This is a generalization, but it is a generalization against generalizations. To apply a theory to a book - feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist, whatever - is to arrogantly assume the writer even knows what the hell those terms mean. It shocks and appalls me when I see essays about Cormac McCarthy's "Freudian Conscience in the Move Westward". What the hell does that even mean? To me it is the equivalent of people who said Jar Jar Binks is racist. I mean fine, he's annoying to a lot of people. But that there were those who interpreted it as an attack on Asian culture just the pinnacle of absurdity. Inevitably, the meaning of great novels will be argued over, but it should be based on their CONTENT - excuses should not be made to broadly apply these overarching, generalizing, confining critical philosophies that just have nothing to do with the actual content of the novel. To study great books is not easy. To pick out a few incidental passages separated from the whole and give them the veneer of neo-nazism or some nonsense is the simplest (and most degrading) pasttime. It is so rare these days to read a critical essay about a novel that addresses what the entire novel means and what it was trying to do; instead, the reference section of any classic will be jam-packed with 90% of its pages comprising, "Feminist Theory in The Sun Also Rises", or something along those lines. How can you read a book like Sun Also Rises and somehow think Feminist Theory is the most important thing to take away? That's being judgmental, but I'm not asking for a unity of opinion. Only relevance and a respect for the author and the art he or she has created.
Things I have learned from some time in an MFA Program:
1) It is apparently considered widespread and popular, and thereby unsatisfactory, uncool, and somehow naive, to write a story with Hemingway's Iceberg Principle in mind (show only 1/8th of the story).
2) The white whale in Moby-Dick has no symbolic meaning.
3) No book on your bookshelf leaves you with questions or ambiguities not answered directly by the author (apparently Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'The Road' (of which the author said "I don't know" in response to a NY Times query about what the unnamed environmental disaster in the book truly was) is not on anyone's bookshelf).
4) Because mediocre writers go through 100 drafts of their work, and great writers go through two, you should be taught to go through 100.
5) All dialogue must be subtext (seems to incriminate rule #3).
6) Refer to simple things in complicated ways. Example: "inactive narrator", "unreliable narrator", "comma splices", etc.
7) All novels must be about three things. A journey from innocence to experience, the influence of society upon characters, and the effect of time upon characters.
As a quick response, number one stems from a need to feel as though something greater has been recognized - that the theory of "show do not tell", is the general fault of this generation of aspiring writers - that the 'secret' has been discovered, and that secret is to avoid the greatest influence on the sentence in the 20th Century (Hemingway). Two falls into the same kind of pretension. Saying Moby-Dick is only Moby-Dick may be trying to prove a point of some sort. I don't know. The only point it proves to me is that you read the Bantam Abridged Classics edition instead of Melville's full text. Have some respect old Herman. Hell, for Ishmael. Three underestimates the reader and supports subpar writing. Four, every writer is different. You can't apply broad rules. Everyone should be encouraged to discover their own formula. Insisting upon dozens of revisions leads to over-thinking; the greatest crime, in my opinion, for anyone creative. Five, take a look at any scene from anything McCarthy, anything Faulkner. Lines are included for the sake of establishing a brutally realistic scene, but they aren't saying anything deeper. Six, an inactive narrator can be a literary device and in and of itself is not a valid criticism of a creative work. Talking about a narrator's unreliability is a two minute discussion and is brought up by people who do not understand what the novel is really about - if the narrator can't be trusted, it is blatantly obvious. Move the hell on. Seven, how fascinating would it be to turn those 'rules' on their heads? Satisfying, in the very least.
What I've learned from a lifetime of reading every single book I can get my hands on, and reading everything I can find about every writer I want to imitate, is that for great writing, there must be no rules. Any writer that accomplishes anything beyond their decade makes their own rules. The 'rules' are self-learned and self-taught in any self-respecting high school and by a few years at the public library. And as soon as they are learned they should be broken.
If you are seeking to write only as a profession, if you are looking just to learn to write what other people want to read, if your sole interest in the art of literature is to have a job that you like more than what you have now, then these rules aren't such a bad thing. But by and large - and here come more generalizations - I don't think these rules, these ideas, aim for greatness. They aim for the general. They assume from day one that a future John Updike is not sitting in that room and they aim to teach with that determination in mind. That classes continue to focus on irrelevance is to me an incredible pretension. So often, in the literature classes I have been in over the last few years, someone will not know what they are talking about and speak as if they were. In early years of college undergrad, when I was not as adept at seeing this deception, I just thought everyone was understanding something that I didn't. That I had somehow read all of this literature wrong because I came to different conclusions. Slowly I came to realize that somewhere between 50 and 80% of the class discussion has involved bullshitting. People saying things THEY don't even believe. All that's fine and dandy, too, if you want to join a bookclub. But bookclubs don't put you into 100k of debt.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
The Death of Mount Taquitz
Note: An excerpt from a story I'm working on. Inspired at least in some way by two very bold and not quite justified claims I came across while traveling in the San Jacinto Mountains this past winter. The first authored perhaps by the selfsame genius architects of the tourism industry who came up with the gem "Idyllwild is one of the 100 Best Art Towns in America." The claim - often placed side by side with that latter gem of knowledge - is that the evil spirit of an Indian maiden killer resides in the lee of the mountains. The second claim was uttered in passing by a few very ancient and thereby wise oak trees in what I shall leave to be an undisclosed location along the South Ridge pass, and it said something to the extent that evil shall find no safe harbor in the wild, and that this untruth has perpetuated your society is a mystery of the most profound depth.
See the man. See him laboring through the pines, wind-whipped and reddened and hair blown through and through by the needles of the trees and the icicles of sweat forming like daggers. Grinning. Disturbed. Knees-weakening, buckling now. He struggles to move. There is much blood on him, more than he knows. From his collarbone to his ribcage runs a strawberry burn from a crash to the ice. The blood drips drips down from his hip down his shorts to his knee.
That is me there. He’s me. Watching the granite peak of Mt. Taquitz approach around the curve in the trail. Mountain lion footprints dot the snow. The sun is banking off the snow and warming my bare chest. There is no cold. The wind gusts and then there is cold for a small time but it fades when I sweat. In the crisp air the wood tells no lie and knows no fault but the men who move within it. Far and farther away, miles down the mountainside, miles long ago since passed, there is a warm little town nestled twixt warm little alleyways and dirttrodden streets. In town there are shanties within which scrambled eggs are being cooked by those reading about that day’s weather and who Obama’s killed now. I spit congealed spit from cracked lips which burns through the frost of the trail. They are thrilled by the proximity of the unknown monstrosity I know to be Taquitz. Having lived in its shadow for years they take from that imagined darkness some serenity which exists in a constnat presence. They listen to the thought of the water trickling through the stream from the back window in the woods by the base of the mountain, on the outskirt of town. They drink their coffee in unintentional sync with that town, they breathe the thin air in unintentional sync with that town. This breathing and this drinking is in sync with what goes on in these woods but they do not know that. They will smile at the thought of what I do and I will smile back.
I remember telling someone once: the mountains to me are like a cathedral, and running is just my way of praying. What the hell does that mean? I ask now. But I’m grinning. Disturbed. Knees weakening, buckling.
The road to the trail to the summit of Taquitz is 11 miles of winding root-ridden dirt whose breadth of ice grows as the oxygen in the air thins. Something heavy in those misty pineladen skies. To breathe is to sift through that sky’s bitterness for those things which might sustain you.
Come with me. See where I pause on that trail to observe the bullet-riddled sign on the edge of the wilderness. This area is known for its high population of mountain lions. Please observe wildlife safety regulations. Do not approach, attempt to feed, or touch a wild animal. I plunge on. I am not brave. Do not think I am brave. There is slush frozen to my shins and I spit dehydrated spittle into the frost. The heat of that spit does not break the freeze now.
I have no notion of bravery. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not brave.
Birds crash through the pines and twiddle serenely. The heights have made them scarcer. I see hawks prowling, soaring across the rim of the range and framed to the backdrop of cloud-blue and the tips of whitefrosted trees. Around the bend I come and I can see Taquitz again.
Here is the story of Taquitz: he was a bold leader of an Indian tribe in these very San Jacinto Mountains. In a time when places were not a name but just a place. Taquitz was not satisfied with his power. With his popularity he was able to manipulate his faithful. He stole away innocent maidens, had his way and smote them on the mountainside. In battle he was defeated, though his spirit escaped to the mountains to lurk in the cavernous rocks near the peak, forming that distinctive A-shaped, whitewashed scraggle which juts above the entire range.
His address is 33°45′36″N 116°41′01″W if you’re looking for the bastard yourself.
Here is the story of me: I want to kill Taquitz.
I’d never heard of him until the day before. Rewind and take that blood from my chest drip dripping down to my kneecaps purpled by the cold. Peel away that ugly strawberry-magenta snarl of reddened skin. Pick me up off that ice and put me down in air which men are meant to breathe. Hand me a shirt. In Idyllwild the tourists and vagrants and rich snowbirds and mountain-beaten hick element juxtapose a brutal image. From that twisted visage imagine spewing forth this line of pithy wisdom scrawled on the welcome sign: Idyllwild is one of the 100 Best Art Towns in America.
The hell you are, I said out loud. I felt wise and Buddha-like with a toothpick in the corner of my lip.
What? a passing pack of the touring enraptured said. They had not heard the thought of the water trickling through the stream through the backporch window yet. They had only read of it. They were only just thinking about those scrambled eggs and what the newspaper may say about Obama killing someone somewhere. Oh, that’s interesting, they said, and pointed to that sign.
Below the sign were a series of pamphlets. One was of directions to an art show which would show a copy of a painting that had been inspired by a selfdescribed raw photo entitled: A Wintering Taquitz. Below these directions was the story of Taquitz. The one I have just told you. They did not include his address. I found that for you on my own.
Put me back on the mountain. The trail is called Devil’s Slide Trail. Perhaps the breath of Taquitz gusts down that slippery slope and whips his would be conquerors into the riparian gorge below. Without thought, without effort. This is the Devil. Here is real evil. The root of it. I mean to kill that. I mean to summit and destroy, grinning and disturbed.
A month ago I would have thought this: when Taquitz the Indian committed those crimes and murdered those maidens and betrayed his people, he separated himself from the mountains. He and they were no longer one big One. He violated a thing sacred and for that you do not become part of the earth but you are banished from it. You are sent to some other place, where no chilly mountain gusts can breathe. The mountains are a cathedral. Running is just a way of praying.
Yet this dear friend is not a month ago. This is now. Now those are not just chilly mountain gusts. Those are biting maelstroms which make my lips crack and turn me into a redskin. I cannot make a fist. When my feet land on the ice, it feels as though I am landing on a rounded nub attached to my shin.
I have no notion of cold. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not cold.
Taquitz is a harbinger of this wickedness and it is to him I am drawn. I flatter myself into thinking that opposites attract. You are good, I tell myself. Taquitz is evil. This is why you are attracted to one another.
The trail is become steep again. I run hunched over because this is how you keep down nausea when running uphill for very long. Nausea I still have a notion of. Steadily steadily the burning grips my thighs. I take measure of the trail ahead, the dirt almost entirely obscured by frozen snowdrifts, the branches weighted still with the snow that had not melted and hanging over the path, the woods on either side thick but still offering at points spectral visions of the whitewashed summit. I take measure. To run mountains is to be like a miser counting his pennies, wanting to be broke at the exact moment he has no need of his coin.
The uphill does not end. I understand I am approaching the final switchbacks. Sweat bears down round my brow to my chin and the whipping wind rips this moisture straight off my face like some ethereal force bound for or emerging whence some distant hell. I look to the trees with increasing desperation as if they might offer some guidance but they remain silent and speak in creeks and whistles only at the wind’s demand.
Soon I will kill Taquitz. I catch a glimpse of my thighs on impact. The muscle pressed through the purpled skin made slick by blood and sweat and slush. I have no notion of what murder is. I have no notion of what cold is. This is why I am not a murderer. Nor will I be. Still I grin a bit when I try to spit. Still I am disturbed.
Perhaps you would like to step back from my trot and make for warmer climes. Search out the most arid desert in your memory and place there a girl. Make her a darkhaired one. Hair black as the night, skin reddish-gold. Eyes which can glow green embers should you seek your heart made to become a fizzing crackling electrical thing. Give her broad happy red lips which say hello! without speaking. There.
Make that arid desert into a black night lit by a blanket of stars so extensive you’d be hard pressed to find the black spaces between. Where is there room for God between those kingdoms? The universe full. We needn’t have God. See me, leaning over, kissing the sand from her knuckle, kissing those chapped and sunrusted lips, the desert seeming to caress us in a suspended embrace. That is me being me. You cannot see the nearest towns but we will go to them. The desert will not hold us, even though from where you’re standing, it sure as hell looks like it’s got a pretty good grip. We will go to the ugly places and in those ugly places I will not be me and she will not be she. I do not want to show you this going. You can imagine it yourself. That is me
losing my religion.
Soon the world will become a pyre, I think to myself, back on the mountain, on Devil’s Slide Trail, blowing into my numbed hands, and Taquitz will burn upon that fire.
*
I am not as strong in the mountains as I thought I was sitting in the village. Sitting in the village I had but a notion of the animal I wanted to be. Sitting in the village I was surrounded by such finicky and delicate excesses of luxury that I could not help but feel like a growling misplaced lion. I make myself fit the image of a beast completely. I eat everything I can put my hands to. I roam for the outskirts, am drawn to the brink. I lurk in darker and remote places to seek out some acceptable substitute for the solitudinal solace of wilderness.
Yet here and now I betray it. I betray it by giving a whimper as I run because my body is getting ready to collapse in on itself. My legs have gone numb and are spasming. Floods of sweat pool off my head and coat my windburnt skin. Animals do not whimper. Watch the antelope take a beating on the African Sahara by a pursuant cheetah. Watch it heaving in the throes of lactic overload as the successful cheetah rips its flesh out with its teeth. Watch it take this de-fleshing silently and calmly before gathering the strength for a final push to freedom and another few bitter moments of life. Cheetahs can run up to seventy miles per hour. Everyone knows this. But they can not run like an antelope. The cheetah has exhausted itself, this is proven by its weakening grip. The antelope digs to its ancestral reserves and tears its halfeaten ribcage away from the jowls of this desert cat and darts in a vicious determination across the plain. The cheetah gives a brief chase but keels over in exhaustion soon after.
I want to be that antelope. I want to be that antelope that turns back to the cheetah and tramples that sorry bastard into the ground where he lay panting. I want to be that antelope that says, no thing and no one of this Earth can eat me. No thing, and no one.
I am not that antelope, though I want to be.
See the man. See him laboring through the pines, wind-whipped and reddened and hair blown through and through by the needles of the trees and the icicles of sweat forming like daggers. Grinning. Disturbed. Knees-weakening, buckling now. He struggles to move. There is much blood on him, more than he knows. From his collarbone to his ribcage runs a strawberry burn from a crash to the ice. The blood drips drips down from his hip down his shorts to his knee.
That is me there. He’s me. Watching the granite peak of Mt. Taquitz approach around the curve in the trail. Mountain lion footprints dot the snow. The sun is banking off the snow and warming my bare chest. There is no cold. The wind gusts and then there is cold for a small time but it fades when I sweat. In the crisp air the wood tells no lie and knows no fault but the men who move within it. Far and farther away, miles down the mountainside, miles long ago since passed, there is a warm little town nestled twixt warm little alleyways and dirttrodden streets. In town there are shanties within which scrambled eggs are being cooked by those reading about that day’s weather and who Obama’s killed now. I spit congealed spit from cracked lips which burns through the frost of the trail. They are thrilled by the proximity of the unknown monstrosity I know to be Taquitz. Having lived in its shadow for years they take from that imagined darkness some serenity which exists in a constnat presence. They listen to the thought of the water trickling through the stream from the back window in the woods by the base of the mountain, on the outskirt of town. They drink their coffee in unintentional sync with that town, they breathe the thin air in unintentional sync with that town. This breathing and this drinking is in sync with what goes on in these woods but they do not know that. They will smile at the thought of what I do and I will smile back.
I remember telling someone once: the mountains to me are like a cathedral, and running is just my way of praying. What the hell does that mean? I ask now. But I’m grinning. Disturbed. Knees weakening, buckling.
The road to the trail to the summit of Taquitz is 11 miles of winding root-ridden dirt whose breadth of ice grows as the oxygen in the air thins. Something heavy in those misty pineladen skies. To breathe is to sift through that sky’s bitterness for those things which might sustain you.
Come with me. See where I pause on that trail to observe the bullet-riddled sign on the edge of the wilderness. This area is known for its high population of mountain lions. Please observe wildlife safety regulations. Do not approach, attempt to feed, or touch a wild animal. I plunge on. I am not brave. Do not think I am brave. There is slush frozen to my shins and I spit dehydrated spittle into the frost. The heat of that spit does not break the freeze now.
I have no notion of bravery. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not brave.
Birds crash through the pines and twiddle serenely. The heights have made them scarcer. I see hawks prowling, soaring across the rim of the range and framed to the backdrop of cloud-blue and the tips of whitefrosted trees. Around the bend I come and I can see Taquitz again.
Here is the story of Taquitz: he was a bold leader of an Indian tribe in these very San Jacinto Mountains. In a time when places were not a name but just a place. Taquitz was not satisfied with his power. With his popularity he was able to manipulate his faithful. He stole away innocent maidens, had his way and smote them on the mountainside. In battle he was defeated, though his spirit escaped to the mountains to lurk in the cavernous rocks near the peak, forming that distinctive A-shaped, whitewashed scraggle which juts above the entire range.
His address is 33°45′36″N 116°41′01″W if you’re looking for the bastard yourself.
Here is the story of me: I want to kill Taquitz.
I’d never heard of him until the day before. Rewind and take that blood from my chest drip dripping down to my kneecaps purpled by the cold. Peel away that ugly strawberry-magenta snarl of reddened skin. Pick me up off that ice and put me down in air which men are meant to breathe. Hand me a shirt. In Idyllwild the tourists and vagrants and rich snowbirds and mountain-beaten hick element juxtapose a brutal image. From that twisted visage imagine spewing forth this line of pithy wisdom scrawled on the welcome sign: Idyllwild is one of the 100 Best Art Towns in America.
The hell you are, I said out loud. I felt wise and Buddha-like with a toothpick in the corner of my lip.
What? a passing pack of the touring enraptured said. They had not heard the thought of the water trickling through the stream through the backporch window yet. They had only read of it. They were only just thinking about those scrambled eggs and what the newspaper may say about Obama killing someone somewhere. Oh, that’s interesting, they said, and pointed to that sign.
Below the sign were a series of pamphlets. One was of directions to an art show which would show a copy of a painting that had been inspired by a selfdescribed raw photo entitled: A Wintering Taquitz. Below these directions was the story of Taquitz. The one I have just told you. They did not include his address. I found that for you on my own.
Put me back on the mountain. The trail is called Devil’s Slide Trail. Perhaps the breath of Taquitz gusts down that slippery slope and whips his would be conquerors into the riparian gorge below. Without thought, without effort. This is the Devil. Here is real evil. The root of it. I mean to kill that. I mean to summit and destroy, grinning and disturbed.
A month ago I would have thought this: when Taquitz the Indian committed those crimes and murdered those maidens and betrayed his people, he separated himself from the mountains. He and they were no longer one big One. He violated a thing sacred and for that you do not become part of the earth but you are banished from it. You are sent to some other place, where no chilly mountain gusts can breathe. The mountains are a cathedral. Running is just a way of praying.
Yet this dear friend is not a month ago. This is now. Now those are not just chilly mountain gusts. Those are biting maelstroms which make my lips crack and turn me into a redskin. I cannot make a fist. When my feet land on the ice, it feels as though I am landing on a rounded nub attached to my shin.
I have no notion of cold. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not cold.
Taquitz is a harbinger of this wickedness and it is to him I am drawn. I flatter myself into thinking that opposites attract. You are good, I tell myself. Taquitz is evil. This is why you are attracted to one another.
The trail is become steep again. I run hunched over because this is how you keep down nausea when running uphill for very long. Nausea I still have a notion of. Steadily steadily the burning grips my thighs. I take measure of the trail ahead, the dirt almost entirely obscured by frozen snowdrifts, the branches weighted still with the snow that had not melted and hanging over the path, the woods on either side thick but still offering at points spectral visions of the whitewashed summit. I take measure. To run mountains is to be like a miser counting his pennies, wanting to be broke at the exact moment he has no need of his coin.
The uphill does not end. I understand I am approaching the final switchbacks. Sweat bears down round my brow to my chin and the whipping wind rips this moisture straight off my face like some ethereal force bound for or emerging whence some distant hell. I look to the trees with increasing desperation as if they might offer some guidance but they remain silent and speak in creeks and whistles only at the wind’s demand.
Soon I will kill Taquitz. I catch a glimpse of my thighs on impact. The muscle pressed through the purpled skin made slick by blood and sweat and slush. I have no notion of what murder is. I have no notion of what cold is. This is why I am not a murderer. Nor will I be. Still I grin a bit when I try to spit. Still I am disturbed.
Perhaps you would like to step back from my trot and make for warmer climes. Search out the most arid desert in your memory and place there a girl. Make her a darkhaired one. Hair black as the night, skin reddish-gold. Eyes which can glow green embers should you seek your heart made to become a fizzing crackling electrical thing. Give her broad happy red lips which say hello! without speaking. There.
Make that arid desert into a black night lit by a blanket of stars so extensive you’d be hard pressed to find the black spaces between. Where is there room for God between those kingdoms? The universe full. We needn’t have God. See me, leaning over, kissing the sand from her knuckle, kissing those chapped and sunrusted lips, the desert seeming to caress us in a suspended embrace. That is me being me. You cannot see the nearest towns but we will go to them. The desert will not hold us, even though from where you’re standing, it sure as hell looks like it’s got a pretty good grip. We will go to the ugly places and in those ugly places I will not be me and she will not be she. I do not want to show you this going. You can imagine it yourself. That is me
losing my religion.
Soon the world will become a pyre, I think to myself, back on the mountain, on Devil’s Slide Trail, blowing into my numbed hands, and Taquitz will burn upon that fire.
*
I am not as strong in the mountains as I thought I was sitting in the village. Sitting in the village I had but a notion of the animal I wanted to be. Sitting in the village I was surrounded by such finicky and delicate excesses of luxury that I could not help but feel like a growling misplaced lion. I make myself fit the image of a beast completely. I eat everything I can put my hands to. I roam for the outskirts, am drawn to the brink. I lurk in darker and remote places to seek out some acceptable substitute for the solitudinal solace of wilderness.
Yet here and now I betray it. I betray it by giving a whimper as I run because my body is getting ready to collapse in on itself. My legs have gone numb and are spasming. Floods of sweat pool off my head and coat my windburnt skin. Animals do not whimper. Watch the antelope take a beating on the African Sahara by a pursuant cheetah. Watch it heaving in the throes of lactic overload as the successful cheetah rips its flesh out with its teeth. Watch it take this de-fleshing silently and calmly before gathering the strength for a final push to freedom and another few bitter moments of life. Cheetahs can run up to seventy miles per hour. Everyone knows this. But they can not run like an antelope. The cheetah has exhausted itself, this is proven by its weakening grip. The antelope digs to its ancestral reserves and tears its halfeaten ribcage away from the jowls of this desert cat and darts in a vicious determination across the plain. The cheetah gives a brief chase but keels over in exhaustion soon after.
I want to be that antelope. I want to be that antelope that turns back to the cheetah and tramples that sorry bastard into the ground where he lay panting. I want to be that antelope that says, no thing and no one of this Earth can eat me. No thing, and no one.
I am not that antelope, though I want to be.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
Fairly self-explanatory. The excerpt below is from Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian. A gang of soldiers turned vigilante cowboys bent on settling the West is witnessing the approach of an Indian platoon from across the plateau.
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
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