New Writing at Webdelsol

Chapbook Selections From Web Del Sol

From Three Goat Songs

Michael Brodsky

Not a particularly long time was required to discover their symptoms were opposed. She had a predilection for well-fed goats whereas he was drawn toward the mineral, or rather, whenever it was a question of the mineral and nothing but the mineral very quickly it became a sliding toward total dispossession.
     More accurate to say her predilection was anticipatory horror in the face of his inevitable surrender to their charms. No point in telling her he positively loathed goats, well fed or not: Her symptom had already learned to be intolerant of the specifications of his own: His symptom was inconceivable to her own, which had its own course to run and intended to run it.
     Each time they went out, with or without the little ones, into the sunny seaside air she tormentedly hammered out her symptom into a statement to the effect that now for the last time only did she need to be told he would never abandon her for a well-fed goat. How explain that this presentation of still another request for reassurance as the absolutely very last request was but the surest perpetuation of such requests.
     Sometimes he was amused by the way she clutched at his wrist when a well-fed goat descended the steeps before them in the direction of the sea. Or rather, affected in some way by her clutching he chose or was compelled to call the affection amusement. She was forever on the lookout for udders wriggling amid the offal heaps adjacent to their borne ground. Sometimes he caught sight of a goat long before her but made it his business to turn away, pretending not to have seen. Though it could be hard pretending with the animal busy urinating all over its beard. At any rate, busy was not the right word since in such cases the animal was invariably distracted by an odor of alfalfa, or timothy, or peanuts, or sudan grass emanating from a nearby browse. His momentary vision of himself--in her--in somebody's--vision--as one who had missed a goat, did not care enough for the goats of this world not to miss a goat--filled him with momentary delight. At once he became the innocent her--somebody's--mistake made him out to be.
     When sucking at the surface of the mineral world he was also innocent--but only in her unseeing presence. In that presence the sucking did not register as anything but laudable nonsurrender to the goats. Outside her presence his connection to the mineral world could only assume a somber canted unspeakableness. And there was no emptying it out, this connection, this unspeakable connection, it was always regenerated. Rather, connection or retreat from connection was always different. Rather, he who worked hard to work himself up to believing that talk about the connection would be equivalent to a being cured of said connection found that the connection was always taking new forms that invalidated, rendered completely irrelevant, any previous saying about the connection--had there been any such saying. What began over and over to smell like an outworn and unfashionable connection exhausted by the words he one day anticipated speaking suddenly revealed itself as the newest of new connections, albeit at the very heart of the old connection, clearly subsumed by the old yet completely new. Of course all this made sense only within walking distance of a confessor. But he wanted to steer clear of confessors for in actual fact he did not want to tell his confession. Without ever having known confessors already he had had more than his fill of the subspecies. With such a connection at his fingertips there could never come a time when he need fear no longer shocking the ever delicate sensibilities of the confessor he abjured with all his heart and soul.
     For example, a sudden penchant for an upsurge of rock right at the water's edge--an upsurge flayed by tiny lichenlike hairs of the same fulvous or gamboge as the fissure whence they grew--the rawness of this penchant made all previous avowal irrelevant, beggared all previous exorcism. For here was a version of the symptom undeducible from and insusceptible to the reassurances appropriate to any prior avowal. Here at last was a version of the symptom--the connection--for which there never could be words, a category for which all words found could only qualify as the easiest camouflages to sleight of hand, as cunning makeshifts not only duping confessor but cutting off speaker from perpetual tangency to the intrinsic unsayability--that is, the very heart, the very soul--of the connection. He was learning that once he found himself talking about the connection he could be sure he was no longer in, of, the connection.
     Yet even if not to a confessor sometimes he had a hunger to rehearse the addiction--this was what it was--to, for example, the tiny hairs that striped the smooth rock faces smoothed even further by spume there where the incoming tide was briniest. She did not care. It was his--in her eyes overriding--craving for the well-fed goats, able to prink and preen in a manner impossible for one whose life was as difficult as hers--it was his overriding penchant for the goats--so hypnotizing and against whose charms he was axiomatically powerless--that concerned her. Pretending to take her madness seriously as they were returning at dusk with the little ones after a visit to the old folks he insisted it was still not clear whether he was charmed by the goats themselves or simply overwhelmed by, appropriated to, their desire for him, which appropriation, he might add, obliterated and rendered laughable any question of an answering desire. Her worry was all he got for answer.
     Off he would go, whenever he got the chance, or made the chance, far from goats and rocks, collapsing in a blind field spangled with horseflies. In vain he tried to daydream, about a particularly enticing rock face, about what life might be like unburdened by rock faces or rather connection with rock faces or by the reproaches of a yokemate convinced of his connection with goats--in vain he tried to pursue these lines of thought. For they always converged on the same fantasy: Spotting him from a distance routing among his byproducts here she was descending to be sure of catching him in the act. And what was her surprise when she found him all alone, entertaining neither goats nor lichen-encrusted rock fissures, not that she would have balked at his entertaining lichen though strictly speaking she could be abandoned in the name of lichens as well as of goats. But for her there was abandonment and then there was abandonment and abandonment in behalf of lichens did not have the same tonality as abandonment in the name of goats. Seeing himself through her eyes as she advanced upon him--more than exonerated, exalted in his innocence--completely incapable of deciphering the urgency of such an advance--this was the image to which he over and over again returned.
     One day as they were sitting at the edge of the road and at the very moment when she was about to speak of their future a flock of well-fed goats approached, slueing more than they scurried, even if scurrrying was in fact their prime function. She clutched his arm. In response he said he had absolutely no interest in goats. She nodded: You say that but deep down. He cut her off, though she had already cut herself off. He felt the upsurge of an exultation at the prospect of now shocking, now reassuring her: I cannot conceive of myself not loving smooth fissured rock faces streaked with fine hairs. And as he spoke something new dawned on him: I mean, once I perceived such a craving could exist I could not conceive of not being saddled with such a craving. She tilted her face. This meant: How did you learn of such a craving. This meant: With what kind of foul company were you obliged to consort to end up learning of such a craving. Proudly he replied, I learned of it from myself and myself alone, with all due respect, that is, for the hysteresis between the learning and the craving when said craving is, so to speak, just a craving to skin the boundaries of such a craving. Taxing her perplexed impatient eagerness for him to continue he did indeed continue but as he went about continuing he realized the signal to continue came not singly from her but from their--his and her--collusion with the impatient eagerness of the landscape, rocks and all: It seemed inconceivable that I should not be saturated with such a craving--tainted by such a craving--for to be saddled with such a craving is to be connected to nonbeing, is to not be. Whereas the craving--the symptom--the hunger--the connection you saddle me with--the craving your symptom decrees that I am to be saddled with belongs to the far larger domain of the comprehensible and makes me member of a community to which I do not wish to belong. Maybe I belonged to it once, maybe never. Seeing her weep I relented, adding: The only problem is I can't decide whether I developed the craving without exposure to outside influence or stumbled upon it in the wilderness. No matter the provenance: suffice it to say I have developed this unappeasable craving for the melancholy ruthlessness of smooth rock faces and in a spasm appropriating it--the craving--have kept it warm inside me ever since. Yet even though I am one with my craving-- whenever I see outside me configurations in any way resembling the configurations that effected the initial appropriative spasm I cannot help feeling what I see miraculously mimics, coincides with, what after all has been incontrovertibly born deep within, has its roots, its origin, deep within that within. She said, obviously still intent on the goats: Yes, how explain the craving born from within but not the target of the craving. How explain the target of the craving being contaminated by, assimilated to, the autochthonousness of the mother craving. He mused: For all practical purposes they too--the rock faces--are now autochthonous to my depths. He tried to explain how he was still dully wondering that anything in the outside world should end up resembling, would dare to resemble, those spiky sullen forms germinated--proposed from--within. Her sidelong look told him clearly he had forgotten that it was in the outside world he was fint scbooled in these--his--forms and in how to excruciate along the contour of such forms. And so my wonderment, he retoned, stunned and spasmed surprise, that such forms can exist out then, in perfect mimicry of those within, perfections long incubated with no help from the outside world, this stunned surprise has become in fact, according to you, my desire, my craving, my symptom. I don't hunger--always according to you--after the rock faces themselves but after their blatant daring to be identical with precursors living, lived, within. She looked pained, not so much for herself as for meaning. For such a construction defaced the halidom of meaning as she recalled it from her last stint of consecration. For here was meaning no longer determining the trajectory of words required to capture it but itself forced to yield to the caprice of their convulsed proliferative inbreeding.
     In other words, he went on, even if she was once again living only for the receding buttocks of the goats or their advancing udders, my desire, my hunger, my craving, my connection is nothing more than my astonishment that the archetypes of that desire--that hunger, etc., can subsist as run-of-the-mill ectypes. Then vindictively, as if to stump and do him in for overpopulating her life with goats and rocks when all she had ever really wanted, etc.: And what is the connection between finding it inconceivable that you should not love these hairy-fissured spume-spluttered rock faces and finding it inconceivable that these very rock faces may be found without the incubation of the eternally postponed possibility of their manifestation sometime in the near future? Or was she shaming his failure to generate another meaning of the sort that had just capsized defaming her long cherished conception of meaning? Was she developing a craving for just this sort of meaning? Everything went blurry, bloody. He looked at her, hurt, not so much at her asking the question as at her asking it here and now, at this point, of such evident vulnerability and bloody, blurry confusion. He would have preferred her asking later on, when the question could be linked if not to an answer then to some equally potent counterquestion capable of defusing its potency. This was a question outside their story, a question aimed at his depths that had no business being mixed up with the story as he intended to contour its unfolding, shear its multiplication. All he could think of in the way of answer was: Sometimes I pretend I don't love the rocks, their smooth unwrinkled recession from my drunken touch. Sometimes I tell myself I am still making up my mind about their faces. But before I can begin to make up my mind about whether or not to make up my mind I find myself actively inventorying, absorbing eagerly through such inventory, certain . . . secondary sexual characters perceptible to and inventoriable by only a seasoned aficionado. Before I have made up my mind whether or not to offer habitation to the craving--the desire--the hunger--the symptom, it has already taken up residence and more than residence, has gone ahead and eaten up too too many qualia--golden ears of wheat on a swaying boulder, for example--to allow my wavering any credibility.
     He looked out to sea and hoped his apparent reflective calm would shame her into calm too. After all, they had everything to live for. There is something about the way certain rocks--not goats, rocks-- stare out to sea in the sunlight even when there is no sea, no sky, no crystailine sea air but only a miasma--one third stench, one eighth vapor--that fills me with rude, even lewd, delight. And it pains me-- that totally absorbed staring. Or rather, my prostration before the staring is inseparable from pain. Yes, the very condition of my observa- tion becomes the occasion of my downfall. It is not that I crave the rock faces per se staring outward. I crave their absorption as a contemptuous repudiation. I crave not the rocks but the rocks' not needing me in the way I need them nor in any other way, since here they are looking out to sea, for all intents and purposes at sea, and here I am looking to them as if their very absorption was the sea's "inscrutable immensity." She looked as if "I crave not the rocks but the rocks' not needing. . ." was yet another desecration of the memory of meaning, recruitment of the always reliable paroxysms of syntax to the ultimate dismemberment of meaning as any self-respecting citizen had every right to know it. She replied: Although your dream is ostensibly to undergo a fruitful collaboration between my symptom, whatever that is, and your symptom, whatever that is, in actual fact you want to slough as fast as possible the viewpoint--the observations--your symptom has made possible, that is to say, impossible to ignore, in order to have done with them and by extension with the symptom and by surextension with any agonizing interconnection with my symptom and by sursurextension--in tandem--with me. For you the symptom--the craving--the hunger--the desire--the frothing at the mouth is the sum of occasional verses to which it has given vent and if only you can find a way to run out of such verses you thereby run out of the symptom and out of any craving to run with me.

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