the search

I can’t be sure exactly what she looks like. Time and obsession have blurred her features. I mean a religious obsession, the deity of her I have erected in my mind is fearsome, I avert my inner eye from its terrible (beautiful) visage, I cringe from it, and from this constant deferment of confrontation, I have come to forget the details of her face. (With our backs to the banalities of life and death we create myths and monsters to represent them. As with love, which is revealed for the earthbound heart-and-prick thing that it is only when the myth makes its final journey to falsity, revelation, impotence.) And yet, of course, I have not forgotten them - how easily and endlessly I could elaborate them here, I’d create a string of blasphemies, a snapshot of a miracle, a gross excrescence on the underbelly of my theme, a miscalculated devotion. True devotion must rid the mind of the concrete. It is abstract communication, abhors recognizable objects and subjects, for it amounts to an act of self-obliteration, an inducement of possession by an alien spirit. So - I have become her. I do not remember her features because they are my own. I have spent too many hours in communion with her ghost. I have lain motionless in bed full days invoking her spirit by annihilating myself, by laying so low and still that the world finally forgets my weight, and loses consciousness of me. I soar. Brick, tree, trash, cloud - all fall away. I am everything and nothing - pure desire. My desire finds her, inhabits her chest, face, hands, finds her among the solar debris in this dusty corner of the universe, using one magnificent astronomical equation, she is pinpointed: I fall into her from above. I languish in her skin, I marvel at her - my - our hands, hold them before our face, bring the knuckles slowly to our mouth and brush them ever so gently, reverently across our trembling lips. Everything we do is an act of obeisance before the indestructible miracle of our intermingling. The dust-mote memory of my self - lying dead-still in bed - drifts, agitated. As I would, along the city streets, filled so with her absence to over-spilling, waking to myself only occasionally to find that I am lost, and indifferent to my fate. So I return to my inner after-life, the part of me that has already passed from this world, to that timeless and eternal place of the most exquisite and fulfilling emptiness. I keep inside me, delicately preserved despite its invincibility, an infinite cold space that I retreat into like an ant in an empty airplane hangar. From in there I abandon my body to find hers, and fall into it, and brush our knuckles gently, reverently across our trembling lips. This inward motion goes contrary to my outer, as I wander this emptiness outside so too do I wander the city, but in opposing directions, and the result is a lopsided consciousness, imbalanced, tottering, where objects from the outside world permeate the inner and are converted to symbols, and symbols from the inner float like microbes across the surface of my eyes, and latch onto people and objects. I will find myself with a crushed beer can, a political pamphlet, my own head in my hands, unable to recall where or why I grasped it….

All is vain… all in vain. I wandered the city streets the entire day, imagining some tremendous destiny guided my steps. There was an impending cataclysm… I surrendered my will. I do not think I walked down the same street twice, but of course it’s possible. After a few hours of this, as excitement and anticipation mounted (surely, around the next corner… the next…), I began to see that I was tracing some design, that I was marking the confounding hieroglyph of my desire upon the urban grid. I saw my progress from above. I crawled out of the depths of myself and ascended to the tops of skyscrapers, behind the foreheads of the pigeons atop the skyscrapers. The line I traced was luminous, my actions hard, luminous and crystalline, as if for the first time synchronized with a choreography that had been laid out for me before my birth. There was even a consciousness, part of my consciousness in this detached, elevated view that directed me, as the mind above guides the body below, but I had never experienced this sort of specific distance from myself… I ceased to feel my legs, indeed almost all awareness of my body, of being in my body, had left me. I had deliberately absconded my physical self before, the phenomenon had always been unstable, it dissolved under scrutiny or the slightest imposition of will. Now it seemed as though all of me had risen to this perch, where I concentrated my dislocated energy on deciphering my path through the city. However… nothing came of it. I returned to myself, and nearly collapsed from exhaustion. Without knowing it, I had smoked cigarette after cigarette until the packet I’d bought earlier that morning was empty. Trembling, weak, I sat down on the stoop of a brownstone, the embodiment of unfulfilled desire, which is enervated emptiness, the hopeless anticipation of satisfaction. I had traced a small, minutely varying set of possibilities, whereas she could be anywhere, and enjoyed the full spectrum of possibility I willfully denied myself by taking control. This barricaded me from her. Fate seems disposed to separate those who attempt to control it from those who defer obliviously to its influence. But there was yet this inverse relation between us, and the more unhappy and frustrated I grew, the more I agitated fate’s sphere, the more it protected and coddled her. For a moment I considered sitting absolutely still as an act of repentance, of not leaving the stoop till night fell and the constant parading of multitudes before me effaced my sin of manipulation. But I immediately saw through this, the act would be just as egregious a transgression, and she would be pushed even further from me.

… I cannot trace the origin of what occurred next. I offer this hypothesis, though it’s as unfounded as it is likely: I was suddenly, precipitously dissatisfied with the depth of my suffering. I felt that inside me was some rare raw material that had always been there, awaiting the crucible of a magnificent depravity the likes of which I’d never come close to conceiving…