Whether in person or not, conversations around this time are like a listening noose. Initially, I come to commiserate, intent on unburdening myself to some other soul. Then they start talking and I bite back my breath from awfully the world has treated this other soul. I can’t bring myself to spoon my dollop of misery onto the pile. My problems are all imaginary, pale reflections of the dark scars these other souls present. So I return here to the recycled waters of the self, to knead out another plastine layer, stretch it over the plain fabric of my unlived life.
I don’t exist in the real world. I know this. I’ve known this. My problems are problems from a different world, or an improbable future. I am an outsider to reality. In my youth a woman spoke to me of her own lost youth. She resisted eating, felt that filling out her body was contrary to her true self. She had delusions of shedding her worldly form and floating up forever into an ethereal realm, like a wisp of spider silk escaping out the bedroom window, off to spider silk heaven. She felt that ghosts were kin. Me a young sage, I nodded at this, and lamented her forbidden dream. In her words I felt an unrealized truth for her and a haunting truth for me. I do not long to be a ghost, I thought, I’ve been one for some time. Young ghost, young ghost, the world prays, hear me young ghost. Watch over me on your sleepless nights. Though you may not touch me, you may weep for me. When you cannot weep for me, remember me, speak of me. Your silent words will thicken the world by one additional ply. If each ghost does as you do, then perhaps the heavy weight of life will not punch a hole through all we know.
In the chamber outside of the animal’s chamber, there is a heavy smell which I am told are helper chemicals. It smells to me like fate. The animals inside perform assigned tasks. Out here in the outer chamber are posted attendants, all assigned the holy task of observation. I have no tasks, but I also observe, hoping one day to inherit such a post. The animals inside cannot see me, can only see the red dots, blue circles and green squares. They see the red dots in the blue circles, the blue circles occluding the green squares, the green squares presiding. They press the buttons. They press the buttons well. In the chamber outside I eat the smell for hours until I am sick, until I am released into the inner hallway outside the outer chamber, where I puke up a bucket load of fate. When I’m empty I finally exhale the hope, my hope that by sucking out enough of the stink, the stink I know to be fate, I will free the animal of any and all such chambers. A janitor arrives to usher me into the outer hallway.
As I sit now, riding a train to nowhere in particular, I realize I am in this moment almost exactly like a character I sketched years ago. That one was a younger fellow. He begins on a bullet train, last stop Yosemite Park. Somewhat of a forlorn fellow, having recently lost his remaining parent, he rides out to an old family vacation spot. There in the carafe-like shadows of Yosemite’s mighty cliffs he encounters an adolescent dragon, the one and same dragon he’d abandoned there as a child. Their reunion is filled with mirth, discovery, and suspense. It is an upside down encounter in an upside down world. Fear not! A sudden movement cows the dragon, wings flat and submissive. Look out! Shedding scales convert hot springs into cauldrons of green acid. Heart skips! A terrifying jet engine roar is revealed to be nothing but the beast’s uncontrolled laughter. Temporarily deafened, this fellow and his dragon play a game of charades. The joys of this drowns their hungers. In time, they finish the ascent. There the sun is cresting over quiet trees, sole witness to this renewed bond. If there is peace to be found, this zenith provides. Then the conclusion I envisioned: our young fellow leaps off the cliff and dives like an Olympic grape into the dragon’s gullet. Single gulp, no mess. Demure with good digestion, the dragon flies off to wherever it is that grown-up dragons go.
Of course, my train is not a bullet train. It will not stop at Yosemite Park. I will not meet a long lost dragon. I do not have the strength to climb all night, nor the courage to leap off a cliff, nor the grace to dive into a gullet. No mythical creatures yearn to digest me. I do not and have never observed animals in chambers. I will inherit no observation posts. Fate is not edible. And you cannot puke it up. I am not a ghost. Ghosts do not murmur silent chants in the hopes of lending strength and solidity to the world. No one bares their dark scars to me. None of this is real, none of it happened. By nightfall I will return to civilization once again, and finish what I am scribbling here. I will lob it into the wild, let the moonlight be its varnish, dew its casing. No one will know what I meant. In good time, neither will I.
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I would like to stop writing now, but all breaks in writing are unrepresentative of life. In a blog post the words stop there. In reality, the train went on. I went on. Cute conclusions I gift to my creations, as a mercy. I have a whole train ride ahead of me, and then all the stuff after that, and perhaps even some post-life shenanigans if I’m up to it, and during today I have this slim volume of Woolf to read. In my timeline she died long ago, but somehow I managed to procure a piece of her brain. To peruse at my leisure. To embiggen my day. She performs for me an old favorite. I can rewind her at will.
I wonder if reading A Room Of One’s Own will have any impact on me, or if it could. The cover is unusually soft and I know this will distract me. It will bother me that someone made a conscious decision to arrange for a soft cover, and it will bother me that most people won’t be bothered by this. I need to rearrange reality to smooth this wrinkle. Perhaps all books have soft covers now. Somewhere along my trip I stumbled into a nearly identical world where all books are softer. Yet Woolf’s keen mind remains, not a bit softer. It awaits in there, ready to gouge another gorge into me. All my mental citizens await like the dutiful Chinese, preparing to be swept aside in the wake of another government mega project. Or, more likely, her mind will slide against mine like glass on glass. The discordant shriek will alert anyone nearby of our incompatibility. I am not one of her chosen charges. I cannot invoke her as my patron saint. I do not know who in the pantheon is for me. Perhaps I need a Woolf of my own.
Or perhaps instead of a Woolf, a Prometheus for the nuclear age. Whoever invents a working fusion reactor could do more for Literature than all the great writers of history combined. Lifting ten or so billion out of poverty and wage slavery will trigger the greatest renaissance yet. I don’t believe in special people. Genius is a fairy tale. I don’t believe in precious experience, in only writing what you know, feel. There are beautiful expressions, and so far we stumble on them in the distant dark. In the future we will be so many strong that we can all link hands and comb the space clean. Perhaps that seems inartistic, unrefined, uncouth, impersonal. I believe in the room full of monkeys. Let them press the buttons as they please.
saltednotion 