Imagine a line breaking out from your past —
ripping through your back,
passing through you,
exiting ahead to meet the future.
Imagine it as the flash of a laser,
flight of an arrow,
invisible x-rays
penetrating flesh.
Whatever it is —
you will not survive this wound.
Henceforth, weigh happiness by the distance
from the oxygen vent;
peace of mind by the reek of a phenyl floor.
Mouth agape, fallen mutely
into dull pain
on a blue-white low-Fowler bed,
wires trailing from the chest,
a burnt-out monkey’s tail.
How utterly still she is now!
If one could restore her for a moment more
with purest breath,
wake her from torpor to spit at mortality —
but heaven’s boat has sailed,
hull heavy, the last weight of the heart
upon the blinking monitor.
Adrift on the wheezing bed,
she is floating afar — without sound,
without making the faintest move.
This day,
this hour,
will return
as long-lost children, migratory birds —
older, soft on wings —
We will call it another day,
we will call it another hour.
It will be just like a night like this one. The light will go out, even the darkness will evaporate. Between memories and the body’s amnesia, dream and wakefulness, without fear, desire, or guilt; nothing will remain.
Being, only being.
No sense of time, not an inch of distance or space, without feeling or knowing anything. It’s as it happens, waking in a hospital bed after hours under general anesthesia, and someone asks, “Where were you all this time?” You don’t know how to respond.
“It was just like a night like this night. I began to lose my senses. Then, there was nothing. I remember nothing. Weird dreams. Then a void. A void of senses, meaning, experience. Suddenly the dreams came back. Now there’s wooziness and a dull pain in my stomach. I guess I was lost to myself.”
“But you were here all the time. In this bed. We saw it.”
“Yes.”
“To whom were you lost then?”
“To myself.”
“Who was this ‘myself’? You were lost.”
“Perhaps it was lost, too. My ‘myself’. I don’t know. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was always here. Or somewhere. Or nowhere. Maybe I wasn’t lost at all. Please, don’t bug me anymore.”
Irritation creeps in. The exhaustion, the confusion that usually precedes a blackout. You have no memory of the anesthetic experience, except for a few scenes from vivid dreams. You don’t know yet how to place yourself on the unbroken line we call time, or the unbroken topography that is space.
Yet an important question remains: who experienced that lack of experience under anesthesia? The confusion you felt afterwards, upon waking — was it only a confusion of cognition, or did it arise from language? Do “I” and “myself” signify the same person, or are they somehow split?
Are the records of your experiences – thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations, realizations – are like the iron bars of a railway track: joined or disjointed easily? Or are they never-ending, continuous, unobtrusive, if of nothing else then of your being itself, though you’re not aware of such a sensation, such a presence.
Perhaps no feeling arises out of such experience — the experience of your own being. No thoughts, no memories. No word is capable of describing it.
If the body is only a body, material and nothing more, a paradox arises: the paradox of self, of subjectiveness. How does it emerge from matter?
Yet if it’s the opposite; if there is only self, no body, no material, although the idea seems logically consistent, there is no evidence for it, except in that logic.
Two porous cakes of charcoal,
a putty eraser, a graphite lead—
white paper, soiled and torn,
a sturdy plyboard—
is all he has,
and all he needs.
The night is woven
from unfurled shadows—
blotches of white
on a stricken tree.
The house clings to a crumbling rock,
harbouring the half-torn lives it breeds.
Lord, I am the house.
I am the lead,
the frayed lives,
the stricken tree—
a fragile artwork of Your being.
Complete me. Complete me.
