Nevertheless

Nevertheless I have the confidence that life can continue through muck, shit, and what is neither muck nor shit but is instead a recalcitrant stopping-point, a point at which, even if you would not wish to stop, even if you would not dare stop here, you must stop.
Nevertheless the company is something fulfilling, the company of friends as well as associates and strangers.  I might miss my family, I might even cry in missing them, but I still have company, plenty of motley company.
Nevertheless food is something you need, and I do not intend to give up eating yet.  If forced to I will eat the very air, become breatharian; if that doesn’t work I shall indulge my palate with the sun’s ethereal light-rays.  I shall find plenty of nutrition, somehow; for the earth never stops providing--even the desert of the earth provides sands for shelter, non-mirage pools, and cactus milk for eating.
Nevertheless my pain is not a depressing pain; it stays with me, to be sure, as pains tend to stay as long as they are allotted stay by the chemicals, the swerving forces, and the shades and states of mind that go to make them up.  Still there is work to be done, and I shall work on.
Nevertheless the air is breathable.  While it is not a clean air, it is possible to breathe and possible to live surrounded by its whispering and clapping, its forceful spurts and less forceful drippings.  Though I take my breaths carefully now, ever so carefully and full of uncertainty, I still breathe, and the breathing is good.
Nevertheless what I have found, while nothing much and nothing worth bragging over, is a thing to be cherished.  Absurd as it sounds, because the thing is so paltry, pale and barely noticed in the clear day, it was a thing hard won.  I intend to keep it.
Nevertheless warriors make their wars, as spiritualists create and ignite their own flaming spirits.  There shall surely come a day when this is no longer so, just as it shall surely happen that the earth is engulfed by the sun or that the earth’s moon goes swirling madly off its course and crashes into the earth, or into some other stellar body.
Nevertheless the meat of things is still worthy of attention, even if I am vegetarian and cannot stand to eat another’s flesh, even if I should be vegan or breatharian or gulp on rays of light.  The body of the earth might become as thin and pitiable as a decrepit man found lying in the streets, but still, its sinews and its muscles and its tone, however poor, is worthy of being touched, worthy of being the object of love, worthy of being consumed.
Nevertheless the mark of my being here was a mark; that is, there is no erasing the fact that someone was here, even if my name should be forgotten, even if all my scribblings and my works should be lost, to fire or water, air or earth or some other element.  We do not work to be remembered; no, we work in order to leave a mark, and a forgotten mark was still a mark.
Nevertheless, I brought along some provisions.  They are laughable things, really?  Still, why not hold onto something when everything else has been washed away?  For you never can be quite certain when a thing will come in use.  My provisions are all of them rusted and appear to be without usefulness--the most desperate man or woman in search of a tool would cry when he came upon them in some impossible place--but they are all I have.  I shall carry the load of them and shall find them handy, someday, some unspeakably appropriate day for the most inappropriate materials for building anything, let alone for surviving or making it to the next level unscathed.
Nevertheless my heart hasn’t stopped; it beats quickly and frantically, then it beats in steady, monotonous slow-drumming rhythm.  It beats when it hurts, and it beats after it stops a frightening moment or two, and it beats as well when I lose my heart, when it falls from me along the road, as when I am in possession of my heart, listening to it the while while it’s with me.
Nevertheless to hold someone is not the end of life.  Plenty of people shall flee me and quit their companionship of me, for all the right as well as for all the wrong reasons, as well as for reasons that are unimaginable for their unreasonable inevitability.  The man or the woman or the other I hold shall not become immortal, at least not because of my merely holding them and having divine fantasies of them.
Nevertheless my plan was not to reach anything, at least not anything specific or definite.  I walk on and on and, while the plan is behind me, so far behind me that I can no longer make it out, I walk on and on.  It would be more than presumptuous, it would be the height of impudence regarding life’s power to bestow, to disappoint as well as to complete and sate, to expect to arrive somewhere.
Nevertheless I stay close to the ground, and I am not disappointed with my state of affairs or with the composition of the world when I realize how close to the ground, so close as to be beneath it, I already am.  I might want to stand tall forever without creaking and breaking, but I must remember that such things spit in the face of my most proper place.  I became floored one day--we all become floored one day, are thrown down past our knees and past our feet--and see it as a seat to take, if not a bed, if not a final resting place.
Nevertheless souls move, and they move because they are on their compulsory way downwards.  So they are not exactly falling--I am not exactly fallen; perhaps I was wrong before--but they must tend toward the earth.  All the festivities of the earth cannot keep the canopy of the earth from closing around the lights and confetti.
Nevertheless error is no refutation, not as far as the thing exists.  It is the same as to say a good thing might be in error as well as a bad thing, as well as what is neither good nor bad.  Neither error, nor confusion, nor wasted thoughts, thoughts wasted in insulting generalities or some obsession, say of guilt or the beginning of all things, nor sleep as it regards thought, the sleep that ignores the waking day of shared thinking, is a refutation of what that error or that twisted, insomniac thinking intends.  These specters, specters though they are, still walk across the earth, unimpressive as their steps may be.
Nevertheless people did not die for truth, not when it truly comes down to it: they died because of death; death made them die, they had to die.  Truth does not make one die; it never could compete with death as far as this goes.  They died more because the time on the clock, or the location and stage of the moon in its cycles, than because of some thing like truth.
I am tired, though.
I admit: I am tired.