Employers, what a topic! You and me have a history of heart-break, but what employer does not indeed in some way stiffen? Has it been that I have chosen employers who have only sought to play it by their own book? Are there employers who will play into my book?
At least here, for this moment, I employ myself to write this thing, this web-log of my imagination at the very edge of any sense I can or would have had.
I won't speak about a patient, or how or what made a patient great or small. Instead there is me, and I seem as desolate as a small worn wooden chair. I know there are greater men who will not make a literature of their lives. I know there are lesser men who will prattle on and on about their own existence.
I won't talk about the women now. To speak on women seems a momentous force that is too big, too tangled and cumbersome: too sharp like the head of an ax. I risk getting my head cut off, but some will say that it is worth that to utter my opinion. Suffice it to say that it would take a whole lifetime to utter the meaning of a single command given by a single participant in the category of "women." I don't understand them. They frighten me.
Men I understand to varying degrees more and less. What use is there to speak on "men?" There is no use to being a man.
Instead we have workers, consumers, politicians, sports. All the news on them is current and up-to-date. The news on "men" is up-to-date, which proves it is utterly useless. But what use is it writing until I have a story to write? It may be my story of prevaricating about the story of writing. It may be a story about digging down in the blood of the instant, it may be the sudden brace of wind, or a song.
I wish you well, all you half-people, visiting the web: typing things in and out of the news data-base. Some of the news will become something deeper, it will sift to the bottom of sediment and become a story once again. It will refrain from being just one fact.
I wish you well, all you people who stop and read, and listen. But listen to yourselves first and most! Listen to: not this.
What good would it be to read then? I have seen men, yes, maybe men-and-women, but I have seen at least one man and therefore "men," I have seen men reading books that were evidently nothing more than just a distraction: as if they were playing at being intense, when the words were nothing more intense than a Wal-Mart Product directory: I'm talking pop-psych.
Pop-psych, a dime store philosophy for a nation on the brink of a new meaning: where the books of the past are no longer the provenance of screaming undead zombie-liches of fundamental faith. Pop-psych: the last strain in the air of something saccharine and processed, like American Cheese, or hot-dogs: eyeballs and assholes. NO!
I am not certain I should publish this. It's not interesting simply to let it all hang out or to say that everything is somehow the same filth, the same excrement. Enough.
Well, I am lost. I am as lost as I have been, and without devices for finding my way out of the forest of my doubts: I am without a job. I think many times all the existential dread is relieved by simply giving someone a job, give them a job to hold on to. Give me a job to hold on to, make me a man with a decent earning wage. Make me no one. Make me annihilate my inner life for the sake of earning enough money to pay the rent.
Otherwise the depths will rise.
The depths are a regular torrent, if you can believe it. A seething event. There are those who profess a sort of athiesm with regard to depth: nothing is deep or meaningful: it is all information enslaved to being up-to-date. Nothing could be more humiliating than being "not-up-to-date:" being obsolete. And while the human species confirms it's obsolesence from the moment one states "the sun and stars will no longer rise and shine for me," to the moment the psychologist says: "this is just a semblance of your infantile immortal inflation."
How young we were when the sun and the stars did rise! How this planet, wrapped in this dream-innocence did seem to sing out with the universe: that if the stars were for us then too we were there for them.
All this is nonsense and is no more spoken.
(We do not speak of the rising star, except in the jaded epitaph voice of a rock-singer like Marilyn Manson: what good is it singing in a grave-yard voice? Bless him, I think he actually spoke with a profound sense, and a sense of grief, when he spoke about Columbine. But nothing more than that?)
There was a time, Milosz, before the wise books were written or read. There was a time when we did get up and shine with the universe. The time when we were a "bare-life." Perhaps this time was now, perhaps it was some future event. There was a time--there was a time. "There 'once' was a time," now there is an epithet!
"Once" is a displacement, not present.
More errors were committed, a hoopoe dives with a glimmer into the abyss. Mahmoud Darwish offers another poem, of nonsense and collected words, and still a more humble sentiment to displace the stars from rising for "us": "Who am I?"
The post-modern epoch: "You lost me." Everything that I am is discharged, abnegated, annihilated, razed, deconstructed, analyzed to the point of complete discontent. You lost me. You go on in a specific direction, like a foot-traveler into a mist. Enough is enough you said, and went back to look for me in the midst of the mist. Meanwhile I am back at the bridge-edge, standing looking at a pitiful Southern-California trickle of a water-fall out of a chaparral desert. I was counting on King Arthur sailing across this mist, a principle literary act. Instead there is only the calumnies of "madness," "insane," "unclear," and "unkempt."
I tower up my screed, scrawl a belief in myself, in the madcap dissortment of words, and I threaten to hit the button "publish post." It is likely that I will not be read for a long time. It is possible that I will never be read. But who am I to speak on the rise and/or error of my dim literary stars?
