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Cultural Instructions:Prosopis juliflora, velutina, glandulosa, pubescens
No more silence. Do not be confused by the simple words. The dust is now being blown from the throats, the sap rises in the gorge. There is nothing to be done about these matters since the seed has been cast, the moist earth licks the pods, and now the life comes on. The parts that seem familiar will turn out not to be familiar. Things have changed under the hand and grown new branches in their new settings. The stem lurks underground. Cut it down to a stump and it multiplies trunks. Cut a branch and gain twenty more. The pod of the seed lacks a suture and must rot off. The tree is made for hard times. The entire thing is rooted and now lives with deep hungers. The tempo has changed also.
As the tree grows, the roots sink deeper into the ground and the bone people are sucked to the surface, dead presidents, living dead artists, dead friends and men made newly dead by the force of law. Naturally, a living tree has a rhythm, the thing we call seasons, and this too is present and uncontrollable.
All this leads to an inevitable place, just as a seed contains within it the ancient tree with vast limbs.
Weather will be a factor. Watch for blue mists. Expect drought. Know the flood is coming. Read menus carefully. Open your mouth.
And be warned: "Mesquite is yet the most feared and hated tree that grows, a menace that is every year extending its ravages, spreading desolation where once was wealth"
Entrance Wound
Come with me and we will sink into our pleasures. No, we won't do a line or have a toke or open that bottle. Those things are nice but they never go far enough. The nose goes, the weed takes too long and the liver must be considered, don't you agree? This time we will get ripped and it will not be an idiom or a metaphor. This time we will take a harder drug, one denounced by the authorities.
I have deliberately picked a room for our work. The room is very small and American sterile, it is the perfect room for exploring our secret places and stirring the strong juices that lurk in our bodies. Edward Hopper lived trapped in this room and painted it again and again. When I was a child in the years just after World War II, special years when people were grateful to have survived and yet wounded and numb, I lived in rooms like Edward Hopper painted, sterile, lonely rooms where silence reigned and yet an explosion of violence was always close by, perhaps lurking in that closet or crouched behind the sofa. My father took me one day to the Chicago Art Institute and I saw Hopper's paintings, or so I remember, and they were among the first paintings I understood and felt. They were my world and my terrors and my loneliness.
So these matters go back a long ways with me, as I'm sure they do with you. And I am talking about the senses, about feelings, about the joy of song and the punch of death. Not certain types of feelings but being able to feel, and more important, being willing. I have been under siege, yes, I admit it, things have at times overwhelmed me. And you cannot deny that this has also happened to you. The sex crimes took their toll, so did the dying. We fled to the country and that was good but never enough. Besides, we could not stay. Country living is behind us, we can only visit or remember that part. The war came also. We felt love, we fell into the cooking, we worked very hard in the garden where we created a lover that rubbed us raw and drowned us in perfume. These things are only part of why I am talking to you from this small room with a cable television and fifty-five identical channels. The rates are posted on the door, plus the essential directions for escape when the fire comes to char our bodies. In this room, I can finally remember that it started with a tree. Come, we will go into the wood.
I met the tree long ago and have remained a slave to its song. And now it is bringing me back from the dead. My life is within the wood. Against the grain, but within the wood. I am an agnostic about God. I can believe in God but I can never trust Him. I waste no time on prayers, not a single moment do I spare for such a thing. It is not that I think prayers go unanswered, I actually have no idea. It is that I refuse to listen to such answers. They cannot be enough to explain what I see. I will not be cajoled into accepting the hurt. I refuse such blandishments. The hurt is real, and the answered prayers are not enough, not nearly enough. I can live the sin, aspire to the virtue, lust for grace. I am a fallen man and I know it, and I accept the torture of living this fact. But I will be damned — and they say I surely will be damned — if I will accept God's answer. So I do not pray. Nor do I worship. I can love, I can comfort. I am the tree struggling in the hot ground of my desert. No bended knee and please no messages from on high. The messages must come from here, from the ground itself or away with them. That is what I learn from the mesquite, my brother-in-arms.
Do not be confused. We are not druids here or pantheists or fairies in a sylvan whirl of velvet and chimes. True, we sing, we have our song. But no chants, never chants. Or ceremonies. We believe in cells and protoplasm and sex, a great deal of sex, and stench and dirt and slime and screams in the night. We are not of the peaceable kingdom here, and we have little peace. We contain a great deal of anger and even more of violence, the hand reaches out at all hours for the throat. We wait for the moment to strike back and yet we struggle, struggle each and every second, to still that hand, to open that fist into a warm palm and caress the face. To not reach for that gun, cool, black, the barrel short, the action fully automatic, the rounds — nine millimeter — resting in a banana clip like so many fangs anxious to tear flesh asunder. We are not sinners in the hands of an angry god since we do not have that trust and do not pray, and when we see a burning bush, we put out the fire. But we can accept the storm, the pitiless sun, the rot and then the dust. And we don't ask why, that is our wisdom, or at least the wisdom of my brother the mesquite and the one I reach toward every dusk and every dawn and sometimes in the blink of midnight.
Imagine this: a world of tongues and caresses, a constant touching of the genitals, a world hidden like the planet Venus from common view by the clouds of scents steaming off our desires, a world obscene with appetite and orgasm and strong spices and drenched in chilies. That is the world of mesquite. And it follows me everywhere because I am of the wood.
Recently I was in the city of New York to talk of the pope. They say he is senile now, but this I do not know. Anyway, I was not to speak to his mental acuity in his dotage but to his encyclical on the Culture of Death. This felt odd. I sat there in the Church of the Incarnation while the cameras rolled and a woman outside the eye of the lens asked me question after question about this pope and his fury about the Culture of Death. She was very quick with her tongue, a woman rich in agendas and welded to her cell phone.
The day before I had been hanging out with a United States senator as he wrestled with the wisdom of some war in the Balkans. I had followed him like a shadow for vote after vote, committee meeting after committee meeting, been allowed into the tent as it were while the elect, the hundred solons of Senate, kicked the matter of war and peace around like a soccer ball and hoped for a goal. At night I stayed in a very good Washington hotel, one rich with old woods and marble surfaces, a place expensive and generous with fine meats and vintage wines. One evening I drank with a Frenchman, an oil executive actually, who had a grandfather driven from Belgium by the German onslaught of World War I, a father born as a refugee on the march as his grandmother fled the armies during the gore of August 1914, and this Frenchman, a Catholic naturally, believed two things absolutely: that this Balkan war must be fought lest the demons of European history break loose and run amok once again as they had in 1914 and that this pope was obviously senile. This second point he would give no ground on, no matter how long we talked, no matter how many fine bottles of cabernet we drank. And as we talked and settled gratefully into our drunkenness, images of that Balkan war played across the television screen like a sporting event.
Finally, after three hours, the Frenchman caved in, caved in I believe to the wisdom of mesquite, and talked of his chief passion in life, cooking. Like myself, he falls asleep at night reading cookbooks — that tongue wet with hunger again, always that tongue. He had just been out to Texas on oil matters and bought some fine chilies to take home to his kitchen in the south of France. He said I must come see him and his family, we would cook and let the world drift away into its madness.
The next day I left him and the senator and went to that church in New York for my meeting with the Culture of Death. They taped me for two hours as a gentle rain fell on Manhattan. I struggled to find words to connect the pope's Culture of Death with the world as I know it and finally, just before we ended the session, I lost my temper and said that any fool can see what the Culture of Death means, see it in our uncaring faces, see it in the gluttony of our markets, see it in our denial of how most of the earth's billions live or barely live, see it in our chemically charged and neurotic stabs at peace. I said it is not my fault that this demented old man in a dress sees this clearly, that this medieval mind grasps the true emptiness modems ignore. Afterward I walked thirty blocks in the rain, workers hurrying past me on their way to dreams of a Friday night, and finally surrendered to a bar and wound up drinking until two in the morning. A few days later, the producers called and said the last few minutes of my taping were strong and fine and just what they needed for, well, maybe thirty seconds of airtime.
Copyright (c) 2002 Charles Bowden
