Relentless miracle always saying something even when there is nothing to say and even more when you try to say nothing and hundreds of heedless times more than that when you open your mouth to say hello or anything equally mundane because if it gains even a little tiny bit of your attention any saying at all will cease retroactively all trafficking in the mundane even to the point where despotic demands for transcendence remain yet quite helpless to do anything about whatever you might wish or want or need done. Watch what you say and see if this is not true.
I could say that I have spent my life in search of a diagnosis in which one of those commonly ordered lists of names for thinking and feeling and doing that gather themselves together in search of a pathologic entity to call their own might provide me with that word I have never been able to come up with when asked how I am. I could say that. But only also that today hearing diagnosis declare its agenda or its infinite varieties of agenda my ears attuned more to fictional rhythm and grace than factual correspondence or agreement or compliance or submission or sacrifice. Just the facts ma’am but are you sure you are ready for them they are not timid and they do not ask permission first.
But much some time ago the age of good faith and credulity willing to believe virtually any account of things that she had any hand in presenting I read my mother’s good housekeeping and mccall’s and better homes and gardens and ladies’ home journal then the conduits of tacitly approved outside interference. And so privy to the experts of the day in domesticity and the sort of whispering and laughing that said the adults were talking and you would not understand and above all do not ask to be filled in. Hush. I learned as quickly as anyone that private research was easier and much less dangerous than posing questions. We had a dictionary and it was not hard to reach and it was even comprehensive enough that I do not recall ever being disappointed except when trying to look up cuss words but I did not do that for the sake of information anyway.
I do not know how it is now most linguistic prohibition having been repealed but these many years ago seeing a bad word in print would have
would have
would have somehow altered its mystical powers
or something
but I am not sure how or in which direction or why I or any other kid so badly wanted to see them typeset with definitions listed 1 2 3a 3b I only know that we would look more than once even knowing that they were not there the last time we checked.
When I did locate a word that was not a cuss word but still not one to say out loud as mostly they did show up in this dictionary my hunches tended toward technical accuracy even if they were not always well-informed by experience. Each outcome on its own filing card in its cleared out space with a light on a table and a door to keep closed and in this and every other way figures of speech and print accumulated and grew tangled and dense. I supposed I was discovering what this or that was called and thereby something about this or that only there remained the political puzzle of why I knew implicitly which of this or that were best left uncalled in the presence of blood relations.
But so some one of those magazines or some other would inevitably feature a piece about the dangers of for example depression in whatever way those dangers were talked about in the very early 1970s at the very latest. Thus depression for example was one thing that I had a fairly elaborate concept for almost before the definition so to speak applied to me so to speak but not quite.
A sign for me that was not for me except for when it sort of was or enough so that I decided to try it on only not to anyone else’s knowledge until it became necessary to state what the matter was because how can we help you if you do not tell us what you are thinking.
As if they believed it possible for one to state anything at all about what one was thinking and so although I think I did say to someone and reasonably promptly once the option not to speak at all had been removed from my list of things to do to be released back into my own recognizance to borrow a phrase that when taken literally means nothing like what I mean to suggest and had been replaced on that list by you are going to have to think of an alibi that gives them enough pause not to keep asking so I reaching into the version I had compiled by then of the library of postwar medical discourse filtered through women’s media so-called said to those making inquiry I think I might be depressed there was very little I could add in order to clarify or specify.
the generic miscomprehension
what are you depressed about
the honest misdirection
I don’t know
stalking frantic, wary spirals around each other’s frantic, wary spirals
had this impasse in translation been resolvable perhaps it would eventually have been resolved.
You see exponentiating every switch running the length of the spine and the femur and the tibia and out to tarsals and meta-tarsals so-named just as though they stood for something else is every switch running the length of the brain stem and the basal ganglia out to centers optical and aural where flux is assembled into negotiable space by way of that minority of hallucinations remaining transparent enough long enough to provide something like bearings but the heck of it is that no matter what one says about the charge that is borne along continuously arcing low-voltage sparks humming intervals smaller than anything mammalian sense can detect and how all braided together in silently pledged confederacies of fine wire think of the metal grounding strap that used to sometimes hang off the engine block like it was supposed to go somewhere but stopped short of its destination and you never knew if someone had yanked it away or if it had slowly corroded to powder at that point where the washer around the bolt was supposed to hold it close to the automobile body quietly thumping over tar-pitched expansion seams in concrete freeways running under a sun that prevailed over their black sticky elasticity until the tar ran in rivulets off into the grass holding nothing together anymore except your tennishoes to the ground.
There were no words for that and it was not even a matter anymore of trying to work something out for himself in his head it was or was it that to enter polite society and not to ask for more than one’s due one had simply that is you had to talk to them. There was no other way. In all of the universe where both potential and the real took on the blazing insignia of infinity and wore it rushing against what was frequently referred to as heaven but which chafed too at its own bindings revolting even against those patterns etched by archaic habit ever scratching the same number once and twice and once more and twice more until however many strikes were no longer any number but a crowd unleashed with every intention of doing nothing other than turning itself inside out with the energy that crackled from ligament to bone.
But it was not like that. It was not like that. No if there is anything I do not know, it is that I do not know what eventual significance might ensue upon taking flint to the skull and spreading its contents on the bare rock in the sun to be read as bird’s entrails might be read or offering the interior of passion itself out pounding the sidewalk then sweeping the floor for spare change eyes still brimming with sunlight fingers picking out dust mites and paper clips allied between strips of oak where every single one of us still lives in the trees still gasps when moss humus worm tracks and scat call us by name.
There was not really anything anyone could do or that is there was not really anything that anyone would do realistically one hears the question all the time if only there had been something we could have done and there probably was but it would have been against all good moral principle and economic good sense to do it since you must not have wanted it enough yourself to go out and get it without bothering the rest of us. To question what precisely anyone deserves is infinite in both nonsense and impertinence but it is not as though you do not ask to be shown every possibility only to be served up exactly two. Two: The same two, regenerating themselves in every choice offered especially those it was said were crucial for whatever salvation it was said one needed. Was it boy or girl was that the first one or the last day and night or just the most chronic: Elect or damned. You know by now which pole to lead with if you mean to be credulous or ironic or unsettling or scientific or contrary or objective or confrontational or not.
If you cannot be retired to this contour of precise exclusion you are probably demonic and the likes of you should not be encouraged lest a message be sent to the youth of this nation to rouse from nodding sleepily or rather gregariously mingling on the cutting floor of what I always thought of as the film that would be made if the script were written on the floorboards of the elementary school where I walked with my satchel and waited solemnly for someone besides the deities I was offered to bear me up on their wings and away. I could hear already the echo behind god’s throne even while taking down to the singular letter every parable meant to drown it out.
I cannot tell a regular story. I cannot work a regular job. I cannot hold a regular conversation. I cannot keep a regular schedule. I do not follow the regulations requiring me to hold onto my financial information for however many years it is one is supposed to do that because it strikes me as patently absurd to expend the space and energy required to gather and stow them in gathering them and stowing them.
I cannot tell you what I was going to tell you but it is not like there is something else that I cannot tell you only this excavated cavern where the world taught itself to speak while having nothing in particular to say but articulation speaking itself: How what is discrete is so because it is so because somewhere or that is in many places at not just one time but every time persons meet or undergo or pronounce or mull over at night when it is too warm for sleeping those clearings out that include them and pinchings off that exclude them and intrude upon them carving those paths any ambulant or aviary or aquatic animal needs in order to navigate its way to where it must go.
In chatter and cry colliding to spark maybe another wildfire that in no time leaps canyon and ridge to spawn whole empires rising and falling without each other’s knowledge in this far corner and that and any corner at all capable of sustaining respiration and if out of all of this there is only good and evil if workhammers are pulled as often as guns and brandished at this or that one life without a nose for wealth in the colloquial sense but that everything we need presents itself literally makes of itself a gift and no other hand driving it or giving it only warm blood giving itself up for cold blood or viscosity for capillary expansion or any of so many more possible exchanges that naming them would run off of every page and continue doing so forever the myth that one must tug at the earth and crack it and otherwise batter it being the founding tale of one stonebroken subclan among many brought up on the hard dried mud flats of petrified riverbeds in all bad luck but now in the middle of tall trees that drip their own rain from clouds of furred branches to teeming loam day and night since before anyone even had the sense to write it down then why not describe a dream less impoverished before turning over to sleep sated with the absolutely unintentional generosity of dirt that is not ours but only itself only even as it is subject to plow shovel backhoe drill string and stakes.
I may have said this already but I used to count the rows of planks in the tall vaulted ceiling of the sanctuary surreptitiously looking up as though that were not the most appropriate place to look given the sermon but counting them made it clear the arbitrary nature of all that unfolded underneath and I knew it and I knew it but it was not something enough to rally around or hold onto me when they came and grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to the baptismal pool and come to remember it was not just the walk which kept me so long from walking but it was also the dunk I had never liked water for much other than for drinking when at the swimming lesson taken for what was it my own protection or need or practicality or one of those other goods universally bestowed upon hopeful nouveau middle class children that they might be prepared for any unexpected irritant to their equilibrium and so there over my head and out of air to keep my legs kicking I breathed in a lung’s worth of chlorinated pool water and panicked in that way that nobody else could possibly notice with my face turned toward the bottom of the pool opening my eyes underwater for the first time. Nothing recognizable the wavy blue green tile neither expected nor anticipated but offering no assistance so without fuel to do so nonetheless kicked harder toward the ladder I had seen before going under sent off to swim toward it. As soon as my hand found the rail and my head broke the surface I gulped in a mouthful of oxygenated relief and then began to cough and I coughed and kept coughing and could not stop coughing through nausea and chest cramp coughed and coughed and coughed and the teacher who had not noticed before taking us to the deep end that unlike the other kids I had not learned to turn my head up out of the water to breathe while kicking asked with a laugh did you swallow the whole pool. Instead of asking how might I have known for sure if I were about to drown and because I could not speak I coughed.
Underwater for even a second would be too long now. I started practicing for the baptist style full body baptism in the bathtub when it became clear there was no escape. By the time the kerchief was over my mouth and nose and I was being bent backwards into the warm chest high pool and liquid rushing from behind and over my ears and then tightly closed eyes and nose and his hand keeping the air in and then a moment and in reverse splashing back up water flowing out of my hair dripping from the jawline and it was over so wherever it was that I used to go when the everyday presented its most dangerous faces and the immense amount of energy required for the round trip and myself there for an indefinite time before bugging back out again was even possible we dropped exhausted and relieved and without notice that I could make out that was not a projection of someone else’s fears of hell onto me. And so for maybe three months I was able almost to rest before it became clear that the promise of rescinded condemnation had been rescinded from the first only now it would not continue after death for all eternity burning and regenerating to keep burning because the human animal pathetic as it may already be deserves no mercy especially if it dares to think that it does too deserve mercy without onerous condition.
We are not here to tell you that you are fine now. That was a ruse but you will have to figure that out for yourself we are not telling you that either. Verbatim and I carefully noted this down only in that sort of cloaked sound and vision whose subtlety and skill are but insulted when you call them the authors of a future psychosis.
I do not recall how many planks there were in the ceiling but I can tell you that I knew already that there would come a time so immense as to render all that we were doing only imperceptibly relevant when my having sat there would be of less consequence even than those heavenly beings invoked on my behalf on a daily basis. What I did not know is that the church had no door out or rather many doors but no out. Oh some of the doors led outside of that church or they would have if out had been able to retain any sense given the situation: That one church contained another church contained another and another and if there were any strategy at all worth the effort to resuscitate hope it could only be dismantling every one of them piece by piece examining each component and setting it in random piles to be used not ever again for edifices but as recombinant dna that might fly and take off without notice for parts unknown and find the rhythm of the time spent heading there itself granting that exuberant peace speeding not home but home speeding itself but although I have managed almost to disassemble one single church it appears to me that the next and the next and the next are each slightly bigger holding more territory more armaments and more crowds willing to die rather than see them taken down even when they know the buildings themselves obscure both sight and sound of the unbearable reach of interstellar space waiting with more patience than we may live to see for us to live to see it.
this was not a continuation of the Blue Socks Chapter but neither was it the end of anything
expect more
