Suddenly, no, at last, long last
There is some scaffold I hesitate to remove. Around a free-floating space without reference, or with only internal reference and necessity. “In a white room.” Description—of what. Putting the most minimal frame around the world. Removing only enough from reality for beauty to become perceptible. Description is just such a reduction. Nothing is ever added, because everything is real. (One could ask whether anything is ever truly taken away.) Imagine describing a hundred-sided gem as “a hundred-sided gem.”
I do not want to think hard about it, even: do not want to think. Writing without words, words without concepts (impossible). Within this relaxation, perhaps something activates. Subtle, at first. Something coming through. Something moving within. The waves wash in and out. The language comes and goes. I will not read back over this. (I have read back over this.) I will type it and send it. I will not linger. Something is something, I will say something. You might be waiting for something to happen. I might be waiting for something to happen. Waiting for first principles: a tragicomedy in two acts, yours and mine.
I will take my black dog for a walk. She will run up to the mesa and sniff all around. I will get what little sun there is left. This is the emptying out I am interested in, running life down to the wash and letting the sun shine in sideways. And this seems colorless, before the spectrum striates. The sun is low in the sky a month from the solstice. I have stripped away all that I can, and I am overflowing more now than ever. Breathing heavily after my walk, or with blood tingling my head. The high-desert air here is thin. I am practicing breath holds, to push my samskaras to the surface. Dredging the ocean three times a day. I am doing my best to be pointless here, to expand what I might say without gaining or losing your attention. I would be happy if this put you to sleep.
Falling to sleep is where it comes to me and comes out of me. I drift in a higher-dimensional space, searching for pinch points in the manifold. My consciousness hooks on one, and it releases with a scream. I have been screaming for months. Last night, a phantom photograph of my sister, perhaps taken in elementary school, screamed out of my left hip and vanished. This afternoon’s nap, a ghostly photo of my parents’ getting married screamed out of my diaphragm, gone in a split second. Spasms of the past in the present, psychic shrapnel. I feel grief on their leaving, and relaxation. Reality softens into dream.