(no subject)
I’m about to do something crazy. And I want the world to know it, but I can’t have anyone knowing. And I’m a bit scared, now that’s it here-this opportunity, this strange beguiling fantasy that’s becoming real, this thing that in a few short hours will be a done rather than a future maybe-a bit scared I might die even, and not just in sense of the inherent and unavoidable physical risk.
It’s palpable: this feeling of starting something, or maybe regressing to a former state, connecting with something that was long ago. There’s the whisking wind on a St Kilda beach in winter, hallucinated dolphins and hallucinated soul mates, love on a tarpaulin beside embers of wood and embers of convention. There was magic in the madness-in the snorting lines in commission houses, seeing televisions flying out second floor windows, running around parks with speeding steaming bodies, being held by the thinnest boy in the world, hearing stories of him streaming down Lismore streets naked and high. Is that what I’m chasing? The history, the once-upon-a-time magic? Adventure, Sartre wrote, is not a thing you do; it’s the narrative construction you undertake after living something. Am I trying to write my adventure before I’ve started, or trying to reinsert myself into a narrative that climaxed and ended long ago? Am I, as Sartre suggests, trying to attribute meaning and texture to an experience, make it feel special, something exceptional, without truly even engaging in the doing? Writing the history instead of living the moments.
You flip back, flop back, feel yourself dissolve. Maybe that’s what I’m chasing: the losing of the self, the forgetting there is a self at all, just not being a being while experiencing the height of being. In other words, feeling without feeling grounded, feeling every sensation of flying without thinking about the practicalities of your wings or your bone structure or your beak or the next worm you’re gonna eat. The grandest, most intense height which is at once the most profound absence. That sounds amazing.
Who knows if that’s what it’s really like, but hey: everything once, you know? Maybe I don’t know what I’ll find hidden-within me or in the air and entities around me-or maybe I will go back, to my imagined womb where I was warm with the floods despite the carving knives and forceps that abused their way through my little porous embryo flesh.
But anyway, this isn’t for him, and neither is it for us. This is strictly for me, for my inventory of life’s nodes and molecules, its extravagant branches and trembling oceans and the plenitude of milk. When the weatherman’s fingers are broken he winces with delight because for once things are unpredictable, and in their unknown-ness they are infinite and infinitely promising; the allure of an abundance of who knows what, who knows what glories, what passions, what ecstasies, what triumphs…
Wonder grows of little buds. That is where we start: in wonder. The wondrous curiosity and awe in the face of there being something instead of nothing: “how strange it is to be anything at all…”
It’s palpable: this feeling of starting something, or maybe regressing to a former state, connecting with something that was long ago. There’s the whisking wind on a St Kilda beach in winter, hallucinated dolphins and hallucinated soul mates, love on a tarpaulin beside embers of wood and embers of convention. There was magic in the madness-in the snorting lines in commission houses, seeing televisions flying out second floor windows, running around parks with speeding steaming bodies, being held by the thinnest boy in the world, hearing stories of him streaming down Lismore streets naked and high. Is that what I’m chasing? The history, the once-upon-a-time magic? Adventure, Sartre wrote, is not a thing you do; it’s the narrative construction you undertake after living something. Am I trying to write my adventure before I’ve started, or trying to reinsert myself into a narrative that climaxed and ended long ago? Am I, as Sartre suggests, trying to attribute meaning and texture to an experience, make it feel special, something exceptional, without truly even engaging in the doing? Writing the history instead of living the moments.
You flip back, flop back, feel yourself dissolve. Maybe that’s what I’m chasing: the losing of the self, the forgetting there is a self at all, just not being a being while experiencing the height of being. In other words, feeling without feeling grounded, feeling every sensation of flying without thinking about the practicalities of your wings or your bone structure or your beak or the next worm you’re gonna eat. The grandest, most intense height which is at once the most profound absence. That sounds amazing.
Who knows if that’s what it’s really like, but hey: everything once, you know? Maybe I don’t know what I’ll find hidden-within me or in the air and entities around me-or maybe I will go back, to my imagined womb where I was warm with the floods despite the carving knives and forceps that abused their way through my little porous embryo flesh.
But anyway, this isn’t for him, and neither is it for us. This is strictly for me, for my inventory of life’s nodes and molecules, its extravagant branches and trembling oceans and the plenitude of milk. When the weatherman’s fingers are broken he winces with delight because for once things are unpredictable, and in their unknown-ness they are infinite and infinitely promising; the allure of an abundance of who knows what, who knows what glories, what passions, what ecstasies, what triumphs…
Wonder grows of little buds. That is where we start: in wonder. The wondrous curiosity and awe in the face of there being something instead of nothing: “how strange it is to be anything at all…”