Baptism

How can I capture the texture of this rock?
I can say that it is grey
that it is rough
that it is big
but not too big
exact dimensions unknown, roughly 14"x12"x5"
that it is sitting at a jaunty angle
pointed up into the wispy sky
that it is part wet, part dry
dipped in this deep black lake
like baptism
or is that not concrete enough for you?

embrace

what is embrace?

first: it is certainly not
“giving you a hug”
a mere social party trick
performed without regret.

embrace is not easy or cheap
it carries inevitable meaning
it is not vacant or empty
it is not just a greeting or a farewell
a hello or a goodbye

instead, a proposal:
embrace is a negation of space.
my space
your space
becomes our space, our-space, ourspace.

embrace is the experience of the other
mutual subjugation of identity
it is love, connection, unity
a sacrifice of selfness

embrace is a code, a symbol
intensified meaning
simultaneously two things:
opening and closure
externalization and internalization

but most of all
embrace is you and me

Cold World (A Relic of a Bygone Age)

"Sir? I found this in the wreckage..."

This is a story that I wrote a few summers ago and have been occasionally revising ever since. I thought it would be interesting to share mostly as a snapshot of the sort of emotional states my words were attempting to produce at that point in my writing life. It seems almost foreign to me now in a lot of ways, but I still think the (for lack of a better word) coldness came through fairly well.

Of course, it is also winter, so literal coldness is very much on my mind right now.

~

Cold World

Her shivering was getting worse. Soon the cold would consume everything, and her body’s desperate attempts to shake itself out of apathy would no longer matter. Why do we try so hard, so viscerally, so instinctively, to live in a world in which death is the only inevitability?

He jumped out of the hurtling train, landing violently on the gravelly slope below. His bones made awful noises as they broke. Somehow he would carry on anyway. If he had to pull the world past him instead of pushing his way through it, then so be it. The cold made his muscles stiff, resistant to the demands he was making of them, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered anymore. He had to save her.

She felt the relentless cold absorbing everything into its inevitable white void; sensation, thought, emotion. She involuntarily curled up into a ball, trying to conserve what little warmth was left in her world. This was appropriate: to leave the world in the same way she entered it, a helpless, senseless fetal mass, powerless against the elements. Why does the world provide us with this circularity, this morbid, fatalistic symmetry?

He carried on, his movement as much an act of creation as of locomotion. When there was no strength left to carry on through the contours of the world, he reshaped the world into the form of his destination, willing himself to reach her. Regardless of the boundaries of the possible, finding her was simply a matter of necessity, and he would not- could not- allow the limitations of existence to stand in the way until he had achieved his goal. But he was cold... so cold.

She was far past any distinguishable feeling now. Identity itself became meaningless in the unrelenting assimilation of the cold. She became the cold, just as ultimately the world itself would; it was inescapable. Death was the only thing that remained. And yet life continued. Why is this infinitely small spark of life so persistent?

He saw her. Through parched eyes frozen open by the bitter cold, he could only catch a glimpse of her before she was diffused into the infinite white, but it was her. Just a little farther now. He tore down the world before him, pulling nearer and nearer but never quite attaining his goal. She was so far away.

She could not be saved. Finally the last infinitesimal impression of her life was gone, vanished into the cold world. In the end, only the cold persists; biting, tearing, breaking, shattering. Nothing endures. How can we live in a world in which the cold consumes all of our hope, all of our courage, all of our strength?

He could not save her. His broken body shuddered to a halt in the face of the advancing cold. The world he was remaking remained unbuilt; his hopes and dreams froze and shattered as they crashed against the icy inevitability of the cold world. Everything is frozen into place, and in the end nothing really moves forward or upward. Only the cold remains.

Nothingness. White world. White world cold white world cold white world. White cold cold world. Cold world. Nothing...

Wisdom

In the streets
She calls out to me:

Don't be a little idiot, darling
Don't go down to the deceitful place
Don't go looking for counterfeit love
Down where the door lies open
beckoning

Don’t listen to that harlot Aphrodite
Who promises you cheap love
With cheaper words.
Her path leads down to Hades.

The truth is,
All love is the love of wisdom.
And it don't come cheap
Don't come easy
But it’s beautiful, my dear
It’s beautiful.
Let me give it to you.

Take my hand
Let me teach you
Step by step in the narrow way
The way that leads to true love.
Learn, love, rejoice
For I am a fountain
In the midst of your weariness
A hand to hold
When there’s nothing under your feet.
I am the grace and the peace of God,
I am the most lovely of His creatures,
I am the stars and the moon,
I am calm oceans and silent glades.
I am vision, I am word, I am truth.

I am Wisdom.

I was always in love with Athena.

~

Place

How can place be so significant
I return, repeat that moment years ago

Come back

And the places and spaces haven't changed
Traces remain of my life heretofore
My memory reconstructs the image
As seen by some supposed observer:

     And I am standing there with her
     In the empty classroom
     I've asked her to stay late
     As the others have all gone
     And I stumble on the words
     She waits as I collect them up
     My knees shake, nerves brittle
     The moment arrives, and I ask her
     No, no, no - not supposed to go this way

     Come back

All of these things still are in this space
The echoes continue to persist, carry on
Even as the event itself becomes legend
My own private personal little myth.

Until finally the event is lost in its own repetitions
Swallowed up in the narrative of its own telling.
And I have gone over the story so many times
That I can no longer remember it.

Come back-
Please come back

The Death of the Author

They strung him up last Thursday. I can't say that any of us were particularly surprised, but at the same time it was a shock to see him struggling, to see him actually depart this world. But it was inevitable after all he'd done, all the words he wrote. The problem is, though, what are we going to do now? I've tried to go back to reading the same as before, but it just doesn't come the way it used to.

I thought it would be okay. I thought that after he was gone I could just go back and keep flipping those pages, but I- I just can't, there just isn't anything there anymore. Or at least, I can't understand them. The words are so wrapped up in who he is, the sort of person he was and the way he used the words that came out of his mouth to talk about the ones that came out of his pen. He was the only person who could speak of the text, who could tell me what he meant and then tell me what he meant by his meaning. But that's all over now.

I just couldn't believe when he--

I'm sorry.

When they started the execution, he looked composed, orderly even. It was unreal, but I felt sort of confident that it would be different with him, that the words would still make sense just because he was still making so much sense even when none of the stuff around him was. But then it happened, he choked and choked and there wasn't anything left, and the pages flew up in the air and shifted and changed order and shape, and all of the connections dried up, and it was done. I burned all his books later that day, they're useless now.

I don't know, maybe that's why books are so wonderful. Maybe because they only live as long as the person who wrote them, that's why they're so special, so fleetingly precious and fragile, like a butterfly or something. Maybe that's why being a reader is such a powerful and achingly meaningful thing, and it's true and beautiful, and I believe it, but you can tell me that over and over and I still won't be okay when they die, when all that power just vanishes like it never existed, when the meaning of a text just disappears as soon as its creator's last breath expires. And I am constantly haunted by the knowledge that my own words, even these, will cease to cohere as soon as I am gone.

So, the end, I guess?

Ghost

This is a tragedy. This is a portrait of an emotional cripple, a failure, a man whose fundamental relational faculties are broken. This is also a ghost story.

 He hoped that someday she would understand. He hoped that she would be able to decipher the codes that he laid out for her in his words, in his actions, in the tilt of his head as he looked at her, in the light that reflected from her eyes to his and back again. He saw heaven in those eyes, but he was broken. He could not use the tools of language to communicate his vision, so he relied on unwritten symbols, on the play of the light, on the labyrinthine illusions of movement and time. He could not trust language; it had betrayed him too often for him to entrust it with this most precious responsibility. But this mistrust had crippled him, leaving him unable to make her see how he felt. He could not expect her to acquiesce to his ultimately impaired mode of communication, and yet language was even more impaired. It would fail him, he would fail it, and the words he was trying to say would be erased forever, replaced by other words, words that would sound the same but would somehow fail to conjure the appropriate meaning to her.

 Indeed, his words would fail in the same way that these words are failing. They are failing to convey urgency, they are failing to communicate the deep feelings of regret and loss that he felt at this infirmity of communication, this inability to simply come forth and speak. Simply put, it was a tragedy to him, just as it should be a tragedy to you. This man is lonely and lost, unable to trust even the words that fill his thoughts, let alone the words he tries to speak. He has no center, no confidence, no security in himself or his ability to communicate meaning, to mean anything to others. He often wonders if anyone is even aware of his presence as more than an impotent spectral breath, haunting the edges of perception.