(8/20/86)

You can go in as deeply as you like
in zooming for the detail, even the red hearts
on the card...you can see the leg of
the table, feel the shoulder of the man
holding the cards...everything stops at once...
hard to believe the gun racks because it
wouldn't be that way now...remember, before
they move, you only need a few details...
Say, the reason for the card game and the
name of one of the players...you can smell
by the air where this is, I mean whether
the way out in the woods or someplace
drier than that...then again, stepping
outside, you can see this is the woods...
you can feel the stakes are high, for these
people...you can already begin to guess
the tension in this for them...now,
how do you distinguish the details from
the results?...you can see something is
about to happen and you can feel it...
you've already had ample time to decide
what you think will be the outcome...this
stillness cannot be borne forever, though in
some sense these men were meant to sit there,
and the women in this room, listening
but afraid to listen...you start to feel
someone in there wants to cry out...but still,
this is only an investigation into a few
details... and to imagine it in the first
place something had to hold your affection...

And then the newspaper account of a man
who stuck his arm into a lion's cage to prove that
God does or does not exist...if God has
a power, he announced to his mother, he will
not let the lion hurt me- and then, he lost an
arm...to be transported to a mental hospital

"Are you going to let these thoughts
push you around like this?"

You were in a room and something was about to
happen...what does it have to do with a
lion? Does a lion burst into a room?
It feels like something is going to be mangled,
something is going to break apart...but,
in this man's cage, his internal world demanded
absolute proof of God's *power* to believe in
him...possibly because his own powers appeared to
be drastically failing him...and this mangling
leapt into the story and those men in a
room anyway, a natural overlap of a
day's experience...and the days keep
switching hands...no question that something
meant to jump out and it turned out to be a
lion's paw, not a card...still, one of these
men was about to say something...look,
he's knocking the table over with one hand while
the other is springing back...there are screams and
a door bursts open...a gun explodes...
a man appears almost to be hurled into the
air and thrown back...the noise is deafening...
yet this scream is really the same scream
as the man who was mangled by the lion...