To be published in the Fall 2025 edition of journal The Bridge.

I Broke a Leg Where Pilgrim Feet Once Trod

Scene: the mountains in fall. Anthony sits cross-legged at a campfire. He’s ready for action.

Anthony: I feel no feeling. It’s from this habitual numbness I punch down. The culture made of memory and edited history both numbs me and stirs up my just Cause.  Then it ambulates away from the Effects. Scot free and cheating at taxes, this is what will make me walk like a rich man, right? Walking on borrowed time with no shame.  So I reach out from screen and page and ask you to join me in a landscape of silent valleys. Let’s shatter these earthen jars full of dissembling parchment, let’s let go of the fragments. With the icy fists of poetic license let’s punch a thesaurus, a genealogy, a hierophant’s foot. I complain to the manager that no starting point was scripted, no basecamp imagined for this set piece. The I/thou dialogue in this box of words gets tangled up, pushed into dry paragraphs, and trips over its own workshopped feet. This is the last pilgrimage of autumn, of papyrus and symbols unknown, and it is not the dance you wanted. Twist the bones before the plot, then backspace. The low angles of light allow erasures and mistakes. The fog comes on club feet, and we stumble, parched, toward an ancient reliquary, the Rule gone wild.

(Director’s cut): Wipe dissolve to a wilderness site. Step by step to the foot of the mountain where he set up camp, sidetracked and firewalled by the washes and arroyos, the dried aspens, high desert juniper, all ready for the deluge to come.  Future destinations spread like cottonwood seeds climbing in air. Where? The head holds the map. The head conspires to smuggle messages to the feet.  The feet are ready for any hubbub, though they prefer he not know there is no feeling.  Neuropathic insolence. The heavy demand of awareness weighs on his extremities and abbreviates timespans. Ah, but the gig is, in fact, up.  The film noir’s credits rolled at the beginning. Now he knows that art just obfuscates, assumes what is unwarranted success. It’s all entertainment to disguise death and old age.  I (footnote: this is the director’s voice) don’t think, though, his place in a cave is cinematic enough. Let’s put him on a path open to the elements.

Anthony: Here at the foot of a majestic cedar I stop to collect the debt accruing in your hands too. I pull the map from your cerebral cortex.  The games will start now, the character development and conflict. You think this is easy? Do you prefer nursery rhymes?  I pull you through the screen into my body, and with this alchemy we can transform the numbness into song. Ok, maybe not song, but spoken language. Ok, maybe not language, but a website.

Review from Cahiers du Cinéma: Appendages convey letters, single file sentences.  Lines enjambed to wither the smidgen of your patience left.  The point (both sharp and dulled) is to find a trail to new breath, new lungs, interconnected neurons with name tags for the icebreaker … oh yes, the body reimagining itself with precious mistakes.  The fine print at the bottom of it. No feeling, where there once was feeling.  Words where there was once a canyon of silence. 

Anthony: Oh sweet lord, dry my feet with your hair. These conundrums are toes.  This little piggy went to market.  The desert fathers are bereft of new ideas. Just find me one true trail to get all the way home, is that too much to ask? What, was that my job?  I hear the French circumlocution here in the Eastern Sierras.  It says, “Tony, heads up!” I play the old soundtrack, a disintegrated loop. Mistakes prove that impermanence is the only way forward.

The Review (cont.): The final frame also has limits and unforeseen expectations. We walk, hobbled and humbled, out of the theater, with this wild hunger, with this borrowed body, one painful step at a time. It surprises no one that the rain has begun.

Anthony: Pilgrim, there is no camino. The absence of maps cuts right to the bone. The loss of the old world is a lamp to my feet.