Truncheons & Bathyspheres

I live in a parallel universe of my own devising.  I live most of my days in a dank cell, in the bowels of a vast complex of cells.  I am allowed to write for fifteen minutes every afternoon, on the refuse recycled from the land beyond the barrens.  The pipes on the ceiling here drip at all hours, and the walls are covered in sweat.

On occasion I hear others moaning from distant cells, but never a sound from the cells immediately adjacent to mine.  I’ve never seen any of other inmates here, only the gloved hands and truncheons of my captors. They allow me out for a day once a month.  On these occasions I visit my childhood home, which is now a pile of muddy detritus and gnarled rebar.  I also visit the site of my former school, which is now a massive dung heap.  Really, a dung heap.  A heap of dung one hundred feet long and thirty feet high now.  Cattle wander about freely since they were infected with the plague and deemed holy beings.  The inhabitants of this neighborhood have been tasked with building the dung heap into a 100 by 100 foot totem to our shantytown — the last refuge before one enters the barrens.

When I tire I sleep on a patch of rocks where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex — to my cell smelling of urine and fear.  I love my little hole.

In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend.  And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity… 

And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.

Imagine that I move through the world inside an untethered bathysphere.  My bathysphere is diving bell yellow, something jaunty from an ancient memory, like the Beatles “yellow submarine” if you will.  You see, “jaunty” is not a natural predisposition for me, but I try. It’s the “power of positive thinking,” I remember a charlatan repeating.  I believe that charlatan was my father — and so I delude myself with repeating this moment after moment.  In any case, there is a wheeled hatch in my bathysphere.  It’s at my feet, and I choose what and who to allow to inside.  And in this manner the things I allow inside become the subject of my consciousness, and only at this point — once inside — does something truly exist.

And don’t fret, stranger.  It’s not as if you’ll get flattened or knocked cold by a large metallic orb as I float into a room or walk by you on these desolate streets — no, in this physical dimension we actually inhabit the bathysphere; it allows for immateriality and transparency — you can walk right by me completely unaware of my universe in the bathysphere.  But you might feel a slight tug in or near your heart and you’ll surely inhale a few molecules of sadness.  Otherwise you’d have no idea of my strangeness.  I am as innocuous as any other person from the outskirts of the barrens.

Thank you for stopping to listen.

Be on your way.

What I’m Reading:

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

— Stanley Kunitz / “End of Summer”