Month: February 2013

  • listen for the whispers

    And demons? What do they wrestle with?

     

    You’ll go insane waiting for others to love you.


    Most move on from a desire for truth rather easily.

    I do not write as I learn; I learn as I write.
     
    The correct answer to ‘why did they do that?’ is always ‘I don’t know’; but especially when the action is suicide.
     
    Do you ever look at directions from your house to somewhere on google maps? There are so many houses! I wonder what goes on in them each night. Who hung out there? How was their dinner? We know so few people. I like going somewhere unexpectedly and then finding out: ah, so this is what goes on around these parts.
     
    But if you are not there at the exact right moment, you will miss what that place meant to others.
     
    Tonight someone asked to talk to me alone and I said sure and we started heading for the door.  I had no idea what they wanted to talk to me about.  When we got outside they said they felt like they had been a bit standoffish a few nights ago, and they were sorry.  This is a person I am not great friends with and have only spoken to a few times.  And they were saying sorry to me.  I had not even experienced any hostility from them; I actually felt like I had been the bum in that situation.  But they worried about it and they took the time to apologize for it.
     
    I think that conversation did my soul better than a thousand sermons.
     
    On Saturday I was driving up to an intersection when I realized I was thinking about a scene of pedestrians that were not thinking about me at all. Later I wrote, ‘We think of the world in terms of ourselves and the world has not thought of us at all.’ 
     
    But I guess I was wrong.

  • Forgetfulness

    They were in a library that had no books. They had all been checked out and never returned.

    On the mezzanine they sat at a drexel table and watched the sunlight filter in through pores in the drapery. The sun set two hours earlier in the library. A garden grew on the second floor that no one watered. Everyone who looked at it walked away thinking that outer space is a garden.

    They did homework. He yawned ferociously.

    ‘Get more sleep,’ she said. He tried to not look at her hair, which she never did.

    ‘Maybe you should get less sleep.’

    ‘I couldn’t sleep last night. I’m just not a yawner.’

    Do not use the word love, he thought. Do not use it.

    ‘Should we move on? I’m tired of science.’

    ‘No,’ she said. She tapped her feet on the curled table legs. He had been moving but he froze, like the man on the third floor staring quietly at an empty shelf.

    ‘Well maybe we should just go down to the pond and skip stones instead.’

    ‘Why are you always so serious?’ She said this in a way that invited him to speak for hours.

    ‘Because I am afraid.’

    He could have danced with her but he did not want to ruin the fact that he did not know what the truth was. The books had all been checked out.

    ‘I don’t like quotation marks,’ she said. ‘They are thick as glass.’

    It was a town where there were no fines and therefore no one did anything. The thin wood steps creaked as he took them one at a time all the way down. He had reached the moment where there was too much of the world to say anything.

    The librarian had a splotchy beard, half-moon glasses and hair like a cresting wave. He looked up from his ledger with the long, dried-out curiosity of an experimental physicist.

    ‘I’d like to return this book,’ the boy said.

    ‘This book isn’t in our records,’ the librarian said as he index fingered his way down a list.

    ‘All the same.’

    He tore his glasses from his face and teepeed his hands together. ‘Stop trying to mean something.’

    Outside a thin mist rose up from nowhere, like the sewers were breathing out sweet air, like the roads were sweating their long-held misery, like the twilight air was where the ocean hung. He walked through it to another world. In a rutebega field a woman’s hands and face came to him, with messy hair and dirty hands, but he knew that she would love him, if she did not love another.

    ‘We live in a cloud of nothing,’ he said.

    ‘Our lives are prayers for rain,’ she said. 

    Where did Woman come from? Why was the world sinking down?

    It occurred to him that it was never meant to be night. They stared together at the forest where the souls of those awake wandered in their truest forms. They laughed, they ran, they danced, and if they wept, they wept alone.

    ‘Have you ever cried?’ he asked.

    ‘I have never stopped,’ she said.

    The moon shone a curious silver light through the forest, that made the silhouettes light against the darkened trees, but it did not matter for waking souls are blind. The boy watched as hands and faces, each with a pair of broken wings, rose up in the field around them and bowed and prayed toward the forest. Could there be enough prayers for a world unknown to itself?

    ‘I watched the moon through my bedroom window as a child. Can we never see ourselves?’

    ‘You only die at others’ graves.’

    He bowed his head. ‘What does your body look like?’

    ‘I have chosen to weep; I shall never love.’

    On the way home he realized the sky was a contradiction of the words nothing and everything, just as humans were. Dawn came and he tripped in the dirt and left behind him a pool of darkened mud. At home his parents sat at the table with their hands clasped, as though in weak prayer. They said they were getting a divorce and he realized that he had never seen them as together. He closed the door gently behind him.

    Do not use the word love, he thought in the tone of a closing garage door.

    It was hot next to the open fields, on the road lined by insect-ridden telephone poles that stretched on toward forever. He tried to remember the night before; nothing in the world of meaning is an inference. It grew rocky and he found a set of train tracks and followed them to a ravine. Below the sky-high trestle miners worked at the base of the mountain in a drying creek bed. They were small compared to his past. His feet dangled from the tracks and the world seemed spread out to him, like he was a being that . . .

    He put his hands on his cheeks and stared ahead. He wondered if he was praying.

  • waxing crescent

    I was dreaming when I heard a loud bang on the door upstairs. In my dream an old high school teacher had brought over dozens of people to watch a horror movie in my room. I hate horror movies and so I explored the basement where I live and found nine (I counted in the dream; I was excited) toy castles in a back room, and I also found a secret room (which Alex suggested we rent out). I was also avoiding a boxing match with a boy half my size because I was nervous.

    This was when I woke from the pounding. I wasn’t sure it was the door until they tried the bell. I bolted upstairs and walked in the front room just as they came in the door. It was a man who looked exactly like John Travolta and I realized that I was in the movie Pulp Fiction and that I was going to die because this man was going to kill me. He turned out to be a coworker of my housemate, who was late getting up and was going to miss his flight.

    Alex had come downstairs and we were a little frazzled until we found out it was 11:30.  ’We should pay someone to do that.’

    ‘Do you hate everything still?’

    ‘I haven’t been awake long enough to hate anything.’  (He he had had a rough night.)

    I didn’t know what to eat for breakfast so I ate everything I had.  Alex joined me later and he told me about an article he had read about people that disappeared. I wrote ‘Somerton man’ on a piece of paper and slid it across the table and later when he came back downstairs we talked about it in very excited voices while he cooked breakfast.  (He can’t eat right when he gets up.)

    He conquered Europe upstairs while I spent time with Virginia in the living room.  It was snowing.  I thought of walking to the park and smiling and saying hi to people I saw.  I scratched out the plan in my mind though, like it was an attempt to do a math problem I knew I couldn’t do. 

    ‘So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen asleep, she thought, were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They had no suffering there, she thought.’

    Entire parts of my room have been dark for months.  The reason is that I needed to go the store and buy the lights for them.  Stores are nearby until you have something you need to get from them.  I built the lamp and it wobbled so I put it in the living room.  ’When did you get that?’ he asked.  ’Christmas,’ I said, and he laughed.  

    I washed the dishes and counters while Alex spent time with Cicero in the living room.  We had a home day.  We didn’t have any cheese and I realized this just as I was making dinner.  I would not be defeated; Kroger is right across the street.  ’You’re going to buy cheese right now?’ he asked a little stunned.  ’Our pantry is huge,’ I explained. ‘We just have to pay for things from it.’

    (The snow was gone; already?)

    I spent some time with a police officer in the evening. He told me his shift ended at eight. I thought about that later on. What if in the middle of a gun fight in a bank the police officer went ‘Well it’s four o clock! Good fight. Money’s all yours.’  I mean really we have been brainwashed with super hero movies where the heroes are always ready to just burst into action.  But let’s be real.  They would have shifts.  A man has to be home for dinner.  

    Laura and I drove to a talk on death and dying.  On the way there we agreed: Age of Adz is a definite kind of mood.  And what sort of love life does Sufjan even have?  

    In the question and answer period one philosophy professor said he wanted to talk about some zen-type ideas.  But the speaker said, ‘That’s not zen. That idea is more daoist.’  There was some disputing about it but the speaker said ‘Who’s teaching Asian philosophy this semester? I didn’t want to have to play that card.’  So the questioner backed off from the claim about his idea being a zen one.  After the issue was over the next questioner stepped up and said ‘So basically that was zen, this is dao.’  

    Afterwards I talked to a new guy and he asked how life was going and I said pretty bad and we had a great time talking.  Another guy I talked to had no idea who I was.  I told him that we had hung out several times, that we had gone out to a restaurant and had a long conversation.  Everything we had talked about seemed familiar to me still and I asked about his poetry and his church, and eventually he remembered who I was. 

    A girl was over with Alex when I got home and we all went out to TeeJaye’s (which is only 2/3rds of a cigarette’s walk from our house).  We had a chaotic conversation about chaos.  Milan was on facebook on her phone and I blamed us for not being more entertaining.  At this point Alex was playing with the ketchup and he squirted it all over his sweater.  ’Taking one for the team.’  

    I talked to Milan about her work at the table as Alex showered because he had gotten ketchup on his sweater.  Nick came home and told us about the Verizon millionaires he had met and the Covenant-of-the-Ark warehouse he had been in.  We told him we had found his cardigan in the freezer in the morning.  

    I picked a book off Alex’s shelf and came downstairs.  People headed to bed. The day was over.

    And those are all the words I have to say about it. 

  • And, action!

    I feel like there are some things I should say in advance. I’m twenty-three now, and I feel like this is the appropriate time. Later on I will be older and it will feel ad hoc to say that I had already thought of all this. So here is the proof.

    Here are some things I don’t want to talk about when I’m older with my friends when we’re old and being old together.

    1) The kids grow up so fast.

    This moves a conversation forward about as much as when two people are on a walk and one says, ‘Hey look, a sidewalk’ and points to the ground. 

    2) My body doesn’t work like it used to.

    Ok, this is a true and sad part of growing older. But I read a book called Everyman, and I’ve wept all this in advance. How about we all just read that book, then we will go to the mirror when we are older and all weep for what we’ve lost, then drop to our knees and repent and thank God for the life he gave us.  Then we will at least be spared the grief of a wasted conversation.

    3) Wives, right?

    She doesn’t sleep with me enough, she thinks I play too many video games, she always thinks I’m insulting her . . . blah blah blah.  How about we don’t complain about our wives?  Isn’t this the person we vowed to love with everything we got?  Complaining, right?

    Each of these is a cultural script, a conversation we’ve seen somewhere and therefore repeat.  We follow cultural scripts all the time, with waiters, cashiers, police officers, professors, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc.  Following a cultural script means you are either out of creativity or are opting out of using your creativity.  Of course, sometimes you should opt out for the sake of time or some other circumstance.  But otherwise you should be following the call to add what only you can to the world, to make it a new place. 

  • Ordinary people are everywhere

    I walked into my bathroom and saw something brown on the floor and discovered that it was a slug.  This was my first ever encounter with a slug.  It raised questions.  Like: what am I supposed to think about slugs?  Are slugs evil?  Do they infest things or just inhabit them?  What is the rap sheet on slugs?  Do they climb inside our mouths while we sleep like spiders supposedly do?  Do they breed like rabbits?  Do they spread the Black Death?

    I decided I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. So I said ‘I’ll deal with you later’ and then hopped in the shower.  By the time I got out Mr. Slug was gone.  Which I suppose goes to prove as definitively as possible that I’m not the quickest showerer.

    As I was explaining this last point to my friend Kyle while driving him to class he spit a huge mouthful of coffee back into his mug.  He had thought the swallow was to the point of no return, but that was quickly disproved as definitively as the short-showerer hypothesis.

    I shouldn’t take long showers, I know.  I learned this in a first grade class that I visited recently.  They had to make a craft showing a way people wasted water and a way people could save water.  Many of them drew putting people’s heads in toilets as a way water gets wasted. 

    I was signing my name into the visitor log when a little boy came up and told the check-in lady ‘My teacher said to tell you there is pee on the ground in the bathroom.’  She asked ‘Oh yeah? Did you do it?’  The boy craned his head around and said ‘No’ and she said ‘Well how do I know you’re telling the truth?’  There was a pause before he weakly said ‘I don’t know’. 

    Sometimes when everyone else is going home from work I am on my way to work. It is a huge conflict of interests.  The other day I was runing late and I had finally gotten off the highway and was at a red stoplight.  I looked at my watch.  Four minutes to go.  I could make it.  The problem was I was on the far side of the road from the turn I needed to make.  Thus when the light turned green I needed to speed past the other cars to merge all the way to the left to make the turn.  The light turned green and the white jeep next to me starts flying.  They are right next to me and I think ‘Crap, I’m not going to be able to merge’.  Then I realized they were going so fast they had left traffic far behind, which was what I was trying to do, so I thought ‘Ok, I can get behind that’.  It then hit me that this was what I actually needed to do, that I could merge behind them to get over for my turn.

    I ended up being a minute late because of a skateboarder, but I like double entendres, so I think it was all worth it.

    On Monday Columbus was buried deep in snow, like it was under a rickety roof that had caved in all at once.  At night I stopped by my church during a work shift to get a hot drink.  In the parking lot Kyle was sweeping snow off cars and I thought ‘Is he going somewhere? Is that his car? What car does Kyle have?’  This was an idiotic thing to think, I realized, because Kyle has an ID card that says ‘Non-Driver’ and I’ve seen it.  But that was how that night was going in my mind.  It was a dark night.

    I called ‘Kyle, what are you doing?’ and he said ‘I’m cleaning off cars!’ and then I went inside.  A few minutes later I came out and he was standing right in front of me and I jumped a little.  I said ‘Oh my gosh. If you had been in the passenger seat of my car, I would have freaked out.’ 

    ‘Well,’ he explained in a voice exhausted from the cold, ‘Ok, so I was going to. But I thought it would be a lot scarier if I was in the back seat of your car. Then when you eventually looked back you would have seen me and I figured that would be so much scarier. So I actually got in your car but then I realized that I hadn’t done that car, so I rushed out real quick and then did it, and by the time I was done you had come out. If you had come out twenty seconds later I would have gotten you so bad.’  His voice was pretty frozen and he used a lot of words to say all this, but I think this is what he said.  The image of him being cold-faced and smiling reminded me of Pierre at the end of War and Peace when he comes home to Natasha.  I suppose that’s what a good author is: someone who creates something so vivid that it comes back to you as a sort of memory. 

    I went into work on Wednesday (what is this? work story day?) and started explaining to everyone that robots would never have our jobs, that I was needed to do my job.  I then listed all the reasons a human needed to do my job.  Years later when the shift ended Caitlin asked me ‘Did you go to Convergence last night?’ and I said ‘Yes, it was about the intersection of ethics and science. One part was about GMOs and the other part was about technology and jobs, like how self-checkouts have gotten rid of cashiers and so on.’  Then she said ‘Oh, so that’s what this morning was all about?’ and I exclaimed ‘You just put my life together! That feels so great!!’ because it did feel great.

    I would like to apologize to everyone who thought this post was going to be about something.  These are just some images from my life, and that’s all.  Little images that make up a lot to me.  Like the time my niece said to her mom ‘I love you this many!’ and held up all ten fingers.  Whatever philosophical ideas you may associate with me, it is images like these I will die with, the things I see when I’m not looking down at my limbs and thinking ‘what is this thing I’m in?’ 

  • Life, forgotten

    The Old Man:

    A fire that singes.
    All these children are lost!

    The Children:

    City lights. We’re on on a stage!
    In the streets they all know my face.
    The sky opens up: 
                            You are not seen.
    Your life is a word that no one means.

    (If you are lost then you are a not a child.)

    The Old Man:

    ‘Do you know this man?’ the officer asked.
    ‘No!’ she replied.
    They dropped all charges and set him free.
    The unknown can hardly be held responsible.
    They have lost it all.

    What’s never sought is never found.
    What’s never heard has no sound.
    This world is filled with open ground.
    I’ll die alone and keep it proud.

    I’m warming my icy hands, I feel a fire!
    Why am I here? 
                         Is to forget to be lost?

    The Children (Older):

    A fire that singes. A million witches.
    My heart wobbles in your silences.
    You forget my face between our scenes.
    Just like a peasant to so many queens.

    Kids drive to the lives they are after.
    Time will release all that we captured.
    I see a dark forest of life forgotten.
    Who will find the rooms we fought in?

    The Old Man:

    No one is sad about a life they forget.
                  Time saves us from ourselves.

    All jokes are sad, and questions too.
    Empty chairs, that I used to be two.
    A life of love, but nothing that’s true.
    A garden of hope but nothing that grew.

    There could never be enough Time!

    God!

    The (Very Old) Children:

    My life changed at a stoplight.
                        What is rest?

    Happy scenes are all that we got.
    Once they end: 
                        they’re not what we thought.
    Circles and squares that don’t quite fit.
    Didn’t he say to hope is to forget?

    She asked me ‘Will you be long?’
    I said ‘No, no, darling, nothing is wrong.’
    ‘Where is it you would rather be?’
    ‘But didn’t you hear? It doesn’t matter to me.’

    A fire that singes.
    I wear my clothes over the scar. 
                                                 And sleep in a made bed.