another letter
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I think it’s often said best by those who don’t even try…those unconscious breathers, the imperial thoughtless geniuses. I heard something this morning that struck me so…”to her death is quite romantic she wears an Iron vest, her professions her religion her sin is lifelessness.” I am marred…I am troubled. I see my romance…I see my religion. I’ve seen how quickly faith becomes blindness and how dull footsteps can become because the months shrink and shape little more than the distance of dreams. I’ve seen the city change and I’ve seen the dirt dry up and chase itself to the sewer. I’ve seen the words run the same. It’s the surrender that strikes me odd perhaps. How easy it becomes to fold up into duty, into deadlines, into the fears of Molochs of our own making…how simple it is to construct the chains of our bondage. I don’t know if I’ve beer given myself the opportunity to be born…suffrage of the simpleton. Salvation for the unworthy. Constance for the inconsistent. Impurity for the virtuoso. I’m not sure what any of this means to you…I don’t know what it says for me.
I saw you two days ago at the library. There is a sense of grandeur there…even the silence is enormous…each creaking chair a signal over the air. I imagined myself there at night…in that cool calm quiet forgotten rooms of a certain size acquire. There is nothing better than to be alone in the dark in a forgotten room. So I imagined myself there or in the Doge’s Palace or in the forum before the fall…what do these rooms…these places say about us…what response is there? How impure I feel in those rooms of perfect quiet…Emerson felt that in nature “I become a transparent eyeball” he said about it. I transport as well but to the negative, I do not become a part of everything, I feel as though I disassemble…I become the light in the darkness, the limit in all struggles, I cease to be connected, and through my destruction, through my collapse, I am free.
But…always rebellion…against flesh, against face, against tides that push us every which way. Is this our cause? Our innat revolution…when our parents called four and made peace…but show the power of the stree, were weleft with thse crumbs? Where our rebeelion is the repulsion of the self? Filling our selves with pale liquours and false idols? TO judge our aims by what we do not eat? The rebels of lack of rebellion? We stand united against ourselves…sacrificing genius, decapitating beauty, inhaling the poison and calling it free. I am of this. Do you think you are too? How did we so easily give in? Not you and I…all of us? I can’t imagine many reasons, or see much avenue for escape but do you think it has anything to do with chasing our child? That we cant succeed like the promise so we do what we can to run away…shuttle into bars, or books, or any other and creative successions of our souls. Help may be the easily word to squeeze through teeth. Prayers. Solutions. Diatribe.
This is a diatribe about nothing anyway. So on…and so on.
There is little excuse for what I do…tossing aside full meals, burying a gun fully loaded, subsiding when eyes burn with tears. I have little and never ask for permission or for more…such is the pity of stubbornness. I don’t think there is any survive left in me to preserve…to give and give…I’ve reached the point of exhaustion…points blackened and dulled, senses corroded…a place grown moldy from unconsciousness. How does the dance dare be made if there is no place for the song to sing, no mouth to lead the way. I’ve said so many times that I’m moving out…that I’d tackle fate and find destiny on the periscopes of the American arches. I’ve realized that it is just a fantasy, a dream…its in my dreams that I really live and my dreams have sold me out…like a mystery sold for pennies on the street corner of Washington Square. A mix of dreams there to lay and the feet so coldly driven like roots in the ground. Slave to empiricism. Let me know something ...a dream to confound…to get me through. I drink so much without a drop…I suppose then that we all have our means of drowning away the daemons. But I’ve driven things away that will not come back…and I need them so. I, lunatic, I. eye for an eye every time. How could I ride off into the sun? Tied by all the young times? I cannot remember my last happy time. I don know if I care…I know only that I, fool, I.
But here’s an idea, I cannot bring myself to believe in karma as a force but I sense it more and more as I age. I’ve reaped what I’ve some…done damage in love and received it in quick k return. I hate 2007 and wish it to be on the wind, taken to the sea to be drowned, to dissipate lowly in the brine. But here I suppose alas all the confession I make to myself. I don’t dream of wife and family…I long for love but dream of a lonely life among the trees. I say that I wan what I cannot have…I long the impossible…I embrace the trap and only ever ensnare. And I wonder who Abraham felt at the presence of the flame…ho w it feels to embrace the nature o impossibility…to raise one’s and with the blade…to cut off the soul, to put off the sound. To set aside the most basic element of self. I used to see Job as brother, no he is just a man how rises in my memory. How much can a man (person) take? As much as he wills himself to…we are the devils of our own creation…the daemons that we see on the horizon. How painful and pitiful to case oneself to the flame. Just a thought.
What is this I am writing and why to you? Perhaps because you were once willing to undertake this old fashioned enterprise, which honestly, we are both too busy for…but maybe that’s the point…the purpose…to take time to pause, to shroud the surroundings and escape to the word. And I admit my flaws in this, my lack of focus, lack of clarity, and that I am writing one paragraph at a time, sometimes hour or days apart. Such is this thing we do. I wrote it by hand because I could. Because the only time I have the idea to write is when I cannot…or dare I say, should not. Now I am waiting for the rain in the library…. to much work to even care…so I write and wait for the rain and the right time to go start playing Christmas music and dreaming of the warm smells of home. I don’t have a home and I miss home more than any thing. I feel I love a hotel life a place that sleeps too much (cut off…)…. … … …
I like the idea of a kite and what Cohen said about it…neither master nor servant, but perfectly human at the same time, serving the wind as if at liberty but subtly tied to bondage. Confessionals of the air. I listened to a song today and reached the conclusion that the singer had to be a Catholic, because only a catholic can constantly display the wounds of betrayal but hold the mirror and reach such lofty and grandiose means of self-immolation. I take heed that so many of my brethren operate with such closed hearts. The days are years, and that’s how it goes. However that may be.
I suppose you and I are custodians of our cares and fears. Emotional losers…I very much so…robotic as I may be I suppose is rooted in fear. A significant source of Christ-like favors, I hope for everyone except myself. I, as much as I think it will come out poorly…and translate even worse, declare my fear of you. I don’t know the root (or perhaps I keep it withheld?), but I love so much to be in the shadow of your contentment’s and indeed and beyond honored to be within your graces. But why fear? Why ever so much do I feel a sense of distaste…that I am bidding time until eminent collapse? Suture the heart and amputate the arm. The heart shall wear no one. No vigorous sleeve. But you are beautiful and even more so the simpler it is. I appreciated the time we laid on your floor with songs and alcohol to heal wounds…how we viewed ceiling beams as stars - simple because they were possible…if we were in another time (I imagined us) we’d have been in convertibles on some over look somewhere. I loved you for your sadness - for your love how you couldn’t see the way your bad fortune could not be worthy of your tears. I loved your hips and how they sang pressed against mine. How I wanted so much not to kiss you because I did not want to catch sadness. How I wanted so much to kiss you because you were beautiful in red. You wore my hat and drank your beer and I played sad songs that brought you near. Don’t think twice it’s all right. And you asked me to stay and I knew against everything that I should flee. For your sake…or mine? I’ll never know, but it does cross my mind. We listened to Only in Dreams and you held my hand and collected to kiss me so very softly. I knew enough to come to terms with meaning, you and hands and my epistemological futility.
Here I am perhaps on my third week of this letter. I was thinking o of this letter on the way to work and the journey, I’ve been on since I started it and wondering where I’ll be when I’m done. I also realized that this is less a letter than a confessional. Is it so very Roman Catholic of me to hold until I burst in waves of contrition? I wonder where God is…where that safety has gone…I think He’s hiding with my sense of home, my sense of reason. I read about sleep and the animal mind…how ducks rest one hemisphere of their brain at a time, that they can close one eye and be very much half asleep. Now this article goes on to discus our human brains at rest, who we sleep poorly in new places because our animal past comes up and yells “potential danger.” So we do not sink as deeply into rest. I think this explains my exhaustion, my constant, unceasing exhaustion. I can sleep for endless hours and not once feel rested. I have no home. I don’t know the warmth of places and only realize the stillness of my temporary places. I am wholly scientific in these estimations. I do know even know if I would know home if I found it again. Home I think is a place that speaks to you as much as you speak to it…that shapes and implies and gestures to you…tells you before you realize that the seasons are changing, is warm when it needs to e and cold or removed as the mood shifts. And where is God? Where am I? Where are you? And why does everything seem as if it sit retreating - drawing back as the tide - why is everything so god damn distant? Everything is so…far…away. And how do you get it back? I suppose that is the essential question at our age. Alone and twenty-eight. So far to go. So far gone.
Do you think one can be taught how to feel? I think that’s what happens at a certain stage…the arrows point to a proper response. Well I for one want to retreat I was never taught that…my father is a stoic. Irish and proud. I am as well. I think of your street some times…the bridge erupting in the distance like some Parthenon of modernism…and those pretty faces all over the street, I remember when the city was ugly - so strange and mysterious…when that left me (and I don’t know when) I lost my sense of wonder and mystery. Do you get that sense? Is that the reason why Texas is calling you? How quickly that moment will come (if it does) when you and I will be stories told to others, retold over and over, ever changing as the years go by until we are but cellular moments in the mind. Long years grown cold and outstretched aching history. Those boys and girls we’ve kissed, those hours spent idly or wildly twisting away time - because there was a moment when the immensity of time was inconceivable - and yet as it shrinks, as all things do, what remains is the stillness in our minds…the epic trudging of an individual life and all the beautiful and sad people we have had the good fortune to know or love or fight or fuck …or something else. Where will we stand in the other’s mind?
But just now I saw high school lovers…and thought, without any plan or vision, ‘what is the point of it if it does not stay. This is impermanent and flawed by design.’ But I was taken aback by the through. Am I so a man divined with control that I would withdraw from, and shun, impermanence. What good does it serve, but to stimulate m lioness…I horizon gazer…I petrified, I. light and lack. I, imperial, I. I shun. I lightning fire. I night. So what are we to do with stasis? We pitiful feeble humans. Stalls in motion, constant motion. It’s all so sickening and beautiful - the revolt against time, against self, against meaning. I am ok wit it. I evolution. I have so little to say.
It’s closing on the holidays, the miracle of Thanksgiving being so close has been revealed. What peace these times offer anticipation as the last leaves of the year cling to empty branches and the warmth of ovens and sweet smells…but it’s the same outside. That river that divides the hop and the highways that pry dreams from the heart. The winter is the signpost of warmth…a thing o always journey from, like everyman tonight. But I try. And I love suspension, the mid-air delight and the metallic city light and in the snow we can wait for the avalanche…the temptation of suffocation, to lay with the cold. But always remains.
I’ve written more than what needed to be said…if anything indeed was. I grotesque. I verbosity. It took three weeks…too many. I impatient. I hope this letter finds you well. Greet always, with kindness, your wounds and needs.
Sincerely,
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