This can't be right. It seems like there is something just beyond my courage and that if I had courage or if I could suspend some sort of false conscience or tension I would be able to understand something important. It would be very clear. It's not complicated, just needs to be looked at squarely.
This something is a source of great energy, or the condition of seeing it participates in some great energy. Or that's the feeling. As of something right there that I'm not willing to take hold of.
Often I read something or hear something and I think, That can't be that hard to write, it would just require commitment to seeing this something, seeing clearly. And but then, my intuition tells me, my life would fall apart. And so I can't decide, and keep waiting for something to happen to me. Instead of deciding to see. Meanwhile, much of my competence, such as it is, is directed towards making sure that nothing happens.
If I were to pursue this in a more limited and practical way, there would be something to say about listening past the momentum of false language before trying to find words for much of anything. So much carefully marshaled falsehood in me. What is it? I keep saying these things: I'm sorry. I don't know. What do you think? And I don't mean them, V. I actually think I'm a creative force in the midst of reality. You know, not more than other people, but an actual and free determining force. Why is that so fearful?
It's late, as you'll have guessed, as I'm writing this. And you're probably driving to Boulder.
It's a great comfort to know that false sentiment motivated by the newly acquired (to ya'all, may you live to wallpaper over another ancient culture) shoulder-chucking of commerce never sleeps. The chucking or the sentiment, I mean. Love what you've done with the lion sentinel thingies by the entry where the twin sibyls were.
ReplyDeleteWhen I jump in with both feet, almost any old place, I find that energy. My life has fallen apart a few times but I don't die. I just end up in a new life that's more to my liking, but it's like getting born again -- with forceps-- each time. There was forgetting how to sleep when I was 11 and I started having nightmares in the day and thought I was going crazy but I learned I'm smart; there was becoming Mormon when I lost all my friends and then got new ones I liked more; there was getting moved west right when I had these new friends and getting very, very angry but then getting even better friends and learning how to be very disciplined; there was going to Mexico and being scared shitless many times and learning that danger makes me a man and gives me stories to tell; there was marrying Margaret and thinking that I had to spend my life unloved and unacknowledged and learning how to be very sad; there was M leaving and me going totally through the disposal and coming out with humility and all kinds of new psychological wisdom I had been all retarded about before; there was keeping my kids and learning how to be gentle and nice; there was finding Blake and learning how to trust and be a partner; I think there'll be a day when someone I really love dies and I'll just have to go out in the desert and come back only for celebrations. I've been reading Bolano like a mofo and I think basically the Gospel According to him is: put yourself out there, leap into battle, act decisively with passion, be wrong over and over, take your meds so you can party hartier, have kids, go to Africa, don't assume an impulse will end in misery, etc. It's the YOGA, brah. You have to stretch to reach farther. IMHO. I say all this with appropriate embarrassment at professing any answers whatsoever, as you know. XO, V.
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