Thursday, December 11, 2008

Florida: Where's The Orchestra? Part One


Just above a whisper..."Hadassah...Hadassah.......Hadassah"A small figure on the shoreline. It's comedian Gilbert Gottfried, portraying a politician (The Senator) in a three-piece-suit slightly too large for his small frame.

The Senator approaches the shore of the Gulf Coast holding his cell phone, he tells his staff that he's seeking a better signal but he really wants to speak to his wife alone as he evades them while walking into the waves, ruining his pants and increasing their professionals' disconcert.

The Senator examines the sky and shoreline, where they meet as one wall. Her voice tiny in his ear but filling up that sky. The terrifying infinity of space and possibility. Haddasah's faith nullifies the terror of possibility, Those endless possibilities of the secular age. He always says her name the same way, as if struck, haunted, and especially when the sky clears.

Returning from the water, surrounded by the assemblage of his staff, revolving around him, speaking and moving at a different frame rate. The Senator's smile is resilient but slightly pained by sunlight, but it looks that way under clouds too... as we'll discover.

The heat makes illusionary tremors out of the horizon lines in the distance but there have been actual earthquakes in Florida lately. Maybe this explains the jittery nature of The Senator's staff, natural phenomena uncommon to the territory named after Easter has expanded naked possibility fraught with the fearful imagination of a collective.

Also happening lately, the shooting murders of German tourists by black suspects on Floridian highways, everything is feeding into everything else in these strange times. The Senator is heading the one man exploratory committee following these unnatural events due to his peculiar sensitivity in these type of matters; it seems that every one of his colleagues has a story about his capacity for surprising clairvoyances. Small things mostly, he once located the missing house keys of his Senatorial colleague from South Carolina, but remarkable nonetheless to any and all observers bound by the normal sensory limitations.

Later on at a press conference, strobing flashbulbs and reporters questions shouted with urgency. The Senator's voice, seemingly designed for maximum annoyance is self-consciously restrained here as in all of the his public appearances, a performative austerity, but one always wonders what he this voice sounds like in full panicky fright mode and unbound at night like a Jewish Werewolf. This is the true undercurrent of The Senator's unpopularity with many of his colleagues and the media: a formal unflappability of manner. Sure, there is the overly nuanced balancing act of his lengthy explanations (The Senator is a master of this "jazz neutrality"), his stereotypically politician transgressions and triangulations from and refusal of acknowledgement of what's plain-as-day-true to everyone else, that is the content which justifies the fists pounded on tables in frustration but the voice...the voice completes this perfect impetus for vexed hair-pulling.

The balancing act, the neutrality and triangulations, these are the byproducts of the Visions, the burden carried and worn by the seer. An elaborate path toward the right thing is being followed and its unexplainable by The Senator because it's beyond words, even beyond vision because the Visions are not literal visions. People overlook this imperfect nature of the prophet, who wears this burden with a shuffling hunched sloppiness, visions are not answers but attacks that lead its victims with not even directions but on a path seeking directions.

The press conference over, The Senator smiles, recording devices shut off violently and pencils stab sentence ending periods onto note pads in frustration. He's said nothing but he's made revelations seem as though forthcoming in the immediate; his gifts are not salesmanesque but he manages this illusion of nearness and farness impossibly through the prolonged static of outwardly flat and neutral execution.

At nighttime, The Senator climbs into a hotel bed with his already sleeping wife. Incidentally, he always sleeps in his suit when not on holiday out of a long gestating superstition. She resembles sea-turtle passivity in these unguarded moments and he drapes an arm across her body, an awkwardly placed hug intended to keep her slumber undisturbed. The Senator recounts his day in an anemic whine with therapy session honesty into her ear. Hadassah jolts unconsciously, moans monosyllables and The Senator nods a serenely felt understanding before reaching his own restful surrender.

He. She. Asleep. And his ongoing psychic investigation will have to resume the next morning as they both maintain their stillness as the next massive earthquake begins. The slow rising falling of their bodies in breaths, comforting to watch from above with God's eye, though inexplicable as the entire room vibrates with violent rattles.