ustxtxb_obs_1999_12_24_50_00009-00000_000.pdf

Posada 010700 BY DAGOBERTO GILB Preface: I know it’s no big secret and everybody’s heard the rumors about it by now but I still won’t talk too loud. For me that’s not so easy because I always talk too loud. The thing is listen I don’t want to cause anything. Even as I write this, I feel like keeping my periphery vision open a little wider, make sure of what’s coming at me from either side. I’m nervous. It’s that people are saying all kinds of things. Like, did you hear that hiss of whispering? Maybe get a little closer to the page. My credentials: I’ve been through a few earthquakes. In bed once, I watched an electrically engaged, spinning ceiling fan swing from its long neck stem above me, unsuspecting and innocent, nearby breakable items falling and breaking. It was a disturbing event, yet more important is that it was psychologically empowering. I’ve watched streets being taken over by radicals, those whose uniforms were not uniforms. Watched them throw bottles of gasoline and litup rags. I’ve seen tanks roll in. No, I’m lying there, got carried away with a visual leap. But honest: twice, a couple of jeeps and covered two-tons. Those other dudes, in the green uniforms and helmets, were carrying rifles. What I’m getting at is that I also have the experience of civil ruptures. Also, I have a relationship with a psychic. I don’t go often, not like a therapist. I don’t mean I’m seeing a therapist now. That was only a particular and unique problem that believe me was not so intriguing. Well, maybe it would be to some. My difficulty was a knock-out, you wouldn’t believe, and I was pretty polluted with doubt as well as blocked. But the point is, I have seen this psychic. She has told me things, very personal things, which is mostly none of your business. Sorry, I am trying to keep it down. The psychic has not told me any specifics about the thousand-year plan, and she did not have much to report about what was going to happen in general when those computer programming digits line up, but by exposure to her process she has taught me things about myself, and when one examines oneself, as Socrates exhorts, when you look inside, therein lies all the wisdom of saints and mystics. As a person alert and attuned, I have been studying other forms of insight, as in meditation, and prayer, and dancing crazed and slow, as well as inducing both the Dionysian and Apollonian ecstasies. Finally, I’ve been reading The New York Times business section, keeping up with less wild mutual funds primarily, though I remain not unaware of the rush of Internet stocks. The visions: Insomnia-driven or not, who wouldn’t appreciate the architecture of these mangled, gargoyled highrise buildings tilting any direction during the dark hours? It might reflect an exploding economy, but it is more logically a form of post-traumatic syndrome. Sights of those sweating men clawing nests of rebar, wobbling on aluminum beams being plywood decked, fatslob bosses who look similar to friends you have who are shouting at you to shut up, a mother no longer alive shaking her head, fathers you don’t really know walking the other direction, lovers and wives who hate you so that you feel major guilt and major regret, children you can’t reach who need new shoes yet again. There is broken discussion, as though in a distant cellular phone call, about the intoxicating juices of fertility, of the biologically ineluctable, and the blind Darwinism of reproduction. Los indios: Down from montanas, up from un valle, from the driest desert and the wettest jungle and into the American sporty outdoors draining the so filthy oil of German Beamers, into the tasty indoors sprinkling decorative shavings of the indigenous chocolate onto French pastry. They are openly swabbing the most highly successful corporate floors, maintaining the chemical freshness of the most competitive graduate school urinals. They are dispensing the latest in folded brown handwipes and rolled toilet paper. Their children are sneaking about. Playing. Laughing. Learning idiom. A non-gig, low megaherti, outdated machine is in a dumpster. Un abuelo, working for an independent contractor, finds it at four a.m. on the usual route. Quien sabe, he says, putting it aside for the chavalitos. On it still is “SimCity 2000.” Revelation: Close the eyes. Smell. A haunting perfume of dust in that first desert rain. Open them. Brown or green. Or red like arose, or purple like a sage blossom. There will be wind that whisks leaves. Light will shine like a mystic crystal. Darkness will lay still the night like the sweetest sleep. It is an earth, which is in outer space, up and down like a rollercoaster ride, all that joyous, thrill screaming despite the inevitable peril, taking on and off the bright throb of a Christmas Day like star that is also reflected against an orbiting moon. What will be called days, and weeks, and months, and years will pass and pass. Dagoberto Gilb is the author of The Magic of Blood and The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuria. His new book, “Woodcuts of Women,” is due next fall. DECEMBER 24, 1999 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 9