How to describe it? The grief is heavy, distinctly. Regret, fear, and misgivings. The experience is prominent, yet so difficult to explain. Actuality gives way to traces, as if patterned into nature, something that should have been known all along, but not possible to identify. This mix of things – complexity – the oversight of choices. Myopia, like scales, and the fracturing, the cloud. Peering and peering, inside and out, straining for meaning, for reasons. Dimly opaque, only powerful suggestion, like lace over frost.
In the way I describe the barn, can you feel it? The barn is rugged and old but stays dry. Light would find its way in if sun ever broke through. But the world here is moist and grey. A totaling overcast with a ground and a sky making one thickened thing. The green of the trees turned so dark that the world peers back black and white. That austere, filled with that many increments.
A perhaps melancholy is more like a humidy cold. You can perceive it in your clothes. They cling, they hang, they weigh. And saturate skin, that feels parched with age, like wax in its melting, still and gone down. You slow there. Drudge, trudge, move (if you move) like a worm at its creep – that claustrophobic a wriggling.
Almost struggle, but lacking the fight.
A zeroing out – the observance of something undoing, with the added false pretense of fate.
Resemblance: tectonic. Some slow, massive shifts, imperceptible morphing, glacial advances – a grind without wounding, pulverized and smothered with a winter wool blanket, a lowering lid made of iron. And you sit there: gaze through the cracks at the drips from the eaves, life runneling away and absorbed. Inconsequent with only replenishing leakage. A purgatory.
As the greying deepens to charcoal. Vision unhinges, becomes soft streaky fades, you were never looking at or out, your eyes simply open. Somewhat. Toward nowhere.
In full dissolution. Not staring, not gazing, not perceiving – what to call it? The mechanics are working, if asked. There is a park, there are trees, there are children, playing in rain like a sprinkler. The bars of equipment are red, green and blue, but really they’re grey, just not actually.
A world made of asphalt. The windows, your flesh, the skein on your eyes. Grey-gravelly sky without markings, just mottled. Movement has slowed to match outlines of concrete, the grasses are cracks, and the trees, the trees and the trucks, buildings and cars – simply humps, objects unleveling the vastness of road. The endless. The nowhere. A world made of asphalt – surely some ass’s fault.
And that’s where you are, granite soldier. Sculpted in the belly of earth, steady to the line, so much of you crumbled to time, and yet faithful. You take up the spaces you’re supposed to, supposing…what? That there must be a reason you sat down. Feel this way. With capability only to stare. Without seeing.
You wonder if something has come or has gone, like a season – expected but oft overlooked as it passes – until another takes place. Like that. Like waiting, without anticipation, there being there for which to wait. Is that really waiting?
Endurance as endlessly patient. But patience expects changes as well. No change occurs here. Here just continues, inconsecutively and vague.
The owl at its nightly watch. The worm at work in its tunnels. The mayfly at its twenty-third hour. The one that never ends. It goes on.
“In my room on 32nd Street…
…words dissolve as they’re spoken…”
with all that drizzle
and no intent.
If it were loss, you’d have lost something or had something to gain, but that is not so. It continues. Everything here, nothing to replace = now. You bow your head slightly, just off to the left. Your hand curls about the armrest. At one point you swallowed a drink. Your legs have crossed and uncrossed. And that is all. You wait without waiting. The barn is so old but stays dry. You probably just sit in your room, the barn imagined like memories. Still you seem dry to the touch, though you feel drowned in a heavying damp. You sit, you go on. You look, it’s unclear. It is dim. It goes on.
At something of a loss, what feels like a “crossroads” except that perhaps nothing in existence is really either / or.
That was not a sentence.
Bewildered without anxiety, I approach a sort of noisy blank. A surfeited absence.
I have the amorphous sensation of being entirely undone and woven up as a satchel of my everything. Every instance of myself threads the material of an empty knapsack that is me, dangling from a stick over the shoulder of the world I inhabit.
That the bag, indeed, is empty. No objects or trinkets in that wee darkness to finger or grasp, no spirits to set free, emotions to unstopper. Nothing within to escape, not even air.
My entirety fabricated as an emptied bag.
All I’ve ever written, attempted, every action, thought, adventure or relation. All my labors, abilities, acquisitions, emotions and dreams; every word or intuition, fear or blatant risk, all ongoing consequence(s)…EVERYTHING – internal, external; past-present-future: is the skin of a being, the form and the boundary, the grafted substance of an absent individuality.
I experience this neither as a blockage, nor an impasse; no meaninglessness, purposelessness or ennui – simply a vague, obvious experience that all I am as a being is my interface with the world within and around me, idenitifiable without essence.
Responsible, shaped, recognizable and devoid of identity – no narrative or plot, character or definitive name, just an inextricably meshed passel of experiences forming a pliable veneer around a vacant hollow.
That all will carry on, as such, until its end. Experience upon experience, before experience, during and after experiences and experiments – weaving, threading, joining…this being-form, this walking thinking speaking shape, this perceptive living husk or porous shell, a wave and trajectory of experiencings.
To feign a purpose, an intention or choicy action as this reality requires some arbitrary groundwork – hypotheses and rudimentary organizational operations. What might this handbag proffer? Or emit? What song might be huffed from this void?
This is where I seem to be. Evaluate. Assess. No pillars, few givens, a smattering of beliefs and bones and hunches, a median vocabulary of gestures. From this – what pretend to build? What fabricate? I find that I want to, have desire to, create. Make out of what is woven – everything that forms me / allows me to be – but in what manner? Open. Free.
As if the absence is realized, the content in-formed, substance resulting from wafting motions and play. Capacity for invention. Something like soap bubbles – materials forming a translucent and wobbly funhouse mirror of shapes…leaking…nothing! Yet capable of popping fragments like droplets or spittle, or words.
This seems to be where I am. I know not what might emerge, but I’d like to leave some trace of the fabric experience has made of me. Scraps or ephemeral stains, artifacts.
I really don’t know what these things are I’ve been writing (“Ideas of Home”, this one…). Seem to be open ramblings. I apologize if they waste time for any readers, I think I’m trying to open up channels inside of me with less self-conscious shaping and imposition of some pre-formed concepts of style, order, characterization, plot, even poesy. Opening veins, trying to allow swollen connections between pockets of my body and brain that otherwise occur only in dreams or infrequently heightened states. Not sure what’s going on, just writing.
In the Depression, A Cavern
The outlook that prides its common sense (for those who bear it)
“I cannot comprehend our attachments to beings”
-E.M. Cioran-
Airtight logic. Closed circle of belief.
The end is doom and oblivion, i.e. “end.”
Therefore, “I cannot comprehend attachment” –
to things? Well, perhaps, for personal endurance, a comfort while still understanding their nature (“truth”: “things fall apart, the center cannot hold”)
that all become, belong to silence (no total comprehension, understanding) all is constant change, therefore ephemeral, ridiculous to trust or develop dependence – everything changes, and then you die…
that, well that does not seem to alter much. Perhaps it wavers.
As all things wobble and waver, are insecure, uncertain.
Well, but maybe not “ends” and “loss” – almost certain, almost absolutely so,
but then not everything has happened, as far as we know.
Hold on to joy’s illusions – real experiences – and why not?
Embrace.
Let go.
You better let go
or it will be taken, suffocated, crushed.
Smile, but don’t forget to cry, there are many truths.
And much matter(s) to perceive (momentarily)
But then there’s that: the individuality of perception
All my Words are Silent 