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.
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