I sometimes wonder if openness is becoming a crutch. The transparency so many turn to for salvation keeps proving to be a shallow attempt at distilling one's own grief and misunderstanding into the hearts of others, in my experience. Honesty deployed as relief like the criminal surrounded by his crimes and somehow pleased for having confessed them to the victim in a confusion of the difference between committal and commitment, and at the same time there are no victims, or others, anyways, the other person is always you, and that is no longer surreal just basic knowledge. And what is a confession? A yielding energy born of infinite pressures to measure the self in relation to its actions/deviance/retreat/from a center built on nerve or lack thereof. Self-objectification. Tacky and beautiful. The verb self and the verbal self make a pact with experience. What is so confessional about our culture now that isn't also somehow sinister? Like what we call reality is just this mounting evidence of the mask. A monument to the mask that makes us feel so real and exactly visible and invisible at the same moment. Like the sun is when it illuminates everything and makes mysteriousness into the farce and inevitability that it is. It makes it hard and eager to concentrate. But at least its disappearances are consistent and regal. At least the sun's cowardice and its courage are born of an identical impulse— a brilliant maniac it must feel like out there on stage every day trying to save us from the hunt for meaning. The futility becomes not that it isn't there (the meaning) but that it's all there, it's all illuminated, until a primitive indifference to everything but its truest function must make that radiance feel a bit blasé, but no less lucid, just almost fed up with its own truth. So all writers should run. Everybody should, to understand the pretense of getting away from oneself in order to learn oneself, to understand how the value of a good mistake is in our ability to let it answer only to itself without becoming just another crime or dream, to refuse the doubt that guilt encourages. And because this is the land between yes and no...
Running does to the body what right language does to the spirit. You reveal one truth and another, deeper and more difficult one is immediately born in the space you thought you had carved out for alleviation and recording. There is no history, only an infinite present. Each stride, each word, I thought I'd cured the abyss/ I'd only exceeded it and turned into this avid speaker between me and my own listening, a point of access to the subconscious that then needs to be toned in order to avoid excess seeing (over-vulnerability) or blindness (delusion). Most everything becomes symbolic and mundane in that newborn haven of an abyss, and most of all... anything that could last through all that silence, deserves the name love, when you finally find it, again, for the first time. Each and every discovery is a romance. I once underestimated the capacity of my own, heart, soul, and spirit, now I spend the abyss forgiving myself, not quite Dionysus but not quite anything else either. It seems perfectly natural to assume that I have always existed. The phone rings. I'm accidentally calling myself from my computer. I still have the strength to laugh. You still don't have the strength to cry and when you discover it don't take it for granted. Yes, that's love.
