We need a new word for this, the old ones won’t do, especially our favorites, the ones forever on our lips, in any extremity, as if all had been done and catalogued before, as if we had reached the farthest extremes once and for all, and are now on the mend, which we’re not, not at all, we are actually far worse, and the flimsy structures that have allowed us the illusion of recovery are about to crash around us like so many toothpicks, leaving us face to face with the razor-edged surface of all things, the deadly, horrific world behind illusion. And the old words won’t even begin to describe what we see, but we will no doubt use them anyway, habitually, as if we were talking about what we see, though we will be using words that don’t have anything to do with what we see, only with our desperate attempt to convince ourselves that what we see, what is happening, is nothing like those other extremes, even if it is as horrible and destructive, or worse. Each new horrific extreme should have its own word, but we prefer the outdated ones, preferring to think we have transcended such things, but for a few intermittent flashbacks, when, in fact, such a ridiculous idea prevents us from acknowledging our ability to manufacture endlessly variegated new horrors, the fact that we are bent on new horrors, comparing all horror to The Nazis, trivializing the holocaust by turning it into a rhetorical tool, all for the apparent purpose of allowing us to proceed with our horrors calmly and casually, because we have no real word for what is happening, what we are doing, all the while moving toward our own incomparable crimes, every day putting things in place to achieve our new horrors, while using every possible contrivance, however nonsensical, to put ourselves in a good light. We say to ourselves we will do whatever we have to in order to prevent new horrors, but we don’t do anything to prevent new horrors, not just because we don’t know what to do anyway, or how to do it, but because what is called for is too costly.
We have always been wrong about everything, we’ve always been proved wrong, even when all the evidence was before us we were wrong. Time and again things we believed were true, especially the things we believed were undeniably true, turned out to be completely wrong, yet we vociferate and evangelize and spew all sorts of political and philosophical twaddle, intentionally ignoring the fact that we are, no doubt, wrong, we hammer and hammer away at points we believe are both unquestionable and significant, though they are trivial and certainly mistaken, like all the rest of our ideas, we even bolster ourselves for the long, tedious task of informing others of our unquestionable and significant ideas by calling this intransigence a sacrifice which we make for the so-called larger purpose of any of those empty container word ideas, those rubbish bin word ideas, like truth or reality or existence or god, in the worst case actually believing that stubborn, unbending adherence to no doubt wrong ideas is a worthy, a great sacrifice, when it is surely only an indulgence.
I don't know anything at all anymore, I told an acquaintance last week, meaning, though I did not, at the time or at any time subsequently, explain this, that, as a humanist pessimist, I could no longer speak, or even think about, causes of any sort (logical, final, first etc.) without simultaneously speaking or thinking about numerous inverse, contradictory, different interpretations or possible interpretations, and that, therefor, the sense, or any idea of sense, to anything at all was, to me, fictive, merely a reflection of my own state of awareness or ignorance, of the known or conscious and the unconscious together, and nothing more. Theory is first whim, accident and part precedent, and then a lie, and finally a campaign of misinformation, a gathering of statistics, sources, records or what have you, and then so-called artistic or profound pastiche of these referents toward some end, maybe a degree, a paycheque, an affair etc., usually having little or nothing to do with the theory itself, and often in contradiction to it.
Not knowing a damn thing doesn't, however, I thought, let one off the hook, as they say, but is itself the ultimate onus, a hookedness to what is that is not yet interpretation, or what is not yet understood, or whatever, as interpretation. We don't "remember" wars, holocausts, cultures or what have you to understand or learn or any such nonsense, but to nostalgize the present second onto some imagined past, to move the big decisions, as it were, away from this very moment, just as, in the future, others will move the big decisions toward us here, us anywhere, and we would be shocked, I thought, if we knew that great evil and amelioration, or what have you, are happening as much now, this instant, as they say, as they have happened in the past. We will be part of the future's nostalgized good and evil, I thought. Most of life, I thought, if not all of it, is us avoiding what we know we could do, the big decisions, as it were, because it would cost us, most likely, our lives, as I have said before. My proclamation of ignorance performs the same function as nostalgia, I thought. I am always in a room (the present) waiting for anyone to arrive, I thought. Whether one knows shit about history or not makes no difference, I thought, in whether one becomes a racist, or what have you, or not, I thought. The really terrible thing, it occurred to me, is that all the speculative, exhaustive, catalogic and, for the most part, dangerously misleading so-called knowledge of the world won't help one person decide to save Jews, say, if Jews need to be hidden. Pessimism alone has saved the world from annihilation time and time again. When you hear it said that it can’t be as bad as all that, that it can’t be true, in reference to the horrors of the world, you are dealing with unwitting or willing participants in the destruction of the people of the world, I thought. Fascists running everything right now will try to silence you if you actually do anything that might usurp or threaten them, I thought. They're happy, I thought, as long as they believe the world will last just until the moment of their deaths. This is, by the way, I thought, how bad it really is.
I had written a piece my friend, visiting from Kitchener, thought, months after I wrote it, when I read it to her, said everything, though the piece was merely the reiteration of a conversation I had had while waiting for a bus, a conversation in which I had felt, and still feel, I said nothing, or almost nothing, even if I had, during the conversation, prattled on and on about this and that, barely allowing the person with whom I was conversing to, as they say, get a word in edgewise, or in any other way interrupt my rather didactic string of declarations and opinions and so-called expressions of feelings, and was completely dissatisfied with it (the piece), even if I thought of it, and still think of it, as the best thing I’ve ever written (not at all the best conversation I’ve ever had). I want to write about Killbear Park and the giggling girls and windy Harold Pt. and the bluest sky of 1971, or about my first kiss (in the woods!) and running home elated and eating chocolate chip cookies with milk in our kitchen 15 minutes later, about the automatic paint brush assembler I operated, around which I danced like a blue collar dervish, its ten thousand adjustments, about another conversation with a philosopher who planted her feet on my chair 2 hours after we met (an inch between us) and 12 hours later was gone to Europe, but I can’t, or won’t. Instead of peach-colored sheets I write about the freezing grey blanket of late February, instead of the long, thoughtful walks I took late at night in my high school years I write about my obsessive search for poisonous plants, instead of the natural bonsai my brother and I found atop a dune at The Pinery, I write about the dead elms of Ontario. Otherwise, people might get the wrong idea.
It is as if, hearing something across the street and getting up from the desk to investigate, one, crossing the street, sere to get run over and, while the black car began to move on after having slowed down briefly, upon hitting one, one began to turn one’s head painfully, as consciousness hovered like a swarm of bees around one’s head, as one just managed to make our the alpha-numeric license plate while saying to oneself, “when they come, when anyone comes, I will tell them whatever they need to know to catch whoever ran over me.” But, of course, consciousness drains out a long, long time before anyone arrives, drains out an eternity, in fact, before anyone arrives and one dies performing that last, closed act of mnemonics.
This seems to be the state of our knowledge.
If these were the people to whom the tragedy occurred, the ones who had become tragic (there being also a mechanical aspect to these things that nothing human can represent or embody), if these were the ones most directly affected by the tragedy, the ones who had, and still have, because they remember what happened from so-called personal experience, the most to do with it, then these are the very people least likely to be able to explain the mechanics of the tragedy, to relate anything about the tragedy to us, being unable to describe, with any sense of contour or causality, the growth of the tragedy, after the first occurrence in the chain of events that led to it, or to describe any part of that so-called chain of events, a so-called chain of events that people who were not such a central part of the tragedy will no doubt describe in a manner they will identify, to themselves, as in a perfectly explicable way, because they had been inside it as it unfolded, surrounded and cut off by it, cut off from the luxury, or whatever the term is, of being able to look at it with the posture of someone not inextricably involved in it (a non-involvement that, if the academics and so-called professionals are to be believed, is a pre-requisite for explicability), and no one less likely to be able to reveal the details, or, conversely, more likely to reveal the details but less likely to want to, could ever be found, the tragedy having become, in their thoughts, a conglomeration of huge, charged mental spaces, echoing, as they say, physical spaces, the details of the tragedy occluded by the emotional turmoil caused by their having had some part in it, or standing out starkly but separated from other details in somewhat terrifying, inexplicable fashion. Emotional turmoil becomes the tragedy itself, the most extensive and memorable part of it, whenever they speak of it, whenever they don’t speak of it, overwhelmed by their having been in such a situation, and being in such a situation as they were still in, survivors, there can be no talking to them about it, not only because one doesn’t bring up such things without, at the same time, knowing and expecting that one has then made a commitment to hear whatever they have to say, whether or not it explicates the tragedy in any way, while no doubt knowing that whatever they say can really only be confusing, given their circumstances, or because they could not explain anything about it without reference to their part in it, putting them on the spot, surely leading to even greater confusion on their part and subsequently on the interviewer’s part, but because they, overwhelmed by the tragedy, are still participating in it, participating in a chain of events that began with the first act of the tragedy and is continuing, from their perspective, whenever they think or talk about it, particularly when they try to so-called understand it, the attempt to understand it being, in a way, forced upon them by the questioning, still continuing whether or not they talk about it, surely, but continuing slightly differently in any case, whether their part in it, the continuance of the tragedy, is conscious or not, and whether we understand that our questions constitute a part of the tragedy as we ask the questions or not. (This is, of course, the impression forced upon us by the commentators and interviewers, the professionals and academics, this impression that only commentary and the appearance of objectivity, whatever objectivity or the appearance of it is, is valid or useful.) Or perhaps they described the tragedy in a perfectly clear way, but we were unable to hear them.
I dreamed Bruce Erickson was standing in front of Bruce Erickson Place. “When are they going to feed the people down here?” he asked, turning from the building. Perhaps he was thinking of the hour and a half or two hour line-ups many down here stand in daily, hoping for a meal, or even for a loaf of bread.
About a month before he died, Bruce told me, while working on his painting at Four Corners, that the Downtown Eastside needed new leaders, people who could electrify the voters with their strong voice and strong visions, and make City Council representative of the real Vancouver. He also said he was going to call councillor Don Belamy and tell him to give Carnegie a couple turkeys for Christmas. He never recited one moral truism or trite phrase the whole hour and a half that I talked to him.
An artist from Poland, it was reported to me, thought the balcony words were identical in function to the communist’s use of public spaces to promote totalitarian optimism and moral virtue, which the artist found insulting. I assume the proximity to the police station/jail heightened this response, which was shared by someone else who had lived for a while in the USSR. “The warm fuzzy ones are okay. But who here votes? Who’s to elect? Who works?” (Not, by the way, rhetorical questions.)
“I think the words are well-meaning, with all that that implies,” said someone else. “I think I know what they were getting at.”
Said another, “some of these are the words that the people I work with, people in recovery, use right from the start of their healing. They are important words.”
Apparently, the committee that oversaw the entire building project wanted to memorialize some of the themes that Bruce Erickson talked about in his life, and garnered these words from writings and articles.
“I’m of two minds,” said a future resident of the place. “I like the words. But I wonder that no one does this anywhere else in the city. Are we the type of people that need to be reminded, more than others, of what’s good?”
“I was trying to think if I found anything wrong with them. I don’t,” another said.
We know good and bad for ourselves, though this may or may not make any difference. But just like the John Cheever story in which a successful man repeats many of the same apparent moral virtues to himself over and over, and as in the Laurie Anderson/Philip Glass song where The Roches sing many of the same apparent moral virtues over and over again, while Linda Ronstadt lilts a loose reconstruction of Cheever’s tale (all of it reminiscent of Chaucer), so this building will repeat these apparent moral virtues to all who pass by, the same ones that have been used continuously against the poor and unemployed, the mentally ill, against immigrants, that have justified residential schools, internments, genocides, wars, inquisitions, purges etc. all through history. When you see these words, will you remember this? Will you remember the wartime usefulness of the moral value of courage, to satisfy imbecilic, dreaming and scheming political no-brains and their bloody, destructive, useless whims? Will you remember how dignified the natives of this continent were typically described as being by committed and visionary Europeans, as they were slaughtered or treated as animals somewhat below horses and dogs? These words shall haunt the Downtown Eastside, these apparent moral virtues whose ambiguity convicts the powerless and absolves the powerful in the same breath, these virtues of the educated, academic, managerial, professional, criminal class, who always vote, whose people always get elected whose vision is everywhere, and is terrifying, and who are definitely committed to their way of things.
What but something so intensely ironic would fit at Main and Hastings, I might ask myself. However, right now I find the words oppressive, charged with a dangerous, destructive moralism that I abide not at all. Moralism is not Bruce’s legacy.
The attempts we make to state, clearly and explicitly, what we believe needs to be done, clears up and explains nothing, ends up, in fact, mystifying and opaquing the very situations we are attempting to impose our desire for clarity and explanation upon, the clearer and plainer the statements the mistier and opaquer the situations they are attempts to explain, while the degree of passion with which the statements are made seems almost always to be directly proportional to the mistiness and opaqueness of the situation, the mistier the situation the more passionate the attempt to impose clarity and explanation upon it, if such an attempt is made, and any supposed gain obtained by such imposed clarity being beneficial, apparently, to the person or people doing the imposing.
This is identical to the process by which this world, this country, this city, set upon by all those passionate to impose structure, to impose their passionate attempts at clarity, becomes rule-ridden, system-burdened and over-examined, with no room remaining for the spontaneous, the irregular, the informal that are not part of the imposed clarity and structure, such clarity and structure always being based on the exploitation of the situation and those in it, whatever the situation is or is perceived to be, by those who impose the structures that they feel comfortable with, that they can see some good in, that they can negotiate with unmatched, unself-reflective ease (because they impose it), that they can benefit from imposing, a structure that will always leave those imposing it certain of the grid of expectations and rules and so-called facts, such as what’s what and who’s who or whose, who’s getting paid and whose bread and butter the bread and butter is, when in fact none of this is clear at all, the grid is merely the exploitative tool by which the imposers of the grid hog everything, feel wonderfully competent, and then say, without choking on their vicious, destructive, intentionally hateful and hurtful words, they will share with those upon whom they’ve imposed their exploitative structures, their clarities and explanations, the prison-like grid of their arrogance, and their fear of the own incompetence in a any situation that hasn’t been signed, sealed and delivered by themselves, their fear of all that cannot be named and exploited, their fear of any situation in which the spontaneous, the unplanned might occur, any situation in which they might be left with no recourse to power (imposed) or structure (imposed) or authority (imposed) through so-called superior knowledge (superior obeisance) etc.
People in this city, this country, this world, suffering under the weight of imposed structures and ideologies, which are shoved down people’s throats and drummed into their heads and their bodies, prove time and again the bankruptcy and destructiveness of those structures and explanations, but this in no way dampens the rulers’ and explainers’ desire to continue with their ruling and explaining, to stay above and beyond those who would undoubtedly be unpredictable and unaccountable and uncontrollable without such enforced structures, they seem to think, those who are doomed by these structures, whose lives are crushed, those who are executed, slaughtered like animals under the weight of these grids, these machineries of hatred, these ideas about truth and what’s necessary that the rulers and explainers hammer down upon the world (a world in which there is more concern about smoking in public places than about the most destructive thing in the world, the automobile, more concern about jay-walking than the on-going genocide of people all over the world, more concern about minuscule legalities or how so-and-so is or is not doing this or that duty or job than about starvation and epidemics or the extermination of entire classes or peoples, more concern about a snub, or a perceived snub, than about the wholesale contamination and plunder of resources necessary for our survival, a world where being lost, even for a moment, is impossible, because everything and everywhere is known and owned and named and regulated), trying, it would seem, to eviscerate existence, to mandate order in the chaotic, enraged whenever their structures or ideologies fail to accomplish the nightmare of control and brutality they want to see universally, unquestioningly applicable, and enraged to see the chaos they have killed and maimed so many to prevent proliferating at their own hands.
In high school, I remember knowing what the important questions were, and I remember asking them, though they were never answered so much as negotiated or skirted. During that time, there was famine in Pakistan, among other places, I recall, and some people at the school took to calling me “Pak-pak-pakiiiiiiieeeeeee,” since my complexion was somewhat dark and my hair long and my activities, my reading and pseudo-philosophizing, suspect, and because I actually talked about famine. The most important question was how to challenge the murderous, destructive, arrogant, lying and cheating people and groups that ran everything, people and groups responsible for, for instance, famine and war and medical arrogance/stupidity (thalidomide, insulin shock therapy e.g.), for poverty and fascism and the anti-educational slave training, brain-killing institutionalization that passes for an educational system, for the piddley-ass shit that teachers and academics, following the lead of corporate hooligan traitor scum that run the show, business class trash that benefit from famine and war and medical stupidity, claim is all important and significant and is all there is to society, telling us that such piddley-ass shit constitutes contribution to society, when in fact their piddley-ass shit only contributes to the corporate exploitation and destruction of everything. The same mentality will justify the deaths of hundreds and thousands, even millions of people on the basis of, for instance, who fired the first shot. Much of history, for example, as it is taught is piddley-ass shit history, a history that disengages itself, as in Camus’ The Fall, where it is always just a bit too late, that is, the damage has been done, and nothing now can be done about it. Whereas we can always do something about it, right now, but would rather not get involved in such an immediate and difficult undertaking.
If someone had said they had felt like they were floating above the city, like they were expanding exponentially, becoming, as they say, lighter than air, I would have thought them simple-minded, until it happened to me, if it ever happened to me, I was thinking, realizing, while I was thinking this, that perhaps my so-called thoughts were trying to tell me something, as it were, or rather, that something was happening unconsciously, or whatever the term is, and this reflection was a reflection of that so-called unconscious process, or whatever. One must be thinking about getting away, thinking these things, I thought. Except that I could not tell if I had been then, and had been, really, forever trying to hold on to something, perceiving everything as tangential to the band of pure white light inside, as I used to call whatever it is I imagined, or whether I had been constantly avoiding so-called reality, or whatever, engaging in only tangential activities and pastimes, resisting fate, as they used to say, resisting the thing or things that I would be doing if I was not always either holding on to something or avoiding something, if there is, after all, anything but holding on or resisting. If we have a fate, I thought, it is holding on and avoiding - what we hold on to, or try to hold on to, and what we avoid, or try to avoid, matters little. For years I would sit on King Street benches or in coffee shops in Kitchener, Ontario, in the evening and write snippets, books and books of snippets, which I pack around painstakingly to this day, trying to get it down, as I would have said then, or trying to put it in its place, as it were, out there, as they say, as I would also have said. There will be nothing left of me, I thought, but snippets, a life of snippets lost in its snippet relics, I thought then and still think now. From exponential expansion to the minutiae of disintegration, I thought, from the so-called oceanic to the so-called atomic, all and nothing, we are fated, just as they used to say. We think we are somehow beyond fate - that fate is an out-dated concept, that everything depends upon our transient whims, now that we so-called know things etc., when in fact we are as embedded in fate as we ever were, the more so we imagine, arrogantly, that fate has nothing to do with us. Fate, I thought, was never an excuse for doing nothing - there are endless excuses for that - but a way of acknowledging how nearly impossible and improbable our lives are, how we are more than the continuous babble of our whims. We would be reduced to shoppers.
It is not so much the ambiguousness of the world and everything, or just about everything, in it, I was thinking, but the headache of the world, and the headache of my existence that holds my hand back from, say, writing or drawing or playing music, from so-called artistic endeavours, from mindless and destructive labour, from producing useless items or manipulating pointless figures and statistics toward some goal the pursuit of which will, no doubt, create or foster something completely unlike that goal, will almost certainly have an effect opposite to what was intended, or what was thought to be intended, as it were, when L greeted me on the bus. L, I said, in response to her question about why I wasn't writing, when I try to write, the whole grid of what I know about the world and what is happening in it resists, almost as if I would have to destroy something simply to put a thought or two down. I pick up my pen and, as I move it toward the paper, something holds my hand back, something, no doubt, in my head, as they say, I said. My life, from the time I was a child until now, has been a headache, a persnickety continuum of analysis and judgement and negotiation, and the only certainty is the certainty that whatever I believe or end up believing, in spite of myself, in all likelihood, is certain is certainly not, I joked. Those in the world who attempt to codify existence have made and continue to make the world a headache, I said, and resisting them, though, no doubt, necessary, is futile. Goofy and/or menacing politicians, for example, with goofy and/or menacing explanations for their goofy and/or menacing actions, I said - resisting them only expands the opportunities for their goofiness and menace, even though such goofiness and menace must, we say, be opposed. The more headachy the world becomes, the more insistently we are made to believe, or end up believing, there is an answer to everything, though there never seems to be an answer to goofy and menacing politicians, say, to the answerers, to those who have all the means at their disposal, as they say, for convincing us that ambiguity, that life, is a problem they have the answer to. Their grammar will, you can be sure, be perfect as well, I said.
"Do you need an aspirin?” L joked.
I used to flatten my hair after washing it, brushing the curls out as it dried, always frustrated that there seemed to be a part of it, or sometimes a majority of it, that would, what is the term, fly away, refuse to be flattened. For 33 years, that is, since I took control of my hair, or attempted to take control of it, I have worked to hide, destroy, defeat, lay to rest the so-called natural curl of my hair, which people, over the years, told me was much nicer looking, or whatever, when I did not try to flatten it.
Talking to some friends recently, I was heard to exclaim, rather histrionically, that I was no longer interested in not saying what I really felt about anything, no longer interested in mincing my words, in putting it, or whatever the term is, in other, more appropriate, or whatever the term is, words. Though, I said to these friends, I still didn’t like offending people, even if, often, our attempts not to offend people offend them, and they deem us a patronizing and pompous booger, as someone recently referred to me, I hoped, I stated, that, on a certain or uncertain level, most people would know when we are mincing our words, or euphemizing, lacking, as I did, any evidence to support any such a notion. In fact, I said, I thought that, for the most part, people believe us wholeheartedly only when we are mincing our words, when they can hear whatever they like, and disbelieve us when we are not mincing our words, not just disbelieve us, but vociferously disagree that anyone could even think that way, unless they were not merely patronizing and pompous boogers, but also dead wrong to the so-called core of their so-called personalities. The final assessment, or anything resembling a final assessment, of this mincing words question, this euphemizing question, seems rather unlikely, I stated, for me, for even when I think I am no longer mincing or euphemizing, when I think I am stating exactly, or as close to exactly as I can be, what’s on my mind, as they say, I seem, in retrospect, I told these friends, to be mincing and euphemizing anyway, not because on some unconscious level, or whatever it’s called, I fear the social, or whatever, consequences of impropriety, since all unminced words seem, in the long run, improprietous, but because, it seemed to me, it seems to me words themselves are mincing and euphemizing things, a kind of cotton cloud sheeting over the maze of razors and barbed wire which the world, I concluded, I have concluded, is.
I think even the idea, I told my friends, of being able to speak not only what’s really on one’s mind, but to speak any words uncontaminated, or whatever, by fears or judgments or passions etc. is bogus, pompous and ridiculous, I wrote. I think it would be like, I wrote, trying to drive a refrigerator, I told them. Refrigerators, I wrote, aren’t made to be driven, and words aren’t made to reflect what’s really on one’s mind, I think, but are pretty much just elements of barter, I said. The whole of existence is like a bazaar, and all our words are negotiations that may or may not have much to do with the items or events bartered, or with the outcome of our negotiations.
Once can, I wrote, stop flattening one’s hair, it occurred to me, I told these friends, but one cannot stop mincing one’s words, our mouths are word mincing organs as much as they are word producing organs etc.
I could be, I said to a group of friends, I wrote to an acquaintance, a patronizing and pompous little booger, as someone recently called me, but at least I'm helpful, I think, though someone else, anyone else, really, would probably doubt this, doubt that any of the things I do that I say to myself are helpful are helpful, doubt even that my intentions in doing any of those things, which I probably consider many but are, in fact, few, honourable, or whatever it's called, in any way, are anything but dishonourable, or whatever it's called. If I say I am being helpful, or trying to be helpful, I am quite certainly being, rather, cagey and/or contentious and/or confrontational, both in thinking I'm being helpful when I'm not, I think, and in whatever I actually or potentially do that I think or say, to myself or others, I said, I wrote, is helpful. If I could talk, I said to my friends, to someone who, not necessarily understanding me, would at least hear me without making negative judgments, it sometimes seems to me, it wouldn't be so hard, I think, so literally impossible, to know even the slightest thing, even if, when I do talk to someone who can listen to me and, possibly, understand me, without making, or appearing to make, negative judgments, it has not, in the past, really made it any easier for me to understand anything, I wrote. It has only calmed me, on one hand, and excited me on the other, and always those most capable of calming me, I think, I wrote, are those most capable of exciting me, of, as I have sometimes said, I said, unbalancing me, though what this (or any other) so-called balance entails I, for one, haven't a clue. I have often thought the idea of balance was, in fact, little more than a spiritual daydream about, I told my friends, a kind of pure white light inside, say, that we postulate, an essential self, an angelic, or what have you, core, around which all our so-called diversions and so-called quotidian activities are merely tangents or echoes, everything having to do with the so-called world out there, whatever that means, being a distraction from this essential core, I wrote. Balance, then, would be, I said, stasis, a kind of death, I wrote, a mantra of so-called centering, which prevents us from being duped, we might think, astray from this rather quiet, ineffable, characterless band of pure white light inside, I wrote, this angel, this core, this hogwash. And not that they unbalance me anyway, but that my apparent need for people to, on one hand, calm me and on the other excite me is itself unbalanced, which is mostly what I am trying to say, I think, I said, and what I was trying to say, I wrote.
I also wrote, ambiguously
ocean's blue epistle
sad, playful seal
echo of two worlds
unjoining
Maybe what I said I assume I think I need, I think, I said, I wrote, is a kind of annihilation.
variations
Maybe what I said I assume I think I need, I think, I said, I wrote, to stop
saying anymore.
Maybe what I said I assume I think I need, I think, I said, I wrote, to stop
assuming..
Maybe what I said I assume I think I need, I think, I said, I wrote, to stop
thinking.
I went for a walk one night because I was bored, but as this time in my life is, so I say, a lonely time, the walk, leisurely enough, became something of an emotional circularity, and in three hours or so, the time it took me to walk from the house to the middle of Granville Bridge and back, circuitously, I fluctuated between intense happiness, almost giddiness, at some really quite silly things, like the ocean breeze, little good-natured, or whatever the term is, acts or words between people that I happened to witness, to overhear, a lone seagull, a thought about D, and intense sadness, almost depression, at some of the same things, but more at the fatal absence of anything even vaguely resembling community in this city, community based on relationships with land beyond fiscal, commercial, proprietary concerns. The history of so-called progress is the history of land theft, I thought, the conversion of productive, fertile land, by way of very destructive processes, into non-productive, useless real estate, and the so-called real estate barons are actually nothing but thieving and murderous pirates. It is the easiest, commonest thing in the world to say that dead real estate barons, or dead industrialists etc. were thieving and murderous pirates. Everyone does it. But no one wants to call the living real estate barons or industrialists thieving and murderous pirates, though they are as thievish and murderous as their predecessors, if not more so. By time we can be certain of something, I thought, it is far too late, which is why we advocate so strongly, I continued thinking, from our positions of passion, even when we are uncertain of the outcome of our struggles, or whatever the term is, as we generally are. Up and down emotionally I went, not without plateaus, as when I stopped to examine a building or a fountain, to examine some part of someone else's real estate. Everything I know, I thought, I learned by walking, by looking, by looking at things, by listening, and if I had never ambled, I thought, I would be a complete imbecile. Books are like signs pointing out possible directions to amble, I thought, but the ambling is the thing. We read posters, signs, engravings, graffiti etc. when we walk, but there is also something very close to reading involved in looking at concrete, fenders, bricks, clothing, trinkets, stairwells etc., I thought. All these articles and structures are communications, it occurred to me, statements. I'm glad I'm no longer the kind of person to correct someone when they say "eksetra" instead of et cetera, I thought.
If we nip something in the bud, as they say, we are more often than not denying, or destroying, the part of ourselves that can read the streets and buildings, as it were, the part of ourselves that learns just by being in a place, the part of ourselves that is in and of a place, as opposed to the part that merely observes a place, the part of ourselves that can be involved in something without being completely defined by that involvement. Observation of that other, anal-retentive sort, some of us are fond of saying, is willful blindness, or whatever the term is, an example of the same posture of so-called objectivity that makes mainstream newspapers so unintelligible, so reactionary, so much a part of and contributor to a world of nipped-in-the-bud thoughts and feelings and impressions, the world of television and newspapers, and, I might add, the Internet. Everything has a proper response or interpretation, according to them, and any other response or interpretation is strange. There is, we suppose, a way of looking at all these things similar to ambling, a way of watching TV or reading newspapers or surfing the Internet such that one learns about everything, about everything else, by doing one thing, any thing, observantly, self-observantly but not over self-consciously, and participatingly, sort of. But the circumstances that obtain now, we note, almost preclude ambling, or observing in that way, and self-consciousness is anathema, unless its purchased as a commodity (with identifiable "advantages" etc.). The world we live in now, we find ourselves saying, is a world of people who are either anal-retentive or who lack any sphincter control whatsoever, a world of strict rules and silly gestures, of law-enforcers and comedians, of batons and beach balls.
The world beneath this grid, the spontaneous, convulsive, abrupt world beneath the enormous, structural inertia of this quotidian, bland role inhabitation, beneath this known, expected world, that "unknown, unwanted life" motivating everything we do, no matter how unconscious of it we try to be, a world pervading every act and thought we perform, with its waves and swells, its tumultuous depths, its wayfaring passions, submergences and drownings that world of the forest and the witch, that world of undercurrent, a world the acknowledgment of which we think would be our destruction, a world the existence of which, over and over again, in every situation, contrary to what we believe, is what allows us to continue, that world buried deeper and deeper under our constructions and transactions, hidden more and more behind our dealings, our evasions and equivocations, behind the incredible convolutions we put ourselves and others through, all for the sole purpose of keeping that world at bay, a process by which the appearance of that wild, unpredictable world becomes fearful and grotesque, becomes a distorted caricature, that world is the world, we end up thinking, of crazy people. We go to ridiculous extremes to deny and destroy our connection to that world, spend all our time and energy making sure that that world stays buried, deformed and dangerous as we believe it to be farcically trying to avoid what we are. We are forever wrong because we don't want to be uncomfortable, or find ourselves in a precarious position, even though our entire lives are precarious in every way possible, discomfort and precariousness we wrongly assume has to do with that other world, since our avoidance of that other world, at all costs, has, in itself, made us grotesque and unstable, made us uncomfortable and fearful, turned us into deformed and messy avoiders, people who do extremely crazy, useless things but think we're being sane and useful, deluded about everything having to do with us, since the only contact we have with that world, a world that is driving everything we do, is a contact based on denial and fear.
These short pieces are of uneven quality, but the all have something more or less to do with the development of my thoughts regarding the so-called ethical imperative, secular Calvinism and so forth.
dan