Cancer Bird

Beth was one of the finest people I’ve ever met. I’m usually at loggerheads with conventional, true believer types, and at first that was the case between us, but eventually she won me over with her sheer integrity and goodness. We became good friends and even, for a brief period, lovers.

But our basic differences were too fundamental, and after graduation we parted without rancor, moving on to other people and other lives. When I learned that she’d died of cancer I hadn’t talked to her or even seen her for many years.

Still, I remembered her vividly, and after her death as I worked on a story about our time together, she seemed very real to me, much more palpable than the usual protagonists of my fiction. I do a lot of thinking about my work at night, in that hypnagogic period between consciousness and sleep, and often in that time my characters seem to achieve a certain independence, becoming neither their real life models nor the paper thin constructs I eventually set down, but strangely rounded beings, at once as vivid and fleeting as dreams.

I suppose the question of life after death can only be answered by those who can no longer speak, but that’s never stopped those of us still breathing from endless speculation. "Experts" on ghosts say that the spirits of people who die suddenly and unexpectedly, as Beth did, often remain, confused and uncertain, on our side, especially if they have compelling interests here. Good Catholic that she was, Beth had managed to give birth to six children in her relatively short life, and, knowing her determination and loyalty, it wasn’t hard to picture her hovering over her brood protectively, observing and, if possible, interceding.

Whatever the truth of that, I will admit that in my hypnagogic imagination she appeared to me as easily and as tangibly as any character I’ve ever worked with. Every writer will tell you that occasionally their so called creations will act in unexpected ways and speak with apparent independence, and in that place half memory and half fantasy I often felt her presence, and what was more, a certain warm gratitude for my having written about her as the romantic, even erotic young woman I’d known rather than the pristine saint she was eulogized as, and even that somehow the sensual power of my imagination was helping her maintain her bonds to the living.

Even after I’d finished her story and gone on to the next, she remained lodged in my imagination, acting almost as a psychopomp, in mythology the "soul conductor" who guides the dead to the afterlife and in Jungian theory the bridge between the conscious and unconscious, helping me approach other characters obscured by time, distance or even death.

But despite my interest in the esoteric, I firmly believed that Beth’s posthumous existence was bounded completely by my imagination, and that her "spirit" was nothing more or less than a useful metaphor that I’d put in service, like most everything else in my life, to my writing.

The pursuit in the contemporary world of any kind of sincere art is more likely to result in obscurity and solitude than anything else, but, since I’ve found those two states rather congenial, I’ve never minded that fact. The problem was that I began to believe that I could say anything even, god forbid, the truth, and still be largely ignored. Mankind, however, is much more interested in being outraged than intrigued, and will often go to great lengths to achieve the former state.

My contempt for most contemporary "serious" literature has never been a secret. I consider the current scene a confidence game rigged by the academics and their allies who artificially inflate the value of each others’ work and then try and sell it to a credulous public seeking culture, or failing that, keep afloat by giving each other grants and sinecures paid for by the taxpayer. Instead of expressing the highest aspirations and maddest visions of humankind, today’s poetry tries to make as little noise as possible, burbling liberal pieties and avoiding authentic passion, the end result being drivel so allusive as to scarcely exist, either pious editorializing or pallid wordplay.

Enraged at a puff piece in the press celebrating a local "poet" I wrote a scathing denunciation along these lines, which appeared, as usual, in an extremely obscure location – but no location is obscure enough for those whose eyes are always searching for their own name. Yes, my wit was savage and immoderate, my critique rudely personal, but isn’t that necessary when a cult of personality that overwhelms the actual work is developing? Used as I was to being invisible to the eyes of the intelligentsia, I was genuinely shocked at the resultant furor.

The poet himself, though baffled that anyone could object to verse that had been carefully crafted as to be completely unobjectionable, was fairly gracious, assuming that he had personally insulted me in some unknown way, his response as anemic as his work. His principle patron was harsher but, as I’ve carefully forged a life free from patronage, his bluster and threats meant little to me.

But I had been vicious and perhaps it was poetic justice (so to speak) that A., a rather undistinguished figure at the fringes began to deliver critical broadsides against me, perhaps hoping to buy his way into the heart of the literary clique with the currency of his invective. His scattershot rants directed at every aspect of my personality and creative project were as immoderate as my own, but lacked any trace of substance or wit, and after a few strategic ripostes of my own, the public, initially somewhat sympathetic, began to view him as slightly unbalanced, obsessed with a man they’d prefer to ignore.

Of course nothing such a person said could possibly wound me or deter me from the path I’ve pursued, but it was certainly an uncomfortable time, one whose anxieties seeped even into my hypnagogic imagination. Strangely, it seemed to me that Beth, my psychpomp, was even angrier than I was about these insults, furious in fact.

Spiritualists believe that as souls tarry on this side they become more elemental, shedding successive layers of humanity, and now, as I drifted into a dream, Beth appeared to me not as a woman but as a skeletal bird, her prominent nose a savage beak, the fierce protectiveness she’d honed for her children now engaged on my behalf as she soared away like a hawk, Horus the Avenger.

In my dream I saw her swooping onto A. as he slept, thrusting her beak, as raptors do, into his soft parts and then tossing her head back, emerging trailing gore. The dream ended when I was awakened by a sudden clap of thunder and the sound of driving rain, the beginning of a violent rainstorm. I got up to close the window and when I lay down again I discovered that for the first time I could remember I was unable to picture Beth’s real face.

It must be understood that I take my dreams seriously only as fodder for my work. I knew perfectly well that Beth was dead in every way, and that her image was only something my overactive imagination had created. That night’s vision was nothing more than a combination of bad dream and bad weather, and, indeed, the next time I lay down, there in my mind’s eye was Beth as I’d known her, as cheery and reassuring as ever.

My critic A. never lost his relentless antipathy, but was eventually regarded as a complete crank, the sort that people crossed the street to avoid. Finally he disappeared from the scene altogether and I assumed he’d moved on.

One night that year I was talking with a friend, a woman who’d owned an art gallery in town and sold it at great profit, enabling her to indulge her true passions for conviviality and gossip. After I’d made some particularly intemperate comment she laughed her husky cigarette laugh. "Your problem UBU is that if you think it you say it, and if you say it you write it down, and if you write it down you publish it."

I laughed, too. "True enough. But I’ve paid for it once or twice." I took a sip of tea. "By the way, whatever happened to A.? He hasn’t insulted me for months now. I suppose he’s left town and is now happily stalking somebody else."

She looked up from her cup curiously. "Haven’t you heard?"

"Heard? Heard what?"

"A. died a couple of weeks ago. Very painful, I understand. Pancreatic cancer."