March 4, 2013

• Your mind it spins the wheel

  What do you see, standing on the hill? I see a thousand moons. You do, I asked. I was not about to tell her that a star was not a moon.

  Where you going pardner? To stirrup some trouble?

  Your future’s a machine, with the mechanics of a dream!

  The world is straightforward: there it is. Wherever you go you see a new thing and think ‘there that is’. That’s all. Wherever you go, a new ‘there that is’. See. Everything in its place.

  And yet his dying words were still ‘I have no idea what just happened’. I heard him and said ‘There that is’.

  My friend Will told me tonight (and he said I could believe him because he had written it in his phone; I was going to believe him anyway) that he no longer believes in radical change. I pointed out that was quite a change from before for him.

  Our angel of joy.

  They found a soul in an archaeological dig, from the infancy of humanity when Plato was our dad. We marveled at it and thought ‘Wow’ and now it’s on display. Here it is: a soul, as people used to have them. We found it in the dirt, fitting enough!

  I don’t believe in free will anymore, but I can hardly be blamed for that.

  Song lyrics never have semi-colons. This is another way of saying I’ve never written a song.

  Now we sit in biology classrooms and learn about the millions (billions? – either one: I’ll never count to check) of cells in us, and the billions of bacteria living on us, and the blood rushing all over us, and all the things our organs do. But when we walk out of the biology classroom we forget all that and keep on thinking it’s just people’s faces, what they’re wearing, and their words. We don’t imagine the world correctly, like how everyone uses the word ‘love’ and ‘death’ but they never mean them. We think about them in church, or reading poetry, or late at night, but then we go out into the world and forget them, just like how we stop thinking about having organs.

  The old man on the hospital bed rang the buzzer and the attendant came and said ‘What, what’s wrong?’

  ‘My medicine.’

  ‘Yes, the words, they’re right here in this can.’

  ‘That can doesn’t have a bottom. The words have spilled all over the floor.’

  ‘So it doesn’t,’ she said, looking at the words spilled all over the floor. The man had been checked into hospital because he had lost all his meaning. She was about to pick them up when she saw in the mess of spilled words ‘let me die’ spelled out across part of the floor. She looked at him; he stared straight ahead, perhaps thinking nothing. Then she looked over at the can with no bottom.

  I took my daughter to the movies and she would stand up and point at the screen when the bad guy appeared and say ‘Do you see him? Do you see him, daddy?’ I do, I said. I see him. What’s that guy’s problem? Why’s he so mean? ‘Because he’s bad, daddy. He’s a bad man.’

  Look at that headless man! That man has no head and he is running around looking for a fire. These skyscrapers will fall on him before he realizes he’s lost his dignity!

  Someday you’ll realize you’ll always be in your childhood.

  He met me on the hill and asked me ‘Where are you going?’

  I was breathing heavy. ‘Show me,’ he said, ‘show me what can’t be redeemed’.

  I felt nervous before the master. What does pain mean to him? Pain is nothing, he is everything! I must be crazy!

  I led him down the hill and to a nearby village. We walked into a house and I led him to a room and I said ‘in here’. I hit the light switch as we walked into the room. Nothing happened. We stood there in the dark and I thought he would ask ‘what?’ but he didn’t. After a long silence he burst into tears. Like tears from a man with no meaning. He will wake up the whole village, I thought, as a single tear fell down my cheek.

  I was not meant to be opaque. The more opaque I am the more I mean nothing; and thus, the more opaque I am, the more transparent I am, a man without substance. If you ever feel me to be perfectly opaque you will know everything about me. Your words will flow through me like a can with no bottom.

  When she is of age I will not swing her around the room anymore, but I will hope that I will have taught her that the look in my eyes will always mean that, will always be swinging her around the room, my beautiful princess who sees in the sky a thousand moons.

  You can say anything you want because sentences are just sentences. You can say the lilypad won the rocket contest, or babysitting is racist, or I love you, or why doesn’t dancing sit down?

  She said ‘I love it when people in my life come together, I think it’s the greatest’ and she flitted across the bar to tell them we were going outside. I stood by the bar and looked at a man sitting at the shortest table in the bar. He was old and wore a golf cap and dark clothing with a bright red tie. He might have been a scholar. His dining companion was a younger woman, though she was still middle aged. I looked at him and thought about life, about his life. The crisis everyone is slowly and dreamily in consists of the question ‘will I be loved?’ Maturity, I thought, means moving from that question to the question ‘will I love?’ as being your primary question. I wondered if he had done it. Had he realized the default egoism of the soul? Had he questioned it, had he cried about through the years? Does he love that woman? Is this a new hope for him? Does he think about what his body is, even when he’s not in a biology lab? Does he think about the weight of his words; did he have a daughter who bottled up his words, filled her soul and her life? Had he loved?

  ‘The feeling I get during the last episode of Band of Brothers is perhaps the best feeling I’ve ever felt. Except for maybe the feeling I get at the end of Return of the Jedi. And that makes sense. Let’s face it, the Empire was way worse than Hitler.’

  Go to sleep thinking, ‘I’ll remember in the morning. This is important. I’ll remember…’

  I am going to make a big city park where the walkway around it is one big board game you can play.

  ‘You never stop learning,’ he assured me. Coming from him, the lord of everything, I thought ‘this world is so much different than I imagined’.

  Everything is a surprise.

  Women most of all. Every time I look at a girl, I am surprised. There is something so very surprising about them. I wonder at them, I want to follow them to see what they do, where they go, I think about them and think they make no sense, but in a way that reveals that not making sense is the only thing that makes sense.

  No one visits there anymore. It is too complicated. It is too earthy. It is a place where people would have to love each other. Sometimes I go there alone, but there is no one there, so I never stay for very long.

  I imagine her standing in a doorway. For some reason I got caught up in everything and forgot. The story of your life happens in half a second; you’ll smell something, someone will use a particular word, you’ll accidentally tilt your head a certain way, and everything will be clear. My daughter will be standing in the doorway and I’ll remember that I had not made her beauty real to her. What else is there to do? There are these people around us, in this ‘I don’t know what just happened’ world, there are these people around us, and what are you going to do? Tell her she’s beautiful, right? What have you been doing? Or are you going to let her walk into a dark room? What are these words we use? Do not just tell her she’s beautiful; decorate her room with a thousand moons.

  Sometimes I think about that but then I realize that none of it really matters.

  Because I’m never going to have a daughter.

  • 3:46 am
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