Cormac McCarthy Fashion Week

There is nothing but the endless void, spiraling around us and all consuming, nothing but the dress we wear.

[cormacmccarthyfashionweek]

She moved simply and gracefully. She held herself with a straight back and gritted teeth, watching as the gussied up butterfly boys fluttered about living and dying their frenetic and, in retrospect, unimpressive lives. All things return to rot, after all, but she stood and planted herself and grew there bending with seemingly effortless motion to the ever shifting wind. And through it all she reminded us that we are perpetually lacking such airs, but that we may through endless determination attain them.

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Mottled parody of years long gone, garish and bizarre wriggling before me. I have no taste for such bacchanalian celebration of the past, to lose oneself in their cups until the world tilts on its axis and blurs to a vomitous pool of whirling color and form is to kill oneself by excess. The shine of daylight shows such foolhardy expeditions to be what they are: a flailing grasp to create some better time that is little more than a phantasm, an impossible past that we wish we had experienced as we perpetually deny that all lives - present or passed - were filled with pain. To deny that is to deny existence.

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It felt wrong to see such beauty in a place like this, youth and joy exuding from them, filling the air around with a crackling lust for life. It bent and curved the reason of things, the way he had come to understand life. This cracked, dust filled mendicant existence was correct and ordered; pain led to suffering led to death and no succor was meant to arrive. He deserved that. He did not deserve such kindnesses and affection. He turned his sallow face from them and clawed at his eyes. If only he could unsee them, unknow their possibility, unexperience the warmth of their benevolent smiles, and return to his pained and tortured existence.

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Under the roiling surface the silt and gravel of the riverbed looked like some striated musculature of the earth lying hidden from the view and meddling hands of man. Straight lines leading the current toward some unknown and distant end, some still and quiet place where the hurtling raging waters may rest and pass the rest of time in peace, some heaven. What is a man but the river made flesh? Water comprises them both, and both long for the moment when they are allowed respite from their constant struggle.

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He knelt in on the lichen and moss watching the peels of steam from his lungs into the frigid air before him, moonlight illuminating the moist and crusty earth surrounding. Before him meandered visions and phantoms as his swayed in the throes of a starved and brittle madness. His equilibrium as off-kilter in his body as his mind he keeled over and found his vision pointed skyward to those fat globules of cooling water who were the only ones to claim god’s own perspective of the world below and he, such an insignificant thing to them, cursed their haughtiness their disconnect from his pain and shame their freedom.

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It is said a crow is smart enough to use basic tools, but what need of that when they can flense skin from bone with nothing more than the use of their beak?

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The car skidded into the curve throwing gravel and dust into plumes behind it. The peeling rubber tearing through earth drowned out their own high pitched wails until the tree, the almighty crunching sound, the hard metal of the wheel against his head, and then blistering silence. He stared, mouth agape and bleeding, at the shattered spider glass before him like a zealot confronted with the Word. The world dipped to black and wavered in and out of focus. For a moment it was serene - quiet, soft, and unclear, a dream of being born - and then it all melted into nothing. And nothing. And nothing.

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She peeked through a crack in the old wooden slats - cracked and warped by time and slowly become derelict - the dark of the forest surrounded her so the dim flickering lamplight cast only a sliver of orange into her eyes. There they floated in the black night, two perfect ivory orbs, unblinking, fixing their gaze upon that celebration of flesh the two young lovers thought they had hidden so well from the world.

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And here among the stone and grass stood living statues. Mourners in form only, clad in black and clotted together with the interred and decaying, observing the rites and rituals of death, but where one would expect to see them bawling raging against the cruel and avaricious shears of Death, writhing in some obscene gesture begging like heat crazed alley cats and offering their souls and bodies for some cosmic justice or reprieve from such pain of the spirit there was nothing; blank faces stony as the corpse they lowered into the frozen earth. They rejected him not with anger but with simple dereliction of duty in that they were the only ones that could be expected to care and they did not. Where they should have lamented the passing of one of gods children they defied custom, defiled his memory by only bearing witness.

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The sky above was a tepid gray - smog clouding all light delivered so many endless leagues away - and the din of man’s achievements tore through the land surrounding, threatening to encroach upon them, but for a moment the world and worlds beyond were cast aside as those who upon their own shoulders and achievements rose up against Olympian obstacles to walk in royal colors and claim their rightly earned titles as kings, queens, and champions of a new world; one of their making and imagining. The press of their supplicants flashbulbs created a new sun to illuminate their glory. The skies above them were bright with perfect blues from their storybook homeland. The sound that blanketed the night were ululations and cries of adoration. Tonight Wakanda walked on earth and paid those who would conspire against them no heed, for they were assured victory and accolades in the annals of history.

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Vines grow through rotten wood, a cyclical bit of absurdity as nature reclaims that which man has stolen from it, devours moisture and humidity, fills every little crack with its slow and inevitable penetration. It used to be a home for some poor souls railing against the elements in that cruel and unforgiving height but now it was nothing more than a collapsing memory, the token of it destroyed and incapable of bringing anything to mind beside destruction and ruin.

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The moldering corpse stood picked clean by birds and other carrion seeking wretches, in a pose of defiant and righteous anger that the world would deign to be so petty as to take a mans life while he was in the throes of such great works.

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It had the look of purgatory. Fog cut through with bright white light, burning away the moisture in the air near the caldera, creating a crown of wetness and airy muck around that arid deathly pit of obsidian rock bubbling hot with magma. Here on the grey and barren rim one could so easily imagine they were stuck between salvation and the pit, walking in endless circles never seeing the entirety of the landscape, only wishing allowance to ascend or fall, but afraid to ever dedicate ones self to the choice.

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Blood only coats skin and hair but it soaks into the soul and stews, a festering grating phlegm of thick tarry violence. Bruises swell and bloat as flesh strains at the seams to encase it, push it back, control the bubbling scion of the act made flesh under skin and through broken vein and capillary. Crimson molasses showing black red through papery veil of battered flesh that begs for release, swears oaths to the body that upon exodus all will be well again and pain will come no more. And those are only half-lies for once that blood, born of such atrocities is allowed egress the pain does subside in equal measure with ones own life.

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He talked of the day his garrison was captured by government soldiers. It wasn’t with the somber and reflective tone so many who have lived through tragedy often take, it was almost as if he were telling a tall tale, something nobody could believe, but he had been there and he had seen all the cruelty and nihilistic depths of the human condition. They kept the men locked in the arms lockers for days on end, taking each out for questioning in periodic shifts. They would sit them under a small faucet and drip the water onto their heads as they asked the questions. Once the skin was puckered and soft from the stream they would cut slowly into that thin skullcap and peel it away from the head. At first it just felt like pressure, but once the skin dried the pain was unbearable. Everyone in his platoon talked, they sang, and when they were freed it was as if a legion of bald-headed clowns poured from the garrison, screaming mad and cackling at the ridiculous appearances of their brothers.

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Light shines through shadowed forms creating pockets of luminescence burning and refracting on the blacktop, particles and waves into the cone of the eye, blinding us for a moment before we adjust to that out of focus projection of the sun; an image so misrepresented as to no longer convey any concept of the source but moreso an idea of some celestial and deified immovable and eternal force. This is the lie we tell and retell ourselves at every moment that the thing which allows us our concept of the world is beyond our ken and yet it is little more than yesterday’s picture of that great sphere around which our entirety revolves.

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Springtime comes to all corners of the globe whether in climate or just that subtle shift every person feels when green things bloom and animals start to blink their eyes sunwards and remember their god-given missive to procreate. Humans are animal, too, at their heart and we feel those shifts in the earth and season, we know in our bowels that the stirring in us is mandated from on high and try as we may to serve a better nature, there is no greater cause than to serve our maker in his demand that we survive ad nauseum.