So Far, Texas

your brutality intimidates me

How long have I been in Texas? 

1. That Townes Van Zandt CD must’ve played itself about a thousand times now in my 1998 Nissan Maxima and I still don’t know all the lyrics to “Tecumseh Valley”.

2. Long enough to own a pair of cowboy boots.

3. There’s a country road called Hamilton Pool Road and once I hit a raccoon headed westbound and saw its still dead body the next day headed eastbound (long enough to observe that dead things decay slowly here).

4. I do not know.

5. Long enough to tell that time runs differently.

6. And that daily sundial does shine its shade upon all those decaying bucks on the sides of the highways, not one have I seen rot.

7. There is no line dancing in Texas, it’s two-step and swing. 

8. It has only rained once.

Last night, I dreamt there was a lark outside my window that could not, or would not, sing. It was always one way or the other: first it could but wouldn’t, then it couldn’t but would. The longer that I contemplate this the more it blooms that in my mind this points to a bizarre distinction I hold between femininity and masculinity. Perhaps I do not mean to say that I feel most masculine when I lie, but maybe perhaps when I undergo exercises in being earnest. When I say that I know how to do things that I do not actually know how to do (see: photoshop, speaking Spanish, grilling). And in turn I feel my most feminine when I am transparent–– not when I tell the truth but rather, when I do not say anything at all. This is, of course, shrieking with cynicism. Nothing is so sardonic. 

Central Texas is a region full of larks that can but won’t sing, and larks who won’t but can sing. These new cowboy boots, these boots are larks. They’re brown leather with tan accents and they cost me thirty dollars, on the inside in black sharpie a girl named Kennedy Jade wrote Kennedy Jade (so I assume). I’m addicted to the way they sound when I walk on the pavement.

Before I dreamt of that lark we watched part 2 of a Ken Burns documentary series about The West, legs entangled with more legs, he combed my hair out of his face, Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia flavor melting in mugs on our laps, we both fell asleep a little, back and forth, though I don’t think even for a second at the same time. Like an odd game of catch, let's take turns dreaming of bloody wars turned history of this land underneath our bodies. Texas is a brutal place. Men and women made oil-rich gavotte around in diesel trucks, bible studies begging the god they believe in to save this un-holy land from the very those who pray, cattle and dogs playing scenes from David and Goliath. Ken Burns narrates the motto of the Spanish colonists: God is in heaven, the Pope is at the Vatican, the King is in Madrid, the Viceroy is in Mexico City, and to hell with you I’m in San Antonio.

Texas is a place of contradictions. I would like to hold the seething and squirming rattlesnakes by the base of their head in one hand and the smile of the old man who approaches my sister and I on the outside patio of the cafe just to tell us that the flowers behind us are called zinnias, and they’re blossoming marvelously, in the other. This is an exercise in space. It’s like an emotional stretch. Because Central Texas is a cactus from which blooms flowers in red and orange. And the blues band above the Continental sings such sad things but they move their hips and they smile too. Yesterday I tried my damned hardest to bum a cigarette from a canoer while paddleboarding on a river made toxic by invasive algaes, and he didn’t have one but he did give me a 3mg spearmint ZYN. 

I wanted to go dancing last night but Ken Burns boy wanted to relax and asked me to meet him at a drum circle in the park instead, specifically at this tree called the Monkey Tree, and when I got there, he was laying shirtless with a steel tongue drum on his stomach resting his head on his black backpack with his mustache pointed towards the waning moon, and there were bodies skipping around in interesting ways and someone painting something too far away for me to really see. We laid on each other and watched lights bouncing off this tree called the Monkey Tree and there were two others exchanging tips on how to microdose, and we laid like that for so long that we didn’t even notice when the fire dancers came out and began balancing beams of flames off their elbows and knees. A guy came up to us and told us how pissed off he was cause somebody stole his meth. Frankly, I was hungry and needed to use the bathroom. I’m no hippie, I just like trees a lot. But I’m getting the sense that the crowd I’ve been hanging around fancies themselves enlightened, or at least on a direct path towards it. Resonate is the word that keeps on bubbling at the three dimensional surfaces of our encounters– I resonate with you, is their highest compliment, and when I come across a passage on resonance in the Cormac McCarthy novel I’m reading at their kitchen table, I take turns showing it to them and one of them copies a phrase or two down in the upper right margin of his notebook:

That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where the rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and tramples down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken only praised.

Why am I here, in Texas? I’d been searching for that resonance. Same as always. I was hoping I might find a landscape whose heartbeat could match my own. Many do, I reckon, and that shared longing resonates. We all want an edge of the world to dangle our feet off of, and a stable ground to sit on while we do this. It’s comfortable that way. We want for behind us to be the things we know. We do not want to spend our entire lives piecing them back together. But no one gets off that easy, showing such little skin in the game. In my mind’s eye, I picture time like a young and clumsy horse with legs too long for its body. When I find cavities in the besotted everything, for which I am obsessed, I long to put them in my mouth and hold them in my cheeks. These are all exercises in the plentiful and diverse tensions of opposites. 

Piecing things back together. 

What a landscape.

9. Now, I really like country music.

McCarthy wants evil and good to make sense and it doesn’t and this torments him. He wants things to happen for a reason and I do not blame him for this. He wants bad to be a permanent state of being and when people are bad he wants them to have been born that way. I think that he hurts because he knows he is capable of terrible things and sometimes this is enough. He invents these antagonists who represent an unstoppable evil, or even the devil himself, and this is therapeutic for him I believe. This is the most important thing I’ve read in the past few months, from All The Pretty Horses:

He said that war had destroyed the country and that men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent’s flesh for its bite… he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold… Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were… Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion. Rawlins asked him in his bad Spanish if there was a heaven for horses but he shook his head and said that a horse had no need of heaven. Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing.

To be capable of it is criminal enough. There is no reckoning from such a crime as capability. These and other divine offenses of conjecture and hot air birth lives of their own and our bodies become their pet bodies. I am both restrained and propelled by the one thousand what if’s, the clouds in my coffee. When I can’t fall asleep I think about the characters tending to the embers of the fire in the vast desert and listening to the old man say these things. I picture Rawlins hesitating and then stumbling over the world cielo and it slows my anxieties. 

What does my heart have the shape to hold? I ask myself this over and over.