A late spring breeze, a concerto of birds, some blue and red, others dun brown and yellow, trilling and chirping like hellcats. A squall of blue sky, fleece white clouds, sheep hobbled to the slaughter, life is unnecessary. A bird perched on a branch in a tree, the branch breaks, the bird plunges to its death. The chirping and trilling stops, birds are surplus, not worth the bother. The man in the hat thinks to himself, to no one, a bird, a cat, a hellcat, all surplus, superabundant, inessential, whether blue, red, dun brown or yellow, not one iota. Birds, he suggests to himself, alone, are devilfish, devilfish with wings and tiny clawed feet. Not even worth the bother of eating, broiling, skillet fried with bacon fat and the green, greenest shallots. A Styrofoam white moon, a fat yellow jaundice whore with fencepost teeth and tiny misshapen feet. Life is unnecessary, a waste of all that energy and good manners.When out walking one day, something the man in the hat did sparingly, he saw a three-legged dog striking its way along the pavement. He let it be, feeling that it was an alms-dog, and should be left to its own discommode and beggary. Some dogs are just not worth the bother. Perhaps, he thought, if I were to catch it a bird, trampling it with the soles of my boots until dead, I could offer it up to the dog, a small benefaction of my own sympathy and selfsameness. The three-legged dog, so he felt, would eat the bird with great relish, teeth clacking, a white slaver frothing its snout. One-eyed dogs mange with feces, lynch tongues cirrhotic with fester and blain; he saw them everywhere, always. Perhaps, he thought, it was his own jaundice eye, a sightlessness that saw only the underbelly of things, dogs, humans and those straggled at the bottom rung of the ladder. The prison that exists within, as some suggest, is a lie, prisons are outward projections, social codes and mores, not bad genes or defective willing. Life is a random series of reoccurring events, many of which we have no control over, a psychotic repetition, duplicitous chicanery. He thought, the man in the hat did, that killing, dressing and eating a dog, one that had no chance of making a go of it, was a blessing for the dog, a way out of a life of repetition and meaningless abjection. The man in the hat, so he felt, was the patron saint of dogs, their benefactor, their profane Jehovah. He relieved them of their suffering, the mange and scourge of their lives’, ransoming them to a world of bounteous food, vast meadows and trampled sedge.
Things, the world of facts, are growing greener, olive drab, emerald, yellow-green, verdant, leafy, an iron oxide greenness. As long as greenness contains itself to nature, to trees and bushes, grasses and flowers, the man in the hat is content, as content as a discontented man can hope to be. Not gangrenous or purulent with ulcers, not fetid green, the augury of rotting and death, but a natural, macrocosmic green, a green that invites wonder and joy. A burgeoning greenness, an elephant frond green, petiole green, a lush forested green, a blissful enchanted greenness that enraptures the eye. Green upon greenness green, green.
Tungsten steel molded to fit round felon bone, a leg gone palsied and numb, deadened, insensate, a drag anchor shoehorned into place with a podiatrist’s speculum. He saw, the man in the hat did, a person tormenting himself down the sidewalk, the demilitarize zone, polder-stepping like a staggered calf. His mother, thought the man in the hat, probably took some antidote, a pillory to ward off vomiting and nausea, a parturition antitoxin. Caudal tails and miserly legs, wee stumps and hogs feet, dwarfed arms, his mother’s retching assuaged and corrected. He remembers a little girl from his childhood who had a hearing box strapped to her chest, an armamentarium of wires and coaxial cables, like spider’s legs, cinched round her back, held in place with a leather halter. A droning staccato, like bees hitting a windshield, emanating from her chest, a cybernetic ritornelle she controlled with toggle switch attached to the front of the box. The girl with the hearing box strapped to her chest heard no birds warbling, no children squealing with delight, tiny feet carrying them across paddocks shimmering with summer rain. She didn’t hear the cars whizzing past, tires fluting gravel onto the neighbor’s front lawns, lawnmowers spitting out stones and cog pins sheared through to white metal. All she heard was a low murmur, vibrations bouncing off her chest, straps caught in clothing too big for someone so small and inelegant. Perhaps, he thought, he could catch a tiny bird, a wren or a chickadee with frail, spidery wings, stomp it to death, panfry it with garlic, fennel and cold-pressed olive oil, wrap it in newspaper, and then offer it to her as a sign of his own empathy for her condition. Perhaps they could eat it together, perhaps on a picnic bench in the park, or behind the Dominion store behind the Waymart. He could unwrap it, spreading it out on the newsprint in front of her, then offer to cut it into ribbons small enough to clutch in her tiny nail-bitten hands. All things were possible, but very few permitted. Those few things that were allowed, tended to be so miniscule and farthing that it wasn’t worth the bother of pursing them even were they placed in the upturned palm of one’s hand. The false impressions that reality left him with, forced the man in the hat to find other ways to make sense of what was so senseless and illusory. Trying to line up what one saw, experienced, felt and heard, was a lesson in the non-receptivity of his mind, his failure to stitch together the material, the phenomenal, with the categories and representations in his head. He allowed himself very little, and those few things he did, sparingly.
