November 21, 2012
-
In media res
What if I was wandering in the middle of this life and I lost you?
It took him ten years to dig the plot to bury her there; it was to be a graveyard of idols. Sweat glistened off his back in view of the angry sun in the sky. He looked out at the thousands of plots left over the hills; he would spend his whole life burying the city of squalid creatures that lived in his heart. Until one day it would give and he would fall into one of the plots and be buried there by whomever found him next.
What is in our imaginations?
The middle ages. Kings and servants, queens and knights, jesters and castles. These are symbols that everyone knows; they sit in the background of our minds as long swaths of history, as waiting metaphors for our everyday speech.
Can you imagine having a different mind, a different world of symbols?
Snowing by a lamppost in his heart.
There are words that you would choose to read only once over reading another set of words a thousand times. Where are those words? Why would we love them so?
Don’t you know there is too much meaning in the world for us to experience? Our minds compress it down and we assume that we are the truth.
Sometimes I think:
I am no one, I have no markers. My clothes disappear, my words are no one’s memories. Good, I drift in-between definitions. Humans are not meant for outward clothes.
Other times I think:
I have no societal function, I have nothing to say when I introduce myself. People soon figure out that I am of no use to them. I should take up some societal role so people can say ‘Ah, this is what he’s good for!’
Why am I up? I woke early this morning and thought ‘I should record every sound I hear today’ and I heard the shrillest noise I have ever heard around midday. The city workers were sawing up the trees by the street and then throwing them into the grinder. They all had stethoscope-looking earplugs.
When I came home I only slept for thirty minutes when I could have slept for twelve hours. Now I’m still up and am meditating on the fact that the only thing I can ever think to say to new people is that I like words.
The best part of modern life is that you can always escape to another part of your life.
This is the hardest shift I’ve worked.
I was planning on giving you a hug afterward.Won’t you let me grieve? They were my idols! Can a man have no affection for his own cowardice?
You are my son. I love you.
We raise our arms from the shrillest place in the city to the sky. Let it buzz all around me. Calm. I am calm. I will be calm. Let our hearts be calm.
It snowed yesterday dear. Did you see?
I don’t want to see the snow.
Come. Come see.This is a social setting. We are all spending time together; we are talking; we are laughing. Well then – what is that feeling that we are all so far apart? That we all see this so differently? Oh Lord, how will the social world be redeemed?
Cultures forget; my children will not know people did not have cell phones. You can only know you are missing something if you once had it. People who did not have a religious childhood feel the adult world is a perfectly normal place.
That a man has a trillion private moments and cannot communicate a single one of them we will accept all right. If he momentarily mutters to himself, however, we consider this an oddity.
There have been so many secret holy hearts.
You love oh so many people and I am glad we are in this world together.
I feel like we’re interviewing each other.
You have to interview people to get to know them.
The truest things about someone are the things they could never tell you.A crisp barn and a sunny morning; a house with a pool and a small girl running through the back lawn with her arms stretched wide. We are responsible for who we are and I want to feel clean.
I will miss the trees they cut down. It was sad that they were gone.
And what about your friends? You feel this way about trees; do you not know every human comes to an end?
Maybe if these stories didn’t mean so much.
Don’t you know that you are my Virgil?
What if I lost you?
