HORNS AT HIGH ALTITUDE by Chris Mansel

 Horns at High Altitudes  

He was a scholar and a lecturer and one lecture he gave once a year always motivated [him] to teach another year.  He had traveled extensively and studied abroad as a young man.  He met a woman when doing so and she had told him a story, among many. She was older but not too much.  They were not romantically involved if that is what you are thinking, no.  The relationship was more of mentor and student for lack of a better term. 

She had seen several studies of the shamanic culture and in her travels there were many stories that she did not include in her books or articles.  This one was told to her by a shaman that concerned fire.  It went, “A bird shaped gorge found in the human skull has its entrance in one of the veins leading up to the central nervous system.  It was swallowed at birth by the young woman.  Her birth was in a cave so the shaman believed she had a vision emanating from the ocular nerve.  When the young child began having what looked like something crawling around in her throat the shaman was called.  He lit a branch and waved it in front of the child’s head.  He had the mother open the child’s mouth but he didn’t see anything there.  When he waved the limb to the child’s eyes he saw her eyes bulge then go back to normal.” 

He would stop here in his lecture to let this part sink in.  Usually, there would be many questions.  Was this true?  He had spent ten minutes at the outset explaining what a shaman was but still there were questions.  He would continue after a short while. 

“The eyes had bulged out then gone back to their normal setting.  Shocked, the shaman waved the limb again before her eyes and the eyes bulged quicker then reset again but this time the child’s cheeks began to bulge down to her mouth.  The shaman stepped back and asked the mother to open her mouth who by this time had begun to cry uncontrollably and started chanting.  What had been inside the young child was indeed a small bird.” 

When the classroom heard this, they began to shift in their chairs and began to chuckle. He admonished them and informed them of the many documented instances where shamans have performed rites unproducible by western medicine.  At this time, he would usually release a small bird into the classroom from a cage he had inside of his lectern. 

Chris Mansel

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DOWN WITH THE SHIP WHILE ENJOYING THE VIEW by Chris Mansel

Down with The Ship While Enjoying the View

Silence, like the earth he thought. He had been reading Samuel Beckett the last few days on the train. The brief lines, the constant steadiness of the eyes going back and forth to the left margin was a good metaphor for travel, especially for the train. His life felt incidental. The kind of dialogue you read before those lines that merged together; where your eye grazed down the page before you realized it. A paragraph here and there and a few years are gone without you realizing it. His first marriage was a bit like Robinson Crusoe. He made his way as best he could on the island. He found isolation suited him until she found that isolation didn’t suit her at all. He was in isolation again on the train, sitting quietly. He had no one on the island unlike Crusoe but he [did] have the feeling of being washed ashore.

The train arrived at its destination and he began the six-block walk into work. This was another opportunity to think. There are so many times like this he thought. Sometimes he would count his steps but usually he counted everything else as well. The letters on signs, [the number of letters or] anything [else] as he was OCD. It wasn’t crippling but it was a major distraction. Not like crippling depression as he had heard it categorized before. He could interact with someone but he had to balance counting the syllables of what someone said with listening and paying attention and responding. It was not unlike the prisoner’s dilemma. The two sides of his existence had to come to a decision separately or together how to exist or fail. Each day was like a game of hang man.

Balancing: this was the hardest. Six years to the day he had been divorced from his wife, who had died from an infection in her arm. That day was coming up soon. As he arrived back home to the apartment he had rented not long after the divorce he noticed the room for the first time in quite a while. The chair and couch, the two prints by Hammershoi on the wall, the computer, the bookshelves that he couldn’t live without, he thought. He opened the two windows and aired out the room. As he counted the folders and icons on the computer screen then the outlying features he re-counted them to be sure. Then he tried desperately not to count other items in the room. He tried to distract himself by turning on the radio in the kitchen. A song came on from his past. It always reminded him of being free of everything around him. He went to the window and held his hands out into the air. Sometimes freedom is limited to what you can reach out to. A few moments later he brought his hands back in. He sat down in his chair and thought of his trip to Nepal with Doctors Without Borders. He had volunteered to help but really, he had hoped to disappear. He had not confided in anyone on the way there or while in the country. One day he went for a walk into the mountains where they were operating and came across a horse that had wandered away. Instead of him going up to the horse, the horse came up to him. Before he knew it, a guerrilla came up behind him and held a gun to his head. Here he was thousands of miles from home, alone with a wish to disappear and here was a man who could make him do so in an instant.

Suddenly and without notice he sat down on the ground surprising the guerrilla. The guerrilla, not knowing what to do, having only met a few westerners, suddenly sat down as well. He held out his hand to the guerrilla, in his own wordless way asking for the gun. The guerrilla studied the look on his face and looked at his gun and back to his face. The guerilla left him with the horse and walked away. He returned home a month later, opened the window in his apartment and left it that way.

Chris Mansel

ABYSS AND ASCEND by Chris Mansel

“Fear makes the wolf seem bigger than he really is."
~ German Proverb

Abyss and Ascend

The last thing he remembered hearing his professor saying clear was that Dostoyevsky liked to write about paranoia. Paranoia about being found out. This was after reading his latest essay and looking up to him. They were seated across from one another and after that comment his mind seemed abandoned for the next few moments. The professor was still speaking but it was a like a cinematic moment where he could see his face, blank and wondering. When he came back to the conversation the professor was staring back at him and silent.

“It’s obvious you went away for a few minutes there, what do you remember?”

He struggled to get the words out, “Paranoia.” The professor smiled, “Have you read any Dostoyevsky before?”

He said that he had and followed the expression that it received. The Professor mentioned Moliere. “I am sure in literature you were asked to read him. But delve a bit deeper. Follow the thought.” The professor shook his hand and he left the office. As he climbed down the three flights of stairs he was lost in thought. He had written his essay about his own struggle with disintegration. He had long suffered with a mental state that bordered on a more fragile state and in its own way it was an argumentative essay, which he had been asked to write. He got the idea to do the essay when he saw the drawing by Frank Auerbach entitled, “Portrait of Julia.”

His presence in the essay had been written rather unexpectedly as he followed the first thoughts in his mind. In short, he didn’t come out well. If he had been asked to defend it he would have no leg to stand on. As he exited the building, he wondered if it was possible to hold on to your humanity while your mind disintegrates. These were questions he had never considered. He sat down on the steps and placed his notebook beside him. 

He had written countless essays in his head, as he lay in bed at night unable to sleep. Then they would disappear from wherever they came. Eventually he would fall asleep. The words didn’t stop coming even when he suffered from his disintegration. He believed if there was a train coming through the tunnel that first it would be good to know the train.

Chris Mansel

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