Training Max: Chapter 12

 

During the fifth day of training, Max, wearing a balaclava and no shirt, was lifting two logs off of a pile, one on each hand, having carefully chosen in terms of their weight and heft. This workout will be hell on his lats and deltoids, he knew. It was worth it, though. Every good punishment to the body is worth it.

During the fifth day of training, Max, wearing a balaclava and no shirt, was lifting two logs off of a pile, one on each hand, having carefully chosen in terms of their weight and heft. This workout will be hell on his lats and deltoids, he knew. It was worth it, though. Every good punishment to the body is worth it.

Nietzsche would disagree, he thought, but the man had purported syphilis, not to mention one bitch of a sister. He would rather go the way of Giles Deleuze: having steak for all meals of the day, drowning it with rum. And then boom, glorious, glorious defenestration!

If Max were truly honest with himself, though (for in the most important moments of his life, he is not; he cannot be), he would rather die in a battlefield, just having rescued a natural redhead with skin the color of ivory who of course falls in love with him. And, as these things go, she had never, ever heard of the Nightingale Effect and thus was ironically named Florence. She asks him to stay, and, with a rueful smile that will haunt her forever, he says, “No, darling.” At a loss as to what to do, barely registering the significance of so doing, he handed her his blue beret. Well, he couldn’t very well give her his rifle, for fuck’s sake.

His hands stretched out, holding nothing but his beret. He looked in Florence’s green eyes, a mirror to his own. “Remember me.” 

That should tell anyone as intuitive as Chris that, despite and because of his carefully cultivated disdain for structure and institutions (all of which he did not choose), he wanted to die by their most noble consequences. It would be perfection if he did so interspersed with the impossible promise of love. It should have told Chris a lot of things. It would have, had she been brave enough to see oncoming trauma with eyes decidedly wide open. 

While in the middle of ten lifts of the ends of both logs, thoughts of her forced their way into his head again, this time of her question when they were just getting to know each other: “You want us to move to another messenger? Okay. Where shall we build our cabin?”

While in the middle of ten lifts of the ends of both logs, thoughts of Chris forced their way into his head again, this time of her question when they were just getting to know each other: “You want us to move to another messenger? Okay. Where shall we build our cabin?”

“I like lifting trees. You just tell me where to put ‘em,” he typed.

She found that he did like lifting trees, after a cursory speed-through of his Facebook profile. The man really loves his wood.

She didn’t want to pry too much into his profile: he, after all, didn’t want her to find him there. After five minutes, though, find him she did, although he shared the exact spelling of his name with sixty-plus others. She only had to search for his previous band, which mercifully still had a page.

There was a video she found worth staring at, though: it was Max’s and Luboš’ invitation to their gig that night, alternating their script between one and the other. She stared for a while, allowing the video to loop eight times before telling herself to quit smiling and return to her goddamned life and her goddamned audio file, for which she already requested five extensions throughout the day. Listening to Emily King’s Distance, she was struck by a song lyric and proceeded to write about it, both file and life forgotten.

Any relationship involving the desire to change the other is a desire to change the pace of his life. It is the ultimate disrespect: it is the disrespect of time.

For when you want the other to change, for instance, a childish habit, what you are saying is: I love you now, yes, but can you hurry and grow up? Now?

That "I love you now" is the problem, and not the latter part. For in being with the person now, you have shackled yourself to a commitment that is of now, but in your desire to change the other you bastardize that commitment to a future of your own ideal making, doubly a bastardization because it is of your hope. Triply so if you manage to convince yourself that that change is for the other's good.

That is why love borne of this desire is a serpent: its coils can snare you into narratives of grand intentions, when all you are is disrespectful of time.

For what does "I love you" mean if not: I love you now. And what you are now is the ground for the pace of all your tomorrows. I love you, then, means you shall not die (as Gabriel Marcel put it).

If you want to pay the highest tribute to time, then, all you have to do is love.

Any more and she will wax poetic. So, sated for now, though knowing that she will never be as prolific and brilliant at smithing phrases as Max, she went to read his blog, intent on figuring out how he can write so many lines in a poem and never fail to rhyme while keeping the context of the entire thing.

She herself wrote free-form poetry, which any idiot can do. She knew Max would agree wholeheartedly.

Having dedicated this one to her long-time Seattleite friend Drew, she still feels the force of it, even now:

πνεῦμα

By definition,
"To define" is "to limit,"
de finitio,"make finite."
 
So gentle, this thing,
I will hesitate unto infinity to define it
with a box or a word that will suffocate it,
 
So gentle this thing,
I cannot draw limits to it,
and arrest it to one thing.
 
And so gentle this thing,
it makes a sound so slight,
like a heart breaking forever.
 
So gentle this thing,
I cannot bear to listen
as if it was my own heart breaking.
 
So gentle this thing,
I might not be able to bear it.
 
For I may be the only one bearing it,
As defined.

She breathed a sigh of nostalgia, which she does not often do, for when things were far simpler than they are now. She decided that the piece, written six years ago, would be a good bookend to this poem, written two weeks ago:

Максим Грек

So wild,
This thing.
So brazen and untamed,
my breath hitched,
and went away altogether.
replacing all insecurity with
stones the shape of your hands.
 
So wild, this thing.
So solid and sure,
chinks in my armor are kintsukuroi'd by gold.
Tracing every scar, every battle,
reveling in the dance victory cannot even compare to.
 
So wild, this thing.
So much like a storm the size of its own eye,
gazing at me from the universe of your words,
and whispering, "No. You may not go."

Feeling something slowly go sideways, like the world had gone suddenly quiet, she remembered Max’s writing about what he doesn’t prefer as a mate: Oh, so you’re an artist? Well, just make sure you’re not a poet, dancer, content creator, conceptual twerker, or a walking glowstick. No rights, solidarity, or protests; and no threats or ultimatums, or else!

Well, fuck. There goes my poems, she thought, rather amused. And then, what is the opposite of a conceptual twerker, anyway? 

Like Sisyphus coming to love his rock, however, she plodded on. Having a penchant for words in any language (but especially those with their own characters), she had entitled the first poem “Pneuma” (Greek for “breath”) and the second, in Cyrillic,  “Maximus the Greek,” who, she was delighted to hide from the casual reader, was a Greek monk, publicist, writer, scholar, and translator active in Russia during the 16^th century. Well, she thought, given enough bricolage, it will stand. Build it and we will come, yes, and write it and it will be so.

She remembered something else, then: an old fart of a post, unfished, sitting on her drafts list.

I have read and reread this quote in my head so many times I can only recall it in a thousand paraphrases each time over: "Seduction is the consent to the inevitable; not the push of effort."

Last night, I was talking to a writer (Max would immediately pick up the reference, she just knew) who, in the morning, echoed the words in an interview of a music writer (by the name of Madi Diaz, whose Same Risk was just genius): Some stories (and thus, songs) create themselves. The writer is the medium for which the story comes to be; he is thus necessary only for the ink that he had bought. His blood on an empty page is useless, ultimately impotent: again, stories write themselves. 

Be it so that both the writer and songwriter are humble and modest enough to give credit where it is not due, the writer then gave an additional buttress to support an unspoken assumption: writers' thoughts travel from the nebulous form of the wordless back of the brain to the front, where they find clothing in words, and breathe in the writer's breath. In that it is like surrendering to the inevitable, and yet creation still takes place with a creator in mind.

Well, fuck, she reiterated, there goes my writing career. She never learned the art of seduction, or effortlessness; she always builds bridges just as she was walking on them, while desperately being afraid of heights. Translated into the quotidian, this merely means that she forces the very things she wants to create, but, running contrary to her own tendencies, this force comes ultimately from a place of laziness and her carefully studied penchant for the path of least resistance. Briefly put, she eats supererogation for breakfast.

That’s why I can never write like Max, she thought then, who lets words be while punishing his own body by lifting logs.