The Journey of the Eye

There is the overself, always there, largely frustrated, fighting against the conspiracy of time and station.  Sensitive, eyes open, the overself sees (and feels) the disequilibrium of the planet acutely.  There are the concerns of poverty and justice, overwhelming; the piercing poignancy of music and art; and the crushing familiarity with the weight of this tragedy that we see in our own lives, know in our own bodies.  Life is an awkward burden that shifts over the course of the journey.  One must stop--from time to time--to adjust, repack, retie.  And one continues--over the mountains that bleed the sunset, fording streams both languid and lascivious, crossing the androgyny of the desert, untangling the knots of the jungle, carrying on, carrying life on our backs as we track this mystery to the water's edge, to the ocean, to the chant of the waves.  An old song... 

Don't disembowel your emotions by trying to explain them.  By placing words to this music (in an attempt to articulate these landscapes of feelings), you cut out the tongue of the world.  Complexity, nuance, contradiction and context all limit the layers of experience.  In deciphering meaning, you neuter the poem.  Be careful.  Go slowly.  Leave the book open...

...to a blank page.  There is much magic in the world.  You may (think you) need words to explain this emotional state, the power and poignancy of an event or idea, but (at the same time) you KNOW you don't need them to understand it.  The feeling is there; and where this feeling remains undiluted and unpolluted by the cannibalism of words, where it is independent of one's "explanation",  the feeling is like the evolving scents that enter the head of the sleeper, quietly impacting the landscape of his dreams.  The overself aside, these are the strange and artless creatures that we are:  reality is made to order.  It is tailored to the size and shape of our senses, a specificity determined by phylum and species, boiled down in God's laboratory to one's personalized dna...

Maybe that blue is a little bit brighter for some, for others yellow might be a the broken yolk of jaundice or the fond bleaching of those photographs from childhood of summer, sweet summer.  Or the ears might tune to the rumble of thunder and water and train instead of the Bedouin calls of migrating birds.  And the nerves in the skin may find sin on the lips, the small of the back, or the back of the knees.  We are robots wired with minuet and mazurka, march and mambo, replicants who in the end are variations on a theme. 

Gay Bar

Names, shapes, and inhabitants, all are subject to change; but there is permanence in the shifting edifice, timelessness, tradition. A gay bar is a gay bar is a gay bar. These brothels of uncertainty, the faces clustered in trinities around the dance floor, a catty composition by Da Vinci, the Lust Supper. No room contains more desperation and desire, more drunkenness and doubt than a gay bar. Arrogance and confidence--well worn by cubit of muscle stacked on cubit of muscle--may melt like fat in the arms of the right rejection, then be restored by flirtatious, smiling eyes. The visual is everything. You can't hear your own jaw popping, dropping to your knees, beyond the dance floor where the beat hasn't changed since 1979.

Waiting

Fill this anticipation--be it with dread, excitement, or curiosity--and its essential feeling will remain the same. It is a disconcerting emotion. It is both subtle and complex. There is that itch of impatience at the heart of it, and the nausea of uncertainty churning in the gut. There is the frustration, a kind of sweat that covers the whole experience, that reminds you of the unsympathetic rigidity of your limitations in time and space. Waiting, percolating in brooding agitation: This is the sickness without a cure. Waiting presumes a time and a place affixed in an unreachable future: "There is the oasis. There is the oasis. There is the mirage." This untenable quality of the ultimate destination is unnerving. Sitting with this impossibility becomes the lesson, because it would be unbearable if it remained only the burden, only the fact.

Before

They talk about muscle memory, and I don't know how literally to take the phrase. Certainly the sinew that gives me my autonomy--taut like the singing strings of a mandolin or a guitar--is composed of ten thousand tensions, old stories, memories that fade. The chords are frazzled and a little torn. The music that was movement is impossible. So I just sit here and think about "before." Muscle memory. I try to conjure up the emotion and sensation of other times, of moments of action, of physical prowess. Maybe I am jumping off a high rock into the glacial blue water of a Montana lake. Maybe I am moving through the acrobatics of a passionate romp. Maybe I am dancing. The memories of the eye--the colors, the faces--are easily recalled, but the physical is more illusive. Living as I live now, feeling as I feel today, the clarity is not retained. I see everything through the lens of this loss, through this fear. "Before" is obscured behind my anger and sadness. But if I can't conceive of that place, how will I return there?

There is an elegance in the conceptualization of emotion as a truer language, a lost language that rediscovered in the therapist's office provides a new understanding of self and world. But just as true is the fact that our common language, limited and awkward, nevertheless reveals its own exceptional insights. There is no better way to bespeckle a person's neurosis than to listen, watch for, the cracks that appear in the unconscious babble. How quickly one sees the shadow cast in the unintentional vocabulary that inadvertently voices an individual's obsessions.