I give up. It’s true. I have been running around trying to figure out life for some 46 years now and I’ve come to the conclusion of what my problem is: I’m invisible. You are too. Imagine it. Really think about it. You have the ability to look at people and have a general idea about their states of well-being. You can almost figure them out at first sight. Perhaps their eyes are sad or they’re old or they’re young and sprightly. Whatever it is you can get a general sense of who they are just by looking at them. You can’t know everything of course, but you needn’t really give them much more thought than a glance provides to prescribe a host of possible cures. Fat? Exercise. Poor? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But you yourself? You look out and what do you see? Everyone but yourself. In a roomful of people, you are the invisible person in the room. You. And there is nothing that you can do about it. Yet they are invisible to themselves too. We walk around invisible yet act as though we are not simply because we can be seen by others. But what clues are we given about the most important person to us in the room? Nothing, memories of what we have thought ourselves to be, something that changes every single minute it seems.
I suppose that you then have to guess about who and what you are, but your theories are as vast as the world’s seas. Now that I see this way I am free to let me be me. Hell, I might be a Unicorn-like beast to the world. Thoughts are definitely flitty. They fly. Vroom. Whisk. Go by me like a meteor. What was that thought? What did it have to do with me? Should I grab it by the tail, squint my eyes and pretend that this thought is what I look like to others? Anything goes. A lot of people say they don’t care what other people think about them. What they are saying is that they have accepted that they are invisible to themselves. The thoughts and feelings are strong enough inside of them that they never question their ability to be surrogate to the them they cannot see. They rely on the million-winged thing inside of themselves as though it is who they are on the outside too. This is a leap of pure faith, but it seems to pay dividends. People who do not question reality can charge through the world as though they are the stronger more positive thoughts that they carry within them day to day. Us questioners, which is a good many of us, are left with the images and the stubbornness of the thoughts which we believe must be connected to something else which must be connected to something else… The more that we educate ourselves, the more that we see how intertwined the world is. We want to be fair, moral, right. We don’t want to accept the flitty world as who we are for fear that if everybody acted this way then the world would be chaos. Guess what? The world is chaos, but figuring out how others can act without a sense of morality and justice is just another vast plain which we float into and away from knowing ourselves through pure faith. We think into spheres of thought that take us higher and higher, lower and lower, out and around until we have to accept a spiritual view of who we are. All because we can’t see ourselves, can’t take a cue from our expressions as to which way we should go.
I guess I’ve been a bit of a stone-face lately. I gather this because of my thoughts, which have been anything but hopeful lately. I have been going into myself deep, trying to find the bottom, in a way. I thought that I had it the other day. I was lying in bed looking up at the bunkbed above me, the top of which I use as a desk, envisioning emptiness (a spiritual state) without considering it that. I had simply come to the place where I had lost all faith in the flitty world inside of my head to bring me to a conclusive answer as to who I am. It would go on forever, I surmised. I could follow threads of thought until the end of time, but without a sense of the whole, enough to fill my very limbs, I would never be able to gather sustenance from the world of thought. I often think about what it is that I need to know, that I’ve forgotten and have to go back and relearn to get somewhere that I was years ago. That ever turning wheel, like a hamster wheel, that gets you absolutely nowhere, is like a false promise by everybody who has ever tried to teach me in my lifetime. Remember this, they say, and let it sink into you and you will rise until your soul will be level with your eyes and you will be able to look out proud as though you could actually see what you look like in a crowded room, as though you could not only see everybody else, but you could see yourself. And it wouldn’t be through ego either, which is a false sense of yourself to make up for the fact that you are invisible. It would be true. You would know that you are what you are supposed to be by the reactions of others around you and there wouldn’t be any danger of falling or being whisked away into the “truth” of another thought that you must first address in order to be “true.” I guess being true is what it is all about. You don’t want to be false, but that is what being lost in the whirlwind of thought and resultant emotion portrays to others. So often the idiots win. You find that you envy the idiots, the ones who never listened to those who told you things about the world that sounded true and that you therefore wanted to integrate into your being so that you could be true.
It all gets pretty complicated, I guess. Back to reality. In the few minutes it’s taken to think these thoughts, abbreviated in my mind, of course, I’ve made sixteen sandwiches. Six of them have been Porky Porkins. Four of them have been the Garden of Eden. Two of them were Royal Cluckers with cheese, three The Mountain and one Ruben’s Reuben. Mario is to the left of me, 19, Diane to the right, 18. My boss is Sheila, 28. She’s nice. Three more on the line include Adolpho (cutting), Roberto (condiments) and then the assistant manager, Dave, 23, putting the order over to the new girl, pretty, about 20, charging people their money and giving them their cups. Oh yeah, Natalie, in her fifties and from Australia, is taking the orders behind me, punching them into the computer where they show up on my computer screen. Her husband is an American trucker and she prefers Australia.
I went to college. I’m pretty much the cautionary tale that everybody’s father tells them not to be when they say they want to become a musician or artist or, God forbid, poet, like I told my father. He ranted and raved, slung his jowels this way and that, but there was nothing I could do about it. School had been telling me that being a member of the literary class was one of the finest things that you could do with your time here on earth. I spent my late teen years with my poetry books and notebook sitting under trees in parks, my station wagon parked in the parking lot, looking up into the limbs, through the trees at the passing clouds and wondering, hoping, dreaming and believing that if I could just translate it into words that I would be accepted and loved by others with the same belief in the value of the loftier of thoughts. Of course I learned over time that it was all tied to concepts such as soul and spirit. This sealed it for me. There was another world up there. Out there? In there? Hmm. Where was this other world? The questions, I admit, inhabit me today, although this new wrinkle about our being invisible because we can’t see ourselves is interesting. I guess it may be the closest I’ve ever gotten to being able to be the dream promised me by the teachers and the mystics over the years. Or maybe I just think so. I figure this too shall pass. I’ll forget that I’m invisible eventually and go back to hour after hour of looking up at my bunkbed/desk wondering what the hell it’s all about. But if I can’t see myself or have mock faith in myself like others can, as though they actually can see themselves, then I can’t be all bad. I’m flying blind. Somehow this feels good. Blind is somehow good. I know that I don’t know who I am to those around me who ultimately dictate the kind of life that I am to have in the “outer” world. I won’t have to pull thoughts out of those unremembered lessons “learned” to present my best “face” so as to advance. Where is there to advance to? What happens to the faces that I present? General belief is that if it is a smile then you are doing okay in the world. So you try to smile as much as possible around here. Laughter is good. But what am I doing here? Why am I making sandwiches at the Sandwich King at forty-six years of age?
Very good question. It seizes all urges to make my cheeks tense in a positive manner so as to be relieved that at least I am not ugly. Non-smiles make one ugly and unpopular. I know this even though I can’t see my smile. I’m not stupid. But I can’t smile all the time and in the times I am not smiling I go so far down? Up? Around? Through? the world that…
“Put mayo on that one, dear,” Natalie is next to me now. I’m the lead. The best there is around here. When we first opened, the place was brand new and I wanted to be a dishwasher. They told me that I would be better on the sandwich line. I got a promotion right away. I learned that little Mexican men would always be destined to be the official dishwashers at the King, but I did it anyway before this precedent was set. If there were any dirty dishes I would wash them which put me inside of a halo for the bosses. At one point they wanted me to join them, but I never fancied myself a lifer in the sandwich game and said no. It felt good though that they approved of me, that I did not have to prove myself, that I wanted to wash dishes in the first place so taking what they perceived as the extra step played in my favor. It feels good when your bosses actually like you. I’m a good worker. Simply put, that’s the way it is. I’m a team leader, although not officially. It’s just my age. I don’t get caught up in the webs of adolescent drama during the eight hours I’m on the job each day like others. You got the lazies, the haters, the aloof, the innocent, the “biding their time” people, the quiet grateful Mexicans. You’ve got the guy who is good at cooking the sides of beef and says he owns eight houses which he plans to sell soon. Too much time in the upkeep.
“Just the one or both?” I ask, for clarification.
“Just the first.”
“A clucker with Mayo,” I say clearly. They use mustard on the Clucker, a special sauce and people dig it, but now and then you’ll get the mayo people a little upset.
Could Natalie see me? Obviously, she could see me. She squeezed my bicep, the one I damaged by trying to hold up a house once. Long story, not worth going into. I sometimes forget whether people can see me if I can’t see myself. Of course, they can see me. They can’t see themselves, that’s all. Each of us alone are the invisible ones. Everybody other than we ourselves are as visible as day. I’m doing it again. Trying to hold on to something that I thought that I learned in order to end thought once and for all. It just takes up way too much of my time. Do I regret that I went into the sensitivity to all thought game? You bet. Regret it with all of my being. Regret that I had a mother who believed that I “am a spiritual being on a human journey.” I was a good student and a good kid. Moral as hell. Very important to be moral if you are to make a difference in the world. Never thought of joining the dark side. Always honed my metaphorical moral light saber skills throughout my life for the day when I would slice away evil forever and ever amen. I’m still waiting for that day. In the meantime, everybody else has families, money and true laughter. They go home to nice abodes whose lights I contemplate as I drive home each night at eleven o’clock. I imagine them in only one way: happy. Their living rooms are warm. Their children curl up into their laps. The couples smile at each other and coo and the next day they do their routines warm with the knowledge that this loving scene would once again be played out behind their solid doors and glowing windows once again and then again and then again. Forever.
Yet I find it difficult to trade it all in. Of course my logic is askew. I have avoided corporate responsibility my entire life so that I could be alone with my esoteric meanderings of mind in search of the true other place in the spiritual realm. If I had done what my father had suggested, and their had been a lot of suggestions: advertising, publishing, writing (as if I hadn’t written enough poems to last several people several lifetimes), business (in general. Do Something!), I would be happy right now, especially now that the charm is just about worn off. To be Thoreau now would classify me as a bum. To be Emerson I would have to play a much more complicated game, one that I didn’t have the social skills (the invisible overcoming inclination of faking it) to accomplish. Everything other than what I have done, contemplated, seemed like a waste of my talent and my talent itself was not even a talent. It was more a proclivity, a willingness to bend into the silence to capture a flitting dream, one of beauty, but one that I found as I aged loses its luster as my body loses its luster until I am just another ugly middle aged man with no kids and very little hope of “making it.” Obviously, I should have put myself into a monastery at a very young age so as to have had a framework that was respected for what I was trying to do with my inner world, the only world that I had come to respect. But I didn’t. I ended up at the Sandwich King.
I can feel it. It’s here now. The dark place. It’s back. Concentrate. Concentrate. Sandwich after sandwich. Pile it on. More, more. Pile it higher. Cost the King a few extra pennies, but just pile it on. Keep them coming back. Save the company by giving the people a filling sandwich, not like most of the others who stayed close to the company guidelines and made sandwiches that I would not buy twice. More meat, more lettuce. More sauce. A better sandwich. More. Once again, filling up the world with the stuff of the world as though recognition that the world existed in plenty would remind me that I was not invisible and at the mercy of the thoughts in my head which had, as of late especially, been pressing down on me. What tool for good was I when I was scattered in a million directions? Only the focused made a difference in the world. Those of us who entertained thoughts were too spread out to make much of a difference. Who cares if we wanted to be right so that the right thing could be done instead of the expedient which often led to chaos and disaster when played out on a grand scale. Look at the world. Wars, famine, cheating, lying for gain. An honest perusal of the inner world would provide the world with an honest answer that would guide it into a place where that spiritual world promised by my mother would then be able to step forward and all would be well. That was my job, to push the world a little closer to that other world where it would then be able to simply step into place, into Holy place, I guess, and, like I said, all would be well. But then I would look around me and realize that it was all taking place inside of me. It was imprisoned inside of me rather. Not even the actuality, but the thought of a better world. I could tell that nothing I actually did mattered. The sandwiches mattered. I would have to get through that to get to the other. I would have to make the best damned sandwich in the world for a little of the dream imprisoned inside to be released into the world. If I spoke all would be lost. If I wrote it would not be read (nothing of mine has ever been published except in a college literary review). All was pretty much lost to the whirlwind inside which, I imagined, may have been guessed at by others through my eyes at times or my silence among different circles than work. Nobody told me how hard it would actually be to be heard when your choice of “career” was to be heard.
I made another 200 sandwiches before I left. I first took off my apron. Semi-filthy. Stunk of food. I made my way out the back door. Nobody ever said goodbye. It was like we had relegated ourselves to being automatons. When the machines took over they would simply be switched off too. Entrance was the same way. You simply showed up on the line and you had to guess that they remembered who you were. A new pair of hands to pass a sandwich to. I made my way to the parking lot, into my car, which I won’t tell you about, and on to the road. Through ten, fifteen lights, never counted, into my studio apartment on the outskirts of town and into my bed and slept. I woke up and went to my coffee house where I read the paper and wrote into the computer that was still working after all these years after my father bought it for me. He’s been dead seven years now. Had it upgraded recently and lost roughly 200 poems. I stamped my foot in anger and hurt my heel and am still smarting from it. I have an extra heel pad for work, but it doesn’t totally alleviate the pain. Inner pain translates into outer pain. Pain is a network. The last poem I wrote there was a guy who looked like the lead singer of the Killers with his family at the next booth. I had to look twice and wasn’t sure if it was him or not. If it was I prided myself on being seen, as though that would make it so that I could actually see myself, that I existed in some way that was remarkable, but then I sifted back down into myself, into that soft twilight, that hazy gray of me and searched for thoughts that would explain everything that was and everything that would be, how I might get out of this thing alive, perhaps find love (ten years gone) and be “somebody” again, before the true lessons of my life took away the true mover of who I was, my younger, more naïve self. I guess back then I didn’t think too much about such things as being invisible to myself. I thought a lot, erratically, crazily, poetically, mystically, but self-identity and the back side of the track were not as pronounced. I guess I fear that as I decline the mysterious within me will decline also, that everything before was a result of my youth and not real truth, as though it was blood of nerve and brain that was the real commander of philosophy and spirit and therefore “God” would just one day fade away, or was perhaps already gone, just a joke of naivete.
At the coffee house, a truly suburban affair that would generally not host a rock star, but perhaps has, I saw a woman holding a toddler to her chest as though it were a bumper on a car, a group of old ladies who apparently meet every once in awhile, the manager in street clothes, a red golf shirt and golf cap, apparently on the links that day and just coming in to see how things were going, the regular help. A most unremarkable display that you are relegated to seeing day after day because you don’t live in New York or Boston or Paris or London or anywhere else that is remarkable. Because it is somewhat nice, although somewhat commercial, you wonder about the levels of success of the people. Then you tire of it. You want to write. You don’t. I don’t. I am the you of which I speak, but it is nice to consider myself a you. Makes me feel like I am there. Reminds me that I can be seen when I can’t, at least not by myself. I may represent an alien with three snouts to these people, but I wouldn’t know it, because nobody really looks at you. This is good I guess. I’m not an alien. Perhaps I look successful to others. I dress alright, white pants, cream really, although there are oil stains on the left pant leg.
What they can’t see is that I have absolutely nobody anymore. You can sometimes gauge a person’s aloneness just by looking at them and the people who work here have probably gauged me as pretty much alone, but you can fool everybody else, make them believe that you are substantial in some way. My computer helps, I guess. I look at the New York Times a lot. Write poems. I try not to look too hard at the news anymore, because it seems as though the country has abandoned its moral base in favor of making more money. After the Republicans took over Christianity it all just sort of went to hell. Now Christians believe in all sorts of non-Christian things like starving children in their own country, killing children of other countries, lying to put more and more money into the pockets of their employers who own just about 95 percent of the country already. Dishonesty is the name of the game anymore and it’s easy if you’re rich. You can get all sorts of “think tanks” to come up with scientific surveys that say that people prefer to be destitute and in the street as long as the richest one percent do not have to dip down into fifties of billions instead of the sixties of billions. It’s easy to fool us now. We are an easily fooled people. I thank Jesus for all of this, rather, his “followers” who aren’t really his followers, but paid public relations men posing as his followers. The real Jesus said “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven.” The new Jesus drives a benz. I try not to think about this. I try to push it away, but it’s hard.
I once wanted to write fiction, but found that I had no plots in my life. I know that people want plots in their fiction because they are also like me with no plots in their lives. Where would people get plots? All people do every day is arrange their day so as to avoid plots. Having no plot means having no drama and nobody wants drama, nobody wants plots, so they open books to get the excitement, the plots, that they don’t want in their real lives. So I used to sit there and try to imagine plots, or drama, that I could give to people so that they would read my work, buy my book, and I wouldn’t have to make sandwiches. But I always end up going back to my poetry which doesn’t require plots. The reader of poetry has come to terms with the fact that they have no plots in their lives and are willing to ruminate on what they do have, namely, existence. Good or bad, they have existence. To understand that existence is the one thing that they feel that they can do as they go about their days, their jobs, through the lives of their loved ones. Once you realize that you will most likely have very little real plots in your own life you can relax and consider what you do have which is the moment, now, expanding outward from inside for its base is inside of you. It starts the moment you open your eyes and realize that you are invisible, if you ever realize it, and then attempt to live life anyway. The world within is you and feelings that come from the images and thoughts make up your day so you have to make the best of it. You have to arrange things, make sure that things don’t get out of control. Those without plots live as I do, a totally insular existence. We feed on what we have and take sustenance from where it may come which is often spirituality, study, rumination through artistic endeavor. But there is no set rule as to what we are exactly doing. What are we doing? We are born alone and we die alone. In the middle we dance with the things within our minds.
A woman walked in and sat down at a table about three tables down. She was eating alone. She didn’t look at me, but she was old enough to do so. I went to the library to get a movie the other day and as I walked to the movie section I had to pass the internet section where people get free internet use. The oddest thing was taking place, every single person on the net was a middle aged man just like me. All were poor. You assume that when you use the internet at the library. I walked faster realizing that I was just another one of those poor middle aged men, no longer able to attract a woman and love, relegated to use the free library services. When I got into the movie room there were more of those men, all middle aged just like me, one reeking of alcohol. Of course, he would be. Why not? But he looked somewhat respectable as though the alcohol hadn’t wrecked his life, as though he fancied himself a poet just like I did me. The sameness of it all. The sameness of me. The woman never spoke to me and after awhile I went home and slept and the next day I was back at work making sandwiches, trying to stretch my face to smile and even laugh, but the laughter was becoming harder to conjure. Being invisible, alone and middle aged was becoming too hard to deny. Something would have to be done. But what was there to do anymore? Standing there I realized that it had been two months since Maggie had called. She always called even if it was to just chastise me for not being a success and having a no can do attitude about life which wasn’t really that, but rather a yes can poetize attitude that nobody could understand. I’m sure I have written as many poems as Wordsworth and he wasn’t considered a troubled failure like I am by those who know, knew me. It’s not really fair. I did my time in college studying a subject that the teachers claimed was the highest calling and yet when I got out I was told that I was a failure as a human being while the partiers who never contemplated a higher thought in their lives rose in the ranks of success simply because they chose their college major according to how much money it would provide them. Who cares that they would end up bilking their own fellow Americans. They were successful doing it and success was all that mattered ultimately. Monetary success. The other kinds were jokes and cover for basic infirmities of mind, heart and soul. I was a child who cared, a teen who cared, an adult who cared, but without monetary success all was a ruse. Now I am simply an un-ambitious lazy person who makes sandwiches at forty-six because he was actually quite “off” his whole life just as everybody suspected. He was going to fly high, was shooting for the stars, but in reality, he was just a dreamer, a bad kind, not even the romantic kind really. The lazy kind. The wrong kind. Had I been able to…which brings us to complaining.
Everything is seen as a complaint. That’s how Maggie sees me too. I try to explain my lack of will to strive for the dollar, to make active plans to bank off my poetry, to try at least. It all seems like business to me. Business is okay, I guess. I would love to be able to thrive in business, but I can’t. I can’t muster the will to do it. I have no passion for it. So a lot of my time is spent contemplating ways to succeed in my own entrepreneurial endeavors, but once it comes time to put the “plans” into action I don’t want to move. I simply don’t care. I then write a poem or ten and feel like I am doing what I am supposed to do. This is outrageous in this day and age. But this is what all of the great poets ever did. They simply wrote and wrote and wrote. They sat under trees. They walked in the woods. They lived in their garrets. They thought and they wrote and they observed until they were one day recognized as actually having been doing something during all these times. But for every poet recognized there are a hundred thousand left unrecognized. What if the recognized ones had not been recognized? Would their work, which would have been the same work had they not been recognized, been any less great? This bothers me a lot. How do I know that what I do isn’t much more important than anything I could be doing in the realm of business? If I move off on a different course my unrecognized poems would perhaps not be written and although I may forever be unrecognized their merit would remain – unseen, silent and hidden away never to be seen again. But what if they are deserving of the same praise as those who had been recognized? If a tree falls in a forest…
So I try not to talk about my work. Nobody I know really thinks of me as a poet. When asked what I do I tell them that I work at the Sandwich King. Their eyes light up. Oh? They say, as though it were a proud thing to be working at the Sandwich King. They have to stifle a lot of negative thinking to keep their eyes bright and alive as they talk to me. It is instant non-credibility as a human being and I accept it, smile a little bit. Then I tell them that I also write poems. Of course, that’s wonderful. My point is that even I myself explain what I do first in the realm of business. Only then would my other interest be revealed, a pithy little hobby that most likely I took up because that is what you must do to make up for being such an unsuccessful person. You get used to things. It’s sad, but you do. Melancholy becomes just another emotion. It is the ending of pride.
At work that day there are a lot of customers. I’m good at what I do. I make a good sandwich. A good beefy concoction. I don’t skimp. It helps business. My heel hurt of course and I wondered about Maggie. She said she was going to have cheap sex with a friend if he didn’t want her for any other reason. I accepted it as I was supposed to do. I don’t know why she calls me. We had love many years before and held on to it for a long time even as we broke up and I went on to other relationships. I don’t know what she was doing while I was doing what I was doing. I figured we were broken up, but she was the only one of them that ever truly loved me and I couldn’t get over that. After awhile I gave up on the whole game and all I had left was the love that Maggie still held for me, but by this time I was too ashamed to go back. I was also afraid that I would hurt her again. Youth. When you get to a certain age you realize how stupid you really were, but then it is too late. You’ve made your bed as they say. Two months later I tried not to think of the bed that I made for her. Where Maggie was is simply a big sad hole now. Her disappearance represents our true split. I am now truly alone. My brother and sister don’t love me, well, if they love me they don’t really have much time to show it because they are off on their own middle class America raise the children fantasies. Poor Peter. It is in the margins of every communication I have with them. Poor Peter. The youngest who was so foolish. Of course he would fail. He was the baby. The baby is always supposed to fail. It is expected. I couldn’t disappoint. I think us babies fail because we are usually the dreamers of the family. All the important stuff is taken up by the elder children. They must learn to be responsible. The baby has a lot of help so spends more time in the dreamworld. He never really leaves. The poor baby who must play and play and play. Poor baby. Last born, most likely first to die. Sad. Sad. Sad. Sad. Sad.
I never bought into this, of course. Dreamworlds are praised by our educators by insisting on our studying art and literature and music. It’s all dreamworld and the babies are usually pretty good at it because of their practice being the baby. Freedom. This leads to higher aspirations, spiritual aspirations even, but don’t ask us to put a car together. Don’t ask us to figure out adult responsibility stuff. It’s not that we can’t do this. We can when we grow up, but the elder children will never believe it. Adulthood to elder grown up children for the baby is worthy of a chuckle only. A baby will always be the baby especially if he or she chooses a dreamworld profession like I did. Profession. The dreamworld doesn’t have professions. It has states of existence only, a fact that the others can’t then won’t understand. The baby is the baby. I’m the baby.
So I’m the baby and it shows. I’m forty-six and I make sandwiches at the Sandwich King. This is a good baby career. I wrapped up my shift at the Baby King, the oldest baby at the King, and made my way home. Through the lights again. Cold outside again at night, eleven-fifteen. Back to the old studio apartment that I can just barely afford and hit the bed hard. I dream almost as soon as I hit the pillow. My unconscious state has been like this lately. I seem to dream even when I am awake. I saw a movie on my day off, one I got from the library, where someone asked someone else in what language did they dream. This was odd for me because it never occurred to me that there were words in my dreams. I don’t remember the dream or the words, but I was aware for the first time that there were words in my dreams. Odd. My dreams have been very literate lately. Sometimes it is almost as if I am writing in my dreams. Words being formed as though I were writing a poem or even a book. Where do these stories come from? It makes no sense that I should dream people I have never met into situations I have never encountered. It makes me wonder about the nature of novels. These novelists write all these words and sometimes the sentences are put together so well and with such insight that it seems they are watching the words instead of thinking them. It seems like dictation. Perhaps it is. I can write in my dreams with a complete absence of conscious thought. So Shakespeare possibly just dictated his plays out of some powerful literary dreamforce in his own head. And he was called Shakespeare. The great Shakespeare. He could have been chomping walnuts, really getting into them while his other hand magically penned Hamlet. This seems to be true to me concerning the nature of great literature. There is a little brain inside of the brain of the named person’s brain that is really doing the writing and maybe it has to do with magnesium levels in the blood or lack of zinc or whatever. Life is life and it will pour forth from where it pours forth and just don’t get in its way if you want it to arrive. But you don’t believe in this because you are taught to believe that magic doesn’t exist. But it may just well exist. Maybe.
Which brings me to the idea that I think we should all go through life as though blind. I told this theory to a person I know. (I don’t know very many people anymore because relationships are decided on first tics anymore and they are plenty and deep and adults cannot talk to one another because they are too smart and feel pain too easily, but that’s another story.) I told this person that we should go through the world blind after he told me about a philosophy of someone he knew. Psychological theories are interesting to me, but it seems to me that you can’t keep them in your head, so you must go through the world blind. I wasn’t sure what this meant. I hate when I say something and then assume that I know what I mean by it after I say it. It may actually take years to come to a true understanding of something you proclaim. We are so wise when we are young, but when we get old we realize that we didn’t really understand. We could see the principle laid out before us, but it wasn’t truly within us. Only time can let certain truth infiltrate you. You only know what you know when you are ready to know it. Maybe this is what living blind is about. Forget about what you think that you know and live what you have at the moment. Use the thoughts that have infiltrated you. Let them be enough. Don’t try to fill your head up with knowledge that there is no way to access until it accesses you. Go blind. Even with this attempt at explanation I feel as though I don’t know what I mean by living blind. Keep things out. Don’t get caught up inside thoughts because there will always be another thought and then another and then another. In the meantime, breathe… Or something like that, I suppose. I really don’t know what I mean, but I feel what I mean and that means it is trying to enter me. Some higher truth is trying to invade me and this is what I want. Actually, this is what I have always lived for, to open myself up to these truths. In a way I threw away my life to keep myself open to this process. I went to the worlds of these truths and studied the words that at times symbolized them and gathered them up like a farmer gathers his crops. But truths don’t open up for you until they want to. In the meantime you should do what you should do. I should have married and had children. I believe these truths would open up and inhabit me not a moment sooner anyway. But I didn’t look at it this way. I had to be ready. In the meantime I wrote all the truths down. Poem after poem after poem. Gathered them close and sat with them. Not unlike a mother hen sitting on her eggs. Incubating dreamworlds.
(coming…part 2)
The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite 