Departure

Yesterday I found the note; it had been folded and forgotten inside an old book; thin paper, faintly yellowed, written in that careful hand I used to know so well… I believe it was a fragment from a conversation I had with him long ago, something he wrote down and saved long before he disappeared from my life without explanation; when he left, there had been no argument, no complaint, no betrayal that I could name; one day he was simply gone, as if he had stepped sideways out of the world, and I was left blinking in the afterimage… In the note, he was saying goodbye without quite saying it, performing the farewell through the geometry of his words… I read: “I know it’s difficult to maintain any kind of ongoing contact from a distance, so if you don’t want to do it, it’s fine. It really is ok. We can say that we are friends for this one moment, this space of time that we have lived together, but we’re just not friends forever.” It was a simple paragraph, almost tender in tone, yet it landed like a door closing softly; this piece of writing, I realized, was itself another kind of rejection; a final experiment in detachment… With these words, he had turned himself into another remote figure added to the slow parade of my past, another ghost to wander the labyrinth of my memory; this is how I have always paid the price of attachment: selling fragments of my soul to history, one installment at a time… I sat by the window and read the note several times; outside, the afternoon light was turning pale, the color of old glass; I ate something without tasting it, and half an hour later my stomach ached and I had to lay down; it wasn’t hunger or sickness—just the body registering loss in its own dull language… I kept thinking: it isn’t enough for the eyes to be clear, to see past the fictions we call continuity; those stories we invent about cause and effect, reason and resolution… History, whether personal or collective, is just a trick of light; we pretend that each event leads to another, that we are always moving forward; but in reality people simply leave or stay, and there is no reason for either; and there never was… By the time night came, the city outside had dissolved into its usual electric hum; I turned off the lamp but couldn’t sleep; the note lay on the table beside me, breathing faintly in the dark like a small living thing; I closed my eyes, but the words kept reappearing, glowing faintly on the inside of my eyelids: We’re just not friends forever… And the darkness kept deepening, slide after slide, until I was falling again; into the place where nothing ends, and every goodbye continues forever… It occurs to me now that for the past year I must have carried the memory of his leaving like a small hidden wound, a private shame that never scabbed over; it drove me—silently, insistently—into bold assertions spoken at the wrong time, into work started with feverish energy and abandoned halfway through, into grand solitary gestures of heroism performed for an audience of one; I mistook stubborn endurance for courage, I chose my own isolation and called it freedom… No one noticed, no one needed to; the shame was self-sustaining; it glowed faintly beneath the surface, a coal that refused to die… History, I’ve come to realize, has never had an ending, can never have an ending; it coils back on itself, endlessly rewriting the same sentence in slightly different handwriting; historical narrative is an invention, an attempt to make the infinite appear finite; historians manufacture closure because they can’t bear to face the open wound of time; my own personal history is no different, it has no resolution, no conclusion, only interruptions and resumptions, unfinished acts and dissolving intentions; every attempt to end the story merely extends it… What is certain is that I got lost again and again throughout that year; sometimes I felt so lost that even the idea of being found frightened me, at moments when someone drew near, when it seemed that I might stop being alone, I drifted back into the labyrinth, as if loneliness itself had become a form of home; being lost was no longer an accident; it was the primary directive, the silent law I obeyed without knowing it… Once, before he left (perhaps a year or two before the note appeared) I spoke to him about the strange unease that had begun to consume me; it was during one of our experiments, when the air between us seemed to vibrate with something unspeakable… He listened, then said quietly, “That strangeness you feel coming over you—it’s there on purpose. That’s part of what makes it useful for you to be here, with me. Let it sit with you. When you can’t take it anymore, go and rest for a while. But don’t reject it at first, don’t refuse it out of reflex. Wrestle with it as long as you can. Work with it while it’s there. Engage with it to the best of your abilities…” He paused, and I remember his eyes, clear and unpitying. “You may actually find that you miss it when it’s gone.” At the time I didn’t understand; I thought he meant discomfort as training, tension as a kind of initiation; but now I think he was speaking of something else—how the strangeness itself was a proof of life, and how its disappearance would feel like death; perhaps that’s why I still carry his absence like a secret experiment unfinished, a signal half-received, repeating endlessly in the darkness… When I woke the morning after he left, there was a heat under my skin, an anger sharper than before, though I couldn’t trace its origin; maybe I had dreamt about him again; about our long series of experiments, the complex diagrams we drew and erased, the long nights when talk seemed to stretch across entire seasons… There had always been questions left hanging between us, suspended in the air like electrical wires with no place to ground; now those questions hummed alone inside me, still carrying their charge… Together we had worked toward a kind of lucid self-awareness, that rare clarity that came with understanding the shape and limits of our own culture, of our own unspoken ideology; we wanted to see what lay beyond those limits; we wanted to build methods to step outside, even if only briefly; we called them experiments because we never knew where they would take us; each one opened a door into an unmapped corridor of the mind, and though we entered willingly, we never came out unchanged; there was always fear involved; we knew that every method, every intrusion into the machinery of thought, threatened to fracture the ego’s delicate scaffolding; in ordinary life such techniques were forbidden for good reason; they could melt the self, they could drive you into a lonely chamber of unreason where nobody would ever be able to reach you ever again… Yet we kept designing these experiments and doing them together, each time pretending that this could be the last one, that this could be the one that finally made us understand… Whenever I crossed that invisible boundary, past the cultural and psychological perimeter that enclosed us, I would tell myself: If I make it back to my ordinary state, my clean, simple consciousness, I’ll stay there. I’ll never leave again… Out there it was too bright, too raw, too vast; the air itself seemed to hum with revelation… And yet, as soon as I returned, the longing began again; the threshold called to me… With or without him, I know I’ll keep going out there; into that dangerous clarity, beyond reason, beyond safety… A philosopher once said that understanding stops action; men of action, perhaps knowing this instinctively, avoid deep comprehension the way sailors avoid a whirlpool; they act first and repent later, if they live long enough… I think now that he and I were caught between those two poles: our hunger for understanding feeding our need to act, our actions birthing still deeper questions… Yesterday, after finding the note, I wandered through my thoughts like a ghost in its old house; each idea led into another corridor, each memory opened into the same empty room; I kept getting lost, again and again, especially in those moments when I realized that I was now truly alone (more alone than I had ever been before) and that the silence surrounding me was the very space where he used to be, the dark gap that could never be filled by anyone or anything… For that entire year after his departure, I lost all sense of proportion; as if something had been ripped out of me and replaced with a kind of static; I argued with people who didn’t deserve it, who had only spoken to me out of some dim compassion, out of pity for my unstable demeanor… I set impossible goals for myself—tasks no one had asked me to accomplish—and refused to rest until I completed them, though completion meant nothing; I posted things online at odd hours: impulsive declarations, barbed thoughts, unhinged promises made to nobody in particular; even the few who still liked me began to fade away, one by one, like moths repelled by too much light… Yet somehow, painfully, through confusion and small humiliations, I worked my way through it; I spent months clearing a path back to something I could recognize as my own life… My endless questions about truth and interpretation: who was right, who meant what, what any of it really meant; it all proved to be inconsequential… The essence of motive is that it is always private, opaque, unreachable; and yet interpretation, like a compulsion, always wants to assign motive; I came to see the futility of it: that I would never uncover the secret behind another’s action, nor even my own; all I knew was that I wanted to return to what I had once called normal, though I could no longer define that word; still, I found a way to approximate it; some semblance of balance, if only temporary… Beneath that fragile calm, however, a darker understanding grew; I lived with the suppressed knowledge that every small trait, every flicker of personality, or even the absence of personality (the hollow blankness that sometimes overtook me) could mean, in the end, that I was still doomed; that my life would vanish into a vast statistical operation where my teeth would be counted, my hair saved, but the person I had been would be discarded; my death would be unrecorded, unhonored, unremarked; I would dissolve into the vast mass of anonymous data: a cipher among ciphers… And yet, through that dread, I continued to believe in the eye of overarching intelligence; the invisible witness I once called God, or simply Him; I believed that this presence watched everything I did, not out of cruelty but out of attention; I tried to measure myself against that gaze, to live by the highest standards I could imagine, to conserve whatever warmth still emanated from the small, pure heart of meaning that pulsed inside me; to keep it alive and not let the warmth escape… For if there was one thing I had learned (both with him and in solitude) it was this: beyond the fragile border of history, beyond culture and memory, lies only the cold, the void, the silence that waits after all words are spoken, where even light forgets itself and only nothingness remains… Those depths of cosmic space; the slow convulsions of time spreading outward like a wound that will never close; the interlocking riddles of truth and interpretation that devour one another; history’s forgotten slaughters; children suffocated in iceboxes, bodies dumped into canals, nations starved into amnesia; the future breakdown of the molecular life-spiral, the delicate helix collapsing in on itself like a burned scroll; the proven physiological roots of the mind; those trembling synapses where thought turns animal again; the presence, always, of dangerous idiots disguised as saviors; and the haunting absence of any single, unifying motive… All of it was, and remains, private and impenetrable; each revelation collapses into another mystery; every theory, when pushed far enough, begins to resemble myth; you can map the galaxies, dissect the atom, catalogue the genes; but the interior world, the one where cause and consequence pretend to meet, still trembles in its own unknowable obscurity… People, meanwhile, are forever arriving or leaving or lingering halfway in between; each life becomes a doorway held open too long; someone steps through, and another stays behind, staring after them… We invent reasons to explain it later—why they left, why we stayed—but those reasons are stories we tell ourselves to survive the bewilderment; explanations come only after the fact, like captions added to a photograph whose subject has already died and whose identity we can’t quite remember; interpretation is just a ritual of rewriting, a rearrangement of what refuses to fit… And yet I keep rewriting, I can’t help myself; every act of remembrance becomes a small act of forgery, every memory is a translation written in a language that never existed… The historians perform this ritual on a larger scale: they bind the chaos into paragraphs, stitch the blood into narrative, convince themselves that the past, properly arranged, might yield some kind of meaning… But history is never finished, it resists that final period, it spills out of its own margins, multiplying in all directions like an unchecked infection; what we call “historical narrative” is only the illusion of completion, the book someone had to end before their grant expired, the story we agree to believe so we can sleep at night… If you stare at it long enough—cosmic space, molecular life, the child in the icebox, the idiot with a gun, the trembling of microscopic thought—you begin to sense that none of it can ever be contained; the pattern is too vast, and the pattern-maker is absent… What remains is the restless motion of coming and leaving, the quiet hum of unfinished history, and the faint, unending question that burns behind it all: what did it ever mean to begin with? When he left, the world went silent, as if the air itself had been drained of pressure; I felt something collapse inside me; not the sudden break of tragedy, but a slow implosion, a private panic that made no sound… I couldn’t will myself to move, couldn’t summon the smallest reason to act; everything I touched felt pointless; even breathing seemed like a performance whose meaning had been forgotten… Every product of our life together—every dream, every remembered conversation, every fragment of the imaginary world we had constructed—contained, hidden deep within it, a single ingredient that held its whole illusion together: the absence of his presence; it was the secret adhesive; each recollection, each recorded experiment, each mythic image bore that trace of lack, the void around which it cohered… At first sight, everything appeared seamless, fitting together into the organic totality of what we had called our work. But if I looked more closely, there was always one detail that broke the perfection: the gesture left unfinished, the moment that should not be spoken, the memory best omitted; the unspoken thing was the core of it all… Around that silence the structure turned; it was an umbilical cord, invisible but taut, connecting me still to him, to the world we made and then destroyed together… I remembered one conversation from years before; we were sitting in that dim room we used as a laboratory, papers scattered, the faint hum of the old machines in the background; I told him about the strangeness that I felt after finishing one of our experiments—the dizziness, the trembling, the sense of being out of step with the rest of the world; he looked at me with that half-smile of someone who has already passed through the fire… “That strangeness you feel,” he said, “it’s there on purpose. That’s what makes it useful for us to be together. What’s happening to you happened to me once. Let it sit with you. Don’t try to fix it. Flow with it, breathe with it, live with it. When you can’t bear it anymore, go be alone. Sit in your room for a while and breathe as deeply as possible. But hold it as long as you can. Work with it while it’s there. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.” I didn’t understand him then, but I do now; the strangeness never leaves completely—it mutates, follows me into the ordinary hours, turns the streets luminous and unreal; each time I go out there again—each time I begin another experiment, those strange rehearsals of perception we once did together—I tell myself: If I ever make it back to my basic state, to that simple daylight of the first half of my life, I’ll stay there, I’ll never leave again… I repeat it like a prayer, but it’s a lie; because I always go out again… Day after day, night after night, I cross the threshold, trembling, half in fear, half in devotion… I go out knowing I may not return the same; and I know now that I will keep going—regardless of consequence, regardless of the cold, regardless of what may be waiting in the dark beyond understanding… There is something there that calls to me still: the echo of his voice, or perhaps only the memory of that absence which holds everything together; and though I know it leads nowhere, I follow, because to stop would be to deny the experiment itself—to refuse the very darkness that made me who I am…

Electrical Manifestations

When they showed me how to use the vast network of electric light, it was not merely another discovery; it was the unseating of an ancient throne… Night and day, once so delicately balanced, were drowned in a haze of fluorescence; the clear ancestral distinctions—indoors and out-of-doors, the pure and the forgotten, good and evil—blurred and bled into each other until they were nearly indistinguishable; the moon no longer presided over my sleep, nor did the stars carry secret shadow messages; their reign was supplanted by buzzing filaments, mercury vapor, sodium arc, an empire of light that tolerated no mystery except the one it created by abolishing the others… I arrived here in stages: a couple of small, precise steps, then one great sudden fall into a new world… And the strange thing was that with each careful advance, no law was broken, no explicit rule was transgressed; I told myself I was not betraying the past, I was merely stepping forward, one quiet motion at a time, until at last I stumbled into the abyss I had been approaching all along… For days I had been thinking that perhaps I might remain here—in this chamber of rapidly falling forward— for a little while longer; months, years, who could measure it? Here in the suspension between choices, in the waiting room of the liminal light… But I understood: no matter what decision I took, something in me would be unsettled, something irreplaceable would be destroyed, it was inevitable; yet since I was the one who had decided to come to this threshold, it would be my burden to decide; everything else and everyone else would simply need to adjust to the fractures I had caused… And so it was that new pasts, remote as aeons, began to crystallize from nothingness; each flicker of light invented another time, another memory, complexities collapsed into a sudden, brutal simplicity—only to recombine in stranger, sharper forms; deep forgetfulness followed, the amnesia of electric daylight, scramble and re-sequence, shift and shuffle, until the pattern itself grew monstrous… From the borrowed fragments of old symbolic energy, unbidden simultaneities emerged: a dream of walking into sunlight which was also midnight, a nightmare of entering a room already abandoned centuries ago… This was the price of the knowledge of light: a world reshuffled, endlessly re-created, and haunted by the shadows it refused to acknowledge… It was them, they did it; they showed me how to see words not as decorations, nor as transparent windows, but as systems of delicate machinery: complex gears of metaphor, intricate symbols clicking into place, translating my private torments and astonishments into uttered sense-vibrations; each syllable became a spark that leapt into the dark, a unit in some recursive machine whose outcome was always beyond prediction; words transformed and re-transformed, like smoke blown into mirrors; from that endless chain of recurrent re-creation I saw the dim outline of a technology of explicitness, and I trembled because I knew I was both its shaper and its victim… As a boy I had been taught to suppress my own gestures in order to hide my innermost trembling, my arms and hands were pinned down by invisible restraints; my face, once too quick to shine or flinch, had been ironed flat into something expressionless;  all emotions were smothered before they reached the surface; I learned stiffness, formality, rigidity, a mask so protective that the smallest hurt could pass unnoticed, or so I told myself… The deep grief was there, vast and darkly shining like a river of tar, but no one ever saw it, least of all me… Now, years later, they had carefully produced a surge of energy that was now rising through me, and it was not mine alone, it came from beneath the crust of the earth, from some boiling depth which my body stood upon like a frail conductor; it was overwhelming: a tide of fury, a wrath that could sweep me into disaster if I gave way; but if I resisted that unconscious slide into rage, the force might transfigure me, the gateway stood ajar; beyond it lay an awakening which I both desired and feared, for it promised annihilation as much as revelation; after the first few months of taking in what they gave me, I had felt as if a vent of hell had opened inside my skull; my thoughts burned in that furnace, seared membranes trembling as though from some cosmic concussion, it was like a wound without origin, an injury I couldn’t remember suffering, yet its pain shaped me every day; words were the only bandage, the only conduit: metaphors to contain the molten core, symbols to map the abyss… And still I sensed that at any moment the code could break, the smoke could spill outward, and I would be forced to face whatever had always been waiting for me in the darkness… During those days, I spent my time irrationally moving information, dragging it back and forth like sacks full of stones through the narrow corridor of my consciousness; each phrase became both a burden and a release: the act of pushing language around the locus of my thought, and at the same time the act of being shaken, moved, dismantled by that very oscillation… To write was to enter a storm, and to read what I had written was to stand in the wreckage afterward, trying to understand what had fallen apart, what had been demolished… The words themselves appeared to me as elaborate circuitry, delicate and exact, yet prone to sudden short-circuits; I saw them as systems of connection, motifs repeating like refrains in a strange and private music; each one translated some unusual sensation, some fleeting experience, into a melodious sequence that might be uttered or merely imagined; what I longed for was to master this technology of particularity, to treat language not as ornament but as machine, as engine of precision, capable of making even grief itself explicit and manifest… As per their careful instructions, I worked with exact and inexact repetitions, phrases looped until they became both prison and refuge; the experience was circular, self-consuming; I felt as if I were trapped inside the loop, but I also recognized that I did not want to escape, the eternal loop was my new home; it was my invention and my self imposed sentence… Once, in the arrogance of my abstractions, I had posited that someday I would resemble more a programmer than a tortured artist: cleaner, cooler, more deliberate, more in control; but in practice the opposite was true, the words grew hot beneath my fingers, there was an intensity in the very act of speaking them aloud, an intensity that could at any moment erupt into red hot anger, or just as easily dissolve into intense love, or sharpen into desire… Talking itself became a raging fever, it was overwhelming, almost unbearable, yet delicious, there was a deep pleasure in the raw improvisation, like playing an instrument whose melody was writing me even as I played it, each sentence was a note I didn’t know I could strike, and in that surprise was the joy, the proof of being alive, of pressing forward into a song whose final cadence could never be foreseen… The need to employ every sense available to me was as insistent as breath itself: automatic, unarguable… It explained the strange compulsion to keep all the computers and the television humming almost without pause in the background, their screens flickering like mechanical eyes in the darkness; this urge toward continuous uninterrupted perception, this hunger for sensory extension, had nothing to do with the actual content of the TV shows or the websites, it was older than any program, older than my own life: the blind impulse to keep the nervous system reaching outward beyond the skin, as if my body had become an unfinished circuit that needed the world’s network of electricity to complete itself… During those nights after their final transmission, when the need became most intense, I woke up again and again, each time aware of some lost dream, an ambiguous image or an unfinished phrase, and yet almost always I ended up choosing to lie back down, letting the dream dissolve rather than catching it; only rarely did I scrawl a few lines before it evaporated… These dreams were like mist, self-erasing, but they left their salt behind in my mind… By day I explained myself compulsively to anyone who would listen; I spoke of the systems of thought I had learned by comparing one against another, through the patient method they had shown me, the method that had opened these doors to me… I told others that this was our chance to learn even more, to probe the “hidden magic of chaos,” I spoke to random people of them, that secretive group I had encountered out in the fields not too far from my home, a group of practitioners of a strange local variant of chaos magic, workers of aleatoric electrical manifestations, they dwelled in an old farm house not far from me… Even now I’m not sure whether they were real or imaginary; when they eventually left, they vanished all of a sudden before I could even say good bye… the years went by and the house was left completely abandoned, all the furniture disappeared: the couch, the chairs, the big library table with its scratches, the radio and the floor lamps, everything gone, one by one, as if spirited away, they vanished; and the house was then sold; its old address blurred… I don’t know where any of it went; I was the only thing left, the lone residue of that entire experience, of so many days of carefully listening and of asking questions, so many nights of irrational experiments… At times I think of it as a secret life; at times it feels like some kind of sociological experiment; at times, it feels like insanity… Ultimately, if pressed, I could not prove to anyone that any of it had been real; perhaps it was in fact only a dream, a dream of a house that no longer stands, its rooms still glowing faintly in the dark when I walk by it at night… At some point I had imagined that a creator should resemble a programmer… cool, deliberate, stringing bits of meaning as if they were code… rather than a trembling, self-tormenting soul; but each day I found myself more and more unspooled, moving information in fits and bursts, as though the text itself were a fever in my fingers; I was pushing language around like sandbags before a rising flood, and at the same time allowing myself to be carried off by the current; I was writer and reader, builder and wreckage, both the stonecutter and the stone… Back when I was a young boy, I can now confess, I trained my own face into silence, my gestures shrank until they were almost nothing, my expression was flattened like a dead sea, emotions smothered themselves before they could fully form or manifest outward; I learned to be stiff, formal, rigid, protective, and so easily hurt that I would never admit it even to myself; I wore invisibility like a badge of shame; my eyes were a locked room no one could open… And then, as in a dream, my childhood was gone… the furniture of my first home had vanished: the couch and chairs on the first floor, the big library table, the radio that hissed and sighed at night, the lamps that once gave off a yellow, parental glow as I moved my shadow to recreate imaginary dances; they were all gone along with my parents and my entire family; the house had been sold and the address had been erased; I was the only one left, a stray remnant of an obliterated world… Sometimes I wondered if it had happened at all; perhaps it had only been a dream—or a code I had written once and then forgotten… The more I reached back for it, the more it dissolved, and yet the ache of it remained, like static after a signal has died, the ghost of a station still humming in the darkness… I had reached a crucial point—the sort of point at which laboratory rats, drunk on the memory of pleasure, stop pressing the button that feeds them and drift into starvation; it was a precipice of self-annihilation disguised as ecstasy, the place where the nervous system finally eats its own tail; I recognized it and yet kept moving forward, because the compulsion to continue into the unknown was stronger than the instinct to survive… Around me, new pasts were forming like frost on a windowpane, entire aeons coalescing out of nothing; complexities collapsed into sudden, brutal simplicities, only to recombine in some new baroque pattern; forgetfulness trailed behind each metamorphosis like a loyal shadow; scramble and re-sequence, shift and shuffle, as if the very syntax of time were being rewritten… In the borrowing of old symbolic energies from the past, strange simultaneities rose unbidden—odd juxtapositions, like dreams that do not know they are dreams, like memories which arrive wearing someone else’s face… All this while I had considered myself not merely harmless but invisible; the world’s indifference to my work had been so profound that I began to suppose I was dead; I hoped I was dead; I had been dead for a long time, at least in the sense of being unregistered, an absence in an official ledger nobody checked… And then, in a single moment, I discovered that I was alive—alive enough to throw sparks into someone else’s mind, to give them ideas which might bend them into something strange and unpredictable, a living force of reborn electrical hunger…. All from that one visitor, the one who came asking questions, the one who needed to know and needed to specifically know from me…  The realization terrified and thrilled me; my voice became an instrument; as I spoke there was a current running through me, an intensity that could veer into violent hatred or, just as easily, into love, or into some nameless desire… Talking itself became a pleasure, a fever; it was like playing a strange musical instrument whose melody I improvised without knowing where it would lead; each phrase rose and dissolved like a note in a song I could never quite finish, yet each note proved my existence—proof that I was still here, breathing, still pressing the button even as the cage around me changed shape… and he would listen and listen and listen eager to take it all in, as if knowing that soon I would disappear and there would be nothing left behind…