Tuesday, February 16, 2010

INVICTUS

My forehead’s glued to Smith’s dashboard, I’m trying to spark up his elegant little bowl out of sight, and a five-O does drive past our parked car, once, but it’s all clear. When we get to the theater Smith opens both doors, breathes deeply, and declares “Ah, the movies!” A fucking prince, I love him. A libra, like Matt Damon, “keen to make a good impression,” “gives wise advice freely,” “likes to know all the facts.”


P.W. Botha gets the gas face. Mandela follows rugby like I watch movies—with time he hasn’t got. Morgan Freeman plays the great man as wide awake. Shrewd and a judo master—this is Eastwood’s Obama movie, all right. The sports narrative, meanwhile, though true, is shameless. One is not permitted both neat drama and the unimpeachable event, as necrophilia is not, despite a seeming valid but misleading arithmetic, simply twice as fun.


Everyone matters, everyone’s in sight. But there is less humanity than there are humans, and it must rove from house to house like a dog in the night. Most suffering winds up in walls, in floors and mirrors, there’s a lot inside chairs of course and then trace amounts seep into the ground and water table. It’s a hard feeling to shake, that the earth is not just haunted but over-haunted, such that molecules of anguish may even combine in unstable compounds of exultation. All the worse, when through dead farmlands a shaggy tarantula leg stretches to run its crystal-tipped claw straight up your back from ass to neck.

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