An Afternoon Visit

 There can’t be a purpose to any of this, there can’t be a goal or a clearly marked destination. I take it all in, the darkness, as much as I can allow myself to open up to it, and I hold it… I eventually push it all out and I am left exhausted, empty and yet eager to begin again; each time it sits within me, the darkness, I attempt to transform it, I play with it while it’s passing through me, I attempt to leave a clear mark on its obsidian surface, maybe a small change or maybe a complete revision, a new unexpected variation, but regardless of what I do or what I fail to do, I know there is no ultimate purpose to any of my actions and I have slowly learned to accept that… My sense is that I recurrently begin a huge fire, here in this dark hole where I sit, I set the stage and light the matches but I never see the results of what I have started, it escapes far beyond my sight; I will never be there to see any result, it will have to remain completely unknown and I will keep on starting these fires, one after the other… I notice that there is something that has started to happen when I push the darkness out of me, it seems as if I’m watching a movie, an old black and white movie I have already seen a thousand times, a movie I know inside and out; it’s about a woman, an old psychic witch of some kind sitting in her dining room, and a man that comes to visit her full of questions… I can repeat each line in my head, I can eagerly anticipate each change of scene, but this time it’s different, the film itself has been transformed, I get lost in it as I watch it, I don’t know what will happen next, I take it as it comes, scene by scene, I get lost in its mysterious horizon, I know there’s something out there, still something left to discover, a puzzle waiting to be solved… Sometimes the whole thing gets away from me and I don’t understand how this is possible, how can I be lost in a film I know so well? There are many new scenes that I don’t recognize, places and people I’ve never seen before, everything around the main characters has been completely changed and there are new characters for me to try to understand and strange little creatures of horror, the sound of many voices coming through shifting shadows, I can’t recognize any of it, I can’t understand it at all… I have been pushed out of all my comfortable assumptions, I don’t understand how they changed this simple story I thought I knew so well, this movie… this dream? this memory? what happened? I don’t know who they are but I can feel their presence… I remember… there’s something I needed to find, something I needed to ask, something I needed to remember… I traveled far beyond the limits of the city in order to solve these questions, but in the story I thought I knew, the main character never leaves the city, the city is all there is for him, there’s something ominous about the world beyond the urban limits… I must have given myself permission to go out there, out beyond the scope of my memory, out where I have never been, I have to take it all in, let the strangeness of this new world slip into me, accept that there is no purpose to any of it and there can never be one, it’s the only way I can forget the shadows and become once again the main character in the story… I remember visiting a psychic, an old woman, I had questions about a strange dream I had, I remember giving her my phone number with some hesitation, I remember a few days later I got a call, an invitation, ‘Come eat with me. We can have a good long talk…’ I accepted the invitation and I went to her house late one afternoon, at the hour that she had specified. She welcomed me warmly at her door and I ate the breads and cheese that she served me, I took it all in, it was my first time there, a very small house in the middle of a vast empty field, open grassland, mountains in the distance, the sound of a river not too far away, birdsong in the air, the wind rustling the grass and the leaves… It was surprising to me that such a place could exist so close to the city I knew so well, here in this bucolic paradise I could believe that the city was a strange futuristic nightmare that had never existed, could never exist… As the evening progressed and we talked more and more, a sudden realization came over me: ‘She sees herself as a true subject, an inherently distinct individual with a very defined point of view, but she is not completely aware of me as a person. I am more like something she can play with for a while. A toy to use and then disregard.’ When I came back home from my visit with her, I was not feeling well, I started feeling sick during the trip back, sweaty, nauseous, weak; I managed to complete a few more tasks at home but I ended up falling asleep very early and I dreamt about the nature of evil… “Evil is using another subject as a tool, as an object.” It was her voice saying it in my dreams, speaking loudly, clearly, I felt her voice all around me, it came with the presence of something painful, something heavy and dark inside of me, I tried to push it all out, I tried to transform it, but it kept on coming, it kept on insisting… “The future is the nightmare of the past,” she said, “take it as it comes, transform it as much as you can and prepare for the consequences…” I didn’t want to let go of my sense of stable reality, I was suddenly terribly frightened of the underlying truth behind her words; there is no purpose to any of it, none of our collective choices, none of my individual goals, regardless of what I want or how I want it to happen, history won’t stop, not even for a moment, time will keep on moving and there will never be a clear purpose, a climactic result will never announce itself as a clear and final goal… I just have to move as if there was one, I have to believe even if only to avoid the absolute darkness of the radical nothingness that lies underneath… I fell asleep one day in the middle of the afternoon and I had a very intense dream that left me in a state of shock; I forced myself to wake up so I could write it all down. Nothing led up to it, nothing had happened earlier that could have inspired it - it came to me from nowhere apparently, a sudden drastic interruption in my daily mental routines… There were many small creatures all around me, tiny little things about three feet tall with huge eyes and smooth heads and tiny little hands that danced around constantly and left thin little trails of light as they moved, they all spoke in a single voice, a kind of telepathic chorus that allowed for a nearly perfectly synchronized speech; they surrounded me from all sides, they held me down tightly and said all as one: "Regardless of your rejections, regardless of your fears and refusals, you're still going in. There’s nothing you can do to stop us. We will put you in the hole and we will keep you in there for as long as is necessary… There’s no longer any need to fight against us, there’s nowhere to run…” I looked at them with a mixture of horror and fascination. ‘They talk about me as if I am an object to be handled, a thing to be placed somewhere until they see fit. They see themselves as subjects, each one of them a true individual, but they don’t see me as a subject. I am just a prisoner, a thing to be moved around, a thing to be held in place’ They carried me over the old dusty wooden floor of the cabin and I tried to struggle but I was absolutely helpless and in their power. “We'll dump you in there... and you won’t come out until we say so… there’s no escape…" They pointed to a small hole in the floor, a dark pit with a single trap door over it, I saw steel chains and thick steel loops meant to secure it tightly once it was closed… These strange little creatures that carried me, they seemed evil to me. ‘But what does that mean? What is evil as a thing in itself? Evil is using another being as a tool, as an object, as a thing.’ I remembered someone saying that to me long ago, I couldn’t place it, I didn’t know who said it but I remembered the words distinctly, the precise concept. They threw me into the dark hole without much resistance, I had little strength left in me, and they immediately closed the trap door, I could hear the steel chains being locked in place above me and I was left alone in the shadows… I heard them speaking as they walked away, so many of them speaking all at once: "In there you will stay and you will experience the worst horror that a living being can experience, the absolute darkness, the eternal void, the true silence, you will be shocked by its infinite absence, over and over endlessly you will be shocked, every time you feel a glimpse of hope the shadows will once again show you otherwise, take it in, push it out, there is no end to it, no help is coming… and this will all keep on going until you finally remember who you are..." Deep in the cold darkness of the hole, I knew it was all up to me; I had to work here even if it wasn’t an ideal moment to do so, I had to work here even if it was the worst possible situation; the process is the process and it never stops unless you let it die, it is up to you to keep it going, it is up to you to give it life, the result doesn’t matter, the desire for a result is the very void you are trying to escape… “The future is the nightmare of the past, an ancient horror is ready to be fulfilled and a new one is about to be discovered…” she said…“Sometimes you don’t want to let go, you don’t want to accept what is coming but whether you want to accept it or not, you are still a son and all sons pay for the sins of their fathers…” she smiled at me with a kind of relaxed self assurance that I found completely disarming. “That is the innermost nature of all history; we that live now are the product of all the many mistakes of those that came before us, history is a long parade of disasters and the wastelands that they leave behind; and history won’t stop, won’t even make a compassionate pause to let you catch a breath, it won’t let you escape, it won’t let you sit still, it won’t let you ignore it…” I looked out the window and I could almost see the world shifting around before me, something was changing and I was changing with it; if I closed my eyes long enough would I even recognize any of it anymore once I opened them again? I was changing as much as the landscape or even more so and I couldn’t keep track of the multiple ongoing mutations. “These magical creatures that you have seen in your dreams… they are known to be intermediary beings, they live above the earth but remain below heaven. You have to learn to work with them even if you are afraid of them, an individual never wants to let go of their fears but the process is the process and your particular future is also the nightmare of your particular past, the history of all humanity, the history of a single human being, it all works in the same way, you are the product of all your previous mistakes, all your previous reversals, and time won’t stop and time is nothing but relentless change, unforgiving, merciless… you will continue to slide into that future that you fear regardless of how much you struggle against it. I am sorry to be the one to tell you but the results you imagined never mattered, this story has already been written and you are not the author, you are not the one in charge…” When I was with her in her little house away from all the noise, away from all the distractions of the city, she made a promise, not to herself but to me, it was at a certain moment during our meeting when everything got very quiet and we just stared at each other for a long time, eyes wide open, focused, calm and direct, time passed by so slowly then as I looked deeply into her eyes and she never looked away, not even for a second… I had noticed that throughout our conversation she wasn’t really responding to what I was saying, it was as if anything I had to say was irrelevant, even when I mentioned the tiny beings in my dreams, she didn’t bat an eye, she didn’t react… I tried to force a response out of her by emphasizing certain words or making exaggerated gestures, maybe I did it simply out of vanity or just for my own secret amusement, to see if I could push her into some kind of reaction, shock or laughter or disgust, but the response never came; she just kept on talking about whatever she was already talking about; if she was making a point, she just kept on adding elements to her argument, if she was telling a story, she just went on to the next turn in the plot, it was up to me to listen or to get lost in her words and lose track of all possible meanings while my attention wandered over her face, her porcelain white skin, her long black hair that fell all the way to her lap… My wish for a response, for a clear indication of mutual communication, eventually disappeared, I focused on letting go of all impulses to make myself heard and I simply listened, letting her talk, focusing on the sound of her words, on the shape of her thoughts, on the music of her presence, the nature of the world as it changed around her… I was quite innocent throughout this whole experience, I didn’t want anything from her, I didn’t have anything to achieve, I had no ultimate goal… “many of these intermediary beings resemble human beings in shape…” she said more than once and suddenly, after many repetitions of the same phrase, it became clear to me what was happening, so clear that I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it before… “There are certain things that we don’t say as we may have to pay for it… modern people are not very forgiving, they reject certain thoughts, certain ideas, and they will punish those who speak them out loud, so we don’t share them, we keep them hidden, we retreat away from the world, we inhabit hermetic worlds of our own, and we accept that we will reside in them for the rest of our life.” I suddenly got the impression that for this one moment, for this one space of intimate clarity, she was not hiding as much as she usually would, she was not completely invisible, she was letting me get a glimpse behind the veil, something I had only vaguely suspected, something I yearned for without knowing what it was that I was missing… By the time everything got quiet and our gazes intertwined, I was completely open, vulnerable, raw, vibrant, I knew what she was doing and I was glad to let her proceed… at that point I had become a willing surface for her subtle unpredictable work… now I can say there’s something or someone molding me, giving me shape, changing me as much as they have changed the entire world that surrounds me, here where I sit in the darkness, here I am molded, changed, transformed; these tiny magical creatures I saw, the ones who trapped me, the ones the witch called intermediary beings, they were intent on changing me in ways I still can’t understand, something subtle, untouchable, impossible to pin down… I’m not in control, I am the product of a process of whimsical creation, playful extrapolations and variations, a musical fantasy derived from a small motif of living consciousness, a magical presence in an ocean of loneliness that never ends; and the entire process itself is about to undergo a radical shift… I fly above the earth in my dreams but something is happening far above me, something I can’t reach, something far beyond my grasp… On the one hand, I have learned something, that much I can say and maybe that is all I can ask for; the next time I encounter her she might be riding a dragon over green hills or she might be covered in a dark cloak in the heart of an old silent forest or she might not be visible at all… but I will still recognize her by the mood that will rise up within me, by the emotions that I now understand come with her presence, the eddies of pure energy that swirl around her, the vibrating spirals of untouchable light… There are some things that we necessarily don’t say, even when we are writing it all down trying to cover every detail, still there are things that we can’t say, not to anyone… Her voice is now the voice of thunder rolling over the plains, for me, her voice is the drone that underlies the wind and the rain and the tiny glitches that emerge within the waves of wild random frequencies that underly our reality, now that I clearly hear it, now that I have heard it, I can’t share what she says, I have to keep it hidden… I get the impression that something has happened, something has changed so completely that I can’t even remember how I was before, who I was… that one time I went to see her, when she asked me to come eat at her little home away from the city, she didn’t hide enough, she didn’t make enough of an effort, and in the process of revealing herself, she forced something in me to awaken, she was too open with what she was doing, too careless, reckless, playful… or maybe it was her from the beginning, maybe she was the one molding me all along; I was only a particular project, a little process which she completed on that afternoon, a process that started long before I had an inkling of what was happening, long before I was born… If that is the case then I am the product of a very long story and I am a continuation of that story as well, I am not the ultimate result, I am not the final purpose, I am not the end, I am just another step that has somehow become conscious of itself as a step and now hurtles forward into an unknown future… Take it in, the darkness, hold it, let it shift and mutate inside of you, when you’ve done enough, push it out and let it dance before you, look at it… Can you see it? It’s now alive with infinite colors…

Unknown figure in the night

 I won’t ask what the story means, as signified or as signifier, as sound or as matter, as spirit or as stone, I won’t look for anything to understand or explain, I won’t seek further ramifications. I woke up in the middle of the night in an average two-story house in the suburbs, I walked downstairs and opened the front door and walked outside for no apparent reason, I felt the cold chill hit me as soon as I stepped out, a slight wind, the sound of a dog barking in the distance, a trickle of water, a car turning on a few blocks away… Then, from the absolute darkness on the other side of the street, I heard the voice of a girl speaking to me, a young woman, an apparition, thin, small, breathy, beckoning… I couldn’t make out her specific words but I gathered she was asking for help, or maybe I only imagined her need for help, maybe I only heard what I wanted to hear; my first impulse was to be kind, to be a savior, to reach out and somehow fix the unknown problem… but then I thought of other possibilities that this unexpected situation could imply; this meeting could also be perilous, some kind of trap, a deadly con for others to read about later on social media and shudder. I determined for myself that her first objective should be to prove her good intentions towards me, prove she was not a potential danger, not a ghost or a demon, not a thief or a murderer, not a decoy or a witch, prove that she was only what she seemed to be; a vulnerable girl in need of help wandering alone in the cold darkness of a quiet American suburb… She moved closer towards me, ever so slowly, I couldn’t see her very well in the shadows, I could only barely see her walking barefoot on the asphalt, a white dress, bare shoulders, long blonde hair, wide open eyes… She was asking for the name of this street, the name of this city, my name, a name, any name… I wondered if her motives could really be to help me in some way, could she be some mysterious kind of guide, a kind of powerful angel materializing here at my door, ready to offer assistance; or maybe she was just a helpless girl, a frail young woman in danger asking for help, a lost human being, set adrift in the isolated agglomeration of a modern American city, a figure of sadness, pity, just what she seemed to be and nothing more… Was she harmless and in need of help? How does one prove that? How can one convincingly show that one doesn’t pose a threat to others? What are the true intentions that hide under so many layers of shadow? Secret machinations, evil plans, shocking twist waiting around the corner, lethal left shoe ready to drop… I am a thousand miles away from any kind of clear understanding, I am alone in the darkness outside my home and I need to decide, this is where future worlds collide and days can become dark or light depending on what path you take; this is the crucial spot where choices are meant to happen; if a stranger asks for help, if they really ask for help, they may have my number, they may take my name, they may have anything they want; if it is really a stranger and help is really all they want, I will do whatever it takes… I told her to come closer so we could talk and she did, slowly and gently, slowly enough that I still felt comfortable as she moved across the street, slowly enough that my imagination could still swirl with possibilities going in every possible direction… I didn’t look for anything to understand in what she said, in what I barely imagined that she was saying, I didn’t ask what her story meant, I didn’t know enough to ask proper questions, I simply waited quietly for her approach. “In the past, long before your time, long before the world you have known throughout your life, they depicted me as blind or blindfolded, long white cloth wrapped around my deep white eyes…” I could faintly see her lips move through the heavy shadows that surrounded me and her thin soft voice only barely carried through the dark silence that was almost as loud as a never-ending hum, a deep drone alive with tantalizing subtle detail, scattered implications… I imagined her looking at me with a kind smile, an invitation to a new and secret friendship, a welcoming glance to let me know I was safe and there had never been anything to worry about… “With the blindfold, they meant to emphasize my complete disregard for the virtuous or the powerful. They wanted to make it clear that I have no favorites, that I never pick a side before its time.” I imagined her with hair the color of the sun, flowing in the wind around her shoulders, a burst of light in between the shadows, trembling, a hint of color over a black void, a slender fish swimming among ominous black waves… “My right and left hands they used to represent good and evil. And they acknowledged that I was the source of both.” I imagined taking hours to die beneath a slab of concrete, a long and desperate death after hours of regret and self-recrimination, surrounded by laughter and jeers, the repeated knocking of final judgments sealing my fate, banishing all possibilities of rescue… What did I do that led to this? What did I do to deserve this? “At times, I had wings, to show that I am fleeting, that I won’t stay with you for long… even when it seems that I am yours, I’m just about to vanish…” I imagined the icy water of a river as it closed over my head, a sudden final clarity showing me where to find my mistakes and what led me to make them, what I could have done differently, what I should have said, where I could have walked, who I could have talked to… During the last few days before this fateful night I had hit a wall, an insurmountable barrier in my ongoing work; I had disrupted my efforts through inattention, laziness, sheer stupidity; I had lost my precious chance, and these come so rarely and fly away so soon…  I was alone in this situation I found myself in, this had become painfully clear, nobody was coming to rescue me, nobody would offer any kind of help or advice, either they couldn’t understand the situation well enough or they were far too removed to care… All I had left to do was to stay calm and watch the last ironic moments of the show, look how he destroys himself, look how he allows everything he has worked on to die a slow painful death… I had to calmly watch the final act, a kind of bemused spectator observing how I slowly fell apart, how I slowly became nothing, pure nothingness, impeccable in its sheer absence… I decided that I didn’t want to be present to see that; it would happen anyway but I refused to sit in the audience and watch it unfold; so I closed my eyes to avoid the play that was coming, to avoid all that had led up to this, the hard consequences, the near silent resolution… After some time had passed in a kind of pregnant living silence, a promise never fulfilled, cold and soft and subtle, I stood up, I looked around me, there was the chair, a wall, some books, a bed, a TV, I was still alone, completely alone, I was still without help or recourse, but everything was coming back, little by little, ever so slowly but it was coming, that which I had lost was on its way back, it was only a matter of holding on long enough for the gateway to once again fly open… For about a month I had been working on developing a state of pure solipsism - in this vibrant chamber, you simply acknowledge that you are the creator, the primary source of all creation, everything you see, everything around you for as far as you can see and farther, everything has been made by you. How can one do so much in one day? one second? How can my creative will extend so far beyond my sight? Beyond my consciousness? I saw it all as a vast communications grid binding all of life together, the galaxies, the stars, the birds, the rocks, my fingers, the light passing through my window, the floating dust, a vast network of creative impulses swirling around itself, breathing with intricate melodic desires, beating in a symphonic complex polyrhythmic statement of forbidden needs, deep fundamental demands… I had always been the creator, I have always been, it is self-evident, it is understood; once that door opens it is hard to close, it is so difficult to return to being what you were once, only yesterday, only last week… Everything that is happening, anywhere and everywhere, is my doing, a mirror of my unconscious will, a private design I could never remember composing, a swirl of simple determination extending into a web of ever more complex specificity…  How is it possible that suddenly I can see it all so easily? So clearly? When did I begin walking on this road? Where does it lead? Is there someone waiting at the end? Am I coming up on some kind of crossroads? All phenomena that I have ever encountered works on a multi-input basis, so many mouths, so many ways to feed them, so many ways to sing, so many melodies wrapped fluidly around each other, all operating far beyond currently known physical laws, integrated circuits based on ethereal chords of silver light… I can’t be anything other than the creator, to think anything else is ludicrous, inconceivable, inherently wrong by definition; I became convinced of this through long sessions of self-hypnosis, carefully planned deep inductions mixed with droning music and rhythmic chanting, a long and careful descent into madness… Here I found a warm resting place of certainty, a chamber whose only feature was to make sense and to stay that way. One hundred years ago, they would have said I was possessed by the devil, a creature of darkness had tempted me into this secret conceit and now I was trapped in a state of fanatical incoherence…  or they would have said I was a heretic, misunderstanding simple teachings meant for calm sane minds and turning them into monstrous irrational beliefs that could only overflow into dangerous transgressions… they would say that anything that now happens to me is my doing; if I am punished, I brought it upon myself, if I am killed, I asked for this final penalty, if I am tortured, it is the only true way to save me from eternal despair, I have brought it all upon myself, I have asked for whatever I am about to receive… A few decades ago, they would say I was a communist, a subversive, an ideological rebel bent on destruction, an arrogant fool who believes they know how the world should work and is ready to do anything in order to fix it, ready to break the system of relations in order to find a new reality that fits my idealized final eternal state and returns the world to its intended purpose… “Everything you see,” I would have said, “you have created. Humans have built this world that we inhabit. And we can change it all if we wish to do so. It is up to us… we can change it all from the ground up. It is our responsibility to try, it is our right to do everything within our capabilities.” Now, they will say that I am an irrational dissenter against modern society, simply insane, psychotic, divorced from simple and obvious reality and deserving of exile, to be put in a cage and forgotten until I prove that I am better, until I show that, once again, I understand, until I acknowledge and remember what I should never have forgotten… Only insane people believe that they have always been the creator and they can’t be anything other than the creator, only insane people work towards placing themselves in this self-referential chamber and lock the door behind them so there’s no way to escape, no obvious way to return to once obvious normality… I closed my eyes for a moment and pictured her blindfolded, a white cloth wrapped around her eyes, tied behind her head and pressing against her golden hair; I pictured wings flowing out from her shoulders, fluttering in the cold wind which seemed to grow stronger as she moved closer; her right and left hands were raised towards the stars, an ancient pose of invocation, showing a complete disregard for simple modern human conventions… She was not normal, it came in a sudden flash, this was not a normal meeting between two normal people in the middle of the night, an hour when people don’t come out of nowhere and start walking towards you eager to talk, when people don’t start simple conversations for the sake of making small talk, this was deeply strange, this was something otherwise… I didn’t have the words to describe it, I didn’t have a way to understand it, to pinpoint it as a specific event within the expected schemes of modern human behavior… When I saw that her hands were raised, I knew that this was unlike any other meeting between two people, this was a night unlike any other night… One hundred years ago, they would have said she was possessed by the devil, fundamental evil emanations flowed through her every manifestation and were bound to contaminate everything and everyone around her if left unchecked… I should run inside and close the door and cross myself to ward against her coming; I should close my eyes and pray feverishly and run to make sure that all other doors of the house were also closed and all the windows were tightly shut… Now they would call her insane, a dangerous mad person wandering in the night in search of some kind of understanding, someone to help her make sense of so many questions that swirl around endlessly inside her head, answers and questions bouncing on top of each other in an eternal loop… If it had been daylight, maybe she would have been just another face in the crowd, a pretty woman with nothing in particular to say, a shopper in a mall wandering from store to store, a friendly face at the coffee shop, maybe I would have stood there listening to her mutterings, waiting for the next set of coded instructions, trying to make out what to do next and how to do it, how to approach the next curve on the road, what questions to ask, how to listen… With a sense of relief and deep existential terror, I understood that to her I was also a mirage; she was dreaming me as I emerged from the shadows, I was the strange ghost that she was invoking with all her might, I was a projection of her unspoken drives, I was the unknown figure in the night, I was both a threat and a promise, I was the living darkness… I sat down on the threshold looking up towards the street; she was still moving, she was still getting closer, closer and closer… I suddenly became aware that I had never seen this place before, this place which had seemed so familiar just moments ago, this street, this house, it was all unknown, all brand new, I was completely surrounded by strangeness… If I am the creator, I must have seen everything already, I must have made it myself and I would hold on to some kind of memory, some kind of knowledge, but this was all mysterious, drastically uncanny, alien yet vaguely familiar, both at once… I stood up to look at the tall white walls of the strange house in which I found myself, what I had assumed to be my home; I looked at the painting hanging just beside the door, a simple statement in bright red letters: “Remember, you are God, you have always been God…” Did I put that there? Did I paint it? I looked through a small window facing the street, cut green grass, a tall tree with white leaves and thin branches, a plastic toy laying on the grass, a piece of paper dancing in the wind… I wanted to see everything outside through the frame of this small window; a dark blue car parked along the curb, a no parking sign slightly bent by time… then I walked inside and the new impressions multiplied, everything in this house was as unfamiliar as what I had seen outside; a long narrow stairway leading upstairs, a wooden division in a wide square room, a tall red candle on a small round table, a puppet hanging from a nail… Up on the second floor, I stepped into a wide circular room, lit from beneath by soft white light; someone was inside this room but I couldn’t see them, someone was waiting on the other side… I felt an intense pressure, so much pressure to step out, to turn around, a strong tendency for me to forget what I was doing in that particular room and to continue walking, to find myself back at the door, back where I started, facing the street and waiting for her to cross… By stepping into this room, I was moving against the current, I was changing the story but the story had its own momentum, its own forward moving force… “Everything you see,” she said, and I could hear her now as if she was standing right behind me, talking close to my ear, “you have created. You have made all of this. As strange as it may seem. As unfamiliar as it may be, this is all your doing.” I went to sit on a corner in the vast living room, I insisted on a process of careful discovery, I wanted to understand this house, to understand how it came to be here, and I wanted to step into that place that was seemingly forbidden, that circular room bathed in soft white light… Who was there? Why was there so much resistance when I tried to step through that particular door? But again, I felt the tendency to leave, to step back outside to where I imagined that she was still waiting, still slowly walking towards me across the street… I realized I had never learned the history of this place, I didn’t know how I came to be here or how this house had come to be here in the first place; who put it here, who designed it, what was its purpose? I insist again, I make a huge effort and walk back up the stairs, I want to enter that circular room that I glimpsed only for a moment, I insist, I move against the current, it takes all my strength, it takes a will that I am not sure I understand, a rush of fiery determination, I don’t know where it’s coming from, I don’t know how I invoked it just now, I insist and I insist again and again and again… and suddenly, without warning, I become lucid. “Everything that is happening,” she says, “is your doing. All of it. The house, the painting, the candle, the light, the night outside, the cold wind and me… me, most of all.” Most of the tantalizing depths in all the many stories I remember reading or writing have been completely unconscious, a creation of dark forces beyond my reach, blind intentions, blind design; I never knew what they meant, I didn’t know their hidden purpose and I would never know, I would never have full satisfaction… I finally decided that this was a special night, a night to do something very different, something unexpected, something I wouldn’t usually do and I might never do again… With a sense of hesitant relief, of utter, complete humiliation, I surrendered to the maelstrom of strong winds that surrounded me, a tornado of accumulated desire, stronger than me, stronger than my wishes or fears, stronger than my will… I found myself a thousand miles from her, far enough that I could only barely hear her thin little voice anymore, a few notes of languid melody, a word here, a sigh, a single breath… Worlds had collided and the elements that made my story had vanished.
The days after our meeting were dark and cold; I found that there was no further need for outside pressure, no need for assurances or contradictions… I had given her my number, I had given her my name, she knew where to find me, sooner or later she would come back. There was no need to wait impatiently, there was no need to even think of her, there was no need to try to call; she was on her way, she knew where I lived, she knew where I was hiding, she knew I would still be here when she arrived… I understood even then that she was only a mirage, always had been an illusion; I was only dreaming when she came to me; she was a ghost to scare small children, a story to be told around a fire to banish with laughter and songs after screams of delighted fright, a tale to be repeated and then forgotten for years, entire lifetimes… I would never ask what this story meant, as signified or signifier, I had nobody to ask, I had nowhere to look for an answer, I would not look for anything to understand, I would not wait or long for a clear and final resolution, I would not gather my thoughts to find a single explanation, a diagram of intertwined concepts softly landing on a final point… It was only a story and stories like this mean nothing, go nowhere, they never end and they never arrive at a satisfying final act.

Faceless Game

 

For weeks I have lived with a sense of heaviness, of darkness; things are moving slowly, reluctantly, as if they wanted to stay still, to fade away slowly and eventually disappear… I see it as my inherent duty to order my affairs and deeds, to oversee and maintain all that is around me; I must keep my attention fixed on all that is happening here, now, I cannot get distracted from my immediate surroundings, I must not get lost in things that are beyond my control… and yet my friend is trapped in a dark hole where he has been placed, sealed away, banished, caged, and he has called upon me in his time of need… I cannot be present where he is, I am so far away, and there is no way for him to get out, no way to escape, no way to find a clear sense of relief, no sanctuary, no obvious path to follow that will bring him back home. I remember myself now as the flower that blooms at the heart of the tornado, and I will continue to live here at the heart unto the ends of eternity; I am destined to forever rule over all small living creatures, over all those tiny things that thrive in the moonlight and hide from the sun, I am here to guide their path, to gift them the electrical impulse that moves them, that pushes them forward, to offer the rhythm that urges them to rise, but I am not just, and I am not kind; I am distant, unreachable, a cold surface of stone, metal and glass, incomprehensible even to the few that would care to know me… From the ruins of the ancient labyrinth that encircles the world, where I have spent most of my days submerged in a kind of aleatoric study, I have carefully created a catastrophic archeology of desire, a deep palimpsest of endless dreams; I make myself readily available to those that would trust in me, but they must be careful in spite of my warm and generous offer, as I am not merciful, I am not loving, I am not open and I don’t look back. There is no place, anywhere within the radius of my influence, that is devoid of me; understanding that universal glowing omnipresence is essential to reaching a state of true devotion, a clear true sight; if someone wishes to love me they should be prepared to do so, no matter what my intentions, no matter what my secret predilections, no matter how deep my secrets, they are a mystery even to myself. I can only barely speak my own language; I rarely find reason to use it. There is no way to get out. I will forever remain where I am. I am as trapped as he is, completely devoid of options, but my illusion is currently lighter and his is spiked and lined with thorns; I reach out to him recurrently and he responds sometimes but the messages are slow and the rhythms are broken… I am left with a sense of heaviness, of darkness, of imperviousness, a cold shadowy nonchalance resting on a bed of silence. I am driving back home one day, listening to an old song I had almost forgotten, a song from my childhood that we used to sing out loud when we were young boys without fully understanding the lyrics, neither their simple meaning nor their unspoken implications; I listen now as I drive and I sing along with the strong thick voice coming from the speakers and I am suddenly confronted with my recurring tendency towards melancholy, an endless yearning for a past I can’t quite grasp or understand; I turn right on Golf Course road and I suddenly feel that older me fully present within me, the quiet thin boy with all the toys, the one that lived on a little side street in a lower middle class neighborhood built by his own Dad… For a moment I feel as if it is really me, the one that is driving, I am the one I knew, I am the one I once recognized when I looked in the mirror, holding my eyes open, the one that didn’t know anything but wanted to know everything as quickly as possible… I let him go so many years ago, I changed in so many unpredictable ways, and in the process, I also lost some of my basic humanity, the quality of simple naivete, the eager curiosity of a pampered child looking through expensive comic books while the world burned outside; that me is now a fading image, a barely recognizable photograph, and all his friends are gone and they won’t be returning, they have faded into a dark cloud that cannot be breached, a silence that can’t be punctured by music or magic; this sudden vision, as I drive and listen to the song, is only the fading illusion of what I was, what I was supposed to be, what I should have become… I recognize this territory where I live now, this complex chamber where I move and act, as a big game modeled on some intricate ancient language that nobody ever bothered to research or understand, it is not a space where a game takes place but a game in itself, the materialization of an intricate infinite game, a game that doesn’t differentiate between ritual and art, between causes and effects, between frivolous rewards and cruel punishments, it is not a game of intelligence like chess (that old cross between mysticism and personal awareness that my father taught me, sitting up on a rumpled bed, the same game I used to play on the street with my friends while dogs barked trying to jump over concrete walls and storm clouds gathered in the distance…) this one is a game of pure luck, a lottery, something freely floating between religion and faith and a secret impulse towards dissonant harmony, where broken glass is the perfect rhythm section and clusters of notes are the underlying ominous drone; this game is unpredictable, merciless, untouchable, it can end your participation at any time, cancel your ticket without warning; and it has no end in itself, it has no ultimate purpose, no reason to exist, no motivation to stop. This calamity that has befallen my friend has overwhelmed my sense of probabilities, the reality of it keeps on hitting me in recurrent waves - waves of disbelief, waves of sorrow, waves of anxious desire, when I manage to forget, the world itself reminds me, I hear it in the cry of a bird, I see it in the many shades of rust on an old abandoned red car, I see it in the remains of a picnic in the park across the street, in the graffiti on the side of a truck; I wish to express my love for him, in the best words I can find, in the best actions I can muster, and I am prepared to do so, no matter what the implications, no matter what the result; but there are only so many words I can say and only so many actions available; all people have a duty and a right to spread themselves in all directions, to explore who they are and who they want to be, to connect with who or what they wish to connect with, and to abandon anyone that they wish to abandon, the ultimate right to become the stars of their own universe, the central point of gravity in their own system of radiant light; understanding that this duty, this right, is attached to each nucleus of consciousness, no matter what form covers them, is essential to learning the nature of true devotion, true friendship, true contact, true love… I couldn’t change who he was, I couldn’t change what he was doing, I can’t protect him now; at times I feel calm, almost as if nothing has happened, as if everything remains as it always was; then I am hit again by a renewed wave of anxiety, a growing pressure for a resolution that will not come, a conclusion that refuses to arrive… the game is all powerful, this game that engulfs us, that surrounds us on all sides, and I can only change very small things within it, tiny shifts in the underlying machinery, slight adjustments in a constantly changing maze filled with traps; the game is not kind as it has no counterpart to be an object for its kindness, the game is not merciful as it has no emotions to be a source for its mercy, anyone who resists the rules of this game is evil by definition, beyond question, beyond doubt, anyone who revolts will end up missing, occluded, forgotten, sealed away in a black hole behind thick tall walls where no one can ever find them, no matter how hard we try… I think and I think and I am hit again by a renewed wave of sadness, a sense that all justice is an illusion, has always been an illusion, a sense that the game has never been just, the game will not bend to my pleading, as much as I might hate it I have no choice but to play. I try to remain calm but the calamity keeps on hitting me in recurrent waves that reach out to me through the ordinary moments that the world has to offer. I see it in the color of dust by the side of the road, I feel it in those waking dreams before dawn when darkness hasn’t quite vanished and sunlight hasn’t quite arrived… this thing with my friend, this thing that has happened to him, this thing that I cannot forget, this thing that insists on being real as much as I want it to vanish… It is a precise measure of one's inner strength of will, the weight of one’s true presence in a vast maze of illusions, to know how far one can live without meaning, how long can you go without purpose or a waiting distant beckoning light; this place where I live is a big game, not a territory where a game takes place but a game in itself; how far can I bear to live within a meaningless game, a world of profit, exchange and betrayals, how long can I play a game with no room for subtlety, loyalty or endless threads of thought resistant to conclusions or dogma; for years I have attempted to organize it within my own mind, I have tried to make it make sense like chess, clear pieces, clear movements, clear results, one part here, one part there, one part that is many parts, one part that is alone, one part that comes undone; but all these parts never quite come together, all these many parts they always end up falling apart in a shower of emptiness that brings me back to the start… My friend told me once within the trust of a special esoteric circle, a moment of vulnerability and simple confidence, about a secret magical agreement that he had made, an agreement we could make as well, the two of us, if I wished to do so, the whole thing was a gentle process of luck and whimsy, untouchable, merciless, unpredictable, but there was a hint of something steady hiding within it, something strong and true; I cannot betray him now by repeating the words he spoke then but they are coming back to me, more and more, in the last few days; I hear them when I close my eyes to go to sleep, I hear them when I walk alone, wandering without a goal… He tried to insert himself into the game as a kind of psychoactive virus but he didn’t fully understand the game’s true nature; a virus has only two parts: a bit of hidden information at its heart and a wrapping of solid armor, of identical repeating blocks of steel meant to protect what hides inside; my friend has now lost his armor, it has been stripped from him by force and only the heart is left, helpless, vulnerable and alone… Many months ago I sent him a carefully worded message to let him know that he should not stay where he was, he should not remain placid and comfortable, waiting for the next shoe to drop, waiting for the game’s minions to come and get him, he should seek a place in the wilderness, a refuge, a dark oasis, away from the reach of the game, from its sleek and cold agents; I know he got my message but I think he was angry with me for having sent it, he resented the implications of it, he didn’t want to become an old story of a disappearance, a cautionary tale to prevent further turbulence in the map, he refused to become a scapegoat destined to bear the sins of others, the transgressions of nights almost forgotten, almost but not quite, he was confident in his own strength, his own resiliency, his own ability to resist; he gave his secret enemy a face and a name and he challenged him to battle, a fight he was sure to win as he had won at everything before now, always, at everything, he had won; I saw what was happening, he had modeled his entire life on a beautiful and delicate ancient process, a careful climbing up into invisible heights, up to remote chambers of unspeakable light, wisdom, clarity, truth beckoned at the top… I told him, slowly and carefully, that the game is real, the game has no face, and will not make an announcement when it comes for you, its voice is cold and final, it doesn’t play by your rules, it creates its own, it encircles you with them in a tight embrace that sucks in all heat and light, when it comes, the game will not be subtle and it won’t even acknowledge your wish to fight, you will be defeated before you even know the battle has begun; I said it all and I said it all again but he could no longer differentiate between ritual and personal awareness, between mysticism and the dynamics of a hidden tribe, between religion and the flourishing of new forms of art; in spite of my attempts to warn him, the ultimate and radical power of the game eluded him until it was too late, until he was held prone under its unforgiving lights… There are only two elements left in me after all that has happened; I still have a bit of presence and I still have a bit of memory, a few photographs, a few recordings and writings and an unexplainable sense of death and renewal, of rebirth at the edge of dawn; I have come to understand that I am in the process of falling apart and the parts that are flying away were never of my own design, they were not what they seemed and I can still stand strong without them… How far can one go without meaning, how long can one bear to live in a meaningless void? One morning just before dawn, I walked through my house, so quiet, so cool, so open to possibilities, a white door, a carpeted hallway, a bookshelf, I walked to where there should have been a stairway, banisters the color of forgotten dust which tremble when I press my hand against them, but where the stairs should have been there was only a thick open tube shrouded in total darkness; I immediately knew I was supposed to jump into it, I didn’t know why I should jump and I don’t know how I knew that I should do it, it was like a forgotten habit that I was powerless to stop, something programmed into me long ago, before I ever came here, before I ever learned about the game, before I became aware of its cold endless surface; I heard the distant cry of a bird outside the windows, a yearning song of unspoken hunger, a message from the most fundamental locus of life, and I jumped into the darkness below me… For a moment I simply slid down as I would expect, gravity was doing what it does and I would soon land at the bottom with a sudden burst of pain and disappointment, but then, instead of falling, I began to float, hovering on a thick soup made of shadows, and as I floated I became aware of who I was, long before the past I still remembered, before I became me as a clearly defined identity, long before the name or the place or the crying… For a moment, I became all powerful, I became the center of all living things, I became the one that others pray to, the one who gives the gift of life, the one whose nature is light and clarity; I was all powerful and all-knowing but I could only change very small things, things so small as to seem insignificant, the route of a leaf flying in the wind, the resting place of a broken shard of glass, and I could only accomplish these insignificant tasks for a very short time… Soon I was back where I was supposed to be, lying on my bed curled up in a ball, and the moment was set aside as just another dream, just another flash of lucidity in a daze of recurring digressions, there was nothing left to do, not even the subtle dances at the corners of my mind, not even a touch of hope attached to a leaf of grass… It is ultimately a measure of one's strength of will to know how far one can go without strong clear meaning, how long can one bear to live in a meaningless void: a world where your friend gets trapped and becomes forever lost and there is no longer a way to find him, no longer a way to bring him back.

A Moment's Notice

 

Over the last few days I have been feeling as if by reading very carefully and listening very attentively, more than usual, more than ever, I am slowly coming back to my intended path; I haven’t slept much, I don’t sleep much anymore, even though I try to rest at night and even close my eyes repeatedly in the afternoons to try to fade away and rest, but I do read a lot, constantly, voraciously, all kinds of books and periodicals; memoirs, stories, philosophical statements, scientific theories, structuralist critiques, fantastic tales of warriors and heroes; and I watch TV; horror movies, reality shows, videos on YouTube about games and politics, and I listen to music at random; Bartok, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Autechre, a flurry of rock and pop, old stuff I used to like so long ago, songs I haven’t listened to for decades, nostalgic journeys through bossanova, Nueva Cancion, Classical guitar and piano, simple statements from another age; structured randomness has taken a hold of me, the constant calling of reason hovering over chaos; if I say A, then B follows; if I hear C, then D only makes sense; and the next step hides behind another roll of the dice, another flurry of contingency over a clear surface of order… maybe during one of these many afternoons that have come and gone the Other slipped into me without warning; nobody announced its coming, nobody held the door open and invited it inside; one moment I was me, the one I used to know, the one I believed in with a quality of permanence that seemed to stand beyond any possible questions or doubts and the very next moment, without any buffer, without a sound, I was Other; alien, strange, uncanny, no explanations, no theories, no structures floating in midair… I now remember my father as a mysterious self-created god, a being full of spite and resentment, a monster I could never fully understand while he lived regardless of how many times we talked; hours and hours discussing movies, books, music, conspiracy theories, the endless evils of the empire, regardless of how deep we delved into the inherent nature of things, consciousness, morality, duty, how much or how little we asked of each other, he could never understand me, he never even tried, not really, there was no point in making a genuine attempt at exploring your own shadow… what could be gained from such an effort? What could be found in the simple absence of light? From before my first physical appearance in this world, I was meant to be an external image of an unknowable figure; instead I became a deformed mirror, a broken creature that refused to say yes when it was only normal to expect obedience… Years of saying no, years of refusal, and now I have no choice but to accept… The higher I go into this strange new space where I am no longer what I was, the more there is a distinct chance that something new will happen, I can feel it, something is coming, something is close by… I won’t find the truth of it in the current appearances, in what passes as understood and firmly determined images all around me, but in the fateful path of their innermost tendencies, the route on which they are traveling which casts a shadow on its own future, the curve of its habits, the cumulative effects of their recurring causes… This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, for so many years, waiting as I sat in silence, staring at a world full of open questions and uncertainty, this is the moment I have written about in so many stories and blogs, the moment I have asked about and I have talked about with so many different people… Now what is there to do? What is the appropriate response when that thing you’ve been waiting for finally happens? I fear that this is the test I have been aiming for and I am not ready, not quite prepared, this is the doorway that opens once and only once before closing forever, that moment when I am put to the test and everything I have described in detail and everything I have practiced and prepared for in the quiet darkness of my room is put to the test as well… and in spite of my tendency towards complete solitude I still yearn for a direct and clear response- a response most deep, most honest, most real; only in such a response will I find true contact, true intimacy, in the eyes, in the body, deep pleasure, deep pain… I still long for an intensity that seems irrevocably lost in the past; The Other has come in to my house, the house, our house, and I didn’t notice the moment when it entered, nobody told me it was coming, one moment there was me alone, eyes open, breathing slowly, and the next moment it was Other, unknown, unnamable, vibrant as a multitude of eyes staring at nothing in particular… I have moved through the world making choices at random, a new choice on every corner, a new path opened up by a new call to chance; this is how I came to see father as a mysterious mythical figure, made of dirt, stone and broken mirrors, something distant, unknowable, incomprehensible, an idol attached to a cause without the heaviness of a conclusive effect, an older man that gave me nothing but expected everything in return, I was meant to be his mirror but I became his shadow, a senseless mirage, a ghost that was never acceptable among the living… For a moment, in that eerie silence between words, I felt as if I was talking about my old friend, who became my brother, who became my mentor, who became a fading voice on the phone, who became a story, but I didn’t want to hear it, I didn’t want to hear the potential implications of the recognition of hidden patterns, I didn’t want to see what was lying quietly under questions dangling without answers, no further statements to be made in that direction, no further inquiries will be accepted, my friend is my friend and my father is my father and my father tried to be my friend but he failed in the worst way possible and there’s nothing more to say about him and nothing more will be coming out of him, no matter how many times I call… all I ever really wanted was a direct and clear response, a ball that bounces back and then bounces again, the simplest of games, the most basic interaction, no specific content attached, no final statement, no call to action, only the clear rhythm of the ball as it returns to me, as it comes back to its starting point ready to be hit once again; only in such a simple answer can I find true recognition… it’s in the eyes, it’s in the body, a pleasure too subtle to express, a pain too deep to fear, intensity escaping language, a dance in a dark void where only music can linger… There are no further questions within me but there is still a deep mystery, no need for organized discourse cycling around it, no spirals of words, no dances of linear light, movement is its own justification, but it must be done on purpose, it must be done consciously, I have to be present at the scene of the crime or no crime may ever happen; when I calmly change my subtle perception of time, all other perceptions change as well, in ways both extreme and microscopic, it’s unavoidable… But now I feel weak, I am not up to the task, too much for me, a disappointment after all the energy that was surging through me just a few days ago; I have completed all the basic assignments and I have come to expect a reward; I have to admit, as much as I am ashamed by it, I still want him to be satisfied with me, I still want him to like what I do even if he doesn’t understand it, I still want him to notice, I still want him to respond… But that ball will never bounce back, that ball is never returning, a dead ball in a hall of broken mirrors… In the end, I won’t find the truth in appearances, it will necessarily be hidden behind heavy dusty doors and thick bars of steel, if I find it at all it will be bound deep within the most subtle of tendencies, the most tender movements, a sound so light that it barely exists, the noise of a quiet room in the brief space before daylight, the sound of eyes closing before finally falling asleep… I listen carefully and a multitude of voices speak to me, they promise to take me to dangerous places, places best avoided by reasonable citizens of the human world, they pull me towards inhuman desires, desires that slowly become more and more concrete, more and more real, with every moment that passes… By cooking the secret substance, everything that was alive within it will be killed, will disintegrate, and the whole process will emerge into the realm of the symbolic, will become eternal, light as air, a flurry of distinct and precise relationships without a solid foundation, this is the way I will change my perception of time and all other perceptions, future or past, will change along with it, the I that I was will disappear in all directions and I will never be and I will never have been and the memory of who and where will fade and this moment when everything changes itself will mean nothing, meaning itself will break into a million pieces that can never be put back together again… I came back from my initial expeditions into the vast unknown beyond intellectual categories with a kind of special knowledge, intricate yet fluid like smoke, just solid enough to put into practice but too elusive to write down into a stable dogmatic set of rules; I used it to enhance my conditioning and the subtle post-hypnotic effects of having traveled so far away while remaining somewhat aware of my role in the ongoing human drama; it all worked beyond what I had thought possible, beyond what I thought to be the limits of the real… I’m now on my way to dangerous places, to subtle chambers that slowly become more and more distinct and language breaks down as I try to grasp them; I will suffer these challenges in secret, in a place where everyone that ever was is still with me, the dead, the living, the estranged, the too well known, the mythical, the flimsy, the deep, and yet I remain completely alone; a complex, infinite labyrinth expands before me, hallways and escalators and long narrow tubes and open skylights, vast dark rooms full of birds waiting in dark corners, open circular halls of stone walls and arched doorways, that inscrutable place where I always was but I didn’t know it, I couldn’t remember.
I walked outside my home one cool and windy morning, just in time to see a young man stepping out from an old white car, a classic Plymouth with a few small dents along its right side and a little plastic tree hanging from its rearview mirror. He was wearing a white button up shirt and black pants and he walked slowly towards my house, with an air of distinct and comfortable familiarity. The house, my house, our house. I heard him speak, so softly it was almost impossible to hear. “Let me grab my keys. It’s time we went somewhere… somewhere we have never been. Let’s go there together. Hurry before the gateway closes.”