3

Out of a vast void of darkness, no existence at all, Billy had come forth, stepped off his helicopter, and said to himself, "Here I am, then." The tundra was cold and the air was chilled. That night he decided to write down his thoughts, after finding a blank notebook and several pens in his knapsack, and he wrote about himself in the third person. And so he began his story, from the first thing he remembered, and then drifted off into daydreaming on paper. A drink of elephant harmony is like unto the killer whale a drain or tax; a terror lies within it, and my terror has endless fuel. Now Billy realized he was writing poetry, and he was very confused by this whole ordeal, and very sleepy, and did not want to, or could not, go off to sleep. The campfire burned near the stone upon which he sat writing, and the other fellows were in their tents or in their roll blankets on the ground, dosing, snoring, snorting. And so the geometric method seemed not quite proper for the present essay, as the production of the materials of natural rectitude have made comings and goings irrelevant. And Billy realized what worlds there were in this new activity, poetry. He realized the difference between abstraction and concreteness; and so he played about with these two poles, making a serpent false and a concept shatter; and the awakening served as a kind of locus or focal point for the balance of the principles involved, so that nothing was left out, and there were equal sums of muck and dried weeds at either end of the equation. And so he lived and loved; and there was nothing else for him but living and loving life, living the life he loved, now that he was alive, now that he was no longer (not dead, but whatever it is not after life but before it, which holds the potential of life, while after life has come and passed life anew becomes impossible, for one has died). And so he began with this mystery of just what is the difference between the state before one is born and the state after one has died, such that before one is born there is, and always has been, the potential to one day be born; while after death to be born once more, or to ever exist again, becomes impossible. And then there are those . . . there are those like Billy, who are not born but their first moment of existence is the experience of getting off a helicopter in a place where the sun never sets, knowing precisely what he must do, though never knowing what any of this means, its purpose, its context. Did I mention it? . . . the sun still hadn't set, but had merely gone three quarters the way around the horizon.

Where did the men get the wood for the fire? . . . Billy hadn't seen any trees the whole march out, nor did he see any now. It was all a perfect pastureland, the mucky, bumpy green earth stretching on forever. The men had merely said, "Let's get some wood and build a fire, just as all these others are doing"; and a few of them went out, and came back with wood. Wait a minute, there's something terribly wrong here. A stint in prison for as long as it takes to live in Los Angeles long enough to get a good feeling about the city, and then grow bitter toward it and leave, is much better than a day in prison for one who is born in dark woods at night. But the daylight is like a sore or blister on the genitals, as where the sun never sets there is also much suicide. And yet . . . the principles of the dogmatic procedure become like axioms none can prove nor deny, though deny them we shall, merely to play the doubting Thomas. And thus the cracks begin at the foundation of the edifice, until it takes the alighting of a thrush at the pinnacle to bring the whole structure down. But the aches of the stomach or intestine come from the intestine being pulled into knots after swallowing a length of fishing line; or it could be spicy food. But these are all irrelevant considerations when we look at copies of objects held in the mind like white kid gloves. And so we see how all this comes together not at the pinnacle but at the foundation, and not in the conceptualization but in the execution. That was how he understood his predicament, and the wolves of the tundra were frightened and large.