silencing thought
on immediacy and the biggest change I've felt in the past year
In San Francisco tonight I peer at the back of your face and hold your waist tighter, but you barely notice, because you are subjugated by the music onstage. My eyes flicker from your face to the lit up guitars and the intricate displays of light. In between songs the singer begins to talk. He holds the key to our heart then. He is the star, the prim provider of our affect. But tonight he does not want to be prim, he wants to speak with more than his music, he grabs the mic in silence and surprises us, douses us in his own human incongruity and utters nonsensical jokes about San Francisco, Guy Fieri, and vegans, and then begins to sing again. The music comes, and I forget the jokes; I let his voice boom through my heart; I am lost to it; my neck shivers; my face makes motions of anguish which I cannot stop. I like it, like the body moving to the drums, the face captivated now as I listen and my hand receives the motion of your body, the shrieks of your attentive heart.
The pupils dilate. The light recedes. My eyes close and the world splits to darkness, and then to colors which I cannot cast into words. It is immediate. No thought then of the memory, the words to tell of it, or the theory to be made.
Yet I speak to you now in words, and gesture to unrealizable concepts, ideas hidden from the everyday, which I can master with the same ardor one might use to masticate a cut of meat. I have spent much time dutifully masticating in the domain of concepts. Saying true things I could have said nowhere else. But also at times failing to speak beyond the concepts, failing to speak in a rawer language. I have spent time considering how to choose concepts, how to choose how to choose concepts, writing about how to choose how to choose concepts, and many other such recursive questions far from the reality of a man’s daily life.
I have also feared concepts, and the words that gesture at them. I have felt the facility with which a universe can be reduced to syllables, oh so terribly silently, without anyone noticing. How easy it is to disengage by giving something a name or a story. she loved him till he realized he did not. she worked for money. the boys failed because they did not know the word of beauty. I have known the dreadful facility with which a man can be put into a box with no holes but a monochrome definition. I have seen our simplifications replace the world, replace the tessellations, the marvelous texture that makes the rugged skin of our universe but is the first to smooth away to time.
Over the past year I noticed my own failure to capture the texture. Last fall my acting teacher told me to observe and act like a turtle. I looked at it for an hour in the park, and then tried my best to emulate the way the legs awkwardly entrap the lettuce, how the forward legs slowly paddle in conjunction with the rear, the squeaking noise of alarm sometimes from the mouth, and the speed with which the flesh unequivocally retracts into the shell. Indifference turned to care, as I read David Foster Wallace describe with vivid detail real and imagined worlds, and I learned to appreciate the inane beauty of two athletes moving balls across a green court. As I prepared to leave college, I stared at the worn walls of that old house, textured in paintings, zany posters, and books that sign the hidden trajectory of older souls. I remember bashfully glimpsing the chains dangling from the ceiling of the living room, only months after I started living there. I remember the skin of those hands I held once, more webbed, less sharp than mine. I remember the face of that girl in that class, lighting up always with joy and kindness when called on but dispirited right after, if your gaze lingered on her expression just a bit longer than she’d expect.
But still your heart was hidden to me, for no fault of yours. I would catch another glimpse and then go cold, protect myself in words that could explain away your face, contorted then with affect, whispering and bereft. je vais partir. tu te caches. I let words and stories slip over your body like turgid slime, starting at the feet all the way to the mouth and head, covered up finally until all I could hear was a caricature interspersed with moments of your raw song, piercing through and making me wonder, but not enough to stave off tragedy.
In the past few months I understood what kept me apart. I learned that we are transformed by the things that we choose to pay most attention to. I learned that there is a boy who fears that transformation and its consequences. That boy, I think, really loves the world. He is maybe a few years younger than me, maybe not. He often spends his time thinking. His vivid imagination allows him sometimes to imagine a whole world of possible lives, forking paths in the mind’s eye drawn as far as the mind can imagine. They are pretty, at times astoundingly large, but never as large as the world in front of him. And sometimes at night he thinks of them, and their beauty, and the death of the beauty. He thinks himself into failure and a certain flavor of anxious fear. And when he finds himself at the climax, when he most wants to give himself to the world, his fear deafens the overwhelming vastness of his heart.
I learned something from this boy. He taught me how to think. His mistakes taught me after a while when not to think. When to jump. When to stop writing about what it takes to jump. The vastness of the world. A hint at the vastness of the heart. The boy is not here now, but if he was, I would tell him more on the depth of seeing and how it transforms. He would tell me that he knows these things, and I would tell him that he does not. I would tell him what he fails to see, tell him to try now to stare without caution and go beyond thought to reach the heart. He will not listen, he will look at me with the same baffled, curious, unserious attitude he had when he read that Zen book his dad recommended, that talked about swinging doors and limitless worlds contained by ideas of the self. But he will live and learn. It will take him time. Pain will find his heart and be his great teacher, and then it will leave him freer than he was.
From my college writing instructor who wrote me pages and pages of feedback, some of the best writing feedback I got, and inserted this funny comment in her letter on one of my pieces.
thanks to K and K for feedback
ur writing prof clocked you