Sixteen Below

He tells me of the first time he met Allen Ginsberg. He was a young man, an independent reporter from New York come to Boulder Co. to interview Ginsberg about a planned act of civil disobedience. There was a factory there where the triggers for the Atom bomb were being manufactured. Ginsberg planned to sit on the railroad tracks thus preventing the train from reaching the factory.

My friend follows Ginsberg into a house, his mind racing with thoughts about the other man's homosexuality, asking himself if he could really say no if Ginsberg wanted to have sex. The first thing he sees upon entering the house is a woman giving a man a blow job.
Ginsberg is oblivious. It takes him a moment to realize that something is going on. When he does, he merely says, “Oh, lets go upstairs.”
Upstairs my friend sits on Ginsberg's bed beside him. His heart is pounding. In addition to concerns over sexuality, his mind is embroiled in the matter of the first question and what his peers at the radio station back in New York will think.

“Mr. Ginsberg,” my friend begins.
“Call me Allen.”
“How do you reject nuclear madness?” my friend blurts the question out spasmodically.
“I don’t reject anything.” Ginsberg tells him. “I’ve come here to make love to plutonium, to sit on the railroad tracks and be connected to it, to be connected to everything.”
Ginsberg suggest that they do some free associative poetry spinning. Gazing out the window at an empty curbside he lays the moment on my friend. All of this, along with the rest of the conversation, changes my friend's life.

He tells me this, and he tells me that he has never told the story in quite this way to anyone before. He has mentioned interviewing Ginsberg, he has mentioned having the recording in a box somewhere.
He has never had this moment before. This moment is new, unique to us, we two who are reflections of one another, who create with words our identities from the fabric of fear, the fear of being.
We sit in silence and look into one another's eyes, dissolving for a moment our creation, our creation of the world and the other to inhabit it, the other to speak to, the other to wonder at, the other to fear and to love.

We don’t know why this is possible, this silence between us. It allows my friend to tell me his story in this particular way for the first time and the only time.
We could try to recreate it, but it will never be the same. We will never be the same two people on the same day in the same place, daring to press against the veil of fear. Daring to speak and be heard. Daring to listen and accept everything.

Two Angels

Don’t break the silence. One word, a single word could send us crashing down into the terrifying gritty details of organic existence. We hold our breath, two angels poised face to face, the substance of our intricate bodies swirling and crawling with electric light. We are two angels who share one mind, one center held between us in the tenuous absence of thought and motion, so still that we are almost not angels, we are almost nothing at all.

Don’t break the silence.  We have two faces and each face contains two more faces, which contain two more faces, which contain two more… Watching the kaleidoscope of apparent being shifting across the surface of ourselves, our eyes grow ever wider.
Yes, angels have eyes. And tails. And wings, and horns, and ears, and fingers, and toes, and rivers, and forests, and ponds, and stars. What would be called flesh is a multicolored light show, but it will all shatter and melt and cascade into tight places if we make a sound just now, any sound at all.
So we are silent.

Bursting with music, we bite our tongues, press our ears down against our heads, freeze our ponds and hold it in. For now.
Eventually we will let it out in torrents of song that will carry us away from this place, up for a while, then down, then perhaps up and away again. We’ll ride the sonorous currents hither and tither, rippling as we go, dissolving, emerging, shimmering, vanishing, gleaming...

But for now silence, cradled between us like a sleeping babe, a pearl set in a silver ring, a solitary star shining in indigo sky, a crystal goblet upon a golden table. Hush, hush, our eyes blink to each other, two and two, faces sliding away like night and day.
Hush, hush glistening lashes flutter, hush, don’t break the silence.
Don’t break the silence.

Baby

Remember those early days when sitting in a porcelain tub of warm water with the rubber stopper on the silver chain keeping it all from going down the drain, the world seemed so wigglly squiggly, so barely there and ghostly. Mother and father seemed to change and the others did too, and sometimes you had a sister or two and sometimes you had none and sometimes your aunt was called Robin and sometimes she was called Betty. All these people all these sounds and shapes seemed to shift around in a way that was neither significant nor lacking significance, just a bit of nature dancing for my developing powers of observation like leaves caught in a little whirlwind on the side walk, turning round and round so that the configuration is different in every moment. This is the reason that carousels hold so much appeal for young children, because they turn and turn in a circular fashion and there is no way of telling whether your lion is in the lead or taking up the rear or somewhere in the middle and meanwhile you bob up and down and with the mirrors there is no way of telling if you are the real child on the real sculpted lion or if that other child and lion are the originals. Bath time, so warm and pleasant and wet, with the water jiggling around your body, so like the womb and so like the sea from which all life arose, back when it was still hot and red, the perfect melting pot for this and that to come together in amoebic ecstasy. The wash cloth is soft and squishy and you can put it in your mouth and bite and all the water squeezes out and dribbles out of the corners of your mouth and down your chin in the most delightful way. The water moves when you move, jiggling slightly. All of life is like that when you are a baby. Every time you move you are somewhere different, with a different crowd, strangely familiar, familiarly strange, forever and ever. Then slowly, the waters of life start to cool and freeze. Things seems steadier, thanks perhaps to the magick words you have been learning. Mother and Father are almost always the same, you generally have the same set of siblings, an aunt whose name remains the same. Perhaps it’s because of the magick words, because when you say “Mamma” this is the one that you mean, the one that you invoke. It’s a tricky thing, because Mamma taught you the magick word, so really she taught you how to invoke her, and the other Mammas, the ones who didn’t teach the words for things, they don’t get called, so they never come again. Only this one, the one that tricked you with the word of power, and now you are here with her, stuck in the frozen world and your legs have grown long and stiff and you no longer bathe, but instead stand in the shower. You no longer ride the carousel, but instead read the books and do the homework and watch the world materialize around you like steel bars. A steady, stable place. Gone is the shifty watery world of infancy. Gone is bath time with all its jiggly wet wonder, and gone too is baby, and all that is left of it is a word for what it was.

Experiment: The Flower Sermon

The sermon itself was a wordless one in which Śākyamuni merely held up a flower before the assembled disciples, among whom there was no reaction apart from Mahākāśyapa, who smiled.
-Wikipedia

What a trick, beginning and end.
If you are a flower who can perceive its own existence and perceives it to be self contained and inherently existent, the moment you bloom seems to be the beginning and the moment your last petal drifts to the black soil seems the last.
If you are black soil you have been built over the course of billions of years, shaped and changed by flowers and other bio matter living and at last decaying over you, by waters flowing over and pouring down, by eruptions from deep below and fires raging above, by the deification of life forms worming through you and striding upon you and by things which fall from the far heavens.
If you are black soil you do not track the life and death of a single flower, but rather count the rise and fall of entire populations of wildflowers, count them silently as you swallow seed and send bloom bursting forth towards the sun.
Can the life cycle of the flower be separated from the life cycle of the black soil?
Does it exist independently?

Can it exist independently?
Why, objectively, would the existence of a human animal differ from that of a flower?
If you are a ballroom of red, yellow, and white burning spheres and spinning bodies of minerals, metals, and vapors dancing the dance of gravitational force, you do not count the individual dancers. Not the blue bulb nursing black soil, not it’s burning yellow partner, nor it’s small pock marked attendant, nor any other. If you are such a ballroom you trace only the dance, silently keeping time in the perpetually motion.

Lay on your back in a silent place.
Cross your arms over your chest and close your eyes with a timer set for 24 min.
Breath deeply and slowly, feeling your belly rise first, then your chest.
The sound of your breathing should be undetectable.
Other than this breathing, do not move.
Without speaking it aloud, repeat the following mantra for the duration of the 24 minutes in your mind:

"Nothing ever has happened.
Nothing ever will happen."

The first line will be contemplated on the inhale, the second line with the exhale.