CIVILIZATION

You join civilization straight out of the womb. They name you and plug you into the symbol system and begin installing the software. Depending on the location of this event you are henceforth either a citizen or a stranger, estranged or privileged at birth. Your soul’s true home is far away in the future, beyond your lifetime, but you can crash here for a while. 

Your soul’s true home is far away and buried in the past, in unwritten histories fading from memories. Your footprints are buried under 20,000 years of sand. “We’ve all heard your dirty stories.”

 

But tell us your stories. 

You were installed in civilization and it doesn’t let go. Stranger or citizen, civilization categorizes you and puts you on a career path.

You have been chosen to be an apocalyptic poet. 

You are most welcome, but it wasn’t my call. I am merely a messenger. Get off your knees.

Your soul’s true home is right here in front of you, behind that veil.

In a few moments the Archetype will be in to see you. Have a seat. Look at a magazine. We have a good selection of Ladies Home Journal from three years ago. The coffee machine is broken. Sorry.

I’m too edgy to sit down and I want to get a close look at that veil, or rather layers of veils. I see they are woven out of ink lines drawn on very thin paper. The lines are horizontal and vertical and form a very fine grid. The lines were clearly not machine made but hand drawn. Barely perceptible but unmistakable signs of human irregularity were plain in variations of thickness and density in the lines. 

Then my mind was blown. The lines were ink but the ink wasn’t dry and there was no paper. They were woven into empty Light. I don’t know how to put this coherently, but at the moment I understood that emptiness held the lines together. 

I was drawn into the veils, as one is drawn into the pages of a book. Now I don’t know if I can say much that you will find useful and these notes I made are only conceptual fabrications of a hypothetical enlightenment.  The Absolute can not be put truly into words but only shown to oneself or others through altruistic practice, compassion, as you’ve always known, and it sounds trivial to say. You cannot say but can only be shown the power of the ultimate whose name I can’t say. I wish I could provide a link to the mode of reality I encountered within the veils. As I said, these notes are worthless.

Yes, the Archetype was there and we recognized each other immediately and I pray that will be the case for you as well.

Afterwards I guess I left the office. I stepped into the dark night, which is where you need to go, into the emptiness, finding the emptiness between the fibers of words and the on off electronic realm of binary technology, the meaning system of civilization in which our hero is subjected as a self fabricated from codes, an artificial intelligence in search of humanity — a metaphor of course of our own estrangement and search for or escape from ourselves, and these selves we thought we were, drawn into the veils like the exotic art of a forgotten civilization whose stories are still told and whose afterimages linger on the retinas of the children of the children of the children of the children back an infinite series of generations, if such is possible, generations of people and all life and material, the stories of cosmos after cosmos after cosmos, an infinite series if such is possible.

Or do you believe in the Last Day? To be honest, I find both the idea of the beginning and end of time as unthinkable as the idea of endless time and I know I’m not the first to say that.

We were in the back of my van passing a joint. The van was parked on a street near the club. I didn’t know the city at all back then and I don’t know exactly where we were but it was like around the corner off Bowery. I remember that it is my birthday and I’m 34. The rain wasn’t too bad. We were going on in fifteen minutes and I had to go to that infamous bathroom from hell and piss in the trough.The soap dispenser was busted but I had hand sanitizer in my gig bag. 

I rubbed it into my hands and slaughtered bacterial multitudes.