1. A world of sleeping fish reminds
Koser the barber to pack his underwater speed goggles for navigating the
circular regions of the brain hemisphere. He comes upon a shepherd and a girl
luncheoning in a brightly sunny ancient pasture – the sun itself seems the
light of truth and reality. A plague of forlorn roaches tears through a
French-bread castle eager for the king. The king takes refuge in the
gingerbread costumeland of Grand National Television. The working class has
surrendered to its abuses. The aristocracy has surrendered to its abuses. All
mortal men must surrender to their own hollowness. The fish castle glows
brightly in the shifting water deep. Koser approaches the oozing palpitating
rabbit heart of his salvation with hope which is fear, optimism which is fear
of disaster. Red jellyfish circle and sting as he limply floats down to his
grim destination. A trumpet sounds which announces the arrival of the king. In
the fish palace the hall of judgement is a pitiful pretense: in life there is
success, no failure, no points for winning and losing but only amorphous
smearing blur, colored by unnamed qualities of blind emotion, permeated and
surrounded by void. Veins and nerves snuffle and bulge, in our hearts we long
for salvation.
2. The days go by, and by, and by.
Nothing to take, nothing to keep, nothing to hold. My greedy soul longs for its
heaven, to hold the bright pearl of tender love in its pale hands. But the days
pass, and pass, and pass away. At the end of a dream I feel I have caught
something in my hand, something precious and important which will change me,
save me. Waking up, I start to worry that it might not really be there. When I
am awake I know that my hand is empty.
3.
Doubt: “Twenty years in black-eyed destiny. The end
of all things seeps in through the cracks.”
Hope: “Twenty years lost, an hour found. An hour
of respite in the darkest storm. Oh beautiful storm! How I long to be with you
in the depths of my aloneness! How I love you and long to be with you forever!”
Doubt: “But the revulsion seeps in catches hold
grows like a vine, propels you forever in flight from your self.
Hope: “ ‘The nature of wind is eternal.’ ‘The
torch burns out but the fire passes on.’ ”
Doubt: “Fine, fine. Or perhaps you would prefer
‘Faith in Nothing, existence in Self.’ Empty phrases, vain reassurances.
Jittering nervous laughter in the face of death’s maw.”
Revulsion
is made in every instant of existence. It comes out of fear, necessary fear. A
bundle of live nerves is torn apart, decaying in the entropic current. A
hideous screaming crumbling dust world. Whatever good is in the fruit of life
is drowned in the infinity of your boundless desire for it. Clinging to life,
you are in agony. Letting go, you negate yourself, disappear into a black hole,
drift off into a trance of false equanimity. If embracing all embraces
revulsion, how can it embrace all?”
4. The king crab fights a silly battle
in an opera. Later on a man with a hat accidentally squishes the king crab with
his boot. The silly crab dies a silly death, slipping away in a second.
A light, a fire, an uncertain ember
spit out into the cold. Quiet Jim sips a soda, acting all cool. Acting all cool
is some silly stupid shit but can he help it in his fear? Enough forever with
acting all cool. But what if they think he’s crazy? So little understanding.
Quiet Jim walks backward across the
sky. The oblivion sings, the oblivion walks. King crab sighs, a tear at the stars’
beauty.
Sitting here all unbalanced a creeping
feeling that something is wrong, it never leaves poor Jim. He has just screwed
up his life; he is just about to make the mistake. Makes a hundred stupid
little decisions every day, and each one he worries about being the mistake. He
has nothing to measure with. It all sinks down the drain like mercury. And here
he sits, tap tap tapping, regret running through him and a cold sweat, the urge
to hurry hurry hurry. Oh all these damn things to do. The sickness, the doubt,
the regret. He just needs one person, one person to really love, one person to
whom he can explain everything and hold nothing back. Since he turned fifteen
it was like this, ah shit, stupid little life of his. Particular, specific, flawed,
sad.
King crab takes a brief walk
among the sand and the stars. The ocean is quiet and cool, the night air damp
and alive with saltwater. The night can sweep in and take him at any time. “I
accept it!” he says, he seeks to accept it. But what good will that do?
5. Violently ill today. The sickness,
even the sickness has been stolen from me. What a comfort it has been, a
crutch. James sleeps a nightlong wonder in the deep agitation of his tossing
turning bed. Agitation, feverthoughts. The broke, the brokendown. The
chimneysweep is coughing up his lungs. Hooray for the sickness. Laugh and dance
with the creeping sickness and dread which gnaws on the life-thread.
Living in a dark path with
Nothing to illuminate the Outside, a trackless eternity deep in stochastic
night. The call of the moon, the call of the stars, the call of my bulging
hungry cells.
My fear to approach. The
struggle to be liked. The crippled void-lack of compassion, the cold lonely
utility. Is the joy of human life made of these damn interpersonal
object-relations? oh Christ it’s enough to make me sick, the contingency of our
most holy soul, the circumstantiality, the fragility.
Fidgeting, fidgeting. Can’t
quite get comfortable, can’t quite stop the pain, there’s always some, creeping,
creeping, in each and every moment of my life. I gripped at my chest. Make my
heart stop beating. It hurts! Just relax, calm down I said to myself. No I
can’t, it won’t stop beating. And my spine!
There is insufficiency. Somehow
I am wounded, and it is through that wound that I have seen the eternal dark
emptiness of chaos, death, blindness, stochasm, struggle, pain. Day after day,
the wound reveals itself to not be a mere temporary scratch on a sound baseline
of eternal equilibrium of normalness and health, but to rather be an infinite,
absolutely infinite body of void which surrounds everything and pervades
everything, tearing away at it moment by moment. From the pain I have learned
that pain is possible, that pain exists.
This is not what I consider real life. And yet it
continues on and on like a bad dream, darkness of absence and uncertainty on
all sides. The sages say to embrace it and I want to believe them, but it’s
like embracing the most loathsome and pitiful pile of intestines. It’s like embracing
my torturer, like falling into my murderer’s arms.
6. Great Wu was startled to observe
amidst his feverdream how strange his body was becoming. From moment to moment
he forgot and couldn’t recognize himself. He knew he was changing but he had
forgotten why, and into what. He was growing unwieldy.
At times Wu may have had moments
of clarity, flashes of the darkness which terrified him and which he was hungry
for. The incredible, incredible, terrible beauty of it. The strangeness, the
groundlessness, the vast openness, the transience, the pain, the immediacy.
What he saw was always lost in time.
7.
Beast: “I have sinned. I have erred in the face of
Death, I know I cannot save myself. I have eaten flesh. Why should anyone feel
any compassion for me? We are organisms after all, in a limited world.
Starvation and thirst are everywhere, the possibilities and need for ascension
go on and on. Love is a complex of mechanism for the genes’ replication. All
human bonds are subject to collapse; separation is always immanent as unity has
never been achieved to begin with.”
Shelter:
“I call to you, I am calling. A shelter in the storm; the storm is the shelter.
There is a place of rest. A little cottage by the water in the great rainy
night, with a soft yellow light. Warm arms are waiting for you. I will bathe
your sickness away, your fever will dissolve like a dream.”
Night:
“The winds blow dust in desert night. The emptiness howls. Stochastic blindness
is in the very heart of your being. The curse is on you, beast, you were born
into it. You must always keep moving and struggling forward in order to stay in
the same place. Pain forever chases you as you forever chase pleasure, blindly
through a maze. If you slacken pace, you fall behind. The race gets faster day
by day, your opponents stronger. The more you fall behind, the closer to death
you get and the further immersed in sickness and pain. In death, any value your
life might have is annihilated. Your world of ideas and little gains is a
sham-house to protect yourself from the nakedness of your existence.”
Beast:
“Can I pull up the root of my suffering without pulling the root of my very
Being?”
8. James was a beast of veins, the
veins which called to life with a peculiar wail. A wail which had in it all the
ten thousand things. The ten thousand things which spin on the inside of the
eye. The mind being who dies, the life that passes away unseen, unremembered.
Groovy kid Jason pops a pill of
purple ostrich dip and trips a trip for
tripping hip. He notices the lark-long day of the desert which rears up with a
straightening gory. He sees the monkey of the apocalypse gleam in the moonlight
bath of mars.
The death comes, it’s the death of a hermit who lived
alone in shame. In the fridge I am keeping the frog of a grim rebirth, the
perfected jazz oblivion of the nightly saint-dance agony. The teenage kids moo
around like living cattle in their zoo, the zoo of brick, the prison of the
brick brick sickness which was forced upon them by the sins of their fathers.
Oh, escape, escape, follow me to the new paradise! Ashes, neck pain, a new wave
of nausea which sends me back to the toilet. The mystical white toilet where my
vomit disappears down in a mystical shudder of the pulsing void. Celebration of
glorious pain.
Indeed some do live and love in our decaying hell
world. Some of us consider it adequate. How do we know if anything was ever
adequate after all. We momentary spark bugs. A spark! ashes. Oozing, flowing
blood of Christian joy. Black ecstasy of the unfurling night. The green hills,
fatherless insects crawling on the surface of the world, busy like ants. The
flare of psychosis permeates everything too, one suddenly sees that not a speck
of sanity can be found. Hee hee, it doesn’t make any fucking sense! I wonder if
you aren’t currently in a state of utter terror, simply lacking the courage to
realize it.
My own heaven, just to taste it for a brief time is
all I want. What people call happiness. Does it really exist? I can’t let
myself rest until I know. I try to look for it I don’t know how I don’t know
how I don’t know where I don’t know who time is running, running. Just an
organismic mechanism? Pragmatic pain and pleasure responses motivating
continuance of human relationships beneficial to genetic proliferation? Or is
it meeting of soul with soul, or soul growing close to soul across the inky
depth and distance of the ever-present and pervasive void? Both at once?
Somewhere in these corridors of causality lies other soul. Release of
loneliness, of shame, of fear? Release of inadequacy, incompletion, end of
searching? I don’t want to wait for my life, not a second!
9. Years of can’t-sleep waking.
Unbearable tiredness. Unbearable urge to be Awake, unbearable urge to surrender
to sleep. Rigid walls of habit-patterns. Is our self-nature nothing but the
life-struggle?
Hans Jarby lives in a dim house
underground. His wife is dead of cancer, his children unborn. The promise, the
potential of his life has been steadily been replaced by the bleak and empty
actual, the ideal by the real. After all, his life wasn’t in the End of his
life, the absolute perfection and finalization of its form, but in the
throbbing will-essence wailing through the windy gaps, struggling towards the
end [perfection], and struggling against the end [death].
Oh shit, I made another mistake.
Some more sand crumbles off the sand cliff! Young Jarby looks bleak into a
bottomless empty well. He reaches in his arm for water and he is consumed by
sucking grasping tar. He screams out but the tar is the only thing that hears
him. The tar is Void, passionless, awarenessless, silent.
He is grasping after his self;
he is running from his self. He is desperate for life; he is horrified and
sickened by life. He wants to yell out and curse God, shatter objects, but he
knows that there is no God, that God is his own self. There is no more good in
wailing self-pity protest like an infant, his parents are mortal too and cannot
help him.
He wants to tear himself apart, like there’s a greasy
black oil accumulating under his skin, a sickness, a squalor, a creeping spider
virus of error wrapping itself around all of his cells and choking them. He
feels unbearable regret for having somehow misstepped and fallen into the
sickness. He is always straining to ascend up out of the pain, but he can’t
quite make it!
His will stands against the
world, yet it emerges screaming from the world and returns screaming into the
world, darkness of uncertain isolation and mistrust on all sides. He wants to
destroy himself; he wants to possess himself. Salvation is just one step away.
What is the nature of my soul he suddenly asks again. A spark of insight seems
possible. He tries to focus on his soul directly and clearly, in its very
searching and fearing, in its very compulsively shuddering and stretching with
the circumstantial waves and ripples of passion pressuring from all sides.
Head in arms on cafeteria table,
seeing black and white speckled floor, seeing one cord of sweatshirt hood
hanging down. Hearing voices and voices and human voices, echoing, unheard,
flickering instantaneously and eternally from void to void. Each voice cuts him
with loneliness and longing. He sees This, and it is gone.
A ladybug smacks against a windowpane, trying to
reach the light. Again, and again, and again.