My Amputations: A Novel - Softcover

Major, Clarence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661430 ISBN 13: 9781573661430

Verlag: The University of Alabama Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Originally published in 1986, this is a work of American fiction.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Clarence Major is a prize-winning poet, novelist, painter, and a Bronze Medal finalist for the National Book Award. Author of nine novels, eleven volumes of poetry and other works, Major has contributed to over a hundred periodicals and anthologies. 

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My Amputations

A Novel

By Clarence Major

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 1986 Clarence Major
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57366-143-0

CHAPTER 1

Again, as in a recurring dream, Mason opened the closet door and stepped hesitantly into its huge darkness, its nonlineal shape: he pulled the door shut then crouched there on the floor—which seemed to be moving—with the breathing of The Impostor. This dimness was not illuminated by the glowing Mason felt. He could smell the man: his sweat, his urine, his oil. The skin of Mason's eyes was alive with floaters. Faintly in the background—perhaps coming through the wall from the next apartment—Sleepy John Estes was singing "Married Woman Blues." Mason pushed hard for the beginning, some echo or view. Anglosaxon monosyllables clustered there. He couldn't remember how it all started nor even his muse's birth. He called her Celt CuRoi. Yet memory was expanding ... Low clouds crawled against a terrible sky. Lots of rainstorm-damaged trees, houses, fences. His birth—?—came like that. He swore to the date, the year, the damage, the blood. And afterbirth ... and his broken-grasping for sea, land, form. Why'd he remember overturned cars, the Great Flood, a woman up in a tree, words: nigger, jig, darky, convicts at gunpoint working to rebuild a broken dam, a six-hundred-or-more death toll ...? and, and from eighteen Woodrow Place? river moving out to lake, to sea, to ocean. Sea? ... already searching for it: to float upside down in its membranous-liquid grasp. Giant sharks might be deep in it but Celt would guard ... yet she, too, was only a beginning—not a sailorette, joe, just ah ... bug-examiner like Lil Massy: transparent wings, pink underbelly bright and silky as panties—mating dogs smelled like a rain forest full of moss and rotten logs. First letter of alphabet fascinated them: a house: Egyptian pyramid, farmer's joke; picture on box of crayons; then D: door to darkness, closed-off mystery. Together they went down the earth-passage—at underworld's first level Celt and Mason dimly expected to encounter themselves waiting—locked in a dark, secret, everlasting closet. Instead, they stood uneasily on the bones of a dog-like animal dead a million years. On level two they plowed through the remains of a dinosaur already taped and labelled MRF. They uncovered the majority—but were too innocent to connect ... to force. Strutters, diwalkers. V was clearly an upside-down hat: it protected them the way back up where—just before the exit—they stumbled into the clutches of cruel aunts with syphilitic-eyes, long-eared witches, drunk crab-shaped uncles, the broken—yet joyous, powerful, love-bound—spirit of a people: his—and by spirit, hers, too. They tasted salt, sugar and felt the frozen ground in winter; watched bird feet, were stung by fish fins. Turkey rot! Mason and Celt discovered it was possible to fly—even with broken wings: flying was not why you are but how: and then why: it was also not rushing downstream on a raft or being engulfed by a storm or swept away in a flood. It was how he got to know Celt. Before Celt he'd been a blind bat struggling to embrace the sky: his spirit existed before he was born: he simply stepped into it—as though it were a Union Suit. At sixteen he was unfinished; eyes: large, blank brown things. Did his mother Melba love him? She was certainly not his muse. Look at her apron: too clean: something is wrong. Is it that she doesn't like him much but loves ...? Her eyes: unfriendly—yet she's a person of responsibility as big as the Atlantic. Small, tight mouth—Anglosaxon. Her skin was lighter than his. He was—in color—between her and his father Chiro: nutmeg. Her Irish-African eyes? His were more in the tradition of Chiro's. As Mason grew: there was laughter in his thunder while he beat his wings against the page—attempting to become a good writer. He jus' grew: Chicago, 1955: there's Mason along the lakeshore: gulls cry. In the stockyards: pools of blood from the slit throats of hogs. He heard Wind Voice here howling in from lake Michigan. He claims he swallowed the lake. Art Institute's lions roared at traffic. Ashtrays and pink salmon. Calendars without dates. A private collage: he was reborn constantly in it: to the gills he settled in this stuff. Distractions, spectacles—where'd he find the force for his connections, a vent for the smoke clouding the thrust of his crisis? And how to fit in simple things, moments, only he knew the shape of—or so he claimed. Hold his hand, reader. Example: a particular line in the sky, skywriting—a particular rose on a particular bush—bushwriting. No echo; no snow in the hills—which hills? Wyoming, of course. He tried too hard to be, uh, profound. But he was young: eighteen. Take him by the throat, dear—. He thought himself, he says, Rimbaud or somebody. The sky, roses, appletrees, you name it. He says William Carlos Williams wrote him, encouraged him. He came to realize he wanted it all flat or upright and permanent like cubism—like things: surfaces. Now, here in the closet there was a feeling not of claustrophobia but one of plague, glut, glue; a sense of pestilence—and redemption—worse than East Africa—1368, a glut worse than Henry the Eighth, a glue thicker than Egyptian cement. Mason: holyshit: heard the pained-breathing louder than ever, smelled The Other with pity and contempt. He was no longer squarely sure these sounds, these smells, were not his own.

Mason, early in life, got slapped in the face by the unmistakable separation of Church and State. Hard-headedness made the hit come easily and irreversibly: his "innocence" became irrecoverable: he'd traded it in for an existential shot in the dark: A bidet was not a toilet without a seat; whores didn't necessarily kiss better than housewives; but ... yeah, you're getting warm (take your time—as Mississippi Fred McDowell used to say: time, time ...), even hot: keep the Clean (Church) separate from the Dirty (State). Point: early Mason lost faith in both. Remember, he was a rat from the get-go. The separation itself: his stepfather, for example, never taught him anything except the separation part: his sensibility was a peephole through which you could see frost gathering on military sternness. He polished his old army boots every Saturday morning although he'd been discharged twenty years before: spit-shined, spotless dude, he was, who chopped beef, not pork, not lamb, for Swift's at the stockyards. Could barely write his name: connected crudely printed letters with cross-bars: was not visibly intelligent either: just noble—full of nobility. Mason's mother caught her bottom lip between her teeth and chewed on it thoughtfully: held it that way, puzzled by the demands of the Church on one side (forced connections?) and the State on the other: that lasted for two, no, two and a half years. Mason's youngest sister, Maureen (never thought of her as half), was the offspring of that civil wedding made holy between Wilbur Young, The Man of Rules, and Melba, Woman of Blues. In six months he'd be fourteen: after school Mason walked to the cleaners—Rapid Magic Delux—his mother and stepfather owned on Forty-Fourth and Langley, South Side. It was December—it had snowed heavily three days before: snow now muddy, slush. He had the sniffles, a runny nose, chills. His pea jacket, though warm, had no buttons. When he entered Rapid Magic he saw...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of Alabama Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1573661430
• ISBN 13: 9781573661430
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 225
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande