Part II
If we fall as crystal objects, obstructions of a light we’ve never given name to, into a pool (clear. soft)… there is a silence erupted by the collision of forms… and when you find your feet against fists of grass and dirt, mesmerized by the moving worm.
So I had a thought the other day, about religion. What does it mean for me to be an atheist? Reason, as seen by many, is a voice, a God-voice, omniscient and real… drum dance drum dance… one is expected to answer to it. As I see it, a voice is a voice and is displaced from what I am living, as much as any tool immediately displaces user from the action. For a moment, I was horrified as I smashed a hammer onto a porch. I used my fist and I could feel my skin twist and burn. I use this hammer and I feel light as flakes of cement fly off into the distance. A tool, a technique of any sort, makes such violence possible… tools, forms, techniques also make it possible to hold someone hands as you drive down endless capillaries of cement, orchestrated by reds and by yellows and by greens…
And if the woman with the starving child asks me why I did not come for her, did not save my cash to buy a plane ticket to hold the odd ectomorphic arms… to bring milk and honey… if she asks me why I will have no answer. I will tell her that I spend the money on a gift for a woman who’s name I do not know. I will tell her that though she is also human, and though the children are hungry and are also human, and could have been my little sister, and could have even been the woman I care so deeply about… and that they will die though I deny that I could save a life. “I wouldn’t be able to help your child, ma’am. It will live.” But it will not. Because you know how many sleep beneath the dirt… and true or not, are we not called by our ethical contracts to do so? Our categorical imperatives, our utilitarian layouts…
And the real is irrational.
the abstract organizing and forming that occurs is not what is my real self. It is a distant rush of calls and orders that cannot grasp the sensations that drive me to the ecstasy of life. It is a voice that betrays all I feel, all that is most intimate, makes forms and faces by pressing its thumbs into the eyes and ears… something is creating bodies that storm and hail against us. Holes burn through. Such distance does not understand.
What is sacred as some define it is experiencing something wholly other, something besides the doctrine that claws us through the days, something truly real, beyond our rational fingers, it really exists. It is not a hallucination but it really exists. mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is the most frightening and most fascinating… Religion is a term that is applied to communities… an ultimate power that addresses that which is of our ultimate concerns… an absolute dependence… many cultures do not have a word for the sacred, and perhaps our definitions are flawed. …God is in the radio… ch-ch-ch-checking the stations…
I could lose myself in your smoke, you know that? Alright, let’s face it, I’m irrational. Fine, no one said I had to be reasonable. Reason is a voice too abstract for us… Is this what Atheism is? Silencing voices that are not there, that do not bite your flesh.
----------I could lose myself in your smoke. Did I say this before? They say changes in trade and technology demanded the unconditional realities, forced the religions of their host environment to respond. This is the age of modernism. Abstract gods replaced by abstract theorems, priests with philosophers, as the new sacred seeped into the homes, encased in its flesh of gold and printed paper. Unleashed into the data stream… let me tell you something. That which is unconditional has no ethical law. When someone is slain in an alley or hungry or straining their finite bodies for cocoa beans, there is no intervention divine. It does not descend upon us nor is it sustained by our wills. Some have said there is only the individual and god. I say there is neither. The self is a hallucination. These reasoning voices tell me they, they are that which is forever. They tell me they know the concrete world. I don’t believe them. There are two things that I believe. Everything else is more or less the dull doctrine, the habit, institution. When one confronts these things, one asks: what is horror? What is awe? When there are dead bodies on the road and jeeps are forced to drive over them (the ethical is invented for other kinds of efficiency), when rivers carry one corpse after the other (when no imperative quiets a screaming mouth or eases the blood), when a woman is forced to eat her child and you sit here… in such a finite spot between war on one side and war on the other side and a roaring vacuum of consciousness, a kind of silence even across the earthquakes endless, emptiness at the ends and in between and in those between. Even you are insubstantial. Two things have a light of their own. The nature of everything is shadow. It is intervened by light. Two things are bright in themselves like fire. One of them held my hand. The world never held my hand. One of them held my hand. A categorical imperative never held my hand. Yes this is irrational. She held my hand. The other thing is that which is immediate and silent, where there is no distance in what is. When mountains are again mountains. One has a world where she is that which is ultimate. One has the ultimate in its silence.
Continued midday:
Let me tell you something. That which is unconditional has no ethical law.
Something in the world… is broken.
I see the cracks, transverse spiders as living bulbs, transcribing their impulse across the bathroom sill. Something hit my windshield. “Good God Almighty.” Something hit my mirror. “The more you drink, the better you think we sound.”
There is news of bridges collapsing.
There are two things.
[I want you to hold me. Everything else feels like a hallucination. I could wake-]
But of course, if we are to perfectly honest, we would acknowledge a few things.
The first thing is that if, at night, she came to wherever I lived, possibly on a motorcycle and I don’t know why it is on a motorcycle, but if she knocked on my door and told me:
“We’re going someone. Pack a suitcase, cause you ain’t coming back here.”
I would do it. I would go with her. I would leave behind everything, even everyone.
If this happened in the daytime, I might stop to think about it.
The second thing is that there are things I would not do. I am bound by doctrines, by habits, by contracts and tacit agreements. Not necessarily by choice and definitely not by force… Many of my preconceived limits (I would not drink, not smoke), though, I would give up for her… for her.
Another thing is… this seems like the event that determines not only my honesty but my conviction. But that is not caring about someone. That is only short of needing them. That is not caring about someone. The truth is that one day I will have to say goodbye. The truth is that there is much I still do not know. The truth is if this is real to me than I recognize the connections. If I recognize the connections, sympathy should flow. Even if my rational mind does not see them, my sympathy should flow. And I haven’t been… I have not responded well.
The truth is that though I recognize two truths. There is only one. It is not a center; it is not anything. Perhaps you can feel it if a sword is against your neck. Maybe you were so afraid when a rat entered the room you lifted yourself off the ground by slamming your wrists into the ground… and you saw it then. I feel this way when she is with me. I feel that things are… there. I am actually alive. The lights… glow. The night is dark and soft. The concrete is sharp. And her hands… are electric. Her eyes are the only eyes… that.
I sung gospels all morning. My foot, dead-tired, dragged across the ground, the air thick with the pulse of my chorus.
These days, telephone poles resemble crosses, (cruxi-fiction) the body of the battery bleeding into long black wires, for decades now. (There are no resurrections; no forgiveness) Transmission towers, a phallic guide, everyone here fakes an orgasm, everyone…It gestates within us (it kicked, feel it) and maybe every nine years or so, blood begets new blood, our beds soaked in afterbirth, as we wait lost in anesthesia for an ending. Congratulations, doctor. It’s a healthy baby boy.
Light on.
Traffic Jam. Red blur. Neon nudes
narrated at the store front.
We started the generator the other day and we could not figure out how to turn it off. The more you drink, the better you think we sound. I wondered if the generator would take my legs… that it would explode and take my legs away. For many years I would have thoughts like this. Something would impale me, something would crush my body. What was the most horrible way to die? I had to die this way. I had to feel that pain, needles and fire so someone else would not, or simply because it was my punishment for not being there… couldn’t someone else have been there? No. I had to be there. Someone else might have been there. It would not matter. I had to be there. And understanding that I was not there, understanding that maybe no one was there, I understood morality and reason are things that are constructed, tools to alter the environment around them. Later I understood the self was this way. And being there no purpose and no meaning and no light. No there’s no light… in the darkest of your furthest reaches, no there’s no light. That even if I was brought into a trance and created such substances for myselves, I would eventually wake up, late at night, walking down a sidewalk… and I would see what vanity is poured into all of this and from what vanity all of this was poured. I could not even depend on my memory… on time. And so there was nothing to do but stare with awe at how it all unfolded. No there’s no light, no there’s no time, you ain’t got nothing, your life was just a lie. Such peace and awe against such turmoil of mind, of rising and falling forms is a prediction of doom… “For the genuinely tribal man there is no causality, nothing ocuring in a straight line. He turns aside from the habit of construing things chronologically-not because he can’t, but as Edmund Carpenter says, because he doesn’t want to.”
“We, who live in the world of reflected light, in visual space, may also be said to be in a state of hypnosis. Ever since the collapse of the oral tradition in early Greece, before the age of Parmenides, Western civilization has been mesmerized by a picture of the universe as a limited container in which all things are arranged according to the vanishing point, in linear geometric order. The intensity of this conception is such that it actually leads to the abnormal suppression of hearing and touch in some individuals. (…‘bookworms’) Most of the information we rely upon comes through our eyes; our technology is arranged to heighten that effect. Such is the power of Euclidean or visual space that we can’t live with a circle unless we square it.” “But this was not always the expected order of things. For hundreds of thousands of years, [hu]mankind lived without a straight line in nature. Objects in this world resonated with each other… the world was multi-centered and reverberating. It was gyroscopic.Life was like being inside a sphere, 360 degrees without margins; swimming under water; or balancing on a bicycle. Tribal life was, and still is, conducted like a three-dimensional chess game; not with pyramidal priorities…”
I feel uncertain and haunted.
When I talk to you… I feel fine.
I hope to carry that feeling in all moments of my life.