Lasya into Tandava

“This don’t concern you at all?”

Rancho Mundo–what was to be Sage Pontiff’s home away from home with his love, and also a destination for those who believed in the power of gridless intentional communities–is awash in activity.  It’s not just the rumbling machines that Jake secured, the ones that have graded out a large meadow from the disused cabin house with thick necked and sun-dried workmen at the helms of their enormous mechanical bestiary.  But there are others, distinct from the workmen by their various states of comfort and ability in what they are doing.  Dreadlocked carpenters are reinforcing the floorboards underneath the cabin after what must be years of rot and disrepair.  Hippies lounge in the treeline, doing dabs and sharing laughs.  Commune workers with bandanas around their necks are digging out what is to be a larger-scale garden plot, easily near a football field in length, putting the work in with swings of mattocks veering from awkward to seasoned.

But most concerning are the tents.

The number isn’t huge, but it’s greater than Zero, which is why Cliff is approaching his man with a brow all furrowed and his mustache set to frown.

But Sage isn’t of a mind to hear the demons of doubt.

“Pike, this is the dream, isn't it?”

“What’s the dream?  Burnouts and granola fucks getting ripshit stoned in the trees while other people do work?  These people are just taking advantage of you, babe.”

“These ‘burnouts and granola fucks’ don’t have anywhere else to go.  We help people who don;t have anything else, on the daily.  Don’t tell me you’re actually considering means testing the support we want to give to the community.”

“I’m not sayin’ means test, I’m sayin’...look over there.  That dude with the plow axe, right?  Scrawny, pale, nervy lookin’ little fuck.  He hasn’t worked honest field labor ever, you can tell.  But he’s swingin’.  He’s putting in the sweat.”  Cliff derisively jerks his thumb to the dabber contingent.  “That dude with the single fuckin’ dreadlock comin’ off his chin, whatsit, Jeselnik?”

“Jabberwock.”

“Jabberwock.  He’s been here for three days and he hasn’t so much as gotten dirt on his caftan.  It’s not that he doesn’t have anywhere else to go, it’s that you’re the next stop on his long line of places to crash before people start complaining about the smell.”  Sage drops to a couch, surveying his land, absently chewing on his thumbnail.  When Cliff brings his hand to the back of his lover’s head, there is no recoil, just the small leaning in of bodies merging.  “You got a big heart.  I don’t wanna see it get broken.  Everyone deserves help, but what are we really helping with them?”  The Bodhisattva stiffens–just slightly, but enough that his man notices.  Realizing he doesn’t necessarily need to expound further, Cliff sets his jaw and shuts up, waiting to hear what Sage says.

“When we’re doing the work you consider important, this question never comes up.  I see the same people at the legal aid tent that Crane sets up week in and week out.  You give soup and survival packets and Narcan to the same faces, over and over.  And I grasp that a lot of these people are in the grips of the disease, no matter what form that takes, and the disease can be difficult to get some room from.  But I’ve never once, Cliff, never once told you that I felt they were taking advantage of you.”  He stands to his full lank, maybe not towering over his man, but certainly a head above.  Placing his hands on his narrow waist, he sighs.  It's clear from his eyes that he’s more than a little confused, hurt, probably both.  “The work is the work, man.  Whatever form that takes.  So Jabberwock is using the land as a place to get high and fuck before he finds the next one?  So what?”

“So he just gets to stay here and do nothing?  Listen to yourself.”

“Listen to yours!  I know what this is, Cliff.  I know if Jabberwock was named ‘Steve’ and showed up here with a bag of ditch weed wearing a Cro-Mags hoodie, we wouldn't be having this conversation.”  To this, Cliff Pike scoffs so thoroughly that even a couple of the gardeners take notice, slowly lowering their tools and looking over.

“That’s such a…I am not a fuckin’ tribalist, Pontiff.  I don’t think like that.”

“Some part of you does.  You need to divorce yourself from bias, it reminds me of–”

“Oh for fucks sake, Sage.  Don’t preach at me.  In fact?”  He begins stepping backward, hands up in the air before he stuffs them into the pockets of his jacket.  “Why don’t you call me when you’re ready to have a real talk about this shit.  Because it can’t just be a free for all.  Yeah, I don’t means test the people we help on the street, but so much goes into that shit.  Logistics, budgets, schedules–and frankly speaking, without that, this whole dream is just a field for people to suck your tit until you’re dead broke.  Then where are you?  Where are any of them?”  To emphasize, Cliff executes a slow turn, arms up, the sides of his jacket wings as if he’s going to take flight.  Sage reaches his hand out, but Cliff shakes his head.

“Cliff, wait–”

“Take the night, Sage.  Take a couple.  Think really hard on how you want this to work and if you want this to be a legitimate thing–or if you just want it to be another failed commune in two years.”

With that, he walks off.

The workers return to making themselves busy.

Sage stands over his kingdom.  Alone.

The world turns onward, the machines grade out the soil, the workers continue to plant, the hippies continue to smoke, and the carpenters continue their surgery on a building that saw the Coolidge administration.

The fury in his beautiful eyes, the hurt and the rage, is impossible to hide.

—

That thrum of the blood in our ears isn't going away, holy one.  The pulse is there because you can feel all the poison deep in you.  Bubbling up.  You keep spitting it out and starving the hemlock but it never stops growing, and you’ve been focusing so much on keeping it at bay.  You’ve been focusing so much on leading a good life going along the good path.  All that wisdom, all that work, the countless hours in meetings, and where did we arrive?  We are where we were.  We did not find a new life upon the wheel of eternity.  It spun and landed us right where we were.  But this isn’t a time for dejection.  They all expect it from us.  They expect us to be morose.  Sadness is an emotion for the unenlightened, remember our own words.  Remember the teachings of zen.  Remember the river.  We flow with the furies of the world, we do not try to change them towards our benefit.  And if the furies carry us away from him, is that such a bad thing?  It is.  It is because he was an anchor.  But what is an anchor?  Can we honestly say we were unhappy in our life before the mass of muscle and charm and that bubble ass and those eyes that cut through our armor and that smile that makes the world go quiet…shit.  Shit. Okay, okay, hold us together.  We’re an enlightened entity.  We can survive this, we can survive anything.  Pax left and we survived that.  But we survived it because of him, because of that smile and the way that we felt our soul in perfect tune of the universe when we would be cradled in those gigantic arms.  Think.  Think.  Check the truth of the universe.  Meditate.  Fuck, this might be past meditation, even.  Read?  Smoke enough sacrament that we get buried underneath one of these gigantic machines as it rapes the earth, so we can sleep in the roots of the trees and let torpor dull the cut of this heartache?  We’ll hear them rumbling and hear the steps of the world and soon we will forget his face and his smile and how we felt.  But the pain is right now.  And sleep will not come.  We feel it, Sage.  We feel it in our palms.  That itch. He’s over there smiling.  He’s over there smoking and he doesn’t have a care in the world.  He doesn't know what his presence has done.  Just like us in a previous lifetime, holy one.  We didn't have a care for the wreckage we left in our wake.  We ruined lives, just like he likely has here and now.  Wouldn’t things have been easier if we knew earlier?  If someone had done something–if someone had taught us a lesson?

—

“Where’s Jabberwock?”

Sage has made his way to the treeline, to the semicircle of tents around a small fire.  The other hippies are reclining on whatever they have on hand–camp chairs, round meditation pillows, paint buckets.  They seem so anonymous to Sage, as if he can’t focus on their faces.  They’re just forms that he recognizes the accoutremants of his former life on–peasant tunics, tie dye, caftans, bell bottoms, dreadlocks, beards, and the pervasive and heady mixture of patchouli and weed smoke.  He arrived shirtless, rings off, beads off, down to little more than his pants and his sandals.

And if the collected rainbow peoples notice the tension in his tendons, the sinew that contracts and expands on his vascular arms, they either dont care or dont mention it.

They just point over to the trees, where he emerges.

Almost as tall as Sage, but notably older.  He bears a bindi, and though Cliff was talking a little derisively, his beard is definitely approaching a knot that could be described as a single, footlong dreadlock.  He wears beads and hemp and his ratty hair is gathered into a silk scarf, a loose approximation of a ponytail.  While everyone else are just outlines and rough shapes to The Bodhisattva, he can laser focus on the looks of this one man.  His smile is easy, his eyes half lidded.  Sage throws him a nod, beckoning him to where he is standing.  It all comes back so easily, he thinks.  Somewhere deep he recognizes that this is unfair.  Somewhere deep he justifies it all the same.

“Jabberwock.  Namo Buddhāya.”  He reaches out and places his scarred hand on the shoulder of the man who was the catalyst for his woes.  It would be sweet if his eyes carried any warmth.

He grips harder.

Smiles.  That brilliant, beautiful smile.  The disarming one.

“Have you ever given any serious thought to mortification of the flesh as a means of expanding your consciousness?”

—

My, but you’re an impressive specimen, aren’t you?  I mean, if you care about those sorts of things.  Wins, losses, accolades, belts, leather and stamped metal.  Or maybe you wanna measure it in like the friends we made along the way.  Because you got a lot of those.  Or maybe they’re sycophants, I don’t know really, but you’ve got a damn sight more of them than me.  I had one.  He left.  May he walk forever away from a sport like this and people like you.  Shit, people like me, too.  Or maybe, maybe it’s just that you’re rich, right?  You’ve made boatloads of money and you want to make more.  Whatever you can do to make yourself feel important, right?  Because all of this, every bit of it, every fucking quark of it?  The accolades, the hangers on, the titles, the awards…they’re dressing.  Shellac to make you feel safe.  They’re blankets to a child, dude.  This is all a night light to fool you into thinking that the monsters in the dark corners of your room aren’t real.  You’re a child, man.  A really impressive child.  But don’t mistake my words for the preaching of a man who has figured it all out.  Because I’m a child too, a stupid child.  Look at these hands, Cancer.  I can’t build with them, get me?  I’ve got no acumen for art or craft or anything lastingly significant.  These hands are great for one thing and one thing only.  And no matter how hard I try to beat the devil out of me, it’s always there.  Always the aspect of Shiva flows through my veins and lays its fire red streaks all throughout my aura, until it rolls off me in waves.  Always their drum in my chest and my skull and my ears driving me to do it again and again.  It’s a hell of an animal to try and tame, man.  And you know what?  You know what the dumbest shit I ever thought was?  I was sure I had it handled.  Truth is it’s an eternal fight.  And when I see you, I have no problem saying it: the animal is going to win.  You know Aghora?  I’ve been meditating on Aghora as of late.  So Shiva is this multifaceted thing.  And for a while, I wanted to embrace what we call their kind aspects, the aspects that radiate creation and peace.  But creation isn't peaceful–creation is the condition of chaos to achieve peace.  Creation is taking that chaos and grabbing it by the ears and forming something from it.  And those attempts don’t always work the first time.  Sometimes, they don't work at all. And that’s why Shiva must also wear the face of fury and of death, man.  Because destruction is inherently anb important part of creation–they literally can’t exist without one another.  And I’ve been creating for months.  Maybe that’s the trick, y’know?  Maybe I just have to let the steam off and some days it’s going to be hotter than others, the pressure greater.  And when I see you, man…will it be the hottest it’s been in a while.  Because I’ve tasted that fruit once more and I am ravenous.  You will look upon me and see the terror of my aspect.  You will see Aghora in my face, skin blue as the clearest seas, eyes burning yellow with the fury of the sun, tongue outstretched to taste the blood of existence, the skulls of my victory wreathing my neck.  And look at me, Jiles.  Look me in the eyes and realize that the condition of me winning this is incidental, it’s a fucking byproduct, right?  The important thing is what I pull from you, what I spill from you, what I break from you.  And I hope with every fiber of my being that you get angry enough to actually wreck my shit good, man.  I hope they have to trade out the canvas when we’re done.  And that’s not me trying to boast.  I really, really fucking hope for it–because I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get it from you.  But I know that it will wear the face of To Whom Nothing is Horrible.  Make yourself ready, man.    There’s no outcome here where you leave unscathed.  Question is, are you prepared to scathe me worse than I do you?  Better figure that out.  Fast.  Namaste.