Outer Limits

 Where to begin?

When will it end?

What do I need?

How do I get it?

Who am I?

I’ll tell you who you are.

This is what I would like to say to you, although it would do no good and would probably be harmful, but this is what I would like to say and that is —

If you ever really looked at yourself,

if you ever really examined your own soul and understood what a useless piece of garbage you’ve become you would either kill yourself or, maybe, have a chance literally in Hell to change yourself and break free from the karmic pull or whatever the fuck kind of conditioning that has you trapped in this wretched state of deluded perdition — I mean you keep saying I’m living in a bubble. But you don’t live in a bubble. You ARE a bubble. You are an inflated nothing, a thin skin overinflated with a foul gas that is going to explode any moment and I don’t want to be here when it does. I don’t want to be sprayed with microdroplets of what ever ungodly goo makes up your essence. 

I know it would do no good to tell you this.

I know exactly what your rejoinder would be.

You will say — Oh, that is very interesting, you are obviously projecting.

Right! You think I’m projecting?

FUCK YOU!

FUCK YOU TO HELL YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF FILTHY GARBAGE.

FUCK YOU TO HELL.

No wonder I read books with titles like Introduction to Awareness.

No wonder I am afraid of death. I must be afraid of myself. Afraid of the nothing I am afraid I am.

Where to begin? 

Cyclic existence is without beginning or end, I read.

4:30AM, my usual time, to be up and drinking coffee. I was asleep at midnight, as usual, but got up to pee at 12:29. All was quiet. I slept through any celebrating. Someone  texted me Happy New Year and I reply Happy 2 0 2 2 2 U 2.

Holy Spirit search my mind.

I’m immersed in a theological stew of mythology and verbal fabrication. 

From outside of time, search my mind.

Nothing is known of the beginning, the sage said.

Cyclic existence has no beginning. 

Nothing has a beginning. 

I don’t have a beginning.

Is it necessary to accept a doctrine of reincarnation to understand cyclic existence?

What is passed down the generations?

What has been passed down that we have forgotten?

Why do the same conflicts keep coming up, never resolved?

Why are the poor always with us?

Why are the crucifiers always with us? 

The lynch mobs?

When to begin?

Dormitory cosmologists try to conceive of a beginning of time and an end of endlessness, but to conceive of a universe even if it is only one of countless multiverses is to conceive of everything as a “thing,” is to think of everything as having limits. That’s reification, man, you don’t want to do that.

Outer Limits. Do not adjust your meaning system. We control the vertical and horizontal and we know what we’re doing.

I wake up at 1AM from a horrible dream. 

I neglected to close you up — those are the words in the dream —  I didn’t close you up and the image is of a body that has been cut open for surgery or autopsy and hasn’t been closed up and because of that, that’s what’s wrong now.

What is it about yourself do you think hasn’t been closed up? someone asks.

I don’t know where to begin, but this is my stop, so this is the end.

beatitude with attitude

 

Those dreams where you discover you can fly.

Maybe they are memory traces of your first steps, after many falls, propelling you through space, over land, just like Them, the people who took care of you.

They carried you and now you can carry your self, you are weightless and free, and even better you are the center of Their attention and They are cheering and happy because you no longer need Them.

I’m kidding. Soon you are demanding to be carried or demanding to be put down.

First steps in learning to speak. 

Names for Them, like Mama and Dada, Betty my sister, and Poo Poo Head — a stuffed cloth dog with a plastic face and nipple nose.

 

I sing “Love me tender, love me true, tweet tweet” to the parakeet as I poke at him with a pencil.

Don’t poke Perky! They shout.

I’m LOVING Perky!

Do you see Sputnik? They ask.

Yes!

What does it look like?

It looks like this, I say, blinking my eyes.

They teach me how to draw a face. It’s easy. A circle and two dots and a curved line and a U for the nose. Two more dots for nostrils. There is a face.

I am drawing a face as I have for countless times and maybe I’m getting bored as I’m drawing the U turn and I make a sudden detour and I’m free. This line can go any where, it can turn any way and it goes for a stroll of twists and turns around the page because I am absolutely free within the borders of the page. It’s great to be an artist because you are absolutely free.

Those dreams where you discover you can fly and then you don’t know where to go and you wake up.

The brain is searching for a mind.

The brain in the skull above my shoulders is like a bowl of meat on a table, my mind is thinking 

— but a bowl of ground beef doesn’t have such thoughts, says my brain. 

Yes, the meat in the bowl is full of life,

but I refuse to liken that bacterial life to my own living thought as it searches for itself in a page of a notebook, in the unique infinite seminal point of the Bic, or in an electronic document. 

A virus is not alive They say, as a new one

colonizes the planet. They labor to domesticate it, teaching it to adapt to us as we adapt to it, both of us evolving in this labor. The labor of evolution. The virus is teaching us. It brings information. It doesn’t want to kill us. It doesn’t want our extinction. It needs us and wants to use our bodies, to reproduce, mutate, until it becomes, if not a member of the family, a frequent visitor. 

The virus wanted to be our neighbor. It wanted to be everybody’s neighbor.

The virus is not sentient, they say. The virus doesn’t want anything. 

The human breath travels around the world, whirlwind of breath overturning our lives. The virus moved into the global neighborhood and started making demands. Some people say everyone is going to get it eventually. I haven’t had it yet. I’m thrice jabbed, so it probably won’t kill me. 

I’m OK where I am. I am fortunate I’m an artist and absolutely free —within certain borders. I’m OK right now and for that I’m grateful, but it’s gratitude with an attitude.

Those dreams when I can fly. Where do I want to go today?