So many souls
as buried cathedrals
yet look closely
and even the barest hint
of broken spire
peeking out from beneath
the rubble and tomb-swell
will tell you that an elaborate
structure of magnificence
and wonder
is waiting to be extracted
and explored,
to be claimed
as a measureless find
of native
cosmic origins.
There is no time like the present
to dig
like there’s no tomorrow.
What is imagination
but a continual granting
of permission-to-self
to free-associate
beyond constraints, blockages
and moral codes,
to bob and float,
weave and flow,
in a wine-dark sea of dreams,
to riff
like a muthafucka
whose fleabitten
firepants
are down around
his scraped existential
knees.
I remember the time, Anya, when my mother asked about you and me. I was thirteen. My mother’s sickness was in its early stages. She had already turned the couch in the living-room into her sickbed. She hated lying down in the bedroom, she said she felt isolated and forgotten, like she could just fade away and no one would know.
I had just come in from playing wiffleball. She started asking me questions and somehow the topic became you and she asked if you and me were an item. It was the first time my mother had ever asked me about you in that way, the first time she had ever mentioned romance. I had a hard time looking at her when I told her no me and you weren’t an item.
I always thought you two would wind up together, she said. I still think that, don’t you?
My mother was smiling. It was like she knew something that I didn’t about us, about the future. It was a fortune teller’s smile.
I don’t think we’ll wind up together, I said, and she said, Why not?
I told her I don’t know why not I just don’t think it’ll happen, we’re friends and I think we’ll always be friends, that’s what we are to each other.
Maybe you’re right, she said. But I don’t know, you two, ever since you were little kids … Remember how she used to follow you around everywhere?
Yea, I said. And I used to get mad.
You did but also you liked it, my mother smiled.
Then my mother’s voice got more serious when she said—You know Daniel, boys your age, they talk about girls a lot, they go on and on about girls but really they’re scared. They don’t even know exactly what it is they’re scared of and that’s what makes the whole thing even scarier and more confusing. And when I say boys that covers all ages because there’s no such thing as men, that’s a myth. There’s no such thing as men, only big boys and little boys.
That’s what she told me Anya, what I took in. What do you think? Was it like that for you? No real men, only boys pretending to be men and some not even pretending. I wonder if Peter Pan is to boys what Jesus is to sinners?
It is scary once you realize that the past can be changed, and that the future is fixed, a rigged absolute. Knowing that changes everything.
And what about the present?
For some the present is intolerable cruelty, unimpeachable company.
For others it is a mirage, a raging gag.
And still for others it is a solution, a salvation. The one and only true salvation.
(Image by Bill Binzen)
It’s tough to always be in love with a ghost. Also it’s easy. The living don’t stand a chance against ghosts. In loving ghosts there are no real complications, no real disappointments, no real anything. There’s lots of teething on absence, lots of wrestling with thin, haunted air.
Loving a ghost is like having some incorruptible tryst in a dream-state.
Except from No Man’s Brooklyn:
I see her rising off the bathroom tiles, toes pointing downward.
I know this is a dream but I also know this actually happened, once, a long time ago.
Except then Anya was dry and fully clothed and she was in a hallway not a bathroom. And she was alive.
Now Anya is dead and I am watching her rise.
She is slick and bright with moisture (indicating that she has just gotten out of the clawfoot tub which she hovers in front of) and wrapped in a beige towel which covers her from the freckled tops of her breasts to just below her thighs.
Her hair is a water-darkened mass plastered against her back.
Palms turned out, hands quivering with rigidity. As are the muscles in her flush-pink face.
Her nose is bleeding, just as it was that time in the hallway. A thin scarlet thread snaking its way from her left nostril to the edge of her chin.
I marvel at the phenomena of inches separating Anya’s feet from the floor.
I marvel at Anya, and the nearness of her unreachability.
Johanna Debiase’s review of Nocturne Variations, appearing in the Taos News.
“John Biscello’s newest novel, Nocturne Variations, is exactly what the title promises, a dreamy narrative landscape bursting with a lyrical kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and perspectives. The reader is given the pleasurable task of piecing together a puzzle from found ephemera of one young woman’s attempt to escape, not just a crime boss, but memories, adulthood, loneliness and herself.
Some people grow up too fast. They are thrust into maturity for any number of reasons and miss out on the joys and freedoms of childhood.
Other people are slow to mature. Late bloomers avoid adult responsibilities and extend their childhood beyond years that society deems acceptable.
But what about a person who does both? What if someone was forced to grow up fast, but held on dearly to childish things? What if Peter Pan had to take paternal responsibility for all the Lost Boys in a Neverland where the repercussions of careless actions were all too real?
Biscello rewrites Peter Pan, the iconic character who never grows up, as a 17-year-old runaway with a voracious appetite for beautiful young women and an addiction to a drug called Sike that gives one the sensation of childhood, ‘like that little girl who spins around and around and falls down and is happy.’
To read the full review click here.
Posted in Books, Press, Prose, Publications, Uncategorized
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Tagged Books, Johanna DeBiase, John Biscello, nocturne variations, Review, Surrealism, Taos News, the new-old Neverland
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I, perched on a craggy promontory overlooking my childhood, and its entire formless geography, saw them, my friends, all of them: a mutant strain of cryogeny, a mummified quivering changelessness, as if youth hadn’t been lived through but pickled.
It stuck to them, like barnacled remnants of infanticide, like stillborn chunks of adolescence, and I re-directed my vision inward and saw the same thing, a sideshow in an airless tent.
People have called it the glow, the click, the hum, and for every abnormal drinker, for every addict, you are willing trade in everything for what amounts to a rigged facsimile of eternity. It is the sort of false eternity that swindles and seduces and you are happy to be swindled and seduced, to yield to the siren-call and the Salome of promises, to indulge the fatal basking. And so yes, Jung was right when he stated, “Addicts are frustrated mystics,” because the innate desire, the heartcave hunger is to commune with God, to connect with something bigger and purer and truer and deeper than what you know or what you have experienced, to connect with Other and live deeply warm and worry-free inside a dream, to cover impossible distances in the shortest, quickest, easiest manner possible. Addicts have a hard time taking the slow road to heaven. And busying oneself with the impossible is one way of protesting reality.
I understand that I am not only with my father and grandfather as family, but also as a writer. I am sketching them. The mechanical hand in my mind that never stops is charting and sketching and composing them. I feel that I am with them, but also at a great distance from them. I fictionalize my father as he speaks, as he gestures, what he says and does, what he doesn’t say and do. I am creating from him on the fly, a sort of metaphysical free sketch, drawing from his reality and unreality, and in that sense I am also creating myself. It is a relationship based on invention and rooted in artistic license. A part of me hates that I am doing this. Or maybe not hates but feels somewhat cunning and diabolical. And yet I can’t not do this, it happens naturally. I participate almost by default. It is an action that breeds a degenerate form of intimacy, which I crave.
I see and hear throughout dinner how my father so desperately wants to impress my grandfather, wants to be applauded by him, recognized, seen. My father bulldozes in with his own stories, his own flourishes of pride. He vacillates between recent past, distant past, and present, in crafting a small legacy to which my grandfather can respond with praise or compliments. This doesn’t happen. My grandfather either says nothing or somehow maneuvers the topic back to himself. In some ways it is painful to listen to these exchanges. No, not painful exactly, squeamish. And sad. And I knew the same was true for my father and me. A sad chain of fathers and sons, not hearing each other, not seeing each other, relations bereft of anything even remotely resembling intimacy. I was my father’s father as much as I was my father’s son. All of it relative in a broad, orchestral sense.
