Meetings on the Edge of Eternity
It’s a good, albeit painful thing to be forced away from one’s old habits, thoughts, actions or at least to get pushed off to the side to get a different vantage point. I say forced because many will resist. The forces of inertia, shear matter in motion, wanting to go in a straight line Newton’s law if right for the psyche also. And the older you get the more matter there is to push out of the way, Slim thought; the two main pushes (or pulls depending on how you want to see it) of life, disguising themselves, as thinkers like Freud realized and so spectacular in their banality really, were birth and death, And who knew, really and truly, what either of them meant. Both the banality of each and their more-than-life aura worked to hide away certain fixtures (like how spectacular they both were). Otherwise how could we function, build civilizations, repair cars, plant crops, have kids, make art, make war, destroy, create. And that secrecy we must hide within the folds of is helped by our machines.
Now O. you might be thinking to your self “well how do you know that there is anything hidden anywhere, especially around the landmarks of either birth or death” What makes you so high and mighty?” And I would love for my answer to be, I don’t know. But here’s the deal big O: neither does anyone else, Science itself doesn’t know. Oh it can give some good stories but increasingly the textures of these stories—especially as they move though maths—don’t amount to a life. death. Other than to reduce us to meat puppets, zombies, a length of string wherein the two ends don’t meet. Leaving us with a pile of nothing, the old Nihil, Nothing to rely on, to believe in, to get hung up on, nothing to blame, nothing to write home about. Strawberry Fields Forever. For sure the gods don’t seem to want to quibble with us, other than perhaps various opaque signals and scribbling seen out of the orner of the eye, like Jesus on a potato chip, or aliens sliding down outside our window at three o’clock in the morning.
O. and I has meandered the five hundred or so feet down the road to the cemetery where many of his relatives lay buried. Slim and O. had taken to walking down, up a bit actually, with Lucky Peaches, the little red heeler halfbreed pup which had been adopted, While the walk added a bit of purpose to the evening strolls, this wish to commune with the dead always gave a certain lugubrious tone to the walk. The evening dusk was filled with the ratcheting serrated rasp of cicadas and tree frogs, choruses shifting from tree to tree. Some sort of electric line on the light post they passed added a soprano sixty-cycle keening, blending in perfectly with rest of the orchestration.
Just past the entrance at the top of the hill where we had been sitting just listening to the occasional car pass by the sonic clouds, O. shifted his position on the broken stone wall and stared into the distance with that look he often affected. I knew there was nothing to do but to wait till he was finished.
“Brother, ‘Solitude does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity’. Jean Genet
I couldn’t argue with that, fact of the matter I couldn’t argue with O. about anything he said..or quoted or whatever it was. My sophomoric failings could barely compare…and anyways, I always seemed to be replicating Tintern Abby.
As if jousting with my thoughts O rose and intoned:
“The world’s ending. The world’s winding down. The atoms are separating, one from the other. Reality’s thinning out. Did you know that? It’s wearing out. Soon, you’ll be able to see right through it. Soon, you’ll be able to see through to the other side.
We will leave the world over behind. We will leave ourselves behind. Shed our lives like old skin. We will hatch vermillion bodies like the dragonflies’ water.”
by Lars Iyer
He abruptly sat down and began to weep