As the Dead Prey Upon Us

As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being! I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered about my mother, some of them taking care to pass beneath the beam of the movie projector, some record playing on the victrola, and all of them desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell I turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it, there?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor poor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations of brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard displays, the dead roaming from one to another as bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed to mere equipments my mother, as alive as ever she was, asleep when I entered the house as I often found her in a rocker under the lamp, and awaking, as I came up to her, as she ever had I found out she returns to the house once a week, and with her the throng of the unknown young who center on her as much in death as other like suited and dressed people did in life O the dead! and the Indian woman and I enabled the blue deer to walk and the blue deer talked, in the next room, a Negro talk it was like walking a jackass, and its talk was the pressing gabber of gammers of old women and we helped walk it around the room because it was seeking socks or shoes for its hooves now that it was acquiring human possibilities In the five hindrances men and angels stay caught in the net, in the immense nets which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels and the demons and men go up and down Walk the jackass Hear the victrola Let the automobile be tucked into a corner of the white fence when it is a white chair. Purity is only an instant of being, the trammels recur In the five hindrances, perfection is hidden I shall get to the place 10 minutes late. It will be 20 minutes of 9. And I don’t know, without the car, how I shall get there O peace, my mother, I do not know how differently I could have done what I did or did not do. That you are back each week that you fall asleep with your face to the right that you are present there when I come in as you were when you were alive that you are as solid, and your flesh is as I knew it, that you have the company I am used to your having but o, that you all find it such a cheapness! o peace, mother, for the mammothness of the comings and goings of the ladders of life The nets we are entangled in. Awake, my soul, let the power into the last wrinkle of being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires be left upon the earth. Let even your mother go. Let there be only paradise The desperateness is, that the instant which is also paradise (paradise is happiness) dissolves into the next instant, and power flows to meet the next occurrence Is it any wonder my mother comes back? Do not that throng rightly seek the room where they might expect happiness? They did not complain of life, they obviously wanted the movie, each other, merely to pass among each other there, where the real is, even to the display cards, to be out of hell The poverty of hell O souls, in life and in death, make, even as you sleep, even in sleep know what wind even under the crankcase of the ugly automobile lifts it away, clears the sodden weights of goods, equipment, entertainment, the foods the Indian woman, the filthy blue deer, the 4 by 3 foot ‘Viewbook,’ the heaviness of the old house, the stuffed inner room lifts the sodden nets and they disappear as ghosts do, as spider webs, nothing before the hand of man The vent! You must have the vent, or you shall die. Which means never to die, the ghastliness of going, and forever coming back, returning to the instants which were not lived O mother, this I could not have done, I could not have lived what you didn’t, I am myself netted in my own being I want to die. I want to make that instant, too, perfect O my soul, slip the cog II The death in life (death itself) is endless, eternity is the false cause The knot is other wise, each topological corner presents itself, and no sword cuts it, each knot is itself its fire each knot of which the net is made is for the hands to untake the knot’s making. And touch alone can turn the knot into its own flame (o mother, if you had once touched me o mother, if I had once touched you) The car did not burn. Its underside was not presented to me a grotesque corpse. The old man merely removed it as I looked up at it, and put it in a corner of the picket fence like was it my mother’s white dog? or a child’s chair The woman, playing on the grass, with her son (the woman next door) was angry with me whatever it was slipped across the playpen or whatever she had out there on the grass And I was quite flip in reply that anyone who used plastic had to expect things to skid and break, that I couldn’t worry that her son might have been hurt by whatever it was I sent skidding down on them. It was just then I went into my house and to my utter astonishment found my mother sitting there as she always had sat, as must she always forever sit there her head lolling into sleep? Awake, awake my mother what wind will lift you too forever from the tawdriness, make you rich as all those souls crave crave crave to be rich? They are right. We must have what we want. We cannot afford not to. We have only one course: the nets which entangle us are flames O souls, burn alive, burn now that you may forever have peace, have what you crave O souls, go into everything, let not one knot pass through your fingers let not any they tell you you must sleep as the net comes through your authentic hands What passes is what is, what shall be, what has been, what hell and heaven is is earth to be rent, to shoot you through the screen of flame which each knot hides as all knots are a wall ready to be shot open by you the nets of being are only eternal if you sleep as your hands ought to be busy. Method, method I too call on you to come to the aid of all men, to women most who know most, to woman to tell men to awake. Awake, men, awake I ask my mother to sleep. I ask her to stay in the chair. My chair is in the corner of the fence. She sits by the fireplace made of paving stones. The blue deer need not trouble either of us. And if she sits in happiness the souls who trouble her and me will also rest. The automobile has been hauled away.