11.24.06
Some Autumnal Thoughts on a Friday in Late November
Smoke a cigarette as the evening’s last sunlight dies behind the silencing veil of weightless white clouds turned dark orange, goldenrod, light coral and indian red, slate blue and orchid…. Smoke a cigarette as the air chills and the street lights come on. Cars light up along the freeway in glowing red and shining white; cars, — dark shapes between alien words of light, indecipherable and blurred. Cars as a metaphor for my thought. Far above, there appear the first of the few stars visible here, far above, far removed, distant — but like relatives still close as blood. Smoke a cigarette; inhale the killing carcinogens, exhale the dying dreams.
And the drift net of my concern, my grasping care for my life, catches on the heights of the city’s boxlike structures and all its poles and towering forms, like the words catch in my throat even now.
It is the season again for me to wonder why: “Why on earth do I go on?” And although I have answers — varied and sundry — it all feels somehow sadly like a collection of dryly pragmatic excuses to my own heart. Crush out the cigarette. Watch the last feeble stream of smoke drift into nothingness, or a haze of pointlessness (as it were; and what’s the difference?). I am here, now, and it is another day. And it is the season for me to wonder why. I wonder why.
Disparate images: all the jetsam of longing and flotsam of hope gathering itself together on an endless strand of an otherwise empty beach… while Sigur Rós’s ( ) — “Untitled 4″, currently — plays in my headphones. What am I telling myself? What is it I hear?
My mind keeps going back to the interview with Robert Pirsig I recently read. He’s 78 years old, now, almost twice my age, and yet I feel closer to his age than to half of my own. Bookstores still place Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila in the “New Age” section rather than the philosophy section. That book — along with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — changed my life, or the way I think about my life. But at the age of 40 years, I have to wonder what the change mattered, what it meant if I make it current and ask what it means now. I am not a contented person. I am not a “happy” person. I am not satisfied. Nor do I believe I ever will be any of those things. What I found in ZMM was not an answer but a deep, abiding, permanent question that Lila did not seek to answer but only compounded. I gather from the interview with Pirsig that he is still working on it for himself, but I am perhaps projecting a bit (for the fact is that I don’t really know). And I have to admit that Pirsig’s path is not mine after all, however similar it may appear to be, …which is for the best, of course, because I can learn more from the quality of our differences, you know?
I tried reading the 30,000 page menu at the metaphysics restaurant and found nothing in the end (which, as Pirsig points out, is what they serve there). But unlike Pirsig, I did not find myself asking the question, “Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?” The answer is simply that there was no motive, and it’s too bad for those people who feel unhappy about that. All we have are our own motives as we find them, and they exist beyond physics (qua the physical universe) even as they emerge from and depend, in the end, on them (so far as we can know or rationally assert); i.e., there is no way to know or experience them apart from what we, as human beings, who are a (by-?) product of the physical universe, know and experience as the universe. So-called “metaphysical” ideas are, themselves, merely part of the physical world like any other thoughts. Putting it in entirely other language: with regard to so-called “metaphysics”, there is nothing to transcend and nothing to transcend in-to. To quote Pirsig again, “The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there”. That really rather says it all.
So, here I am. Darkness has settled over this side of the planet and the sun, existing as it does in the sky of some other country, is for me but a remembered thing I expect to see again. An old French comedy, Marquet and Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances Monsieur Hulot, 1953), plays on the television. My lover is sleeping. The heat of the room is impersonally palpating my skin and my ears feel damp, nestled in my headphones, as “Untitled 9 A” plays sweetly, sadly, beautifully…. I am not sure what I am doing. I light another cigarette. It’s the weekend, and I have time left in my life to figure things out, for whatever that’s worth. But I am also fairly sure that I shall feel again like I know what’s it all about, when I am in the middle of an extended embrace and loving eyes are fixed on mine, all acceptance and empathy, and love slays that noisome portion of my mind once more… (though, that is not why I go on).
