A Selfish Bible
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© COPYRIGHT BY Christoffer Molnar 2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ENTELECHY: A SELFISH BIBLE BY Christoffer Molnar ABSTRACT As entelechy denotes the absolute attainment of potential, Entelechy: A Selfish Bible seeks to examine what it means to become. Pursuing ideas of identity, relationship, and sacrifice, this collection of short stories and poems looks to discover what it is to be a being — not only through its themes, but through its formal experimentation as well. Both the varied structures of each piece and the overall structure of the work — a mimicry of the form of the Christian Bible — seek the possibility of complete identity and fulfillment. In ranging from mythic recreations to choose your own adventures to unreal creatures to oft-recurring images (like the octopus) or lines, Entelechy embraces the multitudinous nature of an individual, and also humankind, by being both diverse and recurrent. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................ii Stories: BOLD TESTAMENT.........................................................................................1 OMPHALOS (GENESIS).................................................................................3 BELYING BUTTONS (EXIT US)..................................................................14 THE RULE OF ST. BENEDICT (BOOKS OF LAW)....................................31 A CARTON OF EGGS (BOOKS OF HISTORIES).......................................54 REALING VISIONS.......................................................................................75 WHAT THE CAVE WORM DOES (MINER PROPHETS)...........................90 MU TESTAMENT.........................................................................................110 ORPHANAGE (GOSPEL PRELUDE).........................................................111 EDIBLE PARABLES....................................................................................129 ORTS (THE PASSION).................................................................................143 M'AIDEZ, MAMAN (ACTS OF AN APOSTLE).........................................161 GO (A LOVE LETTER)................................................................................190 REVEILLEATIONS......................................................................................216 iii BOLD TESTAMENT After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am. —James Agee, A Death in the Family Fettered by the flesh’s morbid impulse and lethal sweetness, I dragged my chain, but was afraid to be free of it. —St. Augustine, Confessions Before the Beginning If on turning 81 I have lived all easily contented, son, I might ask you to shiv a stranger at the mall or shoot your pregnant daughter standing (not too) near me. Don’t. I won’t deserve that story. Turning one, you cried as I breathed into your ear my hopeful burden: “Make your life, son, out there like me. But not like me. Get the story you deserve.” On turning 21 I ran at an unmounted mountain but stopped where its slope steepened and slimmed high above a flat shoal of hard slate. I feared I wasn’t served for such a story. 1 2 Once when there was only One, the nihil dripped with potential — but nobody to serve the One their stories. And then — OMPHALOS (GENESIS) I am a child of fire; I am a lion; I have desires. —Adam Duritz, "Hanging Tree" And suddenly one was there, running toward a dark mountain pass. He found running to be strange, but since that was all he could recall doing, he kept on. He mixed it up: sometimes he skipped, sometimes he leapt. He passed someone. That was new. She was sitting, and he probably startled her. She startled him, too, by being there, so he ran on. He wasn’t getting any closer to the pass. He clawed the dirt hard and ran faster, but he wasn’t getting any closer. He slowed. He turned in a broad semi-circle, leaning into the curve, and returned to her. “I know there’s something over there,” he said. “I know it, too,” she replied. They were following a scent, they felt (or rather, smelt), calling them to a good garden. “Hurry.” He pulled her. “It might diffuse.” They ran through it, through it, and through it. In the pass, dark swallowed them, and the air was thick. They paused sometimes to breathe and wonder about their destination. He asked, “Who put it there?” “The God, I assume.” 3 “Have you seen Her?” 4 5 “No.” “We must find Her and hold Her close.” They ran, they paused. She asked, “What will we do there?” “Garden, I assume.” “I’ve never done that.” “Me either.” “It sounds complicated.” She looked at the uncolored dirt and rocks. They were very clean. She sat on a well-planed stone. “Run ahead,” she suggested, “and call back to me. I’ll walk.” She lay on the ledge (was it humming?) and fell asleep. She dreamed of hyperbolae and vectors drifting down at a casual tempo. A miniature self ran in front of the descending geometry, pointing and pointing at assorted scrolling symmetries. She saw and knew them all. His voice, winding back to her, pierced the graphic scene: “Quick, quick!” She yearned to be with him. In the ground, she meant to leave a mark, but his shout — “Quickquick!” — pulled her away before her thumb could decide which sign to inscribe: X or ! or ^ — so many possible; the multitude surprised her, and she vowed to catalogue them all and teach him. She sauntered within the dancing vapors of orange blossoms and cedar. She took from her pocket a scrap of lemon cake she had found and saved just for such traveling leisure. She nibbled it. She saw a small spring. She sipped. She did, eventually, catch him. “Can you still smell it?” he asked as soon as he saw her toes peek around a bend. “Do you think it’s died?” “I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I think it’s here for us.” 6 “Of course it is, but that doesn’t mean it will wait.” “Go,” she said. “Find our place.” He sprinted. He found a stream. It was slow and deep, wider than he could leap. On the far side sprang an orgiastic esplanade knotted with lean evergreens and frumpy fuchsia shrubs. Beside him a dense bramble billowed, wet with berries; purple finches warbling within; a veiny vine; several auburn melons; ocelots flirting in a glen; trillium. He wanted her to be there. Then there she was. They lay together. He felt her hands across his chest, her breasts pressed into his back, her fingers flitting through his hairs, trickling down his sternum, his abdomen. They slept together. When they awoke, they were frightened. They grew worried about so these urges that surged within them: hunger, drowsiness, thirst, and a shaking in the muscles to be used. They argued about how to escape them, or at least quell them. She tried to cover him, blocking out the light so he could return to sleep, but her shadow fell too small. He gathered a breakfast, but the twigs and nuts were hard or astringent, chipping their teeth or chilling their tongues. “Where is the way out?” “Let’s look for the dark.” They thought the middle would be densest, and it was, but it glowed. They found shadows farther out, beneath several trees, but the shadows ended quickly and led to nothing. It got thin out there. There was nothing to fill them. They were afraid, and it was only the morning. 7 And in that morning, the God swirled up a mist-trail of jasmine. The two followed it and found a fig tree. It said, “Pluck.” In the evening, the God spritzed a line of bergamot. The two followed it and found parsnips. They said, “Pull.” In the night, the God breathed; the two slept hard, and they dreamed dreams. (Though his were littered with fleeting frights of awakening to a bare steppe around him, and no her.) As the days became long, the stream called for them. He was the first to go in, but only because he ran there. When she arrived, having walked and touched with her toepads the clover his heels had dented, she watched him swim: sprouting in an arch from the stream and spouting water in an arch from his lips. “Here’s what the things in here sound like,” he said, going, “Fsh!” “Fsh,” she whispered, “fish. Good.” Wading in, she pointed across the water to a large brown creature. “That’s more like…” She paused and pursed her lips. “Kao.” She thought about it and tried again. “Cow.” “What are we?” he asked. She shrugged. He leaned back in the stream and, floating, splashed some hip thrusts. “Uhnhuhnhuhnh,” he suggested. “Oh, you,” she said, slapping his belly. “We’re just, I don’t know, just we.” Everything smelled of spruce. He snagged three old perch and juggled them. Each fish, swishing in a parabola, whispered, “Delicious! I’m delicious!” Emerging from the swim, she kicked a little rock which caromed off a boulder and sent a spatter of sparks onto a frilly tuft. It smoked and flamed. They broiled one of the perch, held by a forked branch, and picked long, steaming flakes from below the charred tawny 8 scales. They leaned back on the grass and sniffed styrax blossoms. The God laughed. The two heard it, or its echo. There they all were. An octopus squished past, tentacles pulsing, trailing, pulsing, trailing, muttering about how tired she was from carrying her young. “What about that?” “How does it live?” “Not like us.” “We are quite flawless and mighty, not hideously bulged and slithery.” “Let’s stay away from it.” Hexing their fingers at it, they skittered back. They figured it was time to go. The days grew shorter. On the edge of the garden, he found a darkening tree spangled by brown-skinned pears. It looked so full, and he worried it would break. Plus, he felt very hungry. He stripped it near to bare and listened to the limbs’ groans as they, unweighted, sprang back from his reach.