Light Benders

Possible lives, possible moments, possible lies. Possibly the biggest lie I ever told was, “Fine, thank you.”
Sitting in the Boulevard Cafe, watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. No cherry pie, but six choices of coffee. No cherry pie. The noise of life swallowed down with hot decaf tea. The noise of a kitchen, which is the noise of life, the stuff that fuels these fleshy forms coming out on large round white plates.

Fleshy forms, such a deceptive word, “fleshy.” We imagine something very solid when we hear that word, something definite and unchanging, something akin to stone or oak, but it is more mutable than that. It is changing constantly, cells being replaced nightly, a tiny imperceptible operation that leaves you with an entirely new body in seven year cycles. Like watching trees grow. You don’t see it, but its happening, its there, an invisible process of transformation. We have been deceived into thinking that we are stable, of an unchangeable essence, we are who we are and no other. We are one static personality, a good person, a strong person, or perhaps a bad person, a weak person, a smart person, a talented person, a tenacious person, an affable person, or we are a person composed of a combination of two or three of these choices but no more.

We think that we are inherently something,, but anyone who has ever turned their attention inward has faced the terrible truth: we are inherently nothing, we are only something in particular depending on who is looking. We are different things to different people, and when we are the only one looking in at our self, then we are just the one who is looking and the other we thought that we were is a farce. They start us in the beginning, making us choose the words to define ourselves; naughty , nice, fireman, ballerina, president, veterinarian. Just as they were started off. If we look far enough back we remember choosing certain things as if it were a game: my favorite color is green, I like rock music, I read paperback horror stories, I hate musicals and fish.

Well, anyway, I remember making those choices. Perhaps I am the only one. Or perhaps I am the only one being honest. Because the truth is terrifying, a free fall of no cherry pie ever. You don’t see it, but it’s there, an invisible process of transformation catalyzed when nothing notices itself. Our outward forms shift and change and our emotional states vary and our thoughts obey certain patters, certain habitual tracks upon which to run their train. But who is the passenger? A pure and shining void. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind. We call it life, self, mind and body.

And if you see this, if you look at someone beside you and perceive them as a fleshy dirt devil, a living process for transforming light, a sort of perpetual motion machine circulating raw nothingness, and you know that you are not supposed to see it, because you already agreed early on to play the game and not see such things, then you know you are not what is defined in the game rules as “fine.”  You know that if you tell them what you are seeing they will do what they can to stop you from seeing it because it ruins the game. 

So I say, “Fine, thank you.”  and continue watching our possible lives, possible moments, possible lies play out. Six different types of coffee but no cherry pie and the traffic flowing on the street outside.  A free fall. Watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of  others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind I call myself.

Nothing Is True

Aren’t you so tired of all those voices from out there reaching into you like a murder of crows probing the cracks in a sidewalk, the recesses of your mind, with long sharp beaks? Don’t you feel the sickness growing in your gut as you are assaulted daily by the loud caterwauling of authoritarian voices demanding that you do this to be good or that to be smart or such to be healthy or wise or enlightened? Don’t you just want to tear all your clothes off and scream incoherently and run barefoot under the trees and stars?
This author, who states now her presence so that you will be aware of it as it comes into you so that you may either allow it access or deny it willfully, this author admits that she is and does.
Beware of those who wish to sell you THE TRUTH or give you THE TRUTH or explain THE TRUTH. Watch out for fools, for buffoons repeating words they believe to be endowed with wisdom, words from their parents, from their spiritual teachers, from learned books or mystical books, or fantastic television documentaries. Most of all, beware of the voices that came from outside but now live inside of you without your knowledge. The voices of all these loud insistent purveyors of so called TRUTH that now swirl around inside your head, triggered in response to various stimuli.
If you think you can speak the TRUTH, if you feel you should spread the TRUTH, or help others to awaken to the TRUTH, watch out, you’re running blindfolded with a sharp stick in your hand. Because the TRUTH, or that which this author sees as the signified experience indicated by that particular signifier, is indescribable, it doesn’t live here in the words, in this confusing scritch scratch of symbols.
The TRUTH doesn’t want to be spread. It’s the hyena-like cackle of words that wants to be spread. It’s the voice of your ancestors, the confusion of accidental associations between various stimuli and sounds and shapes that is shaping you, informing your decisions, building your version of TRUTH and REALITY.  And it wants to spread, needs to spread, will spread infecting every body it can infect.
There is no antidote against this infection of language except to know it is there, to see it forming your experience and do what you WILL as much as possible within these inherited constraints and work to free yourself of them when and where they interfere with this WILL, if that is something that interests you.
Or if that does not interest you, you can go on pretending that you are the infection, that you are in control, that you know THE ONE AND ONLY TRUTH. Or if you prefer to go willy nilly you might pacifically insist that you know YOUR TRUTH, which is just another way of saying “I won’t mention your nakedness if you won’t mention mine.”
You can take all your TRUTH, personal or universal as you may deem it to be, all your assumptions, all your apish babble and shove it directly up your ass, because this author is uninterested in THE TRUTH. This author is unwilling to offer up her own desperate attempts to make order out of chaos, meaning out of confusion, something out of nothing so that you or she may feel more comfortable. She will not promise you that everything will be okay, that heaven awaits the righteous, that good karma will carry you through, that positive thinking will align you with universal energies, or that Santa will be leaving you a gift this year.
Don’t misread this as an Atheistic or Nihilistic proclamation. This author has brushed up against something beyond the veil of words and acknowledges it. She simply wishes to exercise some restraint and abstains from birthing its shadow in the form of a word that the reader may misunderstand to be something they have heard or read of before.
You have never heard or read of this. The words you have heard and read, all of the words you will ever hear and read, are their own entity, maintaining a life independent of that of the signified. And this is why they can’t be trusted. It is of their nature to be separate. They can never be true. They can only be noisy, more babble to pierce the air and every corner of your mind with its deceptive and authoritarian assumption of power.