09.09.06
Night Thoughts
This strange creature I am…. Every day another gambit, another stumble, another folly, another stroke of genius or spasm of the idiot savant in me. Yesterday: melancholy, death metal, and smiles for Jung. Today: vitriol, treacle, and a joke concerning a man and a bar. Tomorrow: …? I have no plans; my outlook is a façade of mother-of-pearl. And I notice again that my belly is a little more round, now. My hair is a bit thinner and has receded farther (I do not say “retreated”, as my hair is not afraid) up my skull. My eyes are just as blue, and for all the same reasons — reasons both scientific and superstitious — and express with delicacy my unspoken thoughts. Blue eyes as blue as the sea, as the sky, as Billie Holiday’s veins or Nina Simone’s light. My longing is intact in fleshed out paradigm, but it is suffering from pixelation — a numb penumbra of platitudinous plasticity. Every day, I hope to get by. Every day, my hope gets a little bit broader, a little more vague. Every day I feel a little more everyday, but my heart remembers Borges and worries its feathers as absently it contemplates. The night’s still solace remains terrific to me.
Hmm…
Let’s go, you and I should. There is a place in me I’ve been dying for you to know. It is where the river Sane plunges smoothly into a void. The opening to the void is shaped like the lips of a courtesan saying, “Ahhhh…” — run in reverse. It is the very moment, formed into the likeness of a place out of time, when I simultaneously fall fast adream and awake, eyes wide open. I am never sure on which side of the equation I am, on which side I exist. But I am sure Borges was right when he said,
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
I have known this for a very long time, now. I discovered it shortly before I died my first time. Don’t ask me when that was; I was a different person, then, and the time was a different time. Some lessons transcend particular timelines to become eternal. Such lessons reside at nodes, at nexus, as nuance resides in the educated meaning of some sentence, beyond the frail claim of the dictionary proper.
I have known it, and, too, that it means nothing more or less than what I import to it or from it. Here and now I am thinking of fractal forms, of self-repeating replicators reproducing ceaselessly. In the end, they recreate the face of all faces. That is where you get closest to the anthropomorphic “God” of our species, and see yourself therein like some grand secret. That there is infinitely more beyond it is — inconvenient, for some, hateful, for others, a relief for a few and an inebriating fire of profoundest pleasure for fewer still. But once you have fallen into that courtesan’s mouth (like a candied cherry or a peeled grape) and been sucked into the void, there is nothing to deny… or, well, nothing is undeniable and everything is everything. In such a state of mind (“Æternum servans sub pectore vulnus” — Virgil) and weary from the labors of some given/unnamed day, I lay me down by my love’s softly, slowly, undulating side, to feel her stir somewhere in the warm depths of her own deep night. She presses back into me and sighs out her breath and I feel as if I understand in this moment why it is that I remain “I” against the familiar dread pull of all entropic reason.
The night’s still solace remains terrific to me, and I am terrified by my failure to be negated, but my mind glows in the redolent embers of love’s bare mythologies and strives to live on. As I light another Kool cigarette and take another swallow of malt liquor, arch my back and stretch my toes, the sheer inertia of my animal sense of Dasein overwhelms my wounded pride with a cosmic lust for encompassing existence wholly by being consciously encompassed by it. To completely and absolutely (not to say utterly) recognize the whole along with one’s part in the whole, one’s place and role in it, is to forget for a time the stinging barb of the ineluctable modality of one’s unassuageable existential vagabondage.
And so I go.
