Whatever I have ever thought, said or written, however clear or coherent it may have seemed at the time, however complete and final it may have appeared to me, there are always some things left unsaid, gaps, omissions, there are always some questions left dangling, stragglers inhabiting the edges of my thoughts. I woke up one morning and I noticed that something was different but I couldn’t quite define it… for a space of a few hours, I felt the utter strangeness of it all, everything, my entire experience of existence, my entire course through reality… it wasn’t any one thing in particular but all of it; sleeping every night and waking up every day after seeing strange visions during the night, full of colors and desire and terror and nostalgia, strange visions that would fade in the morning without any clear explanation; time itself moving forward in only one direction, leaving no possible way of turning back, no way to visit those other spaces that were left behind, a trail of frozen images that would slowly fade to black and never recover their living presence; the fact that we walk and live on a floating sphere of mud rocks and water, hanging freely in empty space and slowly circling around a huge ball of fire; the strangeness of seeing her again, after so many years of silence, so many years of open questions and aimless wondering without reply… all of it so strange, so utterly incomprehensible, so close to me and yet so far from my mind’s grasp. I remember, at one time not too long ago, I was desperate to maintain some kind of control, desperate to retain my ambiguous position as a wise old leader, the one who knows, the one who can say the right things at the right time, desperate to maintain the form of my world as I knew it, as I had come to know it… A singular void was generated within me by our unexpected break, a pulsating hole of pure nothingness, a heavy darkness formed around me, a darkness produced not only by a lack of basic meaning but by a lack of a clear identity, a clear sense of who I am or who I’m supposed to be for others… In the throes of that void, I was also faced with the absolute humiliation of being left behind, I was about to become an experience in time that can never be recovered, a world that was once breathing and alive and was now left to rot and decompose in the unforgiving twilight of forgetfulness, away from the eyes of those who once cared for it, away from the hands that once brought it to life… A strange incomprehensible power forced her to move away, to break the bonds that held us together, it was something I tried to understand but I failed miserably at putting the pieces together in a way that made sense to me… maybe it was precisely the same power that now brought her back to me, here on the streets of Walnut Creek, on an ordinary afternoon that could have been any other afternoon or could have simply never happened… As soon as I saw her walking towards me I felt a clear invitation to open up once more, to let my heart cut itself in half and allow this strange other energy to slide inside of me, to become one with it, to embrace it as my own… Whatever I may have thought once, whatever I once said or wrote about her decision to leave, about the many mistakes that may have led up to it, about the things I didn’t do which I could have done, the things I did do which should have never happened, however clear or coherent it all may have seemed at the time, there were too many questions unexplored, there were too many things left unsaid, and now there was no way to say them, no way to bring them back… For years I expressed my ambiguous truths through tentative actions, bursts of free creation and careful construction based on an ongoing purposeful interaction with the shifting shadows, long texts full of self-referential spirals, music tracks full of hidden sources, covert references and magical secret foundations… At one point, I saw that multiplicity and nothingness were one and the same and they were an endless source of fresh renewal; as the whole is subdivided it approaches the void and the darkness descends upon the one who watches, a welcoming absence from the pressures of existence… When she left, I faced the utter contingency that stands at the very limit of my perception, the unexpected fall that is the most sacred gift of all, if not the most wanted, if not the most feared… when she said my own words back to me, with an aura of finality and full understanding, when she said exactly what I had expected to hear so many times through the years, everything changed; I could feel the world itself floating away from me, miles of distance with every syllable that came out of her mouth; the multiple slipped in through the open door, the chaos, the random, the unknowable, and I dived straight into it, into the oceanic depths of the unreachable white goddess of the night, the shining feminine figure that guards the mystery of the shadows… once it all came into me, things couldn't go back to where they were, time had moved on and the old space, even if it had not disappeared completely, it was now completely inaccessible, occluded, forbidden… When I met her on the street the other day, she said that she believed that something was molding her now, something powerful and methodical and all knowing, something clearly supernatural and invisible; I listened carefully to what she described, taking in every word; and as I listened, I sincerely hoped that all that she was saying was true and that there really was something out there shaping her inner form from within, a secret spiritual artisan that had emerged from the beyond, but I felt deeply nervous while I was standing there listening to her seemingly endless stream of thoughts and descriptions, I was nervous that she was completely losing her mind, that she was losing her sense of self to the most ever-present nothingness that continually spirals all around us, relentless, merciless, infinite; an offer and a menace, a kiss and a threat… I thought of saying something to her, doing something to help her, to protect her, to warn her but then I felt something else, clear and strong and insistent: let randomness decide, let chaos choose the path, I just need to step out of the way, I just need to let it happen… My most precious gift is my silence, my hands are most useful when I let other hands decide… Events and things and ideas don't mean something distinct in themselves but only as part of a particular sequence, a chain of cause and effect, a moving train of form, motifs, cadences and resolutions… When I met her on the street, she covered her face and she started to cry, thick tears ran down her cheeks as she stared at me smiling, as if she remembered all that I remembered (years of memories concentrated on a single furtive glimpse…) She gazed deeply into me as if she wished to go back, as if we could… We both knew it was a response to something that happened right before, something I said or didn’t say, standing there mesmerized by the shock of her sudden presence, anything further I could add would only inspire further reactions so I remained silent, waiting to hear what she would say next… After some time had passed, I asked her what was happening with her these days and she said: “no… it doesn’t matter what’s happening with me, this is not about me, it’s really about you - the you I used to know, I believe that you would be mad at me right now, you would be furious… I believe you know about the things I’ve said, the things I’ve thought…” And I felt it all clearly and forcefully; she was ashamed of all her incongruent thoughts, her strange sequences of ideas that went nowhere but resulted in a final anticipated closing of doors; I thought of saying something but I decided to stay quiet, let chaos decide, let the goddess step in and do what she must, my lack of action would become my most creative response… “I have continually tried to express the truth as I understand it but I can only do it through unconscious actions - all these things that have happened, they don't mean anything in themselves, they can only come together as elements of a particular message.” When she said to me what she said back then, it made everything change, it was something irreversible, unreachable, frozen in time, an insurmountable barrier. I was so sad, so angry when it happened, I was probably reacting to the loss of all that came before and my late reactions at that time would inspire further uncontrolled responses in her, a chain reaction of anger, sadness and denial, an unstoppable downward spiral; things would never be the same, what once was would soon be unrecognizable, what had once been our daily life would become as unreachable as a distant star, something seen in deep darkness from a million miles away… Sublime radically unstable pleasure is an experience of the utter impossibility of common human experience, the absolute strangeness of all of it, an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds consciousness and identity, pleasure beyond all bounds, beyond fear and awareness of time, eternity come and gone in the wink of an eye… During my unexpected fall from the comfort of my own private sanctuary, I experienced a deep encounter with many shades of multiplicity and nothingness followed by a shocking realization that they are both the same, this has always been true; it just takes a moment of radical pain to finally see it clearly (and once you see it, you can never again forget…) When I ran into her on the streets of Walnut Creek and we started talking as if nothing had ever happened, as if we were two old friends that run into each other every once in a while, and share superficial news and recent events, she told me about a dream she’d had recently, a dream she wrote down just as I had always asked her to do; in her dream we were together as we once had been and we lived in a house surrounded by hills covered in green grass; she came into my room in the middle of the night and laid next to me pressing her body against me, I kissed her and she kissed me back and then she told me that it had become clear to her that we should focus on the girl she once was - we should return to that basic work we had once started together, that was the main thing we needed to do; we had added too many layers through the years, too many side projects, too many elements and sequences and tools, let’s get back to the most simple, the most basic, to that one girl standing in front of a tiny park in a forgotten little suburb of a forgotten little California town, that girl crying about a past she could only barely remember… Standing on the street with me, she talked about our old magical work together, how we learned to project our minds across space and time and flowed together through midnight dream currents to distant realms of wonder; she insisted that that is what we needed to do now, we could change the past while retaining our knowledge of the future and we could get back to basics, to the most simple goals we ever had, we would achieve this sudden shift by means of a self-immolating failure of surrender to the future; we would refuse to accept this future where we found ourselves and we would suddenly find ourselves deep in the past that we should never have left, that was still there waiting for us to give it back its proper life… All this had happened to me before this afternoon or it seemed like it, this conversation, this proposal, this voice coming from a girl I met on the sidewalk… I would find myself talking to someone I used to know, someone I had been close to, someone I loved more than I thought it was possible to love, I would find myself opening up to them again, opening to something brand new that was about to happen, and everything was going well, flowing, perfect, beautiful and then this horrible thing would come out... something dark, heavy, monstrous, something unwholesome and evil. It is that encounter with the utter contingency of the real that is the most sacred experience, the holy jewel among all others, a face to face meeting with the multiplicity, the chaos, the random, with the oceanic sense of the goddess - there is nothing that can be more valuable than that, nothing that can possibly surpass it; we must search for it, even if it comes wrapped in a fearsome skin; beneath glowing red eyes of terror lies the most ever present nothingness, the gift that never ends, never fades, never gets old with age… “The higher up we went,” she said, “the higher we went in the upper dimensions of consciousness and perception, the more structures we broke down, the more beautiful it all became; and the goal of our secret voyages was always unknown, always untouchable, always precious, and we would always find something new, every single time, something fresh, something untouched, in the process of our shared flight, we would always be surprised by the multi-dimensional visions that surrounded us, no matter how many times we had encountered such wondrous things, no matter how many times before we had already woken up to these secret realms…it was always a shock, it was always brand new…” But there’s ultimately an integral part of us that resides within those stable structures, in the colonized and settled diagrams of the norm, of daily habit and programmed work, and that makes us afraid to change them, to hurt them, to destroy them… All our experiences together, from the most magical to the most mundane, didn't mean anything in themselves, they were only true and real as part of a sequence, a distinct step in an infinite path… That night I dreamt that I was hugging her in my bed, in a large house I only barely recognized; I turned around towards her and kissed her on the lips forcefully, I felt an intense overwhelming desire for her, a very deep connection that rose up from the deepest places within me, from the long lost past and from the tantalizing impossible future, it was a reckless desire that transcended all the painful events that separated us… We didn’t do anything more than kiss softly in the dream, lips barely touching lips, breath upon breath, skin upon skin, but I felt it all even more intensely because of its very restraint, because it was all made of pure possibility, a potential outbreak of ultimate pleasure that never surrendered to a climax… My dream that night must have been a response to all that came before and to all that she said on the street when I ran into her; I would let the dream inspire other responses but I wouldn’t seek an answer and I would not break the silence any further, there was a reason for the wall to be there, it was best to leave it untouched, it was best to respect its solid finality… All that I have ever thought, said or written, thousands of journal entries covering decades of memories, observations and ideas, diagrams of thoughts, experiences and dreams, however clear or coherent they may have seemed at the time, the goal of the effort I have put into all of it always remains unknown; I refuse to see it all as pointless, to always leave things unsaid, to always leave questions dangling, no matter how many times an answer is offered, there are always more questions waiting in the wings, whispering mysteries that remain unsolved… “I found your book in a bookstore,” she said standing on the street in front of me, “It was sitting among some poetry newsletters and photocopied pamphlets. At first, I didn’t know what it was, I just knew that I liked it. Then I saw your name and I laughed to myself. We always had a knack for running into each other everywhere. Always at the most unexpected moments, the most serendipitous places. And this book was just like meeting you again for the first time. I always knew that you were looking for a special path in life, something that would distinguish you from all the others… I knew this even before we got together. I had heard what others said about you, what they noticed in you and how it made them feel. I recognized it even if I couldn’t put a name to it. I knew that your path was different from anything I had ever encountered, it was a path full of wonderful and unique people, people that seemed to come straight out of dreams… people that were only partially true and partially invented… people too perfect to be real and yet I wanted to become one of them…” I listened to her closely as she spoke, enjoying the sound of her voice which shocked me as both familiar and completely new; I resisted the impulse to contradict her, over and over I resisted, I didn’t want to argue for the sake of arguing, I refused to have a philosophical discussion at this stage in the game; what would be the point of questioning the methods of composition when the symphony is about to reach its final cadence? She clearly had something to say and the random had given her an audience to direct her energy; I would fulfill my role the best way I knew how, I would allow her to speak freely without any interruptions… Our past was settled, frozen and framed, a vibrant album full of music, recordings, memories, dreams and stories, fixed within a circle of growing nostalgia, untouchable and increasingly remote; our past would not be altered… But I could still listen to her as closely as I ever did; I could still dive into the mystery of her endless theories and questions, there was a reason why I loved her in the first place… “When I did what I did, I saw a boy that was about to cut himself with a knife - and there was only one thing to do: I had to grab the boy and take the knife away; and later I might try to find out what happened to begin with, what led the boy to do what he was doing - but while the knife was still in his hands, I couldn’t stand there asking ‘what does this boy really want? What is this boy trying to do? Is there a purpose to all of this? Does this boy have a deeper understanding of this purpose than I do?’ You take the knife away and you take the boy to safety, before he cuts himself and bleeds to death. And that is why I did what I did and I can’t say I’m sorry, even if it led to our indefinite silence, even if it resulted in a pedestrian closure that we both would have once found distasteful…” To me her words were barely comprehensible, they came straight from a twilight language of constructions and renewals, something arcane and remote, a double mirror in a carnival ride, a glimpse into secret thoughts I would never have suspected, a camera out of focus, a scratched record caught in an endless loop… I let her words flow into me, I let them become a part of me, I was there to listen, to listen and to breathe… that’s why I am here, that is my one objective: to breathe - in and out, and to listen… Whatever she said to me that afternoon, however clear or coherent it may have seemed to her at the time, there were still so many things left unsaid, so many gaps… I could only grasp at the little fragments that fluttered on the margins, charged with a tantalizing possibility of further meanings… In those gaps of silence, I would find my future freedom. In those gaps, I would find a way to understand.
