I wander through the awesome autumnal symphony that is Tompkins Square park, the day before Halloween. A fenced-off rectangle of asphalt where skateboarders scuttle and clack, the sounds of a loom weaving summer’s death shroud. Kids riot on the playground, and I am eight years old at the water park in a delirious state of sustained exhilaration: panic, excitement, animal abandon, glimmering small-boned bodies and dark-wet plastered hair, under and above and under and above and under and above the water! Ravenous midday hunger and greasy-food feeding. Then, subdued, sublime resubmergence in the friendly chemical liquid, eyes stinging, mad massive love for life…
The day will come when I finally assume my father’s countenance, after a youth spent shaping a material that has never forgotten its original form, the mold from which it was cast. He lurks in my soul, and as the years progress, he gains prominence there. I shall welcome him. That day will be a triumph. It is to him I ascribe my good nature, my indestructible (incorrigible) smile in the face of adversity, my agility and stamina in times of crisis. He is also my suffering, but not my nimble exploitation of suffering. I thank my mother for that. The face I turn inward toward my soul is hers. The quiet, devastating gaze, its unflinching exposure. If ever tears are cried, they are hers. All emotional catharsis – hers.
Mine was a godless childhood, without monsters. Nor did I every deify my parents. It seems I have always been aware of their flaws. Of their nudity amid drab surroundings. I did not experience any fall, any revelation of the world as it really is. My only demon and constant companion is mediocrity, the only notion which has been able to put “the fear of God” in me. The possibility of an unremarkable creation drives me to fiendish or saintly deeds, causes me to reject repetitions of pain and pleasure.
Solitude is my salvation. Alienation is a sign of success on the journey toward myself, toward pristine singularity of self. I have transformed my awkwardness in company into a victory. Jean Genet: “My power over myself became great, but by thus exercising it over my inner being I became very clumsy in doing so over the world.”
And yet I am aware of my need for love, to be loved, of my desire to devote myself to the dream of another person, to seek the personification of the beauty I see so generously distributed around me. But this beauty, or my eye, is highly corruptible, to see it is to destroy it. When I write, I seek to give beauty a more humane destruction. I euthanize it with words. Under my pen it quietly gives up the ghost. I fancy that the soul of beauty demands of us this release. What gives urgency to my literary activity, and sadness. Every closing of the notebook is bittersweet, funereal. I have expelled the spirit of beauty which has just possessed me and driven me to elegiac thoughts. It is heavy work. It is constant love and loss. This is perhaps why I cherish emptiness, why I inhabit desolation with such enthusiasm.
It’s likely that I will never find the one who will relieve me of the burden of searching. One face, one heart. I have accomplished absolute fidelity to an idea, to which individual people must necessarily be sacrificed. This is great and terrible – perhaps evil. It has been called “heartless”, and I understand why. But a heart is not “bloodless” because it circulates rather than possesses blood. I like to think of tandem skydiving, in which two people, strapped to each other with cords and buckles, tumble out of an airplane and fall miles to the earth. When they reach the ground, a shock from heel to neck, they disengage. Love is exhilaration, break-neck velocity through colorless atmosphere. That which you generally pass through unperturbed is made to press against you, to challenge your constitution – a celerity through the banal which pries apart your molecules: you come undone. In love I am dizzy, blind, speechless. I may write poetry, or just shit my pants. If I go out seeking love, I bring a rhyming dictionary, condoms, and a change of underwear.
Because I have not loved specifically in some time, I approach complete self-containment, which is self-annihilation, self-poetry. I arrange myself in stanzas, I am metered. I am iambic!
And I am shameless. My quest for love is also the quest for shame, debasement, dissolution – everything denied my habitual indifference to the affairs and opinions of others. I want my love to be seen and judged, I want it dragged naked through the streets, to produce violent embarrassment in myself and others, I want it to offend taste. I want it to be written plainly on me, to show that I am finally ready to be destroyed. I want to be smashed under the foot of an elephant. I want to lie down in front of a steamroller and have my guts and brains squirt across the storefronts of 6th Avenue, like a burst packet of ketchup.
It is incumbent upon me to reject loveless lust, that slow, municipal illness, that poison in doses too weak to kill. That placebo. I want love to be the eighth biblical plague, to sweep down upon me with the violence of disbelief. Each instance will be an atheistic reckoning, the first coming of Christ.
I move about the surface of this sphere with the faces of my mother and father caged within my own. I subject them to my adventures. I am the condensation of a bloodline, its culmination and suggested miracle of continuation. Slowly the past conquers me, makes inroads as time stills my motion. Old age, if I find it, will find me hardened into a relic of the future past, my soul’s gargoyle. I will animate the future by haunting the faces of my children. This infinite halving, this spiritual winnowing and aimless evolution.
I look upon my father and mother with the most intense self-love, which is absolved by their love of me. I look upon my brother and sister as I look at my own limbs. You see? All love is destiny! The flow of blood in the only direction possible.
