Been thinking about…Twilight men

These are the things we don’t say. The things we can’t say. The things we won’t say.

My Basset hound, a friendly, dominating lad of only four, nuzzles into the pillow beside my head. Truth is, my dogs rule the house, which is fine. Truth is, my Basset is a strange boy who barks at ghosts so I like him next to me as I sleep.

“Josh is too sensitive. He is an artist. A writer. He won’t fit in with the world.” That’s what my mom said about me years ago. In a world of doctors and lawyers and engineers, all with appropriate career tracks, I didn’t fit. The grand future of my past was a series of orderly boxes and brand names and African violets growing appropriately under the fake sunlight of the new Kroger’s grocery store. We don’t see the failures of our modern majesty because all the dead plants are thrown out after the store closes.

Still, there was a pulsing life in the soil and rock beneath my Illinois feet, a place of deep yellow clay where all the streams ran to the muddy Illinois River, the river where the nation’s great industry sailed barges and where wood ducks still nested, quacking weirdly from overgrown river islands of silt and cottonwood. Back home there were strange worlds beyond the dark that haunted my dreams. My friend Rob understood as he listened to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast and drank beer in his camper down by the quarry. Trains whistled deep in the night and the stars were brilliant, even as a Midwest winter’s wind cleared the last of the summer air, penetrating deep and cold, freezing the earth down to its bones.

The Celts had a name for people like me in society but that name no longer exists, the caste of men who remembered everything and spoke to the animals — the men who were meant to be friends with beggars and kings, the men whom armies endangered at the armies’ own risk, the men to whom the oak trees spoke. But the armies came, then the governments, and desecrated those men and desecrated their memories but at the future’s own risk: a tidal wave of monolith forgetfulness. Same and yet, the devastation over the centuries is real but we have so little point of comparison — condemned only to live in a world gone gray where people are too easily led this way and that by the simple, the easily manipulated, and the ready-to-manipulate. Free will is a sacred rite in any age, as is acceptance of death.

There is great strength in death, dark, sad lessons full of life. We know only this present time which thickly spreads over the dark with cheery confection and meaningless platitude. Now 15 years distant, when I think of my own mom’s death, what comes first to memory is staring through the white lights of Walmart, uncomprehending the white, sugary paper of a thousand Mother’s Day cards and a world which refused to stop spinning even as my own world had.

And yet death comes in many forms, even in simple words: “I won’t help you out again,” my dad smiled before tucking his Bible under his arm and driving to church. “You’re a bad investment.” I drove the big road to the same church some 30 minutes later and fought the urge to steer my truck beyond the edge of a certain stretch of highway where the mountain falls away precipitously. “I don’t want to die,” I kept thinking, “but my balance of life must be paid. I’ve taken too much, cannot give enough to make up for the cost of my continuing to be here.”

Fear won out over this strange logic of accountability and I kept driving. I drove past that spot yesterday afternoon and breathed a silent prayer of relief. Too many good moments have passed since then and for those memories I am grateful. And that deep Ozarks hollow would be a lonely place for my ghost anyway. I could do better.

Just the same, I’ve died too many times since then anyway. These are the moments that remain unspoken. Nobody says a word. It’s too raw, too unsafe, too embarrassing. Respectable people don’t think these things, say these things, do these things.

There’s no space in the world for the shaman, the man who walks between worlds, who is called to live in the threshold between day and night. Instead, only “doctor,” “lawyer,” “engineer.” Despite the spate of trendy, weird job titles today, the same soulless boxes remain. And our next generation has offered no magic, no color, no soul, only a string of bland achievements before death stalks us all. This is the fate of a world without twilight men.