To Begin Again from the Beginning
Part 1
1. My attitude towards the universe is a very dark one. I believe that it is total vanity; basically there is nothing. I mean this quite literally. Ultimately there are just some fragments. But then if you look at the universe as just one big void you will question how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where you know the idea there is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed.
And I like this idea very much because it states the fact that there is not just nothing but that things are out there which means that something went terribly wrong. That which we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe in which things exist by mistake…. – Slavoj Zizek
A. A huge underground river runs underneath the Nile, with six times more water than the river above. –fact
I’ve been here before, but this is not the same place it used to be. I can’t tell if it is because of this seasonal shift or because the shade of the sun is making the warmth of the landscape glow. The last time I was here was some years back and certainly my footsteps, then, were not as sober as now. Winter had forced my hands into my pockets. The moon was not drawing outlines onto the vista canvas. But, luckily, not too much has changed. Little shrubs of dark green, like trees at dusk, would grow between the rocks that are yellow during the day, tan at sunset and black at night which hint at the idea that this valley was a desert before concrete seeds were planted, before asphalt streets were grown even before the steel and window forests sprouted from the sands of this crevasse. It was foolish for me to have come here the first time. I guess I haven’t advanced in critical thinking over the past few years as much as I thought.
And then it hits me; these are my moments which I am only able to relate or connect to the word ‘existence’, though its sign may have no significance to others and all these moments are, is a looping lucid dream from which I cannot wake, control or even lay down to start. ‘The idea’, I’ve heard, ‘is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving’. These walks I take, because my teacher told me to, lead me through this Byzantine conduit acreage. My teacher told me to take these walks, if when, burrowing into my sentences, I happen to stop shoveling the words with my hands, if I think too much about what I am saying because from what I am told, ‘I don’t have anything to say, just a way of saying it.’ If this happens, she says, I should walk. Now I basically have a direction without a map, a blind heading and a drunken captain. On this particular walk, next to the pointed mountain, I can’t help but think of an Emerson quote, in which he said “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. [...] Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem." (The Portable Emerson, 269) I have been told by this same teacher that I should ground the narrator in the text. But how can I if I cannot ground myself in this world. I have heard before that current events are what influence writers to write. But I am unrelenting in not relating to current times. In fact I do not think of myself as connected to anything before, during or after myself, whether it be in blood, in bone, in marrow, or even in the uncollected, unexplained, oh so mysterious 21 grams that nests – somewhere under my skin. I have to find ground, when I don’t even have a leg to stand on. I wish she was still here – she made everything make sense or at least, everything made sense when she was still here.
This would probably help the story progress in someway because I believe that I see the world with those lenses Emerson talked about and this sunset is a metaphor for my mood but as of now I have no story. Instead, rather, I am indulging in a certain proposed existential crisis. It started when I heard Philip K. Dick remark that “sometimes the Appropriate response to reality is to go insane.” But despite this and its several paradoxical conundrums which play rhythmically around me like the outro of a famous Mozart symphony I still cant even think of a first sentence. Now I can’t help but notice; I can see it from here. That house or ‘ranch’ they called it. Up there, embedded in the mountain all white and broken down. No door, no windows because they’ve been covered by boards. It is completely painted in graffiti which I have read and the one line I remember most written on the wall of that house read “please forgive me” in what seemed like 5th grade cursive. This elementary element added to the eerie horror that floats about the place. But the look of this house, reduced to a shack, full of history and story doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t even make me wonder. Rather I am concerned with something I had over heard in a coffee shop this morning between a very indulgent man and a sweet, yet, curious girl. It went:
‘Girl: What are you writing?
Guy: A novel.
Girl: What's the story?
Guy: There's no story. It's just ... people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest stories ever told.
Girl: Are you in the story?
Guy: I don't think so. But then, I'm kind of reading it and then writing it.
This spot where I am standing now is the exact spot that one of them came back to this house the night of August 8th, 1969, covered in blood, tripping harder probably then Timothy Leary would even attempt. This night, in 1969 brought the movement, the revolution to a complete standstill, only for a moment, until it began to turn counterclockwise, like a hurricane until it turned on everyone who helped spin it from the start.
2. So who knows the difference between houses and homes? When you’re lost and you’re found that’s when you’ll know. – Cursive
At this spot now, I rub the toe of my shoe into the dirt and drag it forming a cross, when, just as I complete the second line my pocket vibrates. When I hang up the phone I stare back at the house and wonder if one can truly come to know the self, the world, and especially the self in the world without the usage of drugs.
3. Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs. – Lily Tomlin (1939)
Experience is totality, a very questionable, unsure totality. It’s a funny and terrible thing not knowing if you are taking the right amount because certainly you don’t want to come up short which is to say that things will happen, there will be an experience but not the kind you originally intended and of course you don’t want to take too much because, well, the results of that can leave a person at the mercies of their conscious and subconscious and really no one wants to be held in the hands of their own minds. It’s that happy medium I've always been searching for and of course, like anything else which man considers a secret of life, have never really been able to find.
This walk has only confused the plot even more. I can’t convey this, this moment, with this non-native stolen language I use for communication. It’s a fact that the word 'set' has more definitions than any other word in the English language and I am set on being a writer and creating well told and great stories. But what does that even come to mean. I feel that missing this sunset as the back drop for this house would be something I would never be able to see again, even if I came back tomorrow at sunset and stood in the same place, at the exact same time, looking from the exact same point of view because it wouldn’t be the same place. In fact it will never be the same place, ever again.
B. Fact: Every hour one billion cells in the body are replaced, which means I am constantly being updated, always becoming new.
And this experience makes me think of when Tomas Mann wrote “that he would rather participate in life than write 100 stories about it.” And I could tell you about this house. This house where they all came back from different areas in the valley, by different means of transportation and didn’t even walk up the road to the front door of the house. Instead, there are little passage ways dug into the side of the mountains which were man made tunnels that they climbed into and scurried back to the ranch. And I feel now like I am lost inside one of those tunnels searching for the way back home. I could swear that if I stopped crawling around I could hear a little girl cry “rabbit!” But this home is different from others because this is the home where people I know tell me I'm loved and will wash the red from my body, bury the knife in the back yard, hold me and give me all the drugs I politely ask for and some I don’t. But how to tell this story, this story? No one likes a story where an infant is killed, well, no one should anyway. But this is one of those stories. That “child,” never got to know its mother, never even saw her. It didn’t even take one single breath of air. And it was so close too, so close to that gasp; less then 15 days away. Instead it was impregnated with silver as its carrier cried “Mother…..Mother….” over and over. Those who inflicted called the baby, ‘pig’ for reasons which were never told.
But no one wants to hear that in a story, even though this is a true story. I could swear upon anything that this truly happened to me.
4. If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages. – Elaine Liner (We Got Naked, Now What? SXSW 2006)
At this house, this moment I no longer want to be a part of though. The ghost on the side yard, the pentagram in the basement, the tunnels buried in sand don’t portray the feeling that this is home. Twice I have been here and never made it around the whole property, never even made it three feet into the house. There is no doorbell to ring, so I can’t play that game. Take a walk, my teacher told me. But the only burrowing I want to do now is into my covers or deep into my mattress. The only focal point I need is the back of my eye lids. My only concern is that I know when I finally close my eyes I will still be walking.
5. It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them. – Truman Capote.
The shaking is so bad that it is causing my grip to slip from the arm rests while the vibrations echo loud enough that it deafens the screams of the children and others when suddenly this is all interrupted by the voice on the intercom crying through the announcement “during the emergency landing please leave behind all personal belongings.” I notice there is no use of past tense or the words “in case” and this causes a carousel of images of family, love, friends, pets, teachers, even random people that I have passed on the streets to flash in my head in no particular sequence as my eyes are shut so hard my cheeks are getting numb. I can feel the weight of the sky pulling me up away from the ground. I notice next that my stomach and heart have left me and my soul behind in the body and the feeling of calmness caresses me despite the realization that there are people around me throwing up, screaming, passed out and speaking to themselves. Like never before in my life I suddenly get religious and I am able to remember what my mom used to say before family dinners. From my open mouth tremble the words; “Dear Lord, heavenly father, bless…………..”
Part 2
1. A. That what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance comic catastrophe that things exist by mistake… and, I’m ready to go to the end and the only way to counter act this is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this and it’s called “Love.” Love is a cosmic imbalance. I was always disgusted with this notion of ‘I love the world’ and ‘universal love.’ I don’t like the world! I’m somewhere in between I hate the world or I’m indifferent towards it. The whole of reality is just it, its stupid, it’s out there and I don’t care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not I love you all. Love means I pick out something I like and ignore the things I don’t and it becomes a structure of imbalance, even if this something is just a small detail. To say this, “I love you more than anything else,” in this formal sense love is evil. - Slavoj Zizek
She grabs me by the chin with her finger and turns my head towards her lambent blue eyes and says “are you listening?” I remember when I first walked up to her my shadow reached her first and I could feel the jealousy in my fingertips. But now I stare into the little dark circles and when my focus shifts the entire beauty of her face becomes so overwhelming I damn near collapse to the cobblestone street beneath me. We are in the historic part of heaven. She said she wanted to take me through the development of the city, through its different boroughs and rows. So she decided to take me to where it all started and from there we would go to the Eastside by the shore then South to its ghetto and finally to the West were it was more modern and had a famous bridge. To my surprise she says it costs more to live in the historic part than anywhere else. I ask her why and she says “some think it’s cooler and more holy to live here.” This is where part of the beginning first started, before wonder and population caused souls to travel inwards of this divine landscape. It was originally intended that everything stay rural but slowly and surely a city began to grow from these fields. With it came the love, the love that will always be here, that founded the idea itself that is in the air and in us. Soon the whole land fell victim to industrial circumstance and everything came with it: roads, canals, railways. She points out over the river and the scenery is the most beautiful thing I ever saw but it doesn’t come close to her. They always told us angels were pretty but obviously no painter ever saw one because you couldn’t draw such magnificence. I watch the way her mouth moves as she details more history about this place to me and all I want to do is put my hand behind her neck, pull her close and kiss her but I don’t want to touch her with my broken hands. I still haven’t healed from the fall I took when I first saw her.
6. Death-torture is the art of maintaining life in pain, by subdividing it into a ‘thousand deaths’. – Foucault (Discipline and Punishment)
I remember when I read that in journal entry I had written some days after getting back from my trip I could relate. It seemed to me that when my feet left the plane that my pen never stopped moving. I tried to write stories about it, characters which would tell those stories and maybe I could fool my family readers and hope that they wouldn’t notice that the characters were me. Of course when they asked I lied. Looking back at the entry that I tried to add into a story, I can only admit that I wrote it.
Day 3: The Spectacle of the Scaffold.
And the nights when it gets real bad, when he really misses her, he sleeps on the floor, for remembrance. All curled up, shaking. I don’t do this with him. I mean it’s me but it’s like saying “I” but not meaning myself included. How he chews his fingernails when he can’t read her text messages right away and the phone sits in his pocket, scratching his leg, waiting to be opened. Hoping it reads something about how she misses him and how bad she wants him to call. Or like the voicemail message icon shines and he picks the skin from his lips with his teeth because he wants to hear her voice so bad, so bad it draws blood from the cracks when he smiles.
This feels like banishment, feels like being pulled on the wheel. This distance is miles converted and equated to the gallows in which the lines on the map are the strands in the nooses that choke the breath from his mouth when he realizes it’s in the thousands. It is like being broken alive; strangled and then broken or drawn by four horses. This city has become his prison and his torturers are called ‘memory’ and ‘senses.’ He can still smell her perfume on his jacket and it brings the most beautiful images of her, smiling to his eyes. I stand back and watch him amazed and notice how similar a broken heart is to dying. All of the symptoms are included; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But this love could sink the sun and black the moon out so it would become like god; you can’t see it but you know its there. I cover him with a blanket, for the same reason Victorians covered furniture legs with skirts; out of shame.
The above entry contains words that were underlined to be used to create a poem. This is individualized so that any reader may do the same. Here is an example:
Ta- Da!
This spectacle of nights
sleeping on the floor,
shine fingernails shaking.
Lips teeth the voice.
Remembrance draws blood as
the city bargains with love
banished to a prison where solitude
broken alive grips the noose
like a blanket of shame.
7. The health of humankind is not measured just by its coughs and wheezes but by the fevers of its soul. – A.M. Rosenthal
To Do List: February 14th 2008
1) Sleep in.
2) Go to liquor store.
3) Write: Burrow into memoir.
Materials Needed:
A) Pen (to shovel)
B) Paper
C) Medium bottle of ‘Maker’s Mark’ ($12.99)
D) One pint of ‘Fat Tire’ ($3.45)
E) Marlboro 27’s (4.45)
F) Matches
8. …I don’t want to be a writer anymore…no, I cant bear the isolation, the uncertainty, the financial insecurity, the constant wrestling with inner truths, the constant necessity for keeping my eyes open to life, the unabating pressure to push beyond what I have only just begun to master, the sense that there is, in this, the most unpredictable of professions, no resting place. – Ingrid Bengis
From a Post-It note found under my desk:
It was the first time he had ever seen the city dead with no skeleton or soul pacing its boulevards, rolling down its alleyways or loitering with un-sober foot steps on avenues but rather completely forsaken and desolate as the iridescent lantern like street lights softly glowed against the cloudless night sky and the half cut moon baptized in silence grazed his skin leaving him to feel more alone and empty from solitude like the streets and the roads which finally helped him understand where he was and what he meant to this world.
9. The stronger the infection the better is the art… - Leo Tolstoy
I have spent the last six days in this one story suburban adorable house in heaven with this angel, but the strange thing, is it doesn’t even feel like heaven at all, doesn’t feel like the life after-life, but more like a very real dream. I have spent the mornings here trying to perfect the way she makes coffee. I know she likes a bold brand in a 16oz cup with half an inch of crème and three teaspoons of sugar. I have practiced several times while she isn’t looking but it just doesn’t taste the same. I watch her make a cup for herself and I when I notice the shirt she is wearing has a set of wings drawn on it in gold glitter. I find this metaphorical because I consider her my angel. She said once to me that “our relationship is like a cup of coffee; it is comforting and enjoyable because it starts with dedication, leads to new discoveries through thought and wonder over intellectually stimulating conversation that only a cup of coffee can bring and continues through careful listening.” I told her it was also true that she makes everything sweeter.
Though she isn’t with me anymore I still carry a note she left in the pocket of a jacket I let her borrow on the last day of my visit. It reads:
To Begin Back at the Beginning
What would my life be like right now if you and I had never met?
What if we begin back at the beginning? I would do it all the same knowing that we would just lead ourselves back to each other.
I think we're on the same page.. in the best book I've ever read. I'm so thankful that it's only the prologue...I can't wait to find out what happens..
I know that while you are gone life will feel like a dream in which I know nothing is real. Until then, this distance will create a void.
