Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (62 page)

Only a generation ago, they would have thought it was the essence of an insane heart to personify an organ, attribute a soul to the part, believe that a cancer of liver or cancer of lung was not extinguished so soon as its malignancy was removed. It would have been considered the core of psychosis to speak of the postoperative cancer communicants of the organ removed. Yet we
were infants who tickled the navel of the moon while suffocating in the loop of our diaper. A line from a poem of Hemingway burned across the funeral festivities of the day.

He broke up with his wife on Labor Day night and knew they would not be together for many a month, many a year, maybe forever. In the morning, after a night of no sleep, he was on a plane to Houston and the sifting of haystacks of technological fact for the gleam of a needle or a clue. And no computer named HAYSTAQ to serve as horse.

It was a long September. He went back and forth between Houston and the mournful memories of the land of the Pilgrims and the cod. Pisces was away, and traveling. In the mend of Indian summer with the crowds gone and the rose-hip bushes in bloom on the dunes, their flowers artful as violet in a pearl, he bought a Land Rover for consolation and took long rides through lands of sand back of town, a corner of Sahara. In the bay, the flats at low tide heard the singing of the clams—dreams of glory at the majesty of oceans emerged in a sigh, a whistle, one could not quite hear the buried song of the clam. And the light dazzled across mirrors of inch-deep water and luminosities of glistening sand—he could almost have packed the literary equipment in for one good year of oil and gesso ground.

There were contracts however. Prose was never so much prose as when constructed with obligation. The more he visited Houston, the more he knew with what unhappiness is not automatic to tell that he might have blundered in accepting the hardest story of them all, for it was a sex-stripped mystery of machines which
might have a mind, and mysterious men who managed to live like machines, and more than once in airplanes, high enough above the clouds to give a hint of other worlds in the gatherings and demarcations of airy attenuated farewell, he came to think again, as he had brooded again and again, on that simple conception of God as an embattled vision which had terrified him from the hour he first encountered the thought around one of the bends of marijuana fifteen years ago. Every other one of his notions had followed from that, for if God were a vision of existence at war with other visions in the universe, and we were the instruments of His endeavor just so much as the conflicting cells of our body were the imperfect instrument of our own will, then what now was the condition of God? Was He trapped in the wound of nature, severed from our existence as completely as the once exquisite balances of the shattered ecology? had that vision He wished to carry across the universe depended altogether upon human mind and flesh in sensuous communication with nature? had radio-by-machine been the cancer of communication? had the savage lived in a set of communions with the invisible messages of nature which we had pulverized with our amplifiers? These days Aquarius carried Frazer’s
Golden Bough
on long trips by plane.

It was the magic of savage metaphor, the science of symbol, it married spiders’ legs to the music of the fingers and the useful frenzy of the rat to the sensors in his hair. It made a wedding between the spiraled-in will of insects forced to focus on a point of tether and the loss of any will-to-escape in the slave. It was pretty, poetic and nonsensical, it was nonsensical. Unless it were not. What if some real exchange between insects, trees, crops, and grains, between animals and men, had lived with real if most distorted power in the first hours of history? What if that Vision of the Lord which had gone out to voyage among the stars had obtained the power to be carried up by the artwork of a bounteous earth exquisite in the resonance of all psyches in its field?—what if radio, technology, and the machine had smashed the most noble means of presenting the Vision to the universe?

What if God wrestled for the soul of man in some greased arena with the Devil, who was now fortified by every emanation from baleful stars beyond the sun—could that be so? What if God, losing cruelly here, and yet gaining there, was in a combat just so crude as the counts of point in a contest. What if, for the sake of a premise, one would assume that the Devil was reconstructing nature with every electronic, plastic, surgery and computer and so had forced the Lord in desperation to descend into the earth and come back with His life in the grass of that most mysterious marijuana, a drug which made one aware of life in the veins at what severe price was not yet known? What if God, aghast at the oncoming death of man in man-deviled pollution, was finally ready to relinquish some part of the Vision, and substitute a vision half
machine, and half of man, rather than lose all? What indeed if the Lord was allowing Himself to be consumed so that the angels and swine of His children who swallowed Him promiscuously each day and night on drugs were able to embark on journeys into the land of the dead, little journeys in through the first gates of the palace of death, and thus giving Himself to the children in the milk of their drugs was, yes, consumed by them each night and thereby relinquished the largest dreams of His future. Such thoughts were an agony of pain if one held them truly, for responsibility was then like a burning of blood, and the time of apocalypse was certainly near. A war of the millennia might yet rest on the shoulders of the young. What an abattoir of brain-splattered substance if they consumed their smack and left the world dirtier than when they began.

Or was it the Devil who had insinuated marijuana into every pot and every garage? Or was the Devil being consumed as well by computers and transistors, by agents of far-off stars? There was also an hour when questions trampled upon questions to leave the ground of thought as much a mire as the gray greasy boot-trampled soil of the moon. Sometimes he even thought that pot and hash and LSD had opened the way to the moon, for they might have voided the spiritual belts of real protection. Perhaps as the runaway slave came back to the master who kept the beetle on a string, so the drugged odysseys of inner space might have altered the zones of the outer. Again and again, staring out his airplane window he would say good-by to these thoughts and stare at clouds.

In the several trips to Houston, he was like a man looking for the smallest sign. For the moon book which he had begun that summer idled now in the gap of Pisces’ absence, and he did not know where to put his feet. One lifted a book like a boulder out of the mud of the mind, and his mind was a pit of wrenched habits and questions which slid like snakes. Where did you put your feet so that finally you might begin?

He found the answer at last in company with his favorite saying. “Trust the authority of your senses,” Aquinas had said. He could
repeat it again, for there was an object at last for his senses, there in the plastic vaults and warehouses of the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston was a true object, a rock from the moon. Looking at it, answers came, answers strong enough to send him back to Provincetown for the fall and winter haul of his book, and a little of the spring. He finished in fact on a day when Apollo 13 was limping back to earth in wounded orbit with two fuel cells gone, its Lunar Module Aquarius never to reach the moon, yes, he finished in an hour when he did not know if the astronauts would return in safety or be lost, but he had written the ending in his mind long before; it came on the day he stood in quiet before that object from the moon, that rock which gave him certitude enough to know he would write his book and in some part applaud the feat and honor the astronauts because the expedition to the moon was finally a venture which might help to disclose the nature of the Lord and the Lucifer who warred for us; certainly, the hour of happiness would be here when men who spoke like Shakespeare rode the ships: how many eons was that away! Yes, he had come to believe by the end of this long summer that probably we had to explore into outer space, for technology had penetrated the modern mind to such a depth that voyages in space might have become the last way to discover the metaphysical pits of that world of technique which choked the pores of modern consciousness—yes, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who knew that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure.

Marvelous little moon rock. What the Devil did it say?

It was not so much. They led Aquarius through one back room after another, and up and down a stone stair or two. The week of exhibiting the rock at MSC was over—it was now on its way to the Smithsonian—and special favors were needed this particular afternoon to obtain a peek. But he reached a place at last he had been in months before, the room with the plate-glass window across its middle where magazine writers had hounded Armstrong
until Armstrong confessed that man explored out as salmon swim upstream, and there on the other side of the glass was no astronaut today, but a small case vacuum-tight on the other side of the divide. He saw the lunar piece through not one glass but two, rock in a hermetically tight glass bell on the other side of another glass with still another hermetic seal. Yet she was not two feet away from him, this rock to which he instinctively gave gender as she—and
she
was gray, gray as everyone had said, gray as a dark cinder and not three inches across nor two inches high nor two inches for width, just a gray rock with craters the size of a pin and craters the size of a pencil point, and even craters large as a ladybug and rays ran out from the craters, fine white lines, fine as the wrinkles in an old lady’s face, and maybe it was the pain of all these months of a marriage ending and a world in suffocation and a society in collapse, maybe it was just the constant sore in his heart as the blood pumped through to be cleared of love, but he liked the moon rock, and thought—his vanity finally unquenchable—that she liked him. Yes. Was she very old, three billion years or more? Yet she was young, she had just been transported here, and there was something young about her, tender as the smell of the cleanest hay, it was like the subtle lift of love which comes up from the cradle of the newborn, and he wondered if her craters were the scars of a war which had once allowed the earth to come together in the gathered shatterings of a mighty moon—there was something familiar as the ages of the bone in the sweet and modest presence of this moon rock, modest as a newborn calf, and so he had his sign, sentimental beyond measure, his poor dull senses had something they could trust, even if he and the moon were nothing but devils in new cahoots, and child of the century, Nijinsky of ambivalence, hanging man Aquarius, four times married and lost, moved out of MSC with the memory of the moon, new mistress, two feet below his nose, and knew he would live with the thought of a visit. All worship the new science of smell! It was bound to work its way through two panes of glass before three and a half billion more years were lost and gone.

The Naked and the Dead

Barbary Shore

The Deer Park

Advertisements for Myself

Deaths for the Ladies

(and Other Disasters)

The Presidential Papers

An American Dream

Cannibals and Christians

Why Are We in Vietnam?

The Deer Park—A Play

The Armies of the Night

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Of a Fire on the Moon

The Prisoner of Sex

Maidstone

Existential Errands

St. George and the Godfather

Marilyn

The Faith of Graffiti

The Fight

Genius and Lust

The Executioner’s Song

Of Women and Their Elegance

Pieces and Pontifications

Ancient Evenings

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

Harlot’s Ghost

Oswald’s Tale:

An American Mystery

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

The Gospel According to the Son

The Time of Our Time

The Spooky Art

Why Are We at War?

Modest Gifts