a letter to -

it is said that there is a place where things come forth from and return to and that these are the furthest reaches of human endevour: to find and better understand what came forth and what returns to and somehow make sense of the seeming madness of the shifting hours (day to night) and impulses (greed and sex) and make holy the struggle of the human experience. nothing, of course, is said about the nature of the struggle and it's self impostition. we long to live torturous lives and last through tragic and brutal circumstance and survive if only so that we may lay claim to having done so. in there lies the weakness of our lives, the emptiness of going on and pushing forward.
and after it, because of it, inside of that heartache and misery lies the moutain where can call ourselves ruler, and free man, where we can feel holy as if we have discovered some secret of the tropics and engage further only where necessary. and to that end, we create a system in which such things as completeness and sactuary can be reached through the eradication of loneliness and the binding of one to another.
we bribe the mind with subtle gestures and phrases like love which can overtake us until we are only a series of sensations had and expereinces remembered. "but we loved deeply!" we say and fail to take the time to understand the value any such notion carries.
with love, we are pedestrians struggling through the crosswalks and hoping to not be overrun by the heavy traffic. and so we allow it, and into the mind it creeps (like a snake) every so often, brittle but unfettered- a systematic pulling of the strings which hold together the fabric of our minds, an unraveling like yarn from a spool after which one may only stare at the pile of ruffled noodles at your feet and wonder how the unraveling has ended. and that great and hopeless unraveling, we call love. like children, we long to be enraptured, with no real thought as to what this enrapturement means.
we dream, with lockstep accuracy, that the unraveling might lead to an inner greatness or a smooth happiness that may wash us clean of our bitterness and relieve us of the burden of our experiences and losses. the unraveling, which any natural order would command come to an end at some sooner or later point, we long to extend, that we may unravel forever and without consequence. but the reality, the laws of all creation make unavoidable that a thing can only unravel so far until, eventually, it becomes just an eaten-away sash, a pile of remnants on the floor like so many torn photgraphs. and then this things, which so nobly allowed itself to be unravelled, loses all it's recognizable features and becomes only a odd mixture of what's left with no real border nor, as the unraveling is complete, a flag of any sort to plant. then we are left, with only memories, which haunt us.
so we dash, like school children between feeble attempts at respinning the cast-out yarn and putting it back to spool that it may yet again be unraveled (the realignment is of secondary importance) and when it has finally come to- we jump headfirst into the next unspooling where we can once again be broken down, taken apart, shredded all the while imagining for ourselves a perfection that comes with all this breaking down and rebuilding and so write dazzling hymns to our own destructiuons and recall it with all the clarity and kindness of a brainwash victim: "how sweet it was!" we say and leave it in our past, forever wishing to dig it up and on it's resurfacing: find the vertigo in which we so lovingly can fall apart again.
but my question is this: where is the final unraveling in which we must no longer respool? where is the victory march and what boon comes forth from reaching through into this place? our lives are like those lemmings which plummet over cliffsides because it is that which has been done over the centuries and therefor, must be right. afterall, who can deny the sweetness of the unraveling? who would turn his back on how fine it feels (like heroin) to fall inside the great dark space where there is no room for maneuvering, nor desire to move? who would be so foolhardy as to walk from the addiction to ebb and flow of "love" and it's gentle conspiracies to take us apart?
and where then, being in that state of unraveling, is the explanation and vitality of knowledge with which we can spring forth in this life unhindered? where is the end of this terrible and calamitous cycle? where is the desire for that end? would we rather, like the lemming, live on thrashing about in the mud for some seblance of what may mean peace and love everlasting?
everyday, out any door or window, you can watch the trek taking place in each and every soul's life to find one or another and in this, we have convinced ourselves, is the answer to our emptiness and longing. so we corner ourselves, thinking that maybe there, in that cornering lies the slow salvation we believe is hidden only in the deep craving for another that carves into us until we are nothing at all but a shell and it's history.
do we not, in all of our ingenuity, know of some other, better way? and where is that way hidden? where can we find the subtle breaking of the storm behind which lies our brightest futures and, in finding it, will there be anyone else at the precipice? will it matter?


2004-12-03 | 1:19 p.m.
0 comments so far