To Continue To Write

To continue to write, even when writing is not an accurate description for what is unfolding, or what is desired.  This typing, this hands-on-keys is just the outlet for a desire to know the depths.  It can only be grasped if it is laid bare on the very edge of the process, where I-writer am looking out across the way for a response…

There is  door out there, and behind the door, well, I cannot give a description of what is behind the door, because that would be to presuppose a knowing that I am trying hard to avoid.   I can only speak about what is on the other side by using the metaphors that have been handed to me by the life that I have lived, and the life that I share in common with all of You. 

Behind the door is a kind of fear, that most improbable fear of childhood, the fear of the darkness, which our Intellects tell us is the fear of predation, that our early ancestors faced, and which most of animal life on the planet Earth faces. Only there is this other part of me that tells me that this fear is not only of a biological origin, and that it corresponds to the common mystery of the human life on earth, which relentlessly resists grasping. 

What I am speaking about is nothing new, at least according to the historical record of most Traditions.  Nonetheless, it is new to the me who has been cast up onto the shores of the 21st century, deep within the Technotropolis of the West.  Herein the City is the metaphor bar non, for the way of life that all of humanity seems to be striving for;  the city the city the city. 

What does the city, and technology have to do with Fear?   I cannot go at this question, head on, because I don’t know the answer to it.   There is an intuitive way of searching that I am obeying by giving voice to what is next.   The professor would like to expound a theory about modernity, decadence, Descartes, and christianity.  The little girl would instead likes to tremble, and feel her flesh;  feel the goose pimples mounting like the mounds of Sand rolling in the depths of Tarkovsky’s Stalker.  This little girl—Monkey—is the Future.  She is the part of the Zone, that has penetrated the black and white of the City.  She has the potential to contaminate all of the race & that is why she is Feared.   This fear is a fear of contamination.  A fear that the old, cannot be mixed with the new without complete annihilation of tradition.  This itself is old story told famously in the New Testament—this points to the fact that the new may be found in the old already, and what is radically new, may be radically old.   But there is no way to prove this, and even the typing of it creates a dull sensation in the back of my head, that suggests the intellect is being overworked. 

“Stop, Just stop”  the little girl mutters, rising to her feat, hands held up in heroic fashion.  “You will burn out the world before it even has a chance to change” 

Her hair moves, as if blown by the wind.  Purple eyes shadow, and a purple aura.  She seems to command the wind. 

Who are you?  “Look now, you’ve pooped your pants”  she points, and no sooner does she point than I smell the soiled smell, and I fall down in embarrassment. 

I fall down, under the power of this little girl with golden hair, and a purple aura.   I feel her trembling within her power; yet, I sense  she as not as certain as she seems.  She is scared herself.  Scared that she will have to go the next leg of the Journey alone.  Scared that she will not make it, that she will be devoured by the people who live in the cities, and that her essence will be scattered to the point of oblivion.  She is not even 12. 

Where are you heading? 

“ I am heading into the heart of tech city, into the heart of the place that will most likely kill me”

What is your name? 

“My name is Dawn” 

I thought you were the one they call Monkey”

“That is my old name, a name that I took from my parents, a name that they gave to me to signify my diseased nature;  I am giving myself a new name, and you are the first to hear about it.  I must be going now”

A purple ray descends and sweeps her up into the storming sky.  It is the purple of sunset.  And there, over the water, lays the city they call New York.   

***

Their God, Your God

Writing to stave  off the tears, or to bring them closer.  Each word is like a platelet, each paragraph a drop of blood.  The book is the body that I must shed in order to continue living.  Deadly serious this task of diving. There is but one dictum: that which is hidden, be revealed.  

(So let it be.  So let it be.  So let it be )

Do not let Them tell you what is serious.  There is a way They have of speaking, that suggests a kind of imperturbable confidence,  reflected for Them in the pop-cultural milieu of Bondean Figures.   This confidence—which must be adhered to at all times— hides an nagging, opaque  feeling that Their life is without the dimension of depth.  They prefer a kind of depth that they can see out there in the horizontal dimension;  a kind of game that keeps them going checkpoint to checkpoint — gold star to gold star.  There are entire industries built up around the mythologization of Their existence.   A series of rewards in the forms of papers, medals, and services rendered unto Cesar. 

Their God, is the shining light of History;  inculcated personally in various battles and dramas; celebrated in songs.  He is the might that makes right their inevitability.  This word—INEVITABLE—-clings to them ( and their God) like a parasitic organism.   Their God is a God of facts.  Facts or Words designed with the percussive power of a high caliber rifle, hurled from the mouths of high priests.  Their God is above all; right, correct: factual.  

PAUSE. Is this your God? Is this your truth? 

Lets digress: no easy answers; no straight lines; no cliches.

Circumambulate.  

X: What is this talk of god? 

Y: It is an attempt to wrestle with those forces that ever-obscure themselves 

X: And what forces are those? 

Y: By definition they are protean; tho some would like them to be otherwise.  

X: You strike me as someone who is afraid to be sure

Y: I think there’s something to that. 

X: So you are afraid

Y: I am afraid at times, yes.  But your twisting words.

X: How so? 

Y: My fear of being sure, is a kind of stance. Not just a blind impulse. 

X: So whats wrong with being sure?

Y: Surety is a kind of immobility 

X: Isn’t unsureity just the same?

Y: Yes it can be; I believe your right. Therefore  I suppose that I wish to be both

X: How is that going to be accomplished? 

Y: Through writing 

X: You think that writing will get you to God?

Y: There are many different types of God, some accessible here in this state of writing.  Others are dwelling elsewhere.

X: Do you believe that there is a difference between the God of this world, and the God of another world?

Y: Shut up. 

X: By telling me to shut up, your just avoiding the question

Y:  Your being too simple. 

X: Well what do we do about this?

Y:  We wait.

X:  Wait for what? 

Y: For something like this

X: Like what?

Y: like this very dialogue that is happening between you and I; It came in a time of need.

X: So we are waiting for another dialogue?

Y: We might be waiting for a Yellow Hippopotamus 

X: Thats impossible!

Y: Your impossible… 

***

I do not know what is happening when it happens, I just allow myself to go with the happening, and let the happening become my world.   This is the dance.  The music is the song of the trees on a bright fall day;  it is early in the Season, and it is still warm.  The leaves are leaking chlorophyll, and the Kingdom of August haunts the air.  The Tomatoes are drooping in their unpicked corpulence, and the garden whirs with the activity of insects that give themselves up to the Energy like a band of minstrels merrymaking before the long voyage across the crag. 

Nearby, and yet not so near, down by the water of the Colorado river, there go many paths filled with hikers, and families enjoying this upwelling of sun and warmth; they gather by the water, and inflate large tubes with zebra stripes and polka dots.   

Off the trail, down a macadam road,  an abandoned lot, just below a decrepit motel. 

A square of concrete, large enough to hold 10-12 cars.  Old, deeply cracked, and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding green.  A throw away scene, not worthy of a more then a sentence in the pages of an Epic.   And yet, here is the rhythm. Among these weeds, flowering still, attracting the last of the bees, a song opens to Hellas, a song particular to this time, and place, which you choose to enter. 

Somewhere, across the globe—simultaneously —a hand reaches for a knife, and pulls it across the exposed skin of a child’s neck.

What is the truth of the matter?   

GOOD OLE WALT

Good ole Walt, what was he thinkin’ when he decided to enter the minds of children? Did he think that he was doing them a favor? Readying them for lifelong suffering at the hands of masters? A Utopian, that one, a special breed, a builder-with-vision. The landscape of America was never the same; heretofore spread a brand of dissonance called FUN.

And fun spelled backwards is NUF.  Or how to know when enough is enough?

So what does this all mean? Scratch it. Stop looking for meanings. Get in there, boy, feel. Something wicked coming this way. Something like a freight train, loaded with the wishes of little boys and girls. Where’s it heading? Where’s it going? I smell smoke, and ash. A chorus is singing some verse:

Tame like a cruise ship

Tame like a shopping mall

Tame like an amusement park

I tell myself to stop making sense of it, but it’s no good, the mind runs on, trying to make connections, concepts,  schemes, programs, conspiracies…  

Is this what it is like to be the architect of others thoughts?  To place into the very architecture of the world, ideas, that are there to be grasped, unconsciously, by the masses?   Either I’m not comfortable with this role, or too comfortable with it. 

I’m itching, scratching, scrambling for a thread that shows itself in this Kidult version of reality.  Just a sour puss?  Hardly. No, these are the mountains that men die on.  Mountains as high as ideals, as high as IDEAS. 

Hey, stay calm, just buckle up, and we’ll take you for a slow, languorous  ride—novel, isn’t it? We just built it last season.  Spared no expense.  Check out the rubber bumpers.

Is it Novel?  Or is it a gateway into a way-of-being, that makes the world into an amusement.  Amusement. Amusing.   Amuse.  

A—MUSE or (NOT)INSPIRATION.   

Get that woo-woo stuff out of here, you armchair religionist.  Grab something from the vending machine, and cool down.  No use getting hot in here, can’t you see, the walls are designed to dissipate the heat.  It’s new tech;  keeps you cool even on the hottest days of the year.   Why the frown?  Lets have some fun, blow off some steam. 

There’s no more time for fun.  Enough is enough is enough.  I can’t just go along with it.  Won’t go along with it.  Bring back the heat.  Let’s put some dents in these walls, and summon all the power of Summer;  yes, leaping up in the air Fuzon, seizes the August heat-bolt, and hurls it down at the shiny, cool dome of the Salesmen. 

POP. A splatter of skull, bloodless . Dried years ago, when the soul shriveled under the weight of all the good times. This one was like a piñata. All sweets raining out. No bitters. Not even salt. Not a moment’s pause. A ceaseless life of running away from the cracks. Energy, and yet, all matter, an expert at mattering: “Matter of fact” “Serious Matters” “Whats the Matter” “Internal Matters” “Matter of Convenience,” all spoken through large gulps of air, unprocessed, repeated, as though original: yes, mattering incessantly out in the world. And what mattered most? Growth, expansion, potential, all fine, fine things that really matter. And an atomic smile sourced from the anxiety of death. Only the best, greatest, good life possible.

WHY WRITE, WHY NOW?

There is anger in me, and anger, unexpressed sits like a snake around the bowls—coiling, tensing, suffocating…

The need to write comes with the anger, a command, an order that I make for myself, and execute.  

Only it’s not as simple as executing a command.  A soldier is not an artist, only the material for the art. No programmatic approaches.  No guarantee it will be felt… here on the page—only, only it must be felt, must be…

No questions.  Just the body roaring itself into existence, just the presence of abutting continental shelves sounding the alarm;  something is wrong, something is sick, something is out of order.

Within the tension, a core: heat. The fire of life resounding through veins of fingers compressing keys-on-board, slowly shaping, shaping, into what ?   

A Golem?   Conglomeration of time, movement, and energy—life, or a statue? 

—Live, live— old Michelangelo thrust his hammer against Moses visage.  CRACK.  The stone had cooled.  No longer pliable, or labile.  The imagination had burned itself out.  But where, where does it go?   

The process begins again, and again—endless—why even give yourself over to this silly task of building sand castles?  Those are the words of a Joker, turned sour.   Lets use the sour too, lets use the bitterness,  grind it up into tiny flakes, and season the anger stew—

I am coming after you—YOU.  Humbaba sleeping in the forests of mind. You, who still clings to the dreams of mommy and daddy, — a beautiful golden thread formed into the shape of a noose.  The time has come to face the whirlwind; be blown apart by the shape of words. 

I gather up the page I have just written, and crunch it into a ball.  Over at the sink, I wet it, and grind it up in my hands, until there is just a sopping pulp, and the tendons in my forearms ache and spit.  But there is a sloshing within, a morning sickness that clings to the bed—soldier on, do not do as orpheus did.  I stagger over to the oven.  Into the fire at last;  the pulp congeals into silver liquid.   I have the mould ready .  And the spear is thrown.

A great gasp went up in the forest.  The tears of birds, and deer met the earth in long, protracted streams. The innocent life of nature could not continue.  No longer is killing just an extension of the magnificent cycles of the mother.   No, I have harnessed the flames, and murdered.    

Humbaba walks with a child, hand in hand they go like Jack and Jill, descending the steps of Erebus.  Farewell, Farewell dear friends, my loves, my life.  Farewell dear ones.  

Hades takes them gladly, clever man that he is, turns their tears into a silver drops out of which he fashions the mirror that hangs in my bedroom.

I face this mirror.  There is anger there, coupled with wit. 

Why write? Why now?  Why engage this phantasmagorical retinue?  

Because It moves. Moves me away from the falsity of unfeeling.  Every sentence etched in the heart is a small victory. 

There are powers on this Earth that demand an overcoming. Bodies are erased daily by digital scrubbers.  But this is peddled as medicine by Warlocks in Ivy towers.  How is this come about?  

There is anger here, unexplored, unthought, and warranted.  Only come come, show me the extent of this web?

You want it too easy.  You’ve not suffered enough, do not indulge in false suffering, this is a sin.  

I don’t want to hear these words.  I think they are false, base, moralizing. Only they are also the truth. 

It would be easier, if the silver spear I forged could continue flying, and pierce through the miasma of mind in one grandiose and resplendent arch.  But this ain’t TV.  The TV’s here, in our mind placed with precision by the thought police.  

We’ve got you now, dunderhead.  Got you caught scrambling from pole to pole.  I.V’d to the silver screen. Unable to act without LIVING the categories we’ve created. 

Cooling now, ending  in doubt.  Where is the fire, the flame which propelled this wording? All gone.  Albion sleeps again.  No chance, no way to wake. 

I sink into my seat.  Feeling that fawn of defeat, cowering in the headlights of the hunter. What use this little exercise of freedom?  What can thoughts do in the face of all this? 

I get down on the floor,  knees to chest, and mutter strange words.  They grow more coherent, in shape.  I need something. Send me something.  Send me a thread in the shape of a Character !  

Hades steps back on to stage: 

It’s not enough to to leave childish things behind.  Thats only the beginning, you do understand that, good man?   What would you like a sticker?  Well listen up, buck.   If you want to build a new earth, then you’ll have to lay all mentation by the wayside.  There are people like myself, who are much cleverer, then you, realize it, and try, only try to slip into their minds.  By feeling alone will this be accomplished, and thats enough.   The building of a second earth cannot come to pass until you’ve visited  these Personalities in detail.   Find them.  Seek out the perspectives of the vile without rejecting them.  Come to understand these points of view, and then, then I can help you, my dear child-in-search-of-adulthood.