I imagine these days he is glad to be free and on his own. It’s hard for me to imagine him far away, alone, laughing, buying groceries, walking on the grass. It’s hard for me to stop imagining.
We used to live in a house on the top of a hill. From the windows upstairs, we had a wide open view of the city and the ocean in the distance… I could see it all from the balcony outside my room and even from the garden when there were few clouds. There were tall pine trees all around us and the songs of birds would serenade us in the morning and in the late afternoon.
Our landlords were an Italian couple that were old friends of his. I never got along too well with them but I rarely saw them so it didn’t matter. I spent a lot of my time hiking up and down the trails that surrounded us. I rarely ran into anyone.
He left one morning without saying goodbye. It may be that he did say goodbye in his own way but I didn’t understand it. He had his own way of doing things. That is why we came to work together in the first place. His way was distinct and so was mine. If he did say goodbye in some way, I didn’t catch it. It flew right past me like so many other things.
Now I spend my afternoons looking out from the window at the ocean. I imagine I can see waves and people but I can only see a thin blue line and the sky above it. Maybe white clouds, maybe a plane passing by. I don’t know if he’s still out there or if he is even alive. I like to talk to him silently but even in my own mind he rarely has any answers.
I picture him sitting in front of me while I say something like this:
"You always admired nature. But in nature everything feeds off of everything else - nothing is independent - there's a constant chain of eating and being eaten. In this way the Circle takes shape,
it diversifies, it grows. But it doesn’t grow in a linear way. It's more like a web, like a large expansive novel. Maybe you will be able to hear this from me. As novels are what you write and read, what you love to devour. This is like a novel that doesn't start at the beginning. This story that we are a part of. It’s a novel that doesn't start with this novel in itself, it doesn't even start with the book that holds it
but somewhere else. The initial moments of this novel are in another book or in a lonely dark street where some kind of crime is about to happen or in your own silent absence as you observe a group of children playing and the children never turn around to see you. They never even notice that you are there.”
(In terms of an explanation, I should say it clearly just so that there is no potential confusion: Back then we were poets. Both of us. All of us. And everything around us was some form of poetry… The house. The landlords who rarely came. The ocean in the distance. The sound of the neighbors fighting. The birds and the cars sliding up the hill, driving right past us. All complex, incomplete, infinite, incomprehensible. All pregnant and full of meaning. All about to burst.)
I imagine him ignoring everything I say. He just looks away and smiles faintly. He never even turns around.
“Life has taken many turns. It will take many more turns in the future. This adventure isn’t over yet.”
I don’t say it. He doesn’t say it either. We’ve said it enough that it doesn’t need to be repeated.
***
Many years ago we lived in a place that was full of magicians, warlocks, psychics, necromancers, prophets. Everyone had something they could do and each and every one of them was eager to show you they could do it, explain it in great detail, demonstrate each variation, explain it again. We were the same. We were as eager to show off our skills as they were. It was exciting, beautiful, chaotic and overwhelming all at once. So many illusions, so many beautiful visions, so many words, so many gestures.
Eventually we both came to understand that these were all costumes. Maybe careful and elegant costumes, maybe costumes badly made. But still costumes. It took many years for both of us to see it and then a few more years for both of us to say it out loud and agree.
That place is where we met, that is how we began to work. We left that place together and found the house at the top of the hill. There we decided to work quietly, without explanations, without long demonstrations, barely talking at all. Just the two of us, away from all peering eyes and gossiping mouths.
Our work together was very simple. I breathed slowly with him. And he breathed deeply with me. The slower we breathed together and the deeper we breathed together the more attention we would build up, the more attention flowed through us. It was as if we summoned attention itself out of the emptiness of the void.
(We saw attention as a force upon itself, a kind of electrical energy that we couldn’t see with our eyes but which made itself known when it was present.) When the rhythm of our breaths locked in and attention was fully present all around us, then time itself would slow down. (Other things happened but any further description beyond that point is empty and pointless.)
After many experiments of this kind, we decided to become artists. We became writers, musicians, painters, storytellers. We put out one creation after another and we went out into the city to find places to show our work. We met many other artists and they showed us what they did and we, in turn, showed them what we did. We would make a brief comment about their art and they would make a brief comment about ours. It was expected. Then we laughed together and said some general things about art and life, and they recommended restaurants and cafes, and we recommended books and movies.
Soon we realized that all artists (no matter what art they make, no matter how they make it) are blind.
Including us. Specially us. No artist can ever know what others see in their art - so no artist can ever know what they are producing for their audience. They can't know if it's good or bad, beautiful or ugly. They can’t know if it’s simple or sophisticated, if it’s shallow or deep, if it’s a dull copy or something entirely new. They can only know if they sell it, if people want it, but they can never know why people want it in the first place, why they buy what they sell; or why they don’t buy it or why they don’t want it.
There’s a gap that can never be breached, a dark chasm that remains dark and insurmountable.
***
One day, back in our home atop the hill, we faced a kind of subtle barrier that appeared in the middle of our work. It was a barrier that we could both feel and recognize but neither of us could describe it. It was something strange and mysterious that we would both have to overcome in order to continue but neither of us had any idea how to do it. We didn’t even have the language necessary to speak about it. We were both at a loss and we both knew it.
That night, I said to him: “Life will take many turns. It has to. But our adventure together will never come to an end.”
The next afternoon I left. That was my way of saying goodbye.
***
Together we became poets. Together we became prophets, psychics, magicians, warlocks, necromancers. All of it at once.
We had learned to play music with our breath. Music devoid of objective, of scales or tones, of cadences or any overt or subtle signs of completion. Music eternal and full. Music from the void and for the void. After that, everything became possible.
Each measure of our breath had become a circle, a repeating melodic motif with an endless spiral of potential creation. The longer the motif was, the more attention we would summon. The slower the motif was, the more time would slow down. At the heart of it were the endless imperfections of air coming in and out of ourselves, the very seed of time hidden within our bodies, coming in and out through our noses and mouths.
When he finally left it seemed that he had taken with him our shared dreams of future history, our private labyrinth thread through an endless world of choices and dead ends. So much work had been left undone, so much terrain had been left unexplored. I felt as if I had been given a book that was missing many chapters and I would never be able to find the rest.
I remained at home, what had been our home. The Italian couple let me stay even though they didn’t really know me. I did my best to be friendly to them, to show them I could be trusted. They were as friendly as they could be and I returned their attempts at friendship as much as I could. I’ve never been good at those things. At this point, it’s too late to fix that.
I still hiked the trails but not as much as I did before. The empty paths seemed emptier, the open sky seemed more foreboding.
In those first few weeks, I became the living embodiment of a dark nihilistic ideology, something tortured, vicious, angry, heavy with menace. I was someone who never felt quite at home, no matter where I was. Upstairs, downstairs, the basement, outside, the city, the beach, in dreams, awake. I always felt a sense that something was about to go wrong, something terrible was about to happen. Because this place - no matter what place it was- was actually not mine, I didn’t belong here. I had never truly belonged.
I knew in the deepest corners of my mind that the Circle was lost and there was no way to save or recover it.
As the months passed, as they years passed, I began to forget. I went out onto the trails more often, I started to breathe once again.
***
“Life will take many turns,” I said to him.
It was the sort of thing I had heard many times before. It was supposed to mean something. Life would take turns but the adventure that was our Circle had come to an end. I didn’t say that. I didn’t need to say it. My actions spoke for themselves.
One afternoon many years later, in a city across the ocean where he would never be able to find me, I observed a group of children playing. I sat on a bench across from a playground and I observed them carefully. A little blond boy in green shorts, a little red haired girl in a white dress, a little Latin boy in loose black pants.
I asked myself as I watched them: “What will these kids become fifteen years from now? What about when the next big turn comes around? What about forty years from now? Will they ever experience the Circle? Will any of them even try? Maybe one of them will skulk in an alleyway about to commit some kind of crime. Maybe another one will work in a pharmacy, the kind tucked away in an old street with newspapers and trash fluttering in the wind over the asphalt. Maybe another will become a tired and bored bureaucrat, silently hoping for death to arrive and take him away. Maybe one of them will have left this place altogether, this entire city, this strange country of whispers and shadows. Just to find some kind of horrible life elsewhere. No matter how far you run, the horrible and dead is always available, always knocking at the door.”
(In terms of an explanation, I should say this clearly, to avoid any kind of unnecessary confusion:
The first stages of this story happen in another place, in a different story written in a different voice with different characters, in a lost poem written on a napkin, in some other kind of broken fragmentary text never to be found again, somewhere else, somewhere that is not here, not in the story that you are reading. The story I’m telling you doesn't start here, it doesn't start with me, it doesn’t start when we met or when we parted, it doesn't even start at the beginning, it certainly doesn’t start at the end.
This story is like a very long complex novel that will never be finished, a novel doesn’t even exist in one particular place or time. Some of it you will have to produce on your own. That part is invisible to me as only you can create it.
I leave it up to you to understand and construct it but not in a linear way, not in a sequence full of closures and final statements, clear curtain calls and formal endings. This story diversifies, it grows, it changes. This story takes shape in ways I cannot predict. When I write I have no idea what others will perceive in what I have written, how they will interpret it, what they will make of what I say. I can't ever know what others will think or feel when they read it or think about it. All I can do is breathe slowly knowing the Circle is always just within my grasp.)
***
One last confession:
Every once in a while, I still miss him. I picture him talking to the Italians, that Italian couple that liked me so much for some unexplainable reason. I see him trying to be friends with them. But they can’t understand him, they can’t even look him straight in the eye. Few people can.
Every once in a while, I’m still surprised that I left the way I did. If I were to be asked why, I would have no real answer. (But nobody would ever ask me because nobody knows anything about it.) And yet I knew I had to do it. It was time.
Every once in a while, I expect him to walk around the corner and ask me to breathe with him - slowly, deeply, ask me to slow down time once again. It’s rare but it happens. And when it happens the story starts all over again. We are together in the old house on top of a hill, overlooking the city and the ocean, and we are breathing together, lost in the Circle, away from prying eyes.
