The Land of Eden

"We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles."
-Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus

On the morrow I journey to the Land of Eden, my home-stretch, where the noble Dan River flows quiet 'neath the trees. My two years amongst the Germans & Sauvages, have barrister'd & lawyered away at my Conscience, till I can no longer stand to be apart from my beloved red clay.

Half the delight of any Journey derives from the anticipatory pleazure. We recall the roads & byways, speckled with the gold & green shadows of summer. We hope for a flagon of dark Mexican beer & a great Dish of Pollo Mole. We imagine the faces of Friends, so long unseen that they seem to have been Characters in a dream. They may only be revived by offering yourself, in the flesh.

Homer gives us a type of this, when Odysseus must pour hot sacrificial blood on the ground, to attract the hungry Shades. We forget the wide distance between ourselves. Gadgetry & Mechanistickal devices - the Cell-Phone - allow us to appear in Effigy, or to breathe a few words into remote ears. But, being good Pagans in heart if not in mind, we prefer always the flesh, to the spirit.

See what grievous loss Departure wreaks: Dido's lovely flesh, burning on the Carthaginian ramparts, after Mercury tugged Aeneas' spirit onward to Italy; poor Fitzgerald, maintaining his mad wife Zelda, who became only a mannequin of her self. For that matter, wou'd not Troy's high walls stand forever, if not for Helen's duplicitous escape?

But Herodotus tells us otherwise, that Helen hid in Egypt, and it was only an image of Helen in Troy. Indeed, no matter how much she was shamed, and whored by the Heroes & Princes of the Mediterranean, always she was reverenced as pure, indeed as a Virgin. Helen escapes from Menelaus, as she later escapes from Paris & the burning Walls of Ilion - by remaining ghostly, uncommitted. There will always be some part of Helen that survives; like a Tree, ever so harshly scoured by Winter & fire, yet blooming in Spring.

The virgins worshipp'd Helen under the sycamores, near Sparta. & it was fruit from the fig-sycamore, the Mulberry, that Eve ate, that expell'd our noble line from perpetuall Happiness. Who can say what spirit they relinquish'd in that garden? Who cou'd say what spirit we have gain'd, by the Toils of our unhappy flesh?

But now it is time to put away recondite Musings, & attend to my tree-dreams.

Overheard, from Tables

-O, I can hoodoo you!
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-I have learn'd, that there are women who simply enjoy coition. As soon they have stopp'd drinking, depend on it, they will attach themselves to a man. Certainly, they will find many willing to oblige their appetites, which are positively ravenous.
***
-I have seen these slippers before, but never in lavender.
-But you have that pair - is't not the same?
-Nay, I look'd far for these, and found them finally in a warren of Myrtle Beach.
***
-I hope that I can calm my twitches before I go to Pennsylvania. The savages are monstrous fierce.
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-The subdivisions are fabulous. So beautiful. I go there, and I query myself, where I cou'd find a tie to match these beautiful homes?