shadowboxing_the_apocalypse
Dosquatch Esau skates on mirrors anymore...
He meets his pale reflection at the door
Yet sometimes at night I dream
He's still that hairy man,
Shadowboxing the Apocalypse
And wandering the land.

from Grateful_Dead, My_Brother_Esau


I love literary imagery, how a string of words can evoke a pictorial response in the mind. It's like art in its most abstract, where you paint out the shapes of letters but the portrait revealed is a thousand thousand fold removed.

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I suppose the inverse should also be true, that a thousand words can form a picture. Every so often, though, an author hits on something magical, something visceral, and can condense the image into far fewer words. Sometimes, as few as three.

Shadowboxing the Apocalypse has to be among these for me. Without anything else around it, I have a perfectly immutable picture drawn. I see him, our nameless champion, working himself tirelessly in some dusty and forgotten gym. His body shedding sweat like there was a hose on him, jab jab. Hawk's eyes focused on his mortal enemy of thin air, jab cross. His concentration unbendable, rib shot. Unbreakable, uppercut. Unstoppable, jab hook jab.

Practicing. Making sure that the footwork is just right, the fists fly just so. Driving himself, preparing for his moment on the stage, rehersing for his role in the end of everything, because he knows that is his purpose.

I see all of that from those three words. I see it because that's what I am supposed to see. What surprised me, though, is that I also see something else.

I see God sitting at a card table, scattered in front of him thousands of painstakingly carved miniature figures, of you, of me, of our boxer, that he is ever so carefully arranging in a deep set frame lined in velvet. Building the end of time, piece by piece, into a marvelous three dimensional snapshot to place on his mantle to remember us by.
040530
...
unhinged covid19 200414
what's it to you?
who go
blather
from