Senseless Man
He of keen empathy and understanding, of intrinsic feeling and observation; he of the profuse senses which received and processed the world as the most beautiful flower the light of the sun; he was becoming a senseless man. The progression was tangible. The whole of him had commenced descending in cosmic disorder. He was shriveling to a facsimile. The gravity of his fall was such that the organs were literally fragmenting with the mind, especially those of the senses: the nose receding to a nub, the ears already drooping like wilted petals, the eyeballs tearing to jelly smears, the thin smug mouth sealing up as a zippered purse. His plight was not the eventuality of age or disease but of era and disorder. In every previous epoch his faculties would have declined in concert with the declining body, the senses, too, in natural course. Then, before sight had commonly exhibited as an hallucination, before hearing had been barraged and blunted, he would have felt an effortless equilibrium in the world and a boundless pleasure in communing with it, and would have shunned death as a sad end: then, when dirt and fauna had comprised the greater ground, and the air had smelled clean, and the days had convened in clarity: the boundless starry lights of waters amply recalled by cloudless nights, and the world’s prevailing stimuli had been the stimuli of life. When butterflies and bees had still flourished.... Yet the world had so changed that the senseless man no longer even thought to consult a doctor. And why? Few, if even the most exceptional specialists among them, would have had the first idea of what ailed him, nor been able to diagnose it properly if they had. True, psychiatrists and sociologists might have been able to assist; yet those others whose only degrees were physiological would neither have been able to surmise his dysfunction nor a cure. (And what cure? What cure is there for a parasite that exists at the top of its food chain?) Rather, in his ears, nose and mouth they would have detected only the usual minutia; in his hands but the feeble grip of infirmity; and in his eyes would have missed entirely the dread view of now....
The senseless man crawled into the world at the end of the last millennium, as mankind’s innocence was passing to adolescence. His parents reared him in a house commonly called a ranch (which propagated as its dwellers: exponentially). In his youth he played board games and puzzles, hotbox and hoops, more time though reading books or loitering in a languishing wilderness while fingers raked peanut-butter jars; deer-slayer of his bookish imagination: piercing the shadows like the sun’s dusty searchlight, cattails slapping him from his back pockets; the jars soon to be full again, with pollywogs. When exhaustion would finally surrender to the simmering heat he’d slow to a skip, as a sprite over gorse, and flop into a hammock of honeysuckle, where he’d sun for a spell sucking long stems: the world fragrant, prepossessing, its timbre the tepid breeze through the grass: the sonority of life. He had not at all sensed the world’s changing then because, like deceit, it would have seemed as contrary to its nature as his own, and also because he had not yet bloomed to such a perception: his heart as yet possessed only of the foibles of his peers for whom life was as philosophic as routine, the earth nothing more than play ground. And so, too, had he not yet discovered ugliness, though such awareness would spawn with the pouring of the neighborhood’s first sidewalks and curbs, because they were intrusive: because they were superfluous to the lean gravel lane he’d felt had had no need of improvement: because their only seeming function was to attract an unwanted commerce of people and machines — because he could not fathom what benefit these “improvements” had over ground. And then more cement, each with a geometry and symmetry as precise as the others: his nascent struggle with modularization. Immediately following the bell of recess, and on the weekends, and whenever else he could, he gave increasing shares of his time to the languishing wilderness, even carting his homework there (and his mother’s cutting board for a writing platform). As aborigines had marked emergence with twigs, he had marked with all his senses. He had never lost his way, for he understood that as trees thin and shorten in their line, the clearing is near. The aborigines would have liked him, and he would have liked them, and though the prospect of longevity would not have been nearly as good back then, it had happened that with his first thoughts of displacement he had come upon the realization that, were it possible, he would welcome then...and the shorter life. Meanwhile, not a year before the wilderness had finally succumbed, the gorse and the pollywog pond having been the first of it razed, had his ignorance briefly prevailed but only for the intervention of the parents, who had moved him to another place before he could have witnessed the devastation.
One day, as the senseless man waited for a bus, the resonant early-morning hiss he abruptly realized (of some fathomable source) was not that of a near breeze or gathering storm, but of the morning’s rant of motorized machines. He was thirty-five then and naturally felt stupid. During the return trip, passing again the mammoth rock facings of the sunken highway, he suddenly realized that these, too, were not of the world’s making, but man’s. —Were these reckonings intuitive? In his stupor he found himself transported to two pertinent days of his youth, the first during which, as he had waited for the school bus, a comparable hissing had forged the early morn yet had moved him naught: a mere feature of the changing seasons, he’d thought; the other, which could have happened during any one of the family’s annual summer trips to the coast, when he had presumed the grading at the thruway’s entrances and exits to be the work of the glaciers probably: as they had rolled out the valleys. Naturally, in keeping with his susceptibility to emotional interpretations, more acute recognitions ensued such that ultimately he was no longer able to be anywhere out that it did not all of it seem tainted and false: that the whole world looked — ugly; every sound cacophony; every smell foul; every taste bitter. By then he was not awake that his heart was not pounding and a constant sweat exacerbating it. Feverishly he framed his homestead to preserve his fading memory of the “lost” world, deeming his tiny parcel the final frontier. From there he shunned everything beyond as unnatural and that which remained inside as condemnable — beginning with the air-conditioning box and proceeding to the oven and the refrigerator and all the appliances and the latticework of basement pipes and even the toilet, all of which he promptly destroyed, henceforth to accept only that which the world provided: the earth to satisfy his hunger, the sky his thirst. His whole property, too, of course, he willed to nature; that is, except for a broad garden of his own making, the rest to grasses and weeds and bushes and trees as they would come by each other and the birds and the wind; the sidewalk and curb, as well the walkway, driveway and door steps, he axed to bits, and similarly the chain-link fence and garage (including the car) — all else to flourish or decline in its own way. And at such times as he must venture beyond, he did so only by walking: abiding utmost caution to avoid everything in his progress that was not the earth: sidewalks and curbs, roads and streets, medians, gutters, driveways, alleys, bridges, viaducts, parking lots,...and when such hindrances were unavoidable, set before himself a path of branches and twigs, leaves and bark, mosses, ferns, grasses, nuts, rocks, stones, especially handfuls of dirt or mud: everything and anything the earth provided and which could sanctify his journey out and back; such goings and comings being very rare, of course: made only of absolute need, as when he had to replenish his coffer of candles; otherwise he lived in isolation, one day to the next as it proceeded by the sun; tending to life as the birds and the beasts: instinctively. With one difference. For in forsaking his kind the senseless man also forsook intercourse, social and sexual: dismissing every kind of contact — estranging himself from everyone he knew and had ever known or could know: never to wed or reproduce — ecstatic that when he would die, so, too (mercifully), would his seed. And thus would be his legacy: having denied the whole overpopulated race of any further nuisances in his name. (Unlike others among the senseless — how many none is yet probably certain — this senseless one would not kill himself; for how absurd would such a death be in its contraposition of his and the world’s nature, which both he so ardently defended, albeit decrepit as his was!)
Far be it that substantial numbers of his kind shook or shuddered from his senselessness; on the contrary, among the billions he was hardly a blip; he languished in his resigned understanding in virtual anonymity: albeit grateful; glad that he was as nil as his burden: indifferent to the few that had ever known or noticed him who laughed him off as aloof. With onset of the hallucinations — first signal that he was no longer capable of existing in the world as it was — he had, for a time, determinedly summoned the inner child that it might accommodate the world (the child’s diminutive view). Naturally, then, had he welcomed his indisposition simply as a passage: the first door to middle-age; and having prayed for its enhancement had become a more accomplished observer: suddenly, as never before, focusing on gazes, that in them might detect something of the success or failure of their bearers’ own inadaptability. In fact he’d given so much to this inquiry that it would not be exaggeration to have described him then as fixated; and as a consequence, not surprisingly, had he been accused en mass as a ninny: such that quickly had become the target of gossip (and his house of tomatoes) — and, as he had still ridden the bus then, had been subjected constantly to epithets including “F—khead!”, “Fagot!” and “Flybreath!”, and eventually cast out (always, of course, well before his stop). Yet despite this had he also taken to eavesdropping, that in any utterance he might have discovered the truth in the mutterer’s heart (including any slightest acknowledgment that he might consider him not really to be aloof at all): indeed, in sum, that he, the mutterer, was succumbing, too (or already had) to senselessness. And so, to this end, had he efforted to dissect temperaments in snarled parking lots and thoroughfares and taken aimless taxi rides just so that he could witness firsthand. He had idled before For Sale signs on lawns recently halved by widened lanes just so he might glimpse the owners’ despair. He had pursued pedestrians on packed sidewalks just so he might feel viscerally their anxiety. And, until he had cancelled his subscriptions and junked the TV, had continually scoured the media in kind for any indication of unity in dread. Of course, no such confirmation ever occurred and his investigation had abruptly ended, and it was precisely then that he had vanquished the new world for the only remnant of the old: his homestead — from which he had immediately commenced a new kind of observation: of the house beyond his bedroom window: not of its shortcomings, certainly, but rather, of the person who resided therein.... For with much luck, he hoped, he would ascertain that the old oaf felt as displaced as he; and for a time it seemed that the odds were in his favor, for his property, too, the oaf had given over to the elements (in his case, to its original prairie state); nor did he, except of absolute necessity, venture beyond his own lot; nor keep a single motorized machine; and, except during the recent census-taking, had never a visitor, either. From the blanched water-pocked sill above his bed, hot as a sauna plank, the senseless man would commence his investigation with a perusal of the oaf’s own little nature preserve (always consoling, despite that its overgrowth was of neglect), then make the visual leap from the sill in, there to observe him in his own reclusion. These dalliances having been, as they were, initiated of a new sense — of urgency, he proceeded to enforce them with a regularity befitting a perpetual mood: each day perched at his sill, elbows fused to it, moist knuckles like gnarled wings bearing his chin, this usually in the late afternoons when the both of them were aching for a second wind: his timeless stare mining the oaf’s every movement for a signal of his own self-banishment and despair. Yet after some time having resolved that he could not know, at least not with certainty, what was the condition of the other’s heart, that is, without making a direct inquiry, he ceased the examination, and rather turned his attention back to his own homestead, now to the little fertile ground outside his door, where, before his imposed sequestration, had lain concrete steps, there to saunter and languish anew: his rogue eyes staring at reality, his hairline mouth zipped into its purse, his whole the refreshed image of doom. Inevitably then the neighbors at the other side, the ones with the hedges, perched — they who had never met the senseless man but disliked him nonetheless — perched in their bramble hurling insults and epithets and tomatoes and threatening that if the senseless man (whom they called dude) did not do something pronto about his goddamned eyesore of a yard, they would call the health department; to which the senseless man never flinched, of course: the rants he never heard: his hearing being, by then, half of what it was. —Yet the table was set such that these neighbors and vigilant others had commenced their own scrutiny of the senseless man: young and old; rich and poor; liberal and conservative; black, white, yellow, red — no social, economic or political strata being without representation — all partaking in common appraisal of him, whom they concluded, in addition to his being a ninny, was hypersensitive. Those especially in proximity who had to suffer his howling at all hours had come to the realization that he would be better off living on a deserted island, or, even more accurately, to have lived in a previous century. Some, naturally, began to seek him out for an audience, wading and scratching through the brush for his windows in the expectation he’d receive them; only, of course, finally to be rejected; though he might appear, mouth gaping, eyes fiery before their ignorance — never to utter so much as a chirp, lest they might think he deserved them. Nor was it long before this lot, having initially been fragmented, formalized: tents, tables, benches, grills, boom-boxes trucked in with eminent purpose and pitched with all variety of finger foods and bottled condiments and bottled waters and bottled flavored waters — all at reasonable prices, compliments of the sponsors; and sidewalk-painting and hide-and-seek and treasure-hunts and tugs-of-war and tree-climbing and pie-eating contests; and, for a mere thirty dollars apiece, donkey rides for the kids and apple tosses for the adults: T-shirts being presented to the latter whose fruit could notch any part of the ninny’s house through the awful jungle. All proceeds going for community development.
Never mind that someone finally squealed and the authorities poured in to inform the senseless man that his property was unbecoming and must therefore be corrected immediately to avoid condemnation, the world having its rules, after all: in this case in accordance with aesthetics and zoning — and he actually acted on the summons (seething), if only that it would preclude further intrusion. He started by clipping back the thistle and ragweed that usurped his perimeter like a prickly beard, their seeds having been brought there by the wind or varmints, it was not important which: snip-snip with scissors (being, as he was, no longer in possession of “gardening tools”) — only, of course, to abruptly cease in horror of this action, of its contrivance, and hurl the instrument of destruction at the beyond; such measured aggression ensuring that he would never again lift so much as a fingernail against the earth, except in consummate appreciation, while to the same degree proving what a fool he had been to squander his privacy to the public — and by extension necessarily also raising a critical reminder: that the principal reason he’d forfeited the world of man (after his desperation to escape its ugliness and perpetual noise) was that he wished never again for sustained human contact. —And damn rules to hell, he would constantly mutter (as another would mutter prayer), particularly those that deem to enforce aesthetic “standards” — infringements! they are: just more of the already countless affronts that are advancing the earth’s ruin (too many people, of course, being the worst)! And so, like the territorial raccoons that made a most marvelous mess of his mulch, he censured the ignoramuses to cease and desist and leave him be; and to be certain they understood his seriousness, as soon as he believed his defiance had sufficiently injured them, he hibernated. —Now for quite some time he was incognito, appearing only, and cryptically, to gather for sup what the little land proffered, especially his favorites: sweet gum bark and mushrooms. And what’s more he thrived nocturnally, which the ebbing curious knew by the starry ivy-covered windows that stoked the dark like a dying candelabra. Meanwhile the world out, world of the eons and his fathers, thrived, too, in its sumptuous fury: his lot’s fauna advancing freely from unfettered seed and spore: thistle, wildflower and wild raspberry usurping spaces; vines snarling telephone wires, the grass going to seed, fledgling trees cropping up like flags on a strategy board: all this resplendent life-without-plan giving to the unfenced ground a gorgeous boundlessness. Even his door had lately sprouted, as an espalier, though more so in public notices, which, of course, he buried in the mulch pile, and which the city, of its own, and more aptly directed, proclivity toward growth, in time forgot. Oddly, then, the senseless man began to feel somewhat constrained by his self-exile. To mitigate this frustration he reacquainted himself with his library’s nature books, beginning with the nineteenth century landscape painters. Absorbed by these, his hallucinations actually receded for some time: noises muffled somewhat; his eyesight clarified a little; the air smelled abruptly and eminently earthly; he almost tasted life again. After all, it was he who had projected the terrible problem of his species to its very source; and in this felt a messianic empowerment. And then one day it finally occurred to him that humans exist as two types: those in which nature thrives and those in which it has been bred out. And, somewhat invigorated by this analysis, for the first time in weeks he ventured back out.
Yet what a blunder! What idiocy! As if spoiled milk can be merely willed back to purity! Within a moment of exposure he had stormed back in, and in a fury had proceeded to seal over every crevice in the house, pardoning no opening, no merest crack, that could yield the chaos of out; and in quick succession double-, nay, quadruple-soundproofed his sanctuary with scrap metal, plywood boards, trusses, beams, posts, flashing, which he had kept, for just such a finality, from the torn-down fence and garage; and when those had been exhausted, every other kind of suitable material he could muster: cookie sheets, mirrors, countertops, tabletops, the washing machine lid; newspapers, magazines, cardboard; his cutting board and ironing board; stacked furniture and stacked books (the latter from his thirty-three bookshelves), and, of course, the bookshelves, too. And so the senseless man had exacerbated his holdout against the new world; and for the next several years reaped its benefits in consummate reclusion within his proper, all but airtight, miniature of the old.
Yet as time in human perception seems often to accelerate, these years of aloofness proved finite, of course: the principal evidence of this being, despite their isolation, his senses’ relentless decline. And despite its intrinsic amenities, his Eden could not derail their dissolution. For still he had only to squint, that even of the vagueness of wakening could easily decipher the wasteland; had only to idle, that despite his near deafness and interminable handiwork among the windows and walls could nevertheless still detect the irrepressible racket as if he were propped inside its core; had only to sneeze to taste the bitterness of inevitability. Naturally, of such acute sensitivity (the senseless man’s blessing and curse) had he rather quickly evolved from a curiosity to a has-been, the once intrigued having shown less and less interest in tandem with his public cynicism, but rather directing their attention again to their better pursuits of productivity and procreation. Naturally incensed, and at the same time also ruefully cognizant of his flickering sense of honor, in response the senseless man begged his will for a rekindling of vengeance such that next he might take up the pen as sword, that his message would finally universalize. Yet now in place of strength was pain; in hope, resignation. He had been reared to believe that a solitary voice can effect change; yet of his singular rationality had come to realize he was voiceless. At the same time, he began to wonder whether such as his sensory decline was not the consequence, rather, of some flaw in himself. He rushed to a closet and retrieved a fan and when he had (wincing) plugged it in cried out, “I!”, “I!”, over and over crying, “I!”, “I!”...that the fan’s little manmade wind would carry him away, away, away. So the ensuing stillness was all the more devastating. Suddenly he longed for the presence of a person, an intermediary, albeit realizing that should one materialize, she might, quite possibly, make a case against his displacement: his exile. Meanwhile, as should be no surprise to anyone, the motor machines out: at front and back, left and right, at a stone’s throw and farther, north, south, east and west and at all points around and in between, in their ceaseless parade racked his mind like Chinese water torture. He hated himself as a hypocrite for having turned on the artificial wind, yet had had to for its hum of preservation, so afraid that his heart would burst without it.
One night, as he lay beside the hum, a pinpoint of light that had somehow infiltrated his window’s plywood board stung his eyeballs. He blinked through to behold, in the nebulous facing window, that veritable duplicate of his own pallid fleshiness. The oaf’s mouth was moving like a fish’s. What was it uttering, an invitation: “Dinner...dinner”? The senseless man pressed an ear to the board (as others once had to the ground to hear the living prairie). “Die...die!” burned the words instead, and babbling on, “for of your making are you no longer somebody, but nobody, and therefore condemned to cease, to be — no more!” And that was the extent of the oaf’s soliloquy, and the last of it the senseless man would have heard anyway, for his breathing stopped.
Vanquished relatives and friends, and looters, upon hearing of the senseless man’s passing, descended upon his house to clean it out, but were turned away, of course, on account of there being no will; and as long as the house sat in probate it would continue to decline such that it would eventually have to be boarded up on the outside almost as much as it had in. It was not long that a flock of ravens had discovered the corpse and by their signals summoned all the other creatures of the neighborhood: the raccoons, foremost, but also the rabbits and the squirrels and the moles and the lone fox, as well the dogs and the cats, and all nibbled their way in and feasted on him in turn, as had been his intention, until the couple with the hedges, so incensed by the odor, had called the cops. And so it was, that as soon as what remained of him had been properly disposed and all concerned had sufficiently washed their hands of him, had the ground, ground of ages, ground of aborigines and forebears, ground of eternal flux, this ground he had so loved and reluctantly called property, finally settled into its proper state: of condemnation.... In time, having sniffed long enough to dismiss any near-term probability of further intrusion from mankind, the entire raccoon family one day pitched its nest; and in quick succession then the branches of the trees bent again with the weight of nests; and the old mushroom patch resounded with the croaking of toads; and the whole of the little preserve swayed in the now constant motion of feet in twos, fours, sixes, and eights. And the senseless man, who had been deceased for all of a month, was daily besieged with complaints of unsightliness and excessive noise.
The End