Fool Proof

I am my father.  Where I stand, how, the way my bones stack one upon the next, the roll of my shoulders, the cocked head that befits my incredulity(that also befit his incredulity, behind the blind): this house of cards, this city made of teetering blocks in the crumbling rust of it all captivates me.  Decay has its magnetism, its morbid fascination.  What is beyond the flower?  The puddle of petals on the muddy road.  What is beyond the body?  A rigidity that leaves no hope for gesture, for movement, for expression...

I am my father.  My dreams extol the virtues of his now cold heart.  I am less gracious, less designed.    He embodies me.  The skin given me stretches and reshape itself.  It is making room for his memory and all that returns with that.  My best friend wants to believe in voices, her own rising like fire to reach heaven and her mother's making its way to her through whispers on the waves, the wind, the smooth rhythm of the river of cars that flows down the concrete canyon.

I am my father.  I am a quiet skeptic who appreciates the metaphors and madness that people ascribe to the universe to make themselves important, somehow, in the infinity of time and the cold eternity of space.  But I may be more impatient than he is.  (I mean than he was; I cannot imagine how one endures the history that becomes our suffering, that culminates in sinking after treading water for so long...)  I might ask for his attention.  I might pretend my prayerful whisper penetrates the scrim.  But such an alliance with magic makes me foolish in my own eyes.  

I return to the current treachery of an indifferent universe, not with resignation, not with fear.  I am more than idea, more than meme.  I hear the choirs of Sunday underestimate their power.  They remind me of the dissonance that I carry, the living contradiction of being.  I think things fall apart more easily than they do.  I am prepared for tendons to snap and bones to become brittle; the tension of my sinewed muscle anticipates the clatter if the rattling skeleton should suddenly succumb.  In the end there is just  "dumb luck" as my father would have termed it.

The Price of the Pearl

Being is a more congruent conceptualization of this consciousness that either mind or soul.  A fundamental dichotomy--the supposed tension between the physical and the spiritual--is disrupted by a new idea of the self, a self that integrates the instinctual, pleasure-oriented body with the creative and language-driven mind.  

This synthesized individual is the new man, and the new man bears the world on his shoulders effortlessly.  Taking under consideration the simultaneous experiences of the body and the mind and demonstrating they are not different experiences but rather the same experience conceived from different angles, being is immune to the conception of the body as a kind of prison (or temple) at odds with the amorphous "true self" that resides in the spirit or soul.  Biology,  chemistry, even physics conspire with the magic of science to topple old systems of superstition and the arbitrary division of the self from the self.  The embattled conception of who and what we are requires the sutures of a new language to reconstruct a self content with its complexity and absorbing its own contradictions.  

Like psycho-dynamic theory, dialectical materialism, and religious teaching concerning the afterlife, it is easy to see (and hunger for) a facile estimation of cause and effect.  This relationship, within the uncertainty of time, affords a certain comfort and predictability that will (at least for a while) ward off the sort of questions that lead to insomnia and indigestion.  But with the erasure of this model of "if a then b" the answers sought change; the questions themselves are immediately and essentially reframed.  For example, instead of asking where God begins and ends, where he intersects with the soul, we ask for what purpose did we creatures create the idea of creator and the idea of spirit?

So if in the updated map, soul (and mind and body) are eclipsed by the concept of being, then what residual value resides in the word "soul"?  We take as fact that soul is a simplified understanding of something genuine but we argue against each infant being imbued with said ghost at the moment of birth.  Rather, much in the same way that the clam containing a pebble or grain of sand, an irritant of some kind, will over time develop a precious pearl, the human--perplexed by the unanswerable awe for the world and for his or her consciousness--transforms fear and doubt into meaning by manufacturing its own pearl, the soul.  Here is a wholly beautiful object that serves no purpose.

Returning to Earth

There are Earthlings

who believe

outer space to be crowded 

with souls

on ice.

Waiting.

Waiting...

There is a tug,

another.  Across millennia,

I feel the pull.

I was called.

I was named.

Gravity is action.

After the vacuum

of space, what is time?

Celestial body

made of light

(and the absence of light),

you are suspended

above

(and below)

the world.

This

rarest pendant is made

of polished stone--

only a moment,

flesh and bone.

The azure oil

slips 

from pink granite

ledges.  The black

basalt cliffs are there

to lift the island

above

its demise.

I am a visitor.

The open sky

inside me 

contains

 the width of some wisdom

that evades me

as 

I 

fall.

a latter-day Dexter Riley

By October my body had left me.  Bereft from a kind of sickness of inevitability, I had been at odds with my flesh for months now.  My consciousness, my being, my soul felt a faithlessness to my physical form that was self-protective and a little numb.  And the material structure of me--the corpos, the form--felt a crushing alienation of self that made flight desirable.  Flight and night and dreams.  I became in the wee hours of  a moonless room a kind of ghost in reverse, my physical form rising, slipping into black leather clogs, shuffling across the floor, scuffing stairs, then out the door into the garden, the alley, the street, the city beyond...

Gone.

Divided.

In my bed, my soul transformed.  A metallic baptism, a Kafkaesque caftan, a bionic experiment (gone awry) in a post-science age:  the iron-plating of the emptiness I had become had started.  By morning I would be the hardened crab nebulae encased in questions and chromium.  This is no tragedy.  I became a latter day Dexter Riley, knee deep in speculation in an electric storm.  "Why the boots and whence the shame?"  For its place, and for its purpose, these things--this robotic ocean of feelings, this compendium of sex and poetry, the empathic answer, the subtle art of silence--are the shaman's logic, the priest's discipline.  The dynamic of that relationship--confessor and supplicant (for example)--is the magic of eye contact between one who is living, freely and graciously, and the one who is dying (by whatever means).

And so it was, in those days, every one who approached me was satisfied and ratified by the "honest" ease of the reflection that met them.  They saw and eagerly stared into their own slightly distorted features.  The image was smiling off my polished surface in perfect deflection, bouncing back into the sky.  My body had left me--I assume into heaven--rising to the responsibility of my gifts and lifting voices, noisily bragging to angels and such about this long program of humiliation and shame.  Here on Earth, I can only whisper, still hesitant, hoping for a new skin,  a new armor.  The bionic promise is still reserved for astronauts.  There is no certainty and there is no confidence where there is no hope.