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.

Moon Eater

The Moon looks so contemplative, so quiet and concentrated. The woman in the photograph beams outward rather than inward as the moon does. The woman in the photo is a sun painted white, a sun disguised as a moon. Big Cheshire cat grin. Didn’t the Cheshire cat disguise himself as the moon? His grin was the horned moon, or the horned moon was his grin, and he materialized around it humming a little “huma de hum de hum”. The woman with the white face is like that, a sun with the moon caught in her teeth. An eater of moons, moon shaped cookies downed with milk and honey, falling, cascading in sugar cookie crumbles down the dark well of a throat, chased by cool white milk, down down down to places our eye should not see. There is no light in there, down in the woman’s gut, in her moon belly. A tiny crumb being pulverized down in there would look about itself and swear that it was now in the abyss, in the terrible place outside of the world. But it is not the outside of the moon eater. It is the inside of the moon eater that is the strange and dark annihilation of a cookie. The cookie is the inside of the moon eater and within the moon eater there are many divisions, tissues and linings and cell walls. Everywhere of the moon eater is an inside of something and an outside of something else. But a crumb down there in the acid bath of the stomach’s delight would never know it. It would have no idea. It would think, most definitely, that it had gone outside. The interior of the moon eater is so dark, but from its dense surface, light is reflected and we are presented with an image. Ah! Just like the moon itself. A dense body whose surface reflects the light of the sun. The moon give off no illumination of its own. It baths in the sun’s radiance to be seen. Only a dress of light worn so that the children of the sun will know it is there. The children of the sun with their eyes for perceiving light could not recognize the moon without her disguise. The moon, like the moon eater, wears a disguise. Trixie things, moons and the eaters of moons. Scary white things whose insides are black. It would be better to be eaten by a black thing whose insides were light. But how likely would you be to make that choice? If you stood before two doors, one painted black and one painted white, which would you choose? And what if the doors were not the doors of houses but the mouths of lions opened wide, bottom teeth pointed up and top teeth pointed down? Would you prefer to be eaten by the black lion or the white lion? I will tell you a secret; the black lion is made of glass painted on the inside with all the colors of an infinite universe so that when you look upon it, it appears to be black. The white lion is made of plaster so that you do not see its dark insides when you glance at its clean bright surface. I am not going to tell you which lion you should choose. I think I will not even tell you which lion I would choose. I will say, that the white lion is the moon eater and that you are what you eat. Are you an eater of moons, an eater of lions, an eater of cookies, or garbage, or hash? What do you eat and what’s eating you, bite by delectable bite? I’m not saying I know. I’m not saying I don’t. It’s worth contemplation though, worth the quiet concentration of a lunar entity, hung as white horns in a black sky, singing, “huma de hum de hum”.