How do you know that the call of the cole tit from the bracken is not really the lamentations of the damned? The world’s a deceptive place. A lot of things that you see are not really there anymore. Just the after-image in the eye. So to speak.
Christ in a crinoline!
Through the noon heat and into the dusk where lizards lay with their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks and fended off the world with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates.
It had grown cold in the night but he was numb with other weathers. An equinox in the heart, ill change, unluck. Suttree held his face in his hands. Child of darkness and familiar of small dooms.
My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow.
He told them that Blevins was his brother and he’d taken a bloodoath not to return to his father without the captain’s head and he said that if he failed there were more brothers each waiting his turn.
They wheeled Suttree on. Bearing his pained bones in their boat of flesh. To where the deadcarriage waits in the dark. Perhaps the wrath of God after all.
But one’s convictions as to the nature of reality must also represent one’s limitations as to the perception of it. And then I just stopped worrying about it. I accepted the fact that I would die without really knowing where it was that I had been and that was okay. Well. Almost.
I don’t think there is some way to prepare for death. You have to make one up. There’s no evolutionary advantage to being good at dying. Who would you leave it to? The thing you are dealing with – time – is immalleable. Except that the more you harbor it the less of it you have. The liquor of being is leaking out onto the ground. You need to hurry. But the haste itself is consuming what you wish to preserve. You cant deal with what it is you’ve been sent to deal with. It’s too hard.
I did want to be included. I just wasn’t willing to pay the entry fee. On my better days I could even grant that we were the same creatures. Much was the same and little different. The same unlikely forms. Elbows. Skulls. The remnants of a soul.
This is the house where the dead lived. It is gone, lost and gone.
How’re you doin Ed Tom. I aint braggin.
The uncle narrowed his eyes at Suttree. No need to get on your high horse with me, he said. At least I was never in the goddamned penitentiary. Suttree smiled. The workhouse, John. It’s a little different. But I am what I am.
Not sure why. But you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.
It was for us and it will be for others.
There was a paper bag on the night table that held things he’d.
Recurrences of dreams he’d had in the mountains came and went and the second night he woke from uneasy sleep and lay in the world alone.
These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldnt even understand, well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you. But what if you’d of told em it was their own grandchildren?
I know that small acts of valor may be all that is visible of great movements of courage within.
But it may be true that you have to be on the outside looking in.