When one gets heavily immersed in thoughts of emptiness, nothingness, when one sees that all meaning structures are empty, that we must die, and that nothing means anything… There’s still one more step. What comes next is the realization that even seeing the truth for what it is means nothing, leads nowhere. This blow is the most crushing of all. It’s that final discovery that even knowing there’s no exit is not an exit. Maybe the psyche needs a sense of meaning to work properly. Contemplating emptiness is like throwing oil into some water. It can’t ever be digested by the human mind. It is hopeless.
There comes a time when you’ll know that you’ve finally gone to far. You’ll have crossed the line into a realm so terrifying and depressing that it no longer seems interesting or spiritually adventurous. You’ll have gone into a zone where there’s just death and doom, ultimate and real. It’s a place of fear. You’ll have gone beyond the end and you’ll have to return to the beginning, full circle.
From this point beyond the end of the line, The only thing left is to try to salvage your sanity and go back to sleep. You’ll beg to go back to the life you once knew when you were young, when you had not yet seen behind the curtain. But can you ever go back? Can you get back into Eden once you’ve transgressed in search of knowledge? No.
4/25/09
Monday, April 5, 2010
gray morning on easter sunday
I step out onto the street. It’s clear that Jesus hasn’t risen and isn’t coming back. There’s desolation in the crowd. Everywhere I look there’s only poverty, uninspiring concrete, the smell of piss, silent people dying patiently. There’s a sense of boredom worse than panic. In the middle of the city, there’s not an interesting person in sight. I’m alone. Everyone’s asleep. Sometimes I wish I were a firebomb that could wake up the whole world.
Denver 4/12/09
Denver 4/12/09
fearful twilight
“Would a day of death and ashes not come, a day in the long string of other days which would give the nod to madness, a day when the gas chamber would reopen?”
-Pauline Reage, from Story of O
Night comes down. The world has left you alone. Your friend is gone. Your lover is asleep in someone else’s bed. Nothing now but thousands of empty hours. You’ll tear yourself apart inside, incapable of letting go of a past that’s already forgotten you. It will always be this way. You’ll go down into and vanish in isolation. The end is not beautiful. It’s slow and pathetic. You’ll die for years, decades even.
Your youth will decline, replaced by the ugliness of decay’s age. No one will ever touch you with loving hands again. No caring eyes will look at you. People will look away. Your hours will be filled with impossible desperation and loneliness. There will be no witnesses to your end. Incapable of pulling the trigger, you’ll suffer a longer, more terrible death instead, alone in your room with the door locked.
March 30, 2009
-Pauline Reage, from Story of O
Night comes down. The world has left you alone. Your friend is gone. Your lover is asleep in someone else’s bed. Nothing now but thousands of empty hours. You’ll tear yourself apart inside, incapable of letting go of a past that’s already forgotten you. It will always be this way. You’ll go down into and vanish in isolation. The end is not beautiful. It’s slow and pathetic. You’ll die for years, decades even.
Your youth will decline, replaced by the ugliness of decay’s age. No one will ever touch you with loving hands again. No caring eyes will look at you. People will look away. Your hours will be filled with impossible desperation and loneliness. There will be no witnesses to your end. Incapable of pulling the trigger, you’ll suffer a longer, more terrible death instead, alone in your room with the door locked.
March 30, 2009
the unknown archetype
Buried somewhere in the collective unconscious of our species, there’s an immense greasy centipede squirming through the deepest recessed organs of sensation and being. It’s black as crude oil, has no beginning or end, and gnaws eternally through the psycho-intestinal passageways of the midbrain with slimy cold mandibles and a train of unconscious mechanical legs. The centipede’s body is an underground river of black tar and primal memory. Prehistoric organisms live in the slow currents. Trilobites. Centipedes. Roaches as big as cats. The first elements of body-consciousness begin to coalesce in the silent dead space of millennia. Five hundred million years pass like snowfall. Nothing happens, but their imprint remains forever, buried in man’s mind. The fathomless depth of life’s history on earth is his heirloom. Centuries wash over a stone when he touches it with his hands. Millennia fall from the eyes as tears. If called upon, the centipede will rearrange continents, work back through the eons, reverse-engineer the planet’s topography until everything clicks back into place. Pangaea.
March 11, 2009
March 11, 2009
ethics of a beating
In a dream Raskolnikov is a little boy again. He watches a group of drunken peasants whip an old horse to death because it can’t move a heavy load. The story shows you something, reminds you of the terrible undercurrents disguised by our civilized and so-called Christian ways. What the story suggests is true. It’s been proven thoroughly enough.
Everyone's either got to whip or be whipped by someone else. As long as we're still on earth, cruelty is the rule of the land. You may try to choose which side of the whipping you’ll be on, but the decision is ultimately hopeless. You loose either way. In the end everyone's a slave being beaten to death, however gradually. There’s got to be a better way. I’m sure there is but it would require a wide agreement, a mass moratorium on beatings and humiliations, and I’m quite sure that will never happen on this earth. Even if you lived a life of perfect innocence, you’d merely be an interesting exception, and memorable victim like Jesus, a whipping post for those who don’t care and have never thought it over. I don’t want a nigger and I don’t want to be anyone else’s nigger. I just want to live.
City O’ City
Denver
March 30, 2009
Everyone's either got to whip or be whipped by someone else. As long as we're still on earth, cruelty is the rule of the land. You may try to choose which side of the whipping you’ll be on, but the decision is ultimately hopeless. You loose either way. In the end everyone's a slave being beaten to death, however gradually. There’s got to be a better way. I’m sure there is but it would require a wide agreement, a mass moratorium on beatings and humiliations, and I’m quite sure that will never happen on this earth. Even if you lived a life of perfect innocence, you’d merely be an interesting exception, and memorable victim like Jesus, a whipping post for those who don’t care and have never thought it over. I don’t want a nigger and I don’t want to be anyone else’s nigger. I just want to live.
City O’ City
Denver
March 30, 2009
girl rotting in plain view
In a dimly lit room I see a face I like. Everything else vanishes. She’s youthful beauty in motion, the perfect balance of awkwardness and grace. Her loveliness, although perhaps still unknown to her, is quite clear to me. Long brown hair graces a thin swan-like neck. Her eyes are expressive. The curves of her body steal attention without being too obvious.
Sensing my attention, she turns her head towards me. The features are lovely beyond description, although strange and imperfect. What would that throat look like if her head were thrown back in pleasure? The eyes are large and full of life. Her weak chin accentuates a large nose. Her upper lip is very full, while the lower one diminishes, the whole mouth unforgettably young and soft, made first and foremost to express pleasure. I want to feel that mouth on my own.
What does she see over here? I’m ugly inside and out. A leper. A nigger. The energy of my life, my love, is trapped in a shell that’s incapable of expressing grace, a crippled horse, a bird with crushed wings. Beautiful insights are imprisoned behind an awkward crooked face and the truth tries hopelessly to escape through a breaking voice that chokes and coughs. The wind’s been knocked out of the lungs. The words can’t be found!
She looks happy; one last spark of something innocent in a world where even the sky itself is bleeding with a million knife-holes. She moves on, probably never to be seen again.
Soon enough she too will be corrupted, the lovely mouth soured with hatred, the eyes turned away with tears and resentment. The body then will no longer be a vehicle of life and pleasure, but an animate corpse playing out the empty functions of the earth, of gravity, of the worms. Beauty is a spark, a glimpse of something at once fleeting and eternal.
City O’ City / Denver
March 25, 2009
Sensing my attention, she turns her head towards me. The features are lovely beyond description, although strange and imperfect. What would that throat look like if her head were thrown back in pleasure? The eyes are large and full of life. Her weak chin accentuates a large nose. Her upper lip is very full, while the lower one diminishes, the whole mouth unforgettably young and soft, made first and foremost to express pleasure. I want to feel that mouth on my own.
What does she see over here? I’m ugly inside and out. A leper. A nigger. The energy of my life, my love, is trapped in a shell that’s incapable of expressing grace, a crippled horse, a bird with crushed wings. Beautiful insights are imprisoned behind an awkward crooked face and the truth tries hopelessly to escape through a breaking voice that chokes and coughs. The wind’s been knocked out of the lungs. The words can’t be found!
She looks happy; one last spark of something innocent in a world where even the sky itself is bleeding with a million knife-holes. She moves on, probably never to be seen again.
Soon enough she too will be corrupted, the lovely mouth soured with hatred, the eyes turned away with tears and resentment. The body then will no longer be a vehicle of life and pleasure, but an animate corpse playing out the empty functions of the earth, of gravity, of the worms. Beauty is a spark, a glimpse of something at once fleeting and eternal.
City O’ City / Denver
March 25, 2009
but can we be alone together?
When I’m lonely I go crazy. Days drag on and on forever. Time dilates to compliment my emptiness. I get obsessed. I long for the love of a woman I may have seen on the street or in the café, and actually loose sleep over it. I devour myself. It’s a slow prolonged existential convulsion. I’m inundated with feelings of certain doom, and have nothing but time to think about them. I obsess over the idea that love will somehow save me. I look for a woman I can crawl into and go to sleep. I imagine the ultimate revelry of love and project it onto the face of every woman in the crowd, looking for a match. If I could only be in love everything would be fine, right?
Of course not.
When I am in a relationship I pine over the days when I was lonely. Everything goes smoothly and I’m content, but something’s missing. Love takes the edge off. There’s always someone to talk to, and the hours vanish into thin air. I sleep well and forget myself. I’m happy but nothing gets done. Take these words for instance. I wouldn’t be writing them if I hadn’t told my woman I needed to be alone for a while. If I hadn’t done that I would have even thought about all this. The way reality just vanishes into thin air disturbs me. I start missing myself. It’s as though love has a sedative effect on me. The frightening intensity of life subsides, but the doomed reality is still there, just under the surface. Even in my bedroom, when we’re making love, there’s a subtle taste of death.
Lovers annihilate one another. In the flash of their embrace they blot one another out like opposite currents, male and female. They find pleasure in their mutual escape from being. They escape being through one another. Each is the door to the other’s nothingness.
Togetherness is a pleasant way of life, but it’s an opiate. You vanish in the mist of lazy sex and happiness. Only sorrow really exists. Happiness on the other hand is the escape from existence. Let’s face it: Existence is pain.
Loneliness opens a void in your life that forces you into existence. Misery is the price of that heightened level of being.
Those of us who know ourselves, who know what it is to truly be, will never be content with any pleasant slumber. When a woman comes to me, to love me, I’ll know that ultimately she’s a thief. She’s come to steal my life, and hopefully to get rid of her own in the process.
February 28, 2009
City O’ City / Denver
Of course not.
When I am in a relationship I pine over the days when I was lonely. Everything goes smoothly and I’m content, but something’s missing. Love takes the edge off. There’s always someone to talk to, and the hours vanish into thin air. I sleep well and forget myself. I’m happy but nothing gets done. Take these words for instance. I wouldn’t be writing them if I hadn’t told my woman I needed to be alone for a while. If I hadn’t done that I would have even thought about all this. The way reality just vanishes into thin air disturbs me. I start missing myself. It’s as though love has a sedative effect on me. The frightening intensity of life subsides, but the doomed reality is still there, just under the surface. Even in my bedroom, when we’re making love, there’s a subtle taste of death.
Lovers annihilate one another. In the flash of their embrace they blot one another out like opposite currents, male and female. They find pleasure in their mutual escape from being. They escape being through one another. Each is the door to the other’s nothingness.
Togetherness is a pleasant way of life, but it’s an opiate. You vanish in the mist of lazy sex and happiness. Only sorrow really exists. Happiness on the other hand is the escape from existence. Let’s face it: Existence is pain.
Loneliness opens a void in your life that forces you into existence. Misery is the price of that heightened level of being.
Those of us who know ourselves, who know what it is to truly be, will never be content with any pleasant slumber. When a woman comes to me, to love me, I’ll know that ultimately she’s a thief. She’s come to steal my life, and hopefully to get rid of her own in the process.
February 28, 2009
City O’ City / Denver
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