Sixteen

 There suddenly was a loud click and the door seemed to become unhinged. But in fact it only became so on one doorjamb; the other moved ajar, like the door was inverting the left and right sides so as to open precisely at the end you wouldn’t have expected, given the placement of the door handle (and so the children saw the  handle at the right but the door now opened from the left. They looked in total puzzlement at this phenomenon, unfolding slowly before them.). The odd mixing of air between the inside and the outer hallway produced a smell of musty rags and mops, with the vague smell of cleaning solution. There was a slight chill to the hallway air. The children peered inside, only to find the ridiculously complicated contraption established for this excruciating reading and unlocking ritual.

The children had long ceased to keep up with this endless recitation. Not being able to contemplate their escape, on account of its seeming impossibility (for the trip was not, it appeared, reversible), they simply fell in resignation to the chill ground, gathered some old rags, boxes and ancient-looking material bags, and collapsed in fatigue. Some of them took to playing games with the odds-and-ends they could find around them. The eldest looked on, dejected.

He wasn’t there, as they stepped through the doorway and into the room on the other side. In his place was another complicated bit of machinery—an old-style tape recorder, which to the children looked as baffling and dimly comprehensible as the inside of a great mechanical clock. It was faded olive green, with beige and off-white keys, one with a red square in the middle, and a series of lights, one of which, bright cherry red, was illuminated and now blinking.

“Hey mister!” the eldest shouted. “What gives here? Where are you? We went through all this reading and…”

Just a minute, children! His voice seemingly came from everywhere, for in this second basement, there were more empty rooms than filled, but all were connected one way or another: either directly through a door, or indirectly through passageways and a series of hallways. The only items that each room had were books, and stacks of records with no obvious pattern. Some rooms found them all neatly arrayed and assembled (and thus one could have deduced that there might be some pattern, if one chose to investigate), in others, a jumble of books and records with the occasional machine of some unknown function, tangled up with coiled wires and other gadgetry creating a haphazard perimeter.

There is a secret here. I am not here—or there. But you are. And this brings us to the secret. I cannot be with you for the secret, but I must tell about something the secret knows but which, since I cannot be there to tell you about it in person, can only be shown to you from a distance. Look through the end of the telescope you look out of, and things close seem very far off. This is how you must look for me.

The eldest found the telescope. It had bent its head down, falling toward the ground like a puppet who lost his animating spirit, left to just the being there of things, alone, sad for want of soul. It seemed to be weeping. Find the opening and look through. Now, you can all recall the games that you play, can’t you? “Yes mister, of course we can. What does it have to do with anything? We’ve been waiting to get through that door for like an hour or something, and you’re not even there. Well, here, where it sounded like you’d be. Are you really there?” Yes of course children. I am always there, where I am. But you must think about the games you play. “Ok so what about them?” They have rules, right? But you have to keep them kind of quiet, in order to really play the games, right? “I guess, yeah.” So what if you had to always talk out the rules, what would become of the game? “I guess kind of stupid, maybe boring. You can’t just play a game that is nothing but rules all the time, right?” Well, yes—and no at the same time. The children let out a great chorus of laughter.

They spread throughout the room into which they had been led by the welcomed activation of the lock mechanism. Besides the strange and antique electronic equipment, which lent to the room a sense that it had been completely forgotten long ago, there were other oddities. Tiny total, miniature furniture, and even smaller odds-and-ends that might populate a small village in a little country that had grown up upon a tiny world, tucked away inside this room within a secondary basement, buried into a hill—the n-th level of someone’s lost dream.

The game you play has rules to it, which makes it sort of special, a special time and place—otherwise what would you be doing? And the rules are like this too, they give the game a special thing, special and certain and very specific things to do. So as you keep the rules tucked away in your head, and as you stay within that special place … the more you do this the more wondrous and joyful and brilliantly fun the games become. Don’t you think so? “Well, yeah, I suppose that’s got to be true, ‘cause if we’d forget the rules or the special place the game needs from us, we wouldn’t be playing it. That’s when you get angry, ‘cause somebody stops, or trips up and does something against the rules.” So the whole thing with a game, a good game, is that rules are there, with force, but best when silent and just in your head, so you don’t have to think about it all the time. Yet I am gone and I’ve got you thinking about me, don’t I? “True, yeah that’s true. We’re not too happy about that, either.” So, but you see, this is the thing about the secret. I have to tell about something that is like the silent rule. But it’s about a person I’ve tried telling you about before, and this person has to be tucked inside our heads for me to really tell you the most important thing about him, which is the story he tries to write. The soup he died into was only the last thing he did, but the thing of his story required him to be eating that soup, but the recipe was found in a strange way, and that must be another story that takes us on a small—I promise you, children!—and brief search for the recipe. Now, you see it was quite fortunate that the lock mechanism was activated when it was, right in the middle of the story I was telling you through the recording you just happened upon, which was in my place. Finding that leads us to forage around the house for the ingredients, and, finding them, leads us to the soup. And—only through the soup can we truly understand this strange little hermit I spoke to you about recently. “Ok but J—n, he’s got to get home soon, and S—m, he’s feeling tired. Actually we’re all kind of tired.” Well then, I shall play out some music for you to nap by!

He was still consoled by the fact that he had managed to place some more distance between himself and the children seeking him out—for that was the appearance of the game he had gotten them involved in presently. He worked and thought and wrote and dreamed best only when pursued, or in pursuit. But the moment the chase was broken was the moment his torpor returned and his desk seemed a shallow grave, empty just enough for his corpse. He could only be revivified by the thought that he would soon enough return to his work, after he pursued the interest of this other thing, or sought refuge from the pursuit of someone or other. Later was time enough for the work. Thus, in this moment, awaiting the arrival of the children through a series of necessary complications, which he contrived to fabricate into the further intricacies of the story of this singularity, the hermit, he set to working out some fibers for the tapestry. But first, the lullaby. Ah! But would the cello sonatas of Bach be too much? Perhaps the flatulent relaxation of the agitated nineteenth century in Fauré?—music that dissipated a whole fury of artistic genius in a few short years. The whirl of his A minor Barcarolle wafted out of reclusive speakers. It was low enough for their ears that it managed to capture their drowsiness and configure it to its own. With the children soon preoccupied by subtly shaped dreams (whose trajectory followed the dissipations of that fateful and tragic age), he soon fell into his own dreamy reverie. And he found himself thinking of his own failings.

Was he ‘noble’? The word, archaic and underused, besides being now unknown, was like a dance of corporeal vitality to his wraith of a life. In a great castle of a work penned during that time, one phrase, like a single but crucial stone, he managed to cement as the foundation of his own hut: “in him was the highest pitch of greatness; here was present the rarest harmony: nobility of talent matched with nobility of soul.” He knew this could never be said of himself. And with this he sunk into a deep melancholy. He cried. Softly. The Barcarolle became a Ballade. But nobility is not for this age, he tried comforting himself. It was a hollow sentiment. Still, he had no true conception of ‘nobility’, except the vague sense of a self-certain stoicism combined with something that might be called ‘fortitude’. He searched after himself and set upon the notion of grace—wasn’t it ‘grace’ that determines the depth of or even the extent of one’s nobility? He thought, continuing, that there could be no nobility without some grace, and that he had, at least, a certain kind of elegance in his ways that could be called grace. And this grace was the charm he cast wide, like a net, but which was wasted always in the vain search for love—vain because of his need to be loved. The most inauthentic love. Thus wasted grace was no grace at all. Therefore he came to the conclusion that he could not become what he was not. If you are neither noble nor graceful, you cannot become such. Becoming what one was not was the highest inauthenticity. The becoming only covers the blemish with want. And there is no becoming without wanting, or desire. Here was the secret—to be or not! It was simple. Bivalent. A simple choice. Either/Or. Exclusive. Authentic choices are always absolute in this way.

He could not get past that one sentence in the book that had once preoccupied him: “… he knew how to love his friends….”, for he knew he didn’t know how. That fell into him like a white-hot slug of ore, melting its way to the core. It cooled and lodged deep inside; his sadness now had a clear and obvious pathway out. And it flowed. Overflowed. He could not be noble who did not know how to love, for if grace is nobility’s form, its substance is the knowledge of how to love. There was nobility without love, surely, he thought—but not without the knowledge of how to love. His own failing was precisely that: love itself escaped his knowledge of how to; but he consumed everything else he could lay his mind upon, and absorbed a knowledge of how. But in this liberality and eclecticism the singularity of love itself went missing. Surely one could love many, perhaps many at once; but it must be, if authentic, a knowledge of how to love one only. Each time a whole cosmos must be founded around the one, so that if there is a second, the love works there because of the one it is. In the many, there is always the one, the true, the singular, the indivisible, the a-tom. He populated his life with the many. But never did he find, he thought, the one in them.

He lived the horror of the philosophers of the nineteenth century—estrangement, the crowds of humanity, the fire of Prometheus finally seen for its true essence in the struggle to wrest soul from god. His novels, wraiths that haunted every mundane task, had only one idea, and it was his life’s purpose, he thought: to rebuild a fortress of self, to find the one again, the one who was worthy of the mantle of love. To glorify, finally, the self, to render it immune to the depredations of that century, reeling from its sudden loss of god. The false starts under the Age of Reason became the tragedy of revolutions, and the vainglorious ineptitude of the fearful reactions to them. No! Only at the century’s end would it have a vague sense, a glimpse, of a real possibility of self—it was covered in ash from the failures of that Old World and purified in the fire of the New, exposed, fragile, strange, ridiculous even. But it met with its true teacher from far beyond the Mediterranean. Yet they could not render it coherent. It was stilted, sentimental, stinking of idealisms and burdened by hope (Furies that pursued it all the way home). All of their authors in the North were clattering away in empty castles, worshiping at vacant thrones, building castles inside servant’s quarters and surrounding the castle by motes of servitude. He saw the possibility. The individual—one who could and would not be divided. But it fell stillborn onto his pages, each one a trial by absent jury that ended in the death penalty over and over again.

And so he fell into a long reverie while the children slept and kept vigil by his figurines and looking-glasses, books, notebooks, windows shaded and bare, doors opened, half-opened, closed, hidden. The light of the afternoon was half absorbed by the cloud bank that had moved in to mark a sharp edge of grey from illuminated sky. He moved to find in this room a notebook heavy with the thoughts that now returned to him from days as a no-longer youth still not having come into his own—in other words, from his early thirties, a time when the first presentiments of time, of death, of a long night ahead, are felt, and one enters into a new skin slightly bitter for being both new and a sign of age, two figures that taunt each other as the moon and the sun play their eternal games. He would contain a century in a page or two of prose so dense with refulgent depictions, aphoristic microcosms thick with essence—overflowing with Promethean intent, covering philosophies, political, metaphysical, ethical; with composers and their struggles; with the new breed of psychologist and their internal battles for mind or body … an age he could enwrap with one gesture of Spirit. From the century’s first days to its close with the death of souls and empires great and obscure. It was the terrible fruit of many generations before. Terrible. Hellish. Bloody. Baffling.

Seventeen

 There he was, children. It was quite some time ago, but he was there, buried alive—willingly. Oh, he could leave, but didn’t care to. He made a pact with the world to disappear, to remain to it invisible, in forgiveness of the world for what it made visible. He disappeared.

There were many attempts by him to begin something, it seems—at least we cannot quite figure on what it was that he was actually doing. We are stuck with several hypotheses—guesses, children, we can only make guesses. Everything I explain to you, therefore, rests upon some guess or other. The closer we step to this man, the further and further away we drift from him, his life, what he did, what he thought, what he willed. We want to know, for he is our only hope. If we are ever to return to that world from which escaped only to bury himself, willingly, alive in order for its salvation—if we are ever to return to it, we must somehow solve the puzzle he left us. At least, dear children, that’s the game I’ve established for myself, and the one I’ve brought you into. The whole house have I dedicated to it. Every room. Every staircase. Every hallway. The gardens. Everywhere stands as a great yes! to this crazy invisible fool of a man. Meanwhile, each thing he wrote seemed to say no! to everything we take as ordinary, basic, plain, common … to our lives he seems to be saying forever no!

If you allow me to take you with me inside his hovel, then allow yourself to think of what it must have been like, alone, inside, without friend or even enemy (except that he took the visible for his enemy—but what is that, children? Nothing!). Let us choose a random day to examine.

What, though, must our hypothesis be, in order to explore the question in specific terms? We must assume that, hunched over a table we assume he used for both writing and eating, we must also assume that the placement of the various objects described in his journal by him on this particular day, corresponds to a text we discovered in a distant room in this labyrinth of a house. Furthermore, we must assume that the first and last letters of the most common names for the items so described correspond to concepts he develops in that text. And, that the order of the concepts is itself significant in some way, and that they exactly follow the arrangement of the objects arrayed upon his table that day described in his journal in such exacting detail. You see, dear children, he never was always exact; rather, his journal is fragmentary, with long pauses between entries. But occasionally, it’s like he’s struck by something and then for days on end the journal entries get larger and larger and more exacting and specific. We choose here only the most specific and the largest as our example for the moment.

Now, the corresponding text itself was fragmentary, and I’ve been quoting from it here and there, as our game advances. In this case, the corresponding bit of text we discovered for this table-top enigma was a strange and even obscure description of someone—a woman it seems. She began to haunt our researches. Here is the text we found…

She had the countenance of an iron-age wanderer, loosed from her family long ago, baked bronze under the wanderer’s sun, and with a consciousness so dispersed by the windless intrepidity of her frantic motions roving, that she was become wind itself, perceptible only when in motion, inscrutable to any corporeal eye and to all who would try undertake an inquest into her inner nature (for to try to capture wind seems an impossible venture, except in the abstract). This creature was fortunate enough to have gone through countless curatorial ages without becoming entombed within the curiosity cabinets of those hooded fools who made their daily habits out of the decaying scrolls of glories they would never know but which, in naïve and vain attempting, they sought, somehow, to win for themselves, and for posterity, through their own contributions to the oubliette, baited with knowledge, which slowly swallowed them whole, a whale that would never yields this meal even back in bone. 

She had deep, thick and blackened lines worn into the leather of skin wrapped around this rarified, winded soul—too restless to cling to the garbage cans and trash heaps from which she flitted, to and fro, deriving, sometimes, a fly’s sustenance, essence of decayed and disregarded matter, distilled death made by her into life-giving, life-prolonging nourishment. She had eyes of milky glass that shone with a gaze that blew fast through those who hazarded a direct glance in her direction. There seemed, to her audience, nothing solid to attach the vision to, for their glances, sliding off the visible countenance, always were reflected back to a concomitant inward monologue exploring the meaning that this wisp of a creature roving could have. 

She pushed a garbage cart, a lifeless metal camel with a microcosm upon its back that was the only population in her caravan. Her body looked puffed, but it was from the repetition of clothes that encumbered her movements so that she was bloated stiff, as a swollen invalid or a hapless child doomed to an impossible snowsuit for an impossible trek across a tundra of sadness for the promised joyful exuberances of snowplay. But this woman, housed underneath strata of textiles, would cross tundra and desert alike, protected, shielded from sun, storms, snow, ice, wind—for these were her very own metaphysic (and one of the hooded fools struck gold when he wrote, under cover of night: ‘… for sun does not illuminate sun, rainstorms do not rain upon themselves, snow does not snow itself, ice does not freeze ice, wind does not blow itself but each touches upon another, and she was the origin of it all, a sun to others, a cool rain amidst summer’s sun, snow to carpet and then silence the frenzy, ice that would put staid to the rushing torrent of desolation around her, wind to give lift to the sails of their imaginations—yes, all this she was protected from because these were her very own things, and things these were of her’). 

And so indeed—she looked vested for a course through snowy plains, yet banished, somehow instantaneously, to our desert-hot land where she appeared to us as some hallucinated fantasy, concentrated into this column of wrapped bones-and-flesh, an opaque ghost, frightful but alluring at once. She seemed to be intoxicated by a strange potion, which she had acquired sometime before this apparition, fondling it with care, rhythmically pulling it up to, and putting it away from, her rusted orange-burgundy lips, parched but for the rivulets forming from this drink. In between draughts there seemed gathering some notions, and suddenly, but inconstantly, her now-moistened lips began quivering and soon established a repetitious movement, inaudible incantations, mumbled furiously. She intoned verses obscure in the sheer quietude; she whispered to some inward deity, or was manufacturing a mystery for a cult of one—or of one yet to come. 

Bequilted as she was in a heavy blue cloak swollen from these many layers from the inside out, somewhere they yielded flesh, adhering to her body by some occult power, magnetized by the bones which kept this creature upright. She wandered obsessively between the many garbage heaps which, in her shadow, sat longingly, treasured outposts that gave freely its loot to this solemn pilgrim, almost ready to find a long repose in a foreign bog, unifying with the refuse that now, somehow, is her nourishment. 

Her hair was white, yet retained a suggestion of blond or some yellow color long ago soaked with the light of many suns risen and now set. She had cheeks red with earthy vitality that, even though the nights and many passing days brought a whiff of death in constant reminder to her that this sojourn (as for all) has but one destination, remained immune to such horsemen of dark truth (and the fool inscribed upon his scroll, ‘…yet does the light of suns ever die? the wind truly cease? Nay, but a change in form brings the truth of death and life to one common form, a unity above all finality.’). Her caravan already hitched death, and pulled it along for a long journey with no known end or beginning. Neither notion—that of beginnings or of endings—seemed appropriate to her nature; her steps, a desert wandering, took her altogether outside our spaces and our times, and thus beyond a first or last thing. She simply was, and sometime later would not be gone so much as have been returned (she was a living repetition having no need of a first or last thing), finding her nuptials, at last, underneath the soil, the dirt, the refuse, the things obscure to us now.

The woman as it turned out, upon further scrutiny of the text, was a kind of impression, an abstract form of something much grander which this strange hermit had been working upon, and who finally recorded in his bizarre way as text and activity (or rather as a sort of complicated dance between the two). This woman was a consequence, a result of having taken an action not sanctioned by the hermit’s system, for this, in fact, is what least we could discover about his strange habits: that they amounted to an elaborate system, a gigantic bureaucracy. As with anything, there was of course the sheer thing-ness of it, and it’s opposite. What was its opposite? The Heresy. There was the System and the Heresy, the One or the Other—and there was only one other. Yet both had structure—else what could have kept this fellow alive and working for so long (we supposed)? He entire life was devoted to just these two things, and we can only assume that, given the protracted nature of his work, his indefatigable energies thrown at the task, and his absolute fidelity to it, that he worked not only on the One or the Other—but on both simultaneously. Indeed, we found evidence to suggest that he worked not merely simultaneously, for how, exactly would you accomplish that? No, we found extensive evidence that he created an elaborate system whereby he took his work on the One, and then on the Other, captured it, the replayed them on yet another system of complicated apparatuses, so that both could be witnessed in operation together, synchronously. So it seems that he had to create the two, separately, then join them in synchrony by means of this complicated apparatus, be witness to the spectacle, then, reflect, return to the work on the One or the Other, and only then repeat the whole process again—but with the work of the previous iterations firmly in mind. It grew into not merely a system of some profoundly elaborate kind the world had never known; but it became a layered world, an embryo of an entire cosmos, a whole life, spheres within spheres of life, working to produce both the System and the Heresy, its opposite. The enormity of the resulting work inevitably led not only to exhaustion (and this we could only suppose, as he simply had died into his soup), but it also led to the construction of things and documents of such complexity that, by the end of his many decades of toil, what was achieved eradicated any remaining difference between the System and the Heresy. Here, as the asymptote of work trailed off to infinity, as the differences between the two became so refined, in-differentiation resulted. As he drove the differences to their extremes, and as they were refined in light of counter-positions, and as those counter-positions produced more objections that had to be internalized into the original position, the result was—at infinity, of course!—only one thing. Yet, in truth, if that one resulting thing did, as we were to discover, contain every difference as nuance and passing notion, then while everything was there, all you had to do to recover any one thing in particular was to magnify one spot and it opened up into a microcosm. It was more or less hidden, but it was there, all of it. All ready was the secret of a hologram present here in the text itself. We had to discover this, but only after the fact of another amazing discovery…

In the Heresy, you weren’t punished, and it wasn’t a bad thing. Or at least good and bad were themselves found within each—hence the terms were clearly, in the hermit’s world, relative in a very specific way. This duality was actually, we soon hypothesized, the hermit’s ingenious means of letting everyone in. He gave everyone a choice, a fork in the road everywhere you turned, so that you always found a way forward, no matter what. The Heresy just meant that you went somewhere else; and if, when arriving at that somewhere else, you happened to make a decision that aligned back with the System? Well, then you just got to return—the doorway appeared, and a stairwell if necessary, and in no time you were back. With all of the change and alteration, what you even wanted or desired—and this was a peculiar preoccupation with the hermit at all times in his work, and it’s what actually fueled, formally, the activity that animated the text with which someone not in the System or in the Heresy worked—this too became something else altogether. That’s what really surprised us: at least in the hermit’s world, in itself, desire and want themselves changed so that effectively they were abolished, at least in the form we, who never had known the System or Heresy, knew them. What it was about the System/Heresy duality that accomplished this was a central mystery to us, as we excavated and analyzed all that we came upon in this sunken hovel.

As he turned to face the children, he found them fast asleep. He immediately saw the absurdity of his present situation—he was facing a wall, and as the children had fallen asleep, he now was speaking to it. Not just speaking. He spoke animatedly, gesturing rapidly here and there as he was wont to do. To a wall.

So, dearest children (he was now addressing the unconscious), even though we discovered this System/Heresy idea of his, and even a strange figure who embodied and ensouled the essence of it in her own person, a figure, an emblem of it, we still had to approach an even greater question than this—the question that will possibly put an end not only to our present researches for the end of this journey today, but also an end to your own childhood itself. If we try to answer or even explore the question, you will no longer be who you were. You will be someone else…and this is exactly what must happen, for the answer to the question is finalized only by you in your own self. Without it happening to you, you would never know anything worth knowing. And this is the one thing truly worth knowing.

Then the snoring began. And it echoed a bit, as there were some several doors ajar, leading into a rather cavernous hallway which in turn led to other rooms with doors ajar, and so on indefinitely (he liked to think so). He continued nonetheless, expecting that he could exactly reproduce the explanation sometime later. This was the trial run, he considered.

Now as it happens, an old text was found that had apparently undergone much abuse over the years. The spine was tattered and frayed, and was so unlike the others that it stood out quite obviously. Inside the pages were heavily annotated quite meticulously and carefully in very minuscule script. Indeed, an apparatus was necessary in order to read it and, we assumed, in order to put it to the page. Somehow only a telescope would do the trick, fitted with a kind of sun filter. This took us some time to figure, and when at last we did, we could not accept that this was indeed the case, that no other apparatus would do. It was as if the hermit managed to convince the laws of nature to suspend themselves just for the technical intricacies required to read the text, and resume otherwise.

One passage was particularly heavily annotated. We were struck by its beauty, concision and its starkness: “There must be something simple before all things and this must be other than all the things which come after it … it is also said to be beyond being…”. His annotations on this page alone amounted to some thirty-thousand words as we could count, and amazingly were flush with footnotes that were themselves often given to evolve into entire texts in themselves. And each of these supplemental texts were marked with an icon, a symbol of some sort. It was a beautiful foiled impression carefully laid into the title page, which prosaically announced the point in the original annotation where the footnote was relevant. Now, these texts happened to be legible with the unaided eye, and so we read them as such. But the foil impression baffled us because it seemed to be intricate but uninteresting to us. One afternoon light happened to strike the foil as we were pursuing one of these texts, trying to understand a particularly difficult point of interpretation in the original annotation, and the foil seemed to come alive with a rainbow of colors. We still couldn’t find anything interesting beyond this seemingly trivial display of prismatic colors, when one of us suggested we view the thing through the telescopic viewing apparatus we had concocted for the reading of the annotations. Of course! we all shouted. We then hurried over, set it upon the viewing dais we had contrived, and in a moment the foil revealed a hidden inscription of a sort: it was a hologram, and it required yet another apparatus to magnify and examine its details.

Now, as it happened, the apparatus that would seem to be required for the magnification and examination of the extraordinary details of this foiled impression, so carefully impressed into the surface of this first page, could not be a microscope or anything like one. Of course, seeing the page from the telescope put what was close very far away from us, and only then did the hologram, glinting in the sunlight of the morning, begin to reveal itself to us. But now, it appeared that magnification was required for examination—distance could not longer suffice. But the moment the page with its clandestine, foiled holographic surface was brought physically near, the entirely of this apparition disappeared, and the page resumed its ordinary, prosaic and rather uninspiring appearance. Only in distance did the holographic nature of the page appear; but we had to close that distance for more exacting examination—thus, magnification. Since we could see the hologram itself only from afar, and only through our inverted telescopic apparatus that we had (rather ingeniously!) devised, we decided on a simple, and perhaps quite elegant—even obvious—solution … treat the telescopic image as the object that needed magnification! That is, put the image under microscopic magnification. And for this we had to invent yet another contraption in order to achieve the desired results.

And for this, he decided to rouse the children who’d been sleeping this whole time. He decided that a performative demonstration, and even a recreation of the moment of discovery, was in order for them, for in truth their innocence was a necessary component for the authentic recreation of the moment of discovery.

He thought that the act of assembling the necessary apparatuses, which would no doubt involve lots of clanging and clacking, doors opening and closing throughout the house, stomping down steps and creaking up others, would be enough to wake them. Since this would likely take some time, for he had even to remember where all the necessary apparatuses, and components for the apparatuses, actually were (scattered as they were throughout the house—some upstairs, some in the basement, others possibly in drawers long forgotten in staircases he could perhaps barely even remember), he decided to play some of his favorite music from an ancient phonograph he’d set up in one of the rooms overflowing with books and his endless manuscripts. What shall I choose?

These days the convenience of everything everywhere instantaneously found him oppressed. The sheer mountain of choice was itself daunting. Rather, he opted for the spontaneity of browsing his (or rather, his long-deceased friends’) collection of plastic records—such a rare item, made even the more valuable by the scarcity of the materials themselves, arguably more valuable than their weight in water. Oddly, this experience of physically browsing physical objects sitting there before you, though not nearly as rich in endless variety that the other contemporary forms of storage allowed for, actually allowed for more decisive choice. See the full extent of even a vast collection meant that you could, hypothetically, reach the end. And the end meant some kind of fulfilment. Conclusiveness was a valuable but fleeting experience. Ah, this is it! He chose a duty album containing an ancient recording of the last piano sonatas of Haydn. They had this almost aleatoric meandering to them, a final exploration of the ends of his harmonic understanding, a kind of critique of pure harmony, so sparse and bare that the limits, and yet even the evolution, of his musical style could be disclosed. Perfect.

Fifteen

 Now, as the children fell, mesmerized by the incessant rhythm of his storytelling, he rushed into a room somewhere down from where the children were, and again poured over the many dozens of journals and notebooks (But what, he quickly thought, was the difference? Perhaps the one was addressed to someone; and the other, written by yourself, for yourself, with yourself—totally transcendent, but falling away from yourself into another self all of your own? A notebook just says, declares, questions—talking to yourself, or to nobody at all, which doesn’t matter. Though, he thought further, can you escape yourself ever? In the journal, at least you have the consolation that you are, in fact, addressing someone—yourself. Maybe not as yourself, but the hand that presses itself down into the book, the paper, the keys (the whatever-it-is that mediates the whole thing) is your hand and, try as you might, like that Evil Genius invented long ago in that ancient philosophic treatise on self-certainty, you cannot escape the fact that it is your hand, that you are the progenitor, the holy Demiurgos. As singular as you are—that singularity is inescapable, as inescapable as the snare the Genius sets for himself when he wants to seduce you into total deception: there must be a there there in order to be deceived. Sly as the fox is, he cannot escape all snares….)

Finally, there appeared to him one notebook, which became its opposite, the journal. (Both sequestered in his youthful sorrows, and therefore tediously earnest, yearning, still full of the last flickering hope for recognition, a message-in-a-bottle received on the other end of time, and actually replied to.) He randomly opened it, and found several pages upon which his glance fell, causing him to linger, and to fall into abyssal reverie. But then, his idea—brilliant—was that in these pages he would find the secret to the place he was seeking with the assistance of the children, the place wherein the hermit dwelled, the place wherein all tales held their conclusions in abeyance, waiting for the singular moment, rarest of all, when that hermit himself rises from his soup—rises again!—and concludes all syllogisms, finalizes all agreements (all pledges of faith, all obedience to law), and speaks, in reverse … where the thought chases the word, the tongue and lips seem mute, and the gasp for air enough to speak comes after the speech.

In the journal, it said…

On the 20^th of May. Marooned.

1

I take from C.—that cynic, the Romanian Dog who has lived inside an ever so slightly silvered barrel, living off the fumes of a civilization he so well has pronounced dead—I take from him a single truth, perhaps the only one he himself had truly discovered (for himself, an utterly alone truth, standing in itself, waiting for confirmation in the bitter sorrows of another): what quietude the desolation of a civilization affords the thinker (in order that he might think against himself), to wander and reflect (ah what dancing grace of Platonic movements would we have known these thousands of years before great cataclysm!)—to dance upon the landscape of decrepitude, the past magnificence that burned itself out on the excesses of its own brilliance (its progress the excessive Real of its own self-annihilation, an orgiastic consummation of its own burning Love of existence, triumphant in its infinite repetition; would this be a schlect Unendlichkeit?), the coming silence that promises to grow into a grand chorus of voiceless whispers, legends and fables indecipherable upon the breath of the Leviathan that burrows into the windswept sands for a moment’s shelter from the tumult obscuring any way out across this desolated land…. Yet! C. can wander along the unending shores of that dying world (where he can enjoy the cool breezes that still manage to waft ashore, challenging the inland inferno); he can wander and carefully observe, or amplify and clarify the observations of so many thousands of tortured and bruised and scarred souls that had come before him. What a pity. It is true that he saw the future taking its brilliance from the rising sun and waxing moon of the suburbs of civilization (and what utter provincialism we find here, from a one nestled within the cradle of cosmopolitanism!)—but does he hope that the suburb grows into a city? Who will then be the St. A.— (to write our future Civita Dei), the evangel of the schools in our eventual St. T.—, sealing our theologic fate in a Summa, written with rags of polyester (rarest of fabrics)—who will be our philosophers after a long slumberous darkness? Will the lights return in the suburbs—surely not to those lands where the death so profoundly overtook it? In a dogged, cynical way, we are given hope, is it not hope, brethren? A hope so profoundly overturned and emptied that its mere husk stands forth as a crumbling monument to a history that could not come about? An impossible history, the foundering of the embryo of freedom—“freedom”—, that rush of fresh air in the Age of Reason. Whereupon this newborn soon found himself loitering in the quicksand of Progress; there he found himself staring at the dialectical horrors of the yearning Voices of the philosophers who had forgotten their theologic past, the need for Other-dependence, the weakness of their own souls, the requisite leaps of fides. Most important of all the theologic theorems: one’s utter aloneness, thrown not into a history, but into an ongoing catastrophe, the quicksand of existence (should we elevate it in philosophic terms—elevate a lowly suburban term to a tarnished brilliance). And thereupon that false surface they discovered the flat plane of truth, one with no depth, no interior, no circularity—only pure enfoldment, pure encompassing.

 

2

In my loneliness and despair (oh, and I do not mean, yet, a dialectical despair), as my memory fades along with the Universal memory loss (wasn’t it supposed to be called ‘Progress’?), taking refuge in our illiterate masters of letters (where are they?—send out a paean for them, sing of their eventual arrival, these Desert Fathers and their tattered theologies of the spirit, of pain, of the body...we long for a pre-Columbian forgetfulness, a clarity and emptiness to rival the waters of the Antilles which, as emptiness does, carries always with it creative destruction), —here I am nothing that forgets with the pen in order to find a hidden constellation, a fragment visible only to the blind, audible only to the deaf, speakable only by the mute, a campaign of immobile musicians in search of starry spheres (the instrumental astronomers—brethren I call upon you!), spheres which have only revolved for the ignoble among us (St. Paul’s echoing missives recompense our waywardness), savage, forgotten men...women who languish in desperate hope of waking up home (afar), found, lost to a thousand years of hopeless toil and commanded enjoyment (scratched upon metallic slabs and emblazoned in plasma for the people). We have found that place, and we have found those people, dear ones (my brethren), but their eyes, filled with oceans of despair, are blurry to the half-silvered mirror of the partial reflection of their self-misery (fulfilled, verily, as self-mastery, self-triumph). We have been the lost, the desolated, the despairing, the forgotten; we have been, for so long! It was a joyful storm that was to have devastated us; it was the debris flung free by their catastrophes, which took our eyes and ears and speech from us—and we rejoice at the new visions, speeches and musics! The density of their world—has it not become so much sand underneath our feet? We press it down only so that the wind does not blow it away; we do not investigate each grain (and if we do, do we not fail to notice it as such—as a grain upon an unending shore, a study in futility, and the self-satisfaction of a mere semblance of a whole that in any case simply will not exist?). Only the birds, insects, roving feral creatures of the land—only they roam over the sand as the true Philosopher, the true Scientist, to pick through its grains for a morsel to eat, a twig for shelter, a hovel for the night (they are cold, indefatigably adventuresome).

3

The sand anchors the palms, is later fired (sometime later, perhaps in the coming cataclysm of the sun, the Form of our light and life, my liege)—it has its uses! But the palm and the glass (the transformed sand) defy the sand itself; they do not comfort it, and they do not comport with it: the one derives sustenance from the other without reducing its being (the sand is not consumed itself), and the other is a transformation, a fiery movement of the sand into the different (a reversal of fortunes, a display of amor fati).

4

Has it not been that civilization (shall we not gather them all, shall we not assemble?) has so far (despite, it is true, the contrary and opposed tendency) emphasized the confrontational, the oppositional? But, in a reversal of values, its logics have pronounced upon not difference but rather identity, unity over differences, convergences over (and against) divergences. The doctrine of civilization is not one of nomadism—this is the evil, the barbaric threat to its own self-coherence—but one of unitary sedentarism. Is not the suburb—much maligned in the high Courts of philosophic wisdom—the bastion of the nomad, the barbaric enclave of pure divergences? Is it not a direct threat to the cohesion of civilization? The philosophy of the suburb is movement, dispersal, dissipation (the boredom of the people the price they pay for their nomadic freedom, the freedom to disperse as a gas leaves its confines). No civilization that affirmed this doctrine of pure Difference (difference-in-itself, the nomadic disintegration)—a suburban doctrine—has been able to take a decisive hold world-historically. There were—yes indeed—divergent philosophies, philosophies of the shadows, of emptiness, of chaotic spontaneous assemblages of “harmony” (I dare mention Buddha, Laozi—silly wanderers amidst great civilizations, offering in the former case a philosophy of divergent quiescence, and in the latter a clever active non-doing, non-accomplishment, a programmatics of absence or departure), but theirs was one of perpetual conflict with the urbanisms of the State (Brahmanism, Confucianism—oh but for the nomadism of their founders, we wonder...). But one of them—the undeniably alien one to that great Han assemblage—was to achieve something of a philosophy of pure Difference, in a profound affirmative modality. Finally, the naked simplicity of the stone and water alone, as an all wholly configured to the individual in itself (thus becoming the loss of the “all” as such); death here finally stands out as death and only death, life as only life, birth as only birth (a gift of spontaneity, zirán), time as only the new, not an infinite Now that contains the All, but a naked moment upon which the schizophrenic frenzy of being goes in search of its play-masks, a now that is nothing ever more...

5

C.—and here he stands with all of them from that dying world—wants the Beyond, wants beyond in its various guises, as beyond the novel, beyond the philosopher, ... the essayist, the critic, the poet, the expatriate (marooned in an alien environ, only to be too easily blessed with that gift of muted tongues—existential alienation, metaphysical desolation, sniffed as the decay of countless invisible sea-creatures that rise continually from the ocean in moments of still, warm air); but that was the discovery of our New World. Was it not so, brethren? That cartography of alienation was the discovery of our A., should we doom it with a name as violent as that (you can hear our ‘A...’ in the wave-runners, slicing their way into the flesh of the sea, in joyous abandon to Progress, desecrating her only gift—infinite silence, to be consummated only by the thunderous storms of cataclysmic newness, lightning both metaphor and thing-in-itself). These compendious volumes of erudition, of deep study, deceitful praise, eroticism, blessedness, earnestness, patient hopefulness, poetic abandon (a poetry that only comes from the music of falling fragments), philosophical incisiveness—all of this, dear ones, has died a thousand deaths upon the shores of this New World; it has died as self-mastery foundering upon its own brilliance, self-affirmation in defiance of defeat, as desolate exuberance of poetry upon their parched and longing lips. I have seen new erotic becomings, brethren, formations intense, dancing upon the glowing orbs of P.’s Mayan Body—does he not manage a firmament for organs, a sky for skin, a symphony for breath, suns for concepts? A thousand lighting storms have raged since the cosmopolitan furies shot decisively across that lake of conquest blood-lust (a red carpet of royal awakening, a shallow pool for human avarice, a false depth—the typical configuration of the sedentary, the urban). We, brethren, have become they, and the palm and the glass have separated from the shore. We are already beyond. Our forgetting is triumphant renewal. Is it that fabled knowing without knowing, the irreducible discovery of the Zi, those masters underneath the Heal of the State, a discovery finally given to a resoundingly un-self-concerned land those many centuries ago, a land of deserts and of tropics, and of planar aridity and of temperate humidity ... is it so?

6

If the future belongs to the suburbs of civilization, then does the past no longer yearn for its urban life? Could it finally come to be that our culture (ours not theirs) thrives not in densities, existential hovels of centering, blissful remembrance of things past (ah the sweet intoxication of nostalgia), nor in civilized ghettoes, salvific refinements of place (the salon, the café), but amidst the aridity of the wide open plane, the deserted bone canyons of howling coyotes, the humid triumph of crystal shores, the lost forests of the tropic, the blankness of ocean gulls carrying dead prey back to the brink of the sea, the definition where sand and sea meet, eternally questioning boundaries (was this not also their philosophic, and their poetic, cradle?) ...

 

7

You must forget to truly know—again. Would that we never remember. Forgetting as active force—creation in itself.

 

On the 8^th of March. Enclosed.

 

1

Where can I begin another failure? At the point where my gaze terminates, at the end of my heart’s longing, at the edge of my catastrophic melancholy—the other side of a terrible anxiety, outside the waiting-room of my private hell. I have always looked outside the moment, looked at my own looking, while, in the meantime, waiting. Neither hope nor despair can console me; only the promise of the concentration camp, the forced labor of my depths. The walls could be paper thin, or feet of concrete, yet they would all the same contain me and concentrate my pain. A prison break would merely bring an obverse suffering, the chaos of openness (agoraphobia stultifying the stratified logic of the curious Socratic museum of dianoia), the frenzy of here-and-there that daily encloses the atomic mass-transmission of humanity (the philosophy of the City-State, urban urbanity, vainly wandering under the starry sky, searching for the Law, vanquishing all doubt, only to yield to the source of being, in Ignorance).

 

2

It is possible to have neither an interior, nor an exterior—is it not? Some want to banish interiority, or the pull of inwardness, but is this not because it suggests a real movement, a being taken, spirited, away? For others, exteriority is the sin, outwardness the danger. But one condemned to the forced labor of depths has neither, or can in any case be said to swing from one end to the other of this ridiculous spectrum (this fantastic spectrum of false depths). In an instant, one may swing from one to the other—but only confusedly, unknowingly. It may be a flight of freedom, a haphazard freedom, the freedom of liquid. In this too-easy slippage, ah, here brethren, do we see the pure form of the movement. Liquid. To the liquid, fighting inwardness or exteriority is no use. A true fool’s errand...

3

Another failure begins here, as the continuity and consistency of thought accepts itself and truly displays itself through the written word (as pure conceptual painting, the formless drives yielding to the informed word, the letter of chaos balanced upon the prose of the Designer, the Demiurgos fashioning for himself a play-thing of a universe, a paean to Dionysius). This process produces the failure as absorption within itself (the gesture, the failure aptitude, of interiority), with neither, in truth, an interior nor an exterior to contain it, and to give it shape (Form). You are left with seeping, a liquid that finds the breaks and the fissures in the solid and finds a quick escape. Yet the insistence of the form, the verity, of writing compels, by sheer contiguity, a single flow. This in turn eventuates a canvass splashed with paint, and this, in its turn becomes that against which one works, the work of the mind on the canvass of the word (I use the old-fashioned tone here). If there is no interior, the flow has no origin, and if there is no exterior, it has no destination. Nothing. Neither a from nothing nor a towards nothing. Ah, the philosophers should here be stripped of their favored terminology of the sacred, the lips of the metaphysician momentarily reduced to a bleeding thirst. We cannot even say that it is encompassed (though I personally am given to use that terminology—should I be hanged for my apostasy). Nor encircling, even less circling, and certainly we cannot say of it that it is linear; but if it is, it is the linearity of eternal divergence, a field of divergence with nor center (everywhere is the point from which anything diverges; thus is it right to consider a field of vectors). The text is the topographical illusion of depths, the double-vision of the lines of divergence (lines of force, in vectoral form), hiding an abyssal depth which abolishes inwardness, engulfs space—freeing on towards the purity of space (one called it the spatium, perhaps rightly so), infinite (divergent) movement. No inside, no outside—this is space, this is pure immanent movement. What we call ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’ is access to this secret. With no interior, there is no center; with no exterior, there is no point of reference, and no relation. Absolute freedom is then a performance of space and movement in itself. To demonstrate this (but in the manner of the ancient geometricians, whose “proofs” involved the description, an exacting description, of the precise movements that a single hand—the real of the absolutely individual—drew across a stable surface), it should be possible to enter thought in the way that a musician or dancer enters into the art, by means of a performance (interpretation simply being what we call the past movements). Play-performance—is our experimentation with space and movement. But text resists this play as it insists on the topographical illusion of depth (the governance of the totality—truth, but often too, probability). It could be literally a dance: take up instruments and play the text as a score. The instruments require a player—this is the human element. But if we are not to return the text to the topographical illusion of depths, then we must also supply the instruments—found objects through which the text may be performed. The text and interpretation are thereby freed.

 

On the 9^th of March. One year out. Lost, Meso—.

What power does this place still have? The gale forbids absolute quietude, the heat exorcises all frost and freezing (absolute foreclosure); the deserts annihilate yet preserve; the sun allows the shade, a respite from intensity, a calming-down. Upon finally landing, the frozen scholasticism—which in any case preserves (in the manner of a preserve) the last burst of ferocious intellectual intensity, merely and yet patiently worked upon from the Desert Fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, to Eriugena and finally Eckhart. They inhabited, and constituted a cathedral; but in its center, its sanctum sanctorum, its sacral core, beat a heart so hot with love that it was to burn the soul into utter darkness. Thus, paradox abounds, the power of suns concentrated—one cannot help think of the Holy Eucharist. But upon reason one of the brightest in the Mexican firmament—I mention him as only P.—the effect upon the scholastic mysticism of the Old World is nothing short of explosive, dynamic, epochal. The “West” showered the true “New World” with their hubristic power struggle, their avarice, greed, lust; but now, as we surpass the fifth century hence, the Old World thought seems (finally) to melt into lava: to yield up its elemental secrets. Liquefied, it may take the form of a new mold, a new clime in which to harden, a new adventure seems to await us upon far away shores... Reading P is like watching the shards of the fractured glass of the cathedral of history finally meld, fired into molten liquid, and finally, cooled, broken into shards of a future catastrophe (somewhere to lay these fragments yet awaits us). And his way, the way of a poet (lost now), is only a living apochraphy: a testament to the solitude of the singular itinerary, a course both wandering and fully determined, a kind of telos inside-out—the very end itself finding a way out of eternity’s refuse bin of possibility. To read P is to watch a fragment launched from the rubble, like the return of a meteor to its former triumph as an itinerary in the sky, a trajectory of love in the starry firmament. And the image of the arc of meteoric return is at the same time the generation of a heat that melts all the frozen glory of the time past, freeing it for future generations.

But all of this is of one piece: the return of Homer’s blind truthfulness, the itinerary of the journey homeward. We have found home. The heart echoes in the sanctuary. My blood flows to the earth, and the sky is blown open for you—to arrive, but then to begin anew. Which is to say—forget.

 

On the 10^th of March. Remains.

An iguana wanders along the short sandy coast, foraging for the fallen fruits of a tree-bush, clinging to a rocky wall, dropping both blossoms and fruit with ageless indifference. The coast, a niche of pebbles, broken shells, filaments of seaweed, dried starfish, blossoms withered, and people drunk with an ideational vacation, submerging, and then submerged, glaring through the crystalline March seawater, punctuated by rays of sunlight allowed to escape the overcast gloom overhead, for a lightning moment—and they search yet without itinerary before them, as chaotic and listless in time as the catastrophe of fragments upon this beach in space. They grasp time, as the waves, sand, shells, pebbles and iguana grab space. Our mobility locked in time, their stability an eternal space, and both dance to eternity (ah—but wherefore space, the spatium?).

A stray fruit rolls under the grove-ordained shade, with no pursuant iguana—and I wonder where his journey has taken him. Each step for this creature is new—a now eternally companion along his itinerary, never too much, never too little, all for now with no “when”, nor any “then”. Perhaps not even a “from”, the path a trace of forgetful abandon to one unending, infinite space.

In the chaos of restful abandon, a measured abandon is apparent. A great tapestry of pattern, without coherence of an idea, elicits a relaxation of form whence the beauty of formless form arises. But as I begin to ascend with my mind, I am humbled by the arrangement, spread upon the beach rhizomatically, a chaos restfully collected in time from its cradle in space.

I want to read this catastrophe of form, which could have been an explosion or a gentle placement by the care of the infinite itself—the open care that eternity shows her children, pointing the way, finding a place (the placement achieved as a direction in an estuary of possible moments, centers hidden from the eye of discernment, but transparent to the blind truthfulness of the dazzle of the music of dark chords—listen, brethren, for the echo, and you, dear ones, shall hear that wide open sanctuary of your heart stand forth as a vibration upon your chest, a stillness in your eyes yet a motion within your ears). This place, with all its clamors of light, and its dazzle of reflection (the sea a great mirror encompassing a sandy shoal of fragments: people, iguana, fruit, blossom, seashell, scattered through the wind, singing into the gale)—this is not a place to read, it is not a place for the Eye. It is a place of the heart, for the ear, for your skin.

The eye is blinded for the ear and skin; the dazzle, the luminous reflection, darkens the vision so that the ear is prepared, the heart quickened—and finally the end of the itinerary of sight moves upon you like a rapid storm-front, pouring down, torrent of black rain, obscuring your surround, but elevating in a flash everything else besides. After the storm flash, at the moment the brilliance of the luminous sea is about to intoxicate the eye, a moment is preserved for the ear and the heart; thereafter, the companions can only be sensed through the gale that blows upon the northern shore in the dead of night, an eruption of hidden sound and mystical rhythm.

Ah, ... but my heart is confused, and this appears to me as not darkness searched for under a brilliant sun. We must look with the light.

I thought I could find the last place of philosophy—of all mere love of something that draws form from a truth out in a beyond of tearless joy and passion abated. But this place will not give me an end. This in my most sentimental and un-poetical folly; a mere semblance of the sophisticated play of words of masters long since departed. Even a film of irony could not contain your skepticism, brethren; and it is true. A failure here is found. This place would not give me an end, the decisive peras of the ancients... This would require a beginning, or the singular rupture of a first, the bursting through of a ‘why’ amidst this wind of hapless and indifferent eternity (the standpoint of infinite movement), the annihilating brilliance of this sun above my lonely head. I thought I could find, even, the philosophies of abandonment. There is abandon about me, but it does not stretch out into abandonment; and would this be a great benefit to us, dear ones? Would this refusal to stretch out beyond itself into an other-than-itself (this refusal at interpretation—for there is nothing to interpret, sayeth one of your numbers!), this singularity of fragments everywhere apparent—would this be the first, the elemental appearance of a new dawn for us homeless, cenobites and beggars, looking, forlorn, through the rubble of time’s great boon to the learned? I have renounced letters (is this not apparent, dear ones?), and my willful abandon is the penance of my learned refusal. I am of the wind; the rhythm beat out upon the rocks, quickened by this endless gale—this is upon my sail, and I, a ship without rudder, go searching. I do not look for Sophia, the sweet bride of Solomon, and I do not pursue with Love. I have love and “truth” upon my back (I dare not turn ‘round to see); I am ever turned to them. Now is the time to pursue with an itinerary of abandon (“as such”). The fragments fall into place of themselves, and the ‘why’ recedes into the now of chaos, the present of the Nothing ... the whale within whom the prophets found the other side of the Voice, before it could cry out in mystical explanation—before the cry of Law, the Covenant, before the breath of life given to mankind; —the teeth, the jaw, the ligaments, the warm saliva, the sanctuary of stomach, the obscurity of intestines, a glorious darkness anterior to the voice, a reclination behind the eye of the searcher, lost to the lighthouse of all knowing, all finding.

 

On the 13^th of March. At rest.

Wandering home along the windswept coast, you find a passageway into the town, and you have now come inside, protected from the fierce and unrelenting wind. Along a street, away from crowds, hecklers of commerce, stands ruins—of the future, fallen, it would seem, into the present, standing, as they must, for no one at all, no when about them, a place—pure in its naked standing alone, unmoored from the insistence of presence, time (a river waiting for none). Amidst the ruins, iguana sun—an eternity in itself, a monadic infinite concentrating eons in a moment, within a single glance—and they search, chow, stare, plod, scurry. Their movement could not be mine, a theater I could not enter.

The ruins seemed a quiet majesty. They stood alone, and altogether far away from the Mayan ruins, crumbling down from the past, blessed by winds of millennia, hurrying centuries like children into a schoolhouse for unending recitation, memorization, all with laughter, surprise, joking and crying (the heart is filled to the brim in the young, and in time prepared for the asceticism of death). The sentimental poet that lingers nearby might find the din of ancient crowds’ conversation upon the insistent winds and pressing sunbeams, or somewhere in the gloom of a joyously grey afternoon when the gulls undulate like a celestial sea laughing against the violent sway of the ocean below—gulls, frozen in the wind, then, in a moment, melting away for their occasional dive from the wind into the waves that reveal to them a fleeting summer’s repast, food of the sea.

But I could not find sentiment within the ruins, nor the sweet comfort of an imagined time shining forth from among their crumbling forms. A ruin of the future, having fallen into the present, has no past. It is a silence, like the eye of an iguana, a presence that annihilates all inquiry, all ‘why’ (a lesson for our lesson-book: learn to live without a why), and resounds in its own faltering glory without explanation. These ruins found time curated in a museum, housed within a cosmic space, the inside-out of the temples and pyramids and altars of our time (a dense and full time of years, of books, of historia). Yes, the Mayan possessed time, eternally renewing the fire of its sacrifice; but here, time is encompassed within a space, a nothingness of silence, a space forgetting itself, lost to time but found within the absolute quietude of the ruins of the future, felled by some cataclysmic beast of a forlorn present we shall never know, or see. Ruins of the immediate, ruins of the now of eternity, time devoured into majestic rubble, signs not of the times but what in space can be accomplished by an infinite encompassing—signs of the spaces of the Now, motion taking the gulf of eons behind you and yielding up their secrets: nothing, silence, fragments, sand-atoms of your present, before you, spread upon the shore—the time long past now littering the way forward, pieces to be gathered and brought alongside one another (no reconciliation, no redemption, simply: baptism, the dance of John in the lapping waters of a warm river). And you move from time to time, and your blesséd sentiment recedes, this poet’s voice silenced...

His hands clasped in prayer, the winds genuflect before the palms—and the benediction of the evening begins, shadows finding an escape from clouds dancing as the gulls’ ceiling, stretching existence between myself and the quiet chapel nearby, the Madonna keeping silent sight over her town, remote inside a seamless byway, from this Isla to ... where? How shall we tell this story? The renunciation of the wandering church seeking askesis and the abandon of spirit in faraway places, yielding up its sedentary soul to the crumbling ruins of profound diaspora, a resurrection of the flesh in reply to the denunciation of earth and change that laid to rest the old church of the State. Here I shall see God, in my flesh. Mixture of earth and flesh send up to the sky a music of burning incense, aflame with the myrrh of tradition, a scattering preservation while the rest subsides and dissipates into airy expanse of ocean and gloom of sun, fury of wind. The raiment was thrown down here long ago, the sword sliced down upon Her shoulders, and the body, vacant for an eon, writhed in joyful acceptation, and they, once two, became joined in a union that was never to be completed, as the brilliant light of the volcanic peninsula insisted upon a double cataclysm: first the great reptilian beasts, their whales swallowing whole prophets who joyously proclaimed “home!”, then the darkness of a future eviscerated by fullness of hope grown within a hothouse of technics. What was the verse that pressed now upon her back?—unfound, written into the lacunae of a gospel beat from the strenuous music of a failing heart, surviving on a filament of heat from a stellar point, crying voiceless tears into an icy vastness… Still, she stood, erect, present to an invisible crowd prostrate in adoration, even as she accepted, finally, the blade.

Thirteen

 The children could be heard rapping on a distant door. His music had changed. More somber now. He regressed from classicism to the baroque. It was a collection of trio sonatas. He turned the music down as the rapping became more insistent. The noise grabbed him, and removed him from the inwardness (he loved the concept) of the music—the truest and only real kind, N—. had said long ago (he always recalled these maxims, these arrows and cheap-shots that kept him going). Now voices were mixed into the rapping. “Hey! Mister! We made it, can’t you hear us?” And, sotto voce, “of course he can—but I’m sure he’s planning something else for us, ‘cause this was too easy you see…” and they continued debating, getting entangled in the child’s whirlpool of thoughts and possibilities, a moment before any dialectic, a precious time that bespoke a wide open world (before the dampness of logic washes the fire out completely).

He made his way underground—he actually (but it was strange) had two lower levels underground. There was a basement, and then something more, something further down and buried even deeper into the side of the hill, a place that, if you bothered to unearth the property’s plans (as he did, once yearly, in a kind of ritual that he embroidered with talk of a demiurgos), wasn’t even directly underneath the basement but askew, shoved to where it seemed not to need the support of the house above it, but which tried to subsist entirely on its own. It was into this portion of the underground of the house which the children finally arrived, via the complications of his map of the intervening labyrinth.

His instructions were detailed but the complications childish—no, they assumed the life and meaning of childhood itself. Not in a regressive sort of way; but in a way that could only seem absolutely ludicrous to an ‘adult’. Byzantine movements and pathways from A, through X and Y, finally to B, with each pathway being itself irreversible twice over: in space and time, a feat accomplished by the subtle movements of the various thresholds and doorways that led from one place or room to another—all this being contained (or one could say, housed) in the absolute underground beneath the basement. The design of his senseless directions from the front door to the back kitchen door, which only brought one to a bifurcation point (that between a door outside and another that only led to more complications within the first floor), where a choice had to be made, was meant to have itself conducted along with the earlier history of the enigmatic fellow living deep within that other hill, prattling about inside a self-made cave of sorts. He was confident that in the fragments of this history, which were to be collected along the pathways from there to here, the whole enigma could be solved—though in a strange sort of way, a way, he thought, that would require quite a bit of recreation.

Now it was time for the children to, in their own way, recreate what had just transpired—in all its hopefully excruciating detail. It was the detail that he reveled in. And that’s just what tortured the children, and jeopardized their innocence. And that was what he feared most: that he would somehow be the immediate cause of its loss. But he wondered: would the very first detail—that it might be in a very real sense impossible to recount this strange fellow’s story—strike out upon the innocency of childhood he took upon himself to worry over, overtake the children and steal it away? He decided that he simply must begin with what could be said, to see if the impossibility of this strange fellow’s story being told would not, of its own inner paradoxes, present itself as such—an impossibility, a tale that could only be told as such.

He called out now children, I know your journey has been difficult, and has had to bear the stupidest of problems and complications, and that it perhaps had seemed as if neither the journey nor its complicated pathways would ever end, but it has—he was calling out from some distance away from the heavy door that had to be unlocked and slowly swung open—but there remains for us but one last complication to be overcome, and that begins first with your patience as I see to it that no society resides within the mechanism of the door’s lock. To which there was a great sigh of incredulity. They looked at each other knowing this was—or at least appeared to be—some game which none but he took seriously.

The music, which was turned down, turned from somber and inward to bright and exuberant. He then led himself closer to the door, at a point still some distance from it, where a great bronze telescope was positioned. I have reached my looking station he shouted and in a moment I will fix my eye upon the aperture of this telescope and it will reveal to me the extent or absence of any society residing therein. The children simply could not believe his speech—how deliberately he delivered each syllable. They just knew that he was conducting them in some game. They enjoyed it. The delight was obvious as they looked at each other smiling and then regarded the door itself, imagining what ‘society’ could possibly take up residence in lock mechanisms in doors—and especially ones that chose the eastern shore in particular (this question came from that odd place within where you feel that nobody except you and your friends and your brother and you mom and dad and sisters could possibly be from anywhere else, and that nobody else was from where you were from).

Let me see now… and one of the children, the older of the bunch, piped up as he began his analysis—“so, hey, you should look past the moon, and if you can’t, you should at least see if the people don’t make a shadow up on its face!” To which he replied, earnestly, indeed! I think I can look past it, and though he seems to be frowning upon us this evening, he still seems to be shadowless. So I think we’re in the clear—if there was a society living there, they’ve up and left. I think we can begin to throw the mechanism and undo the lock. Ah, but for the exact means of accomplishing this… his voice trailed off. Just a minute children. I must find the book of instructions. Again they sighed, in unison this time.

His thoughts wandered as he began his search for the necessary book, and he worried that when it came time to settle his mind on the task that seemed impossible— trying to convey to the children the impossibility of telling the hermit’s tale—he might not be up to it. A maxim might do the trick. “Where a man is a law wholly unto himself, he is free”—or something to that effect, he thought. And suddenly those lectures of his, years and years ago, flooded into his mind, recalling days of long travel for some hours of repetitious lecturing, hours on the return journey, traffic, rainy days, sadness occasionally, but mostly simple, happy and uncomplicated times. Times of no personal loneliness, but for that peculiar emptiness that occasions itself when you’re surrounded by family.

And that was the hermit, he considered. A law—of one and only one, never to be repeated; thus was he truly free. Yes. But if he was free, truly, then was he not incapable of being bound in any sense? A free man always escapes, is of the essence of escape and to tell of it—that would be the end of his freedom. Seeing as this is utterly impossible from the mere writer’s point of view, or from an historian’s (most especially), it follows that the story of the truly free man cannot be told. It can only be represented as a paradox. The man himself must be constituted totally from an abstract—and therefore unacceptable—position. But abstract in the worst possible sense, the old ‘object = X’. Freedom in the purest sense made one an absolute enigma, a beyond to everyone and everything. Enigma was the price of freedom, and to be free was to be outside of and beyond everything. The greatest of them had already realized this thousands of years ago—P. putting it before everything else, entirely and utterly even before a first. This one … he had to be a hermit, therefore. So it must be: Character is destiny—another maxim that seemed to be appropriate here, he thought.

Seeing the future in these children, he flashed inwardly back to his days of long travel to earn what little he could out of his credentials. He loved them, found them all comforting in that eventuality written in their dancing and twirling and in their stubbornness and their jovial refusals: staid and settled lives, rosy-cheeked and silently joyous, or sullen and emptied. He saw in them, these faces of innocence, what they must become—the man on the bus, fussing efficiently over his overcoat, with a face content and primed for holiday fruitcake and Madeira; the woman thinking of her purse and fidgeting with her files under a warm incandescence and pursuing her grandchildren as they arrived home, one by one, under a soft snow in midwinter. A youth distractedly talking to someone else at a distance, boredom always around the corner. A middle-aged woman just arriving at the end of something she cannot quite fathom, but which impels her forward into the arms of her children much later as she begins to ponder the dark light that awaits her…. He loved them. Secretly. And he made a pact with their necessity—they must exist, so they should. And will.

I seemed to have unearthed the correct tome, children—and now the music had come to an end, as if on cue for a needed pause, as the complications compounded—but … and the children collectively said, ‘Nooo!’ in something close to frustrated anger … I am told that only by recounting a tale of a voyage of some oddity or other, whose voyagers went in search of a new home, and had to travel across vast seas to reach its final destination, will there be given to the mechanism, once engaged, the proper length of time to bring its action of release to a proper conclusion. There is no other stretch of time that would seem to fit—indeed, we cannot, I am told, simply wait, for in waiting, the mechanism simply follows suit and comes to a halt; its action of release only completes itself if given a stretch of time that follows, quite precisely, this very peculiar tale. And as the children threw up their hands in total resignation, and considered doubling back and leaving the house entirely, the oldest of them was intrigued and managed to convince the rest to stay put and follow the absurdities out to the end. “What else have we got to do, right?” They shuffled and mumbled, and finally soft-landed onto a place of agreement—“but if there’s any more of this crap” one of them piped up, “I’m outta here!” To which the older child said “Sure thing—I think we’ll all be ready to leave”.

To undo this lock, then, required a prayer, a ritual—a return to his past (everything recounted on the tongue, he thought through as an arrow from those books come rushing through his mind, comes only from the past, is the past, and is felt out beyond it). There and then, far before he came upon this shore, he told himself that this—this!—was the work that he must finally set down to finish.

But … as always, today a sadness took him by surprise, and the children, being on the other side of this heavy door, could detect nothing of it but just the general absurdity that surrounded this whole game, spun from his need for delay and diversion (the secret pact he had established with the children from summer to fall). It was the sadness of days where he could find no consolation in what he believed was his destiny, inscribed in his heart, his meandering, searching, and dissipating heart. The chords of Brahms’s first piano trio (only the slow movement) could be heard irrupting in the depths of silence that exuberant baroque trio sonata left him. The gift of the baroque to the romantic was silence. He filled it with something that caressed, and let flow tears.

The children could not hear themselves—the music was pitched almost to deafening … and somehow he managed to set it so that the player only played the slow movements of several of Brahms’ chamber works (in his youth, besides hating the romantics, he only played the fast movements of anything before the eighteen-twenties).

The tale, the work, was folded away between layers of possibilities. Notebooks buried upon one another, with a leaf or two consumed by fury, only to lead off nowhere but to another notebook which found itself laden with several dozens of pages of neatly handwritten pieces, again trailing off. Many abandonments could amount to a real thing—was this an aphorism too? He, as he always managed to do, eventually seemed to find the right notebook. I must—he shouted from the shelves to the children, through the door—endeavor to read the text aloud; however, it must be read by means of my looking glass. “Whatever it takes mister!” some of the children shouted, as others, hushed by the eldest, mumbled gripes and whimpered after accepting profoundest defeat (for they slowly began to realize the challenge of having to double back without precise instructions on the return journey).

There is one more instruction to carry through, if we are to be absolutely faithful to this text, dear children! There were no sighs and lamentations this time; the little crowd was absolutely still, as the music hushed and fell silent. I must undertake to project this text through the keyhole, beyond the vacant quarters for this vanished society that might have been residing within the reaches of the lock mechanism, and have you read the tale aloud. I will follow along with the text and help you with the more difficult and intricate passages. We may allow for periodic interruptions, but I fear this might set the lock mechanism back several notches depending on the length of your pauses. “Oh no, we’ll just read through it. But how long is it going to be, mister?” one of them piped up, desperately. Not too long, but long enough—the mechanism’s quite intricate of itself, and requires the rather precise rhythms and harmonies that this tale might create. And that’s why I must follow along, quietly speaking the words with you and filling in for when the passages become too cumbersome for you to pronounce on your own—this so as to make sure the words are well-said and follow one another as they should. Now, shall we begin? “Yeah, c’mon!”

Behind the children, as they were soon to discover, there was a kind of film covering a precise section of the wall, visible as a distinct absence of wallpapering (a subtle wallpaper, of floral design, but in muted colors and curly wisps of embroidery). It was into this absence that the text would be projected.

“How are you going to project it?” the eldest asked, insistently. Like this! And suddenly the motes of dust were aflame with a thin beam of light emanating from the larger keyhole (there were in fact two, an upper and lower portal, of which the upper was the larger of the two).

They began, haltingly at first; but soon a rhythm was discovered, and the cadence quickened. His voice carried theirs, and the little voices sounded like the little hushed cacophonies of a thousand church services, where the voices meld into a monotony of languid articulations, homogeneous as the incense rising before the altar of god.

Fourteen

 Already, at the close of another day, I was ready to survive another. From out of my room, the sun lurked low and clear and warm and bright—still. My thoughts were looking backward and forward, as they always do, as they always do with an unstoppable speed and momentum. But the sun and the window framing it and my room, steely gray with blues and whites, were already comforting me and keeping my mind settled on one thing. Those books. They were my light, really. They were the sun never setting it seemed to me [that’s how I’d tell the story, later on, when I’m old and dying and remembering—he interjected suddenly, and the children shouted back, “no, let’s just keep going!” Ok, ok but there must be some explanation, children. “Fine, let’s go.”]

What a frenzy, it must have been. All those books with all their ideas, and all the possibilities wrapped up in them like so many seeds in brown, swelled seed-cases in the hot, late summer. What a welter, what a confusion it must have seemed to those eager to pick those swollen, old, spent blossoms. All the beautiful or horrible or pristine or ugly or terrible worlds they contained. Split worlds, fractured worlds, healed worlds, worlds with no races or genders or differences—or with many races, many genders, many differences untroubled and therefore unhealed, eternally fragmented and un-unified. Each world was a piece, a universe in an atom [you must excuse him , children, but he’s only dreaming stupid dreams… “Yeah sure mister, but let’s keep going!”], but, as I considered my books in total, lonely they seemed, each one of them. Untouched for generations. Unspoken about, unlearned, undone, bled out away from anybody’s mind. Nobody cares anymore. Perhaps this was real healing, I thought. Give it some distance, nobody will get too bothered, and nobody will bother with any grand ideas anymore, no more crazy mobs chanting in terrifying unison, choirs of sleepwalkers wake-walking. No crowds, groups, assemblages; or, only the crowds down at the beach, or at the statues in the mountains, or at a fire in the forest, or around those broken buildings down over there away from the green and brown and blue and whites and the sun and the rain—away from the gatherings and the entertainments that englobe their frenzied worlds. No more underground, no more grind away in the machine. Maybe that’s what we got after everybody forgot all that stuff in the books. It’s only here and now, once and a while, maybe in a few months (only how many years outside?) without contact, with how many for only that long? I tried real hard to imagine those days, inside the books where people were engaged with those black letters on white paper, furiously chattering back and forth like I go back and forth with others in unison, in song of the things we must keep fresh in our heads for the day. But it can’t be like that really, I considered. I don’t stick with things like these people have; I don’t let it drag on and on and on, only if somebody wants to hear our voices and talk when they’re dying. It’s only like this in dying, with them departing, our voices with them as they leave, as far as the sun will go down and come up, we are there with them, out beyond our normal chatter. We go silent, and we voice, and then silent for the sun sometimes. We repeat the things that will be comforting. To let them know about the light and the dark and the stars and the sun again, and the voices too. All of that. Silence, until the death comes. Then we leave and talk about what has to be remembered before the sun cuts out again. That’s all. But in these books, it’s all there a thousand times over, endless, ideas into ideas swollen with possibility. But there’s only now, when I see them. No possibility. Just now. The only thing, really. But these books are with me; I govern them now. No hoards, just me and the books. I will remember them in my head when I go, I think.

It isn’t too long that I sit with one of them and go inside. I fall into the book like falling from a hill-top into a soft sweet-smelling meadow; I get the dirt and grassy green and smell of the earth in me, and wear it, and become it. Maybe that’s the crowd thing, the secret to the mass-movement. Make it you, and you are it moving around with a new-found set of instructions. Let yourself tumble all the way from the beginning to the end and it never leaves you, and the ground you walk on is nothing but the walkway for the instructions leading you on to more people like you. And so it happened.

In the dark, after the sun finally disappeared from my window and the cool returned and the blues and grays got darker and more comforting and more quiet, I wanted more from these books than the words I could read. They were like experiments, it seemed. I desired to make them real, to give the seed some soil and see the blossoms for the first time in many years, the first person to have the vision again before their eyes. I had to get to work. I could meander on for a while, but sooner or later it must come back out of the page, I thought, out near the green and brown and blue, in the full sun, and empty quiet of night. It had to.

I decided to take a trip, back to the places of the Ancients. Back to the old places beyond my house. I like to go, and walk and sing and move, and all that. But now I felt that I had to, and this was new. And to decide, and think about it all, and go with direction. This was going to be something I learned. It was going to have to come by me slowly. You can’t walk before you feel your legs, or play with your toes before that. You can’t walk before you see the way ahead, feel your way out beyond. But too much of that and you’re blinded. That’s why I was slow or awkward. I saw too much ahead, parted with my one moment now, too much over there and not here. It’s so hard to let go of those futures. We conjure up too much out of thought, from nowhere, I said, looking inwardly.

You have to wander, I was told early on. You got to move about, search for nothing, don’t become lost because you’re already there—banal, perhaps; true—infinitely. That’s what I was told, early on. He said this in matter-of-factly tones, no pretension. It was interesting. Those books usually spoke in complicated phrases, not often simple. It was different here. Like a sunrise over and through quiet woods, misty but you could see through it to the stuff beyond the words, nothing like the great infinite or the unspeakable or any of that higher-sounding stuff. Just simple, like sun and light and mist and trees and vines growing at your feet. Nothing heady. Nothing from the idea, just from blood and bones and walking and flesh.

I have all my problems worked out, I was told. My heart sank. I wasn’t a fool to think that I had nothing to work over, but there it was—a droplet of truth, it beaded-up on my water-resistant heart. Where did it come from, I wondered. Of all the possible advice, this one seemed fully aware of itself, confident, strong. I cowered, inwardly. That feeling of outward truth illuminating your inner folly. A lamp cutting out a portion of a lonely room. Fear, in other powerful words. Nothing to do but to press on, to wander out and through and forward. That’s always how it goes. There can be a thousand armies pushing against you from the future, with the truth of the past fueling the rush, and all that you do, always, is just take one step forward towards them—always.

I was here, now, because I wanted this movement, this going out. I wanted to be here. I was refused, I thought. No entry, even as I sat amidst the trees and sipped the sweet humid air and spoke of the creeping things below my feet and the song in the birds (they turned air into music). I sat there, in truth but far away from myself. I had not yet arrived. He told me I had not arrived yet. I was still with the grey and the steely walls and the choked, sun-cooked air, back in that crowd, City.

That was my mind, filled with all the blue tomorrows I could ever cry over, he said. I looked into his eyes, and I held back my tears—they became tears for another time. He moved off into the distance, over to the song in the air; he was elevated for a moment, then descended. I was confused; not being present, I was disoriented. I was present somewhere else. I saw the familiar, but I could not see behind me or in front. Here, my eyes were misted, and my breath shallow. I had to rest a bit, I said. I got a deep, hurting feeling in my throat. I wanted to cry aloud, and be alone. I couldn’t. I had to press on. I was filled with great warmth as I stood up, but I shuddered.

How was it that in one moment you were filled with a great movement inside, and then in another, soon after, you are a adrift in the belly of a cold ship in icy water, or roiling hot with rage and fury, or lonely, beaten down low? Too simple, he said. You can’t speak for your heart. Go over to that mountain, high up in its peaks; you can find the loneliest caves—your heart follows. Somewhere along the way, you might find a stealthy mountain cat, or a sleepy owl or a preying falcon—your heart follows. Find the cave, or those wild things—your heart is there. Find the inside of the cave, and remain. Find those wild things, and commune. Descend from the peak, away from those beasts—your heart follows. What have you learned? He spoke with me as his eye broke from the birds aloft. You are not yet arrived to this place. I wept more, and I pressed on. I wandered more.

What I wanted more, I thought, was my past. I was walking, always ahead, with my mind split. Backward and forward were mixed up; in every step, back to somewhere I had been, forward to where I wanted to go; all the while, never here. It was painful, lonely, dark with him. He sat there, always, up somewhere above. But also down low. Sky and mud. Ocean and coals, tufts of fire going up with ash blowing out and sinking down to the earth. This was how it was. We remained up for a while, in the highest peaks, tumbled down the grassy hills, staying around the muddy valley, walking down to the forest, and to the mountains again. I couldn’t find my past here. I was suffocating, I said. Walk, look, feel, he said casually. My pain was not present to him, neither was I. I was all air in and around my sinews and bones and flesh and excrement and blisters and sweat and fingernails and hair-strands. I was more to myself; I was realer to myself than to him. I was thinking.

I wanted to go back to my books, I said. I have no plan, so I cannot move forward. He said I should just turn the page and walk over the beetle in the tuft of grass before me. I wanted to laugh.

I soon found him already fast asleep in the distance, behind me. I had leapt forward; my pace was faster than his and now I was somewhat removed from him. It was time to rest. Slowing down and coming to meet your sleep is hard, I thought, with pain and fear and sadness. Letting go and falling away, coming back and putting aside those things that came before. Always the same, always ahead and parting from here. I walked slowly now, and thought how I can’t stop at all. Rushing ahead to my death, now the earth was aflame. I could see the orange and purple and grey-blues of the sky. I was reminded of a hundred childhoods. A flock of birds cackled above—preying, maybe; it was somewhere out of sight. The air stilled. Night was descending. Ah, the birds were scuttling to nest; quietude…

It was a soft cool pulling over me. I did not move, but thought that, for the creeping things under the rocks and the traveling birds above, I was accelerating. To the world, I stood near to them; to them I stood far from the world—and I wept quietly because I thought of my loneliness. The cool air was fragrant as the heat of the day now let go of the sweet-smelling oils of the plants. I thought of the hollow chambers within the plants, their inner life, the little molecules being released after being tensed with the energy of the heat of the day. What things stirred in me and around me, I tried to comprehend. It was different here, away from my books and away from those walls and glass and steel. I was away from that and I could only think of it like a faded memory of a past-life, somewhere and sometime but not here or now.

I was really safe for not knowing why I wandered. Ink and paper and turning-the-leaves only brought me inland when I wanted a great journey outward. I wanted to grasp the horizon. That was my plan. Stop inking over your heart’s song, he said as he awoke and slipped into a full-beaming sunshine. You have to cut out one layer, then another, and another but don’t speak of it. Let them fall away. After they, the entire heap of them, fall off, you’ll be free. Your emptiness will be loosed.

I was trying to eat a fallen fruit, and he was admonishing me for taking the wrong action. Always move with skill, he spoke with a great voice to me. Where can we walk today, I wondered in an audible voice. No walking today. He placed me at a rock, which was nearby. That was my chore today, he announced. Then he took off for the stream below our encampment. I was filled with joy and dread. Everything became filled with intense interest for me. Off, beyond the rock, there were a thousand items ripe for consideration. I was in pain, roiling about here at this spot. I felt powerless and powerful, a terrible contradiction inside; to move felt impossible, but memory proved otherwise. Then I recalled the wonder of my travels to this place, from my steel and grey life. I recalled the maze of books that kept me trapped, lingering. It was cold then. Rain always, pools of soaking grey mud water, and always I would go inland, inside. I would not emerge for great stretches of time. Great, cold, billowing clouds turned outside, finally empty of their showers. Dry, mixing with the high sun, warming. They were comforting. They unsealed my hiding place, gave comfort as I returned to my outward travel.

Somewhere in there, in the metal and sky, I wandered into a great maze, through time past. A long time past, to now, had I walked to get to this motionless point, my duty for now. Why did the past always seem like a dream, I wondered, and then I went into it, filled with a heaviness, a sense of treading the path homeward without quite reaching it—delay; one step and then another, hurting sometimes. The hurt was the past looking at me, I think, and the weight of the future bringing me down somewhere, far ahead, into the mist, like a great wandering at night, with a low moon, clouded, calm, hopeful, loving, love.

My studies wandered in there. I always hoped to find something in them, the wide horizon of my great happiness maybe, but it too receded. At least I might be able to sketch out the thing, I thought always, and then there will be a great sculpture, in ink, leaving words adrift underneath, like a soft earth that slowly gave to the heaviness of the marble and would eventually swallow it whole, burying it for all future time, when a new river would carry both earth and sculpture away, and then someone will pull it ashore, like a gnarled piece of wood, and inspect its contours, the merest shape of something, a potentially expansive castle, many-roomed, grand, winding, filled with life. Yes.

Far away from the moss and the rocks and tumbling clouds and sun, before I came to this momentary pause, I heard something in those deadening cityscapes, in the steel and grey sheds where the music pushed out from. It opposed my heart, but was drunk up by them, fast, rushing into it with no mind, just sight and touch and taste and sounding. The mind came haphazardly afterward, slow and tired and confused. My studies took me into this, beyond, down back past what could be heard, through time, and up to now. The only way out, I thought, was through it, directly through, into the mouth, a deep investigation. Don’t avoid; know.

I returned to my room in the high tower beyond the transportways. Quietly, I entered the door, and then took my place amongst my things. It was silent in there, dim and sullen. Just as I preferred on days when my mind began to search. I would not go out; even the hum of the air system was a call outward that I could not bear. But this minor irritation will pass, I said inwardly. I soon went into myself. Into my notebook I thought,

How could such things come to be? It was following after something; now was a mark of what was and will become. So how could such beauty from the past be supplanted by THIS? Who gave such voice to that hallowed music, who could have listened to it without it being part of a curriculum? How do we get from them until now?

But then my fingers stopped. I was pushing my view too far; I was beginning to enter into its grip before an investigation was undertaken. Stop, look, think. Go back to the beginning.

So I go back even further, to before the time of my studies. Fresh, exuberant, unstructured love of the page, absorbing the honey of long sadness, finally settling and concentrating its force inside you. You have to let yourself rest in things, I thought. Go inside before coming out. It was such a difficult time. I was too much before I set down to study in the years that would follow. I was too much with books. My later days were the days of letting it all go, in order to wander, to go out, to escape, to be free … yes, it was a difficult time.