Chartiers
By the time a child gets to be nine and light enough in its own nature to walk the surfaces up and down those tracks with a gun, to shoot out insulators and climb cliffs, pull the dressing off the pollution, reveals what the child discovers, there are slag pits and strip mines in every valley of that square mile of ground. Overtop a pasture of coal-neuks flames sometimes roared up in dry spells from the trains. Farms across the way made an updraft that gouged a burn, rose a hundred feet, fought with mats and rakes, so the sheep will take no harm.
Fascinated with this territory of unregulated space, there was a literal Fairywood forbidden just downstream whose future contained a four-lane ghost Industrial Highway meant to connect UPS and Amazon under the Thornburg bridge. That’s where the Fairywood industrial miners, Russian, Pole and Slovak first lived. Fairywood had been made for miners and gandy dancers who laid track in Pittsburgh before machines in the early 1900’s. A patch town of Russians, Poles and Slovaks lived along the creek, replaced in 1944 with BroadHead Manor, converted in 1953 to low-rent housing for war workers. It was called The Projects, inhabited only by blacks. Construction on that four-lane Industrial Highway began in the 1970s in Fairywood. Now a light industrial park where Giant Eagle warehouses resides with UPS nearby. How could it not be called a ghost highway? It was never finished.
The series of cliffs above at the top were pocked with mine holes and caves. To strip mines and slag piles add a kief of resin between the sawtooth toes of the transdescendent feet of iron and clay. Do not fall into the great pits of green water steep on all sides. These too were filled by the same engineers who turned the black smoke white as the freights came up the rise. A carry permit is recommended for those who fish for cupreous and mudblack sulfate fish from the creek at night from jon boats. At some shore spots in the rocks night crawlers can “catch a little silver trout” (Yeats, “Wandering Aegus”), but those who search the Chartiers banks for flatheads among sunken logs, bends, and undercuts are not without harassment from remaindered projects down from Steubenville Pike.
The town up from the old Thornburg bridge, Thornburg, where the precipitous bend of the Chartiers occurs was where the outlines and skeletons came out with a supply of flares and torpedoes near the wreckage of trains. The creek, the coal, the railroad and the boy happened together in that day. The water route of the train followed the creek, steep at the beginning and end of line. Double tracks followed to the Ohio, but stopped on that bend before Scully Yard, switching and shunting long enough for a child to get on. Laws required freight trains to employ a caboose and a full crew to look out for load sift and hot axles, search the tracks under the cars, check the brakes, and put out torpedoes and flares to signal the train behind. All the real is symbolic. The child could walk the rock hills the rails set on, balance the strip-mined hills and galligaskin forests where the coal slid hundreds of feet down the chutes to rail cars. The rugged and steep basin terrain falls 500 feet to the Ohio where coal shipped when the Chartiers was high. Deforesting and farming added to the floods. That branch of the Pennsy crossed the streambed 19 times in 23 miles. Acid solids and iron dissected the Pittsburgh Coal seam, made it one of the most polluted watersheds in Pennsylvania. If you're one of those that likes to know where everybody went when he left home, I was a character of this natural force. Names sweep the ridge behind the teeth and probe the throat for the author of ten thousand stats in the unsanctified thought that all human beings are geniuses.
My gestures, your gestures, the look in the eye, a walk among doves feels like walking among the trees in the cool of the day. Do not be one with the world. You don’t come out of childhood unscathed. Coal extraction is like that, dissolved and precipitated. Topsoil brushed with power shovels and bulldozered seams of overburden mix soil and regolith in long parallel ridges. Vegetation and bramble prepare cartilaginous cities of the mimoid progress. Society reports from the Ghost Plane that every man is his own priest and wisdom a pyramid of Sav lasav, kav lakav, drunk, drunk. Like the Day before the Flood these mines sluiced a katabole. The trains would end but the Creek run on. Such like steam and coal inspired Hawthorn in his Moss to say, “I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of these blasted allegories... I am a good deal changed since those times; and to tell you the truth, my past self is not very much to my taste, as I see in this book.” We're actually smelling each other as we talk.
Literature, language and land preoccupy birth suppose layers like coal fields. Continually pleating, in the DNA of a family producing 1026 pleats in the ten generations of three hundred years, a child can date innocence as far back as the ocean before. To open the pages like the coal of a black rock book lying horizontal in the zone of change, buried vegetation again and again in waves, in three hundred million years dried and covered and buried again embedded, incised, scratched, scored, and recovered, was stacked onto cars on the Pennsy Railroad. Next to the railroad tracks great cubes of steel had rolled down from train wrecks to the creeki. They stuck up like the cargo of abandoned ships. The rails followed the creek and the electric lines followed behind. Carboniferous Pennsylvania on Chartiers Creek in the Pittsburgh coal seams was first sea shore and swamp.
Should you share your life with a river and tell your spouse one day that the fire of love comes out of your hands, that the ephod bringing succor there is no need for telepathy. Like a rushing wind and a fire that comes, coal is not ready for repentance, drop by drop emblems of conduct sulphur the aureate rocks. On the river of the mind below, chartreuse shirts with yellow scarves not over or under are around and through.
On that side of the cliff overlooking our thoughts and acts on the tracks, scorpions would crood for the mills. The elbow culverts gushed oil against the window panes of the school. The largest class ever seen set sail. Always rural, elemental snow maples, elms, pilsner from the balconies of houses on the mountain heads to the river mouth below, snowflake navies storm saddle the sky. We call them Divine Gates. Long trains rotate like wheels in wheels. How can these not appear? Precognition and serendipity evidence the skein of the worlds, the onion simultaneous at once. That is knowledge of the worlds, a medieval quantum told with Giotto and spiritual beings. Do they come many into one, one into many, expand and contract together as you look at the stars to bring them to earth? Gold-shod prophecies congregate in bushels like pears.
Lord of heaven, help me!
for you have made me in this street
wear bones & marching feet
surely we heavenly meet while are bound to meet.
Franz Kline’s black and white Wilkes-Barre tracks were not much to his taste either where the chubbed smoke exploded bellows undermined with cuttery corn and ruth dug from the ground where Vater Eberhard walks tracks with a gun and collects torpedoes on a whim to fasten and drop with a stone. When that first coal hauled down the flood, Flotsam hailed Jetsam from tree trunks on the bank that He was in the world and the world was made by him and the world knew him not. He came to his own and his very character spoke the Heraclitean pity and indig | nation! / Sheer off / Manshape, on one hand swallowed in the thousand glitters, but on the other, the poor potsherd, | patchwood immortal said, "listen, let's go down and fight a war" (Hopkins).
Place makes the face, the soul conscious. Excavation of the autonomous. Shall Thy wonders be known in the dark, Thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall the dead arise and praise, Thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? Take the body as more than an instrument, as an event, position itself. To grow an experience of the sentient means instruction with a pierced ear. It becomes a musician of that Place to transform an event. So Steam locomotives belch sulphur and aureate cinders in the air. Fires rage up tinder hillsides from train sparks, above the trees, 100 feet up, as high above the tracks as the slag pits beneath. Everywhere in season the hills run red with springs out of the hillside waters of the Woods. They come down the hill from the veins of coal pits after mining, culm dumps, hillocks. Leach residue and tail slime slick the terra-cone watershed, which is the hardest part to know of Humanyte connectedness, compassion, relation, love.
A high bluff on the southeast, Backbone Road overlooks and commands the whole valley there, towering above its neighbors like selective memories that fire kilns of those who think they know. Not that anything can be done to change the way space extracts sulphur from blanket rock or meteorite impact vaporizes sulphur and sin, such that, were the child is infected. Vaporized three times faster than iron by the effects of impact and ion bombardment in the sputtering solar wind, the blows bring light to describe the fertile place at work in the tissue where creation groans individual and social bodies together and feminine and masculine meet, some parts hard, and others not, and the body holds out its arms to the other to do the same, and the saved child pulls pins on the earthly good of the inscrutable corruption of Breughel & Bosch from the coal and window dressing of the towns and the jpeg bloom.
In voluntude the Sovereign One ordains audacity and sentience, a tapestry fertile and corrupt. Sheol sans fire can claim the comedy of desire that says life is a changing event, a Ledean white yolk shell, hollow of cheek and mind, a king caked with mold. Maunders about revealing count up to ten in the western wall of Jerusalem. The candled wood-knots shine blood red. On the creek, incandescence and later diffusion like fish and fisherman hail blasphemy in these hearts that “suffer to possess the tabernacle as they sometimes are, and say the Pater ignosce” with Dr. Donne:
“Father forgive them, which allows all that is done a weight of future glory to counterpose as soon as an upright man appears. As though the greatest weakness in this world were man, and the greatest fault in man were to be good, made the Sewer of all corruption, of all the sins of the world, as no son of God but a mere man, as no man, but a worm. You would think the good would have its reward, but they are blamed for all the evil they did not do. If it goes against the grain of youth then say Pater ignosce. Ignosce, ignorant of their deeds, but not of the counter weight to them, the bulls of Bashan Pondus Gloriae, weight of glory, earthquake, flood, prison. So let me pay my debts with my bones in this penurious prison! …to recompense the wantonness of youth."
Advanced achievments of history mix together and explode. The water watchers don’t bother the fish in a bowl as long what they don’t see. Walk the stones and skip the creek. Take your passage from innocence to guilt as if given both a disease and at the same time its vaccination, not a shot but an attitude of mind. The beauty du mal repented by Baudelaire washes the superfund sites after short-term victims are gone. It remains in cell phones and aluminum. You can surf in memory all day long the different phosphates of the sun. Editors of shame maintain this is good. My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire. The subterrain converse rehearses hispid sticks and spits. Translating aural sense with the nose, lenses in the eye to oppose thinking, except to say what is compelled, cones increase toward center. Rods increase and cones decrease. The fovea focuses light. There is nothing like a boy who remembers it so long that he can trace the events.
The coal, the creek, the railroad, the snow might be just appearances of degraded choices that followed him. The five year old who emerges from the undermined coal seams, extracted by the memorist many times his age, like the small swift drawings of Kline of anthracite or bituminous culm piles of slag, magnified become magnificent. Whether dug in the ground or from open pits mined west, six billion tons of anthracite reserve and a hundred times of bituminous stretch the expansion cracks.
To see yourself naked in mind, but only when clothed are you whole, these lines reveal the lines and planes. Forms repeat patterns of the heart of the being of the world. The morning sky shows overlap to the tale of breath. Maybe we are not aware, but Place is breath canoeing and exploring the major rivers and caves and knowing the sudden storms. You may obtain more explosives from Fischer Chemical. Pounds of potassium chlorate and nitrate, charcoal, sulphur, red phosphorus and mercury are histories of time, like society, leadership, affluence.
These conclude the ages for 15 and 16 old boy who operated a premillenial superheated bath with caustic derivatives for the bronze memorials made by J. H. Matthews and Company’s above-ground entombments. Working over a vat fired by large burners, washing off the names of the deceased afixed in bronze letters with wax, with arm length rubber gloves and steel brushes in summer worked. The native in that commute later from a sheep ranch on the Balcones Fault for a doctorate in literature and linguistics washed bottles after for Dr. Lester Reed at the Clayton Foundation for five years, practiced aikido with Bill Lee, wrote Native Texans, A Calendar of Poems, & Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries, and knowing the transcendent love of a wife, M. A. of the University of Wales and M.D., whom knowing experienced later years of a family and ceramic sculpture beyond all imagining of the person here, as Chuang Tze would say, born of the fitness that forgets about all that is fitting, in extreme chances thrown out of habit to new steps from knowing, give all and everything.
Soul Spinning
We are not digressing from our theme but progress to understand that those worlds prepare Humanyte even in the industrial Viscose plants, spinning affording such. Since shuttered, but wandering all hours through them like caves, on no particular assignment, where huge vats, thirty, forty foot were tall metaphors of remembrances of eternity in time in the stillness of implicit being and power, this job gave that instruction in the compulsion of patterns mediated through time, held open by belief beyond the acetate that spins the world.
Caught up in the acetate spinning rooms filled with rows and rows of spinners that went clack, clack-clack as they spun rayon out of sulphuric acid baths, the smell of acid mist in the air, viscose forced through spinnerets from scaled-up versions of a butter churn turned into fiber strings. Call this fabric as the same as spun the world world. Why do we repeat? Because there are two.
The acid coagulated and solidified the filaments, regenerated cellulose jet spun, emitting zinc and hydrogen sulfide. The filaments wound on spools, passed through rollers, washed, bleached, rinsed, dried, and rewound again, pretty far from dipping a needle in a viscous solution of mulberry pulp and gummy rubber as it all began. The early product called Chardonnay would burn like gasoline. The viscose fiber spun to create the illusion of the world was nothing beside these vats, the tanks of thingness, materiality alone, Dinglichkeit, a magnificent state, but without cognition of the pocket Gower who writes, filled with apprehension I shall sing true dreams whose import disturbs the depths of my heart. May he whom the Isle of Patmos received in Apocalypse, and whose name I bear, guide this work. Unstaunched in this solitude, the beyond large warehouse-sized American Viscose plant in Lewistown, PA was completely swept away by flood.
Iowa
The next step toward the impossible holding that all human beings are geniuses came in studies at Iowa for two years where Murray Krieger was then writing Ekphrasis on the written descriptions of works of art, and Rosalie Colie writing Paradoxia Epidemica on the renaissance tradition of paradox, a bow to Sir Thomas Browne’s 1646 work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, empirical observations of nature. The science and imagination of the renaissance proved as paradigmatic a study as Paradise Lost in its underpinning of epic structures, especially referencing the invisible made visible and giving the thoughts of heroic mind underlying renaissance epic. From the deep structure of imagination drawn in person, places and situations predisposed to respond the way we do, sometimes romantic as in the Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Marlowe’s long poems and plays, sometimes biblical in Paradise Lost, the huge political and social underpinnings of Shakespeare, the rolling sympathies of Donne’s lyrical Anniversaries that extend to his sermons is a landscape always beautiful, various and new.
Heroic and naïve efforts to attain new worlds, geographical, astronomical and encompassing all relations of men and women with all myth of the ancients thrown together with botany inescapable, overwhelming, must be accepted on its own terms and no other, in this last of three ages, the renaissance. The untrammeled swallows up goodness and mercy, temptation and failure where 5th century Greece and first century Rome were surpassed in Italy and England, sustaining those flowers even as they incorporate them. Commercial myths of new world crescendo and storm seas roll into the great writing of the last Yeats and Joyce until the future walls of domination and liberation begin.
All this and more. until that combined with meeting one on one with Donald Justice as he was writing Night Light. But none of it could have been comprehended without the intensive study of biblical texts afforded as an undergraduate with Clarence Mason and Andrew Telford at the Philadelphia College Bible, nights, and amplified by studying the results with Ricardo Foulkes among the many genuine intellects of the Seminario Biblio Latinamericano in San Jose Costa Rica. Further, relationships formed at the Texas with Winifred Lehman and Edgar Poleme in linguistics transitioned to T. M. Cranfill, brilliant Shakespeare scholar, editor of the Texas Quarterly and director of my dissertation. His classes were performances in which he read the plays in nuanced intonations to feel the thought of those ironic turns almost always opaque to American speech. Beyond that there were uncounted conversations with the higher mind of one fellow student, translator to be, John Cullen, for all the seven years we studied together for doctorates at Texas. The para-geography of imaginary worlds of Douglass Parker and Raja Rao’s inquiries of how one becomes two offered in the course of this residence, in association with Dean Henry Burlage of Pharmacy in an attempt to revitalize the Pharmacy Garden, planting a lavender field in the Texas Hill Country, knowing Robert L. Williams at the beginning of his priesthood at St. Hilarion’s, and his circle, when he celebrated mass every morning and I was often the only one in attendance for six months of that lifetime after the death of Carl Bowers, but before he became a linguist of pre-Hispanic Mixtec.
Anyway I took comfort from Kierkegaard’s prefaces, Wittgenstein’s so very simple expressions of Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations and Kafka’s compassion for the world of life, all greatly supported by readings in Emmanuel Levinas and Geoffrey Hartman, to show the reason and wonder. My bona fides in ceramic sculptures executed late exhibited this where there was no need to speak what you think.
But one seems to get help, so to reckon the score, Jose Donoso, the Chilean novelist met on an airport bench in Panama City airport that night after receiving the news of my brother’s death in Philadelphia and to encourage my loved ones I took a sudden flight to return. It had been a whirlwind since I had gotten the news earlier that morning as I was on a bus to travel myself to the most remote part of the country, by train, then mule to the region south. A note was handed to return to San Jose just before I left, which landed on that Panama bench for a five hour layover for the flight to Miami then further north. Jose Donoso, actually on his way to Iowa then sat down and perceiving the state of my mind suggested we hire a cab and tour the canal in the wee hours a while, since he was on the same flight to Miami. This we did and whatever that meant was too deep to fathom, like a dream perhaps, but at leave taking later he gave me his card, otherwise I’d never have known. The agony is that all the time he was at Iowa the same time I was I never made the connection. When I did, much later, and redressed the balance in elimae, he was already gone. There were two other helps in that time, Donoso Escobar’s face of sorrow as he watched me pack and Fred Phillips back in Merion at the funeral who came with coat and tie to express his sorrow. Stand ins, volunteers for the self.
The moment recognized before waking is known immediately as not only possible but as unbelievable, amorphous and dissolving as waking takes hold. But back at the planning, imagine the line that were the mission easy it were pointless, and further, that if it had promise what was achieved gave expression to the difficulty sought, the impact of forces, the provision of allies, the wrestling of odds self-designed to give or get no breaks in order to bake the chemical water out of the clay of that mighty coalition of blessing and danger, which phrase was found written on the walls at Glastonbury.
Adapted from Soul Spinning at Gobbet and A Sacred history of Coal by Augusto Todoele, pseud, at Thrice Fiction 27.
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