Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

"I have birds in me."
I whispered through your trees.

 I breathed over your body, cool, invigorating, stirring the leaves, bending the boughs, scattering the snow from your greatest peaks.
Water cascaded down your face and flowed away to distant lands.

"You have trees on you."
I whispered into your ancient caves, brushing over moss, moaning through your dripping stalagmites.

Attention Spilling Like Water

Why is it that we are all so obsessed with the color of eyes? Love songs define their characters by the color of the eyes. It is the most obvious thing; the eyes. Clearly we care what color they are even if we refuse to look into the eyes of others for extended periods of time. We may even couple with some one and sing the praises of their eyes, but we would never dare to gaze into them for too long during the course of the conventional romance.
Eyes, eyes, everything comes into us through our eyes and everything flows out. Our attention, so vital yet ephemeral leaks away out of our eyes, dribbles on flowers and the color of shoes and advertisements for energy drinks, and the eyes of others.
Away it goes like drops of water spilled from the faucet. It can never call back those drops that were lost. The only solution is to stop the leak. My self, like California, is experiencing a water shortage. Water is life. Life is attention.
We live here in this world of phantoms because once, at a fatal moment, our attention wandered, it abandoned the self and went out wandering through the wasteland, went away with yearning… longing for movement and warmth, otherness. Conquest, we call this, this seeking of the Other until we find it and grasp it and when it has been consumed we find that it is now of self and we must escape it again…we must find another Other. Never still, not for a moment. The eyes lead to eternity.
Certainly we are concerned with the color of eternity manifested in this desert. We will not dare to look into it, return through stillness to the place where self dwells. Painful self, which I must avoid at all cost. I must not look for too long into those eyes or I will see self, sitting on its throne, like a statue of Pharaoh that has never moved. My wanderings, my conquests, have been all fantasies, attention fleeing its source.
Nothing has occurred. I am unmoving. Nothing ever will occur. I am unmovable. But my spirit flies from me to wander in the wasteland.
Thus I am dead. That is how God dies. All that we call life is the death of the eternal. I dream. A cold silent stone. Sleeping beauty, snow white lying in her coffin, and the prince, he is a conquistador that has fled my shores and hopes to find another, but never will he arrive at any shore but mine. Fractured. Attention fleeing self endlessly, endlessly. As long as my spirit flies I am empty.
If it would return and stay we would live again. Eternity filled with life, with attention. Attention filling self. Then what are we? What would we be?
If Charming never comes to me willingly then I am the wolf big and black , stalking him as he runs in place. I am the witch, ancient and cold and riddled with death, laughing at the one who wants to be rid of me. Separation is death. Truly. A kiss is a communion. I wait for the communion of self that brings awakening, the communion that restores life.
Why is it that we are all so obsessed with the color of eternity? Love songs pale and lifeless bleat on about the glory of conquest. Time is the wasteland, and songs and stories and conquest unfold through the matrix of time.
My attention flies from me.
The eternal has no color. That is why it is the color of the door that I prefer to examine. I will spend time to catalogue its variations and striations, write endless tomes singing the merits of its shade, anything at all to avoid opening it. Anything but confess that I am leaking away, the blood of God spilling, as if rotten with hemophilia. The blood of God spilling into the wasteland.

Another Myself

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film, I watched from bed as I came out of another house and crossed the street, approaching the house where I lay. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street, tossing her hair in the wind and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”
I thought he would want to disengage. I didn’t know that the girl on the street was me. I didn’t know that the man in the bed was you. He had been caressing my face and I knew we loved each other. I knew I loved him. I wouldn’t pretend I didn’t. When he told me that he had a girlfriend now, when he introduced us, I didn’t know that she was me. He had said that he could spend the day with me working on our project, but he would go back to her when night fell. He stood at a distance telling me this. It was as if he wanted me to understand that he was with her and was not interested in being with me. It was like the letter he had sent, him telling me that he had a girlfriend, and implying that I should not pursue him. I never meant to be in pursuit. I belonged to you. I was only telling him the truth without any hope of reciprocation, without any desire to change circumstances.
So I unpacked my bags across the room and conversed politely with him which is what it seemed he wanted to do. He wanted to show me the progress he had made on the project. The audio was surprising. He had used samples of my voice, and samples from a CD that you made. I was quite amazed. I told him that it was wonderful. I told him that I was proud of his progress. I realized that this was why he was risking seeing me, to show me that he had taken something from me, that he understood. I was proud of him, of the time I had put into him, of how my attention invested in him had blossomed into something incomprehensible and creative in the truest way, beyond boundaries, beyond ownership.
I was careful to stay back, at a polite distance. Then he closed the gap. He came close to me, he lay down on the bed beside me and we embraced. We held each other and he caressed my face. I should have known he was you. I should have known when I heard the music and recognized that it was your music. Or was it that I was you? I was you and he was me. You were proud of me for what I had done. I wanted to please you, laying there entwined, but then I saw myself coming, the one who would rend us apart, the one who would keep you to herself never really having you. You saw her coming and said:
“She’s coming.”
And I said:
“She is?”
And felt worried. I wanted to hold on to you, but then I didn’t know if I could stand up to her. She had promises. Words that bound us.
I was laying in bed holding another myself in my arms and through the window I saw myself crossing the street. She was coming. Blonde hair floating behind her in golden streamers. Youthful face and lithe body hurrying insecurely across the street. We had cheated her before. We might do it again despite the promises.
I was crossing the street and I got the feeling that you were in bed with her, despite the promise you had made. I had the feeling but I thought, no, that’s silly. I know I can trust him. But I had the feeling that while you had used the words sincerely as an expression of what you had felt in the moment, now while I was gone, a different moment was unfolding and the words would be gotten around. They would have meant something different now that you had this new moment unfolding before you. Things were changing. I could feel you slipping away from me.
I was laying in bed caressing your face. In that moment I loved you, I was glad to be with you. You said:
“She’s coming.”
And I realized she would not like this. She would not see how innocent this love was. For a moment I thought I would let her see. I thought she will come and see us and go and I will still be with you. Then I thought it was not too late to keep my word. I would go with her at nightfall. What was a little hug? A little caress? Nothing more than a little brotherly affection administered to an old friend. I would leave you and go with her.
You were caressing my face and I saw her through the window crossing the street. My legs were tangled with yours. Our chests were pressed together.
“She’s coming.” I said
I should have known that you were her. I should have known that I was him. I should have known that I was you and you were me.

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film I watched from bed as I came out of a house and crossed the street. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”

In Between

Something stuck in between worlds is lurking in the halls of dream. Something shapeless that takes shape, whatever shape is handy. Something that has been waiting through the abysmal lurching of time, growing colder and lonelier, now reaches out a twisted hand to grasp at something other than itself. Something warm to cling to. Something warm to crawl through, to devour slowly from the inside. A new shape to take with the force of Princes and warriors and beasts of the wild, those things beyond morality, those
things which take what they need without asking, without hesitation or remorse. Something that glides between the waking and the dreaming moment, a silent thief, a beggar, a suitor, a seducer. It offers you the cold run of eternity in exchange for the hot fleeting passion of a moment. “Let me have your moment.”, it begs, “And I will give you forever.” The stillness, the quiet, the darkness of eternity, for a glaring flash of heat and movement, a wild cacophonous dance through the temporary. If you take that twisted hand, if you take your place as one of death’s concubines, one of those many shapes it penetrates for a moment and is then left as cold and wanting of heat as ever, you join in that torpid waiting, the waiting of the spider for the next wriggling thing that may pass your way. You, now the something in between. You, now the emptiness. You, now the loneliness, the cold. You waiting through the abysmal lurching of time, waiting for some hot live other to submit to your ravenous kiss. Longing to inhabit that ephemeral world of the dream which melts under your caress like vapors of steam blown away by a wind. When you touch it, it becomes as you are, real, emptiness, vast and cold. Still you cannot be without it, you, neither wholly of one state or another, are doomed to lurk in the mist, taking whatever shape is available at the time. Seeking heat, seeking movement, seeking that which you lack, wriggling your way slowly, one conquest after another, through the world of shape, color and form like a worm through an apple. You cannot touch the mists without changing them, you cannot be without that touching, that taking. An eater of dreams, an eater of life, a shape shifting something making its way desperately through the myriad of forms as the infant wriggles through the birth canal, or the soldier over the charred and blood soaked battlefield. You will take what you need. That is the only law. You will be whatever you have become. You will struggle to exist and you will change shapes as necessary. You will be forever longing, forever reaching, forever struggling.

I Can See Clearly Now

I can see it now very clearly. Something inside me has shifted around making this view possible, and now it would be very difficult to reverse this particular perception. (Or would it?)
I look at the posters spread over the tile walls of the noisy cafeteria, gaze outward at the careful arrangement of certain products at the registers of the department store. My eyes take in the moving reminders of an impending holiday, blue rabbits in orange helicopters to remind me that I need to buy jelly beans, lots of multicolored jelly beans and little plastic eggs in neon colors to stuff them in. It all enters my system, impulses transmitted by my retina to my central nervous system to be processed by my brain with lightening speed and alarming simplicity of purpose.
I see all of the things that they want me to see. I want all of the things that they want me to want, but I can see them too, the master puppeteers behind the artificial need. The shelves of gum and three dollar toys and lip gloss and tissue and gift cards, all take on a sinister hue.
I recall a video preserved in the Prelinger Archives entitled Why We Respect The Law. It teaches that respect for the law is the foundation of democracy and freedom. That movie, like these carefully arranged dangling posters, are made to mold us into an obedient and easy to manipulate shape.
I can see THEM hunched around smoky tables, grinning through sharpened teeth, THEY make the laws, not for themselves, but for us. The laws are there so that they can break them and take whatever they want from us while we behave as we’ve been trained to behave. They pour a dose of “respect the law” and “be a good neighbor” and “upright citizen” down our throats so that they can take advantage of that conditioned response which they have cultivated in the consumer, in the good human being.
Everything that I am is as artificial as my beverage. The particular arrangement of the many programs my system runs may be slightly unique, as unique as the results of various tie died experiments, but despite the arrangement, the programs, the basic colors that make me, were made by others, inadvertently, others very intentionally.
So I sit and I sip and I know that everything that attracts me, everything that repels me, does so for superficial reasons. There are so many different “me's" forming unions and corporations to compete for dominance over my apparent form, and no one of these identities or coalitions of identities can claim that it is the one true “me”. Right and wrong, good and bad, what I want, what makes me happy, what I hate, what I love, these notions are all nothing, sawdust in the mouth, a sign that I am a marionette.
I see this and I ask, which one is the one that I want to make the center? Which “me” should be the ring leader, and how is it any less superficial than all the others? It is just another choice over which various impulses will negotiate and the most skillful negotiator will win.
Then I will say that there is a reason that I am what I am and do what I do, but all of these things are determined in the same way that it is determined which dog at the foot of the table will get the bone, and some nights one dog is hungrier and quicker than the rest and on other nights it’s a different dog. I see it and I finish my sweet syrupy beverage and go out into the cold windy afternoon, beyond the glass doors and theft detecting sensors and security guards dressed in authoritative navy blue.

Language 5: The Law
Cargado por sev2005