Pretense and Paradox

The weather was academic. It reminded Jesus of Argentine winters, growing old, oblique light and compromised dreams. The years he would have spent between rooms at University and libraries, young lovers and Camel lights were instead spent in New York City. When he woke up in NYC he could feel the city hum. Being so small would have frightened him, but instead he was prodded into action. The great metallic city became organic and warm; it was kind to him.

Now, ten years later he looked in the mirror and resigned the ambition that one day he would look old enough to take seriously. In truth, it wasn't the way he looked that made his antics so dismissable, but his awareness -- nearly an obsession -- of how he was regarded physically was a comfortable culprit for what was wrong with him. There was less ownership. Even still, the malt liquor had surely stunted his growth, and he had a narcotic youth about him. In a different life he may have been closer to six feet tall.

Titus Andronicus was but a name for him. He could tell you that it was thought to be possibly Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, but no more than this. A beautiful girl had informed Jesus that he had done a lot of things in his life, but had not truly lived much. As an example, he had never read the play. A dilettante, Jesus was superficial and teased himself with art, culture, history, and language, never consummating any love for one study, never building a foundation on erudition and never raising a cathedral honoring the more divine works a human can invest one's life, mind, and heart in. He had spent his youth on the doorsteps of such edifices, only speculating on the meanings of the architecture and art of life.

For whatever reason, against whatever odds, he was still alive at 30. This was unexpected. Now his bones complained that the stone was cold and hard, and his psyche was less airy and flexible. His heart felt glassy and brittle, and he imagined it like some piece of art, clear glass and mechanical valves, sliding shells and red, red, red through perfect wet transparence. He didn't care to romanticize the other organs, and the idea of his lungs cast a shadow of fear into him like the mention of the most savage ghetto in the biggest city.

When he was young, in the fourth grade, he vomited the day he slowly realized that his own body, the one he was living in, had veins and intestines, a liver, bile, lungs, kidneys and everything that was in the diagram on a poster next to the chalkboard. It felt like he was being made to eat it all, that each organ had to be chewed and swallowed and in his body became covered in blood and veins; this long, protracted, psychic meal was the gory death in life. He still had to look away from the the television when there was any opened body, and he was 30. The nausea hadn't helped.

Now Jesus was made to move his arms and legs, his neck and head and back and chest against gravity's will. A wiser man once told him, "Save some of your rebellion for later, when you need it." The cool, grey air moved Jesus to consider capitulating some of his defiance, to try to play by the rules and find beauty and comfort in pedestrian progress. After all, he was sure he would still be able to conjure up the miracles he needed when the tides were right. There were a fine register of battles to fight without having to resort to fight himself. Another symbolic idea that followed this train of thought was his experience playing chess with himself. He always lost, because he always fell short of playing a perfect game on both sides.