The Pariah King

Painting by Colin Reece


The Pariah King

The Pariah King, Part I
"...this nothing, this non-space of philosophy literally becomes the space of hyper-reflection."
Randolph Gasche

Scene: The Pariah King walks up to Mr. Wagtail who is sitting at a computer. Behind them are the barbed wire gates of a camp. A tall post is near. On the post are two signs. One is labeled Heaven. The other, pointing in the opposite direction, is labeled Hell . Mr. Wagtail is franticly entering data into a computer. A large picture of a smiling Bill Gates is in back of him. Bells are tolling.


Mr. Wagtail: Take a number. I'm busy. I'll get to you when I can. Unless, of course, you might be interested in some sea pines real estate?

P. King: I'm lost. Can you tell me which road to take? I need to get to Santa Barbara? I'm expected at a conference there.

Mr. Wagtail: What kind of conference?

P. King: I'm an educator.

Mr. Wagtail: Aren't we all.

P. King: No, really. I lecture about educational writing and the digital life.

Mr. Wagtail: Well then educate yourself.

P. King: Do you smoke? I smell the stench of tobacco.

Mr. Wagtail: There are worst things you can smell.

P. King: Like what?

Mr. Wagtail: Like good intentions gone bad.

P. King: Would you mind answering a quick question?

Mr. Wagtail: The only questions I'm qualified to deal with are those regarding the human condition and small plots of real estate located in inaccessible regions.

P. King: That's absurd.

Mr. Wagtail: I know but isn't everything these days?

P. King: I need directions.

Mr. Wagtail: Do you know where you are?

P. King: Not exactly. That's the problem.

Mr. Wagtail: Typical. If you don't know where you are how can you get to where you want to be? I have no directions to give. None that you would understand anyway. It's always the same. Oh my God! This hasn't happened in years. I feel a poem trying to break out. Are you Dante?

P. King: What a stupid question. To give you a stupid answer, he's hitchhiking through Tuscany. In what kind of hell hole am I?

Mr. Wagtail: It depends on where you think you are. To put it in words you might understand, this is the ultimate cyberspace cafe where humankind is on the endangered species list. I've got all I can do to keep the species afloat.

P. King: Why would you want to do that?

Mr. Wagtail: I'm actually a good guy. You thought I was some kind of nightmare, didn’t you?

P. King: Am I dreaming or just lost?

Mr. Wagtail: Who knows? Hear them? Hell's bells flail up from inside out. Extinctions, global warming, hunger, suffering. Your species has the power to alleviate all this. Why do I have to winnow the grain from the chafe?

P. King: I don't know which way to go. I don't know what to believe. All I hear are those damned tolling bells.

Mr. Wagtail: A tolling for the season chronicling lost journeys.

P. King: The search for answers sets me on the path of a double cross. The deeper I go the further behind I get.

Mr. Wagtail: Life is a metaphor steaming in its own juices, peeling paint off walls. You wanted enlightenment didn’t you? You wanted answers?

P. King: Not this way.

Mr. Wagtail: Get used to it.

P. King: Once, I ran through clover. I sang what I thought. Now, the masks I wear make me dizzy. I don't know what to think.

Mr. Wagtail: (laughter) Stay current and grow old fashioned. On the mad road between Heaven and Hell lies Purgatory. A vast and teasing battle ground where sex is on the installment plan; where you arrive on vacation leave on probation and return on a violation.

P. King: You're insane.

Mr. Wagtail: Yes. So what. You're insane as well. Admit it, in the bedlam of your mind the Nazi squirrels are sporty this year. No, don't admit it. We treat our nuts to quick burials. Want to check my emails?

P. King: What in the hell.....

Mr. Wagtail: Heaven and Hell have nothing to do with it. If you need to know, I'm a scientist. We've got processing down to an art. It's all a matter of technology. Pure poetry.

P. King: I'm trapped in an era when science acts like a crazy god and a grave digger makes inside jokes. What do you expect of me? Cursing? Falling down before that which ever was and is always changing? Confessing my hopes and fears? My prayers born out of flames and placed on the tongue of a golden calf called technology; chained to the phases of the moon or the rituals of nations, a symbol for the Unknown God, given a name and sold into slavery?

Mr. Wagtail: Whew, that was a mouthful. Some people need more oxygen.

P. King: I got too much.

Mr. Wagtail: In negative times it helps to think of positive things.

P. King: It helps to be breast fed. It helps to listen to Mozart. It helps to believe in yourself. So what?

Mr. Wagtail: There's a famous piano in Sienna whose wood is made from David's harp.

P. King: Yes, and doubt plays my bones like a fiddle, grinding down my manhood, decorating it with used condoms...

Mr. Wagtail: ...yes, like tattered latex catastrophes.

P. King: I wish I had trained to be a musician. Music is the only honest philosophy I know.

Mr. Wagtail: All philosophies are a burden. Man thinks himself the ultimate creation when in reality he is broke, homeless, bankrupt and tone-deaf ...

P. King: Man is the devil's apprentice, born with a storm in his eye, orchestrating through blunders his rise.

Mr. Wagtail: Enthusiasms are picky who they associate with which is not to say they, or I, or you come with taste.

P. King: Life is shock treatment.

Mr. Wagtail: A flickering montage, an eclectic sizzle...

P. King: ...a mental ward of terminal connections morphing into perverse cinemas of complication...

Mr. Wagtail: ...charting terminal fevers and emotional flues with disappearing ink.

P. King: Had I something to believe I'd have drunk from the hope I drowned in. Am I insane?

Mr. Wagtail: Now your getting into the swing of it but this isn't some graduate school. Life's not something you can take a test on. We don't give out diplomas here. If the pain in you demands answers, believe in non belief. Go online. Deconstruct. Explore. You can believe in nothing can't you?

P. King: For what purpose? I waited. Yes, I remember something. I waited, as the all that I knew bled into null space. Beautiful, creative imaginings were once mine until high into the heaving sins of their father they were flung into the ether like blind artifacts littering with tears lost battlefields, unable to see for themselves the nothing they've become.

Mr. Wagtail: Now you brains cooking but so far it's only on simmer. Your minds a sleeping bag of wet feathers slobbering slurs inside your fuzzy head.

P. King: This is what I have to say about that: (an awkward silence)

Mr. Wagtail: (after a pause) Nothing? (laughter..) Lost for words or just lost in general?

P. King: Where am I?

Mr. Wagtail: That's something you have to decide for yourself. Maybe, you don't want to know.

P. King: I could be insane. If I am I have mixed feelings about it.

Mr. Wagtail: Life is pure madness, like shaking hands with a shadow. When a dead man walks he uses other people's feet and there you have it, words get in the way. To know the truth you have to know what you don't know about yourself.

P. King: In my life the gateway to caring goes ca chink, is surrounded by barbed wire while debtor's prison is boundless and always open, where middle aged housewives act like hookers, Peter Pan lusts for boys, the worm catches the early bird and freedom of expression has its tongue torn out.

Mr. Wagtail: And that's looking on the bright side of things. Why don't you try thinking like a philosophic detective? Lets play 10 questions?

P. King: A misdirection of effort. I remember something else. I was hell bent on now and tomorrow; disillusioned, tense and angry. My skepticism showering me in my own kisses of blood. I went for a ride. The wind almost blew me over. I fought back, biting my lips and tasting the flavor of wild blueberry pie. Asking myself: who am I? What am I here for? Where does questioning yourself get you? Where does it get anyone?

Mr. Wagtail: Depends. From the left of center and back again this is your consciousness in the guise of the philosopher king. Between birth and a mossy, darker birth the question branches out as you become the road you travel lost in a landscape you create by the kind of questions you ask yourself, thinking the answers reflect the questing itself. They don't.

P. King: A general disappointment as I see it. Roots reach deep, are nurtured by sweat and blood. Life should sing as it goes.

Mr. Wagtail: Perhaps it does but your not listening. Once, you were curiously happy, out of darkness made, rejoicing in each moment that killed itself. What happened?

P. King: Like an orgasm bringing me to my knees, my life became a narrative of exploding nerves. Sooner believe death can bear fruit than believe we can win against the war inside ourselves.

Mr. Wagtail: Any harvester knows that the fruit falls not far from the branch as it holds in its flesh the truth of the root. You became lost somewhere inside yourself; exploring the capitol of Altered States, without reason, indistinct nor will you ever be complete nor explanation follow until back into the mud you go and of your first crime who can say? Is it in your birth or death?

P. King: As a boy the world stretched before me like a highway of intricate, caloric mental calories of illicit strangeness, mud larks or stirrings or Aesopian fables removed from ruin and washed in joys till I sang like a lobster in my own boiling pot buttered by chance and hefty as bliss.

Mr. Wagtail: What do you really know about yourself? Your daddy was skinny. Your mama was fat. She liked lean. He liked fat. You're unsophisticated, direct, your honesty is corrupted by deceit, your deceit is contaminated by honesty. The anarchy of your imagination represents your umbilical cord of hope and like some rascally orphan it is conning you out of all your spare mental change. You babble on as if your some sort of angry young geek, punk rocker, posh twit or a gnarled old philosopher trapped in life's nursing home talking to himself, attempting to break through the silence of his own isolation. Only occasionally do you ever cough up light, bearing the weight of the truth that not being true to yourself was equivalent to killing yourself.

P. King: I killed myself?

Mr. Wagtail: Don't ask me. You should know things only happen around here when you figure them out yourself. Don't you remember? Think back. You were depressed and melancholic...

P. King: (thinking back to himself) ... and when melancholy came as my drug of choice it was dressed in dreamy restlessness curiously coming to me, gleaning to connect in the face of and despite all odds favoring positive disconnections and somehow miraculous perception lifted itself like a great white light speaking in tongues imperfectly balancing the color of its song to my thirsty need...

Mr. Wagtail: See, treat philosophy like poetry and poetry like philosophy. What will it be? Heaven, purgatory or hell. Pick one. It's your choice. For my own part, I've always secretly wondered what a woman really wants. What any man can expect. when at my ultimate sumptuous feast they penetrate into the mist of the multistoried cosmic wind to drink till clean again they come again to know that all flesh is transient, its own mortuary shroud. Hey, you bring out the [poet in me. You're a mad poet then?

P. King: In the presence of the boundless manna of life, my madness called out to madness. I believed in the power to overcome...I believed in faith...I believed....

Mr. Wagtail: Who would have guessed? You blundered your way, slipping and sliding to the ultimate conclusion. What are you mad about? Is it so wrong that a man's father was born to be overtaken or a woman's father to be adored? Is it a crime to measure death in feet? Better to grow crazy inches at a time or all at once? The greater the undertaking the bigger the box. Know, the future is a landscape without you in it and all faith involves convincing yourself that something really matters above and beyond yourself.

P. King: Wrapped in the dubious husk of life's sushi, neither saint nor sinner I was both. My smile a perfect camouflage. I don't dream anymore. History has cured me. The present is nightmare enough. I must like being dizzy. Of life, death and the soul, their truth is no truth at all or the hook hidden inside the insanity of God’s inscrutable laughter.

Mr. Wagtail: There you have it. Look twice when entering any door that opens both ways. Stitched into that scaly wart of your mind are all the answers you need. Why all this hot finning it along? Your fishy as a salmon leaping the falls toward his own oblivion. Choose which path you want to take. Why linger here? Paddle or swim your way forward. Get on with it.

P. King: Lordy, lordy, like a big fat mama stretching out from the center of me life shimmered all hemlock and honey and like a man eating man eating crow, I have nothing to show for it. But the longer I lived there the more it felt like home.

Mr. Wagtail: Did you think it would be easy? Up from the dust of the road, back under it you go, yours is a chronic condition.

P. King: In life I bundled my perceptions together and though seldom legible- it became a post card from a foreign land addressed to myself I read as I wrote.

Mr. Wagtail: Did you think you could understand? Every kitten when looking into a mirror sees a lion. How could you be expected to do less? The art in digging yourself out of a hole is in how you spread the dirt around. If you must believe, believe in believing.

P. King: Yes and no. Catching up is different from falling behind. I once believed in chance. In a god of fathomless answers. In the light sleeper in whose pulse I am. I believed in the foam at the wave's tip cleansing bruises. I believed in the god of miraculous provocations rebuking billionaires, freeing what we fear to lose in whose holy places the air swells and the Kestrel soars. I remember the early morning light like a crow dancing across a Port Orford Cedar, preening the pointed leaves as if they were its feathers. I recognized then with each breath I took, a fine and gentle madness made for this moment only making my world complete like driving along a narrow road lost in the chloroform clouds of thought. Suddenly I left the road, the ocean rising toward me on tsunami wings as I blinked back at the world, wild eyed and in love with it. That’s what I remember. That’s all. Does that sound crazy?

Mr. Wagtail: To me everything does. But I'm Death. I have a unique perspective..

by Scott Malby

Posted over on The Canopic Press