The Rattle Is in the Bones: An Authorial Meditation

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

They desired no object but sought through prayer the light that was desire’s final destination. Together in the ramshackle domicile they called home — a seam-welded collection of corrugated tin and industrial-grade rubber and incoherently arranged found objects that leaned riverward from the edge of the high stony bluff within which it seemed insecurely rooted, like a bad tooth — the four of them sat endlessly and without want, without need of food or water or (they presumed) air, the father and the mother and the twins, a boy and a girl, each of whom shared certain genetic or morphological anomalies that they believed bound them to the divinity: the limpid blue eyes pure as ink; the hair black as the world’s first anger; the wide-set nostrils vaguely simian in aspect. And, of course, the total lack of mouths.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

Not a sound but a vibration, one they generated deep in their throats without cessation and that rattled the tin sheathing of their ancient home as if it were a kettledrum. Each day the sun would ascend like a pink lozenge into the pale sky and each night it would drop like a stone into the river, and all the while this family of ascetics moaned their mouthless moan and awaited nothing, for it was only the never-ending and always beginning present that had, for them, anything like substance, anything like realness.

How were the children born? Did that not require an act of copulation? Didn’t their ontogenetic development, likewise, require growth and movement from one state to another? What did they do, all the livelong day, as their domicile contemplated throwing itself into the river, as the heavens hauled the sun upward as if it were on the far end of a winch, as the whitecaps levitated above the current and whispered of a truth buried at the bottom of the river on whose shores their lives had surely unfolded, one day and one event after another? Questions like these, the family would have been quick to point out (had there been anyone to ask them, and had they the ability to answer) revealed only the formless nature of unquenchable desire.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

It would be good to now write, “One day….” As in, “One day they rose to find the tin-hut perdition in which they moaned incessantly teetering over the edge of the bluff and then drifting like a child’s blanket softly past the lip.” Or, “One day, finally driven by a hunger that could not be mitigated, the twins murdered their mouthless parents in their sleep, stabbed them with sharpened stones and then bathed soundlessly in the blood of these mouthless guardians.” Or, “One day, a man arrived at their absurd domicile, an Author bearing books, journals, pens in all shapes and sizes and colors, who sat among them and began to describe the uncommon conditions dictating their strange lives.” “One day it was otherwise.” All stories are stories of exception, which is why this is, in the end, no story at all. It exists only as a perpetual unfolding, and it cannot be wound back up, placed in a jar, pushed to the back of the shelf upon which you, (non)reader, house your most cherished tales as if they were mementos, or the viscera of those you have slain. This non-story exists with or (preferably) without you. No matter how hard you listen, you will not hear the guttural vibration, will not feel your bones rattle, though the sonic ripple is passing through you even now. It is time itself, ringing out, containing your life and death and everything before or after in one unbroken and instantaneous pause. Concentrate now. Lean riverward. Pretend.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm