The Greywacke Mantle
Or
Greywacke Sailor
 

Bradley Ange 2015

THE BEACH
A pain in my brain grows and grows.
I can be there at any moment.
That is, how well I know the Beach.

What a rush of life,
a recession of sin,
a restoration within.
And the pain.
Always the pain.

THE BEACH
The Pain of such a thought.
How wonderful.
The Beach. Out of Reach.

My first memories were lucid, waves rushing under my body. I was being floated and rolled, over stone and wrack. There was sea foam green, around, blowing about. A massive stank like heaven, which is how I’ve always tasted low tide, mixed with the thick salty mist wind.  I guess I placed myself in a Europa Seascape, though I have no support for this setting, other than original gut instinct. Later, sometime later, the sense of Scottish terrain dissipated and I feel like South Pacific would be more accurate.  The sky was too phony to trust, so I didn’t, I don’t.

 Through blackness and blur. Then, there was a Sea-Man. Beard and weather worn like a frayed splice.  Heeling often, our first interaction involved him hunching and pulling me downward, transiting a stone path away from the beach. Our finest social interface.  I had no mind to interact and I’m not so sure he had a mind.  Then there they were, my memories: pine trimmed rooms and plutonian pathways. Like bubbles in my beer, bubbles now in my brain. One distinct portion of my existence at that time was the smell of the current and what it brought in. At some point I was sprawled out on a chair soaking in sweat.  And my head turned on in a flash.

 I began to interact with my thoughts.  In this early stage of consciousness things were, as they are, unclear.  My world was based off of sensory data that I collected and processed within nanoseconds.   The control point in my world was the aforementioned urchin character.  My brain craved an answer and my body sort of twisted and stretched to find more perception.  Unfortunately, I never did quite gain full control over my body, nor did I correctly gather the data I craved…  I wonder now, as I write, why(?).  You must excuse such digressions; they will eventually work into a side point that will merge with the story and into the greater focal spot on the shelf…  So my reality formed and began with unprocessed data:  sounds of the sea, smells of beach, feelings of predusk through a pane of viscous glass, breathing, heartbeat.  I felt a floating sense, in openness. All was calm, until I thought of Sea Man. Our lovely evolved archaic neuro processes necessitate the desire for defense options, in the off chance that we need to decide to fight or flea – now, and I managed to capture one of these nanosecond-developed-scenarios as a long term memory (Déjà vu).  I recalled recalling my brain turn on, segment by segment, each adding a portion of context and thus building on reality, watching the ripples of fantasy break on the shores of truth, which are always windblown and scratched by the great pains of our prow-pieces .  It is a great thing, the brain, to ponder on, to rack and break open with a wayward hawser.

He was in the corner staring.
“Staring at me?”
My brain demanded an answer:
fight or flee?

With a tremendous call of will
I analyzed the thing with eyes:
glorified
and romantic;

with grey beard, melanoma skin,
and consistent stare.
I told myself to grab a defense tool
and prepare.

Romantic was an accurate first description, looking back.  I guess the whole description was pretty much accurate. Though “romantic” only fits now, it shouldn’t have popped up then.  I’ll stick with the term because of how I perceived him, his style, his life, not because of his theories or his waypoints. Romantic is how I want you to see him.  I want your imagination to flood onto him and fidget, then solidify itself in its rightful place up on the mantle…

 I was never formally introduced to my man in this story.  I did not know his name.  He was there, in the corner, though not present enough to warrant my senses to include him into my awakening fantasy – the life after the Beach.  I was awake and processing the pains and senses and fantasy many a seconds, maybe even minutes before I became aware of this man in space.  He existed in my world without me even knowing it.  This ultimately created a startled effect, as, of course, such a thing would: a stranger sea man in a corner chair with a stare in wait as you perspire through your awakening fantasy in a strange place during a strange life.  The moment before the brain totally processed this thing was amazing.  So much energy pushed through the fantasy to build a truth all the while retreating with raised paranoia and fist. And then quietness and fast breath and two men staring; one at the other, and the other at something that I’ve come to assume is probably gorgeous.  That Greybeard. That face that held such eyes!

 Once the fantasy of awakening had formed into a true enough reality my story begun, again.  I was on a dehydration high, or so that’s the best I can tell. I had spoken a word to this man, multiple times, “Hello./?”, “Who goes there!”  He resumed frozen enough and communicated enough to instill a sense of comfort in my person, and shortly my sentry was sunk.

 As if floating in space and with an absent of breath and bubble I pondered my setting. There was a mantle over a mudstone-brick (perhaps greywacke) fireplace and on and near this mantle were the treasures of a naturalist or a madman. First, I was drawn to the donkey mask slurping up candle light as if it were drinking from a cereal bowl. This piece was a Mexican Mask from an earlier century hung fast to the brick just above a candle.  The candle was rippling wave size chunks of yellow musk around the room. It was hiding in a half-bowl shaped fixture which was mounted to the wall.  “The ass is drinking the light,” I tried to think, then, “was my Man a romantic poet or simply an accidental artist?”

Old Man from the Sea placed his beard on the shelf above the fire.  “This is beautiful.” I said to the room, pointing my nose towards the hydrating donkey. Old Man continued his steady rock inside his fixed seat and my own rocking chair swayed me like a boat on the ocean. The room began to squeeze on me, it waxed cold.  The few chairs, the couch, the stench was from outside, though I wanted to smell the inside in anticipation of rot, in that horrid continued desire to flee or fight.  Sea Man stood, wobbled, stumbled to the window, peed and carried himself towards an ice chest in the corner.  “Go figure.”  All was drunk shortly. Googely eyes looked to be about finished up there on the mantel.  His light flickered to dark over the course of some extended moments. “It’s funny,” I thought there in blackness, “where the fuck am I?” And I was gone for good.

 Now, I recall another item on the mantle, that delicate greywacke mantle, that I enjoy wrapping my thoughts around. There was a stuffed striped bass mounted with tail facing the room, as if it was in want of fossilizing himself in the greywacke.  Next was the taxidermic head of a beautiful mermaid, with a loving countenance – Il Bellissimo Mare. She was captured by the artist, or perhaps the hunter, as she broke through the lane between the depths and the sky.  That place where hair is heavy and drips – before it is shaken.  Her eyes transfixed in desperation, curiosity and sadness. To her right, the eye of a baleen whale was levitating  like a magic eight ball in a fishbowl, it was reflecting the ripples the Donkey’s candle was making, obviously wet and slimy; I wanted to ask of it things. A pile of Albatross bones and fur. A painting of a Pacific Islander whale hunter with a monkey rope leading under the frame (Queequeg, where is your Ishmael?). These creatures stared out into the silently slumbering room, as the audience, while the Donkey devoured his drink. There were flowers unbloomed, hiding, scattered and vased abeam the shelf – Il Bellissimo Mare’s wet hair watered them.  The wall itself I recall as being endless.  “An endless wall to do what?”  Though I can barely remember, my Sea Man’s mantle, I can never forget.

Agony
Purgatory
Between the swells.
Waiting in troughs,
waiting.

Believe me,
Mio Bellissimo Mare,
please.

Torment?
Suffering?
Forever?

And He was there.
And I was gone.