Towards the Interminable Is

11/30/2006 9:39 AM – 10:00 AM

Rise up. And rising, what then consumes your mind? What consumed it the night before, which is the same as consumed it for years. Does grace extend past death? Is it thus far and no more? Is it Christ’s victory or Christ’s substitution?

And though it marks me again a heretic, I side with George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis. Victorious. “Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by my name that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him.” So I stumble on through faith, learning again each day whether the yoke be easy or hard. For though it be promised, I remain myself, hand in hand with Thomas wondering if it could be true. And that is enough for today. It is enough to sit. It is enough to wake up and go to work. It is enough to work, claiming salvation without proof.

So up then. Rise up and carry your weight to your reward, with a simple prayer. God save us, my father and I. God save us all. Up then. Eyes higher than the grave. Find a dream and seek out its path. Love what you love, it’s a gift you can’t exchange. And, knowing the giver, wouldn’t want to. So. Enough of this downheartedness for today. Enough, enough. Up and to the place of substance. Further up and further in. To Narnia and the North. Let our brows be firm and are hearts be light. There is this adventure and then the next. Your sins are forgiven you, rise up and fear no more. All right then. Off down the path, faster and faster the Fast Boys ran. Better than the ones before, flying, free fall though the countryside. We are who we are before our grandparents were born. We are the inscrutable things made of courage and glee. Delight behind, delight before. Ever onward, ever upward, adventures without end. Our position of precarious balance is indicative of our strength and unseen grace, between honesty and hope. We are who we are and there can be no regret. Teeth clenched and lips smirked, we will run again and find our way to the interminable Is. So rise up. Rise up and follow your feet. There is this and better beyond.

On Eligibility

11/28/2006 8:21 AM – 8:43 AM

To be good. To be acceptable. To be perfect. What is the true height of a man? When will one know that it is enough? Oh Lord won’t ya buy me a pink Cadillac. I’d settle for something verifiable. I’d settle for something like true, justified belief.

Ah but that is an old song, these are old blues, and these are not my words. But they’re mine to use. Citation needed and the no-answer is enough. Forgetting the day, the words, the weakness, being in the here, seeing what is, asking no questions but the ones you can make up the answers to. 1. Get up early; 2. Sit; 3. Write; 4. Walk to work. How hard can it be? Ten-thousand, ten-thousands and some change. But you get up and you do and that will have to be enough. To be honest. To work hard. To enjoy your existence. These will have to be enough. And these are just old words. But they’re mine to use.

Stop, start again. Something for today. Something for tomorrow. Something for yesterday. Forgetting what was. Forgetting what will be. Doing what is here. What is better? What is worse? What is enough? No-answer. So find yourself here, doing here things. Exist and let it go. Tell stories in the morning light. Fall asleep to the quiet of the single bed. Work and work hard while the day is on and the other man’s watch pays you to get out of bed. Tomorrow and something. Today and something. No-sense and nonsense. Forgetting what you’ve failed again. Doing what is. The impossibility of correct makes it fall away. Sometimes. Enough to be here doing doable things. Enough to live in the thick of a small existence. Enough to forget. Enough to remember. Being here in the time of plenty, when the field mice grow fat and no one begrudges them their life. Out among the better moors, when good is at hand and good waits for your return. The general enfolds the specific and we fall away with enough. Get up then. Get up and steal your joy from the multitude of indifferent voices. Be good. Be acceptable. Be perfect. Ha and a long way to the bank. Close your eyes and see enough. It’ll get you through to the next.

Of Tarps and Other Falsehoods

11/27/2006 7:22 AM – 7:45 AM

Throw it all down and pick it up again. Start and the day becomes what it is. Whatever it is. This is here and here is enough. Down the tale and up the morning light, we chased the rabbit, the rabbit chased the grass, the grass chased the wind. Lay it down. Pick it up again.

When it all becomes an aspect of fear (pre, post, present), it’s time to scrap it and start anew with the same old thing. Let us down and pick us up. This is this. Find the quiet, find the answer that is no answer. Telling the tale of the boy with the grudge, the chip and the world on his shoulder. Find a way. Find it by doing it. This is the thing and the thing is enough. Bitter coffee, better ways. Walk then. Walk the garden path to its end. Turn aground and start again. No new words. No new ideas. Nothing new under the sun. Doesn’t matter. It’ll be new to me. Lay me down and pick me up again.

Seeing the thick lines drawn on the wall by the shadows of heavy beams, the hero does as he does for its own reward. Then came the dawn. Then came the evening. Then came the fear. Then came the sleep. I’m still here and this narrow box still holds. Walk away from this and find the other part of the woods where the trees meet the meadow and the meadow meets the sky. Climb the blades of grass with crickets and grasshoppers, when the stalks end, climb the sky and stalk the blue. Doesn’t matter. Pretty turns of phrase. Proving nothing, I prove myself. Unable to prove myself, I prove grace. I will not bend to your blind obedience, but I will not forsake the way, despite your troubled sighs. I am my own. I am myself. I have a story to tell. I’ve got thousands, and all the time left in my nurture/nature, fate/chance, plan/chaos. This is here. This is now. Nothing new and that’ll do. Day becomes the boy. The boy becomes himself. Falling away with leaves in the temperate waters of autumn streams, hidden in hillsides. Thrown by the wind, picked like an apple, the boy forgets himself and remembers his true face, blinding the sky. Ha-ha. A lie. But better by far than your version of it. Fuck it. Lay it down and pick it up again. The day walks on. Me too.

In Praise of Fog

11/24/2006 8:36 AM – 8:57 AM

The fog has come to Elmwood. It arrived sometime around the end of the Dallas-Tampa Bay game. I’ll walk, in a few minutes, and see how far it goes. Clearing one’s mind, the inevitable dreams of the Old Girl comes and we proceed on wetted streets.

All through the night and into faded dawn, we slept. Longer than anticipated. Awakening, we find ourselves in a world twice removed from that in which we bedded down. First, the light, second, the dreams. Indulging in the pleasant emotions of the dream-state, one finds that love is, in fact, enough. Awakening, the dream fades so we indulge in opiates that carry on through the walking life, benumbed to the possibility of endless torment and present not-quite-enough. This little piece is enough. Holding onto it loosely, like a rope that glides us through the impenetrable image of the lower caves.

The clouds align and settle down, hiding life, just life, from prying eyes. The great Paparazzi will have to wait for a better time to get the shot. So let us imagine then that we are free and clear, that the day is enough to carry us through all. Where is that one he said would come? Ah well, let us imagine he is here and so we will recognize the inherent allrightness of living in the endless day of judges, doing what we guess is right. The bubbles escape from the murky bottom waters and we rise with them, past the thickest mud, ascending without fear past the snake and alligator to the green slime that coats the surface water of the bracken swamp, where we join the subtlest pulls to and from the mountains and the ocean. The time of kings and serfs forgotten in being, just being. The drawings on the walls, the music of the footsteps, it is enough to be a lesser creature when one is warm and full and ready for sleep. Let us then praise fog for all its power to forget itself and us along with it, leaving room for stories worth telling.

Of the Between

11/22/2006 7:10 AM - 7:33 AM

In all things, falling down to establish the natural boundary between the seen and unseen propositions. Rising up, we board the wooden rafts and float to the unknown sunrise through mango swamps and the things better left unsaid, discarding the litter of a thousand light-speed voyages amongst the tittering reeds.

Better living through focused forgetting. Getting up in the morning. Readying the coffee maker the night before. Awake then and rise before the sun that you may sit with a sly smile, waiting for day to appear. We must upfill this rosary cage of ours with warming oils and dewy incense. The following day, the trees in the yard sprang forth in guard and killed the swarming masses of belligerent and inert mud. Up then, and on to the next forgotten day. No advice for the wicked or the good, just living and telling lies for better days. The truth of the deed is hidden in the pitching grasses of Babylon’s riverbanks.

No sense then. No sense and nothing more than rolling winds unmoving. Unwind the day into a thread of silver tangles. No time but this, no tomorrow, no yesterday, one long mistake. We can forget it then and move on to odd notes that catch the ear in misstep and take us through to the walk to work. No fear. No misery. Just living. Finding the knot and knowing how to cut it. Being still and carving a mountain from the plains. Where now the unpressed blades that littered the bankside with waving green? Same as always, in the impression of light stored on viscose membranes in the intangible framework of the ghost. The ghost. Yes, he will do. Who I become then, I cannot say. The words here, just words. Neither shame nor glory. Being and a roundness of life swelling the earth in underground mole paths. We must upfill this rosary cage of ours. Hours. Perhaps not. Doesn’t matter. Long lines and forgotten possibilities, fractal states of matter transmogrified by electric impulses into math. Odd that. The heart of the matter is on the floor and all things, falling down, establish the natural boundary between the seen and unseen propositions.

On The Raspberry of Gilgamesh

11/20/2006 6:55 AM – 7:36 AM

The first man that looked into the smoke and claimed to see a shape in order to get a leg of antelope that he had no claim to, he is the enemy. The problem being, I am not a shaman, I am an honest man and seeing shapes in smoke, I cannot tell if what I see is a message from beyond or an active imagination. One is damned for being honest, apparently. I can say the words that describe the fear, but the words are not the fear. The words are words. The fear is fear.

Do not inquire, oh Gilgamesh, into the affairs of gods. They do not concern you. Drink until your thoughts leave you. Make love until your senses desert you. Work until you cannot help but sleep a sleep that has no dreams and wake the next day with an untouched canvas. May death come quickly and catch you unawares; least you learn the fear of it. Do not find questions that cannot be answered, for you have learned to prepare for the worst, and there is no way to prepare for this. Let it go. The dead will bury the dead and the rocks will mourn their passing more eloquently than you. You are alive and your business is the business of living.

Up then. Be alive in the descriptive. There are things to do, all of them more worth your time than morbid worrying. No such thing as a blank wall. Up then, twelve feet tall and rising. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. We’ve got this and that’s the limit of the thing. So the story goes and so we go. There’s a story in it somewhere. The validity of the claim is the joy inherent. Float the current down, the monsters, a weak man’s claim to your food. Let ‘em starve or get a job or do an honest job of stealing. Not an ounce of it. Not a whit. So there’s this and this is what’s here and this is enough. So up again and out and running fast enough to catch the thief. Ten and eleven, you’ll be where you’ll be finding a better dream than this sad sack of tasteless religion. There’s the snow and it falls down on the roof tiles, the dividing lines become more evident. Jesus is bigger than Christianity and his grace abounds. This will do and we can tell the tales of bad men laughing at their title. We’re bigger than this. The touch of gray adds class to the sky. Up then and Mr. Id take ‘em down a peg or two. Pirate bastards and a story to tell. Closed fists and running roughshod over the polite hip. Better the beard, better the sneer before the leaving. Laugh and forget. There is a shape in the smoke and with Charlie Brown, I say it’s a ducky.