The More Difficult Pleasure

Fried cod on bagels and cheap sake for supper alone here in the yard with my dogs of course drunk and wondering where I skipped the rails?

It was when I was 11, that I'm pretty sure of. One day I was a kid, sullen and introverted to be sure, but just a kid. I liked soccer and using a pointed tether to fight orcs and mulling my gifts. The next I was some mentalemotional mutant, all nerves and hatreds and loves and ideas centered on resolution. There was in that moment a future and I could work for it and earn it and it would be mine. This was an incomprehension. It was a failure of imagination. I saw my grandfather whip his liver into submission, the hate in his face, his neck too articulate, and his TSEliot shelved for good. I saw myself imune from all that, exempted, cut some slack because God loved me and I was special and too gifted to die so obtuse. I wouldn't go that way.

And yet. So: girls. I didn't have any. I didn't see any coming. I couldn't. But so then I found a church and girls therein and I had one, my love. I kissed her when I was 16 and the world opened and closed. A great lapse. A missing and a finding and a longing for continuation and a certainty of eventual death all at once, too much for me just barely awake.

Then. Then later I got married and it wasn't ok. I had chidren of the best kind but marriage. A desert. A time apart. In parentheses. I had to consort to make those beauties. I wash myself of the consorting, but not of the beauties of whicvh there are three unimpeachable, clean as clean, their half-mine mouths speaking the words I gave them.

And on and on. a break, A death foretold on the wedding night. A great falling apart. A great patching together.

I found this place and this woman and it was intentional, if accidental. It was what I wanted. However. Amen and amen. and what next? I've been wrong before.

When I was eleven I prematurely was a music snob. Autistic Bach, but I could hold myself aloof and better. Beatles, of course. Then the Boston punks. This was 1978, I know: too young. I heard that stripped sound and I made a fortress around my heart with those square-hewn stones. Now I can't remember. But then I read and read and deeper and deeper into a music that was an identity. I was the first there. So were you. But I ws the REAL first to find that truth. I used that ingot as a dorrstop. I brained the interlopers with it. I kept them out. I sat at a kitchen table slurping solipsism soup and the gold shone and the beggars, the imbeciles kept away. They had their chubby girlsfiends. They had their impure foods. Their moron parents. Their escapades, their softness, their laughing-at-nothing, theor certainties so centemptible and I was in the storm. Everything alone music unsharable and a prescient sense that food could be right or wrong. My own cop. My laws, my jail, my executioner, my basket of heads.

So I found a pleasure more difficult. That is where the young snob lays his head and where he raises it in the early cold morning. The difficulty infinitely fungible, like a dollar. Not that. This. Not yours. Mine. Not what you fell into, but what I strained to climb. To quote my father, and yours: "99% of everything is shit". The poets. The German composers. The French mathematicians. The pure of heart. The pale blueeyed. The inner inner inner. The altar. The place of sacrifice. The chord stripped and screached till nobody could sing along and I postulated a new music of bare speech. a drum, even. No loose ends. The noise necesssary. Faustus at fifteen. can you imagine? An aesthetic like skydiving: one clean parabolic line through the blue with sudden death at the end.. No mercy. No eyelids. No hand in mine. only bones and sky and the onrushing.

this is where I have to look back and postulate the origins of depression in singularity. To be clear: in riding the cutting-pony of the self until the paddock is empty. to find some kernel of you in extremis. I'm not being at all clear: the inward twisting, the all-cutting, the ever-excluding self finds itself alone and the deep black icecold of space is of course lethal. The self has no where else to turn but inward and inward and inward and then the slef Ouroborus consumes the self.

That is what I write alone in my 48th year on cheap sake in the desert without thinking too much.