JON RAFMAN
LEGENDARY REALITY (2017)
Legendary Reality (2017) by Jon Rafman
One day I’m sitting at Ben’s Deli when his voice comes over the loudspeakers, sewing together everything that I observe. Whatever the music touches gets embedded in an immense tapestry. And he is in it––a figure framed by the city.
Late at night, when I look out at the buildings, I see a face in every window looking back at me. When I turn away, I wonder how many go back to their desks and write this down.
I have not seen him in years now, but his words are in my blood and veins. They rise up in me and fuse together the horizontal and the vertical.
A warm feeling washes over me. I can make out the blurry outline of my glass chamber. Am I waking up, or going to sleep?
My memories break like a mirror into a thousand fragments. The line between inside and outside melts away. Images begin to seep in.
I hear his voice now, calling out to me from the tower down the track. It summons me down the passageway, which I did not take… towards the portal, I never entered.
Let me renew myself in the midst of all the things in the world, which cannot be connected.
I open my eyes. I am alone in Murray Hill Park, staring at the city below.
I’m hungry for food, for love, for flesh.
There is a note nailed to a tree. It reads: “The flowers that I left in the ground, that I did not gather for you – today I bring them all back, to let them grow forever. Not in poems or marble, but where they fell and rotted.”
A wave of memories hits me. I’m standing by the window of my childhood apartment, on Peel and Sherbrooke. Wait, no, I’m in front of the Orange Julip, in my first car, my high school sweetheart beside me. And for a moment, I almost forget that I’m in this pod, bandaged by silence.
My sense of self is not strong enough to register my self’s erosion. There is no sustaining belief, no heroic struggle, just a hard, bitter silence. 8:11 This is the only poem I can read. I am the only one who can write it. I didn’t kill myself when things went wrong. I didn’t turn to drugs or teaching. I tried to sleep. But when I couldn’t sleep, I learned to write. I learned to write what might be read on nights like this by one like me.
We all want the past to be vindicated, and so we evoke figures of the past. A desire in me instantly awakes for something eternally hinted at but never achieved, the echoes of a past existence. I know who I have to seek out.
A solitary figure appears on the edge of my vision. A figure among the ruins who couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else. Did I have the right to come after him, with my dusty mind? I approach him slowly, with the pain of a thousand-year-old statue breaking into life. He welcomes me without surprise, as if he had been waiting for me. We walk along the coastline. He leads me into a dark cave, and we descend, through cliffs of glowing green water.
The ground begins to tremble. The landscape feels like it’s about to blow apart.
He tells me that this is the realm of the crack, the realm of failure, the realm of death, and unless you affirm failure and death, you are going to be unhappy.
He says that redemption, repentance, resurrection used to be our spiritual tools, but these pathways have been forgotten, ruined, or abandoned. Instead, each attempt at writing is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate. There is only the war to recover what has been lost and found and lost again, under conditions that seem more and more unfavorable.
You must destroy the versions of yourself that provide too easy a solution, murder the selves that whisper untruths. He tells me all this between the dripping walls of a catacomb, while we watch out for the black puddles underfoot. Who knows how deep they go. We shake hands solemnly and exchange umbrellas and then we tighten each other’s ties. He kisses me on the cheek in the manner of a French general awarding medals and we part ways.
I have not been unhappy in ten thousand years. During the day, I laugh, and during the night, I sleep. My favourite cooks prepare my meals, my body cleans and repairs itself, and all my work goes well.
As I grow older the world becomes stranger, the patterns more complicated. Something inside me has changed. The wind isn’t howling outside anymore, it’s howling within me.