Feeling Around Blindly, Searching

Far as I can feel, both palms open wide in search, searching for the silence. In search of a place I have never been, with spoken tongues lavish with flavors I have rarely tasted, only ever in the most sacred times of my life. That golden dialect in which the most ancient and effervescent prophecies are stricken down and ratified by Agnostos Theos; formally formless and void, float alive and aloft in the halls of this place. Heavenly harmony astounds the ear, syzygic rhythm and feng shui direct every choice of those housed in this place, I struggle and stretch to touch in sheer desperation. A place populated by the only people a sort of man like myself can tolerate and come to know peace with. Oh to be stuck with that honeyed language: silence. Somewhere, some place, constructed in solitude and devoid of all else but the serene. Somewhere where I am alone, A place that is a certain sort of quiet, a lack of volume which assures and reassures again and again with its simplistic consistency, that there has not and will not be a response whenever my heart retches and cries out against my will. To reach out and touch that sweet something: that nothing. To feel temperate, lukewarm, even-keeled, with no one there to see anything at all. To feel that you are the only thing there and touch with both hands a lasting peace. I was reading Haruki Murakami's novel "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," a tale of war crimes, hellish divorce, and epiphany found at the bottom of empty wells. I was reading about the war crimes at the exact time in my life I felt most violated, about the hellish divorce within the bounds of my adolescence; a time rife with loves lost and hopes held hostage. The empty wells came ringing out their restful sonnet a mere month's measure after I was last locked in seclusion-restraints and made to cope alone. Alone with no one to aid me but two wise old friends to men like me, Thorazine and Haldol. To be without them, I thought; Murakami's pen herding me down the rope ladder rung by rung, penstroke by penstroke, down into a stone cylinder of black nothingness. Isn't that preferable to this? To where we are now? Mind riddled and maimed with grief, breaths rattling shakily like a snake's tail. To be stuck somewhere quiet, Alone, and empty.

Away and away, I am whisked hither and there, locked in close pursuit. What is it to walk among the dreaming? To march behind those asleep at the wheel as an observer of the oncoming wreck? How good is it to spectate as a spectral force rather than to participate as its partner or worse, a puppet? A person like me has been stuck aground for more years than it’s worth admitting. Try as I might, I have never found a dark enough hole to disappear into. A hole that’s black and regal as a sarcophogus and easy to forget as a tomb. To feel with my hands a boundary where within I am only myself and my self is the only self who gets to have a say, as to whether or not that’s okay. In the palm of Buddha as the lotus, or under the hand of Yahweh with the likes of John The Baptist, to be favored is a marvelous portion but oh to be a part of the favoring, or even better, to possess a vantage of the favor as a whole that is separate. Zechariah, who begot John the Baptist, would surely know what I mean if you don’t. In your defense, it is rather abstract, and in mine, I’m communicating this want when I’d rather be alone and have my fantasy to myself. John’s father was told well past middle age that he would have a son with his woman, who was around his same age by one of God’s angel according to the bits of Luke I’ve read over the year in a handful of very nearly quiet moments, in which I could almost feel as alone as I seemed in my home. Almost. When Zechariah was told this by the angel, he exclaimed that he didn’t believe God would do it. As a result, the Spirit sealed his mouth shut, and he was unable to speak throughout his wife’s pregnancy until she delivered John. If he were a man anything like me, a frequent host for one-hundred-milligram doses of hydroxyzine and mood-stabilizing cocktails, I think Zechariah would miss very badly the world he was in just before John’s birth. To not speak and not be expected to speak. To be able to shepherd your flock and feed your wife and sleep peacefully knowing that you never had to speak, because according to God, you truly have faith worthy of good lineage, yet nothing to say, which is worth being heard for the duration of your voice’s rest. Not just that he couldn’t speak. That during those nine months, he was free to think and act as freely as he pleased. If communication is magic, and language is a miracle, response is a curse and ego trap that preys upon me too frequently for my liking.

Temporary me, I stumble on through again, through the same old doors. Again and again I prostrate the same broken heart, time after time I reach the point beyond broken. The atmosphere is constricting with constant pressure, abuzz with dementiating sentiments. Again they see me fail. Again, they fill my head. Again, I pray and ask you to save me, God. Again, I descend, downward into the well. This well used to a tub, one wide enough to fit her and me both. One deep as the indian ocean with water hot as a spring. While we were together, I was driven far from the quiet and deep into the whispers of dissent. My scalp still has her signature imprinted on it, penned in discursive letters. The little black box that makes us cyborgs used to make me think I could be like her, too. Always talking and listening, always bickering and snickering, always hating myself or another or another. Today I let it die for the last time. How peaceful is the peace achieved in death? I should like to find out some faraway day. No longer one for idle ideation, I have to rid myself of the loudness in my surroundings. It begins with the blessing of another inhalation, sensitive to the whole body. Shoulders square, hips aligned, ankles under knees, sat perfectly still. Followed by an exhalation intended as a humble offering and the quiet space between breaths. Spine upright. Chin always held ahead, my body weight offered freely in full back into the center of the Earth in every passing instant. To take that breathless void between inhale and exhale and feel nothing but the next breath. One hand reaches down, resting just above my knee, palm-up. Another extends further, fingertips planted on the ground beneath me. The surroundings fade and change as my eyes close and stay closed. Time deconstructs as a construct as the silent breaths coalesce into the same peace found at the bottom of Manchurian wells. The clock strikes twelve, and the space around me is changed from pumpkin to vessel, reflecting the contents of my soul in perfect tandem, pushing and pulling me, moving me in every way I may be moved while sitting completely still and carrying me forward into a better day.