Mr. Fred Natural, image by Daniel Y. Harris
A Midrash from the Quill of Mr. Fred Natural
Daniel C. Morris
Bored with his flat
provisions, Mr. Fred Natural removed his knock off Birkinstock sandals and
silenced his cell. He’d only ever gotten
busybusybusy buzzbuzzbuzz anyway when trying to access WZAP across the coast
from the Bay Area. Frustrating, this
trying to snoop, as if for the first time.
Truth to tell, he’d been searching for edible bugs and a milky dew thought to
settle on eucalyptus branches at dusk as cheap organic filler and
cholesterol-free butter substitute for a “Mr. Natural Brand Foods” energy bar concern,
not angelic visitors. He recognized the damp spores between his toes as having
potential to ease his muddy mind. Why
didn’t you do last night’s dishes? All
these streams since the Big Bang, and you are still searching for edible bugs
and the Sunday Funnies! Echoes of a
daily dose of dissent courtesy of his better half, the usually taciturn Devil
Girl.
Surely, Mr. Natural would have
appreciated some allegorical cattle lacking spots, now that he’d relocated to a
handsome hamlet outside downtown Woodstock, but he had not been privy to prayer
because of his flakey father, who never could find the right tool for the
job. PTSD was the whisper. A forklift
for bowling balls, was how Fred Natural thought about it. O Fred Natural did
try to pray, but profanely. He gazed at some white cattle grazing beside a
White Castle hamburger stand. Not quite
what he’d been instructed to seek, but, although no Gnostic, he knew a sign for
a burial ground when he saw one.
For all his efforts upon
behalf of progressive causes, Mr. Natural felt he lacked that necessary
something to reveal the toxics hidden within his heavy heart. Not the kind of
brick Ignatz hid from Offissa Pupp, heavier than brick. Heavier than body chemistry. Unemployable
since the Cold War, he lacked a lot of things. He lacked the breath for praise
since going around bragging he was passing as a damaged exile who’d been kicked
out of heaven for telling God it was “a little corny.” Sybaritic, he felt his
belly weight expanding under his tattered “Guided by Voices” t-shirt, and shrugged
at his shriveled penis. Excess, excuses, denial, delusion, lies, and lack. Oh well, he could still remember to feel
gratitude for his naked feet on the clay. Because of this fact, this fact his feet still
settled into an impression of the shape of the nape of a neck on the wet
ground, he impulsively bought more of the commercially zoned land than he needed,
would ever need, regardless of the size of his extended family in future
generations, which, at the time of this writing was zero, down one from but a
generation ago. Is it my little dingdong that has caused the dip? He laughed at his misplaced self-regard and
stared at the night sky, blanketed with countless stars. Dream on!
The truth is, he bought so much land because he was trying to impress
his estranged wife, Devil Girl, a strangely silent woman even in the best of
times, whose strengths were observation and endurance, and whose silence he
could never decipher as anything other than a severe judgment about which he
continually felt the need to defend himself. His one métier, he liked to think,
was that he was the type of dude who didn’t ask too many questions around
superiors, kept his mouth shut about the consequences of being blessed, and did
what he thought he was being told.
Mr. Natural knew the nature of
the gift of submission to authority (real or imagined, as if he could tell the
difference!) was where the problem started (the problem to this day). The
problem, yes, he thought to himself, but also the proof of his possession. The
proof of a promise of being possessed was how Fred Natural thought of the
border between what was his and what was not, even if what was his was really
what he got on the sly through mercy and fear and cunning (not that I blame
him).
Now that he’d remembered to
bring the key to the pink pad in Woodstock once occupied by The Band, and
presented it to the Devil Girl with the validated deed to the land where the pure
white cattle grazed, Mr. Natural felt he needed other things, things like
she-asses and opals and hard-bodied nubile slaves, things, in other words, he
hadn’t known he needed when he began his evening stroll. Things, in fact, he
hadn’t even known existed, much less needed. Mr. Natural’s mind locked up. Crucial
distinctions flew by his tangled up brain without enough time for him to
process his blindness to the difference between allegiance and inertia. Stroking
his long white beard, Mr. Natural, as if for the first time, contemplated the
difference between what he needed and what he wanted, between what was sand,
what was seed, and what was clay, and, most significantly, between what he
lacked and what he lost.
Singing a simple melody of his
own choosing and calling somebody up (not me) became much harder for him after
that. Instead of searching for locusts and honey and the eggy dew that fell on
the eucalyptus leaves and that some who disbelieved saw as shit and others as
rare protein milk suitable for a Mr. Natural Brand Power Bar, Devil Girl found
him searching in the branches for angelic visitors. As was typical, she refused commentary,
preferring instead to stick to her talents: silence, observation, endurance. Mr.
Natural sighed, trying not to give offense to Devil Girl’s implicit critique.
Somehow, like Jesus, nothing
literary seemed funny to him anymore and words in general seemed beside the
point. He leaped for a branch, but could not catch it. His bald crown was shiny
under the harvest moon. His tool didn’t work so good, and still he had not
found time to interpret the symbolism of Devil Girl’s most recent instructions
for him to plan on taking a journey to the undersea world of night sweats. Is
the hole in my heart a loss or a lack, he wondered. Is a sigh an elongation of
my breath, or its deepening, or its completion?
Daniel C. Morris is the author of The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic
Introduction, Poetry’s Poet: Essays on the Poetry and
Poetics of Allen Grossman, Remarkable
Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors Write on Modern Art, and The Writings of William Carlos Williams:
Publicity for the Self. He also is the former editor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Jewish Studies.
