City of God (36 page)

Thus the term
film language
is an oxymoron. The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it de-literates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out. You see that lit and dressed scene, hear the music, see the facial expressions, bodily movements, and attitudes of the costumed and hairdressed actors—and you understand. Moviegoing is an act of inference. In the profoundest sense, films are illiterate events. This may be why some of the most fanciful prose written today is written by film critics, who assiduously address themselves to films that are hardly worth the attention. Why? It may be the dreariest, stupidest of movies—it doesn't matter. You get from the critic a full and cogently articulated reaction. However unconsciously, the critic is defending verbal culture, subjecting the preliterate or postlit-erate filmgoing experience to the extensions of syntactical thought.

Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases, and explosions.

—In today's E-mail:

Everett: The desert is where Pike went wrong. It's here in Metro-Diaspora. Whatever it is, it's in this bloody, noisy, rat-ridden, sewered, and tunneled stone and glass religioplex. Isn't that what the sign says?
But therefore visible only to the unhoused derelict mind. So I'm quitting the church.

God bless

Pem

—You say all history has contrived to pour this beer into my glass

and given the mirror behind those bottles its particular tarnish,

But I notice your war stories are secondhand your father's bio, your brother's, but not yours.

You're one of the lucky bastards who seem to have slipped the formation

that has marched quick-time to this moment.

Hey, good buddy, you see this chair?

Let me roll back a moment from the table— you see it now?

I come here because of the dark blue light, morning or noon it's permanent night in here.

The regulars, they know what I look like, they don't stare

I'm just another rummy with his reasons.

The bartender, he's used to me

Not many people come in off the street to stop and make me feel pitiful

I rev myself up with booze and attitude

And the sad, jeaned lady at the bar's end smoking her Marlboros,

She don't care, she gives me a smile,

There's times if she is feeling sorry enough for herself

she will get down from her bar stool and wheel me to that room in back and kneel before me

and perform her sacramental deference in the way of women from time immemorial.

And for a few moments there is no goddamn history, which if you think about it

is an infinite series of befores and afters, as in before, when I had legs, and after,

Or when I still had a spleen and then didn't,

Before I was gut-shot and lay rotting in my own shit in the elephant grass in the sun, and after,

And so on, including when I still had an asshole and now don't.

But this last time that she was kind to me I thought of the little whores of Saigon who laughed as if they really liked whoring and who fucked as if they liked fucking

And who we thought of as meat, who were meat War meat, like us.

And now I don't know if it will work anymore this good lady's back-room act of grace

Any more than morphine when you can't do without it.

I mean my history may finally have found me out here hiding in the blue bar of my illusory freedom.

Oh man you want a war story. . . I don't know.

I don't know how to tell stories

I can try to tell you how we lived over there but if I speak of it in words and sentences I will be lying.
I should speak in tongues

So that it will be God recounting what I have done and have had done to me.

Maybe He can make a story of it, maybe He can make it His story.

All suffering is distinctive

It does not cross, there is no synapse firing soul to soul,

Christ or no Christ,

And the best we can come up with is compassion.

Fuck compassion.

I know the Second World War was no picnic

But the G.I.'s, the worst off, who've spent their lives in V.A. hospitals

Maybe they've found solace, justification, having fought for a cause, having won,

Which gives them a means of forgiveness for the state they're in,

And that by this time no one gives a shit.

As a grunt I can't find that in myself.

Not my honor, but my sanity,
what's left of my mind,

depends on my not forgiving.

I think I hate the ones who now apologize for sending me in there

Almost as much as I hate the righteous ones who won't apologize
for their realpolitikal fantasies
that sent me in there.

It is wrong to think we fought a war.

That was no war, it did not begin as wars begin it did not end as wars end

Everything that made military sense was irrelevant

Who lived, who died, who won or lost the day changed nothing,

It did not matter, there were no conclusions to be drawn

No victories that stayed victories

No advances that were met with retreats that weren't advances.

The worst inflictions of overpowering armaments

Left a temporary stillness in the dunned hills some phosphorescing blue and green bird feathers rising on the smoke

No it was no war, no organized animosity of the social states

It was just some of us dropping in travelers condescending

to the satanic realm of the earth

Where the trees were armed,

and the runners of the colonies of ants drummed the ground

and the naked children crawled under the dazed water buffalo

to drink the blood dripping from their teats.

We shot the monkeys down from their green canopies and like panthers

Crawled slung between our hunched shoulders through their tunnels

to catch them and kill their pretty faces.

Meanwhile parts of me were being shot away and no sooner was a piece of my flesh plopped in the grass

than some hairy rat had clamped on its bloody morsel.

Sometimes the earth heaved up and rained green salads of forest flora bats and cricket crisps and mantis heads.

Spumes of yellow rice shot up like fireworks,

Radios crackled with unintelligible speech

I heard the cries and bleats and shrieks and cockadoodle doos

Of predators and prey fulfilling their genetic destinies

Beetles and wasps alighted on blood turned viscous under the sun and stuck to it

Bird-size butterflies trembling to lift off the blackening blood pools of dying men

Flights of yellow jackets driven to frenzy with the smell of rich-blooded human compost

And oh the leeches how shrewdly they snuck into ears and urethras of the exhausted
sleeping their watch through the blessed night beside the river,
there to expand.

One man took a machete to his cock

Another living host I shot at his request.

I was no angel, good buddy,

I'd kill whoever needed to be killed

I was an executioner, I lived in satanic bliss,

I could break their skinny backs with my boot

I could heave their tidy beings from the chopper a thousand feet in the blue sky

This was not war, this was life as it is and was and always will be

As God gave it to us
as he gave us
the violin spider
chief arachnid of the satanic kingdom
of the earth.

You know about the violin spider, of course.

The pure thin high-pitched tone it emits

during the spinning out from itself of its web of a particularly thick calibration akin to the gut strings of the violin.

This web is woven between tree trunk and forest floor

where it is meant to trap not flying insects but large crawling pests and small animals.

A man who unwittingly walks into the web of the violin spider

finds that it folds to his weight as would a hammock.

And then the spider itself is upon him, a furred creature with serrated legs who spins around him with incredible speed a tightly woven binding over which it simultaneously spreads a gluey impasto that conveys a burning sensation to the skin.

In seconds the man, try as he might, cannot release himself,

He is still holding his weapon but finds he cannot
pull the trigger

He cannot wield the knife in his hand

He must struggle helplessly as the creature wanders over him, his hands and wrists, his face his neck

Doing a bit of intelligent military reconnoitering before it chooses the tenderest place to bite into with its mandibles and begins to suck through its proboscis the blood, its food.

What's that you say? It sounds like no spider you've ever seen?

Explain then the browned desanguinated bodies I found
lying flat, like bladders, on the forest floor.

Will there be a monument to the victims of the violin spider of Vietnam?

How can there be—monuments are for wars

And this was not a war, though we Americans thought it was

But life objective, impartial, giving itself to everything that demands it, from woolly mammoths to the sulfide worm

crawling on the fulminating stacks at the bottom of the deepest sea.

When we consider the varieties of life on this Satanic planet,
in what assorted shapes and colors, of what skills and blunt intentions to survive, we can hardly congratulate ourselves for being one of them,

Can we, good buddy?

—How does it work, I said.

The question amused him: Well, Everett, it's as you'd expect, they do it at dawn in the courtyard, you're standing at attention, the drums roll, and in front of the priestly ranks the bishop steps forward, he yanks off your crucifix, tears off your collar, and bends your fingers back.

I thought as much.

It's just an exchange of letters. You tell them what's in your heart. They decertify you.

Will I see those letters?

I don't know. Maybe. Why not? Not all that much to see.

So what did you say?

That they all know what I know, none of it holds up, the difference being the value to them of the symbolism and the church built around it—it's there, it has a historical constituency, it's a system that works for people. And as far as I'm concerned that's no longer enough.

So that's that.

There's a committee supposed to try to talk you out of it. I told them not to bother. They were grateful.. . . I know what you're thinking, Everett.