Monday12 May 01:01 PM
The Drop Edge of Yonder
“Can you see the truth of it boys?... Life and death. The eagle and the washing up and the outhouse. The stove and the snow. The horse and the mountains and the 'baca juice. No doubt about it. The whole stew is only a passing, you and me and all the rest. The goddam joke is on us, boys!”
——Annie May (Ma) in The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer
I just finished reading The Drop Edge of Yonder, a smooth and hypnotic yarn about self and other, tales and truths, fate and nobility, chasing your dreams and having a drink. Good shit. Legendary cult novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer knows more about the sordid reality of spiritualism, yoga, and the pursuit of freedom, truthfulness and right livelihood than most of us. And he shares a few well-digested golden nuggets with us in this tasty, genre-drenched in spaghetti-western existential technicolor, tall tale. But be careful, he's libel to crack you upside the head and leave you dead in a ditch if you don't pay attention... Quién es?
“‘Perhaps this life doesn’t exist or has never existed. Perhaps this is not a ship but a floating coffin. Perhaps we are dreaming and will wake up to find that everything is the same’ ...The following morning, the Captain’s eulogy was brief. ‘We are guests on this earth. We come and we go. No one knows when or how his time will come. We can only have faith and abide.’”
—Captain Dorfheimer, The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer
“‘You're confused about who is dreaming who. Your problem is that your dreams are controlling you, not the other way around. You no longer know how to stand on the earth. Too much hanging around the Dream Palace and following lost men.’.. He took a pair of dice from his sack and rolled them over the ground, muttering an invocation in a foreign tongue... After he had covered their bodies with dirt, except for their eyes and nostrils, he reached into his sack and took out a round mask of a grinning monkey... ’This mask is your face and the face of everyone who has ever lived. When you understand that the separations between people are illusions, the spirits will go back where they came from. Right now the spirits are angry and confused. All they care about is sucking everything out from inside you and replacing it with greasy smoke. That can be very uncomfortable if you don't know the remedy.’”
——Toku in The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer
“‘Quién es?’ he [Zebulon] asked Plaxico. Or was he speaking to himself?...‘I did what I come to do... Some of it worked and a lot of it didn't... One last thing... Don't either of you hold on to whatever was said or done, even it it comes from me or that power witch over there, or anyone else. If you're foolish enough to hold on to what don't exist, one of you might go up in smoke and the other find himself driftin' between the worlds, not knowin' how to shake loose. If someone pushes your head underwater and laughs about it, or you snake a card off the bottom, or you get suckered from behind, let it go. And even if you don't, let it go anyway...’”
——primarily Plaxico, The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer
Zebulon Lives, the book site: Link.
Erik Davis' review in Bookforum: Link.
More Rudy Wurlitzer: official site, Wikipedia, IMDB, Riding The Dharma Trail.
Illustrations by Adam Collison.
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