in the margins

i've written myself right off the page, out into the groundless air, and wave my limbs about frantically as if trying to find a way to be propelled in the nothingness. it's a foolish game, trying to recall the moment when my feet lost touch with the ground, about as futile as trying to walk out in the open air. so i'll do my best to float, to stay moving, to keep from taking that fall that many a deep thinker take, into the depths of the very substance of being, an agglomeration of every bleeding heart's blood and every flowing lung's breath and every thinking brain's tick of electric current, a viscous sea that cannot be seen or heard or felt, that cannot be traversed, that cannot be quantified or codified or broken down into constituent parts because the parts are infinite, because it is nothing more than a creation of hyper sensitivity; because it is nothing, just a very deep center of the human psyche, as space equally as small as it is large. its the center, the smallest pinpoint wormhole you can imagine, and its the entirety of the air around our heads, the 360 degrees multiplied by every degree in between. ie, something that is everything, but in reality only something to the mind-travelling wanderer who makes it into something traversible, something that starts in the margin where ink ends and life begins; and that is a very wide margin indeed when fear and focus fuse into thought. but its also the smallest margin imaginable, an eye's blink, a brain's twitch, a moment of indecision when the world keeps right on flowing, and if you miss the margin you're stuck out in the formless sea with no vessel, struggling, struggling so desperately to catch up to the turning pages before they close you out or close in and bury you, and the best you can do is to send bottled messages, sideways glances and silent genuflections in the hope that someone would recognize your plight, toss a rope and pull you in before life pulls away and docks at some foreign port where people speak in wild tongues and dress in wild colors. i get the strong impression that this has happened quite a bit in my life, that the world somehow shifted through epochs in those moments my back was turned, that in those tiny yet universally magnanimous margins i was asleep in the forested mountains of my brain, some kind of cerebral rip van winkle, and when i turned back to face the glowing fray i didn't recognize a thing and the world didn't recognize me, and the more this has occurred the less recognizable we are to one another, the world and i. i suppose it comes down to security. the security to float alone on invisible waters without a vessel for what feels like an eternity, to be alone and foreign in a familial world, and to understand that i'm not the only one that drifts in the spaces between pages, that we're all just planets in space and time waiting to be colonized, waiting to collide with other planets and be broken down into something smaller and relatable, not so grand and elusive.

when i hear that lonesome whistle...

(written the morning after a momentary lapse of morality)

sins are just that: of the moment. sure, there's the mark they leave upon the psyche like a cigarette burn through a piece of paper, and just like that type of burn, depending upon the length of exposure to the burning source, it could expand and expand and engulf the entire piece of paper. but generally speaking the sin, misdeed, transgression, whatever name you give it, is a singular entity. it falls upon the sinner to keep the exposure to the burning element short, so the mark upon the mind is not one that expands but one that stays a singular entity, kind of like "the moment." leave the moment to be what it was when it occurred, do not try to reason or rationalize with it if it did not spark an ongoing process, let it sit and fade like a loving parent in your car's rearview the day you leave home for good. just like the parent, the sin will always be there, but how much credence you lend it will determine how much it will hang over your head like a hovering vulture, or it could simply vanish like a hummingbird, something loud and flashy that makes itself known quite well and disappears, leaving a minor mark that vanishes as life resumes its timely progress.

timely progress. like a slow moving freight train. imagine sitting on a stump in the woods next to a railroad track, trying to read the words on the cars of a mile-long freighter, or take a mental note of the color of each car, or trying to match the pitch of the clanking metal to a key on a piano. the moments of life are kind of like that: going by in a procession, linked to the ones before and after and related to them, moving slowly, but not slowly enough to compute the magnitude or unique color of each, beating along well-worn tracks to a song that, as hard as you try, you cannot seem to change the tune of, and the tune stays as constant as the songs of your parents, your peers, neighbors, even strangers you'll never meet.

now imagine an irregularity in the track. it happens every so often on most sets of tracks. it all depends on the severity of the deformation and where it lies on the tracks. if you are aware of a coming irregularity sometimes you can switch tracks and continue your constant churn forward, as smooth and constant as a calm late spring day. if you have no other track to switch to, you can slow to a halt before the break in the tracks, take in the scene as the break is mended. though, i'd say more often than not, the irregularity in the track is a subtle one that we cannot see ahead of time. we plod forward at a steady pace and before we can realize what has happened, the train is off the tracks in a muddled wreck, unmoving, consumed in slow-moving flames. and sometimes the only way to remember that we are still alive is to be thrown into the fire.

holding on

often times we find ourselves unconsciously grasping at things. for me, this most recent time, it was a digital watch. i was awakened before dawn to the grating mechanical sound of the alarm. i pawed around in the dark to find the offending noise and silence it for disrupting my broken sleep. once i laid my hands on it, i could not let it go. "holding on to time, i see," my dreams seemed to say to me. subconsciously grasping at those slippery numbers, those figures that slither through our fingers like snaking wisps of smoke, or like the finest grains of sand from an ancient beach. my life is not as specialized as i might think; everyone holds on to time in their on small or large ways. photographs, journals, scrapbooks, children, houses, memories. in this way, i was taking a literal translation of the concept. maybe because i never thought i had a use for the more superficial figurative interpretations of holding on to time, and those necessities you shrug off often have a way of finding their way back on to your shoulders. i really do need to find a way, just like everyone else, to hold on to time, and the watch in my half-sleeping hand was a most fitting way to let myself know that those numbers i disregard have some meaning in the larger sense, just as important as those distant mountains or a spectral halo around the sun or plate tectonics or the expanding universe; the human sense, you know? and being a human being, how could i not relate in some way to buying a house and filling it with pictures and newspaper clippings and children and fine wood furniture? because i certainly can: i'm building a house for words, and putting into it all sorts of crazy objects of thought, as much memories as future contemplations (which themselves are based on memories). such is the human condition, we can not be in the present or looking to the future without memory being the strongest factor. i'm holding on to words, which, just like numbers, are figures we train our minds to recognize and formulate into thoughts. and, just like numbers, our entire system of living is based on these sets of scribbled lines we place so much symbolism upon. and, just like numbers, words are slippery creatures, they can be, objectively, only random configurations of markings that we've been trained to understand.

holding on. human life is a lot of holding on. we hold on to a lover's hand because we want to keep them nearer to our self, or because we don't want them to float away like helium (which inevitably happens: read a great novel, watch a great movie, have a cup of tea and a conversation with an elder; it is unavoidable). we hold on to life, in the most dire or mundane of situations. all those houses, with pictures tacked to the walls with all those familiar yet morphing faces, or all the books on the shelves full of immortal words, are a means of holding on to something that doesn't change so much, because all of life is change, and change means those slithering numbers and words will mean something different tomorrow than they do today, which is to say our entire conceptual foundation of how we quantify life shifts with the minutes as the minutes themselves are shifting. the best we can do is to find something, someone, somewhere to hold on to.