although I can be cheerful about all of it now the depths of hilarity then were truly staggering even to the point that I planned my suicide daily. this is neither hyperbole nor a ploy for attention nor was it then but now as then it is the story and as it presents itself sorry or otherwise what can I do but love it. because what can you do for a sorry story other than love it. because what do we have but sorry stories each engaged in a lifelong search for places it can be put down without undue upheaval or fuss or disturbance.
if some of mine have pulled through somehow, the best I can offer is the provisional way in which they have done so, so as far as I can ascertain. suicide was to be my last laugh at an absurd and obscene joke made not at my expense exactly but more as the sum total of sense then available to me. I had been offered a cosmos that demanded an exacting rectitude and allegiance from me which, it appeared, I was to produce from the thin air of my very subjection to it. this battened and bound universe was so self-referential that it did not even attempt to go out and come back in an encircling gesture but in one continuous sweep ejected violently all that contradicted it while tucking those who had no quarrel with extraordinary cruelty to ordinary folk further and further away from contact with with the outside. and so, although its expressed desire was to leave nothing out, in fact nothing known to be impure would be admitted for more than a moment. that’s how it is with god’s love: the conditions are multiple and over-articulated and meant to keep the faithful engaged in a constant, excruciating, and minute self-scrutiny for any hint of disobedience or doubt. if you do not belong here why stay.
and so I was an outsider from the very first but was harassed into keeping my heresies under wraps until it was no longer an immediate mortal danger to set them loose. and it is true that being born a heretic almost killed me before I got out of the house.
eventually I had to laugh, incredulous at the lengths I was being asked to go to in order to deliver myself from paradise. as though one arrives in heaven thinking you have got to be kidding me and opts instead for eternal purgatory out of the only compassion then available for one’s own being.
it began perhaps in the backseat of a car but not what you are thinking only much earlier than that but later also or rather what you are thinking never happened to me in the backseat of a car. my backseat life would not continue to develop past the moment when ear to the naugahyde draped in the rumble of over the road carriage I sensed the cycle of love and motion from which no mere god could snatch me. and so sitting, I was, or lying, or curled up against the car window, in the backseat entertaining as honored guests all sorts of ideas that Mom would have pronounced sick or evil and measuring their outrageousness by the reactionary sounds of AM radio in the Bible Belt. in the backseat nobody can hear you think.
but if it began there that is not to say that any particular thing began there or it is not to say that there was anything like a logical starting point for any of it and I cannot claim accuracy in having located this beginning, because where it began was not yet a distinct point in what would eventually assemble itself into that scheme of things that would just as eventually precipitate and orient me—if only sporadically and as random instances of distinct implausibility. beginning is more of a convenience for us, we who find ourselves already moving through time but thinking we must account for its origins and that this has something to do with why we act this way.
however it happened the only thing I can say about my original point is that even if it observed a kind of punctuality, that punctuality in its insistent refusal to act once and for all—preferring instead to echo, rebound, glance, and flash—tends to give the impression that originality is not an abiding quality and I realize I could be clearer but the whole world pretty much opposes me on this point which is to say it would be too easy simply to observe that certain things happen again and again to the extent that no single one of them can be discerned as having started the whole series.
somebody else might have a first memory. I have a collection of affective scenes whose relationships to each other are quite uncertain.
here though it is night and the lights are out and silhouettes that do not reveal themselves pass by without saying anything except that what they do say is something like being just about to say anything at all which is that point you most want to inhabit but cannot as it is not anything yet or not anything habitable but only momentary in the way that moments reverberate like this one time looking out the window or another time.
it could be said and all it would take is the saying of it that daytime and the diurnal shelter under the bright obscuring effects of our atmosphere which becomes at night little to no cover. not that anyone is looking over at us or if they are whatever mechanism is theirs for distinguishing terrestrial light from shade is likely to be not yet or no longer accompanied by levels of curiosity sufficient to cause them to ask themselves who or what might be looking back. for the time being we look.
jupiter. they call it that. and there it is but there is no getting there. like thousands if not millions I have looked. but this one time but no this so many times there is no counting of them jupiter goes by or rather stays still while everything else goes by and only after dark while being whisked along peering up at the light that follows you through the trees insistently even around corners do you notice how far you can see or rather how far something can reach and still be able to strike you. how arduous the journey and yet they arrive unscathed or at least capable yet of making an impression. in its grandiose violence the speechless night sky sends also a steady torrent of hammer strikes so gentle as to be nearly imperceptible. we on Earth, animals of iron and carbon and magnesium, already helplessly bound in a kinship so intricate as to be at once unimaginable and inescapable, latch onto the the light of our forbears—or would, did our own devotion to obscurity not persuade us to close our eyes in mock terror.
suppose some one of us somewhere decided to admit into consciousness with eyes open this remnant ruminant material offering from what we call heaven but what calls us a dark point overhead.
it may be that there is a budding collective memory in the countless instances which surely have occurred over the last century of falling asleep in the backseat. that smooth ride which supposedly we seek with all our automotive technology would in fact be anathema to the mythopoeisis of the backseat because only a constantly shifting acceleration signifies the comfort of motion. I would count the corners on the way home in spite of myself because I did not want to anticipate the end but could not help it. this has become a compound problem for me in that anticipating the end is one thing that I do obsessively and fearfully and I suspect that when it is time to die I will look back and say yep. I’ve always been here and isn’t this exactly what it all boils down to and haven’t I been saying so all along.
the trick then as now has always been to surrender to motion without a thought for its destination one way or the other. unsteady and endless passages of shadow and nighttime lights suggest no resistance to whatever might enter the short horizon of almost now. the world is finite but you can go around it forever except that you cannot go around anything forever or not as yourself. or even back and forth. either way the same thing but different each time.
while the light rains down until it no longer does.
mom used to buy me blue socks. navy blue knee socks. not that there is anything terribly unusual about navy blue knee socks but she kept providing me with them some years after I started wearing nothing but black. I was never sure if she was trying to tempt me back into the relative cheerfulness of navy blue or if she truly did not notice that not only had I stopped wearing knee socks in general but I never ever put on an article of clothing that was other than black or gray. navy blue knee socks do not go with black anything. one could argue I suppose that navy blue socks could be worn with gray without making the wearer look like they could not perceive the difference between blue and black but I was a purist and wore gray socks with my gray clothes.
the navy blue knee socks I collected in a drawer and then later in a milk crate on the floor of my closet and on occasions such as laundry day when my regular socks were being washed I would wear a pair but they lasted a very long time because I rarely wore them at all. they lasted so long in fact that I cannot recall how I got rid of them finally. I do not have them anymore so far as I am aware but I do not know where I left the last stash of them either unless they are in that suitcase of old clothes that no longer fit that I always told myself I was going to leave outside on the street for those who might could use them but I have not yet they are still there at the top of the stairs after more than a decade.
perhaps the navy blue knee socks are all persistently collected together at the top of my stairs. perhaps I have not yet got rid of them. they are even more tenacious than I had imagined.
I wear blue regularly now and my socks are often brightly colored and non-matching but knee socks are no longer appropriate not to mention big enough. and I sit in the front seat now after finding my home in the backseat so long ago.
what the backseat has to do with hosiery is pretty much just that hosiery and suffering were equivalent notions in the Georgia summer in the backseat of a black-upholstered and unairconditioned car. the way the heat would slam into you when you opened the door after church in July and once you were too old to wear knee socks with dresses the way your pantyhose would cling to your skin in that way that no clothes should when it is that hot and especially the way they were not made for long-legged young women so they would slouch down to somewhere between your crotch and your knees leaving your thighs to keep each other overly warm and uncomfortably chafed and sometimes even baldly heat rashed.
remember heat rash?
I didn’t sweat so much then as I do now but sweat in the heat and humidity of motionless subtropical air is no great relief anyway. without sweat I was hot. with sweat I would have been sweaty and hot. either way the mystery of pantyhose will always be a mystery to me because when I wore it I had no idea why I had to wear it and I still do not understand its allure especially in black-upholstered and unairconditioned cars where anything completely covering your skin is a torture and especially when that which covers your skin does not really cover it at all but reveals it there in its exposed vulnerability as though vulnerability were precisely what one was expected to put on with one’s pantyhose and there I would sit unprotected from heat light and the eyes of pubescent boys as well as those of men too old to be looking but looking nonetheless and without even thinking much about it.
as I said several things were wrong and worked together to make pantyhose one of my more unpleasant memories but I think I may have turned out okay and that if these things had not been wrong I might not have turned out this way at all although probably I still would have been okay just a different sort. what is disconcerting is that every time I think I have turned out at all I discover that I have not but am being hurried along towards some other turning where I likewise will get no rest but with all the turning and moving along and turning and moving along are punctuated shadow and subtle acceleration to keep me company and that is enough I mean it is more than enough even it is sometimes almost too much to the point of suggesting love’s multiple origins and how it is that they will not be kept anywhere for very long even though they rarely leave you where you are.
and this is why nothing adds up but the accounting trails ahead of its own running totals by a factor which is itself on the move. even sticky in the backseat in July I knew this but I also knew that it would be years before I would be able actually to say it out loud but rather from the low rumble and the passing obscurity I picked up a silent near-promise that has since passed—so many times I have lost count—as an excuse to live.
the Blue Socks Chapter continues
in two weeks if all goes according to plan which it will not but why not be optimistic
