I was trained in the use of the transitional device. I decline to use it here.
It is becoming clear to me that death is a primary feature of life or that is that death and life are in such close connection with each other that it is impossible to remain with either for very long. Not that I think I as an individual will arise again but on this earth at least the elements of which this body is composed or will be composed or has been composed will go on to compose other bodies and thus be animated to someone else’s complete surprise and this will probably happen many times over at varying rates and efficiencies distributed randomly or by some incalculable necessity across the whole array of particles that ever were, are, or will be me.
Death insists on itself so frequently now that one gets rarely more than a few months rest before someone somewhere succumbs and so it is increasingly apparent that I too will have to do the same, or not do the same, or become undone and other than I am now. How I feel about it means fuck all to the process in which you and I participate and which is realized repeatedly but with vanishingly small variations that pile up to become large ones over long periods of time. How much time there is—for me there is only the time in which I was able to say I but as many have noted this moment is the point at which we who live make contact with infinity, with history and future stretched out behind us as already accomplished insofar as nothing will be accomplished for us prior to birth or after death—how much time there is is not possible to specify without an array of qualifiers that give away the finitude of we who specify.
I wonder sometimes why I could not have waited. To appear. Here. Now. Why now? There is no why of course. None to be asked, although certainly the question can be posed but as such it makes little sense, and none with which to answer but this is not something over which one need despair unless one is particularly attached to causes and reasons and purpose and intention and similar principles which we project out of ourselves onto whatever we can sense out there beyond our own horizons of misunderstanding. The universe is free insofar as intention has nothing to do with it except locally in particular populations: no purpose to fulfill, no cause to fight for or to die defending although fighting and dying will continue on as they always have without reason enough to justify their existence together as a cycle.
The freedom from purpose and principle that we who live enjoy does not extend to consequence: the ever complexifying waves of causality that reverberate throughout all that is cannot be halted and so for every action whether spoken or otherwise there will occur certain reaction which is neither opposite nor equal but is certainly certain. Which is to say that this could have been no other way because all that has come up to now has culminated in this (this being the ungraspable extent of all that is now even as that now continues on its light speed course whose shape might vary depending on the observer’s perspective) and this will be added to the infinite sum of forces that will determine the course of future accidents but according to no calculable course of cause and effect because cause and effect—or at least “simple” cause and effect—are illusions of a linear conception of time.
We here on our bright bud of the present, this infinitesimally tiny halo of light: we ride the waves of an interplay of forces that are probably close to infinite in number and thus close to infinite in the possibilities they engender as consequents, but to the extent that we have anything, which we do not, all we have is this moment from which all else radiates along the fine threads of a web from which some of us wish to abstract ourselves as some sort of crown of creation. The whole universe in our service! How is it that recognizing that the whole the universe is not intent upon planet Earth, that recognizing that we are far from central to all that is, how is it that this be characterized as the stance of arrogance by those whose gods wait on them with a rapt and exclusive attention?
To admit that we here are living in an obscure time and place and when we are gone it may well be that no other being in the universe is either the wiser or the more stupid for our having been, to admit that we are not the objects of a divine intervention so much as we are local realizations of what we might call the divine in our interactions with other beings, and that as corporealities, seemingly independent of9 each other but in the extremely long calculation quite entangled with each other but none of them supreme or grand or anything more than miraculous in an everyday sense: it is perhaps a matter of survival that we understand that we are not privileged among the astonishing appearance of all that is but we are as astonishing as anyone or anything else is astonishing. Nobody is more surprised than I am although everyone is as surprised as I am and so I am not unique in my incredulity intense though it may be.
And intense it is: an infinite number of ineluctable improbabilities surround me with equal claims to uniqueness and grandeur and all of them seductive yet hardly misleading or rather being misled is less than the tragedy we often believe that it is.
This is why when we objectify our surroundings we become obscene, blasphemous, and inhuman: if we could but admit that we and our surroundings are vanishingly improbable and fragile perhaps that very improbability would inspire something like a protective impulse towards our own and others’ brief flashes of life.
more story or more telling or a little of both? how would we know we had one but not the other?
I was waiting for that one communiqué that would tell me that what I sought was waiting for me on the
kitchen table or that I could get it from the man in the red hat standing beside the gate and without having to ask in spanish. it was true that although one could buy anything one wanted within a mile of my house I was too shy to do other than send money to dubious addresses hoping to get the stuff mailorder. it worked some of the time or even most of the time but the real problem was the extended period of anxiety which otherwise would have worked itself out between the man you give the money to and the man you get your packet from. then the first swallow and within an hour you had your answer.
or so I fantasized. the fact is one probably can’t get just what one wants on my street but only something of a magnitude worse and it was this fact that took the shine off the fantasy and with my bashfulness kept me from looking anyone in the eye from sixteenth street to eighteenth although I hoped to glean from a sneaking glance what any one of them might have for sale. they bore no signs.
one writes in the past tense hoping for that stately patina of history and the antiseptic barrier it lends against the puddles of street muddied water that trickles out of the one alley where there are gaping holes in the pavement for the remnant of municipal cleaning efforts to drain into and where gathers during daylight hours a knot of people milling about papersacked and shrouded not going anywhere or doing anything other than just exactly what they want to do or at least out of that what they are allowed by circumstance to accomplish. occasionally one spies a magnificent half naked body there and at other times nothing but the crush of nakedness itself hung in thin drooping sheets between three-wheeled shopping carts and awnings once blue but now gray and full of holes. have you got a cigarette bares itself sideways, demanding and beseeching, hostile and resigned.
so often am I taken for one who smokes in spite of my not being a smoker I have thought of buying a pack to carry with me to give out to people too poor to buy their own. I suppose not doing that may be healthier for them but then who am I to decide whether or not someone with as many problems as the poor often have should smoke for whatever relief it lends.
in fact though I rarely leave my room. and there is not much of poetry to be written from pillules rattling in the bottom of a brief amber tube please let there be twenty more. what separates us. well it is that door and perhaps a job although what I have could hardly be called a job as the balance of accounts rushes away from me in the wrong direction ever skyward.
so I can give you no conventionally sorry story except as they unfold here between unremarkable walls unremarkable as much for their clean white paint as for their absolute replicability. make your way around the world you will pass through one wall and then another wall and another and another and another and another and another and between them it so happens: it so happens over here that one faints on the couch and that over there one slams their hand in the door and that over this way are a number who sleep in the throes of their own dreams and sweat and legs that chafe at the sheets tucked too tightly at the foot of the bed. I speak in the abstract but mean precisely this and that is that for three days my ankles pled to be borne up in silk and cotton hammocks that would hold them exquisitely still and immune both to gravity and the quickening electrical signals that ran unchastened down through them.
it was not enough to sink into the sheets. you remember don’t you they said but it was a good tired and how the bed received you but my ankles were tossed about unkindly. at ten my legs ached nightly.
I wonder at the rate of recidivism. I have a friend who whispers in my ear to go for it as though living vicarious that one time on the edge of sleep when the well-being of the universe seemed to depend upon my hand suddenly springing away from the bed to whack the wall and then stay upright dazed yet sure that it had done the right thing. I was amazed at its impetuousness. it proclaimed itself drunk for one brief moment the archetypal stroke of fate and lightning and whatever else rises up from the earth to beckon heaven but the short of it is I had slammed my finger in a window days earlier and it was the same hand that rushed to meet the wall at twilight bruising and bemused. all the passion of fourteen ran itself out of my arm into the plaster.
for who is the last of us to fall asleep but one who lives always at the brink of fourteen when the spirit still ranged anarchically between rule and freedom. the bruising got worse. what could one expect but exactly that and exactly where the articulate cement meets obdurate the bruised hand.
from one to the other a bruising and a meticulous flaking off of particles too small for the eye to see. there was no choice but to say it as though it had not been said yet. as though it had not been said yet. as though it had not been said yet. ad nauseum but that precisely lies right in the way.
I only hit the wall once. I only hit the wall once but it was one of those gestures which adds itself to itself until there is very little left or that is very little left except all the other gestures commenting on the velocity of just this one.
in the ideal universe there is charm enough to overcome the lack of space. that this is a kind of conversation going on everywhere around you even if you sit and say nothing might not be clear unless you think of the moment of impact as the charm of conversation itself. thank you sir may I have another.
some nights later I awoke with arm stretched out to the ceiling reaching for something forgotten in the half-dream which preceded my awakening. in some circles they say you must hit bottom before you can get better but things are working out all nonlinearly for me in that the bottom was the bottom of something else long ago and ever since then it has been up up up although occasionally sideways or in a circle in the air that your hand draws following sleep’s solemn logic where significance alone bares itself as the obscene joke upon which your life depends.
as I was saying the story will not be sorry as the joke for the moment which brought me to my salvation was not a moment of pathos and awakening except to the cruel force of salvation and so I sidestepped it and found that having accomplished this once you only have to keep doing it as long as you also wish to say anything for saying anything implies coming down on one side or the other whereas to move laterally between choices does away with the whole necessity of making a choice but most do not see it that way. it is said he will spit out the lukewarm to which I reply how delightful to escape being devoured.
I carry a business card. I am not in business and nothing I do is categorizable in a rolodex but in case I feel the need to give someone evidence that I consider myself an entity I carry these cards and give them out at those moments when it seems like I should. so far as I can tell no one has ever thought it necessary to refer to one later on or that is I have yet to receive a phone call that began you gave me your card. I on the other hand have referred to a card like this more than once but generally it is only to check that the memory I have of being handed a card is truly a memory and not the recollection of something I made up. rarely do I do anything more with the information on the card than establish that it exists.
but so I have thought about carrying a business or calling card with me that I can leave with strangers at the end of the conversation or journey or meal or interminable line and this card would say you have just met a gay transsexual drug addict who has been in-patient at the psych ward. wasn’t he nice?
for an ambassador for all that is set to destroy society need only engage one of the embattled ones in conversation to make it clear that society is in no danger of being destroyed and is in fact the one thing that we could not possibly lose as long as conversations are being held in one quarter or another which they are even in hell. sure some of the rules could stand to be loosened and a modicum of chaos would be good for the terminally uptight but the craven among us will still say please and thank you when they want the salt. you don’t need a nuclear family to keep the graces operating as they should.
the next part continues
in two weeks
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