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.