And neither is it enough to say, ‘Down with genres’; one must effectively write in such a way that there are no more genres…
Like a Whirling Dervish, only different
This is the Human Being we are considering. He or she is blindfolded. He or she is spinning around and around. He or she is armed with an automatic weapon, and he or she has his or her hands on the trigger. Just dancing. Just spinning. Blindfolded. Shooting. Everyone around this person runs for cover. Some think about running up to this person, and grabbing the gun. Some think about running up to this person and pulling off the blindfold. This person is High. Whatever this person is doing, this is their drug. Just dancing. And shooting.
What a person!
This person is a perfect metaphor.
How can one attribute such evil motives to a person who is so utterly, viscerally and emotionally high, spinning around at such speeds? It’s almost as if she is too happy to kill all those innocent bystanders. One thinks that her state of mind is not right for such charges. She’s just so high on the idea of just spreading herself out into the world, firing away, without thinking about consequences, that it is almost impossible for anyone to conclude that she meant to harm anyone. She’s just dancing. It’s what she does.
And then there is that whole blind-fold thing.
Well. We can’t call her a Dervish. Since she’s not just dancing. Or at least she’s not just dancing to attain peace, or something like it, like enlightenment. She’s shooting, but blindly. The shooting is part of it. We can’t call her a Dervish. Shooting is not part of being a Dervish.
I think.
But we can’t call her an Assassin, either. Not with that blindfold on her eyes. An Assassin knows her job.
Did I ask you yet: Have you ever known this person?
Did I tell you yet: She also wore earplugs.
My sister Shiva the Destroyer
I am a Zen Monk placed alongside her. My anger management skills are relative. She takes cake. A teenaged boy, oh, boy in spirit, exits a large American automobile with a hood ornament bent by a drive-in theater speaker pole. Earlier in the evening the army-aged were drinking. Somebody’s father’s beers were missing. From a garage in Suburbia. The moon was fuller than their bellies. Away he went channeling my soul sister Shiva the Destroyer. As missing as somebody’s father’s beers. We ignored this escapade. Somebody other than Walter Mondale lost his debate that night. Perhaps somebody’s favorite band was not the greatest. Or somebody’s girlfriend goes down. Others tied one on. Time passed in its drunken way. We went in search of him dancing with Shiva. Broken mailboxes lined the winding street where we had chosen to park. Away from intersections, street lights, traffic and cops. In hiding. The Cougar in drive inched along. In high-beam headlights one of us saw them. Broken mailboxes lining the street. First one, then another… then three houses later, one dangling from its wooden stand… two houses later, across the street, a dent the size of a melon. There he strutted, channeling Shiva, rearing back a roundhouse right, swinging it out in his big broad arc, the sound of his bloodied knuckles striking the metal box shattered the night. A star in the sky for each shattering ping. We pulled up the car alongside him, keeping even with his careening pace.
“Get in. You have to knock it off.”
He listened but misunderstood, swinging at yet another.
It is like this exactly with Shiva my sister. And she filled me up like a nausea, too. When she entered me then like an empathy. And I cannot say where she takes me. But I know where she has gone.
I can read their names on the boxes.
They will not be receiving tomorrow’s good news.
Lighthouses
The downs are not as far down, each time you are tossed down, and the ups only seem higher, each time one is lifted up. Until eventually the difference between going down and rising up diminishes, for the rise carries with it no risk. And you realize that you're not being lifted up so much as returning to a clear level that always belonged to you. Think waves.
This begins with a really good connection. Think of the way a ship fits water. Its hull cleaving the softness of it which in turn invites it and allows it. I was trying to come up with something more extreme as adjectives go, but I like “good”… it covers a lot of ground. Or rather, ocean. Good covers a lot of water.
There's something to be said for being sick, I’m concluding. You're dizzy. Your stomach turns some. You need fruit. Now, suddenly, you're a limey at sea in an extended metaphor. Your thoughts are vague and fuzzy so that the only ones that come through clearly are the ones that resonate deeply, so that they hold true.
Then it all comes into focus for you. Think lighthouses, I suppose, in the fog, for a ship that had been tossing, on the verge of true wreckage, but which now has a home in sight, and, with that, something more solid than hope.
Ashes for me
The pall-bearers of my life will not be the pall-bearers of my coffin. The pall-bearers of my life will sit & smile at the service in contentment. The pall-bearers of my life will be light headed with drink or magic smoke, or neither. The pall-bearers of my life will smile, knowing that a special something which carries birds upward is laying gently, softly, downward to the earth, what was once me, or letting downward those same birds… or their shit, on your boss’s car.
& being good scientific minds, they’ll call it my gravitas, or simply, air. The pall-bearers of my life will know no burden. The pall-bearers of my life will know no effort upon my burial. The pall-bearers of my life will need no strength, & they will expect no redemption.
The pall-bearers of my coffin, if I grow stupid enough to occupy one, would be the six vilest people I have ever met. & they would be just stupid enough to accept this, as an honor. No matter how their cargo. & they would bury me. & in my coffin, with me, unbeknownst to them, they would also bury every unfinished manuscript; my album collection; & my unused weight-lifting set.
So you see… This is why I say—it’s going to be gravity & ashes for me.
How to be saved
Uncle Bud was in World War II. Whenever we asked him about it he said nothing that said something. If he said something he said “I was in it.” & you were 10 or 11 or 12 when asking. & the Lord was 1,972, give or take a few. You’d become familiar with the maps, or snippets of this or that biography, thanks to the Nobel Laureate bulldog. Uncle Bud drove a jeep but barely said so. Uncle Bud’s jeep was hit by a mortar. Uncle Bud never said he lost sleep because of a man he knew well, but he did, we knew, listening to him past midnight… We just knew the man as Him.
Him was from a big industrial city. Him was a sniper with a calloused finger. Him was engaged to a girl named Mary. Him like everyone else had a Father, but Him’s father was a Big Mystery to Uncle Bud & everyone else in this American Company, for whom Bud served. Him looked like your lunch, which in the year of the Lord, 1972, was ravioli, cheese & beef, heated up, when Him was hit, along with Bud, in the jeep. Him’s skin was opened up, so one could see where the hip met the legs, where the muscle met the skin, & one from this American Company could see, finally, clearly, into Him.
Uncle Bud waited to tell you these things. He’d wait until you talked about serving in the military. It was only then… that he finally spoke about Him.
Washington orates on death and growth
I hated that fucking tree. Why else in the World would a ten year old kid chop something down? Did you never hear of therapy? Did it never dawn on you to ask a professional exactly why I hated that tree, why I would chop it down? I mean, otherwise, what in the World would possess a child of my age to chop down—actually take up an axe and kill, destroy—a living example of life that not only gives food but one that exists, right here, on the property of my own family, my own parents, the people responsible for my life, my own blood? Why would anyone do that?
Come on, admitting it is almost more pathological than doing it isn’t it?
It should have been an apple tree, by God. That would have been almost biblical.
Now, according to at least one intellectually challenged congresswoman, I wrote the Declaration of Independence as well as the Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution. I love myth. It’s what allows me to live on, like an immortal, which allows me to set the record straight as you read this. Myth doesn’t die. It grows. Like an erection. It’s big and solid, too. Like a monument. Which, note, is also like an erection: mine. (There are blue eyed Washingtons too, you know. Think about that the next time you tuck my face between her thigh and her waistband).
And while we’re setting things straight, let it be known that after I gave them their freedom, my slaves stayed on.
Sure did: we grew hemp.
I personally think that was my second greatest contribution to the nation.
And think about that the next time you take a hit on a joint.
About this Whole Nature vs. God “Thing”
I recall it now, in a time of plague.
I was in love with someone.
Who it was is rather beside the point.
I loved her and she loved me, that much I remember. If it was the person I am with now, then the story makes no sense to me. That love is still good. And I associate the story with a fall. So, I am pretty sure it was a failed love. That we loved each other, but that something went wrong.
What happened, which was not the terribly wrong thing that took away our love, was this:
We went to a ballet. It was almost that simple.
Other people went with us, friends, family members, they all joined us. We had enough tickets, that we all sat in a row, alongside one another.
I had family there, she had family there.
I had friends there, she had friends there.
We both were surrounded by other people.
I hated and hate the ballet.
It felt like something forced upon me, like life itself.
What I mean is, metaphorically, no one chooses to be born.
But once born… we choose to live.
I did not want to be there, but, there I was.
And during the entire show, I only remember two corresponding sensations, which, combined, informed me about something… taught me something about this experience I never would have chosen to live through.
To my left, I felt, repeatedly, an elbow in my ribs, and, whenever I turned, the person to my left kept saying, repeating, “Look at that DANCE!”
To my right, I felt, repeatedly, an elbow in my ribs, and, whenever I turned, the person to my right kept saying, repeating, “Look at that DANCER!”
So I, listening to both of them, trying to learn from both of them, how I might best enjoy this living experience, looked at what we were all there to witness and experience.
And, dancer, or dance, it all looked the same to me.
J.T. Whitehead has Bachelors’ degrees from Wabash College in English & Philosophy and a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Purdue. He earned a law degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He spent time between, during, and after schools on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a delivery man, a book shop clerk, and a liquor store clerk. He was Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, briefly, for just five issues: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. He is a Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author (2011), a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet (2015, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020), and was the winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize (2015). He has published over 350 poems and prose works in over 125 literary journals and small press publications. Whitehead lives with his sons Daniel and Joseph in Indianapolis, where he practices law by day and poetry by night.