by Harvey Lillywhite
He wanted to dwell in the Temple of Love, like everyone else, and he knew that its walls were made of the here and now, that they were in point of fact invisible, stretching as they did from eternity to here. He was certainly aware that life was a big bang, that each of us was a big bang, a peculiar cosmos sparked out of nothing and nowhere, existing for no obvious purpose for a span of time, then, poof, gone as fast as it had come, signifying…if you were going to be brutally honest and properly hopeless about it all…nothing. And he knew that on the temple grounds the unending fight for survival shrieked and screamed and grimly shook all the lovers until love itself was shook.
But Anxious Annie didn’t herself believe any of this hoo-ha. She was a practical dreamer who’d grown frightened that her dreams would never come true, that they’d already perhaps been ruined, so there was nothing anyone could do—at least not the doctors, who failed to diagnose or cure, and not the family, who ignored at best and at worst jibbed and jabbed and flapped and fought like there was no tomorrow and no precious jewels to care for and no stars in the firmament winking and twinkling a knowing lullaby all hours of the night. She was, in short, just appalled at the treatment of herself by others and had grown selfish as an oyster building that special pearl and ungenerous in that same way, a way that made others even angrier, wishing they had her pearl they never got to see.
But, alas, this is not her story, which she herself is busy writing and which sounds completely different. It is, for better or worse, merely the further adventures of Sir Real, flummoxed and desolate and Santa Fe, who lives at the multiple shifting crossroads of meaning, eats Henry’s Handkerchief Sandwiches, and a third thing he’s about to discover anew every moment of every day.
“Each of us do what we does,” he careened. And free will, squirrelly and shifty-eyed, manufactures a purposeful fiction that unfolds dramatically like any good cartoon, ridiculous and endlessly funny. So he had to admit, “O, magnificent imagination—I almost believe all your outrageous make believe that teaches me to know that nothing is real until it happens, then it’s merely real.”
“It’s ALL so sad and purposeless,” he said.
Flummoxed, desolate, and Santa Fe, Sir Real lives at the multiple shifting crossroads of meaning and eats Henry’s Handkerchief Sandwiches.
“How is it you’re still so perpendicular?” they cry.
“And how arrives it Joy lies slain,” he replies.
Like a guilty Zen monk, he filches a little transcendence like a sweet from the cosmic cookie jar to salve his deeply disappointed heart. Sir Real keeps his emotions corralled in a kind of petting zoo on the lower forty where they rarely escape to cause havoc like so much bad weather. Not at all like his wife of endless years, Anxious Annie, who lets her animals live right in the living room, yapping and crapping in the middle of every conversation. His doubts, like the smallest most transparent and poisonous mosquitoes you could ever imagine, he can’t control but can only swat at as they buzz his head while he’s trying to drive in a straight line.
It can be said that he loved recess time the best and found story time sublime. But what was his story? He was on a quest to understand exactly what he needed and how best to get what he might need along with everyone else in the world. So many people out there telling us what we need—through all that noise it gets hard to hear the voice inside that always tells the truth. In fact, ain’t any of us not hard of hearing—a bunch of deaf ones straining to hear the faithful music of the soul, he thinks. But, alas, the voices cry, there is no soul out here to hear, certainly nothing we can see or measure with the finest instruments. Except, Sir Real complains, a violin measure for measure speaking for some yearning observation like geese flying off in the fall.
But for Sir Real the trouble wasn’t wanting, it was other people, who seemed not to care exactly what anyone wanted, though all of us, it must be said, want each other—need each other and must most literally have each other nearly all the time. Against the blackboard of his imagination, the squalorous screeching of the subway’s iron wheels was the sound of creation itself grinding reality into being from next to nothing. “What people feel they can ask of each other and what they feel they can give are two different things,” he exclaimed.