April 8, 2013

• The Child is Gone

  The years have gotten so fast.

   

  They fall by the wayside. They become litter. No different, in most regards, than the soiled Payday wrapper caught in the storm drain grate. The brown on the wrapper, I hope, is old chocolate but am pretty sure isn’t.

  Those years.

   

  My wife, and my children, I met them so few years ago-I am sure-but then I look and count up the hash marks on my cell. It has been half a decade for my children and over that for my wife. Decades. Merging into centuries?

  
  How much time is there between two seconds? How many fractions between two points? An infinity. How can time move? How can objects move. Finite objects cannot travel and infinite amount of space.

   

  I get a touch of this with my family. It is eternal time.

   

  But then it is not. Well past my mid life. I sit here. Looking out the window at a tree that could be a holy one in the Game of Thrones. White as bone, the first buds erupting from the twig branches.

   

  It is all so dissatisfying.

  I am not great enough to SEE it. I am not. I can understand that the IT is there, through reason, logic, prayer, meditation, I can glimpse the residue of its passing. I imagine it like a rainbow miasma on the surface of water from the gas that has condensed from the perpetual smog above our city.

   

  But this Truth only brings me so much solace. I know it to be true from an ultimate unstained view but I am so steeped in my ignorance that it is almost as if it were not so.

   

  The years have brought me this understanding. The silliness of my thoughts of mundane permanence. The best, in the mundane manner, I can hope for is a catastrophic stroke to end my days.

  The filling up of so much shopping, eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, sex, entertainment-it has become bland for me. Like chewing on sand that a beach fire had once been on. I can taste the embers between the granules.

   

  Even art, reading, inquiry, insight, have lost some luster. I still do these because they drive me to better places and I know, through my Mind, that it is the best. That it is accurate. But it still does not ‘feel’ better.

  And what am I but some exposed nerve to this world? I am so caught up in the “I” and am trying not to be but am still. This “I” of selfhood, that they say is the root of my woe, is so damned strong. I want to feel.

  
  The feeling I get is not one that I would bestow on anyone. Not myself either, but there it is.

   

  My daughter, my Son

  
  What is the best that I could do for you in the travesty of a world. I have made sure, to the best of my ability, that you will be able to conventionally take care of yourself. Eat, etc. And yet, such a pathway leads one to the inevitable end where a catastrophic stroke is the best to be hoped for. It always ends, like my father, on the floor of a bathroom, unable to get up, confused, embarrassed, pants down to your ankles, with your loved one, the one you protected, helping you up. Helping you up and trying to not show his disgust and irritation. Your low progeny.

  This is all that I can give you. Now.

  I sit in my cell, crossed legged, thumbs touching, hands overlapping. I am trying. I would give you more. I would give you meaning, depth....I would give you freedom.

   

  If I knew that death was the end, I would end it. I know, though, its opposite. I know it as I know any scientific proof that I have studied. Be it nuclear fission, cell division, or even the construction of a water molecule. Through experimentation, logic, math, etc. I have been convinced of their processes. That is how I know this is not the end. But unlike most westerners who think that any continuance of consciousness in a semi-fortunate state-I do not think it is good.

  Art is not enough.

  Mundane love is not enough.
  eating, fucking, shitting, and watching others

  Do some derivative of this
  is not enough.

   

  I see now, easily, why the Buddha ran from his family to the forest. He loved them. I can understand this. If I really loved my family, and had shown an ample amount of ability, it makes sense to run from those you love. To find a way. There has to be a way out. The Buddha’s say there are. My betters say there is. I hope so.

  
  For this merry go round of fuck’ness has gotten painfully stale. The things that used to bring me some sort of merriment are gone. The childishness in me, the naive boy, is dead. I watch him float off into the ocean upon the current that passes by me. His head bobbing above his body, his black hair plastered against his paled face. The face of Death. That is what this world has for us-death. And then you get to do it again.

  I watch the sunset and I am shorebound. The beauty of that sunset is not easing to my mind, it is almost a sneer and a mocking of me, this ignorant castaway who only has the wrecks of ships to keep him company and their flotsam to feed his body.

   

  Be well

  G

  • 5:09 pm
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