The Brussels Accord

"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain't the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man, the devil was at his elbow." Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

It was Sunday. After a while you can't help but look around and wonder what all of this is for. You snap photos of stately buildings. You wander through the streets. You take out a map, fold it up, walk five more steps, and take out the map again.

Listless might be the word. Adrift. Not lost, but you can only walk so far before your hands reach and bulge through the viscous curve of bubble you've drawn around yourself. Step back, watch the sun through the champagne colored dome as translucent oranges and oil slick purples wind around each other like serpents in an iridescent pit. 

Why, exactly, are you here? In Brussels, it was next on the map. No, why are you here? The dreaded question on this side of the hill, no account given to--no room to dread--the nightmare wet expanse on the other. Rats in the wall, they tunnel and bore, every muted claw the big question closer to gnawing through your stomach. Why? Why are you here?

Belgian fries are unremarkable. The mayonnaise is nice. Ketchup is so sweet, mayo makes for a nice muted fat to swallow some of the salt. Jupiler Beer is what the men in work clothes and young punks and bums drink, both with places important as the other in the ascension and decline of the social order. In the park, two in hand, this is Sunday now. 

A park next to the royal palace, once a shadow place where people forced into the shadows could carouse for rough gay sex, is now rendered tourist. White gravel crunches underfoot scattered on the diagonal and intersecting park walkways. Roundabouts and median and bifurcations lift with verdant green. Europe has nice grass, grass you can sit on. 

On one median two women pitch a shuttlecock back and forth aloft on racquets. One woman, pegged together with tightly wound athletic cordage, tries to implore the other woman to keep the shuttlecock in the air. She motions with her racket keeping the face skyward. The other woman continues to drive the rubber ball in its plastic nightgown to the earth.

"Up! Up!" she cries as the woman casts downward again, and the world watches as it is indeed drawn from these divergent polarities.

On another median two women, women in love, drink white wine. Their eyes always kiss for when their lips don't. The boy with them is a gawk, shoulders driven toward his crossed legs. He's seen it before, the familiarity of their discourse proves it, but he still hangs his grinning jaw to the side. Maybe he just believes in love.

Further into the park, a gazebo--with its lathe made poles and knit wood accent molding--is surrounded by happy people. Two DJs with open laptops push bass and treble through the pastel rotunda like long star cut clay ribbons wrenched from a child's plaything. All ages gather round. Infants bob near the front still uncertain of their center of gravity, still un-self conscious enough to dance with abandon. Young men in heavy metal tees and long olive colored shorts. Mothers who dance on feet inward, outward, and meeting underneath sway on birth widened hips. A girl, high waisted denim splendor not obliged to wear sunglasses, has a countenance of someone for whom you tatter your heart with a cat 'o' nine tails. Not because she wanted it that way, but because the light in her eyes said she'd listen. She'd suffer your self made prison until jailbreak was her only rational choice. Even though you've held the key the entire time.

Ever hear the one about the inmates in the asylum? Two inmates in a mental ward escape one night. They reach a gap in the roof. The first inmate jumps over. The second inmate is too afraid. The first inmate, feeling the urgency, pulls out a flashlight and says, just walk across the beam. The second inmate takes a step forward, stops, and calls across into the night, No, No, No. I'm not crazy. You'll just turn off the flashlight when I'm halfway.

You begin to reflect on this jeering misanthrope. How much time has been spent looking for trouble. The seconds, minutes, hours, years spent breathlessly building a card house reminiscent of The Good Life only to put a rock through it. A quiet life is one built on an equity of quiet misery. The monster has to eat. Simple pleasures of an extended holiday only starve the beast. There is no fear in a world simply touched with sight. Despair is besotted with too many joy shod kindnesses. It's still unclear what counts for more, the thrill or the guilt. Even today, on this serene Sunday in a city park people would dream to visit, the feeling weighs a ton. Sometimes, you want to sit on a beach side dune and watch the sea fill with fire. Lurching and churning with its enkindled spray until the flames lick clean your black sunglasses of what little eyes there were to be seen. And he finally smiles.

The second Jupiler is as forgettable warm. The DJ samples David Bowie's, "Five Years."

And it was cold

And it rained

So I felt like an actor

And I thought of Ma

And I wanted to get back there

Your face

Your race

The way that you walk

I kiss you

You're beautiful

I want you to walk

We've got five years

Like tumblers in a lock, revelations began to spill out. You realize what kind of life this is, what kind of life this is going to be. Not unlovable, it's just cruel to take someone with you. No money, not real money, but that's not a worthy ambition. This tedious clatter of words and punctuation, the only reward will be to save you, if never to be confused with salvation. You'll continue to spin all this life sometimes whirling toward the heavens and others screwing yourself into the filthy, corpse filled ground. Dead is the only neutral position. 

And it was okay. Nothing hurt, nothing slit the heart open, instead it made all things simple again, like unto a child. 

For once, for a brief moment, these were not the church bell's mournful song of surrender, but warm billows pushing above all existence. Rooftops below just far enough away to see the mosaic of summer palaces and working class tenements and factories vomiting black smoke. None of it perfect--perfection the worst sort of hell--but persistent in its flaws. The end of the ideal self. Devils left unslayed and angels beyond expulsion. Failure is only that of a man acquiesced. No footprint is so deep it will not be flensed from the ever molting indifference of time set to sweep clean the journeys men take across trails broken repeatedly in vain hope of discovery. It may take one hundred lifetimes to erase, but we only have to live through the one. A single, naked, hobbled pneuma remains. Untethered, inimical and luminous, beckoning to those unable to heed the assurances of union with this barefoot shade on some mythic far shore.

There was an art house movie theater outside the park. They were showing a silent film. A piano sat under one lone light and a player came to provide a live score. The story was of a drifter. He was trying to escape a past he was not made to burden. A woman came to love him. Invariably, a man's past comes to him. They ran away together, but a man's past is a beacon for those unable to loose their fevered grip on blights of indiscretion long transgressed. Everything is lost. Their child is thrown from a cliff. The man and woman, in tragic embrace, die, together, in the snow.