Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Somewhere in Middlemarch
One of the drummers said Gerard’s a nonvirgin virgin, which doesn’t surprise me. But he seems so self-assured, as if he’s travelled the world, and seen it for what it is, and sort of laid back into a comfortable platitude.
He meditates, that’s what. He has all those good chakras properly aligned, softly wheeled into place. And his own guardian angel seated on his shoulder, with his hand on his brow to check his temperature.
“I’m lucky as your fluffy keychain,” Gerard said this once, on one of his good days. “It’s as if someone’s looking out for me. Who’d turn away a deus ex machina? Who’d turn away a good intervention?
I told Gerard once that I thought I was George Eliot. I really think I am – who said anything about prosody?
Don’t laugh, Gabrielle. You’re channeling, taking in the cosmos. In another life, you would have been Eliot, and written letters to yourself as if you were preparing your own obituary, as defining a paragraph as one from an encyclopedia waxing turgid on symbols.
You would have been Dorothea Brooks finding the mythology in the floral of the serif, loving and hating Middlemarch. You would have sat in a torn hoopskirt, legs slightly apart under the satin, crinoline showing, with a free reed hanging from the edge of your mouth like a dead branch.
* This piece first appeared in Pinion Journal.
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