The History of X

Source: The Victorian Web

How time passes by with ever increasing speed. I wish someone had told me about his. This asymptotic increasing arc, moving from a gentle uphill to a steep upward ascent so quickly. Quickly... the word takes too long to even conceive There is no other element of my days more persistent and haunting.

I often wake up and think: today I'm going to get around to X. Then the day is gone. A week goes by. And I think about X. In my thoughts, I work a little on this unrealized idea. Ok, tomorrow, fresh start, plenty of time to get to X. Then, time happens, as it always does, and X is pushed to the back of the room. Gotta clear out this area for the dance, roll up the rug, put the animals out back, place X up on the shelf so it won't be messed with. Weeks. Months. Always with X in mind. Adding a little there. Making a clever addition here. That's nice. Can't wait to get to X. Months. Years. The interruptions of life.

X is as familiar to me as an old dog. Curled up next to me on the sofa. My hand casually shaping over the ribs and spine of sweet old X. You know, someday boy, everyone is going to know about you and see what a beautiful creature you are.

Years and years pass by like hours now. I've thought about X for so long, cared for and nurtured X past death. Watched the fur and flesh rot away. Placed X's bones in a shrine.

Decades now like days. X's bones covered in dust. It's been some time since I have been tended to this memorial. Under the dust of long dead roses, in a starlight corner, the bones of X still shine. I reach in a remove a particularly beautiful bone. The archetype of all bones. As I contemplate it and watch my memories flutter around it like moths to a fire, one after another immolating in its being, I think: this is what I have been waiting for. And I comfort myself with a relief that I never let X out into the world in a form that would only taken away from the glory of this immaculate bone now before me; this singular totem of being stripped away of all pretense and folly, immune to fiction. I clear everything off the table and set the bone down before me.

Now, finally, with everything before me, with such clear vision and in complete control of all of my talent, I know with no doubt that the most essential thing within me that I must somehow express before I die - as I am hurting down like a meteor towards this finality - the most essential expression is absolutely unsayable. There is only this bone of pure starlike being before me. And while there was, at one time, so much language to spin up and weave around the story of X, there is no language now that can contain this bone that remains. And as for me, I know now I am merely a sign pointing to it.

A flashing instant of laughter, a gasp of surprise and a rattling sigh whose duration is, for all intents and purposes, already ended. Time passes by so fast that I cannot even perceive it. Somewhere back there, five or so decades past, I heard a distant explosion and the echo cracking the world like thunder and the bullet fired was already through my brain before any of this ever happened.

Dust is the sign of forgetting

Some thoughts I have been collecting, ideas as images radiant in relation to memory and memorization, the language like white hot filaments, illuminating.

I remember the Monk at the Monastery quoting Pascal:

"You can only search for what you have already found within your own heart."

This resonating with Watts:

"The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced." 

Coming to halt at Nietzsche:

“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

The task at hand is to breathe new life into the dead words as in Ezekiel:

And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. 

Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 

Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: 

And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. 

So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. 

And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. 

Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. 

So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

That which we fail to remember is that which becomes absent from our heart, no longer has any dwelling within us, no life, no breath and is soon a sad souvenir covered in dust. Dust is the sign of forgetting. This "signature of lost time."

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The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience by Celeste Olalquiaga

"Dust brings a little of the world into the enclosed quarters of objects. Belonging to the outside, the exterior, the street, dust constantly creeps into the sacred arena of private spaces as a reminder that there are no impermeable boundaries between life and death. It is a transparent veil that seduces with the promise of what lies behind it, which is never as good as the titillating offer. Dust makes palpable the elusive passing of time, the infinite pulverized particles that constitute its volatile matter catching their prey in a surprise embrace whose clingy hands, like an invisible net, leave no other mark than a delicate sheen of faint glitter. As it sticks to our fingertips, dust propels a vague state of retrospection, carrying us on its supple wings. A messenger of death, dust is the signature of lost time.

The Museum of Dust:

"Dust is what connects the dreams of yesteryear with the touch of nowadays. It is the aftermath of the collapse of illusions, a powdery cloud that rises abruptly and then begins falling on things, gently covering their bright, polished surfaces. Dust is like a soft carpet of snow that gradually coats the city, quieting its noise until we feel like we are inside a snow globe, the urban exterior transmuted into a magical interior where all time is suspended and space contained. Dust makes the outside inside by calling attention to the surface of things, a surface formerly deemed untouchable or simply ignored as a conduit to what was considered real: that essence which supposedly lies inside people and things, waiting to be discovered. Dust turns things inside out by exposing their bodies as more than mere shells or carriers, for only after dust settles on an object do we begin to long for its lost splendor, realizing how much of this forgotten object's beauty lay in the more external, concrete aspect of its existence, rather than in its hidden, attributed meaning.""

Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible by Joseph A. Amato

"In this work Joseph A. Amato undertakes the Herculean task of tracing from the Middle Ages to the present Western Society's evolving sensibility about all things small. The title character, dust, appears during the preindustrial period as the smallest and most lowly of all things. It is omnipresent both physically and metaphorically, reminding humans of their mortality and their inability to control the most fundamental matters in their world. Amato asserts that with the advent of the industrial revolution and our improved ability to detect and perceive on the microscopic level, dust was supplanted by atoms, germs and so on, in both its claim to smallness and its metaphoric power. Dust retains for counterculture "purists" a positive association with the natural order, but for the most part Amato claims our fascination with and loathing of dust has been superseded by awe of other small things -- microwaves, viruses, prions, and quarks."

The History of Dust by GinaRae LaCerva

"A particle of dust holds many histories. There is the history of its own becoming. Everything in matter exists in a form waiting to be broken. Dust begets dust. The world has twice as much today as it did in the 19th century. 

"Wind takes advantage of what it entrains. Red dust from India caught in the gales of a tropical cyclone, once bore down upon Australia in an umber hedge so thick it obscured the horizon. A wave of rosy particles reduced, dwarfed, engulfed the ships at sea. In a particularly intense kind of dust storm, a haboob, the particles are carried on an atmospheric gravity current, a massive downdraft generated in the center of a thunderstorm, which often evaporates more moisture than it deposits. 

"What the wind may carry aloft has profound and mysterious influences far afield. Desert dust is so intimately tied to climate that one does not exist without the other. A dusty period in Asia increases snowfall in California. Dust trapped deep in the Antarctic ice sheets can help us to reconstruct past climates. Over the past 80,000 years, dirt from the windy plains of Patagonia was periodically blown south and deposited onto this icy enclave. The ebb and flow of Chilean and Argentinean glaciers corresponds to dirty lines in the ice cores—the very coldest periods also resulted in the dustiest. 

"A particle reveals a world much beyond its boundaries. Dust tells the story of the Mayan decline."

The Riddle of the Dancing Bear

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Recently, Kazoo Ishiguro wrote an article revealing that he had written The Remains of the Day, his most successful book, in a 4 week "Crash."

Until that point, since giving up the day job five years earlier, I’d managed reasonably well to maintain a steady rhythm of work and productivity. But my first flurry of public success following my second novel had brought with it many distractions. Potentially career-enhancing proposals, dinner and party invitations, alluring foreign trips and mountains of mail had all but put an end to my “proper” work. I’d written an opening chapter to a new novel the previous summer, but now, almost a year later, I was no further forward. - Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks

The title of Ishiguro's book, The Remains of the Day, has always resonated with me. One of those phrases that prompted an entire world in my mind as to what the book might be about. While I read the book, there was a consistent tension between what I imagined the book was about and what it actually was. My initial response to the text was not so much disappointment as a realignment of expectation. Because what the title had seeded within me was a world in which the "remains of the day" were the most vital and charged. The day being spent in series of distractions and tasks oriented around that odd phrase, "making a living." It was what remained of the day after all of this storm and fury was decanted away that made a difference - as it seemed to me. And I struggled here to adjust my sympathies to the butler, Stevens.

“What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.” - Remains of the Day

The sad problem here is "the likes of you and I" don't come up with much to speak of when the "making a living" portion of the day is taken away. (And here is the sorrow that haunts the figure of Stevens.) What remains of the day are a few hours within which to relax and forget the tedium and the thousand little compromises that emptied the soul. Not much "cause for pride and contentment." I think of the Eliot line from Prufrock: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." I see that spoon removing a little bit more of the soul each day. And I think, I've got plenty. No need to worry about what the small spoon takes away. But that spoon is a voracious and predatory creature whose innocuous appearance is its camouflage. It feeds on the remains of my day.

The notion often expressed is we should work to live and not live to work. Defining work here as a being paid to do a task you would not normally do, most typically for someone else. And, if most of our lives are spent working in this way, then what remains after work should be our most beautiful and meaningful experiences, "our time." These moment of quiet beauty and charged meaning, when set upon the balance, should easily outweigh in quality the benumbing quantity of days filled with work. But the reality is they often do not. Work empties us out, exhausts us, quietly and steadily fills us with despair. And when we are not working, all we seem to want is mindless distraction. Another world to mindlessly escape to for a few hours: television programs, movies, a bottle of wine, a drink at the bar. And all of those great projects born out of our dreams languish under the increasing weight of dust - first on the desk, then in the drawer, into the box, stored away in the closet to one day be rediscovered with a sad smile and a slight shake of the head: oh yeah, there's that novel I was going to write.

It is clear that even novelists working for themselves suffer variations of this problem, as evidenced by the Ishiguro quote. And his solution: to detach from the distractions and obligations of the world and focus on his work the the exclusion of all else paid off. Of course, most of us do not have this sort of freedom or privilege. Most of us are happily tied down to jobs, bills, mortgages, car payments, etc.. There is a clear cut path for us to follow. Just keep walking, following, head down, help anyone that stumbles in front, encourage those that follow behind by your stalwart example. But what if we could step off the clear cut path? What if we took another path, as the famous poem suggests? And what if we understood these lines of the poem also:

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

And one day, we did come back? And we got back in line? What then? What then will we do with the remains of our day?

The rhetorical corollary of The Riddle of the Dancing Bear:

What happens to a bear that has been trained to dance on a ball and perform for crowds at the circus who one day is released, perhaps escapes, back into The Wild?

The Mirror of Sancho Panza and a Wandering Ghostly Error

Source

The critic is the Sancho Panza to his master, our Lord Don Quixote, the artist. 

Sancho is no bread, butter and beer realist. He too sees and knows with the magical folly of the heart that there is knowledge before reason and science, a secret wisdom that is prior to logic - the vibrant god-telling PULSE. 

“There are reasons of the heart of which Reason knows nothing,” said Pascal.

There are no abstract truths - no Mass Man, no proletariat. There is only Man. 

When the Pulse has been nailed upon the crossbeams, lo, Reason gives up its viable breath and becomes a wandering ghostly Error.

Truth and folly are ever about to expire, so that we, like our beloved Sancho Panza, kneeling at the deathbed of Don Quixote, must always be ready to receive the holy communion of cudgels and distaffs for the rebirth of the Pulse.

- Can These Bones Live? Edward Dahlberg

Every day the pressure of the end of things. There is no time. Plato. Aristotle. Brave old worlds whose shores I have yet to even see from a distance. Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper. Ecclesiastes 12:12 - "And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." The interior structure of discipline has been built over many years. And yet... and yet... the flesh is weak and wanders. 

Perhaps I only notice it more now that I am on the watch for it, perhaps it is a harbinger of decline, either way fuels an increasing paranoia, but my mind seems increasingly detached. I notice this most in the mornings, coming out of the dream, before any agenda of the day kicks in, my thoughts are without focus, aimless. Often - and this has been going on for many years - I hear an inane jingle or virus-like pop song repeating over and over in my mind. It is as if my mind is an "idling mode" and on this wavelength, these songs play like waiting room or elevator music. I used to not mind it as much. But now I hear the mindless music as an alarm: wake up. 

My discipline these days is to work on memorizing Shakespeare's sonnets as I drive over to my step-father's to care give. It takes about 15 minutes and during that time I can typically refresh five or six sonnets through quick recitation and begin to familiarize myself with three newer sonnets. A morning not too long ago, I did not immediately start in on memory work. And about a half a mile down the road, an old top 40 song just started going in my thoughts. I laughed because the effect was similar to that of a screen saver on a computer. I was not doing any work and my brain went into a screen saver mode. When I engaged my thoughts in memory work, the music immediately went away.

It is not always music. Not always something as tell-tale as that. The more I have reflected upon my own thoughts, watching for these "screen saver moments," these mindless "holding patterns," the more I realize that they compose the majority of what most people consider life. It is a passive, receptive state. A consciousness that is blissfully unaware, ready to be easily entertained. There is no intentionality or will to this state of consciousness. It is close to a state of waking sleep.

But this is not daydreaming. It is far less. It is a victimized consciousness where the catch phrases and jingles and ad tropes of the mediated world prey upon self image and desire in a calculated and manipulative manner. This is not the consciousness that gives birth to Archimedes in the tub or Alice in Wonderland or Kubla Khan or Kekulé's Ring. This is the realm of Circe, a land of bewitchment. This is the Field of Poppies. To remain here is to die. 

And yet, I see so many of those whom I once had great respect and admiration surrendered in this place, lost in a dream of self and social fantasies. I remember great minds of such imagination and promise who now post banal affirmations and trite visual memes in the social media they are so obsessed with. Their reading habits are superficial. They are addicted to programs, shows and the latest blockbuster movie. Their taste in music is predicated upon an attention span of less than five minutes. They participate in the arts only to the extent that it enhances their social standing. It is disheartening and discouraging. I fear that fate of my former friends for myself. I watch for signs of it like a vulture watching for death in the slowly dying shape beneath it. 

An old man and I were talking recently. He said he once could remember the joy of the sweetest hours of his life, a first kiss by the oak tree in the school yard, scoring a touchdown on a Friday night, the sunlight in the hour of his marriage, that he was fortunate to have had many days that were crowded with such hours. But that these faded into those self-same days, the hours now blurred and passing by so quickly, that it wasn't long before he could remember only days, a child born on Monday, a promotion on a Friday, a death on Sunday. Then these too blurred in the accumulation of time. Now, he told me, from one Sunday to the next is like the passing of a day itself. He will say to me, it seems like we just did this yesterday, but I know it was last week. And, he adds, when I try to remember those memories that have defined my life, they seem as a series of distant mountains, a few simple triangles on the horizon of the past that I know hold thousands and thousands of other memories but that I am too far away from now. 

I imagine the old man sitting in his rocking chair on the porch, watching the world go by like a speeding train, the hours like seconds, days like minutes, weeks, months and years passing by as quickly as a summer evening so long ago when he first met the woman he married. These last years of his life passing before him in the opening and closing of his eyes. He, with bright mind and biting wit, champion of card games and avid collector of stamps, coins and hundreds of pads of hotel stationary and pens. All the years of world travel. Somewhere back there, the screen saver mind just became more interesting and easier to watch than anything else. 

Open Don Quixote and read only the first few chapters. Here is a man who has lost his mind. But who has not surrendered. This is the beauty of the Quixote. And Sancho Panza riding along beside him, who cannot see what Quixote sees, but still perseveres, still remains and stands loyal to Quixote, here is the mirror in which I look within to see what is missing from my own life, here is where I peer deep into my own eyes searching for the Pulse. 

What does it matter when the torturer is going about his business?

Nimbus II, 2012 Digital C-type Print 75x112 cm Hotel MariaKapel, Hoorn
Berndnaut Smilde
photo: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk

The inward experience, self-consciousness, of the body, the flesh, a vessel which is full of the spirit. These words we use. How we talk to ourselves. What we think of ourselves. The physical body as the house in which the mental creature abides. One imagines the philosopher-king, a Captain Nemo figure, commanding his physical Nautilus through the world, himself detached and occupied with the higher elements of living. And one imagines the hermit crab curled within its stolen shell.

Cartesian connections between the two always difficult and tenuous. Philosophical reductions on both sides abound. Personal favorites, for entirely poetic reasons, are the Ghost in the Machine and its variant epiphenomenalism: the record player and the music arising from it. Surely, we believe, this music is the purpose, the teleology, of the physical thing. The music is the meaning of it. Or, as some would insist, perhaps it is only inconsequential byproduct, the sound of the machine. A mere contingency. The music is not necessary to the existence of the thing.

However, the perception of the music alters consciousness. The awareness of the beauty of it. How it seeps into deep centers of biological pleasure and stimulates a transcendental state. Whether it arose as an accidental byproduct or a contingency is irrelevant. We desire to cultivate it, to preserve it, to enhance our experience of it, to remove it from transitory capriciousness of time and secure it within the formation of a culture. Inward movements of evolution, complexifications of our inner life. What makes being human different. The savage beast is soothed by the sound of music but is not redeemed, as are we, by it. What we hear in music is a meaning that is always subtly transcending us. Levi-Strauss' claimed  "the invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man."

All of this language. All of these sounds gathered in the electric cloud within our skulls. We cannot but think... But the thinking separates us from being. The answer for Keats' nightingale riddle: "where but to think is to be full of sorrow." Bodymind or mindbody? What does it matter when the torturer is going about his business upon us? What does it matter as we are burning in the fire? The Buddha's analogy comes to mind: the house is on fire and who would sit in the center of it discussing philosophy? The question is always begging alongside one, a squalid Gollum tugging at you, whispering poison into your ear:  What does the torturer want to know? Why are you on fire? Who set the house on fire? Why are these horrors happening to me?

Metaphors. Bridges and rafts of thought. Illusions of language. It has been said that the use of logic in language is similar to the use of perspective in painting. It creates the illusion of reality. That what the words are "saying" and what the painting is "representing" is real, is true. Then, what is Truth, if it is not this represented truth? This word, capitalized as a Proper Thing?

Being. Simply being. As unknowable to us as the water is to the fish. We would have to get outside of being to "know" and the language breaks apart at the thought of this. We are being as a bell is ringing. In process. Always flowing, always being.

Again, just words, language pulling its revelatory rabbits out our broken hats. But this tool of language, even the ur-language of thought is all we have. Consider the dream in which you are given a key to escape from the dream. However, if you use the key, you only further substantiate the "reality" of the dream. You cannot use a dream-key to escape the dream. The key "re-pre-sents" (beautiful word) some thing other than what it is in itself. The "For Sale" sign is not itself for sale. It points beyond itself. The thief in the Zen koan cannot steal the moon reflected in the bucket of water.

We are the music of our being. Our name, our face, what we believe to be our self, our memories, all of our thoughts and all of our language is this music. The body and the mind, the flesh and the spirit, and so on are only words pointing beyond themselves. The danger is to become trapped in a metaphor, even worse and allegory. The danger is to forget the mystery of Being. Here is where the torturer's tools become real. Here is where the fire is started. Here is where the house begins to burn. Your world is dark and full of suffering.

And when those you love most are burning and going insane with pain and suffering, where every day is full of tears and the desire only for life to end, then you realize how terrible and inhuman the music of Being is. And it is so difficult to forget that this is part of the Mystery when every day is torture.

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"But the worlds also behold thy fearful form, with many mouths and eyes, with many bellies, thighs and feet, frightening with terrible teeth: they tremble in fear and I also tremble. 

When I see thy vast form, reaching from the sky, burning with many colors, with wide open mouths, with vast flaming eyes, my heart shakes in terror: my power is gone and gone is my peace, O Vishnu! 

Like the fire at the end of Time which burns all in the last day, I see thy vast mouths and thy terrible teeth. Where am I? Where is my shelter? Have mercy upon me, God of gods, Refuge Supreme of the world! [...] 

The flames of thy mouths devour all the worlds. Thy glory fills the whole universe. But how terrible thy splendors burn!" 

- The Bhagavad Gita, Mascaro translation, 1962

The Moments That Make Up The World

Jim and the Treasure, N. C. Wyeth
 from 1911 edition of Treasure Island

Stealing moments from a day
so rich with time
that it makes no sense to steal.

But I do anyway
trying to remind myself
how it once mattered.

These moments stolen
out of time
once were the most precious.

They were sacred,
mysterious, always rare,
giving meaning to all the rest.

To all of the moments that made up
the quiet mass of one's life
upon these few instances everything depended.

Not so long ago
a young man laughed with delight
at his cleverness as a thief,

Imaging his old age:
treasure chests full of
gold and jewels and shining moments.

There would be time then
to spend in wise reflection
over a life well lived.

Now the old man
sits in his Arabian Cave
full of rock and stone and bone.

These things that once seemed so valuable
I cannot even give them away -
scattering it all back to the world.

Now, there are plenty of moments
Indeed, almost too many,
I pretend to steal them only to remember.

These moments are the world.

As above, so below: all dharmas are empty

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What is the nature of the interior language of the self, perhaps the soul; this cloud of meaning that gathers within our brain, the music of thought, the montage of images, the symphonies of sound, theaters and cathedrals of memory, the smile of the mother, laughter of the friend, sigh of the lover, the taste of a kiss, the fragrance of a Christmas dinner?

There is the labyrinth within, the endless maze. Tibetan monks lost in arcane hierarchies of consciousness. The flesh burning in blue flames of siddhis within a frozen Himalayan cave. Hermes Trismegistus as above, so below. Can the mind perfect itself at the expense of the body? Source for yogic practice. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Issues in translation become emblematic: the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.

All dharmas are empty.

 - The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom: With the Divisions of the Abhisamayalankara By Edward Conze

I am being trolled through dark waters

Anatomy of a Fish Hook
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The process of abstraction, of making the thing, the experience of the thing, into a word; of making the territory into a map; the meal into the menu. It is understood the word is not the thing.

There is a sense, which opens a philosophical can of worms, that there are two lives: the one lived in world and the one thought about. My body, my flesh, my meat, seems a thing sunk down in the water, hook, line and sinker. Still, there is this line leading upwards to that which has cast me outwards into the wilderness of this world and that which will pull me back in over the years. The implication is amusing and terrifying: my flesh, my physical being in the world, is a lure, bait. I am being trolled through dark waters and bottomless depths in order to attract something other, some rough beast. At the core of me, I am crucified with a hook, turned over into a mark of question, that, at the moment of my annihilation, sink into the brain of the thing I have lured out of the depths, returning all things to the One.

Over the ruins of his life

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Who read by night above the Rhine the cloudscript of the drifting mists? It was the Steppenwolf. And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering, significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God's presence?

I held my hand over my glass when the landlady wanted to fill it once more, and got up. I needed no more wine. The golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and the stars. For an hour I could breathe once more and live and face existence, without the need to suffer torment, fear, or shame.

- Hesse, Steppenwolf

The Enchanting Prison. The beautiful prison cell. The key you are half in love with, waiting out the hours of the day for the chime of its arrival, the insertion and release. Knowing you are being broken down, the interior discipline of self and soul being replaced by the external structures of the prison. You attempt to forge elaborate rituals in the brief intervals allowed for your internal life. However these are worn away by the exhaustion of hope. When will you be freed? The hope filled fuel of the future is quickly diluted  by the laborious trivialities of the immediate moment. There is not enough... energy, you think and then remind yourself that you once used the word, spirit. Even the language is being hollowed out. Soon there is only a dreamless sleep and a tired waking to another day of life within the prison. You try to remind yourself but more and more, the world outside seems less real.

You do well here. You have certain talents for getting along with others. You acquire status and prestige. You are well liked. Many of the inmates are intelligent and interesting people. No different from those outside. In fact, many have a focus of concentration and purpose that would be absent without the constraints of the prison. You consider this and try to shake off an occasional discouragement by allowing the walls to set the limits. But this saddle never sits well upon you. Outside of your cell, you know that you could find a happiness here. In the night however, alone in the increasingly restless sleep, you reluctantly explore and map out the most intimate features of a growing cavern of despair.

Like a half-remembered dream, it forms and fades in your mind, tantalizing your memory, until the day that it dawns within you fully formed: Escape. It must have been lurking down in the depths, working out every facet of itself like a diamond, until it emerged in the center of your consciousness with an undeniable presence. A fire now burns within. Hope returns. In every waking thought. Re-invigorating thought and language. Yet you are careful to conceal this from the other inmates, nonchalantly carrying it around in a dingy bag with you as if it were nothing, knowing that it is the very Skull of God.

You must escape. You begin to practice the old rituals. You begin to harden yourself through mental and physical exercise. You begin to allow hope to inform your language again. You have no doubt that this will be one of the most difficult experiences of your life. You also have not doubt that to stay here, within the prison, would be easy and lead to what would most likely be a long and happy life with the other inmates. But a life predicated upon a turning away from the cloudscripts over the Rhine, Mozart, the stars, and the Great Golden Braid of the Eternal... such a life is, for you, what can only be called suicide.

Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

- Eliot, The Waste Land

A future now

[ source ]

Brief flashes of being alive return as I sit eating breakfast at a local cafe, the sense of being someplace, of being open, not enclosed, numb, dead to the world.

Walked down this morning, head full of thoughts, too much to keep listening to music.

How does one become so trapped in the world? The prison and the key.

I don't seem to be able to sleep more than a few hours. Wears on me some but not with the same despair and spiritual exhaustion that it once did.

There seems a future now.