The Clay Head Benediction by Marty Rafter - HTML preview

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I used to put on those earmuffs when I would mediate, the big heavy plastic ones, like the ones that people use at shooting ranges.  As far as I am concerned, sensory deprivation is key to a proper meditation practice.  I don’t go for the whole lotus position thing, or any of that other stuff, incense, candles, prayer beads, anything like that.  I meditate lying down.  That way I can hear the voices.  There is probably a rationalist explanation for all of it, the voices.  Most logically, it is my brain, devising little entertainments for itself as I fall asleep.  That is the whole deal with the lotus position by the way, to keep from falling asleep.   Normally the voices are conversations…banal ones about shopping, or gossip about people I don’t know.  It is kind of like in the early days of cordless phones when the phone would be on the wrong channel, and you would hear little snippets of your neighbor’s conversations.  When I was young, my parents moved into a house where the phone would ring without cause at all times of the day.  We would pick it up, and no one would be there.  Two hundred miles away, there was probably some fool putting on his shooting earmuffs and dialing in, messing around in places where he had no business, and playing with things he did not understand. 

For any normal rational person who understands that homeopathy is a fraud, and auras and the spirit world are all bullshit invented underachieving vegetarian baby boomers, this all seems incredibly stupid.  I get that.  It is stupid, but it is true.  In fact, this whole thing is true.  There is a whole body of literature, or more accurately writing, about people traveling around and seeing things in meditative states.  In fact, if one were to spend a little time on the internet forums reading about meditation, he would find that the newbie questions about strange sights and experiences are pretty common.

 There is also this other thing, the machine elves.  On the psychedelic drug DMT, a whole bunch of users report seeing the same thing, beings of light with the same message… “Create”.  Amazonian shamans have been ingesting DMT in the form of Ayahuasca for millennia, and for them, it provides insight into the cosmos and the nature of consciousness, and all those other things that hippies like to talk about.  Celebrities and dreamers in the West take it too, but like anything, you can only start where you begin.  A shaman, who has a full time relationship with the nature of life to begin with, probably goes a lot farther than some guy with a backpack padding around city in overpriced sandals. I don’t know.  That is not really my type of thing.  I would however, like to note that it is incredibly odd, that there exists a drug that makes unrelated users the world over “see” tiny people bearing a message…And that, my friend, is a bona fide mystery. 

There are lots of mysteries, and modern people hate the hell out of mysteries.  Fundamentally, that is what distinguishes modern people from the ancients.  After their basic needs were satisfied, early people sought to find things that they did not understand.  They did not really want the answer; they wanted to find what they could not answer.  That is why their answers suck, and why it is so easy to dismiss primitive answers as illogical superstition.  For example, do you believe, that a guy could build a boat that could accommodate two of every single animal on the entire earth, every one, and a whole bunch of food, and survive for forty days without the snakes eating the mice, and lion eating the guy, the two elephants didn’t get sea sick?  There is a little display next to the elephant exhibit at the zoo that shows what one adult African elephant eats in a day, the food for two African elephants for one day wouldn’t fit in the back of a full sized pickup truck.   See?  Bad answer.  But if the motivation of our early ancestors was to create more questions than they answered, it is a wonderful answer.  One of early mans’ greatest impulses was to do something illogical for someone else to figure out.   Particularly, because those who were able to accomplish the greatest mysteries were held in the highest esteem.   I’m certain that Moses was a competent navigator, but if you ask the average person, they will probably mention the thing about the Red Sea. 

 The existence of the illogical is foundational to the progress of humanity.  Reason does not create, it retroactively explains the mechanics of what was already created, or fulfills the promise of imagination.  Alone, reason is only a tool.  Anyway, the point is, that I am part of a proud tradition that includes the Pharaohs and Moses, and unsurprisingly, lots of penniless men shuffling around on the cuffs of their pants in cities across the country, but like all of them, I have a message, and it is this:  Your ancestors didn’t invent Santa Claus because it was fun to trick kids.  They did it because at one point, it was necessary to open a tiny window of possibility in the mind.  And in a rare person, that window would grow into a door, and then into a tunnel.  Because, there is also a war… two or three types of war, really. I’ll probably get into it more later, but suffice to say now, that each side has allies that don’t even have the window cracked, and each side has leaders who have the tunnel wide open.  And each side is so thick with double agents and spies that sometimes the leaders can’t recognize each other and a whole bunch of leaders are probably spies to, and you’re also part of it too, or at least you fill in carrying water to the front.  In the Age of Aquarius, comrade, everyone carries water somewhere.  But don’t worry; this isn’t some crazy story about lizard people or the secret bunker under the Denver airport.  It is something else entirely.

First I should tell you this.  One day, when I was mediating as usual, I fell into a kind of lucid sleep.  But the sleep only lasted a few seconds, and when I woke up, I was standing in the hallway of someone’s house, not some weird symbolic hallway, but a genuine normal hallway…one leading from the garage to the kitchen.  There were cabinets on the sides of the hallway, and a couple of small unexamined paintings, and a low counter with keys on top of it and a handful of forgotten bills.  The light in the hallway was off, but I could see clearly into the kitchen where a tall attractive woman of the anxious idle sort that is common in the nicer suburbs was talking on the telephone.  She was really animated, and I just stood there for a few minutes, frozen… watching her.  Her back was towards me, and then, she spun around, still chattering into the phone, and looked directly at me.  I froze, but she didn’t seem to acknowledge my presence, and continued to chatter at the telephone.  Then, I waited a few more seconds and walked into the kitchen.  I stood there for a moment, and for a second time she looked directly at me, but did not acknowledge me, so I realized that she must have thought that I was someone there to work on the house.  So, I walked out of the kitchen and into a nicely appointed television room. 

In that room, was a chubby teenage boy reclining on a beige overstuffed couch.  His eyes were glued to the television.  I greeted him, but he didn’t respond.  So I repeated myself again, this time a little bit louder.  He still didn’t say anything or look at me, so I walked over and positioned myself in front of him.  Again, he did not acknowledge me, or even seem disturbed that I was blocking his view of the television.  Then, very slowly, it occurred to me that he couldn’t see me.  I walked closer to him, and waved my hand in front of his face.  Nothing.  Then I shouted.  …Still nothing.  No response from him.   A rush of excitement coursed through me.  I was invisible.  Actually invisible.  In a space where I had never been… and I could explore with total freedom. 

So, I walked through the house.  It was huge, and new, and beautiful, tastefully decorated without a book in sight, except for the giant ones stacked on the coffee table in the main living room.  Then I followed a wide staircase upstairs to the second floor.  I glanced in each room, and in one of the larger bedrooms, sat a very old woman in a chair gazing idly out one of the windows.  She was thin and frail with an uncomfortable expression on her face.  I walked into the room, and again tested to see if I was visible.  I got very close to the woman, and looked into her face.  Her eyes had the vacant confused look associated with some kind of dementia, and I realized that even if she could see me, she was probably unlikely to be able to tell anybody.  So, I decided to test my powers a little bit…very gently, I reached out and touched her arm.  It was dry, and slightly cold, but she did not respond.  So, then I put my whole hand on her arm, and very gently allowed myself to lightly grip onto her.  I could feel the slight involuntary muscle response from underneath her skin, but still her face showed no recognition at all.  Then I kneeled in front of her and gazed into her eyes.  Her eyes remained focused somewhere far off in the distance.  I could smell her breath now, stale.  I suddenly felt very sad for her alone and forgotten in this room gazing into nothing… visited by ghost she couldn’t see.  So I very squeezed her arm, willing a tiny portion of compassion into the shell of her person, but as I did that, her eyes started to focus, and a look of total unrestrained terror came over her face.  Her arm jerked away from me, and she sucked a huge breath of air in, and then, I was back in my bedroom.  I ripped off my earmuffs, and stood up, and that was it.  Some actually majorly unusual happened, and that is my best tale of the paranormal, and oddly enough, in it, I’m the ghost.

There is a guy who hangs around outside my apartment who asks me for a rolling paper every time I walk by.  As far as I can gather that is some sort of code that he has drugs to sell, but you’d figure he would catch on by now that I’m not a potential customer.  Other than the lone drug dealer, it is a pretty nice building.  Mostly students.  I am too old to live here, but I work for the company.  At least in the summer I do, I rent apartments in the building and a bunch of others.  It is not bad, it is easy work, and mostly it is just a lot of hours through the summer.  I’m sure it gives my mother anxiety that I am taking so long to getting around to doing something that fills the minds of others with my successes, but I’m pretty content… for the most part anyway.   The rest of the year, I hang around the library and read.  Lately, I’ve been reading the Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz.  The only copy the library has is really old, and they won’t let anybody take it out.  I have been interested in that lately, Communism.  Not really communism in that I actively support it or anything political for that matter, but in these holistic thought models.  Communism really took the Every Question Answered mode of thought pretty far.  It also has the same basic problem as fundamentalist religious belief does… a pre-supposition of the outcome.  It’s almost as if nobody expected there to be complicated personal questions in between the beginning and the Promised Land. 

When I get to the library, Ben is already waiting at my favorite table.  Disheveled, Sephardic, and overweight from the psychiatric drugs, Ben has recently decided that I am some sort of prophet.  Remember the cracks in my contentedness that I just alluded to?  Well, here is one of them. 

“You’re here early, Ben” I say

“I had to go to a meeting this morning”   He says, as he loudly snaps open the can of Mountain Dew clutched between his meaty hands. 

I look at Ben’s filthy shirt, a too snug Brooks Brothers oxford probably gifted to him by a loving grandmother before his life took an unexpected turn.  The lowest button had popped off, and is revealing the hairy recesses of his enormous navel. “Pitching a big deal to the CEO?”  I ask.

“What?”  Says Ben, as he stares back at me with his wide watery eyes.

“It was a joke..."  I say, watching my tone “I’m sorry, Ben”

I am a little scared of him, once when the librarian reprimanded him about his soft drink, he threw the can across the room, and the police had to be called.  Actually, they probably didn’t have to be called, but they were called.  It was big mess.  Ben cried, and the police were actually pretty understanding to both parties, but either way, Ben was banned from the library for almost a month.  He spent the month hanging around by the food trucks next to CMU, where he tried in vain to talk to the students, but mostly they ignored him, and some were outright rude.  By the time he came back to the library at the end of the month, it was obvious that the alterations in his routine had hurt him.  After that, I tried to talk to him more, but he still scares me.  He is big and unpredictable, but also about as lonely as me, so we talk.

Ben looks at his hands for a few seconds, and then digs into his pockets.  He hands me something in wrapped in a cloth.

“It stopped working” He says

I already know what is in the cloth bundle.  It is a little head made out of Fimo clay.  I made it for him.

“I don’t think it had any special powers, Ben.  It was just a little token”

“Oh that’s not true, Luke.  It was amazing.  As soon as you gave it to me, he went away.  First he was everywhere.  I even saw him in the toilet once, but then this” He picks up the little clay head “you gave me this, and he went away.  For weeks”

“Well, if he did go away.  It wasn’t the head that did it, it was you.  Maybe it just helped you change the way you were thinking.”

Ben starts to shake his head “no, no.  Not true.  No way.  I was outside my place smoking a cigarette, and he walked right up to me.  He took the smoke from my mouth, and spun it around.  Stuck the cherry right in my lip.  Look, look at it”

There is a little mark on Ben’s lip that looks like a cold sore

“Maybe you just made a mistake, Ben.  Maybe you just flipped the smoke around backward by accident” I say.

“No. no fucking way.  I didn’t burn myself.   You need to fix it again. Can you?  Put some power back into it” he says, pushing the small head towards me again

“Ben, I just made it for you as a present.  You might be confused, man.  I really didn’t do anything to make this magic.”  I hold the clay head it my hand, it is cold and feels a little damp “It is just something I made for you…because we are friends”

Ben hangs his head for a moment, and then takes a long drink from his can.  “He knew about you”

“Who did?  The head?”  I ask

“No, not the goddamn head.  Him.  You know who I mean”   Ben says, raising his voice.   

I read once that tone of voice is key when you are talking to people who are seriously disturbed, so I try to be as calm as possible.  “Ben, I’m sorry, man.  I will definitely make you another head.  I will do it as soon as I get a chance”

Ben nods slowly. 

“What did he say, Ben?”  I ask, after a few second of silence.

“He said that you’re a ghost, Luke”

“Buddy, I’m not a ghost.  I can talk to anyone here.  Everyone here can see me” I hold up the head”I made this for you.  This real, physical thing.  I am definitely not a ghost”

Ben shakes his head, and looks at his hands.  “I know you’re not a ghost.” 

  I put the clay head into my pocket, “I actually have an appointment myself.”  I say

“But you just got here”

“I know, but I totally forgot I have something else I was supposed to do today”

“What is it?  What do you have to do?”  Ben asks

“I told somebody that I would meet them at their work to sign a lease renewal”

“Where do they work?”

“The museum”

“Can I go, too?”  He asks

“I don’t know, man.  Maybe not today.  I will make you a new clay head though, I promise.  Can you meet me here tomorrow?”

“I guess” 

“Ok, same time.  I will have a new one for you. 

I rush out of the library and straight up the road to the museum.  They are close, actually attached, and that is one of the many good things about Pittsburgh.  There are lots of good things about Pittsburgh, but don’t move here.  Or else they will be all be ruined by being crowded and expensive.  I don’t really have an appointment.  Even if I did, I would never in the winter.  I am a seasonal employee.   I make all of my money between April and September, after that, if the company needs anything, it is never a rush.

The museum is almost like a church to me.  I go there to wander and to collect my thoughts.  At least I used to, but now there is a girl there on Mondays.  She is fantastic, dark hair, too much makeup, angry and compact behind one of those carts that have additional enrichment projects for children.  For the past two months, I have been going to see her there every week.  I used to just go and walk around with my headphones on and absorb the atmosphere, or occasionally make some small talk with the guards, but lately I have been experimenting with various forms of engagements to see if I can get her attention. 

For a couple of weeks I sketched, which I quite competent at, as long as I am not drawing from life.  My real strength lies in improvisation.  Then, it occurred to me that it might be a bit strange if I am sitting in front of some of Monet’s water lilies and drawing a picture of a person being kidnapped by a UFO, so I left my sketch book at home.  Then for a couple of other weeks I brought something that I was reading.  I try to read important books, not because I am some intellectual elitist, but because it saves me quite of bit of time in searching out what to read.  If it won a major award, I will read it.  I respect the opinions of critics who have awards to hand out.  Plus, it gives me a measure of authority when I discuss things with the type of casual intellectuals who feel like reading the New York Times is the educational equivalent of touching saints’ relics.  Everyone is always seeking low effort holiness.  Any decent really smart person knows that they are mostly pretty stupid.

 So, I would sit in the galleries and read, but I think the guards got wise to my real objective because they would tease me, and suggest that I take my outside reading to the library, or at least move to a seat where I would have a better view of the girl at the art cart.  My latest trick is to take notes about the art.  I think that might be the best strategy because I have noticed her starting to look at me a little bit.  For some reason, even after spending the last eight weeks trying to catch her eye, once she started to look at me, and am finding myself to petrified to look back.  I have been thinking about it though, the next time she looks at me, I am going to look back.  Maybe I will even say something.  I have been thinking about something clever, I have gone over a few options, even something about the art.  She is younger than me.  I’m a bit of a late bloomer.  I lot of things I thought of to say contained the word “lovely” for some reason, and I realize that that makes me sound really old and strange, so I have decided to play it by ear.  Either way, if she looks at me, I am saying something.

The inside of the gallery is calm and cool as it always is.  In my haste with Ben at the library, I forgot to return home to get my prop, but that is ok.  I walk around for a while, and then decide to sit in the only chair that affords me a slight view of the girl at the cart.  It is in front of Alex Katz’s Lake Time which as Alex Katz goes, is a lump of garbage, but his really good portraits aren’t in cities like mine anyway, or if they are, they are in some rich guy’s house.  I sit there for a while, I start to feel a bit awkward, so I pretend that I am writing something.  The girl is probably too far away from me to notice that I don’t have a pen and paper anyway, but I have to abruptly stop when I notice that she has escaped the safety of her cart and is walking directly towards me.  In an instant, she is standing in front of me, and I make a futile effort to disguise my imaginary pen and pad in my pocket and look casual. 

She is even prettier in person.  With her inches from me, I can’t think of anything to say, at all, but she seizes the opportunity. 

“Can I ask you a question?”  She says

I try to smile, concealing my anxiety “Of course”

“What the fuck is your problem?”

“I...I don’t have a problem”

“So, it is just a coincidence that you lurk around here every week and stare at me?  Let me see the picture you were just drawing...”

“Oh, I wasn’t drawing a picture.  I was taking notes.”  I say

“Let me see your notes, then” She says extending her paint splattered hand

“I have already put them in my pocket”

“..And you can’t get things out of your pocket once you put them in there?”

“No, that’s not it.  I just don’t want to.”

“You don’t want to because you are pervert who comes and sits here every week and draws pictures of me”

“I wasn’t drawing a picture of you”

“Then, prove it” she says, folding her arms across her chest. 

So I dig into my pockets, and since there is no paper there, I withdraw the only logical distraction available, the small clay head that had once belonged to Ben

“You are half right.  I am here to see you” I say holding out the clay head.  “I have been working up the courage to talk to you.  I’m sorry I was so strange, but I actually made this for you.  I think you are quite lovely”

“Oh, sure.  Well, for the future, handing someone a tiny head, is not the best way to apologize for being strange”

I look down at the clay head in my hand.  The green Fimo is shiny on one side from being rubbed like a magic talisman by Ben, and the face, which was crude to begin with, looks particularly distorted in the gallery lighting.

“Well, it isn’t supposed to be you” I say and smile

“That’s good” she says, still looking down at the clay head in my palm.

“Look, this was a mess. “  I say “I can’t actually imagine how this whole thing could have gone worse.  It's just, that I think you are really pretty…and you know, when you see somebody, that you think might like you, or maybe be like you, you kind of imagine ways that your first conversation would go."  I put the clay head back into my pocket.  “This wasn’t it. Like, super wasn’t it.  I’ll go, but I didn’t want to scare you, I was just working up the courage to talk to you” Then, I stand up and start to walk away.

“You’re just going to keep the head then?”  She says

“Oh no, I just thought you didn’t want it”

 I rush back over and hand it to her, but I don’t make eye contact. 

So then I needed to make another head for Ben.  It wasn’t the only one, there are lots and lots.  The heads are my other preoccupation.  I make them all of the time.  Lately, the best ones have been really detailed.  I brought some of my hair home from the barber and made hair and eyebrows for the last few.  Then I hide them.  In the woods in the park mostly, but also behind books in the library, and if I travel somewhere I will bring a few.  I left a really good one in the Canadian National Gallery.  I still wonder if anyone had the guts to notice it didn’t belong.  Someday, I will retire to them like Aureliano Buendía and his little golden fish, but in the meantime, I will need to get more clay.

 There is a store in between my apartment and the museum that has Fimo, but they don’t always have all of the colors.  The store that has most of the colors is on the South Side, and I just sold my car.  I do that every year, sell the car.  A couple of years ago, I made friends with a mechanic who has a car dealers license and he takes my money to one of the wholesale auctions and picks me up something decent every spring.  Then, at the end of the rental season, I sell it again.  It has been a great arrangement, really.  I save on insurance, parking, maintenance all that stuff; except for now because I need to get to the South Side and I have no car.  I could take the bus, but I never really bothered to learn how the routes work, so I decide to walk.

I try not to think about the girl from the museum as I do.  That whole thing was mortifying, and worse still, I didn’t even bother to ask for her name or try to recover when I gave her the clay head.  Even worse, is that particular head is in an extremely primitive variation on what I am capable of.  It was a rough draft.  That is why I gave it to Ben.  The good ones, the ones with the eyes that I bought from the taxidermy supply company, are the ones that I want to be found, not give away.  I hope that the people who find the heads, keep them though, or maybe that they decide to put something else that they made in its place.  I have a recurring fantasy that that I will place a lotus flower garland around the Mr. Rodgers statue that is near the stadiums.  Then, a reporter for the newspaper will happen by, and that person will take a picture, and somebody will see the picture, and that person will do some research about Mr. Rodgers and Lotus flowers.  Perhaps then that same person will be another person to realize that Mr. Rodgers is a bodhisattva and she will figure out her own way of getting that message across to people without beating them over the head with it.

 I read this short story about some kids, who find a porno magazine by a baseball field, and it leads one of the finders to discover the truth about his sexual identity, and then later he becomes somebody who throws a pornography magazine out of a window by a baseball field.  I am quite sure that the author figured that he was making some important statement about the nature of identity, but this kind of thing is a pile of horseshit.  I’m not waging a moral war, but life can’t be about throwing porno magazines out of windows.  …the whole thing is just so goddamn unimaginative. 

At the art supply store they have a bunch of different colors of Fimo, but they don’t have the exact one that I used to make the head for Ben.   I will ju