Cosmopoetica

“I sense all the things that I write here, these associations, as an attempt to read a text, and this text contains a mass of bright fragments.”

–Paul Valery

[Context: In 1897, Paul Valery abandoned publishing to focus on his journal writings, what he called “an infinite conversation with the self.” For the rest of his life his life centered around rising at 5a to write down his thoughts and meditations in his notebooks (carnets). He would ultimately fill more than 250 of them.]

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Another Sunday, another disconnected day contemplating what is and what should be. The shambles that is my life and whether there is any hope in it. Thoughts of killing myself (let’s be honest, though I admit I am drawn to the gentle euphemisms and slippery, soft phrases “move on” and “end it” and “take my own life” as if it were something that could be taken and if taken could be held) are followed instantly– even faster than instantly since they interrupt the first thoughts– with hopeful ideas. Tactics to avoid losing it all when the truth of what I am finally becomes clear to everyone around me. The pragmatism of assuming that the past really is past and I can start by doing just a few things better and it will work out. The momentarily calming consideration that there is no self and at any rate my existence is but a spark spawned from a lightning strike deep in an unexplored wood, a tiny fire that never caught flame.

Another day of checklists and checkmarks, to-dos and to-be-dones. Bullet lists of minimal existence, spars of a half-done, undone ship.

The catalog of interventions taking notice of every misstep, every moment of wrong mind and wrong thought, would be infinite. A classic regressive loop like the diarist intent on logging every moment of every day including the act of logging the tiny moments itself.

And to what end? I’m drunk with the random broken firings of synaptic chaos, collections and connections. I can follow the line for a moment, remember the flash of insight that lead me to break the neck of the bottle and drink in the first place, but in a moment I’m back in the blackout where everything is as electrified and bright now as it will be invisible later, leaving only after images that don’t quite cohere.

Even as I write these words I wonder why I do. Who will read them? Not me; not likely. Until someday they burn, slowly and with the feeble flame of stacked paper. Probably not even on purpose, not even as a gesture of defiance or willful amnesia, but one more forgotten thing weighing down one more old box that smolders for a day or a week, buried in the consumer discards, the microwave crisping sleeves and sodden diapers, the empty cans and carefully torn junk mail.

It will be lost as surely as the dinosaurs that lumbered against each other. Lost as surely as proto-islands and protozoa. Lost as surely as the note I folded carefully and passed, trembling, to Tracy, who sat in front of me in 8th grade, begging her to tell me if she felt like I did because time seemed to stop when she wasn’t around and (I was proud of this next bit) every sound of the stars was contained in her name and they were one to me when I spoke it. Tracy. Stars.

As lost as the note she held unopened in her perfect palm until it disappeared like the conjurer’s proffered coin, here but not here, and I with it.

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Situation

A man is sealed inside a windowless elevator and either suspended above the ground by a crane or towed through deep space at a constant acceleration of approximately 32 feet per second per second. There is no way for the man inside to know the difference. If he were to drop a penny from his pocket it would fall exactly as it would fall if he were to drop the same penny while standing on the earth. He might actually be on the ground. He will just have to take our word for it.

Clarification

The windowless elevator is not unlike a diving bell (more…)

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In the right light all glass is a mirror. Wash your face!

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Patriotism. It’s become a distasteful, even shameful, word to me. I don’t know when it changed, at what point in the evolution of my thinking the mere invocation of the word started to make me shiver.

I love this country, though not to the exclusion of all others. The United States is a good place to live, for which I am thankful. There are other great places too. The American experiment—and aren’t all nations really experiments?—is noble and well-intentioned. For all its faults, I feel fortunate to live in the United States. The relative safety, the material comfort, the continued existence of open spaces… I try to be mindful of the gratitude I should feel. And the art! Just as there could have been no Dostoevsky without the panoramic panoply that was (and is again) Russia, the languorous sprawl of Whitman, the concise blinding insight of Dickinson, and the trickster enlightenment of Frost could not exist without the essential largeness—the oversized aspirations, the appetites, the sheer bulk—that is the United States of America.

But patriotism has become—or come to represent, or be twisted as the basis for—an essentially narrow conception of the world that values insularity and entitlement over engagement and charity. (more…)

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For a few years when I was five or six I lived in a trailer park called Lake View Terrace. The lake was really a gravel pit and the terrace was the eroded slope between the row of trailers and the water. Fortunately we were at the end where they were no longer actively excavating for gravel, so we could watch the car-sized buckets being tossed out and hauled back in on drag lines in silence. In front of our trailer you could wade out about 15-20 feet before the 40 foot drop-off. A few doors down it was maybe four feet from the water’s edge where you could see the ledge and be scared. I’m surprised that fewer people drowned there, though a few did. On the hottest days some people– mostly teenagers who seemed to live in a world apart from us kids– would brave the cold water and swim, even going out over the drop-off. I would just stand on the shore skipping rocks, never wading deeper than my waist. I swear I could make a rock skip a dozen times back then, many more times than I’ve ever been able to do so since with even the flattest stones.

We’d still stumble across large stones nestled in the mud, dragged up from deep in the earth by the hungry buckets that made the pit. I once found an enormous geode shaped like a dinosaur egg and as big as my head. When my dad was home and wasn’t drinking he’d ask to see it and tell me how one day we would take it to a place where they could cut it open and reveal the treasure inside. I would hold that rock in my hands and think about the world of crystal inside until my arms were so tired I couldn’t bring my hands to my mouth to eat dinner. I loved knowing that even my father’s hard hands couldn’t break that stone open, that the world inside was undisturbed and had been for longer than I could imagine. I would think of days before the days before the days before now and get dizzy. My dad would tell me about all the colors the earth-colored stone could have inside, how it could be purple or bright red or gold. He would tell me that it could even be pure white like a fist full of diamonds. He would tell me that no matter what it turned out to be, it would be good, because rock couldn’t be rotten. Think of it, he’d say over and over, just think of it. And I would. I’d think of where I couldn’t go. I’d think of the time before any of us. I’d imagine the unseen glistening.

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I wake from only an hour of sleep with a dream that I’m holding her. It was grey and we were waiting for morning. There was no danger, just time. We went to sleep apart and I woke on my side, cradling her. There was fire where our clothed bodies touched. I could see the perfect slant from jaw to neck. Nothing sexual… just contentment. I wake with a lingering sense of the satisfaction of feeling finally, improbably, whole within because of a connection without, the way sometimes giving becomes the purest kind of receiving. I wake metallic within, the galvanic alchemy of my palm on her cheek to make sure it was really happening, that for a brief moment something was created out of the night’s nothing.

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