The Outsiders - a book of short stories by W.R. Baker

The magnificently aged poet of 73 years, William B. Pracht, returns home from the funeral of a beloved friend – Kathryn S. He’s dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black cashmere overcoat. The door to his building is held for him. He takes the elevator to his spacious apartment on the top floor.

His shoulders hunched, he fumbles with the
keys. Inside, he undresses, brushes his teeth and washes his bearded face, never once looking in the mirror. Dear Kathryn, an artist and decent historian twenty years his senior; in his early 30s they had been lovers. She had given him a hand-up and
strengthened his belief in humanity.

Wearing a new dressing gown he sits in the living room and looks at one of her paintings – huge white tulips rise out of the skull of a long-dead anthropoid. In the painting he feels her love for the rainforest and her wicked sense of humor. Goodbye Dear Kathryn, he says. Forlorn, he climbs into bed.

He dreams of a dark and rainy landscape near the Hoboken piers. From a large fishing trawler Italian stevedores unload crates of whiskey into smaller boats and trucks.

Death is there too on the pavement in the shape of a watermelon rind. I am a blessing, death says. On a big blue sun-drenched day two boys, 13 years of age, stand in a field of alfalfa trading punches. I can’t remember where I shoveled the horse manure? Hide and seek. Two Dobermans and a Great Dane stand atop a skyscraper in grandiloquent Manhattan. A war rages inside the steel walls of the City. Brutality and Chaos refined. Oh, I’m cold.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey on November 13, 1936 with one functioning kidney, energetic, athletic, he was a voracious reader of world literature. In later years he would say, “Through reading, I escaped the world of the gangster.” At twelve, his parent’s basement, he ran a gambling casino for his fellow cub scouts. After he was busted he moved into the garage where he set up a strip-tease parlour. Every night before Halloween, he found himself hiding from the cops. Hide and seek. It was thrilling… to never… be captured.

First major decision was to attend St. Francis Xavier High School, a Jesuit military academy in New York City. Most of his family was proud, particularly his mother. Dad knew better, but said little. As he recalled, the school was on 14th Street in a hollow brick and cement building. Many of the teachers were as old as the Academy. In the middle of his freshman year, his mother announced she had divorced his father and was moving to Healdsburg, California. He stayed behind living with his grandmother in Weehawken to complete his freshman year. He left the school with the most incomplete sessions of punishment in the history of St. Francis Xavier. He re-united with his three brothers and his mother in July of 1950 on a horse ranch in Healdsburg, California.

He certainly felt his freedom as well as his mother’s baffling pains: migraines, psoriasis, and an aching need to be loved, but not her impending ruin due to a congenital brain tumor. What did he know of death? He was a colt prancing around in the hills of Northern California. He heard her screams; her gasps for air and her bravery as she fattened, lost all of her hair and became addicted to codeine. Not until the brain tumor exploded did they discover the source of her agony.

Fuck it, he had been with her in the best years. She had been a star, Vivacious Lady they dubbed her in high school, a serious reader of Emerson and Thoreau. Even in the last excruciating years she made loyal friends and pursued and created a world of joy out of inexplicable pain. Emerson and Thoreau would have been proud. She died during his high school graduation ceremony. After he funeral he traveled – walking, hitchhiking, talking, sporting and striding into little towns and big cities all across the country. He was looking for decent human beings and he discovered them, hundreds of them, but he never found what he really desired – a fellow traveler, a worshipper of words. 

Bus Riding

The Daumier-like faces

Clinging to logs
being tossed about
on the bus
me hovering
like a dragon fly
Seeing
Can I help?
Stones hide in each one
if not hope
at least a flickering
of a soul.

Cement headed drivers
(they have to be)
mourn the human condition
All seek shelter in a world
other than their own.

Niches form to isolate.
If you don't find a niche
you are what I call a breakaway,
or at least you ride the range.

As soon as the faces are spoken
to, ah a light exchanges,
warms the atmosphere,
and everyone even the driver
lurches with a purpose.

---

Robin's Nest

When the little bird
in the cuckoo clock
found the switch
in the back
the energy released
was beyond belief – the only child
found a mate:
A wild puppet master
who would not rest.
Always the outsider
he looked into you
pulling on your strings
peering into you
who couldn’t stop laughing.

---

Unknown

I say red is blue not red.

Big money backs me.

Red becomes blue. The money,

the creator of the shift,

means everything.

It would take a lot

of money to change

it back again.

Maintaining the status quo,

upholding tradition

is what the vast majority

of people do or wish they could.

The majority of Americans 

who run things like public

schools, the House of Representatives,

a Kiwanis Club have so

much power

that quite often they are able

to prevent themselves

from learning something

that might be very good for them.

This power is caused

by a false pride.

If the people cannot see

what's good for them

they will often

choose what is bad.

The bad will have long term

consequences and further

complicate the people’s search

for the good.

---

In the Beginning

One becomes two.

Two became the many.

Looking at each other

making faces furrowing,

smiling, pointing, laughing.

In time they approached

other members of their society

and entertainment began – 

In the Beginning.

Entertainment as an activity

grew slowly; there were more

important things to do.

By 3000 B.C. (at least) all forms

of entertainment

from religious ritual

to epic poetry

were finally in place.

---

The Antidote

A naked human

the feeling their skin creates

the light gleaming off

the chrome bicycle handle

salty, foaming ocean water

the song living inside

the face containing all

faces all the vaccines

all the dogs we have created

Hammer, Wood and nail

the touching of the horns

the deepening breath

of humility

early Antonioni.

In general people define themselves

more by their hates

than their loves. Hate sticks

to their ribs. Love is all

around like the sky.

O, How the mighty human multiplies

while the poetic traits

in man are torn asunder. 

Submerged

Inundated

By lies-a tapestry

devoted to Mammon

Has eroded our belief

in an effective communication

transmogrifying the so important

effects of our democracy.

Satisfied by cheap gods

and mind numbing

cultural repetitions

we have lost 

our knowledge of The Good.

Now we will have to

start all over again.

---

In This Time

Our first dream

is of course the womb.

The second is the expulsion 

and third is our struggle,

our work, to create

a womb-like existence

in the waking world.

We walkabout 

in all forms

strutting, barely balancing,

crawling, sliding, flying,

keeping the thought

and the memory of that thought

from wrinkling.

Every now and then

we play small parts

in peoples’ lives.

To transcend loneliness

we live our episodic lives

as if we were expanding

through the eyes

of a distant narrator

or even better still

we hide in the weightless

world of dreams.

For me it’s all about

the feeling. What happened,

what’s happening? 

I define it simply.

I ask do I want to see

that person, do that thing,

go here, stay there?

I feel it out and decide

and try not to put

a label on it.

To define why I feel

a certain way

would be a blasphemy.

---

At This Moment

The fat people seem to be

hustling me

into indolence. 

Though they move swiftly

when necessary

leaving me to wonder

will I be able to mirror

their grace?

I eat like a horse

elongating my jaw

cracking each morsel.

Before destruction there is misuse,

then abuse and finally

the never ending pain.

---

Beauty

Handprints discovered

in a cave near Pendejo, 

New Mexico are carbon-14

dated to around 40,000 B.C.

The magic being unearthed

in Troy

seat of the Mycenaean Age;

the regal profundity 

of all hidden tombs

the astounding myths

of The Aegean Sea.

Video et Taceo

-1-

My conscience whispers I am here to protect –

yourself to win. 

The events of the past may impinge on the present,

preventing us from moving forward. 

In an evolving landscape like Earth

the voices keep shifting from known to unknown,

from the familiar to the strange. 

Look straight ahead and behold everything I have said.

We are always changing.

-2-

The night speaks to me wondering why I came. 

The night says, “The light is so hypnotic. How did you breakaway?”

“Are we not one body like the limbs of a tree.”

“No.  I am the heart without a body.  The furtive beginning. 

From me all versions come

and when they fold into themselves they fold into me.”

“Like all creatures I come unto you for rest

to feel refreshed to begin anew. 

You are the source of vision,

so many visions so many see but cannot speak –

video et taceo.”

The burden of this continuation

the in exorable divinities and demons within

allow the tears of men and women to float

firmly suspended but ready to be moved by any horror or joyful destination.

We are curiously woven

and far away. 

The wars don’t really effect us. 

Individual killings barely raise a brow. 

We’re too embedded to be hounded

by all this shaking in the ground.

-3-

In Tanzania when the cheetahs and the lions appear

their eyes ablaze with hunger

the zebras will stand back to back –

a dazzling wall of black and white.

The predators cannot distinguish individuals from the herd.

In human society if you substitute the knowledgeable people

for the predators and the mass of humans for the zebras

you’ll see the difficulties

in breaking the hegemony

of mass culture.

America 2012

-1-

We are old before our time.

We never really had a chance to grow.

Feel like a squeezed out lime

amid empty buildings and decrepit signs,

burnt to a golden crisp?

Wisps of bloodied hair

float in our breeze.

We sit back in our chairs

and spy upon those at their ease.

Will we attack and persevere

or fall back into the Earth

and disappear?

-2-

I heard Ian Bremmer, Brother of Paul, say

“America is not a fatigued superpower

in fact not crippled in any way

but rather like Gulliver

tied down by the lilliputians.”

In all his pompous glory Mr. Bremmer

speaks for those who believe in full

spectrum dominance; for the corporate

cyclops who move in frightful

symmetry digging in across the globe

ignoring all around them.

In the growing terror

of this half-light

we hear the sounds of collapsing

Empire. The dead are all around us,

feeling our legs touching our once

sylvan hair. On the horizon

geomagnetic storms prophesy

the coming of a new dawn.

Will we be prepared

to make the sacrifice?

Monstorum Artiflex

How the soul of our planet needs to battle in order to grow. Think of our planet as the ultimate ego. 

-1-

What man, during his or her lifetime, knows about the daily conspiracies of mankind can be put in a thimble. After all each of us is ensconced in a nutshell. Don’t kid yourself – the ego is a terrifying thing. It resists all attempts at investigation. Understanding it is possible but remember understanding is a word that sounds like what it is – ephemeral, slippery, sliding.   

     

Usually people begin to understand the ego’s power when one’s dreams and assumptions about reality are challenged by teachers and classmates. If not school early adult love is a great teacher and if not there certainly the job will do the trick. The ego’s main problem is its desire to be the sum of all things. For most people the deflation of the ego is a harrowing experience. “I’m not what I thought I was” often results in “how could I have been so wrong… about my place. I must seal that fissure, hang on and believe in myself.”

-2-

When we are bright and young, when we are calm and knowledgeable, when we rage at despair against tyranny and betrayal, the ego is within us. In play we begin to hide from those who would ruin us. So it begins – the liberation of man from mankind – out from under Her skirts into the dark sweet wine drenched arc of another’s. We are followers of a force we cannot name.

-3-

Black music bells, drumming increasing in intensity blending with the sounds of a cold quiet 3:00 a.m. He stands with her on the London Bridge. He moves his face closer to her own and says, “I’ve been battling this robot culture for so long I forget what the battle is all about.”

“Which is?”

“The freeing of the human mind from bondage.”

She whispers, “yes, but you must become like the owl. Show your true self at night. Cunning should be your middle name. I hear you are heir to the throne.”

“That is an oblique rumor to dissemble my Queen.”

“You don’t have to pretend with me. Put aside your mask.”

“I can never have children.”

“I understand.”

“We can never be truly together. I must leave.”

“Don’t go.”

-4-

It seems like every time I reach out to touch this world both it and I disappear. My life seems to be a procession of chimeras. Maybe that’s the way for everyone. The empire of illusion someone called it.

Einstein in Tunisia

This was my initial reaction, other than weeping, to the events of 9-11. What we call heaven contains all the positive memories of the human race; hell the opposite.


I have been held in this Mediterranean fortress for the last eleven years.  My apartment is appointed with paintings of the local terrain—all hillsides and empty beach scenes.  I can’t tell where I am.  I have forgotten something vital to European security and my jailers and I have been attempting to find what I have lost.  A nuclear device is buried somewhere in Europe.


I was an undercover agent working with the DIA when an explosion in Tunis, Tunisia effectively shattered my memory of all preceding events.  My cell had been targeted by the CIA.  A classic fuck-up.  We know the implanted device is real from a cable I sent to the DIA a good two months before.  I was the only survivor.


For the last eleven years I have been given drugs, watched endless film and video; my jailers even gave me a girlfriend.  I’ve read and re-read my diaries.  All the research, all the prodding, and I don’t know who I am.  I can’t imagine being the person they say I was.  Tonight my jailers throw a farewell party for me.


I read the last entry in my diary: “Feb. 18: People are mad.  Each believes in their own fantasy.  Sanity is for those who see this—the way it is: writhing and terrifying.  People are mad for they remain oblivious to the power of the unconscious.  I think people have always been afraid of me.”  When I was a child I would tell adults, “It’s all in your mind.”  I infuriated them.


“You know nothing about it.”  “Wait till you grow-up,” they would say.  Now here I am.  My freedom is all in my mind and I can’t find it.


The very last note in the diary (the morning before the CIA attack) reads: “Large spirits tend toward domination.  For those spirits to become great they must refine themselves and their desires.  Concentration and restraint are the watchwords of dominating spirits.”  What could I have been thinking?


Roger, one of my guards, comes in.  He stands inside my door looking like the languid Christ he is.


“Anything?”  He asks plaintively.


“You know me.  I gave up a long time ago.  I can’t live my life for them.”  His long face leans toward me.


“A lucky guess could postpone the party.”


“Ah, I had not thought of that.  Would you mind not disturbing me until perhaps a pot of coffee at four?”


“Okay Einstein,” he says politely and retreats.


My parents had been notified years ago of my MIA status.  Hannibal was from Tunis.  Carthage, to be exact. In ancient times it was famous as a place for human sacrifice.  They were also the perfectors of the mosaic.  O Exquisite world, which I’m sure I never loved enough, why can’t I see you?

Statu Nascenti

                                                              – 1 –

Creative writers assemble worlds. In their own minds they are god-like, absorbers who transform life.


I came of age in a Western world that worshipped the creative writer. My own path led me to criminals, disaffected intellectuals and poets both forlorn and courageous. People who lived the experienced life on its many levels were my friends and teachers.


My father was a middleman in the Jersey mob. A crooner, a charmer, he enjoyed punching out black men who wandered into his all-white bar. Siring me became one of the worst days of his life for I was born an egalitarian, a believer in the world of free souls. I went my own way as did millions of my generation. We worshiped the courage and beauty of a people who had broken out of slavery and had transformed themselves into a power in the land of the free. Such expressions being of the highest order I came to love the freedom to grow, to sing the most meaningful songs, to read the most powerful books and to laugh at adversity. Unfortunately, the levers that controlled my society’s direction were clogged with patronage and a condescending hatred for the aesthetic intellect. To paraphrase a line in Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, “Those who seek great power against themselves conspire and shun the cure they most desire.” 

– 2 –

The Ideal is the enemy of the Real. Since 1700 B.C. or so people began traveling in a realm called the Ideal. It is manifested in the oneness, the singularity, platonic philosophy, Indian nations of withdrawing into the ONE (the divine), and the desire to mold the other in one’s own image. Each discipline sifts through the debris – seeking that unimaginable hope in which man resides.


I find this kind of thinking to be props for the expansion of the God of Self-Interest and the prevailing need to heap the ideal on the other. We are the victims of this befuddled and muddled policy. The staggering intellectual creations of men like Rousseau and Hegel (two polar opposites) amount to fictions no different but certainly less elegant than Prof. Dodgson or Jonathan Swift, but Rousseau and Hegel do not possess the beauty of Reality. They are in fact looking for it – the essence, the eye without boundary, a gorgeous bauble which others admire. Watch hamster, meditate upon the dream. All the slicing and dicing about the sad state of affairs the Enlightenment followers have brought us is based on loss – must missed it, as if the great books of the Western world ever did anything but grow individual egos, the impenetrable egos, which freed them to continue the slicing and dicing while maintaining the scaffolding of Empire.


In the end all analysis is entertainment until the work results in the discovery of a new world (Pasteur, Einstein, Jonathan Swift, Matilda Gage). For all the talk about the current lack of political leadership or any semblance of a long term economic policy the brute fact about the West is to quote Allan Bloom, “The crisis of the West is a crisis of belief – in the justice of our principles.”


During the 1991 Gulf War a Moroccan female scholar is reputed to have said: “The enemy is no longer just on earth; he occupies the heavens and the stars and rules over time. He seduces one’s wife, veiled or not, entering through the skylight of television. Bombs are only an incidental accessory for the new masters. Cruise missiles are for greater occasions and the inevitable sacrifices. In normal times they nourish us with software, advertising messages, teenage songs, everyday tech info, courses for earning diplomas, languages and codes to master. Our servitude is fluid, our humiliation anesthetizing.”