if it to with that or not but the other fishermen around here a trying to drive him out. They’ve smashed the majority of his traps and someone cut a hole in his boat. I guess that want him to leave the Bay.”

“My God,” I said. “Have the police not said something? I find it hard to believe that you can just run a man out of town these days.”

Hymel laughs. “There are no police here, Raymond.”

“Hm,” I groaned.

“What were you two talking about?” Hymel asked after a sip of coffee.

“Well: he just asked who I was, what I was doing there, where I was coming from; the usual niceties. Then he left. I guess he wasn’t all that concerned with me. I don’t think he much cares for the English.”

“He didn’t say anything else?” Hymel laughed.

I can’t even recall why this paranoia snuck up on me to lie. Why would Hymel have been concerned by what Cornelius told me? He probably would have laughed at the foolishness of the man. I could have played the snob and attributed his words to the speculative naiveté of small towns, or the credulous assumption of the uncultured. It’s a rouse, a charade, blunder of the overeager, I should have wondered these things. I should have told Hymel the truth but that eerie- feeling has stayed with me.

“No,” I said.

Bib knew I wasn’t telling the truth. But, why expect me to lie in the first place? No, Bib and I were playing a game then. He looked at through one squinted eye, smiled, and then closed it. He never said a thing. Never. What was he thinking? It seems that he was always playing his own game. But what were the rules? I thought. This paranoia now has its reasons, but at the time, it coxed me deeper in. No, I had to be playing. It was the same kind of silent agreement I had made with Cornelius. I still didn’t understand the rules, but I thought I knew content: there is no word for what washed up on the beach, and no way to name it, or even gesture toward it with plan words. It is somehow forbidden, I thought.

With this, the tokens moved again, a move devised by the closing of an eye.

The Split - Part I of VI

2009-09-26T18:52:00.011-03:00

This story was written as a companion piece to a story that Dominic had written in 2007. It is written in homage to the form of tale telling. It takes the conservative tone of the tale tellers of the 19th and early 20th Century - Lovecraft here is evoked by name - only to later show the point at which the tale itself breaks this linguistic conservatism down.

This story explores several themes. There is a concept of obsession-as-transference, where confession and contamination become a coupled operation. Other theme concerns the struggle for organization or order within increasingly dispirited systems of knowledge. Finally, there is the theme of the confrontation with an absence I mentioned in discussing Dominic's writing.

I hope you enjoy this first segment.

THE SPLIT

by Jesse P. Hiltz

My name is Raymond Bale and I have, at last, a tale to tell. The circumstances that surround this tale are wrought with regret, for this is as much confession as narrative. Having marked these words fifty years after the fact, the images flash now before as spectres. But ghosts are not what there is to fear within the violence of these words. We are to fear, rather, that which we hold to be the most secure, most transparent. That which we see and understand as translucent, as trustworthy and comforting, yet within that, hidden in the details, there is something that transgresses this trust and transparency; a limit is only gain sight of when something defiles it.

***

When I first heard of Cape Split, I was sitting in a lounge in a Halifax hotel in 1956. The subject arose after a lengthy discussion with a middle-aged passer-byer named Brandon Hymel. We spoke of Halifax’s recent Fair Employment Legislation and Chris Anderson’s success in the Halifax Rugby League Club. After talk of politics and sports subsided, topics turned to electricity and economics. Hymel was a Yankee in Halifax on business, lobbying the provincial government for funding for a hydro-power project proposal in the Bay of Fundy.

“Highest tides in the world,” Hymel said. “Right there in between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I’ll tell you one thing; with the amount of water rushes through that bay every tide, you could generate enough electricity to power all of Canada, maybe the United States. The person who started that project would be wealthy. That’s why I’m here. If I can get this project financed, Nova Scotia could be the world leader in tidal-power.”

I have to admit, even though this salesmanship irritated me, I was excited by the prospect of a hydro-technological revolution in the province. I had called Halifax home for the past three years.

I had, for some years, engaged in undirected study at Dalhousie University and was completing a sadly weak degree in English literature. After these few years, I was eager to take my leave back to England. My education in the Maritimes had been, more or less, a reason to leave what I had thought was the unnecessary formality of my native London. Why, you must be wondering, would a lad from England come to the New World to be taught of his own country’s literary legacy? As a boy, North America, Nova Scotia in particular, had the charm of a quaint and evolving culture. That hope was dashed so enough. After my years in Halifax, I had found myself more and more yearning for the formalities and luxuries against which I had rebelled in my youth. London called, and I was eager to answer.

I passed my time in Halifax attending the meetings of a small, eccentric handful of college students, obsessed with the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Just of few of us labs, keen talk and a few pints. To be honest, I’d never read of word of Lovecraft’s work. They journeyed around Nova Scotia collecting strange, local tales of the macabre, ghosts and the sort. I went mostly to listen

The remainder of my time was spent with an American Graduate student name Lynn Gerald; dark haired, stern willed. She and I had been close for some two years. Sweethearts, I suppose. Maybe more. If you should ask if we meant to marry, I cannot say either way, yes or no. Circumstance sometimes outweighs all our best intentions.

“You simply must see Cape Split,” said Hymel. “The tides are so powerful that they’ve cut the land in two. Like a loaf of bread; no lie. The cape reaches out into the Bay of Fundy like the arm of God himself, five miles out and jagged are its cliffs. The cut-off part of the cape juts of out of the water like a knife. Tidal boars, whirlpools; simply breathtaking. Can you image it? The sheer power it would take to split the land like that.”

***

An hour later, Hymel left to attend a meeting with a potential investor, thanking me for letting him ramble on. I told him that it was interesting and I would like to be kept up to date, so to speak, on the progress of his project. We agreed to meet the following week and he would explain to me in better details the science behind hydro-electric power production. We parted ways. Instead of returning home to my dormitory, I decided to take leave to the library and attempt to locate some photographs of the Cape. If nothing else, this stop over would be a reason to further put off my studies from which I’d been hiding for days.

The smell of musk and old paper filled my nostrils as I rifled through the library’s dense collections of texts and works. I found nothing on Cape Split in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and even less elsewhere. There was little to no trace of what Hymel called “the Split.” I was only after an hour of probing the library’s insides that I found a small book that mentioned the Split. The book was a brief geological summery from 1925. It explained that the Cape itself was the continuation of the North Mountain range that cut through Nova Scotia’s King’s County that ran out into the Bay of Fundy, disappearing into the water. Hymel had told me that the Cape was long but he did not mention that it all but reached across the Bay of Fundy itself. It extending seven kilometres out, and pinched off a small piece of water called the Basin from the rest of the Bay. It was in the two kilometre gap of water that between the Bay of Fundy and the Minus Basin where the tide power is so strong. The tides pulled the water through this narrow gap four times in twenty-four hours, moving roughly six-hundred and fifty billion tones of water at day. The thought was sublime.

Upon opening another thin, bound package I found, to my delight, a collection of newspaper clippers haphazardly thrown together with paper clips and twine. Some spoke of flounder fishing, others of the growing popularity of lobster. I had never eaten lobster; a poor man’s food, I was told, but now it was evermore popular and evermore expensive, with the market on the East Coast. The Bay of Fundy’s bottom was crawling with lobster and over the last century, the fisherman had turned to them as their way.

Other articles described the tides and the dyke lands of the Annapolis Valley. Finally, I stumbled upon a gold nugget of sorts. A fairly recent article in the Wolfville newspaper described the beaching of a basking shark in Scott’s Bay, the small fishing village with a wharf and the only public walking trail onto the Split. The shark was discovered by a fisherman named Dale Cornelius. I can reproduce part of the article for you here. I’ve kept it all these years afterward:

June 17, 1950

Shark Washes Up in Bay.

Dale Cornelius found more than herring in his nets yesterday. Yesterday morning, at low tide, the Scott’s Bay resident found the remains of a thirty foot basking shark washed up on the beach.

Dr. Furlong from the University of Boston says that the discovery is not out of the ordinary. “The Bay of Fundy is in the middle of the shark’s territory in the northern hemisphere.”

For Cornelius, the experience was more exciting.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Cornelius says.

The shark’s remains have been removed from the beach and sent to the University of Boston for testing.

“It’s not often we get such an opportunity to study such an animal so closely” says Furlong…

The article lost my interest and I stopped reading there, moving on to the next clipping in the bundle.

It looked as if it were a torn from a letter. The scrap of paper was folded and clipped to two sheets of foolscap. It was badly faded and water damaged. The fragment read:

“… given the condition of the specimen we cannot say confidently… all but the structure remains, however… even this I cannot say for sure. - Furlong”

The two remaining pages were research notes on lined paper, some in point form, others written in long form. The handwriting held a different tone than what I had just read from Furlong’s fragment. While that writing was scrolled and hasty, the notes were printed by a steady, scientific, precise hand.

Why these pages had been put into the library, I could not say. They had no form of identification, rhyme or rational, other than their coupling with the geographical summary.

The notes were concerned with the tides. This was unsurprising, but the aspect of the tide with which the notes were concerned was more attuned to the theme of the newspaper article, than with the geological summary.

These obsessively precise notes conveyed a feeling of sublime reverence for the force of the tidal currents. The author’s wrote of how the tides drags ocean life, like krill and plankton, in from the Atlantic and deposits it, in some times great quantities, in the Bay of Fundy. It is for this reason the Bay is home to many whale species who feed on krill and the like. However, the author also notes that with the tides come many of the ocean’s dead. Large, bloated whales corpses cruse into the Bay waters and make a fine feast for the tiger shark population. Most the notes on the first page went on like this.

On the second page, the author starts to writes a series of place names and dates, most of them in the late 1800s:

St. Augustine, Florida 1896. Fleshy mass. 23 feet long, 18 feet across. Found by Dr. DeWitt Webb. Unidentifiable.

Dunk Island, Australia.. Carcass 1948. Anon.

Scott’s Bay, Nova Scotia, 1950. Unidentifiable Mass. 34 feet long, 17 feet across. Origin unknown. Found by Cornelius.. Cape Split...”

I could only conclude that this bundle was once a collection of information for some sort of research project; one that would, something of the sort. Perhaps someone was researching the basking shark and found other dates for basking shark beachings. I found the size of the shark as Cape Split astounding. The Britannica had limited its length to 20 feet.

As you can guess, my interest in Cape Split and Scott’s Bay had suddenly gone beyond hydro-power and provincial infrastructure. I took the bundle of fragments out on loan and left the library. After pining over its pages again that evening, I left a message for Hymel at his Hotel expressing my interests in the Split. And, after Hymel found out, some weeks later, of the notoriety of my family in London, I was invited to accompany him on a survey mission to Scott’s Bay.

END PART ONE

Publication in GNOSIS

2009-09-24T02:24:00.004-03:00

Great news. I've been published in Concordia's Philosophy Graduate Journal, GNOSIS. The piece is a talk I gave at a conference by the Concordia Philosophy Department: Life, Death and Power. The paper is called "Transferences or Cessation: The Destabilization of the Life/Death Binary in Organ Transplantation."

There were many great presentations. Unfortunately my favourite paper was not available in the journal: "Ethics, Organs, and Embodiment: Transplantation and an Ethics of Openness," by Daniel Harris. His paper was very coincident with my own project. Daniel took the discourse of organ transplantation and introduced into a Derridian/Levinasean ethics.

Colin Cordner from Carlton also had some very interesting things to say about Kojeve. The paper here isn't what he spoke of, so I look forwards to reading it: " The Concept of Plato: An Exegesis of the Sixth Through Eighth Lectures of Kojève's 1938-39 Series on the 'Phenomenology of Spirit.'"

Showing one's Work

2009-09-09T21:27:00.004-03:00

It seems like I’m quite apprehensive of putting my academic work out in the public realm – much more so than my fiction. Posting some of my “work” is an attempt to get over the assumption, that many of us in academia have, which states that displaying one’s own work is somehow both pretentious and showboating. In fact, this seems to be just a way of rationalizing our own withdrawal, for fear of public ridicule and inadequacy.

I’m very happy with this short essay, which I wrote for Dr. Zsuzsa Baross. It was written for a course entitled “The Return of the Religious” and it was meant as a response to the following question:

“The question for the final essay paraphrases Jean-Luc Nancy on Derrida: “Why in the latter part of 20th century would a philosopher, thus a Greek, experience the necessity of re-interrogating the category of religion, faith, or the sacred?” In other words, what is at stake in this re-encounter? Whence arises its necessity? From the interior or the exterior of philosophy (i.e. from religion itself or from the “world”)? What does philosophy or the philosopher learn or teach itself / himself in this latest encounter?”

Hence its Necessity:

Encounters with three (re-)interrogations of the religious

by Jesse P. Hiltz

April 15, 2009

The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own. It is also farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me. (Bataille, 22)

There remains this dash or hyphen, like a schema, in the sense of the conjunction of a concept and an intuition, but above all, in the more precise sense according to which, in this conjunction, each of the edges, exceeding the other, remains incommensurable with it. (Nancy, 231)

A question: Why is the re-interrogation of religion necessary?

An attempt to answer: this text, which requires a justification of its own necessity as much as needs to engage with the necessity of other interrogators. We have found with Derrida that even posing the question of “religion”, today, here, or anytime, invokes the most profound presuppositions concerning essence, being, presence, and the world. The prior question of religion, if we think that this initial question had to be asked before its re-interrogation, has already placed us at a distance from the question of its necessity. But isn’t this distance, exclusion, and separation from the question of religion the project of the Enlightenment? Yes, but isn’t it also the mechanics of auto-immunity? Can we abandon the notion that there has been/will be the initial, original, interrogation of “religion”, at least for the sake of this expedition? Perhaps this too will receive its response. Let us for the moment say that the question of necessity, be it in the name of questioning something like a religion, or in questioning something like a “science”, comes down to a question of automatic response, of linking and dividing, or, of the most radical nearness and farness.

Farness

This distance that the Enlightenment, in its various forms, puts between “Reason” and “Religion” is a kind of gap or spacing that it did not anticipate. Nancy offers a general comment on the basic presupposition of this separation. He borrows from Lyotard the concept of the hyphen, a separation that both spaces apart and draws together that which it bridges. Thought, he tells us, draws its own hyphen between religion and itself, the result being a “philosophy… determined as non-religious, even anti-religious, thereby drawing its line over religion, to destroy it or de-compose it” (Nancy, 215). In this instance, the farness of Reason to Religion is also its nearness to it. They are drawn together, or written, into relation by the very naming of their exclusion. Reason, in its own imagined and most abstract state, puts itself in relation to its other in order repel and project itself from it.

Yet, as we have seen from Derrida, the re-interrogation of the religion cannot pre-suppose such a detachment. This re-interrogation must cross-examine both “philosophy” and “religion” in tandem, because, if we believe in Derrida, their development occurs in tandem. With Derrida, Nancy and Bataille, this questioning is always a question both at once. But even that is incorrect. In saying ‘how to think of religion?’ we have already inadvertently asked ‘how to think?’ So we believe Derrida when he testifies that the question of religion becomes of “question of the question” itself (Derrida, 76). The following encounters are not meant as an attempt to tease out some common thread, or thought, which unites their (re-)interrogations yet the shadow of one may be cast. It is meant to touch on their necessity and how that necessity plays with a notion of this nearness and farness.

Hence

And what of my role? From whence does my question arrive? From hence. The spatial-temporal use of “hence” is not unintentional. Entomologically tied Old English word “heonan”, implying “here” in situation (place, history, direction), “hence” implicates what is most near and most far. In questioning the “question of religion”, which is itself a question of the “question”, the play of distances, of nearness and farness, is at work in its structure. (Be it the inaccessibly of the other who remains aloof, the distance of analysis, the nearness of the here from where I question, even the nearness of the inaugural yes, which is afar in its archaic-originary status…).

Since “hence” presupposes the here, the near, and implicates the far. It implies a relationship where both attracts and repel each other; neither can be reduced to, nor separated from, the other. The polysemic function of “hence” extends to the construction of formal thought, where it implies an affirmation, a “therefore”. It claims to associate and coagulate a construction of thought that comes before it, and grants it the status of having taken place. It also names an origin or a source and henceforth, commanding a temporal movement. The spacio-temporal operation of necessity hence, from here to there, like a suspension bridge, which is the linking of the nearest-farthest, interrogates concepts of identity, community, heritage, the particular, the universal, calculation, and the incommensurable. My own questioning of the necessity of the return begins hence because if we believe Derrida, every response responds to a prior call.

Hyphen(s)

Nancy, who acts as a gateway for us, convinces us that, structurally, “Judaeo-Christian” exemplifies a near-farness. He informs us that the hyphen in Judaeo-Christian is commonly taken as an imbrication or a conjuncture, an overlapping that creates a fabric, yet he does not see it as an ordinary conjecture. Traditionally this conjunction would imply a nearness that would permeate the chronological and temporal structure of the term “Judaeo-Christian”; Judaeo-Christian as succession, perhaps representing a transformation, or if we dare to say it, a progression, joined by an event for which it acts as a glue. Yet, this will not do. For Nancy, this hyphen must rather be read as something that both joins and keeps both parts separated as two divided portions of “Western” identity and thought (Nancy, 214-215). There is a gap between Judaeo/-/Christian that respects the complex distance between the near-far.

Thought, as non-religious “philosophy,” becomes overburdened with farness (recall Bataille’s analogy of the bricked wall from the beginning of Theory of Religion). Nancy is concerned by the thought of a heritage that ignores its own short-stroke construction, which privileges a pristine untainted idea over the recognition of its own construction –risking to fall into what Bataille calls the simulacrum of thought (Bataille, 9). Both Nancy and Bataille understand the urgency for thought to demonstrate its own assemblage, as well the products it may yield. (It should not surprise us that both take this as their point of departure.)

For Nancy, the (de)construction of Judaeo-Christian means recognizing what I’m calling the near-far in the linking-spacing of identities, heritages, traditions, religion as well as philosophy. In his dragging of Derrida into the position of the first Christian/last Jew (which is the theme of his lecture), his work is also the drawing near of a multiplicity of distances, Jacques-James, Judaeo-Christian, Christianity-deconstruction. Or perhaps I should say, it is making evident their implicit near-farness. The necessity of his work is in demonstrating of that which cannot be appropriated, a relation to the other, as either faith or work, etc. The structure of Nancy text links our question of hence (near-far) to the question of response.

Necessity and the Automatic Response

A proper treatment of this “response,” would expand beyond this project, so let me simply allude to it with a couple comments. First, let us circumscribe this notion of response in turning to Derrida. Let us consider the possibility of this response as that (the fact that “that” implies an object is a problem) which is expressed in something like the law of law, or the promise of a promise, the messianic without messiah. We understand this as the inauguration of a structure of which it exemplifies, but it (again this is problematic) is not reducible to the sub-set it creates. It is by its own necessity, exempt from its structure. Let us simply name it a pre-condition for something like a universal structure. Faith, which can be both a part of tele-technoscientific critique, the religious, or neither, functions as the apex of both tele-technoscientific critique and the religious, as their pre-condition. Consider the follow passages:

[The] Enlightenment of tele-technoscientific critique and reason can only suppose trustworthiness. They are obliged to put into play an irreducible “faith,” that of a “social bond” or of a “sworn faith,” of a testimony […], that is, of a performative of promising at work even in lying or perjury and without which no address to the other would be possible. (Derrida, 80. Emphasis mine.)

Derrida continues:

We speak of trust and of credit or of trustworthiness in order to underscore that this elementary act of faith also underlies the essentially economic and capitalistic rationality of the tele-technoscientific. No calculation, no assurance will ever be able to reduce its ultimate necessity, that of the testimonial signature. (Derrida, 81. Emphasis mine.)

Here, the one and the other, the near and the far, become implicated at their most abstract levels. Underlying thought, community, heritage, and all possible repetitions of the aforementioned, is this necessary testimony. This is necessity is their possibility.

Thought, whether claiming distinctness as a tele-technoscientific community or in the declaration of pious religiosity, functions as a performative testimony. Within the above passages, this responsibility (the capacity to respond or testify) should not be understood as a conscious decision made at each moment or present. It, like “Judaeo-Christian”, is not a sequence. It has, in effect, already taken place. When I write this paper, in responding to your question, I have already testified to be trustworthy, and you have sworn to enter into that “social bond” with me, without the community of “us” ever making that point explicit. Even in making it clear, we would have always already pledged our truthfulness, or had faith in our language. This leads me to believe that this pledge is thus (which implies hence) is what is most near to us in this act of writing and thinking. It is always automatic. Without it, what could thought be, let alone something like reason or a religion? Yet it is often the farthest from our consciousness, except in this case, where I have call it out by name.

With its most abstract notions of the near-far, illustrated by the double-foci of faith and knowledge, the automatism of the response informs Derrida’s re-interrogation of religion. His questioning operates with the necessity that “religion”, if we want to think of it apart from our pre-understanding, must be thought of the reverse side of thought, not as Enlightenment, but in the mechanics of auto-immunity; “religion,” not as a concept but as a operative movement. With Derrida we consider the structure of this movement, the possibility of a religion which always the play of the near-far, the link-scruple. The “in tandem” of thought-religion is seen here, as that which keeps a respectful distance from the inaccessible yet, in doing so we open “an access without mediation or representation…”(Derrida, 85-6). We see symbiosis where both are host and both are parasite.

Longing for the Inaccessible

We cannot assign the same tasks of nearness and farness to Bataille’s “theory” of religion but there is something that calls between he and Derrida. When dealing with Bataille the language of the “other” which underscores Nancy and Derrida’s re-interrogations offers too much in the way of individuation and division. Imminence or intimacy, at the level of animality, occupies the role for Bataille of that which is most near-far. Is it that something like the autoimmunity that Derrida speaks of, is at work between a longing for lost intimacy and the impatience of philosophy? Consider the following passage from Bataille:

[…] consciousness turns away from the obscure intimacy of consciousness itself. Religion, whose essence is the search for lost intimacy, comes down to the effort of clear consciousness which wants to be a complete self-consciousness: but this effort is futile, since consciousness of intimacy is possible only at a level where consciousness is no longer an operation whose outcome implies duration, that is, at the level where clarity, which is the effect of operation, is no longer given. (Bataille, 57)

Here we find that the necessity of the re-interrogation lies in the awareness of an impossibility for consciousness to use reason (or philosophy) to think this intimacy. This powerlessness of thought, that is, its inability and longing to fulfill itself, draws together philosophy and religion, which were presupposed to be distinct, near to each other under the impossibility of thought at the level of intimacy. So, why turn to religion? Because religion affirms a longing that consciousness cannot comprehend. The impossibly of this comprehension provides the religious with unending yearning within the human to be near to a farness beyond the capacity of philosophy.

It seems that this necessity is the sole gift that the intimate can give since it does not recognize ‘things’ which can be given. “In this gathering place,” Bataille tells us, “where violence is rife, he who reflects within cohesion realizes that there is no longer any room for him” (Bataille, 10). In this way, operational thought, for Bataille, can never account for the whole. The thinker, exemplified through the operation of reason, is necessarily forced away of the nearness of intimate because clarity of thought, which is the effect of operation, alienates him to the realm of things and objects. This withdrawl from/of intimacy and its absence in consciousness leaves an opening, déjà vu: that which recalls through a separation (Bataille, 75). Or, that which draws near through a farness. This is the opening that philosophy impatiently aims for, yet in its own action, the gap closes. Thought as reason, looks for a clarity, a cohesion, but Bataille must turn to the religious not only to trace out the poetics of the intimate, but to consider the human condition, economy, reality, and reason itself.

Hence: “Therefore?”

In my own questioning, from here, hence, from the point of returning to the texts of those who have “returned” to religion, my own questioning returns to the language of location: the near-far, the hyphen, the ellipse, the world of water in water. And also, there is this urgency in these works. I have chosen three encounters with this necessity all of which can not be reduced to the others. These cannot be synthesized or coagulated by a “hence” or “therefore”. Yet one thing comes to mind between these encounters. Something which does not unite these interrogations, but also does not totality divide them. They express the need to respond: it is difficult to say more. Yet, we can respond, as we learn from Bataille, in poetic fallacy, or through the Derridian deconstructive gesture. We can respond silently and aloud. We respond with faith, with or without “religion,” or we respond in our longing. The response to the other is always before hand, and the response to the intimate is unyielding. This responding points toward the most radically near: the promise, the animal; while also addressing what is radically afar: the other, the world of water in water, the world without death. The re-interrogation of “religion” can not be simply a question of an epoché, nor can it suspend or resist its own interrogation. With Derrida, this (re)-interrogation represents the operation of the religious and for Bataille it is consciousness’ curiosity in the unknowable; a striving impossible to quench.

Let us then end by re-turning one last time to section 47 of Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge.” In his treatment of the axiomatic nature of the two sources, Derrida comes into contact with a near-farness that concerns us most here at the end of our (re-)interrogation: the irreducible gap between the structural possibility (pure possibility) and particular necessity (historical situatedness) of something like a religion. This concerns us because any (re-)interrogation cannot deny the necessity of the possibility of something like a religion. Like this paper, the gaps are irreducible, yet they are bond together. If we believe Derrida, this position is difficult to understand because in rejecting it, we would have negativity affirmed it (in the play of auto-immunity).

The position I occupy, here, on a suspension bridge, when I ask myself ‘who is thinking here?,’ in respect to those others, places me in the milieu of response to the inaugural ‘yes’, to heritage, to the intimate, and to thought. And, if we believe those who I credit in this essay, am I also situated in possibility of something like a religion, between the more near and most far. Does it place me into the mechanics at work? Yes. The possibility of the necessity of something like a religion, is also the necessity that suspends the “therefore,” the final pronouncement. If we think of it as the great unverifiable hypothesis as Bataille has, situated at the very limits of consciousness (Bataille, 99), we imagine consciousness’ marriage to the repetition of this (re-)interrogation, from an inaugural ‘henceforth,’ whether in response to ‘yes’ or to imminence.

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1992.

Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. by Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Judaeo-Christian” in Judeities: Questions for Jacque Derrida. Trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007: 214-233.

Concert Review: Plants and Animals

2009-09-06T05:52:00.007-03:00

I wasn't sure if I was going to go. My good friend Joel had brought it up. I had seen them last year with his enthusiasm as their references. They put on a pretty good show, there was indeed a great deal of energy running through the crowd. I was impressed.

But without a new album, and with their less than stellar performances at the Pitchfork Music Festival and on their segment "Don't Look Down," I was losing interest with Plants and Animals live shows. They just didn't seem able to play their own songs - by now, the constant botchings of "Fairy Dance," one of their most famous tracks, was well known.

I didn't listen to the opening band. Instead I talked shop with Joel and Kate, a bright-eyed English/Environmental Studies hybrid, over beers and vodkas, within the plums of second-hand cigarette smoke outside the Montreal House in Peterborough, Ontario. I thought it might rain, but it never came. I listened: a cover band I guess once or twice, with a couple songs of their own.

There was a silence and then we went inside.

The problem with Plants and Animals is that their stage show focusing preciously on what they are not all that great at - the drawn out jams with three or four chords, in constant rotation, rather than the strategic blending of vocals and melody, of craft and poetry, that bands like Hey Rosetta have recently made a career on.

They played their classics: Fairy Dance, Bye, Bye, Bye (as a closer, which was compromised by an encore jam song six minutes too long), even a couple new tracks, which were very good. This next album will be great.

But that is also the problem with Plants and Animals; their live show is also at a great distance from the albums own representation of their work. "Parc Avenue" presents the songs as too restrained. Whereas the live show gives them the breadth they need. But at the same time, the live show gives them the opportunity to tangent into these long, yet not expansive or even creative, explorations. Too many repeated couples of three or four notes, too little understanding of the melody. They do not display their own necessity - they are like a supplement or troupe.

Plants and Animals are a rhythm band, and that is what makes their live show energetic. The slight syncopations within a song helps it chugs along like a train. These rhythmic structures give us no question or the momentum of the song. This was especially clear in the new material. Yet this momentum is not always clear of its directions or conclusion.

After another gulp of my warm draft, I gave the thumbs-down to Kate but she insists I wait until after the show to comment. That was for the best - this crowd seemed to love every second of it. Although, I still wonder if what I was seeing was their unrestrained disposition toward the music or a performance of what was expected of them.

Plants and Animals needs to do some trimming. The difference between a good show and a great show is the feeling of necessity within the movement of the music. These jams feel like they were just invoked rather than crafted. Their is a difference between a song and a jam, even in Jazz where the lines are further blurred. Whatever that distinction may be, Plants and Animals don't always know either.

Dominic E. Lacasse - The Sounds Between

2009-08-18T15:20:00.014-03:00

It is said that only two children were spared from whatever fate the Piper laid on Hameln that day; one blind, unable to see the children to follow them out of town, the other lame, without the ability to dance along to doom or rebirth with the others. Am I that lame child? ~ Dominic E. Lacasse

"Horror Writing" is a dirty term these days. It brings up images of something studied by undergrads hoping to bullshit through ENG100, writing a paper on Twilight or by Cultural Studies professors hoping to gain some fame, analyzing it from the perspective of psychoanalysis or theories of the carnival.

Something happened somewhere in between Shelly, Stoker, Poe and Lovecraft, and these paperback, New York Times Bestsellers, pulp writers of today. A sweeping claim, I know. As a suggestion, and continuing my "Recommended Blogs by my Peers" theme here at Not by Needs, I suggest the work of Dominic E. Lacasse. Not only is he well read in the classic horror canon, but he is also a student of Classics and mythology. His knowledge of occultism, the ancients and their mythos is daunting. No matter how large or localized the tradition, he’s probably has read the scroll, studied the manuscript or leafed through the book. (Not to mention his knowledge of cartography.)

His blog, which he just started last year and is now adding to again, contains stories, fragments and other experiments of his writing, and what could also be called, in many ways, his analysis, of Horror. It called the The Sounds Between, and I highly recommend it.

This is my own take on it: And, yes, I hear you out there, those repeating echoes from fans screaming out in protest how amazing Stephen King’s characters are, or how you thought that Interview with a Vampire was just “the best” vampire book ever written, and how it influenced both your own writing and your make-up in high school… But, - and I want to be vulgarly general here - what I’m calling “Horror Writing” is not what is used to be. And this isn’t just another kind of literary conservativism: this isn’t an argument denouncing narrative driving, pulp thriller novels. I get my Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston fix like everyone else. What has become misunderstood the nature of the Horrible in what we expect from Horror. Not in the sense of a wrongfully detonated referent, but rather in terms of what might be seen as the deep underbelly of the Tale.

Horror is more like an operation between the mind and its other then a description of an object. And Dominic and I have discussed this point endlessly - it was the context of an interview we did two years ago at CKDU (plug). Lovecraft once said something along these lines: the human minds is incapable of understanding either life or the universe. The latter of which, is fundamentally alien to us and when we are confronted with the ultimate reality of it, whatever form that may take, our psyche itself is ruptured by this encounter. In other words, Horror is not the mind’s finality in imaging how terrible “the monster” it is seeing actually is; it operation between the mind and the unfathomable fact that there the monstrous could exist in the first place. It is a play between possibility and the minds grasp for conclusion.

(As a side note, Levinas' trembling at the term "There is" is congruent with this horror of the "Could there be and there it is.")

The Horror is not in what is alien, foreign, or grotesque (this is where many modern horror films get it wrong), it is in consciousness’ struggle to enframe what is occurring. Horror is primarily phenomenological then.

Dominic has a very proper, Gothic narrative posture, which positions his work in a way that makes it both classically inspired and timely, occurring, almost always, in a past which never occurred. Not an ideal past, but something more like general past or Past, in a sense which the element of its distance is never absent from the atmosphere.

In some cases, this tone deterritorializes the setting, taking the events out of both space and time – something that creates a sense of astrangeness between the reading’s and the narrator’s own localization; a place where events are past, but removed from our past. The relatedness, then, between the two nodes of reader and narrator makes the Horror at once alien and intimate. These two nodes of the alien and intimate struggle to close in on one another, but the exclusivity, with its own vastness, snaps them apart. This too is horror.

This past appears to us as though it were this world, our world, but it cannot be, it must not be. This denouncing, this cannot be, is at an ethical level of discourse which permeates Dominic's Horror: if this world, this event, this incomprehensibility, can exist, here, then the foundations of all morality and humanity would rest on nothing but an abyss, and it is in that thought, not the abyss itself, that Horror activates - this is what Dominic's work tell us.

The Queer Behind the Mirror

2009-08-14T18:41:00.005-03:00

Well, I haven't been exactly posting much lately. By the looks of things, it's been over a year. Many things have happened since then, which extend beyond these texts, here, I guess you could say. I've moved, joined a new University, Trent, at the Center for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics. I've began other projects. The most demanding of attention is my MA thesis. I'm sure I'll be writing of the beast called ADHD and Historical Ontology soon enough on this little blog. It has and will continue to, consume the better part of next year.

Until I get back into the swing of things, i.e. actually contributing to the blogosphere, I recommend by good friend Kama's blog, The Queer Behind the Mirror. He has many interesting things to say about many topics. The range of content that comes across his page is astounding. I have no hesitation in recommending his ideas to anyone. He is currently working on a project on transnational transexuality. He describes it better himself. This is from his profile at Trent:

My project aims at problematizing (troubling?) the trans- in the transsexual and the transnational. I intend to study narratives of transsexuality and transnationalism with the aim of locating the (non-)place that transitioning may hold in the two types of narratives. One of my major sites of inquiry will be the articulation of forms of intimacy, gender performance and sexuality in South-Asian diasporic communities in relation to Western sexual epistemologies.

I hope you enjoy his work.

A Letter from Tel Aviv

2008-05-15T18:53:00.004-03:00

Fiction

Miriam Segev griped a crumpled sheet of paper in her fist as she gazed out at the red sun set on the flight to New York. Though, it was not the sky she saw. Her mind rested in another place, with other people, at other times. She had been holding back tears for the past three months, but in that very moment, they began to role down her freckled cheek. She shut her eyes, clenched the paper tighter, and wept.

When the Road Map for Peace failed in 2006, Miriam’s father blamed George W. Bush and Prime Minister Olmert more so that the Palestinians. “I’m so tired,” he sighed reading the paper, at the breakfast table in Tel Aviv. “Frankly, at this point, I don’t care whose sitting in the Palestinian parliament.”

Miriam and her brother, Elliott, did not respond to their father’s blustering. Elliott, especially, said nothing --three years older than Miriam, and very much a patriot. So too had been their father, but the once zealous Zionist had become embittered, losing hope in the success of Israel. He was becoming more and more in favour of the two-sate-solution: “No one is going to get what they want here,” he continued. “Especially not with that maverick Olmert in office.”

Miriam watched Elliott’s face as their father spoke. She wondered if he knew how much his ranting bothered Elliot, who had one year earlier finished his three years with the military. Elliot had felt very strongly about that commitment, and the commitments of his friends then in service. Miriam on the other hand, was unable to serve because of chronic bronchitis but she could recognize the significance it held for Elliot. He would have continued in service, had his father not forbade it altogether.

“That Olmert, he’s a real loose canon.” After this comment, Elliot stood up silently and left the room. Miriam watched him leave, but remained silent, and ate her breakfast.

That evening Miriam sat at her desk staring at a letter she had written years earlier, just days before Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir in 1995. Her father was an Oslo supporter in the 1990’s and even though he bore a resentment for the Palestinians, he refused to take it seriously. Miriam was always amazed at her father’s dogmatic cultural relativism. She concluded that it was only possible because over the years, especially after his retirement, he became more and more secular and spoke more and more often of relocating the family to the United States. Rabin’s murder was a tipping point for him. “It’s Jews killing Jews now,” he had signed. “Can we even say that there is an definite enemy anymore? If not everyone, you know? How could anyone do this to us? We were so close.”

The letter was addressed to Prime Minister Rabin. When she had written it he was still alive and she wanted to thank him for working for the peace that her father so greatly longed for. At the age of seven, she wasn’t aware of how Rabin’s assassination would affect that peace. When she sat in her room that evening, then nineteen, she was sure that with or without Amir’s help, peace wouldn’t have been possible.

She looked at this letter often, always at night. It was a simple little note, written on loose leaf from a little girl, to a politician: Thank you Mr. Rabin. My father will be happy now. But the letter went unsent and her father never became anything more than begrudged against his own government.

Miriam had thrown out and retrieved this letter countless times from the trash bin. She read it in an attempt to preserve an innocence that she possessed at seven because she was also growing bitter; her father’s cynicism was very convincing in its naïve sincerity. Her brother, on the other hand, preached in his own way but in an opposite thread. For him, Israel was a work in progress and he secretly accused his father of giving up on the idea of progress. Elliott was convinced that eventually the Arabs would have to come to terms with the fact that Israel was there to stay. Miriam’s mother had left when she was too young to remember so she often felt pulled between the ardent views of her father and brother. She could not decide where she stood, and preferred not to. She instead worked toward innocence, like that of the young girl she once was. The innocence she craved did not see the world as excluding her, as a Jew, or as something assimilating her, as her brother said of the States.

Yet every time she read the letter, the innocence it exhibited was a symbol of hopelessness and bitterness for a future that her brother prophesized and her father mourned for. She would crumple the letter and throw it in the trash while weeping, only to pull it out in the morning and hide it back in her desk.

That July, Hezbollah launched rockets from Lebanon against the Israeli military, and Israel went to war. There had been conflicting stories about prisoner exchanges and Hezbollah was openly declaring their intentions to destroy Israel. The government was claiming that it was not at war with Lebanon but was hoping for their co-operation to control a threat to Israel, harboured within their borders: the situation was sensitive.

Miriam was sitting in the living room watching the new feeds with her father when Elliott entered the room with his nap sack. Her father was in the middle of a speech when he noticed Elliott lacing up his boots.

“Where do you think you’re going?” her father loudly inquired. Elliot didn’t say anything, and continued to lace his boots. “Elliot,” he spoke very loudly. Miriam knew very well what was happening and so must her father, and this suddenly filled her with dread.

“You had better not be doing what I think you’re doing.” There was no response. “Elliot, take off you boots and come in here.”

Her father stood up, wide eyed, and began toward the door. Elliot finished tying his boots and stood straight, and proud.

“Elliot, take off your fucking boots, because you’re not going anywhere.” He shouted. Elliot was silent and did not move.

“Elliot, take off your…”

“Father,” he said very calming but sternly. “I can’t stay here right now. Please don’t try to stop me.”

“Who do you think you are boy?” her father shouted. “This isn’t your fight. You’ve done your time. Now you’re done. I wont have it. That’s it!”

“That isn’t it!” Elliot yelled. Miriam had never heard her brother shout, let alone at his father. Not even when he was forbad from continuing in the military.

“I can’t wait here for the end like you can,” he shouted. “I can’t just wait for the rockets to rain down on Tel Aviv like you can. I can’t wait for the Palestine to out breed us and overwhelm us like you can. You’ll just set here, barking at the news paper and watch everyone on the planet take a little piece of Israel until there’s none left, that way you can go to New York without feeling like a coward!”

“If you go out that door, never come back here!”

Elliott turned to open the door, but his father grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back into the porch.

“Do you hear me?” he cried.

Miriam shut her eyes as Elliott hit his father, knocking him to the floor. He looked back at her from the carpet. She could not decide what her father was thinking, nor could she break eye contact with him.

None of them said anything as Elliott opened the door and left, disappearing into the warmth of the Israeli night.

Miriam could not sleep that night, nor the night after. She sat up in her bed, with only a side lamp for light, staring at the letter: My father will be happy now. Each time she read the line, she could not help but sob. Each day, the letter became more potent, and each day, her father grew more quiet. He did not speak of the fighting nor of Elliott.

The first day of ground combat saw twenty-four Israeli soldiers killed. Yet, no messenger came to their door. Over forty Israeli civilians were killed by the rockets during the conflict. Miriam did nothing but watch the news feeds, scrutinizing the footage for any trace of Elliott, but she saw none.

It was near the end of July when she heard her father’s voice again. He walked into the living room and sat beside Miriam on the sofa, putting his arm around her.

“You know what we haven’t done in a while?,” he said with a smile.

“I don’t know,” Miriam noticed that he wouldn’t look her in the eye. He seemed to look past her, out the window.

“We should see a movie at Cinemathèque,” she could feel him picking at the back of the sofa cushion. “It’s been a while since we’ve gone there, as a family…” He paused for a moment.

“Do you remember when we went to the Videotape Festival?” his eyes were wide and searching the sidewalks and streets.

“That must have been five years ago now, I guess… Wow, time really just flies by…” he began to sob but he would not turn away from the window. Miriam hugged his neck and they both stared out the glass at Tel Aviv.

The ceasefire took effect on August 14, 2006. About one hundred and twenty soldiers died in the fighting, but no one was sure exactly how many were killed. Elliott never returned home, but an army messenger never visited their home. Elliott seemed to just disappear. Miriam could not decide what she would believe. Had he been killed, or had he lived and obeyed his father by not returning? The army also seemed to be unsure about what happened to Elliot Segev and could provide not resolution.

A week later, Nationalists and Zionists were splashed across the television touting how Israel was national liberation at its finest, while others warned that Israel was no longer safe for Jews. Academics and social critics bickered over the wars effect on Israel’s international identity. Others complained that the international media had slanted their coverage of the war in favour of Hezbollah. Later, the Israeli chief of staff was forced to resign after it was found that he was selling stocks just before the response attack. Eventually everyone in the government was taking responsibility for some sort of mishap or blunder in the Lebanon conflict.

Miriam, bombarded by their shingle and rhetoric, sat at her desk and pounded her letter to Prime Minister Rabin with her fists until they bled. She screamed at the dead man, cursing him. She cursed Yigal Amir, she cursed Prime Minister Olmert along with all of Israel. She cursed it for its success and cursed it for its disgrace. She screamed until her voice was horse and wailed until, from exhaustion, she collapsed.

Miriam’s father had become a recluse, sitting in his study with the door closed. She knocked on the door, letting him know that his was leaving for groceries. After knocking, she opened the door and entered the dim den. Her father was asleep, bent over his desk holding a torn piece of loose leaf paper. It was her letter, creased, tattered and blooded.

She had decided, at that moment, that they would leave Tel Aviv.

It was March 20, 2007 when Miriam Segev and her father, Malachi, stepped onto a plane for the United States. She watched her father sleeping in the seat next to her, hoping that the move would do him some good. They had some family in New York and were welcome to stay their until they got on their feet. It was likely that Miriam would have to take care of her father for some time to come, but that was not on her mind right now. Her mind was in another place, with other people, at other times. She had been holding back tears for the past three months, but they began to role down her freckled cheek. She shut her eyes, clenched the letter and wept.

Jerry

2008-05-08T20:03:00.005-03:00

Fiction

His name was Jerry but I called him ‘Moron’ or 'Shit Head', always to his face, never behind his back. He was a man I used to work with ‘bout four years ago, when I was twenty. At forty, he lived with his mother. I think she’s from Spain or Italy, one of those countries. She’s pretty old I guess; on the verge, if not the summit, of senility. She must be dead if he’s on the bus. But I’d rather not ask. He’s right there, sitting in the seat ahead of me, but I’d prefer him not know I was here.

We use to work shingling roofs in Calgary. It’s hot work in the summer and cold as hell in the fall. His ears are still red and sun cracked. Must be still in the business. As for me, I work in an office now and that’s how I like it. Sometimes, I get nostalgic about that feeling after a hard day work. The sun will pound down on you just as hard as you’ll pound down on the shingle nails. I was his foreman. He was useless as a worker and awkward as a human. Seeing him brings back those old feelings of nostalgia but also of nausea. Why I never fired him perplexes me still. Everyone he’s ever worked for has probably felt the same. Is this person so pathetic that no one can fire him?

I’m on the morning bus here in Hamilton. My destination, a downtown call-centre, is only about eight blocks from my home but I was lazy and took the ol’ bus. I could’ve walked there quicker. The traffic is thick and I’ve been stuck here for about ten minutes now. I’m starting to resent the brick buildings that cage me in and all those motorists who decided to drive today. If they had taken the bus like me, instead of being stuck in traffic wishing we were at work, we could all be at work, drinking coffee, wishing we were home. You know the way it is. Instead here I am, staring at Jerry through the corner of my eye. I hope he doesn’t look up.

I didn’t notice him when I first got on this bus. I guess his demeanour has shown through again; unnoticeable. That, and I don’t really consider who might be one the bus when I first get on. Who the hell cares? I just want a seat. I flipped the driver my bus-pass and seeing there’s no seats, I grabbed the ceiling bar and stood in the isle like a sucker. I never look at people ‘til I’m settled. I would rather just ride unnoticed, you know? I like to be an active observer while being a passive presence.

But I notice lots of things --don’t get me wrong. There’s that girl with the kinky hair at the Beer Store. We talk there, at the check-out, but never outside of that. I doubt a conversation would last longer than twenty seconds; I’m not sure if she could last that long. Usually she’ll say, “how’s it going?” I’ll put the 12 pack of Sleeman’s on the counter and say “oh you know, it’s going.” She’ll ring me through and I’ll say, “anything interesting around these parts?” She’ll laugh. “Here? Are you kidding?” I’ll pay in cash and she’ll keep the change. It’s a little game we play; like we don’t know each other: I think she wants to sleep with me. “See you later.” I go. That’s not a conversation you can have on a bus. Once you’re finished what you have to say you can’t just ignore ‘em. There’s too much time on the bus. There’s too much potential for dead air. It’s like committing yourself to marriage. What if you can’t stay with that person? I can’t risk it and neither can she. So, if I’m walking down the street and I see her, and she sees me, she’ll pretend not to see me and I’ll pretend not to see her. Perfectly fine. This economy is working for me.

There’s a hodgepodge of other people on the bus besides Jerry. There’s a chubby college girl whose white shirt drapes over her rolly body because of her massive breasts. It draws such vulgar attention to them. She sits, wedged in her seat, with here equally large boyfriend. He has to struggle to put his arm around her. They look so squishy and soft. I wonder how they have sex. I image two round mushroom caps, smothered in garlic butter, bouncing against each other as a dirty line-cook jostles the sauce pan.

There’s a man in his late forties with a red beard and matching plaid jacket. He is holding a CBC radio travel mug, red as well; the kind without a handle. He looks like the kind of guy that listens to those early morning CBC shows about trash removable in Brampton or fishing in the Okanogan. He could even be the man on the radio with that silky clarinet voice who’s every word I cherish. So many late nights and early mornings I listen to him; the man on the radio who makes everything interesting and strangely cultured. I would love to talk to that man but this was not him. I know because it’s morning now and he’d be two hours late for work. This man, if anything, looks early.

I’m looking around but my eye keeps lingering back to Jerry. When I say his name to myself it growls in my ears: Jerry. I wish he’d get angry at the traffic like I am and get off this damned bus. That way I wouldn’t have to keep pretending he wasn’t there. I wouldn’t have to feel egocentric or selfish. I could just go on enjoying the bus ride. I wasn’t in a rush but now I am. I want to get the hell out of here. So why don’t I leave? Is there anything beside old gum gluing my legs to this floor? Yes.

If I move Jerry’ll see me. I just thought of that. I can’t even look at him, can I? He’ll feel my eyes on his back. It’s true. That’s just animal instinct. You know, responding to stimuli.

Now that I think about it, that idiot owes my money. I loaned him $40 dollars for beer in Calgary. It was August and we were on a standard tar-shingle roof of a three story split-level home. It was raining the day before and everything was damp. Shingling a damp roof causing mildew and rotting and that is bad news for contractors, so we had to wait until it was dry again. It was a day off of sorts. “Hey man do you have forty bucks I could borrow. I’ll pay you back on pay day. I swear.” I gave him the money after a vicious internal battle. I knew if I gave him that money, I would never get it back. But I did, I gave it to him. He is always asking for money. What a bum. Well at least he ‘was’ always asking. Maybe he’s stopped wasting it on buying girls drinks he knows won’t sleep with him. Probably not. He’d always show up at a job site heart broken because he got stood up by some chick he met on Plentyoffish.com.

I’m the one whose going to look like the asshole. It’s bad etiquette to start a conversation by asking for money, even if it’s owed to you. That was years ago. He probably doesn’t remember now. His memory could be completely fried. Hell, it was then; too many of the good drugs, too often.

I think he was in prison once for something like armed robbery. Now that’s an act of desperation. Now he just begs for the cash. I’ve decided that I don’t want the money. I will sacrifice forty bucks to remain unrecognized. I’m fine with that. In fact, that’s great.

He’s probably baiting everyone on this bus with that sad sunken face. In trying to look like a lost puppy he comes off looking like a shaved, saggy rat; a rat with glasses. He slouches in his seat, weighed down by his oh-so-heavy rat sadness. He’s trying to sell us all a fake Rolex. A watch that looks nice, even makes you feel nice, but when you get it home and think about it, you see its just trash sold under a gold garb. It makes me sick.

We’re moving. The traffic starts to budge, and we are slowly crawling forward. But I don’t look at the road. I’ve been staring at Jerry. I just realized I’ve not moved my glare, not even a blink, for a while. I was gawking. I wonder if anyone noticed. I hope no one’s been watching me. I may have just put myself out there; an active participant in the bullshit bus-politics, in the open for everyone to see.

The CBC guy. I saw his eyes lowering. He was watching me. He was watching and then looked down to pretend he wasn’t. That son of a bitch.

I can see the next stop. Maybe Jerry would get off the bus here, maybe I would. There is a large crowd of people ahead. I don’t think we can we all fit.

The bus stops and one by one they file on. The driver yells to us “everyone to the very back.” He’s going to pack us all on. Some passengers have passes; others have tickets, and lastly a man with a baby. He fumbled in his pocket for change with one hand and held his child with the other. He pays his toll and walks down the isle. Jerry shifts. Why is he moving? Is he leaving? No. He’s offering his seat to the man with the child. The man accepts. Where’s Jerry going to sit? He’s not sitting. He’s walking toward me.

I move back to get away but there’s no room. The person behind me pushes me and I almost bash right into him. I bump around in a panic. Jerry stops and turns to pass to the front and I bump in his back. Oh Jesus. He has his back to me but he don’t turn around; that shows too much confidence. That’s it. He’ll stand with his head down. That’s great.

I can feel his presence. I’m a deer watching the wolf from the bushes. If I make a wrong move, I’ll be found. But unlike the deer, I can’t take flight. I’m trapped on the transit system. I’m in a prison of sweating city people and they’re all breathing on me. And there’s that CBC bastard whose been staring at me. Stop looking at me.

My stop. I can see my stop. Where’s the pull-cord? Jerry. You’re standing in front of the cord. Move. If I reach, I might bump him. I can’t touch him again. He’ll see me for sure. He’ll turn to apologise. Maybe someone will be waiting at the bus stop and the driver will stop any way. No. There’s no one. He’s going to drive by it. I’ll never get off. Someone pull the cord. Anybody pull the cord. I’m getting faint. I squeeze my eyes shut.

The unmistakable “next stop” bell rings throughout the bus. My stop. I’m free. To everyone else it may sound like ‘bong’ but to me it’s the chime of an angel’s touch on a hammer dulcimer. What cherub has played this note? Who is my saviour?

Jerry.

No. This is ridiculous. He’s slithering his way between me and the mushroom couple. Their bulbous haunches have got him wedged between us. He’s caught in a rat trap and I’m the spring. He’s going to look up. That’s it, I’ll just do it. I’ll speak. It its my fate. Destiny has shoved me to this point. I’m the figure in some contemporary techno-dystopian tragedy. My mouth is dry.

“Oh, hey Jerry.” I say. Why not: “Is your name Jerry?” That has much more wiggle room with that intro. Oh well, he’ll be surprised to see me. It been a long time. The bus is slowing down so the conversation’s only got to last ten seconds. I’m sure I can bear that.

He furrows his brow. “Do I know you?”

What? Jesus he’s dense.

“It’s me,” I say. “Gyle Harris, we worked together in Calgary.”

“We’re roofed together,” I say. “Remember?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Are you sure that was me?” Yes it’s you, you goddamn moron, I used your goddamn name didn’t I?

“Your name is Jerry.” I explain. He’s stepping off the bus.

“Hm. That’s not my name but… Anyway, I’ve got the run.” The doors close and the bus starts moving again.

I can’t believe that just happened. That son of a bitch. He’s just walking down the street. He doesn’t even look up. He did that on purpose. He wanted to humiliate me. Well, he failed. He won’t get the best of me. That guy with the CBC mug covers his mouth. He saw the whole thing. I think he’s laughing. Yeah, laugh it up buddy.

I try to turn around to pull the next-stop cord but my knee bounces against the chubby girl and I trip, almost fall.

“Move your goddamn hams!” I scream.

Then she starts crying.

Great.

Welcome to not by Needs of Nature

2008-05-08T19:07:00.001-03:00

This modest blog is my little piece of what has become, a structural phenomenon. The world-wide-web is probably one of the most aptly named human creations, along side of the hammer and skewer. Aside from its name’s suitability, the web is also a tremendous tool for those of us imprudent enough to write. It is a slate, on which we rehearse, and hopefully better, our practising love affair with words and language.

So far, I’ve a few published short stories and a children’s book to my name, and with grievous sums of labour and luck, hopefully that number will grow. I hope also that you’ll enjoy what is written here; the pleasure of reading a piece of writing is the greatest gift to a writer, but a reader’s dissatisfaction is a writer’s epitaph, for the reader clutches both medals and daggers.

At last, a warning: The personal corridors and labyrinths which led me to this point are predominantly constructed by philosophy, theory and criticism. While my writing will be of all sorts, it will remain, ultimately, undercut by these elements. I write fiction, and so, it is in response to desire and mind that I write these words. This space is produced by consciousness and desire, not by needs or nature, though they too manage to carp their way in and make their appearances.

Enjoy, Jesse