The Bus Stops Beyond Language
The Bus Stops Beyond Language
A man believes in words. Always writing some letter or another and usually to some old teacher, school principal or appropriate other authority figure. He woke and thought of letters he'd like to write. The letters would expose (more or less) the reader's own world made from words. He decided to use obscenity. Words have power, he thought."Dear sir," he began. "Words have power." He paused then demonstrated with some choice four-letter examples. He'd have to deliver the letters in person, though. For it would be like the fascination with not so much the naked body, but the naked reaction, when interrupting a shower, or a shit.
This came to him on the crapper. Why call it a toilet? Why indeed. A word gets its meaning from the mind that uses it. It's all mirrors and smoke, he thought. The bird-chirp, the bicycle, the sun and the moon are ideal illusions, nothing more than simple words.
In this way he mixed his concrete. "Fluid," he thought. The world is wet." And he ironed the idea. "My thoughts are like fish," he decided. But do they smell like fish? Are they slippery? "No. I simply mean that they swim around."
And so they did. In whimsical patterns. Splashy patches of plasmodium color, unfathomable like the shadowy undersides of autumnal clouds, the dark forms commingling beneath the sheath blue and dubious purple shades of the stony roof of his mind. Suddenly a FLASH. Apocalypse, as if the idea itself were opiate enough to extract his succulentest essence. Hhyeeeoop. His body, like so much dry skin...flaked away. "the world is nothing more than words," he said.
Two hours later he was hit by a bus.
OR
A man steps onto a bus. A recalcitrant bus: refusing to stop at certain signs, stalling and breaking down, always already late. The bus rumbles and bumps, jarring a spherical spot in the back of the man’s mind. He rubs the spot like an Indian worry stone.
In his palm the stone feels the world. He strokes his thumb over the polished face of the pebble; the stone lets him into its bigger picture. Pools of smooth liquid bubble forth on the surface. He dives in. "I'm splash-dancing in the primordial soup," he cries. The creational big-bang just rang in my eardrum, an echo so full of the juices of the universe. "Like a sponge, I soak the juices up." I'm wringing them out now:
A fat bird expresses my smallest thought, a thin one
does the same. Disturbed, they both fly away, but soon
return, unconcerned. Me too. A duck quacks. Me too.
Prisms spectrum across my field of inner-vision. Red,
yellow, green--all red, fade to black--begin soundtrack:
duck quack duck quack, alack alack alack.
But the bus runs on time, adumbrating along, and shuddering toward a stop. The burden of finitude sweeps over him. Like relief from a room he feels an emptying, a dark portending. The bus hisses: an evil symbol he recalls and contrasts to a dream he once had of shedding his skin.
In the dream the sun dissolved the clouds overhead, not unlike the cells of skin magnified beyond the billionth power, until each cell is a world isolated and whole in its connection to the multiple layers and innumerable other cosms that make up our physical shells. I step inside the exploded view: The sky enfolds me, surrounds me, lifts me to its arms and kisses me. Like a child's bright eyes I dilate in the sky.
And the motion of the wheels begins to soothe; signals a memory. The hallway of the Roma-Nizza express train is put to well use. Solemn thinkers think, perched on the foot-square chairs that fold out from the walls. My light comes from behind too small curtains trying to hide a heated compartment; all the compartments are full, half the aisle seats are out, and the lucky ones are just standing, looking out. A near-full moon is only rarely covered by misty Italian clouds and the ground is mostly fog with trees sticking out. Rooftops and houses swim in the mix.
bright fire dragon's eyes appear in the sky above our train, warning flying creatures of the track's high tension wires; the silver white crackles splashing across the black sky above, telling voltage and danger. A city approaches, a stop, maybe a compartment for me. No. It's too good a movie outside. Movement. no woman no cry, Bob Marley hums into my ears. Rocking. Moving. Here little darlin' don't shed no tears. No woman no cry.
The compartment behind me has gone dim; only a pink knowledge from behind the curtain. Orange cherries glow from cigarettes in the hall. Motion. Outside the window, the movie begins again as we rock and sing along the silver European rails.
A village. An old village right on the water. A small cove dotted with cottages and splashed with wet light. The silver moon. The silver ocean and dories on the sand.
Then a bump. A short-lived lift, before a jarring retreat to the seat. And again the shell of the bus contains the man, reticent within its luke medium confines. The bus stops. And goes, running on time but behind schedule, inconvenient, equivocal, hitting every pothole (like a day). Resigned, he decides "there are no days but these," and indeed there aren't.
This thought sparks inspiration. He takes solace in the moment, temporally bolstered by the bolt of human finitude. Ouch. And insignificance. Bummer. A Cartesian moment of insight arrives. "If thoughts lead to dissolution, ought we not to follow?"
His body liquifacts, flows in deep pools of phenomenal wax; protean he swims within the puddles of his melted shell; promethean he leaves the scene. The bus transports him further, "succumb to the short-lived tyranny of the everyday," he cries. The little damage done by time releases me in its very grasp.
And now I try to hold onto the things bigger than words. A corn- eating-cartoon-typewriter-contemplating-moon beam streams into the room behind the eyes--the soul's main hole out of which we look and judge a little upon a little sliver of scene; we pile the ideas with indifferent structures, until full of musty relics the attic, the brain, searches for some loving demon's mercy killing breath from beyond. It's gone.
But outside the window again, a scene: a forest grotto green to the depths and measured out in beats like the magnitude of water bounding down the distant rocks in an endless orchestration of plops and streams, and falling through crevice, the sunshine dapple and glory bounce along with my thoughts. How do I describe it? Babbling.
Until the moment of departure approaches. The bus slows and horizons stretch like telepathic elastic, expanding and ripping into neon spasms, arcs of interstellar plasm, osmosing and apotheosing upward like amoeba, colored with thoughts of union, expansion. Hhyeeeoop.
The center expands from the core of the being. Centric waves of infinite power ripple away from the body, toward infinity. A euphoric sheen purples the lens of the perception. The bus rolls toward its final stop; the world shimmies; the door opens; transcendence grows viscous outside and in. He hesitates, before knowing we must step off.
The bus is language.
iamdan