Let’s Face It

Cancel that, he told the waiter when she came back to check on us; it’s not that we had been waiting too long for our pancakes and potatoes, or that we were tired, or that we had anything to do: his canceling the meal was just a throw of the wrench in the gears of the day, his wanting to go hungry a little longer than expected, then walk back, perhaps the way we came, perhaps a different way, to the house to do more, empty-bellied, of the same.  Sure, the waitress said, nonchalant–she seemed to be busy otherwise, her section full of diners arguing over coffee and flapjacks or flirting over coffee and flapjacks or laughing over coffee and flapjacks–these tables seemed to be the messiest as, inevitably, some minor food fight would break out at the table, a man or lady would flick specks of the syrupy things at their fellows on the other side of the booth, or, when they laughed, all four of them would lose a piece of their cake from their fork onto the table or onto the flowered carpet beneath them, or spatter a few hot drips from their coffee mugs onto the table or into the carpet to stain–or making some business deal over the meal, consisting, again, of coffee and flapjacks; so much going on in such a tiny place and at such an early hour–she smiled as she was trained to smile, or as she thought best to smile for the best tips, or simply because smiling was her forte, she always did it best, and serving in the diner just happened to be where it was best exploited and utilized to make some quick money, either for school–she looked too elderly for school, but you never know–or to save for her children, their own meals, their own flapjacks and juice, or their own schooling, she smiled, nodded, said Sure, then brought us the check for the coffee, which she had already filled three times each during our short stay.  Thanks and come back or something like that she said, then walked away to laugh and flirt, or compose herself with straight back and etiquette, for her other guests, each table getting a dimension of her shown only to them, or to voyeurs, like us, who wanted to see her in her multidimensionality and followed her, for a moment, around the rows of seats and stools and counters to watch the improvised show.

            So we said Thank you in return, because she was attentive to us, even if for only coffee, paid the 4.89 and stepped out, without any rush, into what was already a hot day, eight in the morning and already the sun was making the plants, not thankful for their limpid nutrition, but cry out in whispers like a dying elderly woman, who can barely speak but has so much to say, saying in their own case Can’t a cloud come by and screen your awful stare?  We’re not saying we want you to leave us or permanently darken just yet–we would never say that, we would be scared, we would be terrified, we would not be, at such a lack of dawning–but give us a little break, can you?  You would think, taking us from our comfort in this way, taking our stroll on an empty stomach to the house, putting on a performance of indifference back there at the restaurant–the manager could be seen making her way to the counter just as we were leaving, probably to ask us why we were leaving, if everything had been alright, if there was anything she could do, if we would come back to visit, The next meal on me, she was wont to say–that he would say something to me but he didn’t, the memories, the whimpering plants, the cars spewing out emissions in the morning traffic, the choking birds poking fun at one another in the air and poking fun at us, poking fun at humanity–the thought had come to me before, when a crow, perched on a lamppost in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Arizona, could do nothing but laugh at me and a different friend, laugh at the bustle there, laugh at his own and his fellows’ demise, the elimination of scarecrows, with a laugh that sounded as if he knew, above anyone else and higher than everyone else on his perch, that the joke would finally be on us, poor wretches–the lonely whiff of a cloud up above, which tried to help us for the trek and block the rays for five minutes or so, but evaporated as soon as it approached near, that only cloud, after the death of which the sky was blue, blue blue and white, and yellow and orange and something like a stretched-out powerful grey, the insane children playing ball before the bus picked them up for school–though it seemed a bit too late for that, and I suspected that they were playing hooky, but just so obviously, playing ball right in front of one of their parent’s house!–sweating profusely through their bright-colored diminutive garments, their shorts and shirts, shouting to one another when the ball went off course or when someone was out of line, when she didn’t know the rules or there was some foul play, the rambling of the English grasses in the divided yards in the tropics, separated by hedges of bougainvillea, or painted fences or walls, as though the walls of a compound, some castaway tropical compound, the shot of a thought going through me This is enjoyable really, although I’m ignoring so much else and cannot even see the ocean now, and, when I do, when I make it there–it’s amazing how landlocked you can be on an island, and a teeny one at that–I cannot see any further than my eyes are equipped, walking with you, sweating alongside you, is something I wouldn’t give away for an airconditioned room and flapjacks towering to the sky, endless fills of coffee, or anything else in the resplendent world: all these things, things which were more affects than anything else, they made up an atmosphere, a charge as we walked along, said more than he, or than I, did, or could, let’s face it.     

Alientology

They would probably dig up the remains,
And make sure to inspect their contours
For something worth hoping for
In that yawning past,
Something that gave way like birth
To unexpected, frivolous, catastrophic things.

They would probably make jokes at our expense,
Especially about that time
We all catapulted ourselves headlong into the machine
To escape from limitless indifference,
To give our unsure hands to madness and tremulous inexperience.

Putting the remains away into bags like evidence bags,
Remarking one last time that Even here
There was something like sublimity,
They would smile to one another
Without teeth, full of raucous malice, looking hence.

There was one time a man’s voice

There was one time a man's voice
Curled up inside another man's voice
The snake song grabbed hold of the throat
And out came voluminous nonsense from that throat
Until soil, trees, building tops
Were all slathered in it.

Now a sticky tar reaches to the sky
With babbling for its steps
Humans climb it only to find
That they get stuck midway
Or before the journey has even begun
And that their cries for help are muted.

The Face Of

One day this world will have on it a face.

The face of a champion.

I wish I could say with you The face of a champion.

Not of someone defeated?  Could the world wear that face?

I wish I could say with you that it couldn’t.

The face of the defeated.

The face of the defeated.

At what was it beaten?

An old game.

Please, be more precise.

A terribly old and wicked game.

Oh, by that, I assume, you mean deception.

No, not deception, though your guess deserves silence.

What?

Silence.

…

…

So…the game, the terrible one, is not deception and nasty tricks?

Gamish though the world is here, it always knew it would be bested at that.

By whom?  By whom else but the world?

The gasp.

(Gasps, then gasps with laughter.)

But we are losing sight of what we were aiming for ourselves.

What (composing himself from his fit) may I ask, is that?

What the game is, the proper game where the world can lose?

Oh, yes!  For reminding me I thank you.

            So…it is not deception?

No, it is not deception; much older, much more painful and terrible.

What, then: my head is empty of sport!

Meditation.  And by that I mean the world tried, for a long time, an awfully long time, to harness its chaos.  But it couldn’t you see: after so long, so terribly long I cannot bother to even recount in paraphrase how long it was, it was ousted from the shrine surrounding it like breath by a gruesome possibility.

Now you have me impatiently wanting to remove every last blanket and mask from the face of the world, to uncover, if I could, if but for an instant, that face defeated in its meditative stance; I want to know how it looks and where it’s looking, what opposes it and how.

Then take off the last shroud, be impatient and rude as you wish, that shroud of deception, because with that talisman the world is capable of dissimulating at anything, even meditation and the struggle to meditate.  But true meditation, that is something else, something the world is long practiced in; you should catch a glimpse of the sides of its face now, now that you are lifting the final curtain; and true meditation can be defeated only by–

–Please, tell me, before I see the world’s face and cry!–

–confusion.  Thoroughgoing, awful-terrible, hard-won because it took so long to achieve, after all, confusion.  Utter and simple confusion.  The world shall have the look of confusion.

Huh?

Look–it does already.

I saw the shell of the rich man’s house

I saw the shell of the rich man's house
And it looked quite the same as the poor man's
Beams of wood fastened together
With metal nails and plates of metal
Which are then fastened onto other things
And enfleshed with guts of alloys and plastic and wires
Before it breathes a generation or more
Or the shorter generations between evictions
The generations of hours
Which is furthermore fastened to unwary-weary, unfashioned earth
For a round of its rounds and a turn of its turns
Only no fire burns this house as of yet
Nor do termites' mouth-marks crumble it
Like the poor man's
But they will
The rich man also doesn't have a floor of dust
Like the poorest man
Who lives his life from last to first

A Note on (Dogen’s) Living-Dying

Dogen refused to consider life and death as separate from one another or as engaged in any type of warfare.  In other words, he would not have been sympathetic with there being within the human eros, a drive to life and ever more life, and thanatos, a death-drive.  This psychological picture, no matter how much it incorporates dying into living, does not fuse them enough; there is still that moment or those characteristics of dying that are distinct from those of living.  Dogen saw it otherwise: living-dying is for him completely fused, that is, it is impossible to separate the components of the alloy.  Indeed, they are not fused, for to fuse is to bring together two or more things: they are not at all.  Living-dying, instead, is one thing, one movement.  There is no life, in other words, and there is no death; only a linguistic or other fixation keeps us seeing the two as separate.  Everything is leveled down to its purity: living-dying.  Fear and paranoia over death, as much as the striving to maintain and further oneself in life, is neither completely mistaken nor completely true.  Not completely mistaken, because it still happens, and what happens must have its time to happen.  This time to happen is living-dying as one road, no matter the seeming of turning drastically from life to death or vice-versa.  Not completely true, because living-dying is the whole of what happens and each thing’s happening as it does happens.  We see that nothing happens alone, that the road to death is the road to life, that the road to life is the road to death.  There is one road, its spiraling turns make up still one road.

How Language Can Come to Tire You

A: So is there nothing else you want to tell me?

B: I think I’m rather spent; I’ve said everything there is to say.

A: You can’t possibly mean that….

B: Well, for now, I do.  It seems the words have left me–the thoughts too.

A: For one as garrulous as you are, this seems an unexpected turn of events, to be sure!

B: That’s just it, friend: I’ve spent so much of my time in the World of Words, as I’ve called it.  You’ve heard me say it before; I wake and I write or I wake and I read, I read after I write or I write after I read.  Then there’s all the speaking.  You know how I can get; well, it goes on all day, more than greetings–the conversations, the delving into this or that with this one or that one, the arguments, the constant need for an account.  After so long, well, it seems, you just sort of give up.  There doesn’t seem to be anything of importance for me to tell you right now.

A: But look at you!  Listen to you now!  You are still–speaking, and relishing it, if I may add!  This can’t be anything like seriousness on your part.

B: It is, it is.  I only tell you these things because you asked, because, I guess, that’s what we do, we humans, we’re always looking for the best way to put things with our tongues.  I know you have noticed my troubles as of late, that I have not been my usual talkative self.  I thought maybe it would be best if I could just keep quiet; that seemed the best way to make it through this dark night of the soul, you could call it.

A: Don’t be so melodramatic!

B: You are so hard to satisfy!  That’s what it is, at least when you see something divine in language.  To no longer have the words at your command, to be exiled to a speechlessness; this is no small curse for a man such as I am.

A: One question, I wanted to ask you one minor question, and for once not have it turn the world upside down.  For once I didn’t want the existential crises to follow upon my questioning you.  I was only wondering why you suddenly turned silent, why you just ended up sitting in place where you are, mouth agape, as though on the verge of saying something, but you said nothing.

B: I was thinking, and I tend to grow silent and open-mouthed when I think.

A: All your contradictions!  You think I can stand them any longer!  Just a minute ago–surely you recall, the day has not moved a breath since you uttered the words–just seconds ago, count them and count on it, you told me that you were not only without speeches and phrases, ways to put things on the tongue as you described it, but without thoughts too.  Now you tell me you were lost in thought.

B: You’re right, and there’s nothing I can do to escape the contradiction you’re pointing out.  It comes in waves, I guess that cliche manner of putting it is the best I can find.  A thought comes, and it’s precious, you even want to hold it dear and close for a while when it arrives, like an irreplaceable gift.  But then like a bird it flits away, it might as well have never come, you stand there, empty-handed and empty-headed, and look out to where it flew, but the thing didn’t even have the mercy to leave a trace.  It’s this thoughtless thinking that leaves me bereft of proper words.  How in the world can you take hold of something so damnably elusive?  Why even would you want to?  And that’s not the only thing: I’m constantly reminded, when I put the pen to the paper, when the thoughts crystal-form themselves within me and I attempt to get them out and express them–the whole enterprise is a sham, at least as long as you hope to really attain anything with the words.

A: What are you saying now, that you have become an adherent of the religion of senselessness?

B: That’s not quite it, either.  There’s sense, to be sure, sense and sense enough.  But like clouds it dissipates, and then there’s the sky, either blue or black or purple or crimson or whatever, and the sky is not a book, nor is it a vault for our memories or anything on whose surfacelessness anything like a face could last, that face we attempt to write into all things and everywhere.  It’s just a dumb dome, a rim and endpoint, an ending, to all of our ramblings.  There’s nothing to say to the sky, I guess that’s what I’m saying.  It seems I’ve been dwelling recently with my head turned upwards; the mouth slits open, you’re right, but there’s nothing of any use coming out of that mouth, nothing but stupefying wonder.

A: So all of that, your work, your poems and your captured thoughts, your essays, the big books of them on the filing cabinet, you’re telling me they are all for naught?

B: That would be a good way of putting it, if it weren’t for this: it’s awfully bold, that nothing of yours.  No, I think it’s more a matter of somethings, little things, big things, momentous and trivial things, all stacked up and piled in a mess atop one another.  In other words, it’s important and all, but at the same time, for anyone who gives it a moment’s thought, or is visited and stunned like I am, it is the stupidest of stupid things.

Just what is shared

Just what is shared?  Just because I share a perspective with so many things, does not mean I rest content with understanding these things, or anything else.  Sharing can give rise to the utmost confusion, and is not a bed on which to rest and call the rest of our investigations quits.  I share a perspective with all living and all dead or inanimate things, with the dog roaming back and forth from the sun to the shade in the yard as much as the grasses he finds for a bed, as much as the bicycles he passes when he finally finds his cool or warm nest, as much as the PVC pipes for whatever human project stacked against one another with wood and other debris in a pile indistinguishable from clutter, but it does not mean I am these things any more than falling in love with any one of these things entails that I become the object of my love, no matter how intense the love this thing and I share.  There is still an ineradicable multiplicity, an indelible plurality, at the heart of things, a multiplicity or plurality that keeps division, separation, distance and the knife’s edge at each thing’s skin.  Unless, that is, I am at bottom multiplicity: then it seems indeed that I am all things, whether I wish this identity or not; that all things, insofar as they are multiple–and what individual thing is not, at bottom, multiple?–share in the essential multiplicity of all things.  But, thank you Nancy, for letting us not forget that, just as there is a need for the multiple when waxing on about the singular, so there is a need for the singular when arriving at the multiple.  Both concepts, as both realities, call for one another’s assistance in keeping the tapestry of existence a true tapestry, one with true woof and warp and distinct threads as much as oneness, rather than a tapestry fluttering desperately in our dreams, a tapestry of solid, seamless cloth or a tapestry where each seam bids us lose ourselves in it and forget that there is a cloth, that the seams go up to make one pair of shoes or one sweatshirt.

            We share, then, our being singular as much as we share our being multiple.  The singular does not merely pose as the obstacle to sharing, but is shared, just as our being multiple is shared.  We share, if we share anything, our plurally-singular being with one another.  And sometimes–all the time–we just don’t know where to begin with one another, where to get this confused sense that we share something–THE thing, the whole of it–off the ground.

Impersonal Love

What if part of the power of love, or the whole of that power, consists in love’s impersonality, so that a person is not needed at the ground of things for love’s existence, indeed love’s preeminence in the world?

The partnership of ugliness and beauty

The partnership of ugliness and beauty.  Part of the project of beautifying the area involved getting rid of all the ugliness anywhere nearby.  But this didn’t work, because the ugly served as a buffer before entering into the world for the beautiful, so that the beautiful would not become shocked by sunlight being given only to them, or glances and stares, even though they were of longing, given only to them.  With too much attention and without the help of the ugly to step in every once in a while, the beautiful, molested in this way on all sides, readily wilts or stiffens.  It decays, deforms, and becomes ugly itself, uglier than the ugliest, because it still remembers, and hopes to remind others of, its former days of sightliness.

Observers, and observing

Observers, and observing.  Observers, insofar as they observe, always die, and more than a little.  We have to ask whether there is anything significant left to them but eyes and ears and skin, whatever does most of their observing, even when the observations they make seem the most astute and lively, and even when they seem to reside in the thick of things, there is a distance, and that distance is the distance of approximately six feet, no matter how close the living thing–the only life nearby, in this case–seems to the dead one, the cold wide-open eyes, the harkening ears, the skin you could kiss if it weren’t the skin of a corpse.

            Then how is it that observing seems to grant us access to our surroundings no other disposition could attain?  How is it that death has a proper, and probably the most proper, view of life?  When we visit a gravesite we understand; the stone could not be felt sincerely by the living.  That is, its weight, its gray color, its size and shape; all of that the living has eyes for, the living sees and is properly proud of its sight.  But the stone, the stone itself, the death-stone: that only the dead, with their eyes shut, can properly see.

I shout and shout at the storms

I shout and shout at the storms within
But they do not obey
Rather they rage on
Because I am not like that one
Who yelled three or four words once
To the subsuming terror and it stopped
Like that. Or I do not know I am
Like that one. I am wet, ravaged.

On Losing Truth

The wise are neither those who profess they know nothing, nor those who claim a certain knowledge, but rather those who fear, or rather admit, that at one time they beheld the the truth, it was maybe not plain and simple–maybe it was complex, maybe many threads had to come together to make this truth–but there for them, palpably lived, palpably endured–but lost.  To lose the truth shows something our other two candidates for a wise human being lack: a sense as to the stakes involved in truth.  For, the ignorant may profess an ideal, and the possessor of truth may rest secure, but the Oh, no! of the one who has lost truth remembers, however vaguely, however tenuously, that there was something to life–if only he could get it back!   

An abolition of privacy

An abolition of privacy.  It would be something, whether a boon or a bane it is hard to say, if our thoughts about another could reach such intensity, could reach such a severe pitch of intention and be pointed so squarely in a particular direction, that the thought lands on the other like a wind, calm or harsh, or like a touch, pressing or light, or like a thought of his own.  And if he knew whence the thought comes, that it comes from you and not from the sky, nor from his own synapses firing or neurons communicating, you of all possible inspirations!  We wouldn’t have to fret as to whether a telephone call is received or whether it shall be returned, whether a letter made it to its recipient or whether we will open our own mailbox, hold the envelope in our hands, and read there the precious address in the top-left corner of the paper.  We would communicate with another, be in communion with another, as though in secret, because the thought shared between us would be like all thought in that, although we might be aware of its source, it is blanketed, always, in thick questions and ambiguities concerning its significance or even its character, for instance whether the thought should be welcomed and cherished or whether we should abandon it, like we abandon others, and move on to something else, some other enterprise, some other flight of imagination or deliberation as we move on to some other living flesh to be our lover.  That is, our very relationship with others would be as though in secret, since, when we come in close proximity with one another–the proximity where flesh so blatantly meets flesh, where flesh entwines with flesh–when there is no need for our specially questionable telepathy, first on our mind and at the foreground of our discussion with this special intimate, whose organization and chaos of ideas is somehow open to ours, would not be to share this specific transferred thought with him, nor even to bring this thought to mind, however vague it might be, however unclear it is precisely when the link occurred, or how it occurred.  Our highest intimacy with another could, as it were, lurk in the background, at least its thoughtful and sensitive foundation, the unspoken fundament of our bond with another, no matter what we end up discovering in the other’s more obvious company and closeness.  We wouldn’t have to worry over what we say to another or about another, because we would always, as it were, be with this other, as though alongside him but not, the other being, as we say, so far away, living, as we claim, his own life.  We would be yoked to others as we are yoked to the wind when in its stream, or as we are tied to being touched when it the thick of bodies, and the thread connecting us to this special other, with whom we share thought, would touch that most delicate plot of the landscape of ourselves, could consider himself, after long enough, a fulltime farmer of the land or explorer of the land, as we are of his, since along with any growth, any other ambushes of thought or long-pondered dreams, there would grow up inside him, as there grow up inside us from the other side, thoughts and flits of ideation from an absent interlocutor. 

            So much for privacy, then, at least as regards this one with whom we share the private realm.  At any time, we might stand open to his encroachments, if it happens that during the course of the day he comes to think of us with any power.  How far does this power stretch?  Is it so that it is only one with whom we may be so intimate, that the others are behind dense screens, the screens of their eyes and the screens of their skins?  Or can it be that our thought ever partakes in a thoughtful community, where doors are always opening and closing, where windows more than look out onto the world but are open to the world, so that a thought, thin thing, could sneak inside, or closed with whatever distraction or whatever clinging to autonomy so that the voice of the other on the supposed outside grows faint?  Passageways, doorways, windowpanes, all leading into and opening out onto the other, leading into and opening out onto ourselves.  Even if they are closed, even if bars are erected, the mere possibility is already and always there, the possibility of being invaded, being occupied, the thought of not having any thought of our own.  If it goes so far as all that, if we say nothing that hasn’t come, in the end, from some other communicating with us in his secret way, could we live with such an abolition of privacy?  What would it be like?  A transparency, if not of total clarity then at least of knowing we cannot escape one another, we might as well be open with one another, open to one another?  Would it be a paradise, this arena where we may shoot darts at another’s heart; or a hell, where the thrown arrows of thought above our heads must finally land somewhere, that is, past our flesh and into our flesh, past whatever defenses we had erected and into our permeable, so permeable, interior?

There is a great noise in the world

There is a great noise in the world
That we want to stop our ears to
Plug them up with anything
To stop the chaosophony 

It takes many decibels past deafening
To realize your silence and peace
Is so much chatter in the great resounding
So much adding zero to zero

Or color to the rose
A great noise everything emits
Like the alpha or the omega of speech
Even you, silent one, speechless one.