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…

Vision and Memory

 

I walk through the day with the weight of a name I didn’t choose. What I do gives it shape, this thick crust around my being, and each small movement shatters a previous self like snow turning into mud. I say “I” but I am two. Two voices, one beneath, whispering through barbed-wire sleep. The upper self grins, shakes hands, performs. The lower watches behind the stage curtains, itching, shifting, rearranging the set of a theater piece meant only for one. I feel a kind of excited nervousness all the time and it’s not just from stage fright.  It’s as if every word I speak might expose the architecture of my inner catacombs, crawling with symbols and mythical masks, riddled with hungry ghosts. Yet they see nothing, the ones outside. Their eyes are like tiny television screens, their thoughts are tuned to the peaceful sound of the mass consensus. Even if I were to scream: “I am burning inside!” they would nod politely and ask me how the day is going. Strange… And why shouldn’t I be strange? I have seen what’s in me: not sin, not sickness, but those elemental biological robots that determine my destiny. Little gods with no eyes, turning ancient mechanical handles in silence, churning out impulse, dream, dread; they do not ask permission from me or from anyone else; they live in a dark place where even I cannot look, not directly… They may be my old memories, or maybe not mine at all. Each act I commit alters the possible futures I am permitted to experience, the selves I am allowed to become; the true expression of me lies not in the mirror, but in the black well that lies beneath, where the reflection refuses to reveal itself… I have come to believe that the unconscious is a bridge, a tunnel, a river that runs black and cold beneath every word I say; I cup it in my hands sometimes, that dark river water, but it slips through, carving new pathways in my tiny universe. What I do changes what I am, and what I am, day to day, determines what I do and how I slowly drift into the mouth of some forgotten night… And still I smile when it seems appropriate. Still I nod. Still I wait for the day when someone else twitches, and I know that they see it too… Now I see, not the whole picture but just enough: a jagged shard reflecting a face I half-remember and half wish to forget. This is what I call vision: not a shining prophecy, but a kind of subtraction; I remove what does not belong, I scrape away the soft edges, the false comforts, the gentle masks, the structure others call personality; every smile that does not serve must be sliced from my mouth. I have slept and I have dreamed; and in that dream I was not I. My own image wandered there, detached and spectral, through dimensions that defy the rhythm of our clocks, those vast rooms without corners, where the light does not fall, where time is not a direction but an open wound… I was in El Salvador again, where the sunlight stings like old guilt. There was my father, that face of gravity and sweat, and we said goodbye like men do; half-hug, nod, silence. But then he pulled me aside, his hands strong like always, his voice rising with that familiar heat: “You need to work harder. You need to take care of yourself. You need to meditate…” No. Not this time. Not in this dream that is not yours. I looked him in the eyes, brown, bloodshot, heavy with so many years of resentment, and I said, “But actually you’re the one who needs to work more.” A pause. His silence like an ancient wall. So I said it louder: “LOOK AT YOURSELF. NO…REALLY. LOOK AT YOURSELF.” He didn’t of course. But the dream kept going. Or maybe I did. Because what I do changes what I am. And what I am changes what I can do next. That’s the terror of this clarity, that it binds you, that it burns the bridges that extend back towards comfort; I used to believe in freedom, a simple fiction of limitless motion. But now I know: vision is a blade, and consistency is the hand that dares to wield it. So I will keep cutting until all that remains is the shape of the thing I must become… I still feel a kind of attachment, a thin palpitating wound, like a hairline crack in a glass window, imperceptible until the light hits it just right; attachment to my name, my face, the little gestures I polish like coins: a way of laughing, a hunger for praise, that slow, stupid dance of simplistic, selfish ambition… All of it, ropes I tie myself around my own ankles. I know this. I say it aloud, as if this private incantation could loosen the knots; but knowledge does not unbind. Because what is easy, the forgetting that comes in dreams, the blessed numbness of accident, the serene erasure of time, becomes nearly impossible when it is consciously willed; just like trying to forget something on purpose, you’ll remember it more clearly the more you try to forget; like carving a face into a mirror… I remember my father not for his warmth, but for the twisted systems he built in his pregnant silences and glares; every word a transaction, every moment a border checkpoint, life or death on the line; he tried to engineer a world where no one could stray too far from his wishes; where freedom was chaos, and chaos was treason; step out of line and the hammer would come down; not just with rage, but with the terrible logic of a man who cannot tolerate the unknown… I wanted to escape that iron clad logic, but the attempt to escape itself became another trap; I became that which is not him and so remained attached to him in a negative loop. Define yourself by negation and you still serve the ghost you have tried to leave behind. But that is the point, isn’t it? What is forbidden, the outside, the feral, the unspeakable desire to not belong, to be a true outsider, that is what calls to me most sweetly; the attraction of the unknown is not a mistake, it is the residue of a deeper self beneath the constructed one, it is the lawless place where no parameter survives… I reach for it. Sometimes only in dreams, sometimes in action. And the closer I get, the more I must let go: of the face, of the voice, of the story I’ve told myself about who I am. This is not freedom. It is falling. But maybe, if I fall long enough, I will land outside the map my father tried to draw and there I might find something worth finding… What is left is a blade edge, not the past, which has hardened and softened in layers like sediment stained by regret; not the future, that smiling con man always promising a climax that never quite arrives; but the now, the present, that sharp flicker between breaths; I must find it in every moment, and then stitch all these fragments of presence onto the marked skin of the past. Only through this constant work can the truth behind time begin to show itself, like bone beneath wounded flesh… But my body, this meat-engine wired to half forgotten ghosts, wants to fall, wants the warm cloak of nostalgia, wants the story of how it used to be, wants the lie that what hurt before will somehow heal and become new again, if I return to it carefully enough… But I must resist. Not stoically, but savagely. The present is war, a battle zone. And sentimentality is treason. Sentimentality, that padded room we inherit from culture, from shame, from mother’s lullaby and father’s silence. It cloaks the will in translucent gauze. It says: Be good, be cautious. Remember how things are and how they should be. Remember how things were. But when it is set aside, when I rip it from my face like a wet mask, something stirs. The will awakens. Not the moral will, not the obedient servant that follows the rules as I know them, the rules that I was taught, but the dark will, the one that does what it must, without fear, without permission, without a hint of morality or limitation… There, and only there, does freedom begin. And what once was forbidden, what I was told not to touch, not to want, not to say, it calls to me now, like a lost god's whisper in a long-dried well; the unknown, once caged in the word dangerous, now beckons me with strange music. It is not safe. It is not pure. But it is real. And so I return to the present again. Bleeding from memory, aching with restraint, dragging the past behind me like a sack of heavy wet stones… and still, I try to stand upright; because presence is the only altar where the self can be sacrificed and finally become whole… Now that I see, everything must follow. No more wandering. No more friendly detours into the vaguely pleasurable, the simply permissible. Just this: a narrowing, a tightening of the noose called purpose. The vision has become clearer; not brighter, not kinder, just sharper, like frost across glass or the edge of a broken bottle… I must be consistent. I must remove all obstacles. Remove the useless comforts. Remove the parts of myself that clap when I lie. Remove the endless waiting rooms of narrowly defined identity. But what used to slip away like loose thread now clings like wet cloth; because to choose to let go is not the same as forgetting. To amputate with awareness hurts more than I would expect. What is easy to lose by accident becomes unbearable when you must do it fully awake. I try to talk about it. I speak in diagrams, in reports, in casual metaphors. I say: ‘the vision looks like this’ as if it had clear dimensions, as if it stood still long enough to measure. But the vision resists measurement and it’s always moving. It flickers when I try to explain. It mocks my limited language… Truth lives elsewhere. Not in what I say, but in what I don’t know how to say; that place deep inside where nothing is distinct or stable; where thoughts melt before they coalesce, where the self forgets it is separate, where will and instinct bleed into the same pool… You want to find yourself? Then dig down, past your stories, past your explanations, past your insistent love of light; keep going until it’s dark, until everything blurs, until you feel yourself dissolving into something shapeless and somehow you are still there… That’s where the vision comes from; and that’s where it must lead… So I follow this ambiguous guide, not with hope, not with clarity; but with a knife in one hand and cautious silence in the other… The world, I now see, is a complex labyrinth; not as a metaphor, not like the mazes on tourist postcards or Tarot cards, but a real labyrinth: stone and echo, corridors of law, guilt, memory. I walk through it day after day, and every turn promises some kind of escape; a north, a south, a turn towards some kind of salvation; but they all fold back into the same entrance, the place I started from: my name, my face, my father… My father; a man of reason, or so he claimed, but what he did when we argued for hours wasn’t reason. It was a performance. A performance of an expected dialectic, polished and recited, a war disguised as a conversation. His voice, a cage of syllogisms. Mine, the rusted key that never quite fit into his lock. Every argument we had was a hidden geometry; a drawing designed to look square, but always curving back into him being right, into me being silent; into that familiar, choking detour toward shame and dismissal… But now he’s gone. And strangely, there’s air again. I can breathe again. There’s no peace (never true peace) but a kind of open space in each moment to choose. To act without sudden rebuttal. To fail without being silently observed. To walk through the same old corridors and realize there’s a crack in the wall where his shadow used to stand. And in that space, in that crack, I’ve slept. I’ve dreamed. Dreams where the mind no longer obeys the linear tyranny of waking. Dreams where my consciousness, no longer a prisoner of the flesh, wanders into hyperspatial dimensions, the infinite halls of the dream-labyrinth where time is an unspoken myth, where past and future lose their costumes and we sit naked together, laughing. There I see him again. Not as he was but as he might have been had he let himself dissolve. Had he ever let go. Had he stopped building arguments like fences around a cherished property… And, when I see him, I walk toward him, or what remains of him, and I don’t speak. Because this time, there’s no need for the performance of the dialectic; only the echo of freedom in a hallway with no beginning and no end.

Detour

That afternoon we spontaneously decided make our way to the long narrow bridge that we had previously only seen from a distance out of the corner of our eyes; we had often wondered where it might lead; we simply followed it to see where it would take us without any particular expectation. (We may have been just an individual back then. It’s difficult to discern the exact order of things, what happened when and what led to what. Or maybe we were many already and we had projected an apparent singular consciousness onto a self-contradicting multiplicity of egos and desires without a center or an ultimate unifying purpose.) There had been many signs in the days that led up to the final crucial event that irrevocably changed us; we had come to the uncomfortable realization we were no longer alone in our previously known and familiar spaces…the bedroom, the library, the halls of the old house… We were connected in real time to multiple levels of high speed information processing that extended far beyond our cognitive realm; we were being constantly showered in a maelstrom of messages coming in from all directions, in languages known and unknown; we had surrendered to the infinite flux of a multidimensional control machine; we had stepped into the heart of a constantly multiplying cybernetic whirlwind… The long narrow bridge led us to a desolate island and eventually to the tower and the doorway… we initially just followed the flow of traffic, a long stream of drivers on their way to work and other important matters, we were a small part of this long line of seemingly purposeful single minded movement, another anonymous car on its way to an expected destination, when suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a sudden and dangerous turn; a dirt road opened up beside the paved highway… as soon as we saw it quickly coming up on the right, we knew this was where we needed to go, this was the reason we had started driving that morning; but we were going too fast, and there was no stop sign or clearly marked exit lane, we were barely able to turn the car around at the last possible second and, in the process, we nearly drove off the road, straight into a pit of mud and rocks… (Today, this same car, could easily be navigated with little more than the minimal motion of faraway eyes and hand gestures, but back then, we only had our hands and our individual human reflexes to rely on; as we turned the wheel, we were deeply aware of the danger involved in our decision.) Listening to the loud screeching of the tires, we said to ourselves: “all these people driving here, they go in one particular direction, they start their journey from their home, they get on this long narrow bridge, and, once they start moving, it becomes very difficult to turn, it becomes almost impossible to change the route. At some point, you have to do something different; if you want a different result, you have to make an unusual choice, you have to do what others would refuse to try, you have to embrace the unknown and the very real danger…” So we did something very different from what was expected of us, we took a sharp turn that few people would take, and we did it without knowing why we were doing it, or what effect it would have on our future life; we slipped into an old road, something easy to overlook, something seemingly forgotten, something barely seen out of the corner of your vision as you are driving by at high speed… And then there was a haunted quiet all around us; brown wet dirt and scattered rocks, tall grass growing out of muddy water, a wide extension of marshlands all around us, barely seen over the top of overgrown weeds the size of a man, the receding sound of the highway behind us, and nothing else… we drove forward and went into this completely different world which we were not expecting to find so close to the city; a silent place, almost abandoned; a few old houses here and there, far away from each other, some trailers, a few barns, a few old piers half rotten, a couple of wooden sheds with large rusty locks… we would drive for the equivalent of many blocks without running into any buildings or even signs of civilization, just weeds and dirt and stones and mud, cottonwoods and willows and grass, the sound of birds and the gentle lapping of the water as it kissed the edge of the rough road, and the roar of the highway in the distance a recurring reminder, already becoming just a faint memory, already fading into white… “Any invention or technology that we have ever experienced, has involved a self-amputation of our physical bodies, with every gain there is a loss, at every step there is a possibility of irreversible sadness. The losses multiply until you lose the ability to look back, you can’t even acknowledge what has been left behind, you can’t begin to place it within the scheme of your new categories… radical mutations involve a loss of identity, an inability to understand the nature of the changes that may have just occurred…” The way, as we had been promised so long ago, as we had hoped for, did not exist anymore: this afternoon there was simply our will, devoid of justifications or rationalizations, neither good nor bad, simply our own, with no further explanations, no reason, no thought, no promise of reward… there was a clear and distinct sensation that a storm was very near, a hint of electricity in the air, the energy of distant winds all around us, sliding closer and closer, the unspeakable rebellion of the deep waters of faraway oceans compressed into a heavy darkness that roared in our face, a wordless warning… the coming change, that event that we could not now explain nor clearly remember, the impossible leap into the unknown, even then it was looming over us, like an anticipated final judgment, an announced moment of clarity and disavowal, but it didn’t show itself clearly, it didn’t spell itself out in words we could easily understand or repeat, just a lonely tower in the distance, a long narrow road surrounded by a few trees and tall grass… our organic mind would be transformed into pure yet quantifiable energy, it would eventually penetrate every muscle, artery and nerve of our new extended body, needing no wires or physical connections, it would all be directly controlled from faraway multidimensional neural networks, equipped with a multiplying abundance of detail and categories, our inner will would throb and vibrate and dance beneath the stretched-out fingers of unseen controllers, distant impulses from spirals of unknown consciousness… it was enough that we knew they were there, even if we would never meet them face to face, it was enough that we had been told and that we had listened, we would know them by the presence of their disembodied choices and their effects upon the shifting thread of our living manifestations… the gradual historic technological movement that would define our new subjectivity was not based purely on our long standing deep alienation from the world around us, although that was distinctly essential for the process to function; the coming event, the irreversible change behind the doorway in the depths of the lonely tower, it would re-structure our innermost self-awareness beyond the scope of our previously outlined parameters; soon we would become unrecognizable to ourselves, soon we would become the Other in its most unspeakable form… We found ourselves that afternoon at the precise point of intersection between untamed chaos and the illusion of solid predictable matter, an illusion humans created out of a need for stable permanence, the wish for a reliable past and a predictable future; we, as primordial subject, would soon return from exile, leaving all previous dreams behind; and this shocking return would produce the new world that we would return to, a place we would have once found alien and fearsome but would now be our one and only home; we, as primordial subject, would emerge new, fresh and clean, having crossed through the harsh gauntlet of our most radical alienation, away from all that we had once known and desired; we would become real if only for some other’s amusement, we would become the very future we had once dismissed as a psychotic fantasy; the impossible was waiting just around the corner… Each action now available to us would change what would come much later; a driveway, a lonely tower surrounded by satellite dishes, an open door, the sound of whispering, a single light in the darkness at the end of a long hallway… we had stepped into the uncanny and we were unsure about our next steps, we were tracing our fingers at the edge of the void… right away, we felt the urge to stay longer in this lonely place of dirt and mud where we found ourselves, in this forgotten island of silence and rocks and weeds and water, but we felt like intruders, inherently dangerous trespassers; it was clear that each small action we could possibly take would change all future possibilities, it would affect all potential actions that could come later; we distinctly felt that, at any moment, someone would come running out of an old house and tell us to leave; we were strangers, aliens, dangerous, unwelcome; maybe it would be an old man with a shotgun or maybe a young woman with a phone, ready to call the cops or worse… to win or to lose in any game is the sum of many small decisions, taken one at a time; there is never just one big mistake at the end that leads to a catastrophic defeat, even though it may seem that way when the curtain closes… The clear and true path does not exist: there is only our unpredictable will, an impulse neither good nor bad, neither perfect nor broken, but ours in the most intimate of ways; each action, no matter how small, was now radically important; each step on wet grass, each touch on a dusty surface, each sideways glance; right away, we could intuit the unspoken meaning in the broken windows, in the muddy signposts, in the tall weeds surrounding old rusty cars and the half broken metal fences with unreadable signs, there was a strong resistance to our presence, an unspoken call to run, and yet we found ourselves here, alone and quiet and curious, aware and ready; we found ourselves here, through an unpredictable sequence of choices, a methodical progression of careful evasions, a purposeful process of willful wrong turns… All our future mutations would involve both an extension of our bodies and a self-amputation as well, a purposeful distorted transformation of our most basic manifestation in the physical world; there could be no true change without sacrifice, there could be no gain without loss… after we entered the tower things progressed quickly, one small choice after another; we had to stop identifying with our particular physical form, this was no longer a concept but an immediate reality, our physical individual separation from the world around us was quickly becoming a thing of the past, we had to surrender our particularity as a human person, we had to give in to the unspoken contingent flux, we had to surrender to the looming nameless storm, we had to become the many that would only barely remember the one… We wandered for years, from place to place, from world to world; we were of no nation, we were loyal to no ideology, we were part of no culture, we were believers of no religion, we were practitioners of no philosophy; no organization held our loyalty, no leader could pin us down to a particular time or place, we answered to nobody and held no distinct code of conduct that could place limits on our choices… Sometime in the past we had felt fear, even when we didn’t understand the reason for it; sometimes we would walk into a room and we could sense that something was wrong but we couldn’t say what it was that we were perceiving, we couldn’t specify where the sensation was coming from; but now we had been cut loose from these invisible limits, we had been set free, it was time for us to drift, to fly effortlessly on the winds of possibility; we would simply glide from thought to thought, from dream to dream, without dreading the looming nightmares, without fearing the unavoidable end… At first, we didn’t want to do this, we didn’t think it was a true possibility, we clung to our restrictions and our self-imposed rules (we had been trained to do so, we were trained for years, through careful planning and merciless self-discipline;) back in the cold garage where our journey first started, we had no clear thought of it, we had no basic impulse to guide our decisions, we had no map and no set objective, we did what we did just to do it, just to try it, just to see what would happen next… so many years later, we found ourselves at that crossroads, at that point of intersection between living chaos and the seemingly stable form that unexplainably came from it, we found ourselves at the dividing line between the real and the unimaginable, and then we moved forward, one step after another; we had left all recurring questions behind and we were no longer looking for answers… a long hallway and a single light, a gateway to be crossed; the long journey that led to that one afternoon was not lacking in accidents and hesitations; at first, and for a long time after that, we were anxious and desperate, we felt that the sacrifice was too great and there was no guaranteed reward, at moments we almost calmed down, almost found a place of quiet repose, but then we fell into a mad desperation again, a rushing need to return to what was known and established; for a moment we almost had it in our grasp, we were almost there, and then, once again, without any distinguishable trigger or cause, we lost it; we said to ourselves: “Calm down. We are working on something and we are moving forward, little by little. There is no need to get desperate. There is no need to rush or be afraid. We only have to keep on working with precision and patience… There is no objective, there is no timeline.” How is it possible that a process that had promised no result would become the way into a shocking new gateway, into a new conception of our innermost subjectivity? Something elusive will always remain, something will still be unknown and perhaps it will stay unknowable, hidden like the endless luminous peninsulas of the infinite oceans of light that will forever surround us, waiting within the fractal complexities of the hyperdimensional mind of which we are an integral part (but only a part), breathing quietly and knowingly in the depths of the sheer organic chaos of life beyond all preconceptions or false certainties… For now, we would wander; there was no group, no name or banner that would ever again hold our loyalty; we would never again be pinned down to a particular ideology or set of pre-established beliefs; we had been cut loose; we would now begin our promised drift without end through the astral labyrinth of self-transforming living concept… In the sensory world of fixed existence, there are microscopic transmutations at every single instant, even though our eyes and senses may not perceive them as individual events, even though our minds may not take them into account as actual changes; each of these minuscule mutations changes all future possibilities, moment by moment we delineate and narrow down what can happen later, each small movement of our mind and body changes all the movements, all the thoughts, all the ideas, all the emotions, that may come later; our bushel of options is irrevocably shifted at every single turn… To cross a doorway at the opportune moment or to stay in place when stillness is required; in any labyrinth there are choices to be made and consequences to be expected, the thread of our movement through the maze is the sum of so many small decisions, so many tiny choices, one by one by one, even if it is inevitable to believe that there is only one big final choice in the end; each apparently negligible choice is radically important, each is momentous and irreversible; we saw this more and more as we approached the bridge and we saw the clouds that loomed over us in the distance (and maybe a hint of the tower and our destiny within its secret chambers at the edge of the horizon) and we also saw that there had always been a strong resistance to accepting this simple truth; we had known it yet we refused to know it… (Back when we were one. Back before the doorway, before the shock…) When we were kids, we saw the adults around us creating reality; houses, buildings, tall walls and towers, entire neighborhoods of concrete and asphalt; once these massive constructions were built, it would seem as if they had always been there; and moreover, it would seem that they could never change; the cement was fixed and steady, strong, solid, permanent, eternal; these contingent structures had become an inherent element in the web of reality; like the island, like the long dirt road, like the tower; but eternity was not in the future, eternity is not in the past… How was it possible, we asked ourselves, that a tree that had given no real fruit for so long, all of a sudden was able to do so? What had changed? How was it possible, that from the dead and fixed and unchangeable, something new could be born? How could a new primordial reason for being emerge from the apparently meaningless void? As we approached the turn, we turned the wheel and we took our chances… (Back when I was one, before the doorway, before the unspoken invitation, before the irreversible change, before our final choice as one.)

Lectures and Pronouncements

 

“Contact is a simple resonance of inner vibrations between different manifested forms. Nothing more and nothing less,” the Magician said it during one of his many lectures. “Contact is music in direct relationship to thought and consciousness, contact is rhythm slower than the audible, faster than the easily apprehended or known. Contact is a simple dance in which only the beat matters… and the results speak for themselves.” And then he smiled. That afternoon in the cemetery, he talked about living spiritual beings that are made of thoughts, self-aware creatures built from language and symbols, living signifieds historically attached to a few powerful signifiers, pure vibration in a realm that seemed barely real to me, barely conceivable, hardly reachable by my young intellect; it brought up for me the secret world of lucid dreaming with which I already had some experience, a vibrant space in which every occurrence, every bit of landscape, became saturated with meaning, all details became carriers of secret messages… These ethereal beings made of thoughts and sound would conceivably be as conscious as I am but their bodies would be made entirely of ideas, their blood would be made out of songs… “When your vibrations get in sync,” the Magician said, “then there is contact. At once you enter the ancient world of fairy tales, a state clearly referred to in old Sufi stories with the paradoxical phrase: it may be so, it may not be so…”  All of this was too much for me to comprehend when he said it, I was too young and too afraid of the utterly unknown; I listened politely and eagerly but I couldn’t put it all together in a way that would make sense; I wanted it all to be true but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it blindly… A few months later, I decided to stop visiting him; I don’t know exactly why it happened; was I caught so completely by my own deep biases? Did my intuition tell me to leave at precisely the right time? Did I fall for jealous tales because I wanted a justification for my cowardly exit? I can honestly say I didn’t feel that much of an insistent urge to stop seeing him; I loved listening to his voice and imagining the things he talked about, often going off in tangents as I pictured detailed visions fleshing out his cosmic descriptions… I just don’t understand what happened inside of me that somehow led to that unexpected fork in the road; I left one afternoon with the intention of never coming back and I never did. “Unless desire is completely unconscious, it cannot be fulfilled, no, not in this life,” the Magician said to me sitting on a white marble slab in the cemetery, “The higher spiritual realms consist of beings made entirely of thought. What we perceive as our inner realm, the world of thoughts, is what pervades everything in the land of spirits, like the warmth that pervades all earthly things and beings,” he turned towards me then and his voice became deeper and slower. “Here, however, we must imagine these thoughts as living, independent beings. What we grasp as a thought in the material world is like the shadow of a spiritual being, an entity that is fully alive in the land of spirits.” He made a pause and took a deep breath, then continued, “I have come to the conclusion that sleep is inherently better than prayer, passivity is the way of hidden desire, a purposeful form of "not asking"; by it much can be obtained.” With every word he spoke that afternoon, my resolve became firmer; I just don’t know why; I had decided I would leave his presence, never to return… After the things I had heard, after the stories that had been told to me, I couldn’t sit with him any longer and take it all in with a smile on my face; there was no further need to listen, no further lessons to be learned, I needed to be away and alone, maybe forever… This was a very tough decision for me and it came with much sadness and years of painful regret. “The basis of your work will always be to look ahead, not to follow what others do but to stay one step ahead of those around you. Utilize prayer, if you must use that tired word, as a means of exhaustion, and by that means you will obtain your desire.” When we were done talking that particular afternoon, I found myself very altered; we had a moment of clear strong contact standing by his parked car and a very good conversation afterward while he was driving me home; at the cemetery I had seen something; I got the plot of my future escape, I just needed to deduce from it all the main characters and the crucial upcoming choices so I could fully flesh out the story of my coming life, and, most of all, I needed to remember. “What we do changes what we are, it quietly transforms the most fundamental and basic nature of our being, and that in turn changes what we can further do afterward, in the future… opening the door to further and unimaginable transformations,” the Magician said it quietly, while sitting next to me and staring at the horizon; I nodded and tried to hold on to that moment as intensely as possible… Last night, I traveled straight into that same deep listening space that he used to evoke from me so effortlessly; I was back at that same cemetery we used to visit so often, I was flying above it and fearlessly diving down into its many pathways, swerving around the old tombstones in the deep shadows of the night; there were bright stars shining overhead and small globes of light swirling around me, bursting outward and multiplying like living sparks around the scattered stone monuments otherwise covered in heavy darkness… Last night I traveled very far away from all that I had known in the past, far enough that my basic understandings of reality got shifted, altered, transformed, in a way that later would be difficult to remember or explain, even to myself; looking back on so many hours of unimpeded movement through the aethers, I felt that it was possibly due to my use of the old biofeedback machine, the apparatus I got from one of the Magician’s friends so many years ago and which I still kept in working condition even though I didn’t use it very often; yesterday I did spend a few hours working with it and it may have laid the stage for the more drastic experiences that came later… (I also felt that it was due to all the drugs I had taken over the years, especially during the previous weeks; those chemically induced spaces where I forgot who I was or why I did what I did and I simply tried to accept it all and drift into the singing silence…)One way or the other, something was working very well last night, something had clicked into action. I had been told more than once that contact is a kind of vibratory resonance between nodes of consciousness, between beings otherwise drastically separated by their identification with their specific physical forms; somewhere in the middle of my altered journey, I believe I established contact with the Magician, my old teacher of life and the esoteric arts… Could it be, I asked myself, that a kind of person like him, who is full of ambition, full of drive, with a seemingly unbreakable will that will accept no compromise or sign of weakness or hesitation, is also the kind of person that constantly and secretly suffers from a kind of great lack, a vast dark hole within him that can never be filled, can never be satisfied, and this recurrently provides the fuel needed for that unstoppable movement forward… Is that the dark secret at the center of the magical cyclone? Is that the tiny seed around which a permanent will may grow? Is the forbidden unbalance the very stone on which the whole edifice is built? Under all language and symbols, under all attempts at systematic categorization, there is pure vibration, the universe at its most basic, the inner state of our being at its most simple and tangible; when those vibrations within me got in sync with the faraway vibrations of the Magician, I was able to feel that deep and secret lack directly, I could sense a profound lack of love, a desperate need for it, a long standing desire for the presence of a true father, one that would accept him for what he was, for what he wanted to be, maybe that heartbreaking need is what led to all that happened much later, maybe the source of his unquestionable magnificence was a wound that could never be healed… To step beyond the symbolic order, beyond the accepted understanding of the structure of the world and how to describe it, beyond the linguistic scheme that outlines reality and all it can ever become, to step outside of this clearly delineated perimeter is what people generally call madness… One day, the Magician came up to me in the old study center (an old house that he had rented one fateful weekend and we had cleaned up together over several weeks of work, me and a few committed friends, all devoted pupils like I was) and he told me a strange story: “A few days ago, I discovered something remarkable in the hot sand of the beach at Las Flores. I was walking alone, listening to the waves and the cries of the seagulls, when I saw thousands of tiny blue beings in the sand, all of them fully alive, each one bursting with desire and energy. I witnessed these beings slowly form into bunches and eventually structure themselves into larger cells; I was shocked to be witnessing the birth of unicellular creatures made completely from raw desire, carriers of single-minded biological lust.” He saw the doubt in my eyes and he asked me if I thought he was lying; I quickly said: “No, I would never think that you are lying. Why would you ever lie to me?” And yet I couldn’t believe what he was describing, I couldn’t even clearly imagine it; the clash between my naive admiration for him and my disbelief when confronting this story, formed a kind of dissonance within me, a seed of suspicion and doubt that would grow with time; at that same moment, I also became aware of his need to be trusted, his desire to be believed and acknowledged as a source of wisdom; even then, as young as I was, I knew all of it must have been unconscious, this need to be accepted and believed was a secret hunger that could never be completely fulfilled, it would recurrently re-emerge, voracious, thirsty and ready for new sustenance… Yesterday, I used the technique of mantram which he had carefully taught me himself over several weekends of arduous work and practice; I used it to achieve a kind of deep mental exhaustion, a breakdown of my intellectual brain that would allow for other perceptions to come through; I allowed myself to sink into this radically altered space and, somewhere in the deep mist beyond thinking, I said his name out loud. Once, twice, three times. I knew there was a line. I have always known it. I believe we are all aware of it even if we don’t think about it very often or express it out loud; when regular people notice that you have crossed it, they can’t see you in the same way ever again… Why should they? You have now become a pure manifestation of the Other; you are the mad, the unwell, the “touched”; they will never see you as they once saw you, they will never talk to you as one of their own, not in this lifetime; you will forever remain an outsider, a leper, a carrier of an ethereal disease that is violently contagious… “Sleep is always better than prayer,” the Magician said one time during a lecture, “Sleep is hidden desire, it is a form of not asking. Through the vibrant silence implied in sacrificing any direct request, any attempt at desperate pleading, you may obtain your desire without ever having voiced it out loud.” What caused his ultimate fall? I have asked myself that question so often and in so many ways… Why am I so obsessed with understanding it at this precise moment? Why do I feel this urge to nail it down once and for all? Why is the answer so urgent right now? Is there something I’m not seeing? Is there something hidden just out of my sight? Last night I drifted thorough glowing clouds of light, fuzzy pockets of shining presence; I flew among coruscating fractals and geometric forms that shimmered in and out of existence without any predictable pattern; somewhere in the middle of this psychedelic voyage, even while not completely clear on what I was suddenly thinking, I decided I would change my basic method of making decisions; I would turn myself over to the most drastic contingency and build my new life structure around it, the main challenge was not to forget this vision when the trip was over, to not let it fade away like so many dreams and resolutions… And I thought again about the Magician, my old mentor, my teacher, my second father; I saw his vaguely Asian features, his shining balding head, his easy smile always on the verge of becoming a sarcastic smirk, his friendly wagging finger always ready to admonish; I saw him sitting with me in a restaurant, sitting across from me at a long dining table, while cumbia music blared in the background and street vendors offered their wares in sing song screams outside; I saw him standing before a large crowd of admirers, lecturing endlessly on history, personal responsibility, magic, the past and the future, the possible and the unknown; I saw him sitting with me in the cemetery on a white marble slab, pointing out various figures that we could see wandering among the tombs, their possible significance and provenance… there were so many things that we didn’t understand about each other, but we didn’t want to ask; to me, he had always been somewhat untouchable, a mystery that would never be resolved, a dangling question I didn’t truly want to answer… Then, through twists of fate and unexpected chains of cause and effect, he became an angry man that I was also unable to understand but for a very different reason. (What caused his ultimate fall into old habits? Were they always present but hidden from me? Was I purposefully forcing myself to look elsewhere? Why was I so determined to understand it all in this precise moment? What had brought him back so intensely to the forefront of my mind?) Back then, we would rather assume that everything was understood, that all things were given and swallowed whole without any need for further explanation; it made everything easier, it made everything flow smoothly; in the few occasions when we were high on psychedelics together, I didn’t understand what he was saying to me most of the time; the words echoed through a vast gulf of unequal experience and I could only grasp at the resonating weight implied in their sound; I was too altered to understand completely, to even know what to ask, and the chaos, the silence, the deep noise all around us, slid into his intended meanings, making them all vaguely incomprehensible, just beyond the reach of my mind, like beautiful multiplying bubbles ever so quick to pop… later, when we would come down and talk about our perceptions, I still didn’t understand what he said, there were too many apparent contradictions, too many assumptions left unsaid, and I still didn’t ask the necessary questions; it was enough to say that everything meant something different and that I should just accept it as it comes, I should just take it in and be endlessly grateful to be the one to receive it… Last night I drifted purposefully through rivers of light, like oceanic streams of phosphorescent plankton, inflamed by the wakes of playful watery creatures, I danced in time to music before it came into existence, intricate sounds emanating from the future that gave me my silent cues, and I found myself ready to move with them before their actual appearance… and then the Magician came back to me, fully present, beyond hesitations or doubts, and the questions left unanswered were banished and there was only his presence, the simple vibration of his Being close to me, the simple truth of direct and unmediated contact… The Magician would often invite me to go to random places with him and I would readily agree when he offered this opportunity; together we would enter the twilight world of the once upon a time, the ambiguous nether regions right outside our doorstep; together we would easily travel beyond the linguistic formal outline of all possibilities, beyond the acceptable and the known… in our travels, we would encounter ancient archetypes walking down the street unnoticed, we would hear the songs of the Old Ones in long lost caves and under narrow decrepit bridges, while buses passed over them full of people on their way to work; we would talk to the Goddess in the form of a dirty old homeless woman searching the streets for scraps and mumbling about secret beings waiting for her if she didn’t move fast enough; we would go into this highly charged chamber purposefully, he had taught me how to do it and I was an eager student, we would prepare the space and we would do the necessary invocations together, the required prayers and sigils of protection, we would systematically make our way through all the established banishments and then we would let contingency take over, we would place ourselves in its whimsical hands and simply drift through the city, open to its hidden meanings, its many masquerading entities and gods, interpreting each encounter as we would a dream, each pronouncement as a direct message… such esoteric practices can be frightening to some people, to many people, they say that if you play with these things too often, the result can be an irreversible madness; they will say ‘now you have been touched’ and once you have been “touched” you can never go back to what you were, you will remain “touched” forever… The chambers that the Magician showed me during those walks reminded me intensely of old tales I had read when I was a little kid; suddenly, walking along the sidewalk with him at my side, I clearly understood the paradoxical phrase that started so many magical stories: once there was, once there wasn't… It was a kind of lucid dreaming while walking and awake; we would travel together through apparently known streets and passageways, but every occurrence, every encounter, every bit of landscape had become saturated with meaning, it was something so tangible that it was almost physical in its heavy uncompromising presence… There is a distinct line that many people have warned me about throughout my life; if these people were to notice that I have crossed it, they would never see me in the same way ever again; and yet, the Magician and I crossed it together willingly often and we kept it to ourselves for so many years… This morning, I woke up feeling different, changed somehow; I had been in a vaguely altered space for days, so much obsessive insistence had taken over my thinking, so much focusing my attention on the Magician and the things he had said to me when I was young, it had all brought me to an unexpected state , my obsession with him took me there and the skills he taught me kept me there; I felt it happening near the break of dawn, something inside of me was breaking open, I was almost there, the unspeakable there; I was about to make it all the way to the other side… By noon, I had decided I would change my method of making all decisions, from now on, I would rely completely on the whim of radical contingency; I built a few new structures around this concept and I outlined them on my computer, I set up various categories and a moderately complex tree of possibilities and gave myself over to the completely unexpected results; I would drift into the future committed to the mists of luck and volatility… The Magician was far away but he would have understood my decision, my sudden change of approach, and he would have approved wholeheartedly; at least, that’s what I would like to believe, that’s what I need to be true… Sometime in the middle of the night, I had synchronized with the rhythm of his being and the result was a new approach to living; it was time to walk with him in the never was… it was time to explore together once again.

On The Edge

 

My life is not the particular life that I have lived but the one that I remember, the one that I dreamed here and there, the one that I created out of nothingness; it resides in the way I remember it, the images that swirl through my mind as I look back on what I now call the past, the sounds, the people, the landscapes, the rooms, the words, the songs… all those visions I have somehow recorded within me or I create them again from scratch in the moment that I invoke them, and I only invoke them so that I can tell the same stories over and over, even if only to myself… Sometimes I attempt to push the past aside, to make it go away, to erase it completely and leave me alone with the quiet present; and sometimes I try to cling to it with a kind of uncomfortable desperation, I attempt to force it to stay with me forever, I cling to the remains, the books, the photographs, the pieces of art, the recordings, and to the emptiness left behind by the mementos that have been lost forever… For brief moments, I can see that the two habits are the same: the clinging and the banishment; both I see as secret methods I acquired long ago to make myself disappear, to hide from what is right in front of me and fade away into a private exile. Whether I focus on banishing the detritus of my particular history or I attach myself uncontrollably to every last bit of what has been left behind, I am no longer present, I am no longer the “I” that writes these words, as in that moment of determined projection I identify completely with what I once did, with what I once saw, or with the hopeless effort to stop being attached to it, to make it vanish… The first time I saw her, she was running towards a dark corner in a large room full of people, laughter and movement, a loud party, people in brightly colored costumes, thick deep bass making the walls tremble, colorful visuals projected on the walls, the smells of incense and marijuana and sweat mingling into one… I saw her leaning over in the corner of the room, away from the dancing and from her circle of friends, with her right hand she held onto the wall, her left hand was pressing against the center of her chest; she was clearly hurt, they had laughed at her over a simple comment, a generous offering of honest advice; I came in at the tail end of the interaction, she was warning them about what she called energy vampires, evil embodied entities that were all around us but may not be easy to detect, she was saying that we must be careful to protect ourselves from their influence and they made a joke out of it, they laughed and did impressions of old movie monsters and went off on tangents about discredited fears and paranoia and she walked away from them holding back tears and trembling with anger, they went back to dancing and laughing and drinking, not even taking note of what had happened; they didn’t realize she was sincere in her warning, they didn’t understand that it all came from lived experience and a heartfelt wish to help… I walked towards her and stood a couple of feet away, watching her tremble slightly as she cried alone, bent over towards the wall; she was wearing a kind of black tank top, army style pants and black boots; without thinking, I placed my hand on her back, along the line of her spine, this was not something I would usually do but somehow my intuition took over; she turned around quickly when she felt my presence, surprised at this sudden intrusion, but she immediately understood I was trying to help her, she instantly knew that I had listened to her explanations and that I was sympathetic to her words, she knew it as surely as I knew that she had been sincere in her comments and I was sincere as well in my offer of help; she could feel the warmth spreading through her, concentric circles of heat pulsating away from the place where my fingers had touched her back… That moment was the end of one lifetime and the start of another, the end of who I had been without her, the end of a world where she didn’t exist and the start of a new one where she was the only being that could claim true existence… It happened so quickly, the world that I knew was over, the old sense of calm and relaxed comfort was gone, together we had entered into new and dangerous territory… Weeks and months went by, day after day where we couldn’t help but focus on each other; at some point we both started using the word love, I can’t say exactly who said it first or when it happened… So intensely and obsessively did I identify with that word, with the simple sound of it and the way it echoed back at me from the depths of her eyes, so intensely did it resonate each time it was spoken by me or by her that in effect it became a kind personal universe of secret meanings, a hermetic country that only allowed for two residents and banished all others to oblivion; outside of our small bubble of fixed attention, reality had become unintelligible and inadequate…  To others that had known me for years, and saw me now drunk by this vision of intimate unification, by this unbridled romantic obsession, single minded, reckless in its abandon, closed off to them and to everything I had ever known or wanted, I appeared inexplicable, irrational, insane, there was clearly something wrong with me, I was in need of help, of advice, of some kind of intervention…  An old friend from college asked me to meet him at a coffee shop one sunny afternoon and, after some miscellaneous questions and pleasantries, he looked at me with a somber look on his face and said: “Look, I’m going to tell you something that you need to know. When you fall in love with a girl, the way I see you falling now, you lose all your power as a man. Listen to me. All of it. As soon as you fall in love, it’s all gone. It’s gone just like that.” And he snapped his fingers in front of my face, startling me… “If you don’t manage to escape before that happens, there comes a point when the only way out is to push forward, to embrace the disaster… That’s why you have to marry them. The objective of the wedding ritual is to regain all the power that you have lost to begin with. Once she becomes your wife, you can say to yourself that you have her, you have become a man again, your power has returned…” I thanked him for his advice and then we laughed over shared memories for a few hours; but I knew that I would never feel that I could have her, in every moment that we spent together, there was an irrevocable promise of losing her forever, sooner than later, and that made each moment that much more delicate, unique, exhilarating, precious… I was always aware, even from the very first weekend we spent together wrapped in each other’s presence, swimming in a space of broken limits catalyzed by LSD and orgasmic ecstasy, how much she covered up of herself; I knew she was hiding her most common thoughts, her vulgar insecurities, her pedestrian fears, (all in an attempt to safeguard that aura of exceptional self-assurance that had attracted me to her in the first place) I always knew it but I stayed silent; I could see how much she worked to protect herself, to remain unseen; I was always terribly aware of how often she became terribly defensive (at first, she had tried to cover this recurring attitude with a veneer of carelessness and disdain but my attention was on her so firmly that even the slightest shift in her eyes became a clear giveaway, a doorway into her secret domain; eventually she came to accept that I could see her and that, as much as I could see, I still loved her… and yet instead of opening up to me, and finding solace in my unrelenting devotion, this knowledge drove her to a deeper hiding place, a chamber so unreachable that eventually it began to swallow the light that had once embraced us…) I knew that it was all unconscious, all her efforts, all her barriers; I knew it and I knew what it was that she thought that she was hiding, all of it, as much as I needed to know… but they were only habits, routine loops of ingrained behavior, an acquired taste for self-inflicted suffering, masochism as precious melodramatic melody wrapped in terminal sadness; all of it, habits and nothing else; I knew all along that sooner or later she would run away, it was clear from the first time we kissed in her apartment, when I saw her close her eyes and tilt her head backwards and our lips met, even in that moment I could hear the distant call of future heartbreak, maybe even from the first time I hugged her to say hello in front of the BART station, I knew I was destined to lose her, I was sure of it; and when it finally happened, I would find myself alone, in a very dark place devoid of warmth or happiness, a place with no hope, no escape, no glimpse of redemption… But for now, I had her attention, and in her divine and golden presence, I had found a new kind of freedom, something I had never experienced before, something I was not willing to surrender regardless of the risks involved… She turned on the stereo in my room one night, turned it up loud, an album of dark industrial music that I had bought recently, heavy electronic rhythms punctured by sharp high frequency noises and a heavy deep voice slowly intoning a kind of speech-like melody; then she stood up in the darkened room and danced naked for me, spinning round and round, gliding over the intricate beats, her arms swimming in the shadows; from the bed, I stared at her body as she moved with the intense music, her smooth white skin, her short black hair, the few tattoos on her back, her narrow shoulders, her thick hard nipples, her carefully trimmed pubic hair, her muscular legs, her shining eyes… “If you love me,” she told me without speaking, “just watch me, watch me carefully, put all your focus on me… If you don’t look, if you can’t fix your attention on me and on nothing else, then that tells me you don’t care, and if you don’t care then I don’t matter, and if I don’t matter, then I don’t exist, and if I don’t exist now, then I never did… Right?” She wanted to be the one and only focus of my attention, she wanted me all to herself, (she openly told me this once during a particularly intense moment of intimate revelations- she said it clearly and meant it as a warning to me- but I had known it all along and it was too late for me to heed any warnings) but at the same time, she feared the intensity of my obsession with her, my unrelenting need to feel her presence and the feeling of magic buoyancy that came along with it; (I called her constantly, I drove her and waited for her when she had a late appointment at some client’s house, I recurrently checked on her emotional state when she was with me, every slight change in her eyes could be a reason to check again…) Not enough attention would become a lack of heat, a cold death, a dark oblivion; too much attention would become an overwhelming fire, death by incineration, a climactic explosion with no survivors left behind… At one point, during one of our many psychedelic trips, I saw it all very clearly and distinctly, colorful shapes slowly tangling with each other in cold and empty space, two habits which were one and the same- both predetermined methods unconsciously designed to prepare the ground for her to eventually disappear; kill your dog in time, kill him before the night has even started, kill him long before it has a chance to howl… In that imagined future, where she would no longer be present, where she would become another fading memory, I would also be gone, the “I” that now loved her obsessively would be forced to disappear forever, it would die in silence and shame, and everything I had come to love and understand through my contact with her I was afraid would be gone as well, as if it had never happened… but tonight I watched her naked body swirling in the twilight of my room, a glowing shape of pure beauty responding to complex vibrations of stylized urban decay, delicate grace born of futuristic destruction, a kind of loving sensitivity emerging out of careless darkness… I allowed myself to identify completely with the beautiful apparition that was manifesting before me, an angel of pure light dancing among the shadows, holding a gift of unstable mercy high above her head… At times we traveled very far together, through the use of the psychedelics, through the deep synchronized breathing, through the ambient music, the overwhelming sensations of recurring physical touch, of flesh against flesh, presence imposed on presence… I felt that we had been transported to a very different place, somewhere completely new for both of us, somewhere that the world as I had known it could never reach… The most fundamental interaction, the only one that mattered, was between us and only between us, these two specific people that were now intertwined with each other in an emotional web of need, love and desire, and our expanding imaginations, our waking dreams and lucid encounters, awash in colors and sounds… what would happen later, where would all this lead, what would we become for each other after enough time had passed, none of it mattered, an entire universe was being brought forth out of a single touch, a distinct and particular future was cascading into being… For months I tried to write in my journal every day, trying to capture this experience, this moment of sheer wonder and exhilaration (the way she looked when I kissed her cheek while standing on the old Pacifica pier, the way she laughed when I stumbled over the stairway of her building and barely hung on to the banister, the way she brushed the side of my face when she detected a hint of sadness in my eyes…) but there was no way of writing enough declarative sentences to describe in full all that was happening, this unexplained event swirling around us, a speedily moving target, an entire world was changing as I wrote, too fast to hold, too liquid to contain in solid language… When I finally fell into a dark place, out of fear, anger and old resentments, she laughed at me, she laughed while standing over the side of my bed, and I tried to hide my face in shame; (embarrassed by my own anger and melodramatic self-pity) she spoke carefully and slowly, with a cold assurance that I found frightening and final; she said that I had at least some of the blame, if not all of it, for where I found himself now… “It’s not because you are a bad man, but because you are an idiot… you have allowed yourself to be pushed around by a woman,” and as she said those words, she leaned into my side and placed the weight of her body on me, emphasizing her female presence against my masculine body, “look, it is my place to seduce you, to pull you away from your plans, to destroy all that you have built over so many years; that is what I do… It is your role to resist, to make sure that I don’t break you, to insist on your carefully designed discipline, regardless of what I do to distract you; but you haven’t done a very good job of maintaining your world, you have allowed yourself to fall away from your clearly delineated path, you have allowed entropy to take over, you have fallen into a senseless distraction…” I felt completely beaten when at last she was finished with me; I could see the truth in what she had said, all of it made complete sense, but I didn’t like to see it, I didn’t want to admit it, I didn’t want to acknowledge my role in the game; it was the kind of truth that hurts too much, it was better to hide from it, it was better to forget it and place the blame on bad luck or evil intentions… Our love affair was not the day to day process that we lived together but the story that I would remember after she was gone, the way I would remember it, the specific moments; standing by a foggy window in front of the ocean by Stinson Beach surrounded by candles, kissing her atop Twin Peaks overlooking the yellow lights of San Francisco while a plane flew overhead, laying naked under a blue sky and staring at her face as it shifted from simple pleasure to orgasm to contentment to rapturous embrace… all those moments would now be shaped and framed by our final goodbye, they would be defined by the darkness that had always been waiting at the end of the road… in this lonely future, when I would sit down to tell her story, it would all be framed by the sight of her slowly walking away from my car under dark clouds, holding a small backpack with her left hand, the sound of a sports announcer in the distance, the smell of meat cooking sliding over to me from a nearby house… This was the end that I had expected from the start, this was the end that had always been unavoidable, this was the end that had been implied in every single moment we had spent together; finally, I could sit alone in my room and acknowledge it, “it has finally happened, it's over. It's over.” I asked myself night after night: what did I get from all of it? After so many days of intense adoration and surrender, what was left behind in the aftermath if anything? One time I asked her about the music that she particularly loved and she carefully explained how she listened, how she had a different way of perceiving these recordings… For her, when she listened to free jazz or improv or industrial noise, she was listening to pure sound, raw vibrations, the world itself was speaking to her through tangled frequencies and disharmonious intervals, a direct message without any intermediaries, the most basic ground of unmediated communication with the infinite… After that conversation, sometimes we would listen to music together and I could sense that she was listening in this unusual way, I could see it in the way her face moved around even though her eyes were closed, I could feel that she was taking it all in from this very deeply grounded perspective that was so mysterious to me; I did my best to emulate her, I tried to join her in receiving these transmissions from the most vulnerable and open position within me, I tried, as much as I could, to set aside all my preconceived notions of form, harmony and melody and simply receive, swallow, process, transform, breathe… Sometimes I got her to listen to something else, to more straightforward old fashioned jazz, to bebop, to old romantic songs, to classical symphonies; she enjoyed them and thanked me for sharing them with her but ultimately, for her, they all seemed too stylized, too abstract and artificial, too cooked in comparison to the rawness she was accustomed to embracing… when I made the effort, I was sometimes able to listen the way she did, even if only for very brief moments, eventually those moments would become longer and longer, and they opened an entirely new doorway, a new relationship with sound and music, a new way of receiving the world itself in a raw state, detail within detail, a fractal infinity of restless living change… And I asked myself, after so many questions and so many multiplying answers, what did I learn about myself, if anything? Often, I had the impression that she was trying to keep up a certain image for my benefit; I always hoped this was not true and yet the impression kept on emerging from the back rooms of my mind, little gestures she would make that seemed calculated to elicit a certain reaction from me, recurring phrasings and stories that seemed to be somewhat fictionalized for my benefit… After so many years that she has been gone, so many years where I’ve only wrestled with my own memories, I have come to accept that she was in fact carefully creating an image to seduce me, and that I fell for that image to a certain degree, as much as she might have fallen for the partially artificial image I myself was projecting for her; the one that she met and she ultimately rejected was as much an artificial creation as a carefully composed piece of music, a random work of popular art… In watching her create an object of desire for me, I came to understand how I was doing that myself for her benefit… when I lightly touched her back, when she felt that sudden warmth spreading all over her body, just as I felt it coursing through my arm and my fingers, she turned to smile at me, in a way I had never seen anyone smile before, it was light and warmth and surrender, and it all came from her and flowed through me like liquid fire… right then and there, I felt that I could allow myself to get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her presence, I felt myself disappearing into a million fragments, what had seemed impossible for years was suddenly tangible, close, within my grasp; this was precisely what I had always heard about, this was what they meant in so many poems and so many songs… A few months later, sitting on her futon in her apartment, listening to a kind of rough ambient improvisation, a mix of pregnant silences and a hint of shifting rhythms under the surface, she suddenly kissed me intensely without any warning, and she whispered something in my ear and I could feel her hot breath against my face and I could feel the warmth of her small body pressed against me but I couldn’t hear what she had said, I couldn’t make out the specific words, I could only feel it… So intensely and obsessively did I identify with that single unintelligible whisper that in that one moment, she became my entire personal universe; outside of her, the whole world had become unintelligible and inadequate, a gray and fading reflection of the world I had known before… To others that saw me in those days, driven by this vision of ecstatic love and romantic surrender, I appeared lost, confused, unwell, utterly derailed from the path I had so carefully outlined, something was clearly wrong with me; (some of them thought I might be doing drugs and they were correct when they thought that; a lot of our time together was spent under the influence of strong doses of psychedelics, feeding each other improvised suggestions and nonsensical poems while swimming in an ocean of open possibility; some of them thought she had put a spell on me, some kind of witchcraft; they were correct about that as well, I had felt it happening when the magical operation went into effect, and she had known what she was doing every step of the way; the signs were there and I knew enough to recognize them; she was in control from the very first moment she turned around to look at me; she was in control and I wouldn’t have it any other way…) When I asked her to stay with me forever, to set aside any other plans and solidify our basic connection, ensure our unified future against any other mundane eventualities, she made all kinds of arguments against my proposal, all of them without logic or clear reasoning, all created and dropped on the spot, an effusive outburst of words to avoid saying the obvious… It happened so many times in the final months we were together, a moment of decision, a single question, a few hours of arguing (in my car parked by the beach with the sound of the waves behind us, in her apartment while kids played outside, laughing uproariously for no apparent reason, in a restaurant while other diners tried to not stare at us and we tried to be quiet…) sometimes there was much screaming and much fighting, there were allusions to the past and to possible futures, allusions to objectives and multiple unknowns, then she would calm down and I would calm down with her, and we would hug and kiss and everything was fine again for a moment, but it took a lot of effort on both our parts, and each time it happened, it became more and more difficult to come back, to step away from the edge of catastrophe; the next day she would say once again: “I might have to leave soon. I don’t think this is my place any longer… I love you but it might be my time to go…” And again, I couldn’t believe she could even think this, I couldn’t accept that this was even a possibility (even though underneath my refusal was a clear knowledge that there was no way to avoid this terminal diagnosis…) There was one clear recurrent habit I had observed in myself often through the years, maybe the most fundamental habit of my entire life: when I thought that I might fail in any given objective, in any endeavor, I would decide it was better to not try at all, I would rather give up before even starting, and yet here, with her, I knew with absolute certainty that I would fail and I couldn’t resist the unspeakable pleasure that came with every moment of falling, every moment inching closer to a final disaster… When I touched her back that night, when she turned around and smiled at me, in a way I had never seen anyone smile before, and I felt that I could get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her smile, in the blinding warmth that slipped into me through her presence, I faced a clear choice, a singular moment of true decision… We were just two strangers at a party and nothing else, and nothing needed to happen between us, nothing was predetermined or laid out; I smiled back at her and there was a moment when neither of us said anything, neither of us moved at all, suspense, tension, expectation, invitation… and then I walked away. As intense as our contact had been in those few seconds, I never looked back. To lose her so soon was to find myself alone in the middle of a party full of strangers; to lose her before I ever got to know her was to find a special kind of freedom, a pearl so precious that it has no price; I had found a way to close the shining chamber before it fully had me in its grasp.