Our experiences are always catalogued as story, tale, fable and song. We are storytellers, before we’re anything else, before lovers and fathers and cellmates and heathens, we are storytellers first and foremost.
Our mind lags as it grapples with the ‘now’, it trails just barely behind the moment itself so that we are forever scratching the pens across the pages of our mind, lazily taking note of the history unfolding on a second by second basis. We anticipate a future, but never a present oncoming.
Consider, as I type, I hear these words in my mind, and my fingers trail still, always behind, always the scribe and never the sculptor. I take note of the songs in my mind and I lay this sheet music bare and before you here. But the now, the present, the actual moments and notes in this song, those psychotic, clanging keys, banged out at random, impossible for me to apprehend and then overtake in process, impossible to predict and out-tactic, impossible to walk with and alongside, for it’s stroll is my fervor and race.
With all the struggle I can inflict upon such a chase, I can reach only that precious point behind our present, where the trails of it’s long hair just brush my cheek and the scent of today and what ‘is’, eludes me so gracefully and without exception.
Eluded without exception. Hmmph. Do I fail as a hunter, or do my moments fail as prey?
But then, that is my function, to record and recall, to emboss into memory what impressions I’ve been left with, to survey and pore over the marks left upon me after the fact(s).
I hold her in my arms and I forget that I’m there, so busy a bee I am, buzzing about and collecting into my honeycomb the very stuff of my dreams, stockpiling my senses in slavish anticipation of my wants and needs to come.
I’m alone tonight, but I’m never really alone. So sweet does my story of her taste to my memory, the gentle calligraphic arcs of each of her subtle curves and subtle words and subtle nerves; her subtle verve and subtle… her.
I am the story of a writer who wrote of a story of a writer who wrote of a story of a writer who will never know what the present feels like: whether it would be liberating, like a car with no roads, unchaining and everchanging, or whether it would be a horror unlike anything else, a limbo and wry emptiness of soul, an unconnectedness of strained proportions, a vertigo into self… and as I dream of it, fantasize what a moment would feel like, I’m again just the puppet and idle hands of a mind un-idle. I am the story and the student to the author, a mind and soul that teaches and preaches and hopes, that perches just behind and above and recites to me my thoughts and loves… and with each clack of the key, I write of his wanderings through the mindscape. I’m forever the middle-man, the go between, the hoarse, grimy voice of the cover band that, despite an inspired performance, ruins a great song with uninspiring skills.
I’m eyes that see and believe and warm winds that lift and soften and wax wings that just never get close enough to melt.
I’m the story of all, and all that I am isn’t close enough even to be touched by what I see, at least not yet. I see it, but I can only give you my insular, impish perspective on the whole accord, my story of it, my characterization of it’s people and my dramas set in it’s settings, my fantasies of it’s laying of hands and touching me so that I might learn of it’s touch and collect it’s details for honest recall.
I’ve been told that I love this story, so I’ll keep up my read and recital; my gentle, forgiving trudge through the litter and opened boxes and packing peanuts and blister packs of ideas, my well chaptered and appointed books, bound with leather and pomp, set in such bookshelves of grandeur and importance.
But when I opened the drawer in the hotel, I found a bible there. Not my petaled words and thorny grins, but something else, a story and book that can sit on any shelf, rest in any pocket, be read by any voice. Unassuming, but assumed to be present. That’s a moment there, a real present and ‘now.’ That’s one of dozens I’ve seen, but I’ll never know their character well enough to write of them and add them to the story. I can only describe their appearance.
15. Enlightenment
The enlightened possess understanding
So profound they can not be understood.
Because they cannot be understood
I can only describe their appearance:
Cautious as one crossing thin ice,
Undecided as one surrounded by danger,
Modest as one who is a guest,
Unbounded as melting ice,
Genuine as unshaped wood,
Broad as a valley,
Seamless as muddy water.
Who stills the water that the mud may settle,
Who seeks to stop that he may travel on,
Who desires less than what may transpire,
Decays, but will not renew.
15. Enlightenment
The enlightened possess understanding
So profound they can not be understood.
Because they cannot be understood
I can only describe their appearance:
Cautious as one crossing thin ice,
Undecided as one surrounded by danger,
Modest as one who is a guest,
Unbounded as melting ice,
Genuine as unshaped wood,
Broad as a valley,
Seamless as muddy water.
Who stills the water that the mud may settle,
Who seeks to stop that he may travel on,
Who desires less than what may transpire,
Decays, but will not renew.
I love this story – our story, and all it’s subtle whispers into my ear and heart. How nice to be a character of this world. How nice to hear the narration.
~ Driz
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