August 31, 2010
On a pilgrimage to my past, I encounter the ghost of my own ambition. She's eating crackers.... Now here we are, shelves and shelves of books: what were we thinking: print is the only lasting fame? The printed word, obsolete. OBSOLETE, carved into the headstone of the present.
There is something noble in recording, though no one reads it. It not being about “hits” or readership or whatever that implies. Just myself and my pen: we might as well be on a voyage around the world in a submarine, the world's waters passing blackly past the round portal where I sit in my pressure-optimized bubble, surveying the scattered contents of my own brain: a shiny penny from 1957, the last hurrah, Abe Lincoln's assassination, jelly on toast, a neighbor's laugh, the particular way in which passion allows for focus on the visual, a yeti I once imagined who now, in his dotage, feels lonely in his ice cave, and wonders whether he should take up knitting – socks, maybe, or striped scarves; what I intended and left undone, the curves of my signature on a document I couldn't read. Every once in a while, a ghostly squid tentacle flashes by, and I remind myself I'm not alone among creatures: there are others like me, with as many arms, with as poor a vision.
Why do I want the chronicler's pallor, his twisted bedsheets, his bachelor's dinner of PB & J? Surely there is some other Fate, hell on wheels, a motel with the light on, a moth-motel where all those light-besotted moths congregate and beat their dusty wings, pollinate our dreams.
And so I come again, and come again: this is my life, this thing without form, no plot, all sub-plots, plotted out for blotting out: we none of us live very long beyond the grave. It has to be that there is something larger than “I,” a sensory organ, the mind of God who blinks into and out of existence like a Christmas light in a string slung over the antler of a plastic reindeer on a suburban lawn.
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