[from a crumpled writing found under a car seat among additional trash, transposed to typing as a record of a mind’s mayhem and mistakes]

“Deliver me, prays the haunted man.  Therefore…”

Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

I am Dostoevsky and I am Beckett.  I am Hegel and Heidegger and Holderlin.  I am Kafka.

I am not good enough for any of you.  I do not merit your time nor your attention, affection, sensibilities, your human talents, or your care… no conceivable reason to mention “love.”

But I love you.  I am the one who loves you.  The one who writes.  Who writes these words.  The haunted one, the Reader, the Librarian; the Lover, Scholar, I am me.  I love you.  I am haunted.  Words runnel through me, and with them thoughts, and with them feelings, and with them meanings, which means…nothing.  No matter, no space, no time.

The “haunted man” is a passage, a passing, a ‘type.’  Of no import, little reality, barely occurrence.

*

I am Blanchot, am Homer, am divine Scriptures, and Shakespeare.  Simply, small-ly, in my own way, this very general way, I am what humans do with language.  For one another, with one another, to one another, as.

*

Yards and houses, flesh and voices, signs and symbols, marks and sounds, music and rhythyms and gestures, as attempts to conjoin – join and connect – survive, discover, endure, be, become, in-volve… With no idea.  Or ideas that continually prove false and faulty.  Elaborate records of revision, perhaps better inscribed as simple songs of effort.  Urges only TO BE, and that, TO BE CONNECTED.

But what do I know?  I’m Pythagoras, call me Ishmael or Ahab, Everyman or Whatever.  I’m out-dated.  Assign me a number.  I don’t really care.  I really care.  I am here, and I, (at least) re-present, or present again, or presence, a sort of being.  Such as it is… with no “REAL” way to evaluate, estimate, “tell,” or “express.”

*

Satan, then, Jesus, Joyce, Proust, Alexander.  No matter, no space, no time, only IS.

A “tradition” (as it were, in our own words).  We.  Its + That + This.  US.  Humans strangely (apparently) in environments.  These ways of thinking, of being, of behaving and operating, of supposedly surviving (but with what evidence?  WHO or WHAT might know?).

How might elements arranged thus & so, survive?  I am Nebuchadnezzar, Mohammed, Hammurabi and Ishtar.  I am ab-original.

I am Nothing.  Everything.  No one.  Me.

Each time.

Each press of the pen: “Hello – ‘here’”

*

As simply as I can construct it (all of it, any of “it”) it goes something like this: accidents occur, accidents are weird, and accidents give way.

I, like all other(s), an accidental novel.  Occasional and Whatever.

WHAT HAPPENS TO BE… at any given point-of-measurement (i.e. as far as we have a capacity to render, sunder, and effect – “Reality” (for us)).  Some quirky, unlikely, ridiculous, painstaking, odds-massively-against, and over-dramatic assessment of a certain sort of being-in, being-with, co-occurrence, happen-stance, we fabricate “human.”

TO BE SOMETHING

(organism, constituent, element, participant, activity)

*

In many other words (for the sake or ability of ‘them,’ ‘it,’ ‘all’) I may as well be.  Be Hallie or Ollie or Aidan or Rhesus.  Chief Joseph or Samson or Ghandi or Jordan.  Be you or Sara or Maya or Jimmy John.

“no matter.  Try again.  Fail again…” no matter.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

“the venom of the serpents were within him”

Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

HOW SHOULD I KNOW?

*

And so what if I were Bernhard or Bach, Napoleon, Attila, Montaigne or Dorothy Parker?  If I had the ammunition or energy (and weaponry?) – the rhetoric, the nerve, or the madness.  L. Sterne, Nagarjuna, Hafiz, JL Borges?

“No matter.  Try again.  Fail again…”

Titian, Beethoven, Plato/Socrates, Palestrina.  Michelangelo, V. van Gogh, and Chuang Tzu.  You.

“No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.”

(hardly Beckett)