The GG

No amount of fire and freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.




The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Yo-Yo going down, a mad Squirrel coming up

I lolled in the warm sea, my legs dangling weightless in the sunny green water. I didn´t believe in exercise, conscious exercise to build one´s muscles. As a skinny kid, a kid so skinny total strangers would come up to me on the street and offer to buy me milkshakes, I had long ago learned to put up with my freak´s body. The situation was embarrassing, ridiculous, sometimes unbearable, but I knew it couldn´t be changed. Set very deeply in my mind was the idea that any program of self-betterment would be doomed from the start. To change from weakling to strongman, from C student to A student, from bad boy to good boy! I not only believed it couldn´t be done, but even that it wasn´t worth doing. Success would have me made another person, or an actor hiding the past. And I wouldn´t succeed, I would fail. Failure was dangerous, threatening my only reliable source of strength, my pride. I was proud, and God knows why.I had no reason to be. I´d picked it up and it held me together. Better simply to live in my absurd body and not think about it.


Stop-Time by Frank Conroy

White Days and Red Nights

It was noisy. A noise that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Far-out throats, tongues, and lips forming sounds that wound their independent way up and down the scale with no relation to anything. Whispering, mumbling, fake laughter and true laughter, bubbling sounds, short screams, bored humming, weeping, long roller-coaster yells-all of it in random dynamic waves like some futuristic orchestra. In this meaningless music were sudden cries of such intense human significance that I stood paralyzed.
It was as if all the saints, martyrs, and mystics of human history were gathered into a single building, each one crying out at the moment of revelation, each one truly there at his extreme joy or pain, crying out with the purity of total selflessness. There was no arguing with these voices above the general clamor, they rang true. All around me were men in a paroxysm of discovery, seeing lands I had never known existed, calling me with a strength I had never known existed. But they called me from every direction with equal power, so I couldn´t answer. I stood balanced on the pinpoint of my own sanity, a small, cracked tile on the floor.


Stop-Time by Frank Conroy

Going North

A slight man, Jean had never, as far as I knew, mixed with anybody. But as a boxing fan he knew the language and enjoyed salting his speech with an occasional fight reference. It took me years to discover the surprising fact that Jean was somewhat self-conscious about his body. He thought he was too thin , and despite his height had the touchiness of a small man. He saw all forms of beauty dimly, but most particularly his own. The delicacy and grace of form that had been the delight of so many women went unrecognized by the owner. If he´d had the discipline he would have ruined himself by working out with bar bells.


Stop-Time by Frank Conroy

Space and a Dead Mule

We rambled over a tremendous amount of space every day, over vast areas of silent, empty woods ( a pine woods on sandy ground is more like a desert than anything else) , rambled over miles of wasteland trying to find the center of it, the heart, the place to know it. We sensed the forces around us but they were too thinly spread, too finely drawn over all the miles of woods for us to grasp them. The forces eluded us. We would run into a clearing knowing that just a moment ago, in that instant before we had arrived, something of importance had happened there. But when we found the dead mule we knew we were very close. The forces spread like air over the woods had converged here, on this animal the moment he died, and were not yet altogether gone.



Stop-Time by Frank Conroy

Savages

My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I had to begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I wonder, suddenly, if I am alive. I know I`m not dead, but am I alive? I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life. I find someone moving. Is it me? My chest tightens.



Stop-Time, by Frank Conroy

croatia part one