El Cenote (January 2003)

          Yet absence implies presence, absence is not non-existence, and we are therefore entitled to

          repeat 'Come, come, come, come.'       

                            E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Just getting back from Portland last night, missing the northwest terribly.  Mentally, I’m still driving up the Columbia River Gorge, listening to Sigur Ros in the misty dark along I-84, on my way to visit Matthew, my brother, in prison.  Seeing him there provoked a kind of terror, brought on my general predisposition towards self-inflicted torment, though nothing particularly significant was said.  We weren’t supposed to.  Those are the rules.  After—driving down the Washington side, the rise above John Day with six deer before me, the rain into Hood River, Portland, the traffic, descent and conflict.  I so resented leaving Norfolk, having to reconcile my old life with the present version, all those apparitions walking around Hawthorne, tapping me on the shoulder, reminders I’ve sold my soul, and cheaply at that.  Slowly, though, home seeps in, like the rain, and the weight of the past—these connections, they mattered.  After seeing Matthew there was nothing so clear as the difference in our lives—me the fortunate loser without a chance, but many, the survivor aware defeat is unbearable, as is the poverty of success.  I’m just as stupid, or worse: I’d say evil if I took that idea seriously.  I muck things up all the time, occasionally manage a humdinger but mostly make the landings pretty well—compared to Matthew, who had it much harder, by far.

I’m sure he knew how bad things were.  It must have been exhausting, his life.  But why make it so hard?  Wasn’t he paying attention to the signs?  Did he prefer to ignore them?  Couldn’t he see them?  They might not have been specific but I’m sure it was perfectly clear that we have to live with ourselves along the way.  They must have indicated alternative routes—those requiring less effort and much less suffering.  Belief in their existence helps, though a healthy skepticism warns me off believing they’re much more than self-projections.  For those of us prone to interpreting signs, who have a penchant for their collection and accumulation, as personal and professional practice, their discovery is vital, and finding the clues ranks more highly than planting them, though there can be great joy in that, too.  But few of us want to believe that we’re the mystery’s source.  Locating it outside ourselves is a convenient fiction, allows us to maximize our pleasure, minimize our effort.  It’s hard work being creative, plotting out the narrative, smuggling Christmas presents into the house.  Much easier, by far, though, than ending up in prison, more than once.  

My wife asked last night about quitting the path that brought me to Norfolk, Virginia Wesleyan College, teaching English, whether I’d ever thought about giving it up.  All the time, I said.  But, really, I’m just living out the continuity of some very early choices about interests, tastes, directions.  Those signs I chose to follow.  They made all the difference.  It wasn’t that I was better than anyone in my family or smarter, just that I made some choices that have had some influence on the difference in our fates.  This isn’t pride or even conceit that I’ve achieved anything.  When Matthew talks I know he’s done more and lived lives I never will.  I had the middle path, the pretty darn easy, in relative terms.  This difference—does it serve some purpose?  Does it incur some obligation, some duty or responsibility, even if only to one’s self?  We answer yes but act from no all the time.  Both responses assume an imperative: seek inspiration, humanize the mechanics of modern life.  Use all the faculties given to you.  Try not to hear all the flaws.  Seek an audience but not approval.  Keep the dogs of doubt far hence, though they circle now about the margins.  It’s difficult to sustain—all this comes so oft to naught.  If not for moments of bliss, why bother?  There’s just so much weight against one wonders that it ever happens at all.  But there it is, unbidden and sudden, all the glory and vision, something pure and beautiful.  Even in the magnification of little bits, the expansion of smaller elements—just like this—that yields powerful results.  Just lean closer—do you hear it?  It’s the 23rd remix or revision, boredom slinking around the edges, questions, doubts, fears. . . but what’s that sound?  Is it calling me, or am I calling it?  Is it even really there, or am I just hearing things?   

I once told my brother “There is gold in your heart.  Keep looking if you don’t see it right now, cause I know it’s there.”  It may have been myself I was speaking to, though: there is a part of you pure and good, radiant and clear, a precious jewel freely given.  Protect it, jealously.  If taken, seek it, overcome all obstacles in its search.  Soil it not with your dreams, as all is in your care.  The world robs us—with our help.  What fragile wings in our dirty hands.  Easier just to ignore the self than confront el cenote.  Yet compelled, called sometimes, it feels we are.  “Come, come . . .” this spiral within—up or downward does it tend?  For who?  For or out of me?  And fear?  Failure?  Right after yes, here’s no at the door, or rather, no-thing, an absence and a question.  

There is, essentially, only idle chatter about things.  There is experience and then our ideas about it—the distance, the stuff that fills the space between knowledge and the unknowable, all the ontological implications that follow.  Why write when we need quiet arguably more than monkey-mind filler?  As Tomas in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being says, “Missions are stupid. . .  And it’s a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions.”  But, then, why this sense of a calling to me, still.  There to drown it out is stuff not even I want to think about, let alone write about.  Silence seems viable, even necessary, certainly functional.  Other options might include a general inability, lack of talent, mediocrity, sympathy for the elimination of the dividend tax, and various other forms of depravity lite.  I’m a small part of a larger problem.  When you move about in the world you see—sometimes—how fortune or birth creates particular advantages and makes some pursuits less important than others.  That I get to sit around in the comforts of my socio-economic position makes me rather pragmatic about my own ambitions.  Perhaps the highest aim, if you could call it that, would be to take up less space with needless words. 

Yet to that void desire responds as a basic, elemental feature of human life and consciousness.  To that absence our questions are necessary, right.  It makes sense to ask them.  Seeking the purpose of things, causes and effects, reveals an absence for and to desire.  A confession of emptiness, desire is an acknowledgment of nothing at the core of all things.  Desire evokes, even creates that absence—without it, less than nothing, an absence of absence.  Without nothing everything is impossible.  Lear was wrong.  Nothing is fundamentally generative.  In that chasm one and one become three—something greater than what’s put in.  Silence becomes music.  El cenote is the absolute absence, the essential lacuna, within the self that calls “Come, come” search the molten core that churns ceaselessly, though quiet and violent by turns.  There within nothing is essential, desire the most fitting response.  

If there is nothing there, at the very core of identity, this is why so much attempts to flood in at any given time.  We wish it would, and so often end up letting it—much more pleasant than the empty hole within.  This is a vital absence, and it may very well be why the Romantics often saw a form of divinity as emanating from within.  Esse est percipii.  That the reality of the external world is contingent on the knower elevates humanity to a position of deity—things are because we perceive them.  As Blake puts it: “Where man is not, nature is barren.”  There’s nothing there and, thus, the necessity of perception.  Absence, nothing, is generative.  It’s also a tremendous burden, or paradox.  We are almost required to create meaning, or at least find it on occasion.  We’ve got to pull the threads, though perhaps learning to sew is also an option.  But it can be laborious, even tedious, to make or find meaning.  We’re all in the position of the Overreacher—a Faust-like character, the star of our own self-centered psycho-drama, where we are lodged perpetually between our spiritual potential and our material form.  We can create or find meaning but so often deny or seek to extinguish the fundamental spark.  As Lord Byron puts it: 

How beautiful is all this visible world!

        How glorious in its action and itself!

        But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,        

Half dust, half deity, alike unfit

To sink or soar, with our mix’d essence make

A conflict of its elements, and breathe

The breath of degradation and of pride,

Contending with low wants and lofty will,      

Till our mortality predominates,

And men are—what they name not to themselves,

And trust not to each other.

The world’s “sovereigns,” humanity is “Half dust, half deity,” a paradoxical and oxymoronic being, equal parts spiritual and material, and “alike unfit / To sink or soar,” unable to do much besides wander in an aimless middling state.  Our “mix’d essence” mingles “the breath of degradation and of pride,” “low wants and lofty will,” and this, in turn, results in self-loathing and mistrust of others.  Our emptiness, the nothing within, this is ironically the highest part of ourselves.  We are the source of meaning and significance in the world around us—it has no other source, and this absence raises us to what Byron calls “half deity.”  Yet we are bound to the limitations and frailty of this mortal frame.  It’s maddening to grow old, to loathe our selves for not being or doing what we might.  As Byron suggests, our predicament leads to isolation and alienation—becoming unrecognizable to ourselves and separate from the social world.  

That’s why, if I’m honest, what matters most is the sheer terror I had coming back to Norfolk, the breathless nightmare I had of losing my wife.  Literal nightmare, and figurative—the familiar pleading formation: “Forgive me?!  Forgive me?!  Her standing above, impassive, considering for naught, and me wondering just how stupid to take this all for granted.  I could see Matthew sitting across from me, all the other inmates in a row across from their matching visitors, saying “Every time there was a choice I chose wrong.”  Then the paranoia: what if I can’t have kids, even if i wanted to?  Would she leave me?  Down comes the black veil.  Always and again, this sense of separation.  There’s no one other than her and yet even she, even at my openest, is still separate, apart.  No, that’s not even it—it’s more frightening, this realization that without her there is only a vast abyss of fear.  The truth is I’m afraid of everything without her, that feeling of everything suddenly lighter, without weight, significance.  There’s just so much that I either can’t say because it’s not understood or because I’m afraid, just scared, a pair of ragged claws, at best.  I am in her hands, at her mercy.  What ever she wants I must provide.  I went to Portland almost certain I’d come back and tell her that I don’t want children.  I’m home now and certain I am lucky.  To be here on a night like Sunday with her crawling all over me, doing it slowly, like there’s plenty more love like that in this house.  

And how terrific to talk to K. today.  She’s always so positive and interesting, so forward in her attitude and efforts on her creative path. I envy the sense of purpose in that pursuit of expression.  Confronting the void, as it were, staring into the abyss.  The sublime, death and beyond, the whole kit and caboodle.  I had the distinct sense yesterday she was seeing right through me, or into to me.  I felt safe somehow, like we were there together in very real places.  There were moments when I felt out of my depth, that she was the gifted one and it took my breath away, this sense of her power as an artist and thinker—that swamped me.  I always get that way around women artists.  Kim MacNeil was like that.  The first time I saw it: a sheer blissed out melting in her hands.  She really knew how to work magic.  Twistickery.  Those were conversations.  At one remove, granted, but that’s exactly what I’m missing right now, come to think of it.  The only thing left is to reflect on things.  

Talking to J. tonight was much different.  She was telling me that she chose to have children because she was scared about missing the chance.  I feel the same way about silence, that missing out on it would mean forsaking something invaluable.  It seems almost inevitable that I’ll end up having the time to reflect, to the exclusion of all else.  That I’ll run screaming from the room for having to look deeply into the hole.  But talking to Janet was like initial negotiations with a foreign nation across a barrier, or through a veil.  It slipped, a bit, became less dense, and I distinctly felt when it did but I was so scared, at first, to talk to her, like I was going to cry for wanting to open up to her.  It felt like I had to hold back, like she wasn’t ready or willing to listen.  She relaxed into it, though, and that helped.  I had to meet her on her terms, part of which meant, apparently, forgetting about our mutual fascination with “The Imp of the Perverse,” but I can’t, as it’s so productive.  

I also have the distinct feeling that I’m so right about so much or that I have no traffic with reality whatsoever.  Something more moderate, between the two, trails at some distance.  Those appear to be the only viable options.  When you get old, older, everything just sort of gets weird, like some Blakean perversion, Theotormon’s “sick . . . dream,” his mediated simulacrums of experience, or Bromion, that nasty, mind-garbled bastard who’d be better off if he took his medication regularly.  I mean look at me: rich in all the major character flaws.  A faint whiff of rot, the failed attempts of the past, that’s as real as life will ever be, though I’m not entirely sure how much I mean that.  And what is the use of this?  The question presumes a purpose, an audience, if only the one in the mirror.  Sometimes, though, it’s just resignation that there is this veil, this sense of permanent separation and isolation.  Though always also with the opposing senses of bliss and terror—bliss, for the spiritual opening that might accompany it but also the sheer terror of perpetual disconnection.  I alternately yearn for it yet and flee from its presence.  I sit here with the sun and birds all day, sensing a gradual decrease in velocity, an awareness that a background is created for even the slightest movement to seem momentous.  The kestrel taking a finch.  The gradual diminishment of time.  Great comfort and safety, and then panic about right and wrong.  Mostly wrong.  There’s resignation, also, to the present conditions.  Something like Johnsonian endurance.  Dare I say optimistic resignation?  Whatever.  What’s it matter—just get on with it.  If not for this, paralysis.  But here I am. . . and thinking that . . . yeah, I still run from it constantly and what would it mean not to?  And more: if I only have myself to tell it to at least I understand.  I can trust myself.  I should try to anyway.  Maybe I’m the audience.  Maybe that’s what it takes: relaxing into yourself and your own skin, into your own voice, the dialogue with yourself that is the central one.  Maybe that’s the only place to ever find what you need—or that there’s nothing you need at all.  Maybe the dialogue with self opens up into a larger conversation,  perhaps through self-dialogue an opening emerges.  The idea—fantasy—that through writing we discover ourselves and, in turn, each other.  Am I writing you or myself into existence?  Pshaw.  Mumbo jumbo.  But it did happen.  Twice.  Once more than it was supposed to.  I’m lucky.  Not only that, it’s happened in brief instances, too, those occasional flare ups filled with fire.  Oh, to be as blessed as those it happens to all the time.  Saying what needs to be said, though, saying it freely, as easily as ever dreamed is to salvage sanity and self-respect.  I’ve always been aware of el cenote, danced around its edges many times.  Knowing it, to the core, is punishment and privilege.

I will never know, and maybe he wouldn’t even recognize the question now if he heard it, but I wonder if my brother feared his own voice, whether he simply couldn’t bear its echoes.  Might he have made meaning out of nothing, or discovered enough for himself, if he had persisted? Instead of trying to drown it out, in all the ways I know he did, and some that I can only guess at, I wonder if being able to hear the emptiness made all the difference in our fates.