…Because I Don’t Want to Write an Entire Novel

“Have you approached the bareness? A kind of skulking before the spirit, amongst the living, yet beyond the stubborn soul, where indifference pries itself into one’s instincts in order to go on living; marching down on the thunder claps of hesitancy with a wide open determination, vast enough to incorporate their power; obsessive enough to continue moving forward?”

–

“Just this once, give up all your memories and embrace the sensation of the ever present void, that “blank check” of creation, dashing itself upon the shores of discernment, not as a conqueror, but as an all-pervading “what will be,” a kind of sempiternal foundation to which an eternity of constructions may put themselves upon. It does justice to life, much as you believe the opposite, if you could but draw nature in the figure of your imagination instead of your mind.”

–

I lay on the floor. Suddenly it felt like my body was a mound, under the soil and covered in earth. From out of this mound grew flowers, the roots of which were underground, tangled up with my body, growing from my organs. Though buried beneath I could perceive the flowers, I could feel their bloom, feel them grow, feel them age as if through seasons. I felt and became these flowers dying, withering and crimping until they laid low. And then suddenly a tree burst from the mound, rising into the air, fully grown, with huge robust limbs and a solid trunk; the flowers were the source of this new life; my organs were the source of it, and it grew from my body.

–

“He was an incredibly sensitive soul. If you ever sat and looked at him for a long period of time it was if he was carrying the weight of the world’s emotions. You could look into his eyes and see the entire world, all the pain and suffering, but all the pleasure and joy as well.

Most people run from that kind of sensitivity, he never did, but it took its toll, and I’m sure more than once he regretted and hated how sensitive he was. But he never betrayed it because he knew it would be a lie.”

–

How does one survive the challenges associated with understanding the mysteries of life? By that I mean the great wonders and the unfathomable beauty that survive without reason or a lasting explanation, always as an incomplete answer, like a divided number with a constant remainder. Do we survive by taking pleasure in the mystery itself, finding peace in the fact that it is a mystery with no complete answer? By indulging in the mystery, by accepting the unanswerable quality as somehow the source of its majesty?

What is an answer after all? Does knowing how a flower grows increase the splendor of watching it bloom?

–

He did not want to live, but he did not want to die; he wanted be alive and to feel life, and for that reason, living, living in a way connected with the expectations and norms of society, felt pointless, unreal, like the life of a mannequin.

“Why live when one can be alive? Yes exactly!” he thought.

–

Incited to feel the heart of attraction itself, lofted into the realm of a source found past to nowhere; moving beyond to a place without motive; leaving intention itself behind?

–

Lost in thought and daydreaming, he carelessly looked around, moving his eyes from the grass, to the birds, to the clouds; from the porch, to the house, to the pavement. Then his eyes landed on the large green leaves on the lawn. He looked up, realizing they had fallen from the giant tree next to the garage. It occurred to him that this tree was shedding leaves even though it was not Fall. He watched the tree as another group of leaves fell from the top. Then he realized: trees shed their leaves in Summer, not because they are dying, but because they are so filled with the sun that they are literally bursting with life. “That is how I want to live,” he thought.

–

She morphed into a cloud, floating in absence, through obscurity, no one there, and yet, there she remained.

–

For me one of the most important things was to realize that life has no time limits, there is no list of things that must be “checked off,” there is no final destination. You have to live without a care for where you end up or how you get there. You have to be present, content with the simple feeling of being alive, and when you do this, time will slowly come to halt; you’ll be puzzled by the dissidence of your momentum, wondering how it is you can go on after revolting, having thrown off the chains of your own impulses. But you’ll breathe again, only this time each breathe will ground you more firmly and with ever deeper roots into the constancy of the all pervading moment.

–

And so I search for the source of that feeling, finding it somewhere at the center of a great pulsation where the light of the universe refracts through an open stretch of darkness, a vast expanse that has lost any and all characteristics for the sake of transcendence.

–

“I was walking through the city. I passed an older woman with a sallow face, and exhausted eyes. She bore the look of quiet desperation. Seeing her, it dawned on me that everyone is trying their best with what they have, doing the most with what they can to live a happy life. After that, looking around, for some reason everyone I saw became more beautiful.”

–

Her real name is something foreign and irrelevant, but in my own mind I call her ‘The Black Rose,’ both for her black hair and for her stunning beauty, with eyes like caves, but not the part of the cave so distant from the opening that no light ever pierces it, but more like that part of a cave where, as one goes deeper, reaches that part where light will touch it for no more than a few steps. A cave is also an appropriate analogy, for it is a cave that contains dark recesses of space that no eye ever sees. Likewise, I will refrain from saying anything more of this woman, and will keep, like a cave, my thoughts somewhere within the dark recesses of my mind, at the risk of otherwise falling victim to my vulnerabilities and vices.

–

That strange time of year when the seasons seemed locked in ambiguity, when Spring can just as easily be Fall and Fall just as easily be Spring; when one knows not whether Spring is transitioning to Summer or Fall transitioning to Winter; when the cool crisp breezes of morning and night make it so, leaving one unsure where he or she is or where he or she is going, fooling one into thinking there is a choice in the matter; perhaps stemming from the seasons themselves, who, aware of the seeming lull between time, gain the desire to move from Spring to Winter or from Fall to Summer, all the while knowing deep down, that such choices are impossible.

–

They sat at the dinner table. She brought her hands together saying, “Thank you.”

“Who are you thanking?” her older sister asked.

“No one. I’m just thankful.”

“Are you thanking God?” her father asked.

“No. I don’t know whom I’m thanking, and it doesn’t seem to matter. I’m just thankful, I’m thankful there is food when so many children are starving. I’m thankful I have a home, and I’m thankful I don’t have to sleep out in the cold at night. I’m just thankful.”

The rest of the family sat listening, chewing their food with their heads low to their plates, but with eyes up, unable to resist being curious about what she was saying.”

“Well you have to be thanking someone. It doesn’t make sense otherwise,” her sister retorted.

“Yes, it makes perfect sense!” I realize that for some unknown reason I have things that others don’t and I’m happy and grateful for it.”

“But that’s a prayer you said!”

“No it’s not! And even if it is, it’s still true!”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“And you’re stupid!”

–

He lied on the bed, at peace with doing nothing. During such moments it was important for him to find comfort in doing nothing, in doing nothing but being. For here he felt he had hit on one of the secrets of life: to be comfortable with doing nothing. This was not being lazy, far from it. Indeed, he had learned from watching people from the “baby boomer generation,” how hard it was to do nothing, and had come to feel that it was those people working constantly, unable to ever take a rest, and take time to enjoy being alive, unable to enjoy life itself; those people who thought to be hard working meant being virtuous that were truly lazy. To him these were the laziest of people for they were too lazy to stop and take in the pure essence of life; life with it’s good and bad, with its perplexity, and the existential anxiety that came with wondering about it all. Such people had busied themselves with the belief that existing meant doing and doing meant being. But all he ever learned from watching such people, with their incessant activity, was that their drive to stay busy was at heart nothing more than a determination to avoid some inevitable reality about life, and that they were merely trying to escape some unavoidable day when an individual is no longer physically fit enough to occupy his or her thoughts through labor; with the inevitable reality of being feeble, bed ridden, and stuck relatively handicapped with a whole world of doubt concerning the point of life, four cornering the space and time left to existence.

–

He thought about the optimism he had at that time concerning new beginnings. He wondered if he was wrong for having it then; he wondered if it was wrong to want it now; that he desired either the past or optimism itself, he did not know.

He felt buried by the present moment, and was uncertain what it meant. It involved feeling and being comfortable with the past, though it made him want to disappear from the present; it made him accepting of and happy that in the present he was able to be so at home, at piece with his memories and comfortable with the person he had come to be. He thought about this contradiction: loving one’s past from the present moment, loving the present because of it, but desiring to escape to the past nonetheless.

–

Doesn’t it bother you that you have to have sound all the time, that you can’t sleep without music? Shouldn’t it alarm you, or anyone, that you are unable to tolerate silence? What will happen when you’re older, or on your deathbed? Won’t silence catch up with you, chasing the very bones in your body as they begin to age and weaken? You’ll fight the silence with your body through tensions that make your muscles strain and your bones crack. You’ll claim to be upset over becoming old, but secretly you’ll come to love your decaying body because of the sounds emanating from them as they age, and you’ll pass away telling your self there was no other way. And you’ll die screaming in your head through a voice that no one will hear.

–

The endless distractions; a glass of tea here, a cigarette there; a nap, a walk, an endless stretch of daydreams; songs, food, drinks, TV shows, movies, idle talk, video games, gossip. The restlessness that gives way to movement, the movement that gives way to restlessness, and somewhere, floating between, a stillness that seems ephemeral, but only because one tries to hold on to it.

–

He lied in bed, on his side, with his arm by his face stretched over his head. From this angle he could see the pulse in the vein of his arm. He watched and began staring at it drearily. Soon he was thinking of her, focusing on the beat, the pulsation, Before long, the beat became her breathing; he watched and could feel her breath between kisses; he stared, and his pulse became the thrusts of his pelvis while making love; then the beat became the blink of her large beautiful eyes, opening and closing with the rhythm of her heart; staring back at him as if she was there. He watched his pulse and with every beat a memory of her would flash in his mind until it seemed she was his very blood, coursing through his body in torrents of red and blue.

–

He adamantly asserted who he was and clung to it so as to be done experiencing the inevitable effects of change as he experienced the world, a world with the propensity to shatter the will of any person determined to make it indissoluble. And so, as the currents of time flowed to erode the ground before him, he stood on the shore, intent on believing the currents would cease or that his will represented the very waves themselves.

–

“Try not to worry about that. Do what you want. Almost everyone will end up making a living,” he said. “But only a rare few will make living meaningful.”

–

He had chanced to utter things that he instantly regretted, that he knew he never meant, words that merely spoke themselves – that is language sometimes. He had seen her eyes close. He saw she had lost herself in a possibility, a possibility his words had only suggested, but not foretold: that he might get to a point where he could not stand her; something he immediately said would never happen. But the possibility had been spoken, and people live in possibility.

–

From where he sat there was movement, a sound and a whisper trying to change itself, with hills from where he watched the trees sway and bend with the wind; his soul in sync with their motion, and thought becoming something else; thought that fell to becoming, to existing absolute. He felt nothing wanted to be the same as he felt this nothing real. He felt the pulse of life, and knew death would not change a thing.

–

“No, the problem is not that you feel depressed or sad at times. The problem is that you think it is a bad thing to feel depressed and sad, to feel such things at all. You measure yourself against the rest of society where everyone wears a false and ridiculous smile all because they are afraid to feel life in it’s entirety, and so you think yourself something shameful and base by comparison.”

He sat there listening with his head down feeling the urge to respond struggle with the urge to stay silent.

“You want your peace, I know, but it doesn’t lie through any kind of dishonesty with yourself.”

–

In Sufism there is a Turkish word, ‘hüzün,’ which is used to describe a melancholic feeling that Sufis feel from being unable to get any closer to God. He felt this same melancholy when it came to trying to take in the world through his senses. For him, no matter how hard and with what concentration he tried to taste, feel, smell, hear, and see the world, he could never quite transport as deeply as he felt was possible. Of course he would transport to certain places: a sip of tea would take him to misty hill-tops with endless rows of tea trees; a piece of chocolate might take him to some tropical climate where he would sit protected from the intensity of the sun’s heat; the smell of the ocean might take him underwater to swim with beautifully colored fish. All of this and yet he wanted more, to get closer. He wanted to be these things because deep within the recesses of his feelings he felt a part of him was all these things, and all things him.

–

And so they continued to put off their final conversation, the last time it was decided they would talk to each other. They delayed, delayed and delayed until they decided to have no conversation at all; that words would do little justice to the love they were feeling, and that the unsaid would speak the truth and stay the more beautiful if it remained unspoken.

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