This I Know

Dear A. Mole,

Let me see now.  In the following, I’m not talking about instinctual reactions of fight or flight.  I’m talking about the roads we travel.  The map we carry and when we come to signs that point in opposite directions, we pause.  Hmm, we have a few minutes or a day to decide which way to go.  Sometimes it is not so clear, yet we choose.  The alternative is to stop.  Fall down from ourselves and accept the local conditions forever.  This sort of thing happens maybe a few hundred times in a life and if we are an aware person, we remember how all of it transpired, how we changed along the way.  How did I get here, we might ask, and then we recall.  There are usually people involved and when we drill down into the event, we can see it in our mind’s eye.  What we did is sometimes pretty damning.   Other times, we guess it was the right thing to do.  Regardless, we turn and go and if we survive, we travel to the next moment of choice, and so on, until we come to the end of the road, where the choices have dwindled, and most are involuntary.    

I thought of all that when I read your comment.  I’m down to only a few people reading my thoughts, but that is the way of Word Press.  We are the flotsam of Book Trope, drifting around. There is a guy, maybe dead, in Ireland, who once said, life is away from the computer.  I partly agree.    

Life for me has always been inside my mind.  Even those times when I was very hard pressed as a human on earth.  I always retreated to my mind.  Sometimes I was panicked and other times I had the luxury of contemplation, but the dimensions I measured where always inside my mind.  My view of beauty, death, animals, plants, the oceans, lovers … everything and everyone, reflected in my mind.  This is the essential argument of existentialism, existence vs essence.  Most people are into essence, but over the years, I have gravitated toward existence.  I’ve carried it to the extreme of language predates reality.  The language of existence comes with the first words.  I just heard someone say, all artists must believe in god as a way to confront mortality.  I don’t buy that, of course, but I do think that we can accommodate mortality within the mind.  I remember Hitches said, when I die someone will come out of the woodwork and say, he converted on his deathbed.  Don’t believe them. 

Anyway, I sometimes lie in bed, usually before I fall asleep, and there is a steady stream of images that cross my mind’s eye, cells that are close to each other, maybe touching.  One thing leads to another in a very rapid pace … the horrible fields, the mountains, the fucked up roads, the burned buildings, etc. and I start to think about these lines from Life, Life, both the poem and the song.  Most of the Russians are terrible, but some are rather god-like in their feelings for humanity and right before I fall asleep, I usually end with the movie Solaris and how that is the closest thing I have ever seen to what humans might be, since no one knows, and it makes sense to me.  And Solaris is about loving relations, about violence, and how we make decisions and finally die.   

Neither death, nor darkness, exists

We’re all already on the seashore

And this I dreamt, and this I dream

And sometime this I will dream again

And all will be repeated, all be re-embodied

You will dream everything I have seen in dream 

Melancholy, for sure.  Mistakes of memory, absolutely.  But, I’m in a hut on a river.  There is a woman beside me.  She has long black hair and she says she loves me.  It is humid and we wash ourselves from buckets we have brought from the river and I congratulate myself on my decisions.  How I feel alive.  How I am doing something that others call foolish and this makes me happy, so happy I will stake my life upon it, over and over again, until I can go no further.  This I know.  Thanks.  Duke