I
met with Lars Knowlund just weeks before he died. He was quite
agitated
about it all. He did not ask for this trouble. He most certainly
resented
the attention. He never felt it was his personage that
deserved
the credit, but rather his mind...don't ask him why, because
he
claims, "no clue" that the mind had a mind of it's own and
doesn't
belong
to him at all, but instead, chose him to transmit that
which was to be
dictated
to him...through him... nightly. It was, at first thrilling and
electric...he
channeled with great energy, and enthusiasm rippled
through
him. They flew through the words, ripped through pages,
strode
through volumes of uncanny verse. Strident, daring, head on
A
bravado assault in the pairing.
Symbiotic
brothers, belting them out
Fish
to water...current take me where you will.
But...
Time
can turn the exuberant into the expected ...with more expected
from
each party, each passing night.
“Don't
think. Just type. TYPE!”
The
voice began to bitch.Their nightly rituals gone stale. Lars was not
channeling properly. They grew to doubt one another, Lars and the
voice. Night after night, the battle, the fight.
Listen
to me damn it!
Then
Lars' mind finally locked...he was, he moaned, "oh so Deathly
blocked."
Consciousness
overruled the “sub-”... and Lars felt vacated. Nothing
lived
in his attic. No one came knocking. No one shook him awake.
Just,
Quiet, Cobwebbed coherence.
Coherence?
Blasphemy!
Incomprehensible
as it seem, the dream stopped.
"That
can't be," he told me, "that just can't be! How could we
possibly
have
separate ideas, he was part of me...but not mine. He had the
thoughts,
I had him, at least for as long as he determined to stay. But
you
don't leave me barren with nothing to say!"
He
raged that day. Shaking a fist at a sky growing darker than he and
full now of it's own Energy.
“Damn
you! What have you left of me? Hollow as hell,
thoughts
I can't swallow. Myself a self doubter! Damn you. Better that
we
never conjoined, than to have shared and be left barren.
Ignorance-is-
bliss
can kiss my ass, it's fucking boring!”
He
slammed the door on me. Smack in my face. Now it was my turn to
pace
and there was no better place than this lush pine grove. Who would
not appreciate this glenn? So, I strolled the meadowed field hoping
the weather would hold. I had to connect with my own thoughts. Get
some perspective on what I had
just
experienced, the words I heard...
"What
are you thinking?" He asked sneaking up behind, or perhaps I
was
just distracted by the distractions in my mind to notice. He had
calmed.
His face not so troubled and lined, but his complexion quite
pale
as if he'd just reached a reckoning.
"...no,
no, tell me...the thoughts...the words. I'd like to know. Speak to
me
as you think them, aloud so I can hear. I won't use them I swear,
they'd
be your thoughts, not mine, I 'd just love to hear...words strung
together,
and take some joy in here."
I
rambled on for several hours...bits and pieces of work and
interviews...
"Ha!
That's crap," he'd say, and rightfully so.
Sometimes
his eyes would light up like he could see it before him, his finger
fidget as if tapping it out, like code...feeling the sense, the smell
of it formulating...before
the
shade draws back down again and he fades.
The
storm finally mastered him, I hear. Oh, not the piddling one that
we
experienced, but it's big, big brother, who took no time to pay the
man
it's mind as it barrelled inland. “Excuse me while I blow this
bare-ass old buggar to oblivion.” He railed back at the storm, "Go
away !!"
And
so he was, in an instant...within a flash. Gloriously Gone.
Lars'
last laugh.
