On Cash and Jewel

Kerstin A. Schaars

 

Cash and Jewel are half-brothers. As half-brothers, each takes death differently, which is another way of saying life draws each of them differently. Each brother finds a shape and falls into the habit of it. Cash lies as flat and balanced as a plank of wood. Jewel freezes himself in mid-air, dragging a horse along with him by hooking the legs tightly into the animal’s muscles until the horse, too, does not feel anything but a portion of his own body tighten around him.

Life draws both Jewel and Cash.

Cash knows how to draw. He can level, sketch, take the weight of bodies, pays attentive care to how the shape of bodies changes. Cash is a creature of mass before he is a creature of shapes. The weight of a still body is still not uniform. A body’s proportions will change: a pine container must express a strategy to keep a still body contained. Above all, Cash needs his tools: the saw-set, hammer and the rule. With them Cash’s drawings grow square, planked, rising into a blowing, orange sky. Another drawing might grow flat, balanced on sawhorses so that the planks might be beveled, lifting the planks to show a still-living body where it will soon lie and rot.

Jewel draws as well. His intentions are sketched slowly, in the haze of days full of half-sleep so that his nights are full of moonlight labor, a shadow cutting away brush, twigs, minimizing the shapes of a future forest. All this so as to move differently in a full sun, on one of Snopes’s half-wild, spotted horses that run through William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county.

“Yoknapatawpha” might come from an early transliteration of the Chickasaw name for the Yocona river that binds the southern part of the county. According to Faulkner, “Yockney-Patafa” means “water runs slow through flat land.” So do most of the creatures that cross this territory, through the novels, short stories, the essays and haze of one man’s thoughts. These creatures were chopped, reshaped, and they appear again over and over. They were fitted to fit to film. Perhaps luckily these creatures never had to expose themselves through cinema. They keep busy. They are animated enough as it is. Cash carries his tools close to his body to adjust the balance of a wooden box. Cash keeps knocking, cutting and fitting doing little more than becoming the adze that snores through pine. Jewel suffocates a horse in their slow, dancing violence, full of heat, orange light and Jewel’s body frozen for a moment in the air, “earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-limber,” until Jewel and a horse’s body, a Jewel-horse-body, strike into ground. Jewel is not even on the back of the “sweet son of a bitch,” the “pussel-gutted bastard.”1 He is not yet on the back of this horse that draws and gives birth to Jewel.

A different man makes the following claim: “All creation, because it is a drawing-up, is a drawing, as of water from a spring.”2 The implications of this activity exceed those parameters that formal analysis imposes upon art. First, creation draws from what already is. A flux coexists with the shaping power of the world. From this, the hunt for an origin need not be so anxious to impose its authority. Questions concerning authenticity and originality become moot, and perhaps even mute, when they run up against shapeless change. Such change passes through all formations and associations, including the formation of questions.

Further, art indifferently creates sensation, becoming the relational force among sensations that pass in-between and among things. A drawing-up, “as of water from a spring,” not only pulls from what already moves, but also pulls back upon the drawing. Something weighs the drawing down, balancing by changing constantly. In a similar way, Cash draws the balance between a dead body and planks of wood, while Jewel combats a horse until they can run, not against one another, but upon each other. Vital to both is the very weight of a thing like water, a thing that takes as its shape those things it passes through, but also shaping those same things which pass through it.

Two final men thought that art “throws a plane over chaos.” In writing, words become the plane that can pass through sensation but also carry sensation along, as water does, or Cash’s adze on wood, or Jewel’s hand blocking a horse’s breath. Like Jewel’s hand twisting upon the horse, a “writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it”3 until something new strikes through the everyday quality of things. At the same time, writing also shares a common contact with Cash’s tools, the adze, hammer and the rule that draw barns from a sketch or boxes from a tree. So too:

The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the ‘tone,’ the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that summons forth a people to come, “Oh, people of old Catawba,” “Oh people of Yonapatawpha.”4

Hence, Cash and Jewel are half-brothers as they both set to work, allowing sensations to pass through them, shape them, as they pass through a body of writing. They are half-brothers that writing summons forth, each a minor chord in a new, striking style. Each obeys a new collection of sensations that pass through them. Hence Jewel becomes part horse when he tries to wrestle one for its own breath. From this, Faulkner can write, “Jewel’s mother is a horse.” Cash becomes a list he himself “draws-up,” a list that takes into account the “animal-magnetism” of a dead body when shaping a box in which to keep it. He knows first how this “animal-magnetism” will express through a smell of rot, attracting the breath of convulsing townspeople, and curving the craning necks of buzzards.

As half-brothers, Cash and Jewel take death differently. Cash and Jewel are the common ancestors of writing, being both the balance and the flight. They are the careful, rhythmic breath of the adze and the breathlessness of a horse-in-rage. They are how writing summons forth a people to come: the drawing-up of two planes over chaos, one a pine plank and the other a horse-breath, planes which constantly leave us. They leave from us.

 

 

 

1 William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying. 13.

2 Martin Heidegger. “The Origin of the Work of Art.”

3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? 176.

4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? 176.