To be in the world in the Heideggerian sense.
My thoughts will become actions, my desires fructify,
and fears be kept in the shadows for the night
sweeper to come and remove. I touch nothing.
The environment of my present existence is false.
A dream place – I wander a composite of landscapes
where I have been and suppressed all memory from:
hills of concave mortar craters in a bygone battlefield;
generic interiors of empty houses; desert rock promontories;
seaside ghost towns that smell of salt-distended clouds.
Blown in over the waves, across an abandoned parking lot,
over ineffective barriers of hanging elliptical chains,
stands still my nightmare pursuer, a person who I can
barely make out, in my hurry to turn and leave.
At most, I lean against walls and hover over counters.
Hold notes across and receive things in exchange:
food I have not cooked, rented weapons, torch to pass
on the flame to another. The creator closes his eyes,
looking down on the supplicant, who has come
over mountains on knees, through oceans without a boat,
across vast chasms unbridged. He holds my head
against his heart. I can hear how hollow it is:
a storefront in a movie set; a business in painted wood
and decorated window. He charges me grievously.
The old crook rips me off. No recourse to retribution
or justice for this crime. The response to get away
and the resolution to lie if anyone ever asks where I was,
though in the aftermath no one does, not directly.
Sounds reach into my corner; voices whose words
I have no choice but to process. Few are in my language.
I have only the timber and tone to decipher to determine
whether their vitriol might be referring to… Arthur,
they address me. I cannot deny that this is my name.
You are expected to answer for this outrageous bill.
Who authorized you to go on a spree?
No one Lord. I did it on my own accord.
I am meted out my punishment: a dark phase of demotivation;
actions carried out with the cooperation of the body;
my taste sense screaming – This is not what I want!
O well, it isn’t so bad. The baited hook on offer hints at sympathy.
I engage them to listen to me talk about my general dilemma
in consciousness so full it sometimes distracts me from speaking
in the middle of a sentence of the utter vanity of my pitiful plaint.
A rope inside the well deeper than the light at the opening
can penetrate brushes and shocks my face, startling me
to realization that I had not been numbed by the fall,
as I had only surmised from the lack I felt of pain.
I thought I was numb, but was too afraid to try to prove it
by budging under my own will. Now I find I have hands to grip
and climb the heaven-sent lifeline – the spider strand of Buddha.
I am reciting myth: the soul in hell is offered paradise,
immortality in the Garden of the Lotus Flower.
He has a way to go to get there. This is the variation
that is interesting: what thought causes this soul to fail?
Shit! Merde! Mierda! Scheiss! I was Jesus Christ
leading shadows out of a tunnel. And I could see light
up at the opening. But I… stopped and called off
the emigration for some reason.
Hmmm, the psychoanalyst looks up from his pad
and raises to an angle an eyebrow.
A reason? What might that be?
I… the mental case reflects, gosh doc, I don’t remember.
He gasps, expresses contempt. Behind the couch
I am lying on I hear papers that he has thrown flutter.
He storms out of the room. Alone, I sit out the session
for the hour I have already paid for.
The soul was near enough the surface to smell
something other than the cold moldy mist
inside this hellish well. He can hear fall the sparkles
of a fountain gushing… Why did you let go?
a former follower asks hundreds of years after it happened.
Finally, suddenly, the karma of my guilt is up. The event is expiated.
Someone can come and talk to me. I have now the lucid perspective
that suffering in perdition can bring. I am able to say ingenuously
my variation on the myth – but I cannot describe my response,
nor my fellow lost soul’s reaction. The Buddha frowns
and turns away – the creator closes his eyes.
He pets the spider’s diamond back to thank it for spinning
its strand. You will be rewarded well my little friend.
Your buddhahood has been hastened by your act of generosity
to that soul who unfortunately couldn’t take advantage of it.
The spider’s karma advances. It prospers in flies until,
at a ripe old spider’s age it dies a natural, animal death.
The baby wasn’t rescued. The savior must have been martyred.
As a child I saw a show one evening on television, supposedly
based on true events. In a backyard in Texas, a baby fell into a well.
The mother discovered the accident and, weeping, called emergency.
Crews arrived: ambulances, police, rescue workers, news reporters.
The entire drama consisted of these adults’ adventures. It was
quite a boring movie, actually. The part that was poignant for me
was when the sound effects of a baby’s screams stopped
and everyone around the well went silent in acknowledgement
of what that meant. While I knew this to some extent,
even as a youngster, now I am fully aware that although the baby
was central to the story, it was a fictitious artifact. There were
a couple of shots at the beginning and the happy ending
of some baby that maybe belonged to one of the director’s
friends, which they used for not more than half a day of filming.
But the poor baby at the bottom of the well, for whom I felt
the movie viewer’s empathy, whose screams quieted
at the climax did not exist. Just a bunch of cheap actors
dressed up as mother, defeatist policeman, heroic news reporter,
pretending to fret around a hole in a backyard in Texas.
The thought that occurs to the soul is supposed to be the lesson.
To me, the writer, I have to admit, it is a total mystery.
It is a hardship to have to think about while still involved in the cycle.
I have been in hell. I survived on only hope. I got knocked
back as the hope exploded and the shrapnel from it blinded me.
I touch nothing. The mother’s breast with which I came in contact
was a booby trap; a residual mine in the gentle country
where a bloody war once took place. I have lost limbs;
been rendered castrate. I’ve been deafened by the flash.
My mind is idiotic from having to cope with the consequent trauma.
Ornaments bedeck every available space inside the palatial room:
stupid, useless objects manufactured by slaves for the waste market
and sold in souvenir stalls for a cheap price that can be
negotiated down yet further. One is my friend, the king, who is
imprisoned under a spell. If I touch his corresponding ornament
he will be released and reestablish his rule. But they are all
indistinguishable. The jade lion, I decide. Doubt seizes me though
as I reach my hand out. If I choose incorrectly the day is lost;
I become an ornament too. Which other one then?
I vacillate between the jade lion and the pewter ashtray,
toy memorabilia, a tiny heavy statue of Manjushri,
a gun studded with gems and jewels, stone fruit,
the crystal bowl that contains the grey apples and oranges,
the plate on which this stands, the mandala in the center of which
is obscured, but from its edges looks like the Wheel of Life.