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Night feels torn apart by the clutching, broken-china voice of the wheels grinding uphill wailing the ancient Indian woman’s song. Song of what I am not sure, she speaks, they speak a different language something more primal, more guttural and I can not understand what they mean, but I feel it rattling its way up through my dangling feet, feel it in the vibration of the boxcar floor as it rattles and lurches across the uneven tracks. My head lists involuntarily, pulled downward by the inescapable gravity of the desert. Utah is laid bare in moonlight, harsh and forlornly beautiful it lulls the mind, spreads out ones thoughts like the dotted Juniper trees, creosote bushes, and gnarled twisted trunks of the mosquite; vast open tracks of sand and rock inhabit the empty spaces like waves of light in space, they exist but only as a vacuum as a reminder of emptiness. The moon is full tonight reflecting its pale solar continace across the land in imitation daylight, the mosquite lowlands are beginning to be usurped by once more by grasslands and Junipers of the high desert.
This train is slow, a plodding freighter loaded with something that is apparently in no great rush to get anywhere, it’s a better ride than the first on I hopped… that one was fast, blinding fast and I suffered from velocity sickness which is my name for the strange restless queasy feeling I had the entire time I was in that car. This train is slow lazy and I managed to befriend the brakeman; I am not hiding anymore I am not slinking about in the shadows. I am stretched out on a flatbed; an open car that the brakeman says will be filled with logs at some point through the Rockies. I haven’t decided yet if I will go that far, in the mean time, because we have to stop a lot for faster trains to pass, the brakeman will wait for me to get coffee and food provided I bring him some which I do without hesitation, I even buy it for him despite his protests. His name is Joe and originally he was supposed to drive me from the railyard in Flagstaff down to the sheriff’s station where I was to be book on several counts of trespassing, vagrancy (a fancy name for existence, which sadly is illegal in most places), and several others I am not sure of, but I talked him out of it. We reached a more amicable solution, one of mutual aid; I wanted to ride the rails and Joe wanted someone to talk to on his lonely ride from here to Denver. So today I sat up with him in the engine room where the whirling lights and strange computer guidance systems dragged us out of the pine forests of Flagstaff and across the windswept high country where for more than five hours we did not see a tree or any shrub save the endless seas of grass dancing like senoritas at the town fiesta.
Joe hails from the lexicon of true Americanism —individuality. He is a rustic grisly type of man, the kind that inhabit the backwater towns of the west, ornery you might say, but he is not ornery he is simply inhuman like me. Which is to say that humanity or ‘syphilization,’ as one misanthropic author referred to it, has no hold on Joe, false modesty, false politeness and false pretense have been shed here like dry useless lizard skin. Joe hails from somewhere older, livelier and healthier his ancestors are the men who lived beside ponds and didn’t write books, who hold court with the mysteries of the universe and don’t attend church, who know what life has taught them and who have there own ideas about morality, reality and humanity. Joe represents a rare breed one that should have flourished on this continent, but as in the case with a seed that never gets water, their lot is small and dwindling.
Joe could well be me in thirty years, he looks about sixty maybe younger but the years he has walked through have taken their toll. He has a salt and pepper scruff beard and piercing blue eyes; he told me about the war by which I think he meant the second world war; he hates Steven Spielberg, says it wasn’t like that movie at all; he has a wife in Moab and two daughters both married and living back east. His stories are endless and my patience is too so we drifted, undulating with the sway of the train, his words came out in growling whispers just loud enough to here over the noise of the wheels and the engine, but without yelling or even appearing to raise his voice. He talked with rhythm of the train, we went around a bend and Joe went in on the beach at Normandy, we started uphill and Joe moved out west after the war, we went through a tunnel and Joe fell silent mid sentence. That kind of creeped me out, but when we emerged back into the blinding midday sun he started into his courtship and marriage without missing a beat and I learned that for Joe, when you are underground it is best not to talk.
Lying on my back trying to piece his life together I get lost, lost in the stars. The moon is to my back but in front down near the horizen the stars are visible, scant few tonight but they are there; the invisble the inky blackness that is between them is the pure white void of space. It is the void, the spaces in between them, the vast open empty tracks of sky, the darkness that is the platinum setting into which little diamonds, rubies, amethysts, and emeralds are laid… it is there that life exists in between the arbitrary line of reality and phantsmal yawning mouth of imagination. Look at the stones, the setting, the band, but none of it is so beautiful as the empty space between her finger in which all life hides. The space that allows it to pass through your hair, to fit your fingers, to stroke your chest, kneed your back and for the space and the space alone you should be grateful. Grateful that there is emptiness for without there would be nothing. I am grateful for you, I am grateful to all the spaces in between so that you can ignore them so that you can continue to fill them with jealousy, with fear, without understanding, but do not be afraid everything is okay….
The night sky was thrown into being by the great god badger who in an effort to steal it from the last world accidentally pulled to hard and it went soaring up over his head where it stuck to the ceiling of life. No Hopi mythology there, just my educated opinion, just how it looks from here... But I am not thinking about the sky right now I am just looking at it; I am thinking about the Indian town back on the reservation where I bought us dinner. I bought cornmeal cakes and beans from a wizened old Navaho woman who inhabited an abode hut that glowed orange in the setting sun. The store was closed but the woman approached me asked if I wanted to buy dinner, I did and she took me to her hut; in the middle there was a fire and a pot of food on it along with too smudge faced Indian girls maybe four or five years old. They watched me intently in silence with enormous liquid brown eyes that seemed irrigated with understanding far beyond the physical age of their bodies. As the old woman wrapped the corn cakes and beans in foil I got lost in a strange hobbit-like land where the true secrets of the universe were about to be revealed as beans and corn bread seen through the eyes of a child, it was a pregnant moment. Then she brought me to by insisting that I take one of her chocolate Jesus statues for desert. I thought about a Tom Waits’ song, about a minister I knew once who wouldn’t allow his parishioners to sell donuts at church and about the good Jesus himself; what must he think if he really was the son of god and really is watching, what must he think of being molded in wax, filled with chocolate and wrapped in colored foil?
I thought that Joe, being a Mormon by conversion might be offended, he struck me as a serious guy when it came to religion, but he just laughed and laughed said “what will they think of next?” or words to the effect and he devoured Christ’s chocolate body. Finally I thought as I watched Joe eat, someone is enjoying the body of Christ. And even now I think, in arrogantly retelling history, that if Christ was indeed the son of god he will come down here tonight in fire and brimstone and he will extend a hand out to the two men, the only two men who ever took of his body and ate with lust, with vigor with the true enjoyment of being alive, for if there is one thing undeniable out here it is that we are alive. We may not being doing anything, we may be talking or staring at the passing scenery through the dirty cockpit window or we may be climbing on the roof of a boxcar, but whatever we are doing we fundamentally alive. I say this because there is no reason for humans to exist out here at all. We lack the specialization of desert evolution, we are not covered with barbs and spikes, we do not have thick skin which can hold water seemingly indefinitely, we are pulpy fragile creatures we ought to be dead, but somehow we are not and we are more alive because of it, we are aware. We are here by an act of will —our own. It takes an act of will to realize that you are alive that is my revelation for tonight.
I light a cigarette and throw back the sleeping bag, it is September and the night is cool, I throw on my jacket and walk to edge of the car and let my feet dangle off the side. We are doing about forty I would guess, fast enough to do some serious damage if I fall, but slow enough to study individual plants as they pass by at about ten yards away. I have never been to Coney island, but for me this is an amusement park the landscape itself is so alien as to remain forever fascinating. It illuminates a part of my personality that is as esoteric as this desert. We are picking up speed and heading downhill into the canyon country. I know this because Joe showed me the maps, pointed out scenic spots when I ought to sleep and when I ought to be awake and amazed, but I like it all. Sometimes the less scenic things are the more beautiful they become, that quite ineffable sense of beauty which require the careful turning of the eye to detect; such as a trash strew alley that you find yourself staring at after waking up in a gutter behind a bar in SoHo. Or the way the smog lifts slightly almost imperceptibly off the mountains surrounding Mexico City everyday around seven o’clock.
Or the way this juniper tree is sitting alone clinging to the side of the canyon wall able to exist in the slightest most overlooked fissure surrounded by a monolith of compressed sandstone which yields nothing, there is only the one tree here. That this tree could be able to survive is miraculous, but in end explainable, what is not explainable is me, that I should be here, that is should be right here on this train, at this moment, staring at this tree is truly miraculous. I was not scattered to the wind with thousands of my fellow seeds, I did not lodge in a crevasse, I was not carried by wind, I did not get just the right amount of sunlight and water. I was planned from the beginning, I nice addition to a nice couple who were themselves nice additions to an already nice town that was part of nice and highly advanced civilization almost at the end of its second thousand years of existence. All my life is orchestrated by something, pushed and pulled about by forces which can be explained with, goddesses, DNA, evolution, badgers, crows, old women, trister poets, visionary superbeings of alpha centary, but the end conclusion by all humanity it seems is that something is controlling things. There is no freedom for me, no wind to carry me, no water or soil to nourish and no light by which I can grow. There is no visible thing gravity that pulls on me, there is nothing tangible about DNA, I live in betseen all mythology sandwiched like a chucalwalla in a sandstone crevasse. I have learned infinite things, made them finite, knowable. I have built great castles, great monuments, great societies, great people and torn them all down again to start over. I have lived a thousand lonely huddled nights from bearskin to tapateries to the silk sheets of Manhattan nights; I have climbed every mountain peak slide down the cree and talus slopes of meeting with pharoahs, Voudans, with moses and god; I have held a billion women lovingly in my arms and give birth to a trillion children through all historyies wombs from Sarah to Satan all filled themselves with my nurishments. but I still do not know who I am or why I am here. I am Everyone and I am driving myself mad.
Today at dawn this is the most beautiful place on earth. I get up not having slept much, not that that is out of the ordinary these days, balancing myself and reorienting to the sense of movement that has not left my head for almost 36 hours now, I stretch and yawn greedily like an insomniac does. The sky is green yet, not long till dawn by when I must be in the engine compartment because today the tracks run beside US highway 60 and I can not be seen. I am secret, I must be hard to find. My precarious journey over four boxcars to the engine is rewarded with the smell of frying bacon, eggs, coffee and biscuits. Joe smiles his craggy grin, in the electric lights his teeth are yellowed and stained with coffee and cigarettes, but rather than being grotesque the seem only to add character.
“I was just going to blow the whistle to let you know that breakfast is served.” He hands me a cup of coffee. “Beautiful night wasn’t it?” Joe seems to now sleep at all.
“Yes it was,” I mumble as I try to sip the coffee, but it is still too hot.
“Here….” He hands me a plate full of greasy bacon and eggs with two biscuits perched precariously on either side. “Let's eat on the roof, we’re not by the road yet.” The way he says road gets me, his voice has a hatred in it, a bitterness towards this thing the road. We go up on the roof and eat in silence. All around us the sky is a color show. The green begins to fade, replaced by the first crimson rays reflected on the bottoms of the wind carved clouds. The first direct rays of the sun find me chewing on the last piece of bacon, I close my eyes and we welcome each other across the ninety three million-mile void.
I open to a squint and turn around, behind us lies the akdjflkd, endless grass and somewhere in the middle the kdjlkadkj; to the north there is the escalanted wilderness, the green river and the largest uninhabited area in north America; to the south and east there is the maze, Canyonlands and Natural bridges National parks, the confluence of the green and Colorado rivers, and somewhere a tiny speck of a town called Moab where we will be putting in for two days to load rock and other assorted things.
“Quartz and sand mostly, which we’ll be dumping in Denver, but whatever the case I wanted to invite you to my house to have a home cooked meal with my wife and I. She’s a real looker and great cook too.” He laughs and nudges me in the ribs. “She was a beauty queen in high school, she was miss Hoboken and might have been Miss America if she hadn’t decided to give the whole thing up and go to college… course I’m glad she did ‘cause that’s where I got her….”
I hem and haw non commitally thanking him for the offer, but not agreeing to it just yet. I head back down to do the dishes and then I splash cold water on my face in the tiny bathroom and study my face in the cracked tarnished little mirror. Things look good; a little haggard here and there, weathered a bit by the years perhaps, but still young still enthusiastic. I spot a gray hair sprouting out of my closely cropped scalp, but the skin is still soft and smooth; I need a shave, but that is of no concern out here. Back on the roof I smoke a cigarette while Joe calls into the Moab station. After a while he yells up to tell me that the yard will be empty when we arrive, today is Sunday he informs me, and this is Mormon country —nothing happens on Sunday.
“You know a lot of my friends were pretty hard on me for converting and they was downright pissed when we got hitched in the Tabernacle, but I tell ya… Mormons may have some strange ideas and beliefs but on the whole they are some of the best people I’ve ever met. Sure it’s a little ridiculous there bible and all what with zebra’s running around here —imagine that! Zebras here!— and I don’t think the ol Mr. Young really carried those gold tablets under his arm, and why god called himself Moroni I have no idea…. But in spite of all that ridiculousness which really is no more ridiculous than the Catholic’s eating wafers of gods body or the Jew’s giving things up for no real reason at all once or twice a year… it all ridiculous when you think about it objectively. But what I have noticed having a Mormon wife and a lot of Mormon friends is that they build real communities… they are good people at a level that is very basic and seemingly below the more refined religions…. Your average Catholic will walk by the poor bum on the street and give him a nickel or a quarter, but your average Mormon will invite the man to their home for a meal and offer them a shower and of course a little counselling on the true church of God, but when a man’s belly is full and his hair clean he can listen to that sort of nonsense. I don’t believe a word of it, but I took the vow because it made my wife happy and I would do anything to see that woman smiling….”
Joe smiled at me and said that I could stay on the roof of the engine so long as he was down below, that way anyone watching would think that I was him. So I sat up there letting the wind hit me in the face, sunning myself across Utah, land of Mormons —for now. One day I suspect the Tabernacal will fall, the religion will dwindle and disappear like every other civilization, but for now they reign over god’s last piece of land. And what a land this is here. The tracks have climbed back out of the canyon country and we are on the mesa tops cruising at thirty five toward the Big Switch as Joe called it. The Big Switch is apparently the only non computerized part of the journey where Joe will have to stop the train and get out and actually throw the heavy iron handle to switch us over to the track that heads down to Moab. Once he drives the train past it he has to stop again and walk back and switch it again so that the next train can pass on by. It remains manual because most trains do not stop in Moab anymore, most of them pick up a few cars that have been driven up or just don’t even slow at all.
It was Dean who pointed out the curve in the tracks behind his mother apartment complex, which he really only did for one reason —so that I could catch a train. I had never ridden on a train be it hoping a boxcar or buying a ticket. I didn’t have enough for the ticket that much was certain and I knew that there were some lingering stiff vagrancy laws and such penalties as to keep people from riding for free, but I had never been on a train. The chief reason that I had never been on a train though was that I had never been near a train. Never lived near a station or had a track pass through the neighborhood. As child the best part about going to my grandmother’s house was that in the course of the hour long drive we crossed a train track and occasionally we would even get there just as a train was passing. Something about them always got to me, the way they roared along, not fast, but roaring a primal movement that harkens back to more primitive days. You could see the past in them when travel was something worth doing. Airplanes had power and thrill, but trains have something bigger something all together more massive about them, they do not roar they lumber and lurch they are more human than the smooth sterility of the car or the powerful speed of the plane
I stare off at the distant looming La Salle Mountians where first frosts are melting in the morning sun, Dean my old friend who set all this in motion, whose life existed as a catalyist for my own just as mine existed as a catalyst for his; so it is with brothers be they of blood or not. When I think of Dean I think of him as he was a year ago when we touched down in Paris, his hair jet black and greased back in a fashion that was at once greaser and not, he looked as if he were completely at ease in his own skin. We both had on suits, not expensive once like we wanted, but ones that we handed down or bought at thrist stores, we were highly incongruous with the international image of what an American ought to be. Or I think of a photograph I took at the Little Knight so many years ago or was that only months? Dean is in the a pinstriped suit, carefully greased hairline pure black and illuminating his face framing it in the luminesnce of empty space, the eyes are laughing, but the lips barely curl, womething intangible is lurking under the skin and bones. Another from the same night caught Dean unawares as he leaned against the wall and watched the crowd. His arm is blurred lifting the everpresent cigarette to his lips and all around his swirling women’s hair and exited arm waving men fade into a faceless blur, in the middle there is Dean, standing still like the hummingbird.
Dean is right now probably just getting off the internet where he was undoubtedly chatting with bilixa66 the girl whom he is in love with, but tries to deny it. Right now his weary bones are preparing for rest and I am gliding along through Elysian fields. So it goes. Everyone everywhere is doing something different than me right now, I know this because I am alone. I am playing mental solitare then infinite game which doesn’t pay anymind to rulles like time or space. Time is an inconsequential and inconvenian human invention which the traveler learns to disregard and ignore. There are two games going on one is the time game in which all society and interaction with humanity, ones culture, ones beliefs, once hopes and goals all thing bounded by time, in the other game there is the infinte self which has no time no dreams, no humanity, no space no thing. It is the seemless interaction of the two that create what we formally call the ego, the self, the thing that is perceivable, identifiable, and recognizable. One can see or be seen depending on which game you want to play. The train is slowing, the turn off to Moab is nearing, from the Big Switch it is only about half an hour down into the canyon carved long ago by the green river. I am wandering back to my flatbed to gather up my things and hide out in the cabin of the engine; I am thinking about how to ditch Joe without offending him, I need to get off the train andout into the desert, Everything is falling away like great sheets of burn skin sliding off the greasy shiny red flesh that lies beneath the surface. That was how it went this morning.
It was four in the afternoon when I said goodbye to Joe and headed off down Moab’s main drag toward the mountaineering shop to see about a ride up into canyonlands. I left it open with Joe so that if the urge struck to go back to the train into denver I could, but I was intent only on getting to Canyonlands for now. One thing at a time, evverything one at a time, nothing in pieces everything all at once fell to pieces. I got a ride from two hippies rock climbers clad in the fashion of the earth first and other environemtnal activitists who share aside from a love of the wilderness apparently the same love of Kakhi’s, Tevas, Tofu and flat tasteless foodstuffs that originate in the same facotires that make oreos. Funny folks the country culture these days, like ldemocrats and republicans they are differential from there enemies primarily by custom and fashion. The radical tree camping, pottery making, hemp weaving, Dave Foreman worshipping, mushroom eating, toms of maine consuming hippie-enviromental-social consciousness raising-guitar playing radical of the outback is no different than the BMW driving, Starbucks drinking, software writing, technology worshipping, juice drinking, spa loving, health club hopping, slandes wearing dog walking, family rasing white picket fence building, church attending drug abstaining yuppie eviel consumer destroying the world capitalist pig set that the so-called radical crowd hates with such superior disdaim. One uses Tom’s of Maine and the other crest, beyond that they are the same. My hippie climber friends bought trail mix and candles at the super market while I opted for steak, beans and potatos with a bag of chemically enhanced brickets that would light from my cigarette butt. Its all a matter of taste. I requested paper bags and rolled them up so they wouldn’t abandon me for not being one of there own. I rode in the back of there bus which turned the hourlong drive from Moab to the Est entrance of Canyonlands into a three hour long crawl. As we switchbacked up the canyon walls to the top of the Mesa country Dave and Tom grilled me on my beliefs, they were both college student on a semester long vacation so I could forgive them for still being tangeled up in ideas but it wore on me after a while. They were astonished that I did not vote, that I never had, but was not disillusioned with the political system, I just don’t give shit one way or the other.
“Man if you don’t vote you give up your say in what goes on in the world man, come on how are we going to change things if everybody has that attitude? Why are you going to be giving up your power to change things man? Some people would die for a chance to vote…?”
Its better those people go right a head and die I am think but aloud I try to formulate something less offensive to their tender idealist hearts. “Perhaps Tom I don’t want to change anything… perhaps I coulld if a itried, but what if I don’t want too?”
I figured to let them do the talking and they did all the way across the grasslands right on into the campground, I learned the Toms of Maine was better because it was natural, Teva was better because it did not use child slave labor and that one acre of farmland can support a faimly of ten with vegetables of two hamburgers worth of cow if it is grazed. I don’t personally give a shit either way. Is fast as I could I said my thanks to the Dave and Tom and wandered down the road to an open campsite where I proceeded to build a fire in the light of the fading sun with its crimson glow licking across the thunderheads to my back. It was the still about eighty degrees and I was sweating in the heat of the fire, but I wanted a steak. I was staring at the sizzling fat dripping from the enormous side of beef I had bought thinking of a woman I had never seen staring at a well in the French countryside. I felt an effluence of enthusiasm; the taproot broke through dry soil and was swamped by underground water. The sizzled meat melted down to the flavor of sweet salt, the mixture of spices and blood. My plate was stained a greasy pink Moroccan-color with each carving slice of the knife and the potato swam about in the bloody grease tailing is own gooey mixture of butter and pulverized potato flesh like a tanker ship leaking crude oil in the pristine sanctity of the ocean.
I was fucking famished. With the tired wise-consumer guru advise I had endured all the way up the mountain made the dripping animal fat like a tonic elixer cleansing my artieries of stale plache of idealism realism. Nothing is ever seems so real as fiction. The world I exist in is finite, bounded and ruled by certain inescapable laws, here a house, there a job, and everywhere by the transient people and events that make up so called life. Existence takes place in the world of not I’s, the mysterious other, but that is not where I do my living. Nor does any one else. We live in the spaces in between the temporal world, the infinitude of the imagination, next to which our terrestrial existence looks flat and tasteless as a junkyard tire cracked and torn in the sun. In these moments where the internal merges flawlessly with the external I go roaring back through memories of childhood, of selves that I was truly, but am no longer today, through all the marauding personalities which have governed this thing called I. Pregnant moments are these, usually catching me unawares and throwing down a track of thought I had not expected; moments when the light of the sun breaks through the sullen clouds of an afternoon thunderstorm and hits the steeple of an old church just as you come up over a crest in the road. It smacks you in the face when you perceive something in a moment that you know is not tangibly present and yet it is real, the fluid transmission of emotion that can be tasted on the back of your tongue as well as felt beaming into your chest. The hurricane of the unconscious whirls up to the surface for moment, the imagination leaks into the real world. You catch it when she stirs at night and tosses her hair so that so that it falls across you face with the delicate odor of peach blossoms and perfume mixed with the earthiness of her organic body, fecund and warm. You hear it when the crescendo of thundering drums climbs up out of the ninth symphony and lodges in the back of your brain sending chills down your spine. Some interaction of the personal with the infinite, a stabbing at perfection transcends the ordinary moment. Every one of us has moments of transformation when we feel if only for a mere second, that something larger than the present is in the room, the sky or the music. The world gives birth before our eyes and takes us spinning down reveries and private waterslides of imagination through the twisting spiral corkscrew of imagination. How long must ancient man have wondered where do these thoughts come from? What am I to do with them?
Looking backwards with clever red sunglasses I could trace the history for you; the first thing the human species got out of these encounters was a loose clumsy word: spirituality. One day caveman Thak felt with authority that there was something beyond the simple organic, fertile, pussing matter of his body, there must be a realm august to this temporal one. Thak ruminated over this for time and finally invented language in order to describe how he felt to other prehensile monkeys. With language Thak separated us from the entire animal kingdom. Not by virtue of communication, for any one who has ever observed even the simplest of animals knows that they communicate, but rather what Thak gave us was a means of creating memories —severing us from time. Out of memory came dissention as other monkeys did not buy into Thak’s explanations and as time moved on and more voices from more and more places were heard and the general became divided and localized. Those that believed one explanation tended to associate with only those that agreed with them, they had their “gods” and they were the only gods, the contrarians on the other side of the proverbial river lacked THE TRUTH. Not much changed from then until now, there are more gods and even less comprehension of the godliness, but other than that we still behave in much the same manner as our ancient ancestors, some would same we have actually gotten worse not better.
And all of this reasoning has not in anyway helped us to understand that initial question —where are thoughts coming from? All the philosophizing rants of all the arrogant monkeys can not answer the simplest of questions: who am I ? Where is this vitality teeming from? What is emotion? What the hell is really going on down here? Why? Why can one person be moved to tears by a quartet and another put to sleep?
Much of the wonder and amazement that greeted our forebear’s is lost for us. We have explained it away, dissected, mapped, catalogued, and miniaturized it. Unable to comprehend the universe we carefully construct a replication that can be understood and ignore all the rest saying in essence that anything not comprehensible to the human mind does not exist. But it does and she knows what I am thinking before I say it and the light continues to pour through the clouds onto steeples, rocky pinnacles and the back porch of an antique house in the south where I am forced once more to stand face to face with the unknowable. Miniaturization is for small minds I say. Science is the culprit here they wrecked the whole show shrank it down and claimed to understand how it all worked. I hope they all choke on those miniaturized hors' dorve corns or get mauled by a tiny, shrunken Doberman pincer. It would give them back the humility they have tried to shed.
For a long time this miniature world was all I could see and it threw me into a depression every time it crossed my mind, but I studied it with great enthusiasm because I was looking for way out of it. The more I looked at all the evidence the farther I felt from the truth. The truth is that sometimes the light is magic and being able to explain why it has the tones and hues, how the electrons spin, says nothing about the experience of it. What good is knowing without feeling? Those moments when I am confronted with the essential mysteries of my life and perhaps even yours, all of ours, all life, are not something that can be taken apart. I can not break it down, understand the smaller bits individually and then hope they add up to the same thing I started with.
If we stop taking apart things for a minute and just breathe in slowly one breath at a time it will flood the hatches and bouyantly draw us up to the surface of things. It is time we stopped this nonsense of science and floated our way back up to the surface of the pond. Time to start over, to assimilate rather than dissect, to feel rather than know, to live rather than abstract….
But back to our brief history of LOVE…
Unfortunately by the time you and I got on the scene it resembled uncooked spaghetti, thin strands of information imparted over the years, scattered clumsily about the kitchen, there is no pot, no water, nothing to cook it with just dry hard idea that crunches when you bite into it and sticks between your teeth long after. We externalized the internal, brought all out, the good with the bad, so that we could take it apart and understand it. We live amid the rubble of Decarte and the mechanized universe. We dissect, we want answers, but we ask questions that can’t be answered by the narrow methods of research that are considered valid. Joseph Kellar ought to be our patron saint, to preside over every convening moment to remind us that we are looking for our tail while it is in our mouths, right below our noses where we can’t see it… we can taste it though and it drives us with even greater fury, mouths watering and ravenous fangs dripping the saliva of untold desire. But we want to see it with these eyes, these imperfect eyes that we know are not even used for seeing. We want answers to appear, to be made real. We want Christ to appear, we want spacemen to appear, we want something to appear, but we are not by god going to accept anything that we haven’t had tested up and down with all the rigorous insanity of a mathematician trying to write out equations for her emotions.
What is science doing if not that? Making the world better? For whom? Scientsists? I don’t want to live in a Cartesian nightmare where history is mechanically plodding along with the cold calculated precision of a steam engine. No many people do, consciously speaking and so came religions, sects, and politics… but none of that comes close to pulling the sense of wonder that science threw out the window. None of it brings back the endless nature of grainy experience. Have become more enthralled with the human created side of life and in doing so sacrafized the intertwining of the individual with the universal. We have found a distraction which eases the anxiety that unanswered questions provoked in us —our selves. Don’t think the church/state/priest/politician/scientist/special action committee on the overexertion of gray matter will take care of it for you. We wrote a lullaby called god and put ourselves to sleep. Until today we find ourselves at a crossroads in human evolution.
As we come to understand the ineffable world around us in increasingly greater minutia, we are reaching the end of the external line. We can measure and measure search and search the world for new discoveries in a world that we once thought was infinite and impossible to wrap our minds around we are in danger of knowing the limits of knowing.
The scientific community has been the first to realize that such a day is coming and true to the morbid and yet curious nature of scientists the future is being drawn with great caution and precision. And yet if one were to delve into the that world with the skepticism of a mystic looking at a computer code one would eventually notice that the experience of science is really not much different in that of the eastern philosophers of millennia past.
It is very popular these days to write books about the connections between the physics of indeterminacy and the constant contradictions of the Tao Te Ching. (One of the best is actually called the Tao of Physics.) And what has this endless search given us?
Nothing. Nothing more than a system of belief, which in the end says that no system, can describe anything that is outside of the system. What that fancy phrase means to anyone who is not absolutely enthralled by making things a lot more complicated than they need to be, is that we don’t anything about anything and we never will.
But Lao-Tzu already said that: The farther you go the less you know. So what’s the big deal? What has the “cutting edge of science to report back? That it can’t describe anything that can’t be measured. You can’t measure the emotion that light hitting a church steeple evokes, you can’t measure they way you feel propped up in bed watching the sleeping form of the one you love. You can’t measure them because they are encoded in you, they are uniquely yours and there is no way to translate them to others.
Science’s end will be when it achieves what art has been doing for most of recorded history —trying to give the uniqueness of experience a form which allows it to transcend the individual and share it. Science is but a new language and nothing more.
Perhaps with virtual reality we will one day be able to exactly encode everything that another has experienced and feed it all into our own nervous system, but the response will still be different. In order for emotions to be communicated everyone would have to have the exact same history, exact same thoughts, and exact same experience felt be all at once. Even supposing the absurdity of this to be possible what would be gained?
Fuck science; fuck it along with religion, society and culture, fuck them all because they say nothing other than what any two year old could tell you is obvious. It is obvious because we have all felt it. All the records of how we felt pall in the face of the question of what? What is it that sends the chill down our spines, the warmth out of our heart or the goosebumped hair up on our arms?
No one knows and I think that it would be safe bet to assume that as long as we all have different brains we never will. The technology fanatics will burn themselves up the same way the drug gurus of the sixties did, they will fall prey to the one thing that makes them human —ego. It killed the belief in god, it killed the belief in the cultural reformers and it will always kill any attempt to transcend because it is the point at which belief originates.
Only an egocentric monkey would dream of being able to understand the orbit of the planets let alone they vastness of all existence. Only a very confused and disoriented creature would throw himself into a corner and examine every little microscopic piece of dirt without first discovering what a monkey was.
Herman Hess once said that the only job of man was to find the road that led back to himself. But we being the tragic creatures we are doomed forever to a life lived in melodrama and confusion, seldom do such things. Seldom do we celebrate love or transcendence. At our best we celebrate the by-products such as art of music. At our worst we record those who were farthest from themselves, the emperors kings and queens, generals, bishops, monks, people who led the most perverted and hideous of lives.
Very few lovers rattling around in the tomes of recorded history. Oh to be sure there were lots of them, but we haven’t paid too much attention to them, or to what they knew. We have created a cult of worship to our egos to the things that we think are so unique about ourselves at the inescapable expense of the things which we have in common.
Its built into our culture and if we Americans seem particularly arrogant to the rest of the world it is only because we house the temples in which the worship of the ego if held. We play host to humanity’s darkest hour, an experiment that has fallen off track and yet it is so ingrained in our minds that it forms an unbroken circle which steadily contracts into smaller and smaller rings the closer we come to the zero hour.
We will do anything to draw the attention away from ourselves and as Freud hinted and Reich out right said we do it by manifesting our fear into the real world. The only things that happen are ones that someone wants to happen. The problem is that none of us really know for sure what we want. The subconscious mind is in the act of creating… always and forever…. It is creating even the conscious mind. Everything that you think you are is dream that some other part of your brain is having; to explain this we had to invent something called chaos which says that you are, in mathmatical terms living in an endless noisy feedback loop called non-causality and non causality is merely causality that is too complicated to trace, but there is a cause nonetheless.
Their will always be a cause without it the world could not exist, without a beginning then there can be know end and we all know there is an end, an end to ourselves and from all appearances an end to the whole damn show. The end has in fact already happened because time like everything in the universe is something that someone wanted to exist.
Where does this terrible looping logic take us? Right back where we started. It’s a loop remember —really nothing to marvel at. You can travel the whole distance or just stay where you are and let it come back around. In the end even those are no different. So here we are again, perhaps there it is another person next to me in bed when I watch them sleep, perhaps it is a techno song that sends the chills down my spine, and perhaps the next time the sun breaks through the clouds it will be illuminating a mountain instead of a church.
At the end of the line the breakdown of the word I realized there was no hope for communication to take place I was too isolated in experience to hope to relate it to anyone other than myself. I was not close enough to anyone so close was I to god. It is not near the bottom in the sewers of cities that humanities hope lies but out here in the great heights, closer to god and only then to we seem so much alike. Only next to god are all the political games that divide men stripped away out here you arrive naked and proud. Only then do you see every man as your ally every woman your love, only scorched clean of the petty differences of race, creed, color of skin do we draw together huddled in fear of insanity which we ourselves have wrought upon each other. No hope for a cure is on earth, no hope save death. No cure but death and then Quien Sabe?
With the bleakness of snow and the blanketed certainty of disillusionment I cast off all doubts. I was ready. Ready for what I did not know —a thousand faces before the day is half over passing like the jerky photomontages of Man Ray. Each pair of eyes radiant unto itself delicately in the corners of a stray glance I caught the recognition of understanding though only tragedy brings them any closer. Forged and smelt in the dry heat of rock furnaces here the charnel ovens brew alchemal liquid souls and fuse combinations of liquor and lips, souls to the experiment of which we are all part.
The medieval alchemists searched in the stone, the modern physicist searches the heavens, and perhaps the future shaman will try to fuse man with machine. All have missed the most obvious of truths with the dedication to illusion that had carried the Catholic Church on its back for so long. We want ourselves to so make or form each other into the god that we were fashioned after that we forget that such is already true. The wisdoms of heaven are in the DNA strand yes, but what are we to do with them? Copper may be turned to steel, but what are we to do with it? Everything may be taken apart and put back together differently, but what will have changed?
She waited by a fountain in a park just outside of Paris where I have never been. I watched her sit silently for hours staring at nothing or so it looked to me her eyes were fixed on the pump handle of the well. She sat motionless and never without the quite smile of a woman in rapture, a woman in the private mysterious world of orgasm. I see it on the face of the ones I have loved in that indeterminable second after where everything is.
Which brings you right back to the steak, but now there was a woman or there was the sheading of a woman, an inescapable need to be at once masculine and feminine, cunt and cock, both sides of the coin as it were, but tonight the blood of the cow is burning away the feminine scorching it like so many glowing crimson embers that glow and warm, but which fade in the spectacular face of flame. Meat sizzling over a campfire gets rid of girlfriends and wives, gets rid of lots of entrapments, like a cure for the plague. It’s a proven fact.
With the final rays of sun went the final heat; as the gentle coolness of night settled in the humidity of the rain began to evaporate and the desert returned to it’s dry self again. Eating the salty and sweet steak with a baked potato and a pot of baked beans I wandered off on a walk. At first it was just my mind bouncing lightly among the juniper trees that were behind my campsite, but then when the food was gone, my body grabbed me a beer and a pack of cigarettes and carried me down to the edge of the canyon. I sat with my legs dangling off a rock that was perched on the rim and extended out into space. All around me there was nothing but air and under me only a brief moment of rock and then more timelessness we called air.
We call it air. But it used to be called ether, before that it was liquid, now it’s mostly dirt in some places. Here it is air.
I thought about Dante, about God, about steak and about women. It was beautiful just to be alive and to able to think. I thought about that for along time. There came an utter silence in which I watched myself think in the way that you might listen to another talk. It detached but remained aware that it must return back and live with those thoughts that it could only then recognize. It was a spiraling double helix of a logic that corkscrewed all about my mind drilling little holes hear and there opening wine thoughts and pouring glasses for the self that continues to stream in the door. It was to watch a feast of thoughts or personalities come together for one sort time and dine like old friends. A reunion to catch-up on where each had been what had happened and what they had done. It turned to a smorgasbord of philosophy and love and there was endless debate, dissention and rising voices. A circus dine roared around the room slap happy train car attendants moved about taking ticket and slapping the men in the faces for not having the right change.
And then the wave crested at cacophony and confusion and broke leaving only silence in the room. Silence that carried on its back a poignant nostalgia for the past and a calm understanding of the future. I touched for a moment the void that Buddha preached, the nothingness into which you must cast yourself if you wish to understand. Riddles that seemed ridiculous to me before where solved with simplest of maneuvers truth gleamed with the caustic light of florescent light posts on an asphalt road. In the blinking blank look of the deer just before impact is the look of understanding the look of recognition that it is all nothing. No thing. What do I want out of this life? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I understood with sharp focus the difference between understanding how something works and understand what it is. I came to see that even the void of understanding was not the end but only a means to something else which would also be yet another means until the final thought was had and the conversation between self and the other ceases forever and weds them together.
And the two shall be joined as one. I have acted that out with others; I have joined souls with several men and women in my life but I had never had the sensation of meeting myself on that plane until that moment. A net was cast over the side of the ship and the wheel turned starboard to trawl a giant net through the waters of the past which played out in slide show fashion, a game show in which I had to meet myself
Endless images of my own arrogance played themselves onto the back of my closed eyelids like a cinema of embarrassment and I went to myself, as stranger might go, out of pity, to reach down a hand and help myself up. All love flowed through me and made everything hyperreal and tactile as if thoughts were the rock and the trees and the silence was the minds way of answering the endless question of the universe. The transitory nature of my own existence was illuminated and I was washed with feeling of warm and celebration of the embarrassment and I felt the sheer hilarious joy of my own folly fall along side the folly of all those I have ever know and ever will know, a giant heaping ball of laughter. Coiled up tight like yarn and batted about by the kitten of the universe the ball dances nightly behind the moon, all our selves playing as children endlessly. A cat. A cat in the hat. The trick top hat.
As the moon rose up from the east I watched in silence as my life unfolded behind my eyes I watched memories I had no conscious knowledge of the way a father watches his sun playing in the yard. They started off recent memories of Amy, of Dean, of Ed, of moments shared with each and then it kept racing backward to college classes, high school girlfriends, playground friends…. Until I went back in utero to a point of no consciousness at all and then other stories unfolded as if out of some kind of genetic memory. I saw the light of the fifteen-century break through the night hitting church spires and scorching the brass coffers of foreign temples. Wild and uncharted regions played out scenes from Arabian Nights with silken tapestries women’s arms entwined with gold bands; and then sagas of Templars, all the wisdom seekers of the fertile crescent and the girl in France by the well came up near the end like a phantom as if to introduce herself but only disappeared again into a background of Egyptian palaces and the fragrance of silk and spices from the orient. There was a warm glow of light in the room that slowly as the eyes adjusted revealed itself as a temple of splendors. The walls were adorned with rugs and woven tapestries in designs that acted out the living myths of the sun gods. The floor was blanketed in pillows and a sweet incense smoke floated in wafts of Jasmine and myrrh; in the center of the room slightly elevated on steps was an alter upon which a beautiful and naked goddess lay, a statue, an answer, a testament to any question that you might ask. She was a goddess and in her silence I swam the thalassic of sorrow and joy in placid caressing waters that even now three years later come back with absolute lucidity as if I were returning to the vision at will just by writing it again.
And then the moment itself swelled beyond its proportions and burst leaving me only in awe of it, but dancing on to new lines, new tap roots burrowing intensity turned up by the alchemal union of soul and steak, god and potato, desert and breast, me and my self. The minute I became conscious of the fact that I was having a thought all sense of it was lost. I saw in this the futility of my own quest to know. I saw the source of my unhappiness that I could not live here now but only came looking and in being so overwhelmed with consciousness of myself I lost myself. Everything was laid unequivocally bare to the opulent austerity of the truth the contradiction when contradiction finally fades and all things are true and not true all at the same moment. A place indescribable, incommunicable precisely because it exists below the refinement of words. It is too raw to be said or explained it must be devoured with the intensity of an animal ripping at its prey
I felt it for what seemed like an eternity. I remember coming back to fire in dazed kind of trance like state that held me like a loved one returned from a long voyage at see. My spine trembled and doubt slowly crept in. What if this stops? I want to feel this always to live in this mindscape whole world be damned and with these thoughts so went the vision.
I awoke feeling an eternal peace settled into my chest and the words of Terence McKenna came to my mind. “If you have seen the end you take your place in the drama and you live without anxiety.” I don’t know what he meant by those words what space he went to what he felt, but they mean something to me. They mean something as if I myself had said them. I did not see an end or anything so literal as that at best I can saw that I felt everything as it really was beautiful and unbounded and I felt the release of anxiety that he attempts to approximate with words.
I made breakfast in the morning heat. The desert was waking up and it wouldn’t be long before I could have cooked the eggs right on the rocks. I drank the last beer to wash down the eggs and I asked around the campground for a ride back into Moab finally at the last sight right by the entrance I found a young couple who let me ride in the camper shell of their truck crouched between my gear and theirs, it was a long bumpy ride into Moab, but I didn’t have to suffer lectures on political duties. Instead I thought about Joe, he was expecting me at the yard around five which gave me a hour to kill in Moab. The bulk of the hour I spent trying to figure out why some people meet someone and they share there live and other meet people they share there ideas. I like to think that my life is an idea and every idea a life, but then again I have a fondness for wordplay, deceit, double entandre. delibrete acting and outright lying when it comes to talking to strangers. I just try to stay one step ahead of my brain as if I were writing myself into existence all the time. My life changes as fluidly as the writer traces his pen.
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