- 2 - Go to Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 The Legacy of P.T. Barnum Beyond the Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock Many people looked up to Jove Dardanian Moses, in the early dawn.  Arm in arm he strolled with goddesses, who wearied of the expectant wait, took what pieces of heart they could for meter fees, and shooed him on his way. "Whatever destiny," they would shout in parting words of lament, "that is meant for you is not a relationship but a void, and a torment." Looking back they missed him stubbornly and found him again and again in what wasn't.  There he was in the dishes, smeared and crusted, smiling and speaking words of vows, ceremonies, and marriage.  Silence was the most elucidatory and an answer in truth. "Let us go," he said.  "Take my hand through the long dark night of the soul.  In Nemo's crowded sub of revelers let us drink to children who could be.  Spawn a new generation if you please, in the search of what might be." The Flight from Egypt and Forty Years in the Dessert Fear not the perilous journey of a bug in tatters.  No one bolder than Kohler drove the exiles in elusive if not erratic navigational maneuvers to part the sea of traffic with the aid of visionary glasses thick as glass bottle bottoms.  Boldly they blazed a path off the road or into unsuspecting and dazzled traffic.   Scared out of their senses in the senseless pursuit, they were washed ashore to find a goddess in green pastures at the end of their trial by backfire.  A caress, a soft smile  soothed the over-taxed, frail, and elegant engine of possibilities .  Thus confidence was restored to endure forty years of depravation and enduring complaint.  With visions of Elysian bikinis on Westport shores, they dared the the enduring length of the long dark night of the soul. Irrational fear paralyzed the magic carpet bug and with eyes shut tight, it hurtled through the dim lit streets of austere souls in which there appeared no mercy on the desert asphalt of Barnum's Bridgeport.   No light to give them away too soon, they conjured exultant epiphanies from close encounters.  Thus blessed with the least expected enlightenment, they were adulated with many raucous utterances of sacred benediction reeking with the lung-scorching, choking incense of harsh atonement. Golden Venus of Bridgeport In an ancient black voluptuousness from the forties and in the soft round curves of gloss, a golden haired secretary rode with the comrades of filmmakers of unseen films; scorned and pitiful artists of unknown, eschewed and hopelessly unprofitable works; and writers of regularly rejected tomes.  In the reservoir of time, they lived without question as questions, sparing no thought of consequences of union or betrayal.  What was worthy to say, Jove Dardanian Moses did not know, but felt it winding the gut...   The Temple Rebuilt in Bridgeport Though she wore a wig and was not beautiful, Jove's true love of all time ran the boarding temple for which he paid no rent except in audience as her royal retinue. In the official guise of coachmen, the boarders dutifully chauffeured her Cadillac from the 40's to town in the 80's for ice cream and dreams of a realm that extended into past loves and unforgotten, un-mended, and un-remedial betrayals.   Rather than give in at an old age or to gratuitously oppress the artists of no name or purpose, whom she loved and cared for, she ate dog food so that others might eat and live a dream.  In her monastic austerity, they slowly turned on the spit of harsh purification.  Such purification is not a personal, self-satisfied purification, in which pleasant belly-buttons live serene, but one that leads to visions of beauty even in the snakes of the sea or leaky pipes and cold water baths.   If purification was to lead to a heavenly abode, they would have learned to pack a moving van not only with the essence of being in a vacuum bottle, but with the motes of dust, the roaches, the decimated spring mattresses, the handsome and arrogant male prostitute who killed himself for no reason, the gay student from Africa who stole food from the refrigerator and books from the library.     Vulcan Forges a Trojan Horse and Sacks the Temple They loaded the romantic indiscretions of a human volcano, Vulcan, who would love (used in the common vernacular here) anything on two legs or four.  He finally married a beautiful woman and had a son, Christian.  These two jewels of his were set in an antique ring of tarnished tenements that were formerly the glory of the elite.   Vulcan was the high priest of dynamite after a stint of lumberjacking and boxing that ended abruptly with cracked ribs. It was a restless Spring, when Vulcan, Aeneus, Pallas, Jove, and Dido concocted a plan to rival Walden Pond and threatened Thoreau's stature in history or Moses quest of the Promised Land. Aeneus was a tall and loquacious filmmaker of unseen film.  Dido was diminutive, quiet, and somber.  She espoused a communist utopia despite the revealed evidence of Stalin's purges and Moist style starvation.   A former girlfriend of Vulcan planted the seed of paradise-like dreams of remote Nova Scotia.  They should have been leery of a former girlfriend's gift.  A gift could be a Trojan horse, a payback, a payoff, or a kiss off. The powerful benefits to their psyche outweighed harsh reality.  All sanity was overshadowed by overwhelming, euphoric dreams of pristine land held in sacred abeyance and reverence from the Golden Age, the Eden of Time to be bestowed, bequeathed in all its awesome beauty and grandeur to honor and raise in stature before the eyes of the Creator the least of creatures so that all blessings of life and breathe might be theirs and their offspring as multitudinous as the stars and Abraham's children. A Tentative Farewell to Venus The blonde giant of beauty of everyone's dreams bade farewell to an every increasing wall of silence and un-belonging that belonged to no one but everyone in distant past and many plausible, possible, branching of the future.  They touched, but didn't touch. Her husband left her and two daughters for a younger woman.  Jove was the younger man with an impressive boudoir of a closet-like room in which the temple's teapot on a hotplate cooked rice and tea.  In a rocking chair Jove meditated on energy that coursed through the body at one with mind and heart, a prayer of unity and peace to return to shelves of books and a coronet that was a reproof to talent and accomplishment.  Thus women were impressed and intrigued to find a monk they could topple from an arid heaven to the soft comfort of an embracing earth. He watched an antique grandfather clock in the hallway with its sonorous resonance's of a deep throated past calling to presence what lay beyond our every minute reach.  Father Time said not now.  "But when?"  He, Quentin, Job, Jove Dardanian Moses asked with that ardent longing that comes with probing long, wide, and deep in almost indecipherable and abstruse books of uncertain possibilities.  "Not even from the last book of runes and Algham, nor Aramaic biblical sources did you answer me.  And now you point with those callous hands, broken and healed and broken and healed again until no one can tell the color or origin, male or female, or even human or tree. "I see what you are pointing to in your panoramic view of yesterday and today.  You don't have to be so insistent.  It's the 'Barnum Arch of Triumph.'  Or is it the window you point to and not through? "If you point long enough perhaps you will lead me through the arch and even beyond what we see. "Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  What cannot be done in the moment cannot be done in the future." In the park it was, holding hands in the deserted realm of bleak austerity on the poisoned waters of the Sound, Venus was leery in case of discovery.  Eyes scanned fretfully for an explorer, who didn't know what he was exploring yet.  Fidgeting hands gave her away in the silence of what is real. At her apartment, the explorer, of unknown intention and lacking validation, met Jove in his kinky colored briefs.  His annoyed lack of recognition through a mitigating screen left him puzzled but accepting her through him in her rooster-like adornment of hair rolled on a giant crown of roller.  Talk about being human...  Goodbye for Jove never said goodbye, not oriented in one direction or another.   The Rape of the Sabine Women and Atonement They drove through the night to Canada's hope.  Only once were they stopped by the police in Maine, when Vulcan assaulted even virgin nature with a discarded wrapper in the cold, blind romance of absolute dark.  There was not a moon or star to orchestrate the common vision in the union of lovers across the globe.  There was not a car in sight to disturb the long dark ride of perished souls.  Yet a siren of unlimited decibels and flashing light that rivaled a sudden slap of a solar storm, broke the night as with a sword of an avenging angel.   At gunpoint, they were forced to ignominiously crawl through the cold, clammy wet and mud of a ditch until they found the wanton instrument of rape.  They searched wearily through the night with roach-like feelers.   Weapons had evicted them from the first Eden, placing one man over many, making slaves of free people.  "Do not stop!"  They were ordered in vehement tones of wrath.  "Do not stop until you are gone from sacred Maine landscapes!  We as a people will not forget the scar to her august honor.  Do not return through the heavenly gates of Maine!  The retribution of a just God will be waiting to cast you into the darkest cells beyond the reach even of lawyers and lesser gods." The Purification in the Temple In Canada at last, they inhaled their first breathe and took refuge in a trailer park.  Completely unprepared, they fashioned plates out of discarded boards and ate from cans as they discussed the pros and cons of communism and free-trade, as if they could settle the question easier than the excesses of power, lust, vengeance, theft, arrogance and so on from the beginning of time. There were four free-trade men and one woman for archaic communism, but the woman prevailed in the end, leaving the men puzzled and confounded with the complexity, and all too ready to run for cover in bed.  They slept on the ground in their clothes, not having thought to bring a blanket, much less the glorious luxury of a mattress or foam pad.  Sleep didn't last long on the harsh cold, unfeeling ground of recalled souls and planetary compaction in the molding hands of unrelenting gravity. Not having slept, they were called by heavenly promises and prodded by earthly threats.  The campground guard cheerfully waved goodbye as they left without paying, for they had brought no money. One car ran out of fuel.  They left it spent and forlorn, but resigned to its fate by the side of the road.  The remaining conveyance was running close to empty.  Only once did they stop for gas, pooling their money to fuel their threadbare dreams of Elysian fields.  Dido exasperatingly compared their spontaneous pooling of money to a conscious and practical acceptance of communist philosophy. "Did you ever read Animal Farm?" was the irritable reply of Aeneus, who wasn't particularly interested in politics, but detested nagging. "I'd rather read Kant or Hegel" "Can't and Bagel are the screen writers of propaganda for the pig communist boss and you are the cow proletariat." "And you are my oppressor, so that makes you the Great Male Pig.  The films you make are selfish wallowing in the mire of psychological escape." Aeneus made a film of Jove sitting in his imperial meditative rocking chair in the cavern lair of the boarding house temple.  For the grand opening, Aeneus unrolled the reel of film in a parking lot.  The film tangled in great spaghetti knots and glossy ribbons of what it is to be alive and floating in the wind, unobtainable, forever beyond our grasp. In the gas station summit, Jove held up his hands in a gesture of peace, as if to calm the turbulent waters of a storm.  "You're acting like dogs fighting over a bone.  You're feeding on each other's agitation.  Harmony and peace supercede all contentions.  They absorb and redirect their potential for harm." It was useless to struggle now.  They were caught in a current taking them beyond themselves, their known environment.  Aeneus and Dido dissolved words and agitation in a kiss and a caress.  The universe was whole again.  They could breathe again. The car sputtered as the false sunset shed it's life for them to identify the turnoff for the entrance to the new Eden.  Having strained its last finger hold on the cliff of the day, the sun swiftly dropped from the edge. In the dark, Eden was still a dream.  They slept in total darkness unaware of their senses that bound them to the earth. When the heatless sun neatly severed them from their dreams, they discarded their raiment, their pretenses that bared them from Eden in their shame and desire for separation.  Despite the chill of cold Spring, their clothes lined the dirt road in collapsed patches of faded color, returned to their rightful owners.  Dido was a dissenter who  never entertained the possibility of dreams.  She was there as an observer of fact of proof beyond doubt of an endless seam of harsh truth locking all levels of effect (chemical, atomic, space, and time) into one interlocking fabric one could wear without doubt or fear of a tear or hole.  The fabric was immutable if not God and sure as her life had been anything but sure.  Her life had not known parents, but state guardians and tenements where life hung by a thread accepting a stray bullet here and a jailed sibling and yet another tenement.  Drawn into books, she looked for sound moorings, steadfast, defiant thought with proof that a chemical or environmental arrangement could make a man or woman or state and this could be adjusted incrementally to trick the void and the old gods, to erase them from the mind, to supercede them and subdue them in a puritanical purge.  Thus she followed with pride in her clothes and holding onto the invincible shield of Neitche in her mind.  The shield did not let through the thunder claps that said to them, "This is holy ground, the root of Mt. Sinai.  Nothing fabricated of man shall pass through the gates." The dirt road turned into an overgrown path, thick with  ancient, and honorable trees whispering the graces of ancient gods that predate even man.  They spoke with the wisdom and lessons learned of the underlying soil of fallen soldiers, hunters, explorers, hunted animals upon hunted animals, vegetation grown and fallen again and again.  to build an ageless temple of sacrifice.  The holy book of the forest temple read in eons of time unimaginable to man and more profound than all of the muted examinations and explanations of man.  There was nothing that wasn't understood here or left to be explained.  Only the will of the Creator existed here.  Anyone who came with arrogance or imposing pretense did not belong and could not see if they did enter. Finally, the path was no more and there was no way to tell direction, but in their exposure, they knew the way as if they had been there before.  Dido watched and waited for their disillusionment, so she could save them and possess them in her safe haven of an inflexible and ordered world. When they finally broke through the gate of the forest, it was discovered that the house, the refuge, the solace of dreamers was no longer there.  The house had been hunted and harried by those who rejected dreams for safety and comfort for a price, a price that often included the soul. The soul was not taken at once.  The immortal soul was given freely at birth, and if the house and training ground of that soul survived, the devil was too good to be obvious in her devices.  She offered safety and comfort until one was lost in an unbearable sea of comfort and safety.  She offered entertainment of choice that eventually dulled the wits and windows of the soul.  One day it is too late and one finds oneself in a well paid job that one does not like or dislikes but is there like a habit.  One has a commute in a fine car where the air is poisoned and agitation fuels the aggravating journey that pulls one down in unnoticed increments by the hands of gravity and friction until one is crushed physically and spiritually along with the convenience of a car.  In other situations, the soul is sold to the state for bread.  Life in this situation is safe from birth if one rejects the soul. Vulcan carried the picture he was given of the beautiful refuge by the sea.  They were to be caretakers, to care for the home and gardens, to exercise stewardship as in a covenant.  They were to grow what is fresh and whole.  They were to fish for purity in the sea of serenity.  What they found were broken boards like so many splintered twigs. Somehow they weren't dismayed, or amazed.  They weren't even quizzical.  The twigs were the refuge. "This is the way it was", said the sea.  "The house is mine now.  You may think you came too late, but it was not to be found in a house and gardens." They followed the sound to the strand of beach, and into the sea, except for Dido who cried now and longed deeply in her soul for a royal marriage blessed by heaven that could never be. Go to Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5  Click here to buy a book in print. ArtTechnology.com, A Gallery of Original Expressionistic Art, Poetry, and Prose