SAD COWBOY
I
A cowboy with yubitsume finger sits low at a red bar seat. He views refracted light through the bottom of a crystal glass; it’s cut in the style known as the Lone Star Cut, the state cut. His lens outside is a lone star. Out the window is Edwards Plateau land from its southwest corner. Ashe juniper, honey mesquite, oak trees. The semi-arid region is lined by transparent streams that well up from underground, the Edwards Aquifer, caves and bats. Indian-blanket wildflowers stroke a sky of dappled altocumulus. Sick at heart, he regards the bursting desert sunset through wet eyes. Irregular clouds continue passing above, the time out of joint. ‘Are you ready to go on? You’ve got a couple hours until showtime,’ a young lady obscured by waggling camcorder says. ‘I have not art to reckon my groans,’ the cowboy poet replies.
Analog televisual snow under a mounted taxidermic longhorn skull in a craftsman off the rollercoaster 38th Street in southwest Hyde Park. The pattern is random. The dot-pixel static enraptures me, because I have become lost in thought, staring off into space. No signal is coming in, and so radiated electromagnetic noise is being picked up by the TV antenna.
Austin, Texas, 1996. I was watching The Show With No Name. Underground variety clips played on public-access. Ephemera. Unruly local callers-in. Circulated obscure cult favorites of the video underground. Music, culture, oddities. It was during banter between the hosts and a caller that I saw the cosmic microwave background radiation and thermal noise appearing in a subtle way, almost as though there all along. Spectral visitation, visual and auditory echo. Jonathan Davis 2
I do not know why I lost connection. I became lost. In my memory, I was this way for perhaps several minutes when I heard a voice. It was female, and familiar. I heard the voice different nuff I knew was unaccountable to the room and anomalous-like. First I muted the program with the tacky plastic button on the remote. Then I smoothed my hair and looked round. I unmuted and monkeyed with the volume awhile until deciding it weren’t that I were crazy. Through my television or of some extratelevisual plane had the voice come, I dunno. I climbed the roof and checked the new Digital Sky Highway satellite dish. Nothing.
I was involved in a horrendous incident when in single-digit years caused by an adult patriarch resulting in trauma and disfigurement. Still stitched and in PT unable to walk, I was riding passenger with a relation when Hank Williams was introduced me by cassette. Vanilla hillbilly music—and the soul! It had a picture of the man in creamwhite Nudie suit with blue musical notes and staff stitched in relief, with his tan felt cowboy hat tipped back enough to display the face of the star so he could emote in that earnest and theatrical style of the day.
Though I was but a boy, it sure spoke to me. I too had felt haunting pain.
A few short years later. I heard Hank over a 50,000 watt clear-channel border blaster operating from Mexico. This was during summers in the Mex of Tex-Mex down south when shipped off due to being trouble to my parents. The hot little transistor pulled me in, and the music reordered who I was before it put me back material. The antenna farm hummed far away. A 500k amplifier driven off a special 50k transmitter. Twenty 100,00 watt tubes with water cooling from an outside cooling pond of distilled water. Pyrex tubing with high-voltage
DC and the works out there in the desert. The signal was so intense, it obliterated anything Jonathan Davis 3 within fifty kilocycles of the station’s frequency path. Ranchers claimed they could hear it playing through their barbed-wire fences at nighttime. The musical purr, the vibration.
A boy underneath a large pecan tree, pecans littered beneath. Many cattle couchant enjoying the shade of the tree and the boy’s company. A waft of grape Kool-Aid smell on the air from Texas mountain laurels. I was trouble and so sent to work the ranch summers. I bailed and hauled hay, monitored and filled feeding troughs, worked clearing land and building barbed- wire fences. Hot, sweaty, dirty. A familiar notion someone was calling. I thought of someone I didn’t yet know, someone I dreamed to meet one day out there in the world. I saw a swirling yellow rose on a backdrop of prickly pear cactus. I took a drink water while my knees wobbled and eyes yodeled a blue cry. A hard-edged bluesy feeling, no end to the desert I’ll cross.
I see a billowing wispy shape, but before I recognize seeing, nothing.
II
2009. I am twenty-one. I saw her at Shangri-La first time. The Violet Crown aglow.
It was Armadillo Races night, so you know it were gon be all get-out. Figure I’d be drunk, so I set the hasp unlocked on my garden gate. I paid for my one-dollar ticket with the number written on back and placed my bet. I was fixinuh get myself some firewater when I saw her.
Then my little racer set to runnin’. He made his dash across the turf to the line undistracted.
My bet was largest on little #3, so I was ushered forth from the crowd and held to testify on that microphone held by the announcer whether I would keep the money, or go for pocket, what’s in his, like behind door #2 or some kina thing. The crowd yelled out various decisions I might make. I was feeling ballsy, so I went pocket. They cheered in anticipation. He asked me, Jonathan Davis 4
Left, right, or back. I said left. More cheering. Well then wouldn’t you know, I won just about prize-and-a-third for a total of $117 that was in his Skoal-ringed left Wrangler pocket.
I groomed my hair and smiled under the spotlight. I gave my molasses haw-haw into the microphone. I looked and saw her looking back at me. She made eyes. My mind unspooled all in romantic thought as some brisk up-tempo jukejoint song kicked on. Lum dragged me to meet a fresh pint to my lips, and though quick I made to look once more, she was gone.
Man some things are chance. Like real chancy. Like I mean what I mean is I got a ride from Lum and he said like, ‘Kay, so, a left here,’ and all I really heard was queso, and so home, I rode my racer from Hyde Park to Barton Springs for some at El Alma and that’s when :
I’m eating queso fundido and having a margarita when I see her down the bar. She is pretty and looks smart. I like how smart is the look in her eyes. She knows things, the kind of woman whose presence causes men to straighten and present themselves without realizing.
They elevate their natures by her visage and actions. You could trace the wake of impression. If she lends her approval of one, they are ennobled. I saw in her countenance the guarantee of a deep, rich inner world, that she is keen, smart, and kind. She sharpens light like crystal.
—I think we met eyes last month, at Shangri-La? I placed top bet, won a race, and lost sight of you before I had the chance to say, um, Hi. Her face is silhouetted by the El Alma sign, neon, hanging by chains, a spikey goldenrod sun rising and visible by half, four stripes of red bullnose, the middle reading El Alma in vaguely Arabic emerald-green letters, and at the bottom, glowing with warm invitation: CAFE Y CANTINA in mellow yellow. Jonathan Davis 5
—It’s you, she said. I remember. I wanted to say hi to you, too, she said. Hi. My friend dragged me away. There was another party or something. I’m Sophia Anne.
—My name’s Wesley, he said, brushing back his hair. It’s the oddest thing, how I ended up here. Small exchange of coy glances. A mosaic of social doings on the rooftop patio.
—Maybe it’s a good sign, she shrugged, smiling. Brown almond eyes.
Crooked white umbrella over his head. —Can I buy you a drink? he asked.
She swirled the melting ice of her glass and made thinking eyes. She flicked the straw.
—I have to meet someone for a thing pretty soon, but…
—Okay, sure, he wrinkled his mouth, straightened. Another time?
—Here’s my number, she took his phone in hand, navigated, typed deftly.
—Au revoir, he swept his hand in like a casual wave, twisted a heel and split.
She smiled at his shy charisma as he made leave of the scene.
It would be wholly insufficient to say ‘burning with passion’ after five dates, ten. He was aflame and betrayed by all formerly defining independence possessed. The fibers of his heart now enmeshed with another, he could see no life apart; she the same.
They had sleepovers, picnics in parks, took trips together—met each other’s friends, shared histories and plans for the future, coupled. They were caught in the high of early infatuation, everything pink and red. Time seemed to take new shape.
—Such is my largesse, she jested.
—Clearly I’m in such awe of you. Jonathan Davis 6
Succulents and cacti along the windows. A whiff of bluebonnet candles from that time they visited Fredericksburg Farms, so blue a wax in their glass canisters.
—Both sarcasm and not. I love you.
—I love you too, he smiled. A real lovematch.
She stroked his hair. Her arms circled atop his shoulders. Passionate kissing. The embrace diffused, they floated round the house through evening. Comfort.
—I’ve never had someone like you. Or someone really at all. Not like this.
—I can hear your heartbeat through your chest. Both drift asleep.
The morning sun and lovemaking. Soft light through white drapes. Amoroso.
After dinner (North Loop) and drinks (Eastside) on the town (Austin), home.
—I have something to give you, he said, hands behind his back.
—What is it? she perked, stretching herself tall.
—This, he said, revealing in his right hand a somewhat large jar. It was a thirty-four ounce clip-top made of high-quality glass with heavy bottom and red-rubber seal.
—Well thanks babe. Any idea behind it—she motioned at the left hand still concealed behind his torso—or is it just a really great jar?, she spun it around in examination.
—Interesting you should ask, he said, mischievous eyes. The second hand came out. In it was a little packaged organ; it read: GROWING SUPER ABSORBENT POLYMER HEART, with the message that it GROWS HUGE WHEN PLACED IN WATER. The dense little heart was red, veiny, and maybe an inch tall, encased in a tight plastic bubble against a celadon cardboard sheet with product branding, etc. The realistic heart lay in the center-chest of a white male silhouette with Jonathan Davis 7 red and blue veins running through his body and up to a pink brain under coiffed hair. On the back were instructions on placing the heart in a jar of water to watch it grow.
—You’ve given me your heart! she requited a sopaipilla kiss and smiled.
Inflorescence led to deeper roots, moving in together, commitment. Commitment enriched. Years passed. But then he felt the commitment and obligations seemed to blot out his need to explore emotional pain in alienation. The heart grew larger, but the jar tighter. He had questions without answers, and thought he knew how to answer them. Love was unlike anything he’d ever had, anything he’d ever known. Yet he was suspicious. He became vulnerable as he fell deeper, and so, uneasy. Unconscious self-sabotage began.
—We just aren’t consonant with each other no more.
—I feel the same way. I’m so sorry to say it, but it’s true.
—We’re going nowhere. The feeling of watching the clock.
—The truth is, no one gets it right. But we’re all supposed to try.
Both evinced great regret and relief. Bitterness. Ugly light through discolored curtains the shade of tarry cigarette paper. Them in the hunting house on family land in the wilds.
His family and society bearing down on him all his life, to have someone new threaten to take away his freedom and hard-won independence was too much, even in the name of love.
He withdrew. But withdrawal is a flawed way to protect oneself. Wesley thought he could keep from further injury; instead, the inevitable separation between them was itself cause for more injury. Vulnerability gripped him. He felt the loss of his best friend and lover. He ached for her Jonathan Davis 8 return, yet prevented it from occuring. His behavior disallowed return, anyway, before the arm’s-length alienation. How could they connect if he felt disconnected himself?
What a damn shame it was and what shame I did feel. Five years done and split up. I knew I was not yet where I needed to be and facing an acute confrontation with the Long Dark
Blues. It wasn’t long I made excuses, if at all. I knew what I had done, knew of the disagreeable and surly nature that had welled up from inside me from trauma and confusion. She moved her things out of the house; I moved mine into permanent storage and listed for rental.
I didn’t know why or if it would do me any good—obligations, expectations, demands from anyone I could not abide. I needed total freedom, though I knew not what it was or what it does to a man, not really. I was lonely but had to be alone—the Blue Paradox.
I was now hors de combat. I could take no more punches. Too bruised and bloodied.
Sometimes love hurts. Hurt comes from Middle English, originally in the senses ‘to strike’ and ‘a blow.’ From relationship- to shadowboxing instead. Conflictual living is not living at all.
I would cry myself to sleep wishing I could help it, wake with dusted eyes aching for her sopaipilla kisses. I dreamt hurting for her conversation all day and’d slip into unconscious focus such as the flow state looking at any old thing in any ole scenario and see the unraveling fabric of the corridor of time. Malevolent memories crawled after me, grief and regret.
I could see it dripping molasses-like before me, but not enough that I could stop it happening, Berardi’s concept of ‘the slow cancellation of the future,’ our future.
Jonathan Davis 9
Nighttime. He looks scared or crazed or both. Exiting the amber glow of his craftsman, the stars are made pale by the light pollution of the growing city. There’s a rustle of leaves in the wind, the smell of pollen. Large old trees shade the street lit sparsely by lamps, many dark spots between the light. He walks the path through the grass and mesquite past the chimenea and seats in a stone circle, where once they had the good times with friends, to the shed, lined at its bottom with lightning welk shells. Wesley stares at the shed door painted with the
Reverse of the Texas state seal, old and decaying, which reads: ‘ONE AND INDIVISIBLE.’
He flips open the rusted latch of the shed door. It creaks on its hinges. Inside he pulls a chain hanging from the ceiling and a filament bulb alights. The shed’s almost empty. He sets something down on the workbench wrapped in worn leather, rolling one end to open the contents before him. Knives. Wesley takes a seat on an old Texaco bar stool.
He takes a diamond honing rod and begins to sharpen his selected knife, the butcher’s.
He smoothes the edge heel-to-tip, all its knicks, bumps, imperfections removed. He holds the tang with loose and adroit confidence. The point is sinisterly pointed and twinkles against his eye. He cannot forgive himself. He wants to punish himself. A wet, scared sound escapes his lips. He places a straightbar mouthpiece in his mouth. There. Then he examines the wrinkles and fingerprint of his left pinkie. Aqueous tears flow in clear streams down his face and splash the mirrored blade. He places the hand flat posteriorly and with digits spread. Next he situates the knife in his right hand and pushes it just into the flesh below the smallest knuckle. Wesley lifts the butcher knife in a practice motion and lowers it gently to the spot at which it began its ascent. He does this once, twice, and on the third time, with the image of her pretty face in his mind’s eye, presses down on the knuckle in a hard clean way that instantly severs the left small Jonathan Davis 10 distal phalanx from his pinkie finger in a cracking bloody splash as his teeth chomp the bit and fainting horrent he looses a muffled cry, the knife dropping, the point stabbing the workbench sticking upright with a bloody metal wobble as he falls crashing back against the tin shed wall.
(Long, gradual scene-dissolve set to “Moanin’ The Blues.”)
III
I leave Austin, rent the house I inherited from my father to strangers. I couldn’t stay. A long drive into the vulnerable shrublands and desert of the Chihuahuan, dusty roads and rising rock. Yonder some alterity to be entered. Am I driving to or away from something?
I din listen to nobody. Horatio telling Hamlet if he follows the ghost—waved to a more removed ground, do not go to it. No, by no means. But South and West in pain I took.
—Yet wherever I go it haunts me. It is a hellish kinetic bull rampaging over me like any shadow. Its fretted flesh hangs shredded by hot wind. Its large keratinous hooves are angled grasping at my sprinting figure. It charges. It charges without appearing to spend energy. The term might be hell-bent. Its skull is exposed, eye sockets empty, teeth gumless. It countenances a pervese pleasure with its chase. It no more hunts me than it seems to always be chasing. The rippling muscles and ragged flesh are rotten clouds above me. Its great horns of live bone are dead, the proteins and keratin bestilled in their passing. I try to do things like tell him I do not wish to make food or decorative furniture of him, but he does not appear dissuaded.
Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself. Terribilia meditans.
Jonathan Davis 11
I became a ranchhand out in various West Texas towns, underemployed and keeping myself busy. Sentenced to hard labor. My friends were cattle, horses, and cowboys.
Aching nights were filled writing sour valentines in acute loneliness. My mind beetled o’er into the sea and assumed some other horrible form which drew me into madness. I made a good name for myself on many a border ranch. Was blackballed as a transgressor or drunk on many a one as well. I couldn’t allow anyone to get a angle on me. Like a wild animal, nobody could get close or know me with my hackles down. Worked from can to cain’t. Bone tired.
Some ranches featured oldworld carpentry, miscellaneous undusted porcelain, dot matrix printers and fax by landline. Others were computer-enhanced technical operations, ranches integrated with simply the newest set of tools: second- and third-order business software, a YouTube channel, blog, trade-edifying forum participation, real-time web-based study of prices and markets, sensors and security, radio repeaters, digital rain gauges, eartag microchips, online cattle auctions, water storage tank sensors, tamper alarms, opened gate alerts, solar power—with sometimes even Edwards Plateau wives really into the horses and succussing homeopathic remedies, others grizzled women trade-adept, bosses.
He’d worked them all, and being smart with tech, was responsible for these things at various times, plus typical labor and ranchwork. So on it went. He lay not in any bed his own, always in some strange new location, everything repeatingly unfamiliar—and in that he began to experience the familiarity of unfamiliarity. Physical work for an intellectual guy: to keep the hands rough, brow beaded, dirty, he could forget for a few seconds each day—and maybe on Jonathan Davis 12 good days minutes—the loss of her presence in his life and his regret. The more spent and physically exhausted, the farther away he was, the easier it seemed.
Yet they never stopped writing and talking. They were hung up on each other. In the
Digital Age, loss is itself lost. Memories are tied to clouds, linked to accounts on servers, hosted and shared in a webbed network, much the same as the brain. She was with him everywhere he went. Traces of her were now who he was. Wesley never thought to consider dating or another relationship. Never crossed his mind, really. It would be impure of him, because his heart would not be in it. His heart still belonged to Sophia. She did still have it in a jar, after all.
Hot golden sun on a cool windy morning. I wake to música ranchera playing nearby.
Where am I? O heat, dry up my brains! I am sick hungover. No surprise; too many nights did I drink until I could lay on the ground and fall off it. This time I did not make it back to the ranch far outside Marathon. My boots drag in the dust awhile before I feel my legs return.
It is likely I will be fired. I do not think my broken heart will be a forgivable excuse. My boss’s family ranched since his daddy and his daddy: sheep and goats for Big Bend Wool and
Mohair in the ‘40s-on, then cattle, and now back to sheep and small-scale fiber production.
—Wesley! The hell you been, kid? Old Boss stared in anger.
—Eyes red, inflamed: Yes sir, I been in town, in town again.
—Where in town, Wesley? What was more important?
—I was drunk and did not make it back come work. Cardiodynia.
—Well now son, least ye’aint toady. Give me one good reason I shount–
Wesley simply cried. He placed his hand over his heart and cried. Jonathan Davis 13
—Ah now son, what could the matter be? Don’t do that. Has something–?
—It’s this heartache I carry, sir. She– I– I am forsaken… by my soulmate.
—It can’t be put into words, son. I should know. He looks to the sky.
Wesley raised his watery eyes to Old Boss in sympathetic shame.
—Let’s get you coffee so you can work. But it won’t happen twice.
—Yes sir, he said. Wesley threw on his denim jacket and followed.
I think to visit modern grief specialists. Among people’re variant grief experiences in both intensity and duration, like perhaps cowboys grieve harder. I’m really not sure. I have the symptoms of heartache: exhaustion, fatigue, muscular tightness, loss of appetite, weight loss, hollow stomach, nausea and poor sleep. My thoughts continue. Sometimes they are intrusive ones, about sad stuff. I am searching for the Lost Object. The mourner remains lost. He sifts through memories of the departed, transient perceptions of spectral visitations.
Mental searching and obsessive thoughts, love. How to reunite? Can we? Teach a lonely traumatized person not to respond to others combatively, with distrust and defensiveness— things that used to protect in bad situations—and over time their body will make fewer stress hormones and the person’s brain will actually repair the fussed-up connections.
In some cases, the depression of a broken heart can cause an emotional trauma severe enough to leave an imprint on one’s psychobiological functions. Future choices are colored by harmed feelings about, say, loss, rejection, disconnection. Primal separation fear. The anterior cingulate cortex lights up when rejected the same way it lights up when the body feels physical Jonathan Davis 14 pain. It registers the affective component of pain. Doctors clip the anterior cingulate cortex to relieve chronic pain in patients for whom chronic pain has become unbearable.
Out toward the border I found myself with a old tent and supplies between jobs.
First I suspect it is but a vision and not real. The spectral outline comes tracing through moonlight. She is a dark form, elucidative and majesterial. I am waved to join her.
White but dark, the lady. From a sort of visual mist blurring is the being. Is she celestial?
She has not wings or halo. Her presence is both comforting and bone-chilling, as if some sort of numinous reality floods into the cracked-open chestplate of my tender body. Does she bear a message? Is she an immaterial voice of some larger mover? One with the Logos?
The silver specter shimmers in eldritch motions. I acquiesce to her beckoning, and we remove to a resaca of the Rio Grande under weeping canopy of some type riparian cypress. I am afraid I must speak, though I know not what to say. Suddenly I am thinking thoughts that feel to me not to come from myself. Her face becomes less opaque and her eyes look at me wittingly, as though to agree she is tacitly using my own thoughts to communicate.
I am thinking that I must not fear. I am thinking that I have the strength to withstand what pain I endure. I am thinking that true love will find me in the end, and in some strange way I feel caressed, though she is before me at distance enough and unmoved.
Suddenly the apparition is gone and I feel heavier again, moonstruck.
IV Jonathan Davis 15
Purdy soon I could take no more riding with the ghost. I decided to put an end to the feeling. Some people are haunted by the ghosts of their romantic past, and some aren’t. Well how is one to be one or the other? I read it is the difference between b’lieving yer personality is fixed or fluid. If you think it’s fixed and your partner has found bad in you, you believe you are bad and that’s just that, and you now live feeling and thinking this or that about you is just bad.
Or you believe your personality is fluid and that well, whatever inside you that isn’t great can be worked and made great or replaced with something great, with healthy new aspects.
If your self becomes entwined in your partner’s self—whew. When your identities and memories overlap, like two lassos circling atop each other, you can feel the loss of part of your identity. I felt a loss of self. The more personal growth experienced during a relationship, the larger the chance for a devastating blow to one’s self-image upon breaking up. If you let your self-image change for the worse, and the rejection causes you to question who you really are, pain from rejection might linger a lifetime. To me there were weaker connections between the problems I experienced and my self. I saw our breakup as an opportunity for growth.
A lone star encircled in branches of olive and live oak. I am entangled by lovesickness, ensnared. It feels like a cangue I am made to wear for reasons of severe punishment. American men, psh. He had seen the darker realms of that old myth destroyed, that silence and stoicism means masculine strength. His escape from his past itself becomes an escape from his present and a denial of his future. A cowboy who cannot put his pain into words—and so he does not speak, his ‘strength’ a type of defeat, an unwillingness or incapability to recognize his reality. Jonathan Davis 16
But he the Cowboy Poet picks back up his pen and begins to write heroically sad pieces he won’t admit are about him. He gets a therapist and is therapized. Kintsugi.
Back on a job Far West. I begin hatha and Iyengar yoga at the Granada Yoga Studio in the former mezzanine of the historic Granada Theater in Alpine on Holland Ave. Restored in
2008, I think it’s a sight. The main building is a premier event space for the Trans Pecos Region.
The studio is in the front-facing streetside of the mezzanine. It has bamboo floors and clay- plaster walls. There is much natural light and a sense of elevation I find good for me.
I meet nice women in class, but am not romantically interested in them.
Sometimes I go with friends I have made from yoga to various musical and theatrical performances at the Granada. Community and private events, too. I lose myself thinking and notice things such as the whisper-quiet HVAC system like those used in hospitals.
I am taken out to the open-air courtyard by a woman who tries to kiss me. There is a framed photo of the Granada in the ‘30s with Cowboy and the Lady (1938) advertised on the marquee behind her which catches my eye. Never seen it. I tell her I am sorry I cannot and enter the ajoined Saddle Club for a drink at the bar. They used to sell saddles.
After my year or so debauched came those months armadillo curled. It is a despairing and unresolved situation. I am lonelier than ever. Sure, I have re-entered the social world. Still, loneliness is a subjective and internal condition, not an external, objective one. Loneliness has been linked with extensive bodily and mental ailments that can hasten death. Psychobiologists have discovered how it sends misleading hormonal signals and throws the system out of whack.
The molecules on genes that govern behavior are rejiggered damagingly. Long-lasting loneliness Jonathan Davis 17 does more than make you sick: it can really kill you dead. Oh neurodegeneration, heart disease, even cancer—tumors metastasize faster in lonely people! This new biology of loneliness proves by scientific fact that all those blues and country musicians were right all along; all the pain, the struggles with heartache and the blues—it’s not just art or entertainment, but real.
Some psychiatrists have speculated no patient with like curable psychiatric disorders too sick to be healed through trust and intimacy, that loneliness lay at the heart of nearly all mental illness, and that the lonely person is the most terrifying spectacle in the world. Viewing the
Saddle Club front, it is so blue, ultrablue, a rectangle of neon framing the business beneath the cobblestone mission top, that it mesmerizes. In the center is the name in red and the logo—a boot with a bottle in it, tipped right at about, oh say thirty degrees, spilling golden hooch out the throat, all sat atop a lone star. Underneath the neon, I can be spotted at a red barstool through one of the angled windows of the stone mission building holding a glass.
That night he felt the calling home. Wes was there with his grief when the incorporeal intelligence seemed to visit him. A hynagogic hallucination, that must be the explanation, he presumed in less precise verbiage. The nocturnal spirit is wearing her clothing. Is this all in my head? he questioned himself. This ghost only a mental impression of a past love? Everyone hosts various ghosts of their lives in memory— But she lives? Some cultures believe a person to be both a simultaneous physical and spiritual entity. Do I believe this? he asked himself.
She whispers to him in his own voice providing direction home. He listens. Wesley leaves the Saddle Club and quits the Big Bend Wool and Mohair without notice. Jonathan Davis 18
He followed white lane-boundary lines under a dark and starry sky until he hit Austin. He stayed in Lum and his partner’s granny flat while he outlasted the tenants and reoccupied his father’s old house in Hyde Park. Nights, especially nights, Wesley heard the call and felt a conspicuous sense of ascendancy from some outside force. Is it beneficent? he asked.
He returns to her healed. He proclaims he will never stop loving her. She is finishing her degree at Texas and is so unendingly busy that although she doesn’t need help, she could really use help, and welcomes him back into her life helping her to make the grade. Time passes as they rekindle the relationship. Wesley commits how he could not commit before. But Sophia
Anne is damaged due to her past and cannot answer. Things remain in the love limbo.
It was as if she was trying to inspect him ages to identify if he was pneuma akatharton, an unclean spirit, a spirit of impurity (because before he failed her, was too pained to commit, impure from pain). But whatever was unclean in him now was result of this sense of not being accepted or rejected, only left to hang, a hand in broken time. It was not that he had not gone through ritual purification re his old pains, but that he now had such traumatizing new pains encircling him in this love limbo. A voided sphere of heartache without time. That whatever pneuma astheneias visible in him—spirit of infirmity or weakness or powerlessness—was a patina of circumstance to be buffed clean by an answer, any answer, yes or no.
Wesley listened to “Take These Chains From My Heart” by old Hank Dubya and the words cut to the quick. The breaking of chains is in old lore associated with being set free from an unclean spirit. Deserts are considered in same lore and religions as a likely haunt for restless Jonathan Davis 19 spirits, where unclean spirits come out of man, go through arid places seeking rest, and do not find it. The Cowboy Poet must exit the corrumpens aura by any means necessary.
V
Alpine, Texas, 2018. A cowboy with yubitsume finger sits at the bar of the Saddle Club.
He has removed the end of his little finger to atone for a serious offense, the breaking of the heart of the love of his life. Two people with once-swollen amygdalae just trying to love each other. He keeps the pinkie knuckle in a little silver box to remind himself. Of what? Changes daily. He takes another shot from his crystal glass which he holds deftly despite the missing end. Wesley’s back in town for Alpine’s 32nd annual Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
Wes would rather be shot again by a deer rifle. The trauma and disfigurement when he was but an eight-year-old boy. The pain is unbearable in the infinity of this love limbo. It is the sense of the no longer and the not yet, the liminal space of spectral visitation. The no longer lingers, is immaterial, remains effective as a virtuality. The not yet shapes his thoughts through anticipation, is effective in the virtual as an attractor to certain behaviors. Derrida’s concept of psychoanalysis as a ‘science of ghosts,’ of how M. Fisher said reverberant events in the psyche become revenants. Derrida’s claim that ‘a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come back.’ The pain is worse in that the future has not arrived, is no longer what it was going to be, no longer seems possible—and yet he refuses to give up the ghost. And the ghost will not give up on him. He practices a failed mourning. His desire is backward- and forward-looking, but not present. It is punishing and melancholic and stubborn. A ghostlier attachment. Jonathan Davis 20
Is their love lost? A lost future? He is a stranger, an outsider in his own time, refusing to allow the current conditions of reality to become so easily his future condition while there’s still hope. Something must be done to set right this quantum arrow of time and decoherence.
Here he is the night before, trying to hone and cool his edge. He sits underneath a taxidermic longhorn skull and he thought he heard somethin’ that reminded him of his youth.
The barkeep asked what he was doing back in town. Wesley took a breath. ‘Well, I submitted my Performer Application and have been accepted to present my piece on the main stage of
Marshall Auditorium at Sul Ross round dusk. Even hired a girl to record the performance on an old camcorder. I ain’t out here with the steer and sheep no more. Not now, at least.’
‘That so?’ the lady replied. ‘So you’re still hung up.’
Wesley left the Saddle Club and drove south toward the border. “I’m So Lonesome I
Could Cry” plays out in full. The words are too fitting, the experience too true to his current state. Wesley cuts the cassette player, removes his headphones. There he was meditating late that night before the Poetry Gathering camped by the old quicksilver mines in Terlingua when everything became impossibly still. He opened his eyes to find himself in a pocket, a vacuum.
Sound became locked into a looped drone. There was no time there, not anymore.
Images play in his mind. The nightmarish aspects of memory/heartbreak/-ache begin to exploit cavities and fissures in temporal continuity. He feels the omnipresent and simultaneous trialectic of past, present, future, time breaking down, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another. So much silence and crashing thunder. O, this is the poison of deep grief! Jonathan Davis 21
A white mist, airy, subtle. I hear the voice again in my head. I must be going crazy, I think, I must be. Disembodied intellect. Do totally disembodied minds exist which emanate from like, the concept of God? Angel is the action, not their nature—spirit is their nature. The invisible wraith becomes translucent vapor. I see its shade revealed. The solitary and human- like essence dances on air. She wears her clothing, is her vital principle, psyche, mind in action, the soul in movement, her essence traveling. In form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel—words of another prince come ringing again.
Her silvery-lit form fades into mist and then ignites in colored flames. There is direct communication with his third eye. A paradoxical mixture of bliss and doom, Possession. Wes previously consulted an encyclopedia out of fear of his recent experiences. Perception is like a series of hypotheses about the external world, and central perceptual ‘lenses’ such as memory and expectation frame and determine the incoming phenomena as content of perception. So were these visions like, only his wishes, dreams, nightmares come alive? delirium tremens from trying to quit the bottle as medicine to his heartache, or something? overworked and sleepless, and so resultant hypnagogic hallucinations from the recesses of his mind?
He waxes desperate with imagination. If a dimensional or spectrum-based view of psychosis is taken, those psychosis-prone might be more prone to anomalous perceptual experiences without ever falling into psychosis. Psychologists have contemplated ‘reassuring apparitions’ as having adaptive effects in some, helping them to cope with adverse events. In this way, schizotypy would appear a normal dimension of personality, and why they were not weeded out by the process of natural selection. More matter with less art.
Jonathan Davis 22
They are a crowd of peoples from Montana, Arizona, Wyoming, Texas, California, New
Mexico, Colorado, Idaho and so on. Denim pants and jackets, fleece-lined ranch coats, leather and other brown suede clothings. Vests, cowboy hats, decorated belts and bolo ties. The civil theatergoers fill a packed house from the main seating area to the second-level balcony above, warm bodies against red velveteen chairs with wooden armrests in lit cold space. The stage is set with various props which are not from say www.westernstageprops.com, but actually from these people’s nearby ranches and on donation for use during the event. There are rocks, dirt, brush, trees, tools, log seats, barbed-wire rolls, a fake horse, a handcart, a holster, a handgun, blank ammunition, spurs, an old 1960s style triangle pup tent and various lanterns.
She asks me once more, Are you ready to go on? with the shouldered camcorder light red. He feels the ache in the cancellous features of his bone. His spurs sparkle both audibly and visually as he straightens his wardrobe and rises against the blue velvet curtain. She flanks the crowd filming and places the camcorder on a tripod to one side of the lower level.
Wesley takes the stage. He recalls the quote, ‘There’s no darker place than the edge of the spotlight,’ Hal Cannon, from the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. He steps into the light, for the light does not find him. Again the Hamlet stuff haunts Wes. That he would weep for her. He would drown the stage with tears, unpack his heart with words. Words, words, words.
—Hi, how are you? My name is Wesley. You may’uh heard me before, on West Texas
Talk. They say sharing the language of affection can help ease the pain. Well I ain’t got no more options ‘cept the hangin’ rope, s’here I am from out of solitude into the spotlight. This piece Jonathan Davis 23 here is titled Sad Cowboy. All the chuckwagon-fed people of the crowd straighten, exhibit salt- of-the-earth posturings, little tells of pricked ears. They have possibly been improperly primed for this performance; before Wes opened some pastoral songsters, then the comedy poets on the Cowboy Humor show, and now here goes an unadorned tragedian of highest call.
—Well they say to get over the past you first gotta ‘ccept it’s over. This cowboy won’t accept it’s over. He spends his waking life trying to revive the ghost. It follows him room-to- room. It follows him in light and in dark. It nests hollow in the reaches of his heart. Yet still somehow he cannot reach it. His flight from the ghost is one of desperation. He cannot put the feeling into words no matter how he tries. He can’t recognize or accept his reality, and so he’ll never put in words the heartache he feels alone in a trailer, out in the desert, on a horse. Well so he just goes ranch-to-ranch and works till he bleeds and sweats and there’s no toxicity he thinks left in him, but this thing is immaterial, is not a thing to be treated with alkalizers or detoxifiers or whatever methods of whomever. Nothing works. Nothing seems to work.
He’s prickly out- but soft inside like a cactus. And like a cactus he says to her presence I am stuck on you. Cact-I + Cact-you = Cactus. That’s not mine. Saw that on a t-shirt.
You see he sank his roots so deep he took up more than they could bear. This cowboy, he felt too much and then he tried to feel more. Now he is mighty sick with it all. He hugged that cactus real tight, tried to transcend that pain through really feeling it, until not. You see eventually sore feelings of his metastasized into heartbreak, bitterness, grief—then he just got stuck there with those feelings, not in present, or past, or future. It’s like the quantum zeno effect: if you measure a particle in a quantum mechanical system often enough, you can arrest the particle’s time evolution with respect to whatever chosen measurement. Well this Sad Jonathan Davis 24
Cowboy, he kept taking measure of his heart, and his heartbreak, and his sadness. He loved this woman so much it was killing him, and he was arrested, timeless, in this void. See a system can’t change while you are watching it. So he tried taking eyes off his heart.
But then the damn thing just thumped harder an’ louder an’ wouldn’t leave him be all
Tell Tale–like. So he thought to pull it out, but then he’d die and that woun’t do. He didn’t want to die. So on he kept living. For a living death is all that’s left for men with broken hearts.
Harvard’s Grant Study is the greatest longitudinal study ever done in America. What has it shown? Men who have no deep love in their homes are three times more likely to suffer from mental illness, two-point-five times more likely to suffer from dementia, make fifty percent less money over the course of their careers; the number one predictor of success in that study is not
IQ but emotion in the home. They mean love. Well this man has no love in his home.
He sucessfully thought his way free in a grand existential way, and then found that true freedom was hell, because it was only alone could you really truly have no outside obligation— and forlorn loneliness is the worst hell of all. She’d taught him how to not be defensive, how to be open and vulnerable, how to love with his mind and heart and soul so totally he was disintegrated and washed among the stars. But did he make his change too late?
From town and country to city to out among the stars, he wrote her name with great beauty, mingled with words of such passion and intensity, crafted in such ingenious ways that each were mutually exalted, her, and the poetry, and the poetry, and her. He wrote words and made art for her which aimed to free her soul and enrich her mind. She didn’t need his words to do so, but he wrote them for her anyway, to add a little something extra to her rich inner world, of his rich inner world. In return, she shared with him her presence and thoughts as Jonathan Davis 25 muse which inspired and powered his art, and so it was merely that she was influencing her own rich inner world through her own means, theoretically, by speaking through him.
The Sad Cowboy’s art was just a means to her end, as it were. So the Sad Cowboy recorded himself performing this piece Sad Cowboy on the stage here this very moment and decided he would package and send the tape to her to testify his love to her one final time, because he was finally living his present, and because it was time he finally let her go.
“Men With Broken Hearts” by Hank Williams plays out over the loudspeakers of the
Marshall Auditorium. (The slow, swinging, original Luke the Drifter version, not that awful ‘60s posthumous remake.) The Sad Cowboy Performer then enacts physical theater of him against the dark and washed-out starry background with many props as the sad song about men with broken hearts continues to play out in full. Wesley sorrowfully spins a lasso a little, sits blue on a bail of hay scratching in a notepad with appropriately telegraphed emotional expressions, and then pretends to wrestle a papier-mâché bull down by the horns. He finally removes a rubbery heart from a jar and looks at it timidly in his two palmed hands. This is his ‘To be or not to be’ moment: To love or not to love, that is the question. Curtain falls, lights go black.
After the performance. He’s at a conclusionary event-celebration at the Saddle Club. All the cowboy poets and their cohorts and affiliates mill about. They are the crème de la crème.
I was twenty-eight years old when I heard Hank Williams for the umpteenth time. That potent cheap music. I was at the bar and “Weary Blues From Waitin’” came on the juke. A sick joke by the barkeep that calls me something of a friend. She heard about my performance. The final verse came loud, those lines about all the things that might have been, and I cried. Though Jonathan Davis 26 rare, there is in fact a medical condition called ‘broken heart syndrome,’ whereby some people even die from a broken heart, I tell her, from the surge of stress hormones caused by intense emotional events such as the dissolution of a relationship or the death of a loved one.
East Austin. She walks out her little thunderbird-painted house and pauses to feel the sun on her face. She walks the walk to the box and retrieves her mail. Some bills and a small rectangular package of dense cardboard with a TCPG sticker stuck neatly in the upper right corner. She recognizes his handwriting before she reads the ‘to’ and ‘from’ texts.
Sophia Anne takes the package inside and goes at it with a knife.
She removes a videocassette that reads Sad Cowboy in silver marker.
She isn’t sure what she’s looking at. She doesn’t even have a VHS player. Wes is always doing things his strange way. She’s thinking of where one is, and decides to hit the thrift with the large electronics section nearby. She finds one. They beg her to take it. She takes it.
Loose cables are snaked to the TV from her rug where the player rests. A snowy screen.
She feeds the tape into the mouth of the player and presses play. An image jumps to motion.
There is a stage. A navy velvet curtain hangs wrinkled behind him, and tall painted moon-and- star-covered panels flank either side. A packed house of red seats. Grey and white walls with various moldings and decorations are lowly lit, the stage dressed in soft white lights.
It seems a performance is about to begin.
The tape induces an overwhelming sense of melancholy. The edges of the movie undulate in rolling waves. Static pocks various quadrants of the screen. Lines drive down the film sometimes, aberrations of the tape of the videotape. The imperfect analog technology Jonathan Davis 27 materializes memory in an arresting way. The flaws create a sense of nostalgia, paint an impression of a time that is out of joint. She is transfixed by the image.
Wesley is introduced and takes the stage at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
Wesley worked a ranch tucked into the near hillsides of the igneous Cathedral Mountain twelve miles south of Alpine. Shallow and stony soil support Douglis fir, aspen, Arizona cypress, maple, ponderosa pine and madrone trees. Bleached white bones against all shades of brown run to pine and forest greens meeting a sky blue sky of such clarity that at night it seems to shimmer. Ahw but ranching the highlands couldn’t take his mind off his heart and ache!
A call to come home one final time. A call on the telephone to come running. On the love-fevered drive home, he experiences none of the previous animism whatsoever.
They meet at Epoch Coffee in Hyde Park. The fine smell of fresh beans ground through burr grinders. The sounds of social activity. Wes wears a lapis Apache scarf tie she gave him, aged clothing: brown suede jacket, white shirt, black jeans, boots, glove. Sophia wears a plaid shirt knotted at the beltline, flared jeans with lace-up crotch, red felt cowgirl hat, new boots at a lick. She takes a seat across from him and they share a look. Nothing is said at first. Wesley has the unsettling and destabilizing eroto-bliss experience known in French as jouissance just by the sight of her, by her presence, by the love he feels for her deep in his heart of Texas.
He takes a deep breath, pink alveoli, lungs of lungs. She smiles. A green cactus tealight floats aflame atop motionless water in a glasswork teapot betwixt and between them.
—I think it’s strange you never knew how much I loved you back then. Jonathan Davis 28
—You were so caught up with all your other stuff, Wesley. I don’t know if you loved me then, or like you love me now. Maybe before it was being ‘in love.’ The two are different.
—Well now that being ‘in love’ has burned away, I’m left with love itself.
—That’s the real stuff. Not first flames, but the embers that keep.
—I’m begging that you give me some kind of answer. Explain yourself.
She looks him in the eyes while considering what she wants. Again, time stops.
He feels the weight of all that through his actions have become lost futures. And he realizes it is too late. It was always too late. Wesley can’t love her anymore. He must go.
A large clip-top jar made of high quality glass with heavy bottom and red rubber seal sits on a shelf over her workdesk where she paints. It collects dust. Vision lingers on the jar, and slowly zooming out, losing focus, the music of Hank begins, image fading to black.