Secret Pathways

 

Up or down, light or heavy, right or wrong, big or small, real or imaginary, good or evil, sleep or awake, left or right, the distinct truth or an ambiguous lie… all these carefully determined distinctions, all foundations built upon the shifting sands of flimsy words; a thin veil separates one from the other, a veil which at times seems impossible to find or touch (making the distinctions seem insurmountable) and at times it vanishes as if it was never there to begin with… Our common language creates a recurrent illusion of permanence, nouns in themselves point to stability and affirm it with intoned finality, the promise of an ending implied at the start of a melody, the final cadence hidden in the very first note of a song… our common reality changes all the time and language and its meanings change as well, from year to year, from hour to hour, from moment to moment; but the illusion that each given moment is permanent, that each given concept is eternal and final persists, in spite of the transitory nature of its carrier signals, the illusion is maintained by the sound of the grammar, by the cadence of its hidden music, the secret medium of its invisible power… I was laying down in the middle of a large round room with a tall ceiling, I had my eyes open and I was breathing slowly, in and out, in and out… there was a large drum circle going on around me and I was trying to make sure that my breathing would stay synchronized with the music, with the insistent rhythm of the drums; I knew that my old friend was also here and there were a few others with him, members of his esoteric work group, they were all sitting somewhere behind me where I couldn’t see them directly; they began to sing a song together, I could recognize their particular voices, their sound as a group had a certain air of familiarity that filled me with a sense of nostalgia; they sang a very old song, something that was already here before the conquistadors came, an old song that had been roughly translated into Spanish many years ago but had somehow retained something of its old archaic magic… I heard them sing it forcefully and I could feel the intensity of their commitment to the simple melody as they sang, the raw emotions that spilled through their mouths, but they were having trouble synchronizing themselves to the drums, to the music, and as they attempted to fix their problems of timing and harmonic resonance, they each went in separate directions… I could hear and feel that they were on the verge of falling completely apart, an ominous chaos was implied in the collision of their various sincere impulses… I woke up choking, gasping, inhaling forcefully. It took me a while to recover as I took in large gulps of air, trying to calm down and regain a sense of stability; the clock said it was 1 in the morning, I could still hear the echo of the drums and of the old song in the back of my mind; I closed my eyes again and allowed the ancient rhythm to take me for a ride… I have been carefully acting out a long story that has been repeated over and over for thousands of years, sometimes I can recognize it (a doorway, a style of hair, a smile, the sound of an old woman laughing), sometimes I get lost in it (a sudden reversal of fortune, a knock on the main door of my home, a single gunshot in the distance, the howling of a pack of dogs…) the basic story is always basically the same even if it’s also slightly different (different enough to be unsettling, similar enough to be uncanny); the script has been carefully written ahead of time but it is always slightly improvised, there is an ongoing open invitation to be part of the improvisation but I often refuse to participate, I would rather stay safe within the known guidelines of my habitual shape for no apparent reason… She woke up and called for him in the middle of the night, a soft voice in the darkness calling for help; it was my fault, I had opened her door and then closed it again, somewhat violently; it was a careless unintentional move on my part, I was only starting to get my bearings in this new place and in my wanderings, I had come to the wrong room by accident… But regardless of my lack of intention, the sudden opening and closing of her door had startled her and she had jumped up from her bed in a sudden wave of shock and fear, she knew that there was nobody else in the house besides the two of them, her and my old friend who was now her partner; nobody else could have opened and closed her door, and yet it had happened. When I heard her calling my friend’s name, I jumped backwards rapidly and flew into a very thin crack in the wall, a narrow space barely visible by human eyes; I remained still and listened to everything that was happening around me, the wind outside, the vaguely rhythmic sound of the windows being shaken; my friend came out of his room quickly and asked her what was wrong; the two of them searched throughout the house to see if someone was hiding, they searched one room after another, they looked in the many closets and bathrooms, they looked in the same place more than once; my friend had always been methodical in his approach to any challenge, but of course, in the end, they determined that nobody was there, they were alone and safe, and yet they knew that her door had been opened and closed distinctly and forcefully with a clear sense of purpose. My mistake. I saw it all from my impossible hiding place in the crack in the wall… Eventually, they went back to sleep; I had the sense that my friend was thinking of me as he slipped into a dream, he had a vague impression of the doorway through which I had traveled, he could almost envision it in that twilight space before losing consciousness, he could almost see it glowing not too far away, the little amulet that I sent him through the mail, the little piece of me that was now a guest in his home… At this time, I can’t physically go to where he is; the human dimension has taken control of my body and is holding it hostage; but I can visit him in other ways, I can find my own passageways through the labyrinth that normal humans can’t trace or even talk about… When I first found myself here, I stumbled around the house, from stairway to living room to the windows at the front and even into the attic, all of it was completely unfamiliar to me; eventually I accidentally found my way into her room… For a moment I saw her sleeping; a middle-aged woman with long black hair and smooth white skin; after some time had passed, I fell away back into darkness and I found myself in the old house, the large house back in El Salvador where I lived for so many years, my childhood home; I was in the living room, the furniture was all completely different but I could still recognize the place; there was a little coffee table in the middle of the room, not the same one I remembered but very similar and almost in the exact same spot, there was thin sunlight coming through the side windows, there was the sound of a loud mechanical clock counting off the seconds as they passed by, a kind of soft insistent drum… I heard someone coming in through the front door, the voice of a man that sounded very familiar to me and yet I couldn’t place it, I couldn’t give it a name; a man in his thirties, a bit heavy set, brown sweaty skin, thin alert eyes; he was walking into the living room with a younger woman, I had the sense that they were coming to get something they had left behind, something they had somehow forgotten in this old dusty uninhabited house… The man stepped into the living room in a forceful, intentional way that called attention to itself; I reacted to his sudden movement and slipped beneath the sofa and pressed myself against the floor; he then spoke up loudly to the entire space as if perceiving that someone else was invisibly present: “Whoever is here, whoever you are, don’t be afraid, we are only here to get a few things… we will not disturb you… we will be gone before you know it…” They then lifted something big and heavy together, a kind of old-fashioned chest made of metal and leather; it had been sitting off to the side, close to the windows and the doorway that led to the old backyard; slowly and with some effort they carried the heavy chest towards the main doorway of the house; I watched it all from the floor, safe in my hiding spot; the man turned around once more before closing the door; “We are leaving now. Thank you for allowing us to take this with us. We won’t disturb you any further.” I know I have visited that house many times through the years; so many nights wandering in these rooms and hallways… such recurrent strong attachments, particularly to a place that I am apparently not interested in consciously, can be likened to a small flame, a flame that could easily burn out at any time if smothered or ignored, but somehow it refuses to go away completely, regardless of my conscious thoughts, regardless of my seeming desires, I still find my way back here more often that I even realize (it’s only sometimes that I manage to remember…) Whenever I come to visit, I feel that I am standing at a crossroads, a threshold of change, a vortex of possibilities; I am about to see something that I have avoided for decades, I am closing in on an uncomfortable realization…  The myths that have grown around these nighttime experiences are all stories, legends, exaggerations, linguistic constructs of one kind or another, all of which can only vaguely suggest the actual experience, tentatively point to the real possibility of such an unlikely event, something that would otherwise seem impossible, a feint of pure imagination, a tall tale, a lie… Sometimes I find myself surrounded by my old friends, both living and dead, the one that went for a midnight walk with me, screaming hard rock songs into the darkness while everyone in the neighborhood slept, the one with whom we would talk endlessly for hours after the time we were supposed to go to sleep and I would concentrate on his voice while I stared at the shifting shadows on the wall, the one that read horror books with me 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, the one that taught me to love the hidden phantom, the secret musician that hides behind the walls, and explained the meaning of the words that he sang, the one with whom we ran around over the neighbor’s roofs oblivious to the dangers of being shot or beaten for no reason at all; I find myself surrounded by all of them, and together we move around the old city, sliding through secret pathways, the kind of pathways that only children are aware of, narrow tunnels, broken fences, forgotten bridges, abandoned walls… I lead them as well as I can and I try to not surrender to any kind of hesitation; I know the way to some degree because I used these secret pathways when I was a boy and I still vaguely remember them (This is not the city where we all grew up together. It’s another city that is strange to them and yet somehow familiar to me.) Last night we found ourselves looking at a pair of enormous stone doors, three times as tall as a man, four times as thick as regular walls; in my memory I could see them as they had been once, I had been here before, standing in front of doors just like these; but they had been wide open, that’s how I remembered them, imposing, heavy, intimidating, but open; and tonight they were closed and there was no apparent way to pull them open, there was no way to call for help; the entire space seemed changed in radical ways that seemed impossible to me; there were now large new barriers that stood in front of us and separated us from our apparent objective; large underground rivers that we could only see from an angle, the heavy current slipping under large veined stone planks that formed the floor, sprinkled here and there with green vegetation; I looked at it all from above, several floors up; even though we could still see them, the large stone doors were no longer accessible, something had changed and the change was apparently permanent… I looked up over the edge of the tall walls that loomed over me and I saw a great shining white pyramid not too far away, I was so close to where something wonderful was happening but I would have to learn to fly in order to get in to see it, to be a part of it; flying freely was the only way I would ever get over these walls, the closed doors would become completely irrelevant if gravity was not an obstacle… I had engaged with so many constructs through the years, street legends, video game simulations, cinematic approximations, all of which could only point to the actual experience, all of which were only a vague fading approximation to the real thing… Pattern is the only order I can trust now, the only shape that matters, these days I care only about specific details, tiny decisions, minuscule adjustments, microscopic flurries of creativity; the overall composition is unimportant, the underlying meaning is implicitly dead and false, if it can be spoken at all; the fundamental inner structure will reveal itself eventually, like a sculpture that slowly emerges from a large virgin rock, blow by blow, adjustment after adjustment, choice after choice… Certain details of my voyage were specifically characteristic of mythical infernal descents; for example, the black dog and the old porter that we all saw as we passed by a large seemingly abandoned warehouse in the old city, on our way to the stone labyrinth where we would encounter the large closed doors… Even as I saw the two figures out of the corner of my eyes, I remembered their significance, I could almost hear the voice of the Magician speaking calmly as he sat next to me on a white marble slab in the middle of an old cemetery in El Salvador; “Look at them over there. The old man with the hat and the large black dog licking his paws…  they are there to guard the entrance to the realm of the dead. Look at them closely and remember how they look. Someday you will encounter them for real… someday it will be imperative that you recognize them…” When people told me about places and people like these when I was a kid, they had inadvertently changed almost everything that mattered in the process of their telling, all the most important details had been removed, all the sensations and the textures had been forgotten, they had neglected to mention the music that was present through most of it, what had seemed stylized and abstract in my imagination, almost translucent and flimsy and unreal, here it all became rough and sincere, heavy and ominous, too ancient to be an invention, too real to be denied… There are so many myths that have grown around this kind of voyage; stories, folk tales, poetic descriptions; but they can only outline the treacherous pathway towards a true encounter with the underlying mystery; the kind of unobstructed movement that I was currently experiencing would only seem barely conceivable during my regular life; I found myself in an atmosphere saturated with delights, all fear was absent, particularly fear of abandonment or death, as if such possibilities had been transcended long ago when I wasn’t paying attention, a kind of doorway that can only be crossed when one is not facing in that particular direction… the whole mood of this place implied something magical and inherently meaningful, at the very least,  and among other things, it implied a kind of restless eternity, a living permanence of infinite potential change… I thought of the couple moving the large chest out of my old family house; I had an immediate reaction as soon as I knew that they were gone- a kind of relief, another night where I can avoid opening the chest, another day when the secret can stay hidden; I rested against the cold floor under the sofa and curled up into a tiny ball, something smaller than a coin; I recognized the movement, it was the same thing I had done before in a similar situation in a completely different world… I looked up at the walls again, everything was shining and new and overwhelming, there was a kind of recurrent music all around me, a simple music, both rough and sincere, endlessly predictable yet recurrently improvised, that repeating pattern is the only reality I can ultimately trust; here, where I found myself, I cared only about the details, the ultimate meaning of everything I was seeing was unimportant… How would I talk about it later? How would I describe it? What meaning would I come up with after the fact? It would possibly reveal itself eventually, after days or weeks or years; but I wasn’t eager to find an answer; an answer is just flimsy language trying to achieve certainty, and here there is only the eternal insistent rhythm and an infinite underlying drone… A place like this, alive in every detail, constantly shifting before my eyes, vivid and bright and overwhelming in its complex and intricate beauty, such a place only seemed conceivable in fantasies, mine or borrowed, a glimpse of eternity, a pulsating space beyond time as I have known it, beyond the ongoing sequence of years, life, history, evolution, beyond memory or anticipation… I can say, at the very least, a lot of my regular perceptual habits were gone, particularly anxiety over abandonment, loneliness or death, regret, attachment, nostalgia, yearning…  I was now immersed in a recurrently reborn vision of shifting permanence from which all apparent fear was absent, an atmosphere saturated with delight and child-like wonder, a mood of open curiosity and alluring possibility… the structural linguistic order, the rules of the game by which our innermost thoughts are built, grouped, arranged and forgotten, that most intimate of structures which makes us particular, certain, defined… the order changes all the time, it can sometimes change so slowly that the changes are barely perceivable and easily ignored, it can sometimes change so quickly that our mind is barely able to catch up; but the overarching illusion that each given moment in time is somehow permanent, that each thought describes a concept or space or object that endures beyond the ravages of change and becoming… that illusion persists. My nighttime voyage, this deep dive into a hidden world of seeming unreality, has been repeated, must have been repeated, for thousands of years, always the same, always different, always predetermined, always improvised on the spot, always striking and surprising, always vaguely familiar… When I woke up, I was feeling very tired. I sat up for a moment and wrote down some of what I remembered: a drum circle, a pyramid, a wall, a river, a man talking to a woman, a house from another time… As I wrote, I knew there was so much I couldn’t capture, so much I couldn’t describe, but I wrote down what I could write and accepted that some parts would be left to be forgotten. Then I laid back down and breathed deeply for a moment. I watched TV for a couple of hours and slowly forgot everything. There were some people arguing on the screen. I think it was a show I had watched before. I shook my head and I laughed and I shook my head. And I slowly began to fall asleep again.

Many Turns

I imagine these days he is glad to be free and on his own. It’s hard for me to imagine him far away, alone, laughing, buying groceries, walking on the grass. It’s hard for me to stop imagining.

We used to live in a house on the top of a hill. From the windows upstairs, we had a wide open view of the city and the ocean in the distance… I could see it all from the balcony outside my room and even from the garden when there were few clouds. There were tall pine trees all around us and the songs of birds would serenade us in the morning and in the late afternoon.
Our landlords were an Italian couple that were old friends of his. I never got along too well with them but I rarely saw them so it didn’t matter. I spent a lot of my time hiking up and down the trails that surrounded us. I rarely ran into anyone.

He left one morning without saying goodbye. It may be that he did say goodbye in his own way but I didn’t understand it. He had his own way of doing things. That is why we came to work together in the first place. His way was distinct and so was mine. If he did say goodbye in some way, I didn’t catch it. It flew right past me like so many other things.

Now I spend my afternoons looking out from the window at the ocean. I imagine I can see waves and people but I can only see a thin blue line and the sky above it. Maybe white clouds, maybe a plane passing by. I don’t know if he’s still out there or if he is even alive. I like to talk to him silently but even in my own mind he rarely has any answers.
I picture him sitting in front of me while I say something like this:

"You always admired nature. But in nature everything feeds off of everything else - nothing is independent - there's a constant chain of eating and being eaten. In this way the Circle takes shape,
it diversifies, it grows. But it doesn’t grow in a linear way. It's more like a web, like a large expansive novel. Maybe you will be able to hear this from me. As novels are what you write and read, what you love to devour. This is like a novel that doesn't start at the beginning. This story that we are a part of. It’s a novel that doesn't start with this novel in itself, it doesn't even start with the book that holds it
but somewhere else. The initial moments of this novel are in another book or in a lonely dark street where some kind of crime is about to happen or in your own silent absence as you observe a group of children playing and the children never turn around to see you. They never even notice that you are there.”

(In terms of an explanation, I should say it clearly just so that there is no potential confusion: Back then we were poets. Both of us. All of us. And everything around us was some form of poetry… The house. The landlords who rarely came. The ocean in the distance. The sound of the neighbors fighting. The birds and the cars sliding up the hill, driving right past us. All complex, incomplete, infinite, incomprehensible. All pregnant and full of meaning. All about to burst.)

I imagine him ignoring everything I say. He just looks away and smiles faintly. He never even turns around.

“Life has taken many turns. It will take many more turns in the future. This adventure isn’t over yet.”

I don’t say it. He doesn’t say it either. We’ve said it enough that it doesn’t need to be repeated.

***

Many years ago we lived in a place that was full of magicians, warlocks, psychics, necromancers, prophets. Everyone had something they could do and each and every one of them was eager to show you they could do it, explain it in great detail, demonstrate each variation, explain it again. We were the same. We were as eager to show off our skills as they were. It was exciting, beautiful, chaotic and overwhelming all at once. So many illusions, so many beautiful visions, so many words, so many gestures.

Eventually we both came to understand that these were all costumes. Maybe careful and elegant costumes, maybe costumes badly made. But still costumes. It took many years for both of us to see it and then a few more years for both of us to say it out loud and agree.
That place is where we met, that is how we began to work. We left that place together and found the house at the top of the hill. There we decided to work quietly, without explanations, without long demonstrations, barely talking at all. Just the two of us, away from all peering eyes and gossiping mouths.

Our work together was very simple. I breathed slowly with him. And he breathed deeply with me. The slower we breathed together and the deeper we breathed together the more attention we would build up, the more attention flowed through us. It was as if we summoned attention itself out of the emptiness of the void.
(We saw attention as a force upon itself, a kind of electrical energy that we couldn’t see with our eyes but which made itself known when it was present.) When the rhythm of our breaths locked in and attention was fully present all around us, then time itself would slow down. (Other things happened but any further description beyond that point is empty and pointless.)

After many experiments of this kind, we decided to become artists. We became writers, musicians, painters, storytellers. We put out one creation after another and we went out into the city to find places to show our work. We met many other artists and they showed us what they did and we, in turn, showed them what we did. We would make a brief comment about their art and they would make a brief comment about ours. It was expected. Then we laughed together and said some general things about art and life, and they recommended restaurants and cafes, and we recommended books and movies.

Soon we realized that all artists (no matter what art they make, no matter how they make it) are blind.
Including us. Specially us. No artist can ever know what others see in their art - so no artist can ever know what they are producing for their audience. They can't know if it's good or bad, beautiful or ugly. They can’t know if it’s simple or sophisticated, if it’s shallow or deep, if it’s a dull copy or something entirely new. They can only know if they sell it, if people want it, but they can never know why people want it in the first place, why they buy what they sell; or why they don’t buy it or why they don’t want it.
There’s a gap that can never be breached, a dark chasm that remains dark and insurmountable.  

***

One day, back in our home atop the hill, we faced a kind of subtle barrier that appeared in the middle of our work. It was a barrier that we could both feel and recognize but neither of us could describe it. It was something strange and mysterious that we would both have to overcome in order to continue but neither of us had any idea how to do it. We didn’t even have the language necessary to speak about it. We were both at a loss and we both knew it.

That night, I said to him: “Life will take many turns. It has to. But our adventure together will never come to an end.”

The next afternoon I left. That was my way of saying goodbye.

***

Together we became poets. Together we became prophets, psychics, magicians, warlocks, necromancers. All of it at once.
We had learned to play music with our breath. Music devoid of objective, of scales or tones, of cadences or any overt or subtle signs of completion. Music eternal and full. Music from the void and for the void. After that, everything became possible.

Each measure of our breath had become a circle, a repeating melodic motif with an endless spiral of potential creation. The longer the motif was, the more attention we would summon. The slower the motif was, the more time would slow down. At the heart of it were the endless imperfections of air coming in and out of ourselves, the very seed of time hidden within our bodies, coming in and out through our noses and mouths.

When he finally left it seemed that he had taken with him our shared dreams of future history, our private labyrinth thread through an endless world of choices and dead ends. So much work had been left undone, so much terrain had been left unexplored. I felt as if I had been given a book that was missing many chapters and I would never be able to find the rest.

I remained at home, what had been our home. The Italian couple let me stay even though they didn’t really know me. I did my best to be friendly to them, to show them I could be trusted. They were as friendly as they could be and I returned their attempts at friendship as much as I could. I’ve never been good at those things. At this point, it’s too late to fix that.
I still hiked the trails but not as much as I did before. The empty paths seemed emptier, the open sky seemed more foreboding. 

In those first few weeks, I became the living embodiment of a dark nihilistic ideology, something tortured, vicious, angry, heavy with menace. I was someone who never felt quite at home, no matter where I was. Upstairs, downstairs, the basement, outside, the city, the beach, in dreams, awake. I always felt a sense that something was about to go wrong, something terrible was about to happen. Because this place - no matter what place it was- was actually not mine, I didn’t belong here. I had never truly belonged.
I knew in the deepest corners of my mind that the Circle was lost and there was no way to save or recover it.
As the months passed, as they years passed, I began to forget. I went out onto the trails more often, I started to breathe once again.

***

“Life will take many turns,” I said to him.
It was the sort of thing I had heard many times before. It was supposed to mean something. Life would take turns but the adventure that was our Circle had come to an end. I didn’t say that. I didn’t need to say it. My actions spoke for themselves.

One afternoon many years later, in a city across the ocean where he would never be able to find me, I observed a group of children playing. I sat on a bench across from a playground and I observed them carefully. A little blond boy in green shorts, a little red haired girl in a white dress, a little Latin boy in loose black pants.
I asked myself as I watched them: “What will these kids become fifteen years from now? What about when the next big turn comes around? What about forty years from now? Will they ever experience the Circle? Will any of them even try? Maybe one of them will skulk in an alleyway about to commit some kind of crime. Maybe another one will work in a pharmacy, the kind tucked away in an old street with newspapers and trash fluttering in the wind over the asphalt. Maybe another will become a tired and bored bureaucrat, silently hoping for death to arrive and take him away. Maybe one of them will have left this place altogether, this entire city, this strange country of whispers and shadows. Just to find some kind of horrible life elsewhere. No matter how far you run, the horrible and dead is always available, always knocking at the door.”

(In terms of an explanation, I should say this clearly, to avoid any kind of unnecessary confusion:
The first stages of this story happen in another place, in a different story written in a different voice with different characters, in a lost poem written on a napkin, in some other kind of broken fragmentary text never to be found again, somewhere else, somewhere that is not here, not in the story that you are reading. The story I’m telling you doesn't start here, it doesn't start with me, it doesn’t start when we met or when we parted, it doesn't even start at the beginning, it certainly doesn’t start at the end.
This story is like a very long complex novel that will never be finished, a novel doesn’t even exist in one particular place or time. Some of it you will have to produce on your own. That part is invisible to me as only you can create it.
I leave it up to you to understand and construct it but not in a linear way, not in a sequence full of closures and final statements, clear curtain calls and formal endings. This story diversifies, it grows, it changes. This story takes shape in ways I cannot predict. When I write I have no idea what others will perceive in what I have written, how they will interpret it, what they will make of what I say. I can't ever know what others will think or feel when they read it or think about it. All I can do is breathe slowly knowing the Circle is always just within my grasp.)

***

One last confession:
Every once in a while, I still miss him. I picture him talking to the Italians, that Italian couple that liked me so much for some unexplainable reason. I see him trying to be friends with them. But they can’t understand him, they can’t even look him straight in the eye. Few people can.
Every once in a while, I’m still surprised that I left the way I did. If I were to be asked why, I would have no real answer. (But nobody would ever ask me because nobody knows anything about it.) And yet I knew I had to do it. It was time.
Every once in a while, I expect him to walk around the corner and ask me to breathe with him - slowly, deeply, ask me to slow down time once again. It’s rare but it happens. And when it happens the story starts all over again. We are together in the old house on top of a hill, overlooking the city and the ocean, and we are breathing together, lost in the Circle, away from prying eyes.