O Autumn, Laden With Fruit.

AUTUMN IS A TIME WHEN ENTROPY REMINDS US OF ITS CONSTANT PRESENCE. All things striving to defy a preordained return to chaos. The word itself, Autumn, comes out of the Etruscan root autu- and carries connotations of the passing of time. It was appropriated by the Romans autumnus, rose to Old French, autompne, before settling into Middle English autumpne meaning "drying-up season.” There’s an old Iroquois legend, in which the annual hunting and killing of a great celestial bear stains the leaves of the trees red with blood. Autumn is a harvest time where we gather what we’ve sown throughout the spring, once directly true in a neolithic, agricultural sense. Now, in our time of plenty, what we harvest is more figurative. We reap relationally, going about our sundry gambits and endeavors.

Good news rarely finds me when the leaves blush and fall. Autumn’s fruits mere salvos of catastrophe: Waking up, from a shot of adrenaline, in the ER at age 8; dyspneic hallucinations of Slimer from Ghostbusters wrecking my corner of our post-modernistic bullshit house — uncertain if it was really me doing the wrecking. Adolescent love cut short, her October suicide at 14, with “Three Lions” by The Lightning Seeds wearing out in my walkman since a Summer I clutched like grim death. A university friend throws the Irish Good-bye to a Halloween party, making a shambolic climb into the dorm’s attic to hang himself from the rafters. A 2016 head-on collision, while stopped at a red light, totals my car only days after moving in with Justine. Blacking out on the old Indian lay-line Sandy Boulevard, another crisp day in the ER; Asthma 1-0 Me — Deferral of car crash trauma suspected in the psychosomatic calculus. A doctor tells me I have cancer at 36… All gifts of Autumn. I love this bracing season, despite its dodgy past.

I was supposed to go to a friend’s birthday party in an hour, but I was feeling anxious. So, I walked my dogs around the lake and up to the top of a nearby hill to clear my head. An introvert, guilty-as-charged, but I’ve never been prone to social anxiety. It wasn’t dread of the people themselves; many of them had been supportive of me over the years—especially after I announced that I had cancer. The anxiety arose out of a dread of being in the presence of people who weren’t going through what I was going through. They would all have “normal” lives: Career progress, career setbacks, marriages, Harry’s first steps, Sally’s going to college; relational milestones. The trappings of middle-class material success. I had none of those things. My last year marked by immolation and collapse, all I had was that a tumor up my ass hadn’t killed me — so far. Cancer hadn’t yet spread to my lungs and killed me. Cancer hadn’t yet spread to my liver and killed me. I had the rise and fall of my breath, neurons still enkindling thoughts; sensations. Why was I telling myself that wasn’t enough?

Cancer had locked me in a panopticon with a single window, high above, and the six most demonic parts of my psyche each taking up their corner. Blial holds court in my head; the observer whose silence fuels the competition of the others. Mammon, huddles naked in the single shaft of daylight slicing down from the widow, gnawing on the bloody flesh of a dove in his avarice.

“Achievement,” hiss-tick-chitter “ Acclaim. Hiss-Stature,” his rat-like whispers, a mist of bloody spittle erupting from broken teeth, “Thingsss clutched to the breassst while the wind howlsss, never able to whisssk all away.”

Mammon - Dictionaire Infernal (ca. 1863)

“Succedaneum for meaning in a world gone to nihilism!” A sonorous baritone cuts in. Rolling on five agitated legs, Buer looms over the cowering Mammon who stuffs the debris of his grisy prize into a tattered doublet, “Philosophy! I urge our charge to heed reason!”

Mammon, swipes at one of buer’s legs with fungus-ridden talons. “Hass! In every one of usss there are two ruling and directing principlesss,” his rattish chittering giving ground to erudition, “whose guidance we follow wherever they may lead; the one being an innate desire of pleasure;” The mangled dove re-emerges, held in one blood-slickened palm, “ the other, an acquired judgment which aspires after excellence.” A familiar arguement; Phaedrus.

“I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed,” bellows Buer as the rolls back into his shadowy corner, “… from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.” If only he had arms — they would be crossed, over whatever passes for his chest, in peurile petulance.

“Better death for thy charge than to suffer more of thy witless prattle!” The thunderous bass belongs to Andras, an unswerving great claymore resting on one herculean shoulder. “A mortal, facing eternity forgotten amongst the shades, nurses not the drippings of vermin and vipers!” He towers above me, becoming a monolith before the solitary ray of God in the room, “I can deliver unto him a blow that will abolish his suffering!” As the waning daylight caresses the fuller of his claymore, a low growl boils up behind me; a sable wolf’s breath hot and moist on my neck, “I command 30 legions of Hell — He can run in my pack, his spirit unblunted by life’s ruin. There shall he be fit for purpose!” The wolf’s gnarr shakes the room, a flurry of flaking plaster falls to the polished stone floor. In its amber eyes, dance pins of light; five candles materializing, to singe the wolf’s whiskers. The candles are embedded in the fingers of Yan-gant-y-tan, who dances, undeterred before the wolf’s bared fangs.

The emaciated demon’s a-tiptoe dance macabre, kicks plaster dust into my mind’s eye. Even shielded in my imagination I feel the telltale tickle of an oncoming cough. “Revel! Rollick! Raise Hell!” He cackles, leaping into the air, hirsute legs raised in mockery of a Grand jete.

“Begone! Pale satyr of the night! Our charge molt thee no regard!” Quiet all of this time, Amon emerges, gouts of fire erupting from his beak. His tail thumps the ground, making the chips of plaster dance, “Enough have we uttered this day. Gentlemen, Shall we bequeath our mortal to silken sleep?”

“Some say the night is for secrets, others say the night is for sleep,” With little effort Yan-gant-y-tan shifts his gravity, continuing his revels in the gathering darkness of the ceiling, “I say sleep is rehearsals for death.”

“It is difficulties that show what men are,” Buer redoubles, pushing off the wall with two of his mighty legs, coming to rest, his nose within inches of mine. I catch ashes on the wind, “True instruction is this: — to learn to wish that each thing should come to pass as it does.” Patience. Endurance. Take things as they come and find new opportunities in the embers.

Amon Marquis of Hell - Dictionnaire Infernal

Andras, Great Marquis of Hell - Dictionnaire Infernal

Curiously, human beings the world over constructed similar conceptual allegories around Autumn. In chinese medicine Autumn is the time when spirit is more at hand. A Liminal time, when the boundary between material reality and the Otherworld is more easily be crossed, not unlike Samhain in the Gaelic tradition. Here man faces other demons:

Who am I?
What is my meaning?
What remains constant in a world forever in flux?

The key organs involved:

Yin - Lungs lit. Inspiration (breathing, taking in).
Yang - Colon lit. Expiration (elimination, of waste).

Both organs have given me Hell. A breakdown in their symbolic partnership manifest in my body. Lungs. From Old English lungen, High German lungun, "the light organ," The lungs balance the ability to yield and demand, hold and let go; in the exhale, to shed preconceived notions of reality. Think “heavy” in emotional terms, weighed down with the gravity of a thought: Marty McFly saying “Woah, Doc! This is Heavy!” Conversely, The Colon is in charge of distinguishing what is harmful from what is harmless in the body, and eliminating it. Colon. My cancer is Colorectal: Rectum “straight intestine.” From Old French rectifier, "to make straight,” or Late Latin rectificare, "make right,” and Latin rectus "straight.” Withholding, of something impure, unable to express, excrete, or let go. In Autumn, I am more highly attuned to my surroundings. I nestle deep in introspection where small talk becomes quickly trampled by a daily urgency. If we are indeed the universe attempting to understand itself, probes detached from a single unified whole and scattered abroad to sniff out every cosmic possibility, can I be that one who reconciles controversies within itself?