Conversations With 1998, A Shaky Vintage
(What I wrote in 1998)
I am most afraid of myself when others are afraid of me.
I want to say that I am uncomfortable with the fact that in general I dislike people tremendously, but I find that it isn't at all true: I should be uncomfortable with this fact, but I am not. Most people are pretty obnoxious.
I am myself no butterfly, it should not please me to wear a dead one on my breast.***
Would that I could be the amber, luminescent, hoarding the soft beams of twilight collecting in the contours of someone Else's throat. Holding inside of me the body of life and light and all the warmth of remembering, being, and pulse bright, hold all the wonders of suspended flight, remembered wings inside of me, and yet be- myself- still free.
***
The human mind is a formidable instrument. Actually, I was just going to say that the human mind is a terrible thing, period. But the first line sounds so much loftier.***
I get lost for a fractional moment in notes and sound and numbers and vibrations and I float ; somewhere beyond the reach of mortal hands, body gone, nothing but air celebrating the mathematical arrangement of life.***
I live and thrive in the landscape of the dead. I surprise myself with bursts of brilliant color cutting through grey blankets of air, set against a backdrop of leafless branches. It was all a dream, then, that I floated amongst people unseen. For I was seen. And even heard. I'm just uncertain of what it was they all saw and heard. What sounds did my life emit? I know it matters not, but is merely the curiosity of the voyeur, myself.***
Shedding selves with the memory of hours. I am one person who lives and cries in the unpeopled shadows, laughs in rooms full of faces, breathes in new languages and exhales exhausted wasted knowledge, old language. And then I am another person walking, as in a dream, seeing a sea of faces approach, recede. Separated by some barrier of heart and experience. I watch myself watching others. Two parallel people whose points may never meet the full length of forever.***************
In the present moment I would like to become a Leonard Cohen song. Right now I need to become "Halleluja" or else I need to ingest it a thousand times in order that it become mine.
Also contemplating how much it might hurt me to ask everyone in my life who's known me what they thought/think of me. I want to get in their heads to see if what I saw/thought matches what they saw/thought. Yet this is such a dangerous road. I'm wondering if what I thought of myself is what everyone else thought of me too but am afraid this may cause me much more reason to repent than I am prepared to accept. Looking through these old passages makes me hungry for dangerous truth.
There are no pews deep enough to take the depressions of my knees' spiritual regress.
Also contemplating how much it might hurt me to ask everyone in my life who's known me what they thought/think of me. I want to get in their heads to see if what I saw/thought matches what they saw/thought. Yet this is such a dangerous road. I'm wondering if what I thought of myself is what everyone else thought of me too but am afraid this may cause me much more reason to repent than I am prepared to accept. Looking through these old passages makes me hungry for dangerous truth.
There are no pews deep enough to take the depressions of my knees' spiritual regress.
Labels: philosophical crap, writing