Until you’ve given yourself to it entirely– until you’ve stepped forward in the silence of your own heart, drenched in commitment, and called your life’s bluff, or taken a sabbatical from what makes sense and spent a few of those precious vacation days sleeping in back of a rusted car that is flying awkwardly in gutted stasis on a litter of cinder blocks strewn along the ground like the crumbs of a passing barrage of scrapped cities, […]
What if we look into the night sky, but can’t understand what it says? This happens all the time, because we sent Meaning away once. All of us. Banished it from our minds. Cut ourselves right in two like cosmic butchers. Each from each. Then each from each again. For our own good, we said. Looked up at the stars. Lost count. Lost our way. Every half blamed the other. We’ve got the right half, we […]
Christ is a friend best made before you try and set things straight in the world, because that’s a tall order usually involving such experiential delicacies as walking through fire, negotiating with fanatics, imbibing poisoned tonics, standing trial before a stadium-sized jury of the bitter and scorned, writing defiant op-eds no one understands, being shoved out of a slow-rolling car, or spraying something minty into your mouth right before doing something reckless as a last […]
The other day, unexpectedly and without provocation, because it made sense in a very incalculable kind of way, and eschewing momentarily all my previously aggregated momentum of character and personality, I responded to a clever advertisement stapled to the picture of a pet mountain goat that by some accounts had gone missing, and by other accounts been found, that was taped to a promotional photograph of a local practitioner of esoteric dietary arts involving seeds […]
Miracles work like this: we stop trying to choose a life from the menu and invite the chef to surprise us our plate arrives twenty minutes later, empty but for a once-folded, scribbled note: where have you been get your ass back here the meringue is on fire Suddenly– we remember… We enter the kitchen to hearty cheers, exploding custards, the incoming flight of a ripe tomato, a glimpse of flames from the open pit rotisserie, […]
Calculus reveals itself to be the study of my fears. The tangent to a curve is a line, a rock slung into the void of space, a cannonball flight untempered by gravity, a prognosis insulated from relationship and possibility. If we take the vector properties of this miniscule instant, extrapolate them, and play the tape, well… uh oh. When the Studebaker is whipping around a turn, an antique rocking chair strapped inadequately to the roof, once […]
I was sitting on the squishy bottom of a short stack of water about three feet tall, beneath a full sun, fully clothed, buttons made up, with little bubbles hiding out in my eyelashes, watching a fish watch me back through the grass, thinking about the strange economies of tadpoles and turtles, wondering what that brewing pain was inside of my chest, as I was somehow temporarily without my memory of the direct effects of […]
A self is a heavy burden to carry with you across the desert. Despite being invisible and weightless in principle, it is the often overlooked, but necessary battery of accoutrements that are required to render the self manifest and functional that take their toll. There is the steamer trunk full of historical data, for instance, with its rather robust coefficient of sliding friction across the hot sand– the modern take on an old classic, a […]
At one level, the human body is an Enigma– a code machine. All day long they run: informing, creating, conducting. There’s the genetic code, sure. Then there’s the histone code, the sugar code, the signal transduction code, the ubiquitin code, the adhesive code, the splicing code, the tubulin code, the metabolic code, and so on and so forth. Kids, too– they know this game. We’ve all dabbled. We sprinted across the yard, dove into leaf piles, barked […]
The heavy lifting is done in the invisible realms. What’s left to be done here is simplicity itself. Beauty emerges from tending to the obvious. Get some water. Carry stones. When we’re like this, we live inside of choreography, though we’ve never seen the script. We couldn’t read it, anyways– ten million movements on planes of existence whose names we cannot understand, all conspiring to make our next step plain. Just take it. Don’t wonder about what […]
Embracing Forever 