Lance Olsen - Head in Flames

A poetry of complexity.

The Quran telling the story of how Allah allowed the Prophet to marry his friend’s six-year-old daughter and consummate the marriage when the girl was nine.

The culture of consumption they call it.

Please don’t think too hard , the still lifes say. It will only get you into trouble .

Theo’s middle-of-the-night note to himself: It’s not my fault that some citizens hang on to the fundamentally uncivilized faith of a little-girl-fucker who roamed the desert in 666 .

Because it consumes them.

In French: nature morte .

Ayaan in the Q&A after a public lecture: They froze the moral outlook of billions in the amber of the seventh century — brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women .

It eats them up spits them out.

Nearly one a day for the last three months.

Union Square. The greenmarket.

They say braless Dutch girls in their T-shirts and knee-torn jeans are easy but they’ve always turned you down no matter what you did no matter how nice you were to them.

A murder of mustaches.

The arch in Washington Square.

My beard just unruly enough to frighten them.

Hovering in bed, ciphering whether I might be the bearer of that face gazing out from the canvas: red hair combed back to reveal its hasty retreat at the temples, burl on the flagrant nose, full beard, blondish eyebrows, retreating chin.

Fundamentalism in all its forms — Christian, Jewish, Muslim: the socially sanctioned excuse to abandon all humor .

Good.

And next—

Someday they will write about these things.

How cancer slowly replaced your mother lying on her side in bed hands tucked against her bony cheek staring across the room at what her life had become.

Prussian blue, Persian red, pumpkin orange, parrot green: like touching someone without touching.

And next Holman is phoning.

It is Allah’s will she whispered to you it is what I deserve.

I am a stranger here.

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion .

The five drunk Australian teenagers passing the café where you sat over a cup of coffee the faggots called out to the owner smiling at them from the doorway Hey mate you eat cats and dogs?

No, you may not paint my children, Monsieur Vincent , they informed me graciously in the language of lacy sanguinity void of guttural backbone.

Said someone once.

Just to see what he would do and then breaking into light-spirited laughter.

Some of these aren’t lies.

The delectable adolescent joy of crossing the line of good taste. Repeatedly.

As if it were a joke as if his life were a simple joke.

Look: the pistol, once in my pocket, now in my palm.

There’s nothing like it: their faces, their stupid little suburban middle-class shock.

Can’t take a bit of a laff?

Dear Theo: I am a musician interpreting the works of great composers — Rembrandt, Millais, Delacroix — yet—

Offended by the audacious truth of it lying there unwrapped like—

Bit of a leg pull?

— yet I don’t seem to be able to afford ink or paper. Do you happen to have a little spare cash you could part with? —V.

— like an uncooked chicken on the counter.

The café owner smiling so broadly his eyes almost disappeared.

I turn the gun over like a sea thing pinched up on the beach.

Theo can make them do what they dodge doing themselves. That, he decides, has always been his single contribution to culture.

Come and drink my fucking coffee you fucks.

Brushstrokes multiplied like words from syllable to paragraph.

No one ever promised that thinking was going to be easy.

I’ll piss in it for you.

From syllable to paragraph, and then that changed.

Holman, the rumpled journalist, phoning one evening to let Theo know Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversial new addition to parliament, was dining at his house. It was February. It was 2003.

Where do you go from there?

Red tasting rowdy like copper shavings.

You should drop by if you aren’t doing anything, Holman told Theo. You should hear the sorts of things this woman is saying.

After high school you tried bookkeeping then information technology then educational relief work but everything reminded you of other possibilities even if you couldn’t name what they were.

A twenty-two-year-old man, recently returned from a stillborn attempt at looking busy in a London art gallery, doodles on a pad in the airless back room at his podgy Uncle Cent’s in Paris: a silly pen-and-ink drawing of a runt tree gagged with branches.

Theo had been attending another dinner party. He excused himself, saying he needed to use the loo, then slipped out the front door.

Thinking about how when your mother died you decided not to attend the funeral in Morocco she already in Allah’s hands the case already closed.

Translating the Bible from Dutch into French, German, English, its verses staticking through his hands and arms and jittery legs.

Pasicceria Bruno on LaGuardia Place. Remember?

You began to refuse to shake hands with women instead.

All the other people inhabiting my head.

The doorbell rang, Ayaan later confided to Theo, and this loud, dumpy, disheveled guy with a high-pitched voice erupted into the room, blundered in her direction, and wrapped her in a bear hug, white smudge of cocaine still visible upon his upper lip.

You began threatening chums you caught drinking alcohol in bars.

Look: here I am, easing back the pistol’s hammer.

I’m Theo van Gogh , the guy bellowed, and I VOTED for you!

Shouting down acquaintances in cafés when they dared disagree with you.

Look: here I am, pointing it at the crux of my longing.

Peddling, Theo commences humming to himself.

You grew a beard while shedding your Western clothes your faithless friends.

Thumbing the trigger, focus floating up to the fields.

Shocked Ayaan had never seen such a public display in this country. She decided she liked it.

You smoked dope drank beer went to the cinema surfed the Web and then you didn’t.

I see every room of the house in which I grew up, every path, every plant in the garden, the magpie’s nest in the tall acacia in the graveyard of the church where my father used to preach.

Thought callousing into belief —that, perhaps, being the most accurate way of putting it.

You taking special pleasure in the scandal of fetish sites.

Someday there will be no one left to remember these things.

Theo stayed no longer than ten minutes, a storm uproar-ing in the living room, then passing over as quickly as it had struck.

Asphyxiation plastic love amputees.

How they called my father the Handsome Pastor, even though they found his sermons dull as Dusseldorf at dawn.

Theo’s hum so deep among his vocal cords he can feel more than hear the melody.

Sans arms sans legs.

A canvas by Jacob van Ruisdael that you live in.

Ayaan had the impression, she told him later, that Theo was the sort of person who had the compulsive urge to goad and insult even his closest friends, preferably on live TV.