If someone were to ask me what my role is with the STSC I would call myself- perhaps pretentiously- ‘the editor in chief.’ But that doesn’t really capture it. Because I don’t edit these submissions or think I hold much authority. The pieces come fully formed. They, like the writers, are more than ready to go. I’m just a facilitator, a lighting operator in the gods who shines a spotlight on works that deserve to be seen and enjoyed widely.
And so it is with today’s piece, which I would argue is the best thing that Victor has ever written (which you will realise is a big statement once you’ve delved through the archive on his Substack).
If more people read this than would’ve done otherwise then the STSC as a platform has done its job and justified itself.
Enjoy.
TJB.
I came to these gardens to lay my darkness down, to brush my fingers through the wisdom of trees. I came to share my tongue with the strata of boulders and savor their fragrant histories.
I found here companions in caves and quicksand. I found them in shadows of ships – and crying the wet mouths of doorways.
When I am cast from this life into other embraces, find an honest man to carry home, or any child I have touched. Bring them to my bedside; they inherit my tomorrows without ending – and without ending, forgive my imperfect creations.
***
In another past, I met people living as ghosts in train yards of burning pallets and marveled that they still counted their blessings.
Here we are fortunate, an abundance to eat. We blanket our beds with love – and cherish our neighbors.
If you must, think only of those outside the gardens who live in fear of illumination – as if illumination might force a shuttered window of their vision and guide them from the poverty of their thoughts.
***
In hills of Appalachia I walked a long forest. Nightingales put their ballads to breezes and I wrapped my contentment in their choruses. I had hope mankind could retreat from its war.
So I came to know this stillness, this symphony of natural breathing. Days ran like rivers through me and my blood was cleansed.
My blood became a living thing of its own – and when I dipped my mouth in lakes, the water carried me to canyons, cradled me to seas where I crossed a thousand currents and swam the spawning beds of rivers into the thirst of strangers.
***
We are all the man with a family of adorable misfits who cuts my roses and calms his concerns when he plunges his scissors into the soil. His troubles are my troubles and in this we quiet our differences.
No saying how this will end. Life gives us a wheel and we spin it. With twenty nine summers in my eyes, life gave me an encounter and a chance to trust in angels. Like a knife that hurts and heals, I buried this trust inside my chest.
A few moments shall pass when I die to explain that angels have since possessed me.
It’s something you can’t take back.
They flooded my failings with light when my addictions pushed me into the darkness.
***
A boy wandered into the desert without his own desire. He wanted to help. He wanted to shepherd a truth into an unclouded grassland where the perpetrators of falseness would abandon their falseness in shame.
His story continues. A few thousand decades of seeds gave us these gardens. He gave us these gardens.
And yet still I wonder where he has gone. I wonder if he left the world to its own or if he stands outside the moonlight waiting.
***
Where would we be if we didn’t ask questions?
Asleep in the sun or rotting the bottoms of rivers.
I didn’t invent this line of inquiry. I only invented my world. A world of thieves in confession, a world of plentiful plates.
***
My hand was forced to meet my death, forced to embrace life, squeeze its juice. I learned to value the wretched and the doomed.
I might be grabbing a limb here and breaking it over my neck but even those in the thrall of madness are my kin. They came to me when I was naked, when I had nothing but scorn for my birth. They showed me how they slept at night in peace.
And like gods, they made the world in their image. Like patriarchs, they demanded obedience to their vision.
And so in an outbreak of commitment and passion, I prepared for my punishment. I felt ready for the trials of condemnation.
***
When I arose, I entered a kingdom of comprehension. No one is ever prepared. Nothing is honestly ready for today. Today knocks a feeble beggar on the threshold of tomorrow.
Even lies have their purpose. If presidents could not press an untruth from the grapes of their lips, who would kill the foreigners? Who would give their life?
I have lived a million miles of minefields and thrive in the throes of confusion. My determination has carried me to these desert gardens. I need a rest.
***
But a barefoot man sits on the subway steps. Dead or only looming, his hand betrays the existence of his hunger. Mexico City has no broken heart.
Besides, not only the living may show us a truth. Every palm – creased in death or by the sun – has a story.
And sometimes a dream must die.
In San Francisco, I assaulted my own nature when we stepped from the shadows on Van Ness street – and beat the shit out of strangers. May I confess in the heat of Jalisco far removed from those foolish causes that nothing was as it seemed, that none of my friendships gave comfort?
In those days outside the gardens, I granted each false foundation my reckless affection. The mob climbed down my throat and filled my guts. Had I the courage I would have confessed that my anger followed in the footsteps of hatred.
And how hatred could strangle my grace, maim my mercy, then slap me shocked against the killing wall.
***
But let’s turn from the partition and find beauty on the boulevards. Take a look at:
Shoeshine men, trinket vendors, barely bearded drunkards, old ladies, tattooed convicts, heroin hookers, dancers, dog trainers,
painters, unionists, street corner preachers, cancer victims, homeless teachers, car washers, bottle breakers, cops and criminals, mayors, movie star gazers, tailors, carpenters, wine blotched boxers,
ex-marines, street stalkers, animal lovers, young mothers, children with gum for sale, snake handlers, fortune tellers, pineapple peddlers,
zealous critics in the tenement shadows of everything light.
All of them placed another viewpoint in my temperament. They enlarged my capacity for empathy.
And empathy illumes a dark vaulted heart, fills an empty bed with warmth, dampens a heated tongue.
Without it we hurl the needy into deeper wells, imprison the neglected in factories, trample justice with a herd of excuses, and throw families in the gutter to build a coliseum.
***
Imagine a five year old who thinks that truth is absolute. Imagine the ridicule. Imagine a five year old who swears to tell the truth and nothing but the truth for as long as his spirit shall remain.
He cannot see the implications as years grow into decades nor swear to keep to the banks of sensation and observation that flood him daily when gods in senility drool, when warm sands like ants of the desert gardens crawl over his feet, when nations throw spectacle and ritual slaughter from their bridges.
***
In my innocent age I volunteered to kill the enemy of the day. I dotted contracts with duty.
Don’t tell me it was for nothing. I touched the mad face of flags.
And yet still I grieve for what I didn’t do and for friends who burned up their lives and buried their futures. They bled while I wept my regret. They gave what I never could.
***
Many pleasures, the sun warms the roofs. Early morning, men shout in the street below my house, sell their foods and water.
I could gaze upon my sanctuary always, my spirit relaxed and uncoiled. But for chance of birth, I am the woman from Querétaro who begs her children in the street. How I welcome the harmony of her dignity when she smiles a shy elevation of lips, puts her hand out above the street bricks.
***
If I were a sculptor, I would carve a world of perpetual honesty, a world of fidelity with no exchange of blows.
But honesty loiters on hilltops. A family lives in peace. Their house and their children become their world.
They are simple and content – and the same as you and me. With the help of rain, Earth pushed them from seed (long dormant in the garden) and escorted them as they left their primitive desires to find a fresh future.
It may sound like I love everyone and I sometimes do. Yet I still rally my rage at our heartless humanity and summon a mighty impatience for fools.
***
A headline reveals another young man dead. My head packed with relentless obsession and nails, I question the ever changing rationale of war.
Look, I don’t want to create a debate that Fords are better than Chevys, but the kid died for deceit that:
difference is evil
that God is small, has only one name
that enemies may soon burst into the inner chambers of our values when they already share our balconies and beds.
***
Now boys on my street climb the steps to the plaza and shout that old is the same as dead.
But if I may be permitted to say listen, listen:
I have been beneath the cities. I have crawled tunnels and over broken bricks. I have blackened my leather feet. I have been escorted by the flesh of god to a hall of dead Romans, known the accusation that their dust dead eyes delivered to me – and though passed, known fear of their retribution and awe of their power to persuade from the mausoleum that their crimes were kind, compassionate and wise.
One arm gripped by goodness, the other by hate. I have lain helpless on the slab.
But I escaped from a lifetime of catacombs.
***
It’s time to surrender. I say with the strength of scaffolds that my life was worth it. I carried my joys and burdens with vigor.
A reward belongs to those who cast the day into its grave and breathe new life into the night.
Suffering has no god to blame, no deity to shame.
If anything, we create our own cross. From hilltops, when policy makers dictate who will live in ruins and who will slide their shoes over marble floors, we craft responses with our silence. We spread stains into the fabric of our cities.
***
Ordinary people buried under life’s cargos stare at the sky. In the streets where the transports are heavy, they carry their children on their chests in the dark dusk of evening.
Without them, we are nothing, a windswept pile of October leaves. Without them, we have no home.
***
Sometimes a man comes to the end of his life before he dies. He sees ahead a world where bakers continue to make bread, horses continue to trample the grass, bells and steeples continue to call the hour, children continue to tilt their face to the rain.
It’s not hard. When you have received the music of heavens and carried in your cups the incredible seeds of creation, it’s easy to die, to leave your garden to its blooming.
What’s not easy is to feel that underneath the lust, behind the trust in gods who may not give a whit for my legacy that I have been foolish and ill to break bread with 10,000 years that flash before my eyes like bolts of light when I stand upon my terrace and donate my gifts to the indifference of masses who cast from false faded love of popularity suffer.
***
It’s time to take a census. It’s time to consider. I am large, with many wonders and contradictions.
I am evil. I am darkness beneath your umbrella. I am light.
I am mad and sane, have crossed a thousand islands in the sky.
I am mist that rises from mountain valleys to caress your eyes.
I am curves in the road that winds above the river.
I am the bird that pecks you on the head at night.
I am the butterfly that flies from your mouth when you speak.
I am a wing that flutters on the crow when the farmer takes aim.
I am a drop of spring water on your skin.
I am an angry rude spirit and have no hope.
I am Judas as he runs his rope over the branch.
I am an antelope in the field and the grass beneath his hoof.
I wear clothes that Solomon left behind when he ascended.
I hold a bloody birth sheet in my hands.
I preach into the sky and anoint the mud.
I buy a candy from a stranger when I have no hunger.
I am a caravan of wise men on their way to a birth.
I am a long line of ships.
I am a thousand pieces of glass beneath your naked feet, a thousand insistent demands, a thousand chunks of gravel in your throat and all the sweet notes that float from horns and strings in evening as the orchestra of birds and beasts begins to warble.
***
And it’s time to admit this is my closing song. This is more than graffiti talking. I have shared skin with devils, have stretched my grasp to heaven. I have children on the outskirts of Texas and grandsons who play games with their lives.
My fear is that another fraudulent prophet of glory as salvation for your threadbare youth will step to the mic and spew claws from its mouth.
My fear is my grandsons will heed the call, and blindly sound another battle cry.
What can I say to them and all people that I have not already said?
I love you.
I want a better world for you.
May you realize a true and lasting peace.
***
In the beginning, I came to these gardens to lay my darkness down.
In the end, I have dragged you by the hair. I have chewed a hole in my disguise. It’s time to put on my horse legs and ride. Many towns have not yet met me. A score of gods have yet to sympathize or make me red.
In my final fortune of footsteps, a gift of millenniums opens its mouth and bellows my name, and the name of every human being who put their beliefs to the test,
who pried creeds from their shells and like oysters slid them down their throats, who threw back the door when the beggars knocked, who planted a flower in the garden, who opened the borders of their arms,
who crossed a desert of mad whims to find a drop of rain, who gave themselves to life as if life were not a plaything nor a trifle but a large and splendid door that opens on a universe of passages that run as panthers though worlds full of sculptures and portraits of our bloodline standing as it does on the shore of our souls.
Listen. Our heritage calls across the water for our compassion and wisdom to grow freely from trees that every child from every continent and country may pick the garden fruit there.
And from this great nourishment, flourish.
I am late reading this, but finally this morning, I took the time. Just an incredible work. Thank you.
Geez Victor burns hotter than most can handle