Set the moon at my eyes

See it’s dark and there’s a full moon. The back yard is small but like any place it gets big in the dark, no matter how familiar or ordinary.

Forget everything you knew, or not, it makes no difference to me.

Out of the darkness you suddenly appeared
You smiled and I was taken by surprise
I guess I should have seen right through you
But the moon got in my eyes.

Call it a spell if you like, but what do you mean by a spell? You haven’t even the faintest idea what you mean by that word.

For now, as you hear me out you may think yourself mad — perhaps you are! — but maybe what you are hearing is only a corpse granted a temporary sanity.

Imagine if you found out they were wrong about corpses. That corpses continue to have feeling, even a kind of mad, mad consciousness like the worst trip you ever had — the taste of decay, the long nightmare of decomposition. No words! No screams. Only horror, the horror that comes of being fully, constantly exposed to the truest, most raw things in the universe!

When it happened to me they threw me into the sea and I entered the kingdom of darkness — not the cool pleasant darkness of a summer night in the backyard that you feel now, but the crawling underside, the crushing weight of the ocean. My own mother in the form of countless preying creatures, first the ones with backbones and then the ones without, dishonoured my body… tore, bit, ate, scattered in a thousand directions with my shredded, bleeding consciousness in their mouths, and were in turn eaten, scattered, and eaten again.

And all the while, the full weight of the ocean squeezing and grinding me to powder. Not all of me has yet sunk into the mud and the slime — but someday I will be all there. I wonder, will the horror of endless smothering mud seem a rest compared to the horror of being shredded and re-shredded, of feeling my already-shrunken head continually invaded by the small, stupid minds of the worms and crabs, which is the horror of being consumed by malignant ignorance itself; or will the mud, in the end, provide only new horrors, and no rest at all?

What if you found out the Bible was wrong when it said “the dead know not any thing?” In fact, only the dead know anything. If only they had burned me on a pyre like the pagans! I have gone an endless millenium or fifteen minutes when my only consuming wish was to be able to scream the words, “Burn, burn burn burn burn, burn me!”

I was so thrilled by the love you volunteered,
I gave my heart without a compromise
I guess you don’t remember, do you?
When the moon got in my eyes
I thought a kingdom was in sight
That I would have the right to claim
But with the morning’s early light
I didn’t have a dream to my name
You know the saying that all who love are blind

A Kite Out of a Hell

It was a twelve-mile trip to work, and I had only been biking for seven when I was hit. Leaving for work at nine in the morning on should have spared me any problems with traffic, and it was one of those clear days in May when you can see for miles. But it turns out “traffic” is only a broad, statistical risk; there is no accounting for the individual driver. Every moving thing on wheels or on water is a potential collision, a destroyer of worlds. The regrettable part is that the whole thing was probably my fault. I listened carefully as I pulled up to the trail crossing, but I was too heavily invested in a hard-won store of momentum I had going to seriously consider stopping, and the shrouding bushes made it inconvenient to get a good look at the road. I heard nothing, incorrectly associated the peace and quiet with safety, and was consequently hit by a very quiet car.

Getting hit was actually the best part of the experience. People who all their lives fear the experience of dying will be well advised to be fatally struck by a fast car while riding a bike. The sensation was like one of suddenly having a thousand cords suddenly snap and let you go like a kite out of a hell. In fact, the most intense sensation I had by far, in the split-second after my demise, was one of bursting, uncontrollable strength and speed that had cried out for exercise since the moment of my birth. My lungs seemed unlimited, and the strength of every motion I made felt ridiculously amplified. I whirled about for a bit in a sheer fury of physical elation, which lasted only for a second or two before I settled towards the ground again, standing upright with my hands on my hips, master of the world.

I think perhaps my unconcerned state of mind at the moment of impact made my experience less traumatic than one would have expected. In fact, at first I felt little real emotion at all when I saw the body on the ground, motionless and bent in an odd way. I had the attitude of a captain supervising something being done just the way it ought to have been done: the driver progressing through various stages of shock and frantic concern, the police taking down the report, the medics cleaning off the road. Such wild, capricious serenity as I then felt seems now so clean of sentiment as to be nearly inhuman; it betrayed less than the interest of a bystanding child - it was, rather, the briefly-stayed curiosity of a west wind.

Should I go with the medics, I asked myself; it seemed fitting, but I had a feeling that it would be nothing but unpleasant. Overhead, the blue sky was beginning to show rents and rifts, here and there, like clouds parting. Through them I could see space, the stars, and, much nearer than before, the round orbs of the planets in motion around the earth.

Glass Harp

I have seen eternity, and yet somehow I am alive to tell about it.

The word eternity means very little to you. Depending on your generation, perhaps you have some Sunday-school idea of “eternity” which is actually just a single, long, unvarying stretch of time; or perhaps if you are younger and interested in science, you have a much more interesting idea — a universe of stars forming over billions of years, hundreds of thousands of species evolving, flourishing, collapsing, and changing again, the earth being swallowed by dying sun, the universe collapsing and then expanding again and the cycle repeating itself.

Every prophet faces the same dilemma. He has seen things for which there are no words, and is compelled to speak about them. So you can see he has a choice: either express the wild grandeur of the vision as faithfully as he can (and make no sense to anyone), or boil it down, dry it out, and cut it up into sentences that anyone can understand — at which point it looks and smells nothing like he saw.

Right Stage Left

There was a guy on stage yesterday, he read some things he’d written that took twenty years to finish while he was working at a gas station in Oklahoma. We were enthralled the whole time.

Tomorrow he’ll drive out to a cabin with a plan to stay there alone for a year, then a month. Then he’ll be ready to go home after five days but he’ll stay the whole month. Then he’ll start checking his email again, once every few days, and stay the whole year, and more, out of habit.

Once you know you’ve done something a lot of people really like, it takes a good deal of time to find your balance again. Suddenly you are standing on a thing that is very large and is always falling gracefully sideways. This thing is a crowd of people, most of whom are imaginary. If you focus on your posture and your breathing, you can find your balance, but you need to have learned this ahead of time.

4. Insubstantiality

There’s this trick of life that makes you think that the sap on your palms from climbing a pine tree, or the cold snow melting and trickling down your back, are things more real than “abstract” things like Time, or Hate — but this is a mere accident of perspective.

When we want to understand things, we idolize the scientific method: we exert force on things we can hold in our hands or capture on film and observe the results. The problem is that because of our perspective, this approach works extremely well on things we can touch, and not very well at all on things we cannot touch. But death is nothing more than a crack in the lens of your glasses just before you take them off. The sap and the snow you felt in your fingertips may turn out to have been an illusion. When you can swim up and down Time as in a strongly-flowing river, when Hate is a rock you can pick up, or put down, you will know you have seen round to the other side.

Money’s another one: people say “you can’t take it with you” after you die. But it’s not that “you can’t take it with you,” it’s that it was always an illusion, something that only seemed like it had heft because of this accident of perspective, the same way Love seems like an illusion to a strict scientist or materialist. Your money never really existed at all except as a lever on your spirit, a pry bar on your deepest desires, which will turn out in the end to be more real, more tangible in your hand and in your mouth, than your possessions ever were.

Rear Window

You've really got to keep good records, it's very, very important to keep good, accurate records. And you've absolutely got to analyze the records, that's absolutely critical. If you don't analyze them you might as well not keep them at all. If you don't keep them in the first place you will be flying blind, you'll have nothing at all to analyze.

Think of it like driving a car where you can only see backwards in the rear view mirror. The windshield is a black sheet of chalkboard, there's no way to see through it, the only way you can tell what kind of stuff you're driving in is to look backwards at the stuff you were in 2 seconds ago. If you look back and see a mud patch, then you might be in the mud now. You don't want to let off the gas too much cause you'll stop and get stuck, but if you go too fast you might spin out, depending on how much mud you're actually in -- but of course you can't really see that exactly. The mud is the economic slowdown, the driver is the board of directors at the Fed, the car is the economy, and the rear view mirror? Well, that's your records, and everyone's records, and how you analyze them, and the government's record of your analyses and their analysis of their records. Everyone: you've absolutely got to keep good records. And analyze them.

3. Substantiality

A child notices everything for what it is, or for more than what it is. I think this is what we did when we were children. We noticed the freshly mown grass for how it smelled, and for how even it looked. We did not yet have our minds on other things we could not see. A child will observe a cat and notice how very cat-like it is. The child will notice how this cat is different from other cats. A child will see things for what they are, because a child is truly watching. A person who still has some true feeling of himself will enjoy it when he notices a child watching like this.

When your mind is on things you cannot see, you cannot watch. When you notice and observe things for what they are, you become more yourself. As you grasp and recognize the nature or substance of things and people around you, you gain substance yourself. This happens when you survive a near-death experience, suddenly you begin watching and noticing everything in life. When you are a child you do this. When you are attentive to others and forget yourself, you become more yourself.