D.S. CHAPMAN

The heart of the hero is heavy, his hands shake, he complains of the cold; in his head he is falling, he clutches, he sees, he is knowing; impaled upon a grey-glass landscape of obelisks and columns, sheared on all their common fault lines, geometric forms and angles, the sense that all things living share of a soul, of shells crushed and tragedies, ambition and pride; people stumbled, people swayed; the towers on the planet grew taller and taller until they blocked out the sun and surrounded the clouds with their heights. Alternative fantasies no longer exist, nor are dreams from logic distinguishable; everything is breathless, a mass in inertia, a thin bead of heat on a low palpitation, something just under the surface; a fleeting sense of familiarity, an absence, a loss. A hero, him, or her, with her hands, and her pale-dawn insomnia, aluminum and ice; skin laid bare and hairless, nooses swaying from the hooks – the portraits on the wall faded day after day in the sun – cracks formed in the pain – he slid across ice like a know-it-all, shaking the fruit from the trees and then beating a horse with a stick. He struck fear in the hearts of the locals; a murmur of the heart, and tepid, the young bird fell far from the peak. Horses neigh and stamp their hooves on cold, hard ground. Even in the silent calm of peace there is danger, and no one will notice the blood in the streets. Over cards, like a dope fiend, the pillories raged; the castles brimmed with inorganic matter, and in the basements dead men wept, reaping the coins that they hid in their anuses, praying on the single star that met them through a crack and gleamed; as in a prism spectra scatter. Portents told of this – they promised the hero her due, and his insolence hastened an impotent fate. Fortune knocks; spiders climb down from the rafters. She said, “It is hard on us all,” and lived out her life in a foggy glass jar. “Time is not kind, not at all.” And so the Sibyl, living, wept.

And while the moon was sinking, so slow and soulfully, through its pendant veil of clouds and shadows, while the rain watered down from the eaves and the awnings and straight to the ground just to drip in a puddle, the people folded, lonesome, over, sound-asleep and sinking deeper into their abyss, softly, through the soft morass, edgeless, drifting, patient, blue-hearted and kind, wrapped in bandages, the blue-tinted light of the dull evening silence, the transient fleet of a listless, white beating; I listened, with my fingers laced, and beckoned the whiteness to beat me; in bliss, like the red lettered days of the old world, in single file side by side; I missed a step on the stairs and I fell, black and grinding through the middle, bleeding like a piece of meat; and I, with my shoes on, was alone in a low glowing light watching movies, bodily sourced from a single pink pill; time moves onwards; angelic figures fall from the sky; the meteorite, flashing, from my roof watch them fall – in the night, with the gold becomes red, and the red becomes blue, dark and volatile; motionless, I laid and hoped; I hoped for a movie called Drive, low and heavy, heart pulsing beautifully inside my chest as in photons, like the standstill bands of perfect light, as in structures, and monuments; buildings, climbing towers; balconies; water, and coves; our eyelids burning, fingers dry; I am sleeping; a solitary car drives on by me, filling the room in the morning with the tall passive flash of their headlights, sweeping in uneven bands from one wall to another. I thought of colors in my mind, letting the heaviness ease into my head and out of my mind, feeling exhausted with futility. Time cannot harm us, our minds are not all that we have. It feels like winter; it invokes the feeling of midnight in winter, watching the snow falling slow through the fields, in the cities, turning to slush, on the threaded garlands of light; ships on oceans, listing slightly in the storm; weight shift; I am yawning, fast asleep. There were people in the lobby, giving kisses, being kind. A party was underway in the parlor. A dog waited outside the door of the kitchen. It wants to go in, but it can’t turn the doorknob. A doorknob is a simple thing. I wonder what would ravens do. I wonder what an owl looks like without all its feathers. There were geese once, in the lake in the edge of the forest, but all the geese flew away before sunrise one morning, and I do not know if I will ever see them again. I am cold at night; I turn the fan on; I am cold in the circulating air. In my clothes, I am warm, and secure, and I wait for the dead calm of twilight to rise and be thoughtless, and turn over in my chair and read; and in my head in an alley I am walking, very cool and lonely, through a very heavy rain, and I am waiting under an eve near a streetlight to meet with a Gambian; there is a hole in my shoe and I can feel the water in my toes, it feels something like blood and it bothers me; it is time for new shoes, I am full of new hopes, and new promises. God save me from these wicked visions; hold me with immortal hands, and bear me with eternal patience. Christ will kiss me, I will frown; I will secretly be happy.

While walking my dog in the young summer evening I came upon a quiet road, well-shaded by the arching limbs of the elms and magnolia trees, and though there were bottles in the gulley and erosion eating away at the asphalt, it was as pleasant a road as any other; and on this road there was a child, singing and skipping ahead of his mother, wearing cheap cotton clothing and laughing out loud. The boy saw me coming and spooked. He ran to and hid behind his mother, and his mother said, Don’t be silly, but she held him very close, pressing his head up against her side. And I passed, with my dog, while he pulled at the leash, trying to say hello to the strangers, and I pulled him close against me as though I were holding him back, holding him back, while the strangers passed in discomfort, afraid, not at ease, without any laughter. Do not be afraid of me, I wanted to plead. I love you, I want you to know that I love you, you have nothing to fear from me; do not stop singing, at least not for me. I am simply a boy in nice linen. I tried to smile and to be re-assuring, and the mother even smiled back, her eyes wide and remote, firmly set against my gaze. It made me sick to see her wary of me, to know her son was scared of me, the blue-eyed stranger, hollow as a ghoul and normal, I wanted to show I was normal, and safe. I wanted to kneel down beside the boy and have him tell my dog to sit, to show him there was nothing to be afraid of in man, and in animals, and then give him a toy that I had in my pocket. But nothing like that could have happened. I did not even have any toys in my pockets. I passed them in silence and hated myself.

This is a breakdown…

Edifices, crumbling, effigies burning sink deep in the mud. Flags, tattered, half-mast hang discreetly.

I confess it clearly and loud: I am broken. Too vain to ask for help, I could not be helped if I tried. I am a monster, here is why.

I am acutely aware of the universe, and the universe has crippled me. Everything is a tragedy. Life is just one damn thing after another, and I am never as good as I ought to be. I am a brain in a vat and I am not even notable. I should have been smarter; I should have made a fortune already. I have been making mistakes and each time I am ready to off myself. A day late and a dollar short; ten thousand dollars; one hundred thousand more…

I have been mistiming my bets lately and missing big gains. The frightened hand of chance is holding me down and laughing. I am terrified by the idea of my own mediocrity, by my glimpses of infinity and brushes with fortune, how close I have come to pure fortune – but I lose, and each loss is a tragedy,like each day is my only chance, each trade is my last one. I am a tortured and pathetic sort of speculator. Weak-willed, like a farmer. Emotional and unsuccessful. I ignore my blessings and lament my losses with furious, suicidal vigor. I could have made twenty thousand dollars this week – I could have simply made it. But I did not, because I was one day too late, I was lazy. I flagellate myself in hatred. I scoop my brains out from my head.

I hear someone singing and I want to punch in her throat. I hear someone coughing and I want to punch him in his throat. I want to pour a bottle of cough syrup down his throat to stop his ragged wheezing. He doesn’t even cover his mouth. He is stupid and a bastard. I am surrounded by animal bastards. Like animals, they make their biological movements, habitual, weird, and they perform their animal movements, snorting and sneezing and scratching dead skin from their elbows. Oh god – I’m going to be sick. I almost passed out the other day. My head started spinning. That has never happened to me and until it did I was sure that it could never have happened.

Oh boy… I have really done myself in. I am done for. I talk to myself, out loud, in my head, I schematize and narrate. I am a maniac. Absolutely psychotic. No one can love me, I am incapable of love. I am overwhelmed by myself and the world and by money, and my faculties are black and porous, soaked with violence and oil and delusion. I do not sleep at night. I do not even dream. I am lost in a muddle of constant confusion, overwhelmed by the heavy black soak of reality. I see a bird, I want to hold it. Hold it in my hand and carry it. I see a squirrel and I want, too, to hold it.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I have tried and I have tried to be strong, but I not strong. I make mistakes. I am not innate and deserving. I will never live a decent life. I am a loser – I am losing. Lost… empty, sitting still. I am useless and a failure. I am everything wrong with the world, bodily, consummate, collapsing always inward. I am caught in a recursion from which I could never dream of escaping from now. I will never be happy again. I could have really changed things – I could have been a prodigy. I could have been a poet, a dreamer, a lover, and a king. I could have reigned with pockets lined with gold. Secretive, alone in my sum of all knowledge, the wise master slept with a smile, keeping the lanterns half-lit…

Old women die in the homes that I built with my hands in my childhood. I have written them letters because they made me cry and they have always written back to me, but there will be no letters anymore. Godmother – a child of god, back to god, one indivisible. I told them all that I was truly a Christian, and that I loved a divine and perfect god, and I apologized for my evil, childish ways, my confused and useless atheism. I promised I was a good man, that I had grown to be a good and loving man, a Christian man, and capable. I outlined a future in which I was king for them, and the end-times were glorious. But winter is not glorious. Winter is lonely and cold, and it comes without sound and it leaves without ever letting go, ice and reeds and thin pale skin, frail blue veins, corpses under blankets, lost.

I am a normal man. I live in a peaceful neighborhood, in a house made of plaster and wood, and I leave valuables on my porch, where I do not worry about them being stolen. Sometimes things go missing and I report it duly to the law. I am in love with the law and I live with it. I understand Rome – I am lawful. I am literate and familiar with second-order processes. I enjoy good satire. I have read the Satyricon. I am Roman – that is to say, I am normal, modern, and my pockets are full.

I walk my dog, which is normal, down my street and he eats the dried, desiccated corpses of sun-burned worms on the sidewalks and I make him spit them out, but I do not know why something like that would even bother me, why I make him spit them out. It is the consumption of organic matter, and that is perfectly normal. Everything is either organic or inorganic matter. Matter interacts with matter; nothing is wrong, everything is right. But it is my whim that I do not allow him to do so and so I continue to not allow him. I am right to have whims. I teach him right from wrong, feeding him cakes so that he won’t eat the worms off the sidewalk. I teach him how to walk in a straight line, in a circular mile, and how to keep his eyes perfectly level with the skyline.

Swing and big band, gypsy jazz guitar; at night, I stretch out on an overstuffed bed and I listen; the stars glisten from beneath their lacy curtain, barely visible, and the swaying branches from the trees in the garden brush calmly on the windows. I am trying to get a hold of myself. I am trying to be calm, poised, and happy. There is no room in my poisonous heart for happiness. My head is full of toxic junk. I am no good, and I know it. I am sick and fat, and getting old, and I have not done a single virtuous thing in my life. I am not a genius, rich, nor beneficent. I was healthy, once – I derided my health and then lost it. When did everything become so difficult? I hang my head in shame while I play with myself. I am consumed by exhaustion, and distracted by pity, and my skin is so thick that I can not even feel what I touch, I can only trust that what I’m touching is there.

It has gotten so hot inside, even when the heat is off. I sweat. I pile up on blankets, I oversleep. I leave the air conditioner on and slowly freeze. I watched a movie late at night once as a very young boy and I have been trying to recreate it ever since. Time has stopped and left me weeping. My tears are private, but they leak through my eyes. I am tired. I’ve grown old. I lament my memories as though they were all that I have. I have not got a hold on myself, after all. I will get lost in the laps of some filthy, pale whores and then off myself. Gun to my head, I will pull back the hammer. I have been here once before – on a stool, under a glowing hot light, my tie loosened, I still can’t breathe; I have been in this sink, I have felt these frail bones begin trembling. I use shampoo and it dries out my scalp. I rinse my face with acid and it dries up my chin. I wear tight clothing when I can to simulate the tightness of securely wrapped bandages, protecting my terrible wounds. Am I normal, after all? I know I am destined to failure; that is the route of normalcy. I know that it could have been many other ways, but that it was this way, and this way is all that I have…

The real mystery surrounding all this is what I will do when things really get bad. Things can be good and I can hardly breathe; things start to get worse and I completely asphyxiate. It is four in the morning and I have been laying here in silence for over six hours now, unamazed, my heart rate slowing. I picked up a chair and I threw it across the hall; it did not break. My back aches. I drew a picture of a building, and then I erased it. I imagined a flowerbox at my window full of flowers, but I did not build one. Ghosts weigh heavy on my chest. I am tired of jazz and of headaches; I am sick of listless incantation. I am not a master rhetorician. I am not a tenor, nor a fencer. I am not a handsome ballroom dancer.

In the streets, playing saxophone, the cold grey nostalgia of smoke and glass lingers, the shoes click and glide in the shadows. In a staid ray of light, the single man turns up his collars and sleeps. You can still hear the big band and swing program if you tune in late at night, four o’clock in the morning on a Thursday, and fade in to the peaceful consistency of another world, a strangely insistent new universe. Old colors, the flag ran  deep and not innocent, and I was not amused.

There were seasons, once, and barns in farmyards, and I with a girl once skipped rocks through a stream, in the sand by the sea where the white-foam tide came lapping at our calloused heels, and in a field full of clover and daffodils I ran, waiting for no one, afraid of no man nor the future, impossibly strong with the wind in my hair and the snakes in the meadow.

Just one more gust of cool, cleansing air to exhume me, one more fresh and re-assuring breath, to fill my lungs and oxygenate my blood, how goodly that would be, how thirstily I crave it…

The wind is at my back; I feel it, on my back, and I move forward in time with it urging behind me. It flows over and around me and envelops my limbs. It has its way with my hair and it laps at my eyes. I taste it, on my tongue; I savor it. There is the sweet scent of spring on this breeze, like honeysuckle, the innateness of life. I let myself live with it; alive, with my hands folded behind my back, while the rushing pall of life undoes me.

For the first time in my adult life, I have gone for a run, I have been running. Like the little boy with bracers on his legs, I broke through the stiffness and pain and ran forwards, pounding my feet on the street. It hurt like hell; after only one block, I could hardly walk, and I limped and staggered home, dragged behind my dog like dead weight. But I went out the next day and I began, scared and curious, running, and this time I ran for two blocks, and my legs hurt even worse. But soon I was running three blocks, and it did not hurt as badly; in fact, I felt stronger. And soon I was running for miles, my dog by my side, like a goddamn normal human being.

But I am not afraid of limitation. I am even lucky, in my ways. I am fortunate to live on this earth and be part of it. I am fortunate to know what I know; I am powerful. I have no right to be powerful, but that does not give me license to waste it. It is time to be good, because it is in my power to be good. It is time I killed my demons off; I have suffered their wicked temperaments long enough. Gun to my head, it is time that I put down my gun. I am not Ajax, after all. I simply am not.

Limited, and less afraid. And that is almost good enough. I stumble forward through the ether, trying to keep my wits about me. I lose faith in reality, I rely on assumptions; I get lost in assumptions, the world gets swallowed up; time freezes, time splits, time carries onward without me. In a daze, my mind working furiously, I sat at my desk and I penciled in all my observations; I was left with nothing, but a blur, the graphite-grey blur of  reality, descriptive and connective. Poseidon, and I calm the waves. Aeolus, and I rile them up. There can not be angels without not-angels. There must be dichotomy, if there is to be anything at all. Duality, duplicitous and difficult to understand, is the only assertion.

I will be good, now. I will read Keynes and Aristophanes. I will try to be kind and accessible. It is not just sick and tiresome to be consumed by negativity; it is evil, and it has no place in God’s good earth. I will be an agent of goodness, and I will think simply, and postulate optimistic formulations. Life will get better, and I will leave a better world behind me. I will value simple things, inherit a petty approach to existence. I am better than this; I am stronger than the verge of death. Death can not astonish me. Nausea will not overwhelm me. Anxiety will crumble under the crushing weight of my own animal naturality, my will to survive and get better, be good. I will be good, now. Or I will die trying.

I cannot see; I am blind to the fact that I cannot see. I am blinded beyond all recognition. I have seen the things I can’t unsee and will not see anything new again. I have tried to change my ways, but I…

Creeping through the sweeping tides, scared to death, I spoke of dying; I said, “I am Death, come to love you all; I am not unkind, I am calm, and impartial. Speak nothing of me; I go unspoken for.” There is nothing to talk about. Discussion is gone; it has died beside me, while I knelt, and struggled to put down my burdens.

In a cavern, by the sea, the lonely mistress wept for me; she ran her fingers through her hair, her skin was damp, the mist was heavy around her waist, her eyes were dim and acquiescent; I watched her from my ship, while I sailed slowly by; and the cove, full of pearls, slowly flooded, and the sky became heavy, and the girl let out a silent high; time froze, impartial, and we ceased to exist; and time stayed frozen.

And while I wallowed, head in my hands on the verge of collapsing, starting to spin, growing dizzy, about to faint, everything hurting, everything hurt. Pain – great pain; but at least there is pain; I have realized my pain. And I know so well that pain is pure mythology, but I am feeling mythological. Cleanliness, so pure – but I am not clean. You cannot trust me. I am immoveable; I do not move, made of glass, slowly breaking, fault lines growing through my heart. Tap your hammer on my glass; sink me – I will drown.

I have seen the most people in the world, and I have loved them, I have longed for them, I have walked beside them and imagined our lives together, if our lives would come together; visions, warm, alluring. But when it rains, it rains alone. And I lament loneliness, remaining alone.

I have seen the deconstructions…

If this is me living, then I’m a survivor; I faced the gaze of nothing – I fled; and I, ashamed, built steadily this cell around me, and I swallowed the key.

Green light at the end of the pier, and the fluttering ends of a long cotton coat; apples hanging from the trees, heavy-laden golden boughs; what has happened to the apple pickers? Rags snagged upon the pointed limbs; worms, long and thick, in the streets. Cotton in the gutters – I have knelt on my knees in the cotton. I am losing my head. My directions were wrong. I am confused. My altar is empty. I am begging, on my knees.

And in my car, I use premium gas. The lyre in the woodland – Orpheus – Orestes, full of hope, lying down; I drive fast through the woods. Chariot of flames, the blue-eyed hand of god to guide me – intuit through the darkness, life; guardian sun of the gallant condition, mankind, flourishing, falling apart; indulge me this, my one compulsion; rip me open, see me writhe.

I have worshipped heroes…

Upon my sword, by God, I’ll do it – I am a Christian, I will swear to God; I have sworn to God before, and I shall do it again; and I have suffered condemnations, and I have uttered vapid prayers, and given false confession. I shall fall upon my sword; I swear to God, I’ll do it. I should have been a better man… I could have been blessed, or at least a mechanic, someone practical.

Orange groves of washed our dreams, winding lanes, diminishing gains, a distant strangeness, something lurking in the distance; monsters, strange and ghostly, irregular forces of unfathomable knowing, the presence of the past and future, the purse of Disparity; thank God for Disparity. Prometheus, the Constructor of Men, the logicist, the poet, the benefactor; producer of fire, moulder of clay; the faithful, and the irredeemably guilty; the Creator, the Destroyer, the Protector; the prince; the burning face of madness; dreams of bands of perfect light; I am the destroyer of worlds, my hands are crushed and tired, not masculine, scrubbed clean to the bone, broken bone and scar tissue; my intentions are meaningless. I drink water from a glass. I am conceited, and I lie. Lakeside, where the children played, and the men drank and laughed by the fire, blessed pieces of devotion rang, and a choir sang from a theater built into the hillside; early morning, I am not scared.

Bold and unrepentant, Apollo’s leg brushed against my own. I loved Apollo, but I wanted him dead; and I wanted to kill him. A brutal, irredeemable killer. Cancer, growth of claws, the crab; fountain in an isle, blood; transformations, metamorphoses, similes, escalation; the curse of the pride of the mortal; the fountain of youth, and the liquor of endless discontent; power, slipping; lingering; lightning, burst; the disasters spread, the plans go wrong, the reels are all still creaking; I was scared, so I fled. I went home, to the land of my childhood, and I threw my arms around my dog, I said, Dog, do not worry; I am here. I prayed. Causality lost… selfness, slipping… slippery capitulations; there are snakes, and they slither in the walls…

Xerxes; Godhead, despondent; on the coast of the desert, a warrior died for his word, and a murderer upheld his virtues. Disparity; I am the dead at Thermopolae. I have seen the sweeping tides of men; masculinity, I have bowed to it. I have hungered. My gaze was vacant, my stare turned down; sitting down, I would stare at the ground, and slowly deconstruct it; moaning, empty pleasure; the details unclear.

I have lived in the twentieth century… It was the greatest century that could have ever been conceived. Of beauty, truth, unimpartable; the saint, the angel, clips its wings and sings of folly; economic policy, difficult lives; community or not, the fitness weakens. Heavy-handed, and proud; very interesting, and I – well, I am a genius. Feed of thought; quite sad; and unintuitive; good philosophy, beautiful men, strange-accented women, flexible legs, hard analytics; I have seen this before, I have fallen down this flight of stairs, I have owned this sacrilegous piece; I look at everything from a religious point of view…

Everything will be different in the future; we’re mutating.

Oh, boy. It is one of those days again. Today will be long, and painful, and I will end it in a spree of drugs and antipathy. Learned helplessness; I am done for. I should give up now, while I still can; cut my losses, call it a day, crawl back into bed and wait one more eternity.

Stocks are down, tensions are high. I am running out of money. Every day it just gets worse. This is how depressions start. Problems are beginning to mount and death is beginning to rise like a subtle, breathless smoke around my ankles, threatening to topple my loved ones and my friends. My friends are negative influences and I resent them, and I am resenting myself for being resentful. I am a negative influence. I am a terrible friend and I hate all my friends. I am not well-equipped for the world. I can not keep eye contact for long enough to even finish a conversation, before slipping off, inward and negative..

I was driving through the countryside with the sun in my eyes in the morning, trying to take my mind off the gradual collapse of my world all around me, my helplessness, while admiring the gentle undulations of a warm, organic planet. I tried to count my blessings, and act gracious for my blessings. I noticed a swooping black raven in the sky ahead of me and I dared to admire it; it swept across the road, before my path, and I, moving with deadly speed, ran into it. It crashed into my grill. This is not a good omen, I thought. There were feathers everywhere, black and shimmering and flecked with the blood of the impact. I hoped it hadn’t broken my grill, because if it had, it would cost me an arm and a leg. I tried not to think about bad omens. I admired the shape of the feathers, and the way that they spin in the wind.

Determined to remain calm, I turned on the radio and listened to my favorite station. It has been a very good week for the Billboard Top 20 Hip-hop and R&B  charts. Usher has a song in which he sings falsetto and though his single is one month old it is still in the charts, and it is certainly my favorite song. LoveRance, Ciara, and Robin Thicke (featuring Lil Wayne) have done particularly well for the last few days. Many ancient legends have been making their comebacks on the heels of more recent phenomenoms; Missy Elliott, Eminem, Busta Rhymes. Their songs are angry and triumphant and their verses of power and status and vengeance inspire me. Everything is very highly produced and incredibly well engineered. By far the most successful and prevalent artist is Lil Wayne, and YMCMB entertainment is the undisputable master of the charts. Their mastery is warranted, and I am glad to have been a part of their rise and their subsequent dominance. Especially for Nicki Minaj, and even the Canadian, Drake.

0 and 1 are the structure/form/schema of the first-order universe (all that is the case).

0 and 1 are interpretative symbols of a computational process. The universe is computational.

0 and 1 are indivisible, relational, and infinitely extendable.

0 is is-not/other-than/absence/not-P. 1 is is/self/presence/P.

Existence is dichotomy/duality/distinction, and the universe is real only in terms of dichotomy/duality/distinction.

0 and 1 is the indivisible description of all that is the case, and could be. It is the relationship of totality.

2 is a metaphysical representation of the second-order reality of humanity.

2 is the conceptual construct of thought/logic/theory/meta/doubt.

2 is philosophy, art, humanity, beauty, ignorance, and confusion.

In a numerological schemata of the existence and organization of the universe, meta-reality is a transgression of the necessarily binary code of existence. This secondary existence (2) is a conceptual system of certainties and uncertainties. It is a result of the progressive qualities of binary coding.

The essence of the second-order precludes all successive orders. Once the meta position has been realized, it entails an infinite symbolic and sceptical organization of the universe downwards; third-order, fourth-order. Thus there is only 2 – 3, 4, 5, and ∞ are extensions of 2 and therefore divisible into 2 itself.

0, 1, and 2 are the symbols which describe everything, and in which everything is describable. Nothing else exists.

I laughed at someone for preferring pink flowers. I said that obviously I preferred white flowers but that when it actually came to flowers I preferred yellow flowers, and I listed all the flowers I was most partial of; sunflowers, daffodils, daisies, dandelions; very just and simple flowers.  Once I loved snapdragons but I have long since outgrown that. I have begun to grow out of fruits and into vegetables but I am having trouble figuring out which is the most nutritious vegetable. Kiwi is obviously one of the healthiest fruits but I still prefer pears and berries, which are both very healthy as well, although also very decadent. Intuition tells me that asparagus is probably very healthy, but I am suspicious of asparagus, and though I obviously prefer spinach to anything else I am not sure if spinach is a vegetable or a leafy green. Are leafy greens vegetables? No, I decide; leafy greens are green leaves and leaves can not be vegetables. Vegetables are more ambiguous than flowers are and I think that flowers are mostly up to personal interpretation. I am slightly suspicious of flowers, except for the yellow ones, and I am not sure what to think of them. I am even less certain of vegetables.

I’ll drive that goddamn Mercedes until the day it wraps me itself around a tree or a telephone pole. I’m a speed demon. I have a nightly vigil that I make, a pilgrimage, and it is cathartic and self-assuring, and it reminds me of James Agee, and then I want to cry; I do not cry; I roll the windows down, I lower my seat; Billboard Top 20, cold and self-assured.

I drive gently and civilized when in the presence of anyone else but in the dark and isolated wilderness of my lonely listless desperate path I settle back low in my cool, black rocket and descent like a wraith on the road paved before me at very high speed through the cotton fields and cotton fields, the forests and the pecan groves.

The world remains largely undiscovered. Night is not well understood; the emotions of night are not well understood. I move like a wraith through the countryside of my childhood, afraid of nothing, confident I’ll see no one. I was not a child here. I was a child in a different place… I can never go back to that place again.

I go back roads. There are not any cops. There is not any oncoming traffic. There are no streetlights – time is standing still, the trees on either side form tunnels, heavy-laden leafy limbs. There are mountains and in the distance and deserts and there, past the levee, is an old, tired river. The river of my youth was raving mad and frozen over, frothy currents full of ice, winding and immaculate.

I am carried away by my thoughts… Vengeance, unholy discord; our fathers’ fathers, sacred vigils, rainswept stormy nights. Words take on monstrous forms and assault me. Inadequacy digs its heel in my spine. Insignificance licks my face and neck. Uncertainty peels off my fingernails and Anxiety beats me in my eyes. My eyes go dark and lifeless. I submit; Submission consumes me.

“Get out of my head!” But there is no one in my head.

Sometimes I turn off my headlights and becoming blackness hurtling through perfect blackness for a moment, and it refreshes me. Sometimes I envision a pale figure standing in the middle of the road around the next bend in the middle of the woods, it will have limped from the forest with its hands to its face, hollow-eyed and horrifying. I would run the bastard over.

I even have a gun in my dashboard because I am feeling goddamn drastic and I am being proactive. I have been low and I have been lower still but now I am reaching new lows, overburdened and insolent. I am both prideful and terrified and my brain and my heart are in paralytic discord. I am self-paralyzing. I don’t know what will happen next. I do not really know what is around the next bend. I have seen some very strange sights at night, and I have hardly scratched the surface.

There are worlds within worlds and everything is crystal spheres. Something is in my head. I am being controlled by some terrible fate. I have been infested. I am a little blue-faced boy looking in from your window, born out of hell frozen over, and I am tracing the letters help me in the frost on the glass.

I used to wear corduroy and fall asleep on transcontinental trains in first-class cabins, plush and spacious. The conductors never bothered me, even though I never had a first-class ticket.

Today I bought myself a pair of leather shoes. They were designed by John Varvatos; I would have rather had shoes by Billy Reid, but this particular boutique was very low on stock.

My shoes are too tight and they dig into my ankles and threaten to rupture my very tender scars and grafts. It is a risk that I must take if I am to live a normal life and wear decent shoes. It is a pain I am very familiar with, one which never seems to pass, with or without leather shoes.

I spend the afternoon new shoe fooling, sliding around on my best hardwood floors and then tapdancing until my fragile bones are almost broken. I have work to do but I am unable to do it. It is not even work. I do not work for a living. I dick around and resent myself, and I resent my sense of misfortune.

And sometimes I ask: what am I supposed to be doing? No one answers; robot inherit the earth. Meteors rain from the sky; time passes silently, with or without us. The world can not be overcome; it is all-encompassing, and it will consume you, with or without your consent. I feel airy and it makes me sick. Men are supposed to be earthy. We are rocks, after all; just stones in a quarry, slabs of granite, chiseled marble columns. Or at least we were meant to be; I myself could hardly be called columnar.

I do not even know what to believe in, who there is to believe. I know better than to believe myself, but I have no other point of reference. I can do nothing but watch while the cycle of destruction continues. I can practically predict my fate, and the fate of those around me. It will take a miracle to save me now, something truly unforeseen, and positive, because everything else has already been priced-in. The end is not elusive; meekness will not save us. We are not even allowed repentance. We are barely allowed to exist.

Forgive me for this – I am about to be quite conversational.

I have asked you here for a reason – well, there are many reasons. Where could I begin? Everything is so important, and yet I must be very careful; I must parse my words, for one misstep and I will have overspoken. My speeches are boring and no one has time in this world to be bored by me, nor does anyone deserve it. And yet – you have come, after all, you are listening. I do not know where to start. I could always apologize – there is always something to apologize for. You will be pleased to learn that I have become quite apologetic lately. But with apology there must be repentance, and repentance is a heavy responsibility. There is so much work to be done; I have barely begun, and yet – the prospect of failure is so immense and suppressive, it looms impossibly large over everything I can dream and endeavor. All I can say is… We are not doing nearly enough. I am not doing enough.

Mankind has finally outgrown its own limitations. All the schools of thought are faulty. Epistemology; ontology; psychology; symbolic logic. The only thing that makes any sense is theology and theology is a dead and rotting horse. A culture higher than ever before is limited only be its sheer multitudiousness. We have created our masterpieces, and they are not any more re-assuring; perfect syntheses of sound and color, perfect symbiosis of our senses; we have created the electronic medium, introducing a new generation, a more perfect symbiosis, and we have composed a new language, the meta-tongue of programming, a binary honesty of infinite potentiality, a magic force that permeates the world as all forces permeate. Math is all we have left – and math is tautological. It permeates everything – and it doesn’t make sense.

If I sound conspiratorial, it is because I have witnessed something elusive and significant, and it has made me conspiratorial. I can not explain it to you now – it is beyond explanation. I can only call it intuition. I know only that mankind needs confidence, and I can at least offer you confidence. It is the confidence of a man with a gun in his own hand, pointed squarely in the back of his mouth in order to sever the most important part of the brain from the spinal cord, as the world wide web has taught him to do. It is indestructible confidence.

Everything is becoming very mythological… It is as though everything is, or is symbolic. Everything is, or is allegorical, and that is the extent of language and ontology. Mythology is neither true nor untrue. My own personal mythology is growing exponentially. It worries me. I feel the pressure of death on my shoulders and the growing desire for legacy in my chest. I fear I will not leave a legacy. The only thing more worrisome than my fear is the knowledge that even if I did leave a legacy, I would die unhappy, in a world of meaninglessness where absolutely nothing mattered, in a society bereft of hope.

If I overly prophecize, it is because I am in a great deal of pain. Like the great seer Tiresias I was blinded with pain for my impious transgressions and rewarded for my pain with the gift of prophecy. Everyone reasonable person in pain is a prophet, an oracle of things to come, because pain is the only philosophy, oblivion the prophecy. Like Tiresias, I am growing blind, and I am lamenting the loss of my sight. Grant me my lines in a poem; the world was not so favorable.

There is no use for philosophers and prophets in a truly scientific age. The only real work is done by the scientists and engineers. Philosophers are masturbatory and opulent. Metaphysicians and witch doctors and logicians delusional. I am overtaken by my own delusions. I live in limits of time unadorned and not astonishing. My time is quickly coming to a close. I cannot take the stress; I am not as strong as I may appear. Do I look strong to you? Someone told me I was pretty – strong men are not pretty, are they? It is true that I am pretty – frail, pale, and impenetrable.

Mind over matter; time and time again, the same inclinations, non-distinctive, de-veiled and uninspiring; basicness, discreet and deadly. Coarse. I am circular. My skin is soft. My wounds are thin and brittle. Caught in rapture, inorganic, everything turns gossamer. I draw my sword and break a sweat. I am the last one ready to fight, and the first one to fall. An honest pear tree broke my back; just think of what a war would do. I am weak and indulgent. I am bored and controversial. I speak in terms of contradictions. I am not a natural killer, though I profess myself a killer. I profess myself a prodigal son, but the reality is not very prodigal. If anyone is better served by remaining silent, it is I, yet I cannot stop muttering under my breath my insanities… We were born into a lonely world; we will leave the world a lonely place.

Listen to me: I am speaking to you directly. Do not dare attempt to deconstruct this. This is not a mere construction – there is no technique yet to deal with this. I am undiagnosable. The first order becomes the second, the second then becomes the third; and the third becomes infinite. We are not well-equipped for the infinite.

Hoary-eyed and velvet-throated, I waited like a clam around a shiny pearl in the bottom of the ocean, and I waited in darkness for someone to dive down and visit me. But I grew lonely there, because no one came to visit me. And that is where the fable ends.

This is just another story about me.

It was the summer of my first discontent and I was still very childlike. I was trying to civilize myself. I had invited myself to societal gatherings and forced myself to smile more. I was trying to learn how to speak again. I thought, then, that I could rid myself of discontent, that there was some sort of solution. I was very naive, then.

I was in my house, where I was living alone on an over-extended budget, keeping my wallet stuffed full and cabinets overflowing, and I was preparing to go out for the evening. I had put on a tie because I was trying to be respectable. I tightened my tie and the pressure on my neck reminded me that I was thirsty. I had wine and gin and tonic. I poured myself a gin and tonic. I could hardly stomach anything other than a clean white wine or a modest gin and tonic, and I did not know why.

I thought that I if I drank, it would slate my thirst. I was very naive, then. I drank plenty of water and spent my time at the soda fountain, savoring the unique tastes of syrup, freshly carbonated. I take my carbonated water sugar-sweet. I take my tea and coffee dry. Nothing ever slakes me. Once I have even drunk a tall glass of cold, frothy milk, cow’s milk, which was strange. I felt sick afterward. I washed down my sickness with water. The water felt dry.

Even the word “drink” is suspicious. Drank; it clangs, too Germanic. I feel like a barbarian when I use it. A goddamn Ostrogoth.

There was a time in my life when I drank anything. I was lucky if I had cheap vodka; I stumbled around fisting bottles of undrinkable wine, feeling romantic. I was well on my way to a future of hardline alcoholism, to cigarettes and whiskey and blurry aggression, but I never made it. Instead I became a forced ascetic and could hardly stomach gin and tonic – easy even on the gin.

Oh, Christ – this isn’t even a story. I don’t have any stories to tell. To hell with it all.

I was feeling gross and excessive so I decided to sell my Mercedes and drive the car that I drove when I was younger and penniless, which at the time was a very good car but is now almost unbearable, hard to control, slow and decrepit. It was refreshing to drive something ugly. I was falling out of love with beauty, after all. I was feeling disgustingly decadent so I emptied my cabinets of all my good food, pastries and cheeses and liquor and beverages, I threw it all out. Absolutely fucking disgusting. I gave my iPad to my parents and a laptop to my friend. I even cut the portions that I fed my dog in half, because he had taken after me and eaten too much, and grown fat and soft around the edges.

Not that I was growing fat; but I was certainly decaying. It is impossible to halt decay; every moment lost is gone for good, forever. The world – known as time – erodes us all, the elements of time descend in forceful swarm around us. It is like watching a statue (picture it, with wings) in a desert sandstorm, fading, disappeared. There is sand in my throat and it gags me and I struggle to breathe, I try to survive. But time is not on my side. No one is on my side. I do not even know what my side is, but I know am alone in it, and incomprehensible. I am goddamn fucking horrified. Everyone slips away from me; I kill them. I feel like Patrick Bateman, uncontrollable and not of this earth, and I feel a bit like Ludwig Wittgenstein, slapping school children because they are ignorant as hell and obnoxious. Good god, I’m obnoxious. Thank God I am here to contain me.

Even now I’m thinking about buying a Dior suit, as if I can afford a new suit, as if I have any goddamn need for a suit. Like a fucking lunatic, as I drop off a bag of old suits at the door of the Salvation Army, thinking about suits. What wicked ascetics are these? I am an abomination. Christ was 33. St. Augustine was a sinner, too. There is still hope for the old and the broken. All men can grow wise and old and seek their own absolution. I live as if in a dream and I do not understand what my dreams are. I think I have goals – I think I am wildly ambitious, a maximizer, desperate and sad. I think I am able to reason, and my reason shows me more than I want to know, so I have hurried beyond reason.

I live as if in a dream and I like to drive cars dreamily. My Mercedes is a dream. It is powerful and smooth and assertive. It contours to my form like a well fitted suit from Dior. I saw a man in a Dior suit once and he looked incredibly handsome. I wanted to look handsome, too. But Dior sounds like its for fags and I’d rather get something more masculine. As for the American designer… But he has only one suit and it’s too exotic. I am not an exotic man. I am accessible. I would like to be more accessible. But I don’t even know anything about suits. It is frustrating as hell to think about nice suits when you don’t even know a thing about suits. I don’t know a single goddamn useful thing. I am a fraction of the man that Wittgenstein was, and even Patrick Bateman. That was a gross comparison of me to make. I am gross.

God clamped down on me and said, “No, damn you; no,” abusively.

I want a goddamn Rolls-Royce but can not yet afford a chauffeur. Instead I drive my Mercedes as fast as I can through the night, listening to the latest highly-produced R&B song. Late-night Billboard 100 2010-2012 FM shit. I am shooting to the fucking stars, meteoric, clutching my chest as I climax.

I am in the second spring of my isolation and doing surprisingly well for it. The world has already begun to forget me. I barely keep myself alive, sustained on artificial chemical mixtures and dietary fibers and other carbohydrates. Artificial sustenance. I drink water until my head hurts and then I piss it all out, my head still hurting. “I must be dehydrated,” I think, drinking some water.

Women can really be bitches. I think I am better off without them. I cry alone at night without them, and even then I’m better off. A hound sits at the foot of my bed like a portrait and stares out the window, watching the street. He is silhouetted in the moonlight. He is all that I have.

Falling through a sharp and convulsive darkness, a salty hand covering my mouth… I bite the skin, the thin tissue bleeds.

I cut a corner too close and the corner of a piece of furniture cuts into my ankle. It scrapes deep into my skin graft and pushes the graft bloodily free from my ankle. I cry out in shock and disgust. Once I leapt into an explosion and it burned a huge patch of skin from my leg; the skin slipped around in place, brittle and rubbery, atop a thin oily pus of organic matter, the same oily pus that slips under my skin grafts. I want to take an axe to my legs and cleave the sickly tissue off. I want to start over again – “Fuck,” I say through gritted teeth, “I’ve fucked up.”

I am done keeping journals. They are more trouble then they are worth. They are embarrassing, and full of expletives. Expletives are not poetic; art is not meant to be obscene. No one in the world would be better off for having read my journals; no one, not even someone who loved me, would know me any better for them. I speak only of “I,” and I am ashamed by it. I am behaving quite shamefully; it is all I have ever known how to do.

I rode on buses, feeling free… I pissed in bushes, slept in shadows, crunched broken glass beneath my heels…

Believe me – Please – I am in earnest now – I am always in earnest now – I love you, I am afraid for you, I am lonely, I am a warrior, I am brave, I am alone; I was a crusader, I was a failure, I was a drunk, I was a fag; the planets crashed into the sun, the suns were sucked into the blackness; even gravity can not be proven.

Sit with me outside the cafe by the river Ljublijanica and let me order you a drink. The sun is shining and the pigeons are playing with the tourists. I have just come from a book shop, where I found this copy of Henry Miller. What do you say – you find Miller to be rather juvenile? A bitch once said to me, “Not everyone sees everything in Miller that you do.” Miller is juvenile – fuck Henry Miller. Here, have a drink, on me. Sit down on this metal chair on this smooth, cobbled sidewalk and talk with me. Admire my new linen pants, and I will even make you laugh. I know how to make the bitches laugh.

I am crushed. I smoked a joint on a cliff feeling useless, admiring myself for no reason. The dogs in the train were hunting me. I ran down the tracks toward the train yard, where I lay in a blanket into morning, frigid, visible breath, separated in an instant from the entirety of my past and my future. Time has slowed down; ever since nightfall, that first liquid nightfall in the early summer of my youth, the blue-hot wires, the spacious collapse, desirous, bleak; ships driving up the Piscataqua at night, flashing their colorful lights; the water is numbingly cold.

To the gallows with me. I am a criminal. Have I detailed my crimes? My confessions are coming. I have already begun the long process of confession. I am a filthy, crooked, selfish villain. Do not leave your loved ones alone with me. Do not think you can trust me, not even for a minute.

I have been to the isle of dead children, and what I have seen there was frightening…

Do not worry about me. I am stronger than I look. I am so strong that I can’t even help it. I am strong enough to be a good man, which means I am weak because I am not a good man. I am weaker than I’ve ever been. I cannot stand my weakness. I wish I weren’t weak. I wish I were somebody better. I could have been such a – I could have been a… I should have been a better man. I should have been colossal.

I will die as I came, silent, in an earthquake, fully intact. To hell with me – straight to hell. To hell with us all. We sure as hell don’t deserve this. We missed the climax – it passed us in a blink of an eye. We have gotten out of hand – we are really unbelievable. The world is unbelievable. It will only get worse. Hurtling headlong towards the final enlightenment… They were right to predict their apocalypse.

I am gone, now. I have run away from the world. No one will find me anymore. I have left no trace of my self, of my other life, and I never even said goodbye. I am altogether something different now. No one will ever see me, not again. I will never let that happen. The story of my life was a short one, full of television and relapse, confused on the treadmill of pleasure. Now it is all just mythology.

Though once upon a time, when the earth was still young, there was hope for me, I have squandered my hope for a world full of loss and deception. I have done terrible things. I have lost control – and it cost me. My feelings are hurt. My back is broken in half. I will never be a bricklayer. I will never make an honest living.

I used to flay my naked self across the city. I do not get naked, anymore, and neither do I flay. I am utterly repulsed by my nudity. Nudity is animal, animals flay, and I am not animal.

Drawings of a tired artist…

Crystal-suspension, arcs of light, tired absolution, familiar love, the absence of familiarity; ego drift, torrid motion, the eternal wisdom of autumn and the romance of youth, dewy-eyed and jewel-hearted; pearls; strands of pearls; children growing restless, rowing to their secret islands…

I used to wake up in the morning and go out in the afternoon, down to the river, and I would walk on the frozen ice through the wilderness, on the iced-over path through the forest of snow, getting tired. I used to get tired because I would have wandered so far, or climbed so high or ran so fast, that I could relax in the evenings, sleep well without drugs. I used to have a life, and, undeserving of my life, I lived it. Life was better, then.

But now I am old, and decrepit, and I have run out of time. If I could only make them understand, that they do not understand art, that they do not understand logic, that they do not understand God, if only I could make it all clear to them, then… then… Then their worlds would be over, like mine is.

I am feeling depressed again. I know the end is near and I am worrisomely apathetic. I had plans on revitalizing my life (I am depressed by the mere notion that I need to revitalize my life) but fell asleep in my chair and woke up, disoriented, at nightfall. I don’t usually fall asleep in a chair like that, especially in the middle of the day. I am in a heavy daze from it, unsure of where to go from here. I think I am about to be sad.

It is night and I have missed the day again. I stand at the window trying to give myself place and existence. Across the street the house is dark; they must be asleep already. Their day is already ended. Next to that house is a house on a slight hill, and it reminds me of a better place, or the idea of a better place, of a home where good people are living well, where things are happening and people are also being sad as well, and some of their lights are still on, there is still plenty of activity, it is clear that night is still young for these people, waiting for a man to come home so they could sit down to dinner, a late and appreciated dinner of meat and starches. I am struck by my speculation and hurt. I can feel the very real energy of life, and it beckons to me. I imagine why their lights are still on and it breaks my heart. The porch light is on, too, and all of the cars slightly illuminated. Silhouettes can be seen moving back and forth through the house. I imagine the father coming home in a minute, on his motorcycle pulling up close to the house from the somewhere else with other people, and I feel acutely, emptily sad, in touch with the fabric of the universe, and apart from it.

I throw off my clothes and lay down in my bed with the lights off, on the verge of tears. I want to cry but I have nothing to cry over. I look around me desperately for something to cling to, but there is nothing. I need to spoken to. I need to be comforted. My dog walks in and I call to him, almost crying, and he sits down beside me. I can not tell if he is sad like I am, if I have let him down as well. I can not tell if he is very smart or rather stupid. I strain my neck to kiss him.

After a few minutes of holding my dog close I begin to feel more normal, slightly more able to cope with the world. He is signalling that he needs to go outside so I get out of bed and walk him, naked, out the back door. I closed the door to keep out the moths and mosquito hawks and stand around in my kitchen waiting for him to finish, eating pieces of bullshit and washing them down with some sugary bullshit.

I am ready to go to bed. I can’t brush my teeth tonight, nor anything like it, I just don’t have the heart for it. I am surprised I had the heart to eat that bullshit. What is wrong with me? I would drink, if I could even drink. I am not even drunk – I am much worse than drunk. I am existential. Total crisis mode. I open the door and call out to the dog. He is standing a few yards away from me, looking up at the sky. “Come on,” I say, but he doesn’t come. I step outside and close the door around me.

I am overcome by the physical presence of night. It is nicer than I could have imagined, or remembered, although I remember it all now, and it is too overwhelming. It is a beautiful night. I mean, it is really a beautiful night. It is infinite. I could be anywhere in it. I would be anywhere, right now, if I were a younger man. If I had been the man I could have been… I am a maximizer, depressed and insatiable. I am basic post-modern economic-psychological theory.

The air is the perfect weight and consistency and temperature. It is empowering to move through, like a mist of cleansing totality. It is still early in the night; most of the world is still awake. People are walking around, getting off work, laying around, with their families, their televisions, getting drunk, having sex, being abusive and incapable. I shudder with awe. I am in the exact same weight, consistency, and temperature of the thousand countless nights of my childhood, comfortable, unbelievably enjoyable resorts in delirium, the myth and the memory of childhood. When I was young, with these nights, I would rape them, and I would turn over the crust of the earth without fear with my equal, a warrior. I imagine my warrior friend even now, in this very same night, sharing the same world-space, our time, our moment to burst, and disappear.

I don’t know what has become of me… I do not know who I should have been. I am out of touch with the cosmos. I used to be a part of the universe, and I could sense the epic scope of space, I could feel the planets, self-assured. Now I am massless. I am a construct, deconstructible. I am a tautological proposition

My friend is gone, now. He did not say goodbye to me – I do not know where he has gone. He is in the night with me, feeling heartbroken, like me. He could not take it. I can hardly take it, either. I do not blame him for not taking it. I wonder what will happen to him. I wonder where he is in this night, what strange and unusual world he is prowling. I hope he is not dead.

In the prime of my life I ran with a delinquent group of friends. One of them is gone now, and he did not say goodbye to me. Another one snapped his neck one night in a friendly fight and is paralyzed from the neck down. Another is doing allright, although he is just out of jail and he has crippling debt. So is another, crippled by blood debts and multiple felonies, unable to cope with the actual world. And then, of course, there is me, the prodigal son who led the crusade into crippledom, into the heartbreaking tragedy of the actual world, the world of mortality, determined and sad. I was the first poet to die, tested by fire, and be re-born on the wings of the ancients. I was a boy-poet, too, and a bad one, and I died for my poetry, but unlike Rimbaud I have not since abandoned poetry, because I am weak and resentful and persistent in my hopeless delusions. I am too selfish and decadent to abandon it, and to be a man, and be silent.

I have always thought that I was a perfect and innocent soul and I assumed that if I had an aura at all, it would be something golden, a halo. Unfortunately that is not true. I began to suspect it was not true once I began to be degrade and was forced into meta-cognition. But I was confirmed in my beliefs when the mystical old Southern widow told me that I had an aura, and that it was dark. My aura was actually dark.

The process of aging is called senescence… homeostatic imbalances, progressive deteriorations…

“The world is… data… processing, data…” cried the man, with his hands held like claws to his head in an existential anguish, over and over again. “I will not sleep again peacefully, I will not be comfortable, I am too busy processing, I will process the world,” narcotic, dyslexic, amnesiac. He was a man given in to obsession. He had found out the secret of the world and been driven insane by it. The world had changed dramatically; who he was, the time that he had, the way that he spent his time. His youth was gone; he had spent it freely. He was cold and sick and in an overbuilt cathedral, in the middle of winter, starving for meaning. He has read the decadent literature of the Americans and the destitute literature of the Russians and he does not know what he is doing with his life. He becomes robotic because it seems natural. It seems highly evolved. He involves himself in the metaphysical essence of evolutionary perfect. Light fills the earth and is blinding. The people are drowned in the flash flooding passage of light. Logic destroyed them, and logic will salvage their lives. Salvation is clear.  ”The frustrations of living in this world… I am stuck in my head… and my life is determined; I am process, I am causal, reactive; zero sums, zeroes and ones; checks and balances, empty scales… This is the way I must live now, there is no going back from this life.”

It is true that I have slept with the devil.

He has sat on my chest in the deep of the night, staring directly into me, through my eyes and out of them, refusing to let me break eye contact. I could see nothing; I was absolutely paralyzed, and the crystals of my mind were hardening, polluted by watery, noxious blackness. When I speak of blackness I do not refer to the color black. I refer to unknowable colors, rightly unknown. I refer to an inexperienceable sensation.

Blackness held me erect and devoured me. I was mortified. It felt like sitting in death. I have sat in the welcoming arms of death and been cradled. Totally immobile, importent, erect. I felt helpless.

It was possession, unwelcome and severe, and it haunted me. I was being possessed. The temporal world was disabled. I was frozen in time. I did not know what was happening.

I could do nothing but lay there, praying for my life. I was at the sick, helpless mercy of this new and evil demon. Like God, it was a Substance, formless and unimaginable, entangled in the strings of existence. It frightened me. I thought: This is fear. This is me being afraid. God please help me. God please deliver me from fear.

And yes, I was delivered from fear; evil disappeared. It was as though a battle took place, an exchange of energy, and then I was enlightened, light flashed back into my nerves, and I took my first breath; and I breathed in, deeply, still horribly afraid, and I exhaled, as quietly as I could, and I turned my head. I could see out my window, I looked out of my window, into the certain, lucid black of the forest, the trees and the moons and the old glowing lake, and I grew less afraid.

But I knew that I was in the registry of the devil now. Whatever I had done, it had summoned the devil, and I had no doubt that I deserved it, but I could not understand why. It did not really matter. Good and evil exist; nothing really matters. I had earned the mark of the devil. I was marked.

I knew, too, that there were demons in those woods, after all, and that people are right to be afraid of them. I knew that everything up to that moment – that integral change in existence, that encounter with absolute fear, that sordid confirmation, in the boundaries of reality, the presence and omnipresence of goodness and evil, of actual evil, the stuff of nightmares, actual nightmares – was the life of a previous era in time, and life forever for now on would be incredibly different.

I knew that I would have to be strong. I would have to be decisive. I would have to atone for my sins and be virtuous. I would have to be selfless, productive, and even promiscuous. I would have to train, to take nothing lightly, because I knew that I actually had a reason to, a reason more motivational even than God; the motivation of evil. I would have to struggle, if I wanted to survive. I would have to be ready, to be pure of heart and strong, if, when my time came again to meet blackness, to brush up against the deep belly of death, my midnight visit the devil, I hope to be able to stare straight through the eyes of the devil and out of them, and drive him from my presence. Otherwise, it might be the end of me – I don’t think I could take it twice.