Maybe the next epiphany

08/05/2005
6:00 AM

Five minute: That I am awake and not asleep. That I am alive and not dead. Write. This too is living. I am my own. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. For the She, the cottage, the garden, the water, the woods, the books with my name on the spine. And all the rest. They are all there but become steps to fall back on and we pick up and move on. There it is, this part and the next and the continuance, the persistence of the experience of a single self. We are our own. We are one and not the other, but the one become many in a single. If I knew what it meant, if I could see how far it goes. There we are though. Here we are. If it doesn’t mean anything, it simply doesn’t mean it. But that is hard to see. What are the negligible parts of the equation? We wonder what the end of it is, but we see this far. We’re here now. I’m here. This one that lives and will die. This one that tastes and smells and feels. We are our own. I am myself. - 6:07 AM

Five minute: And maybe it’s because I ate too much. That would seem to meet the requirements of satisfactory explanation, because we can tell ourselves that this is what happens if we do this. Maybe it was the sleeping pills. Maybe it was the heat. I did get up, though. I got up late and I have less than an hour before the possibilities narrow. A man rode by on a motorcycle. See, I told you my bad poetry was always about escape. I don’t quite know how it works. I don’t quite know how to move from point A to point B. I know enough to go to bed early and get up early. I write my little bad poems and push up a few times. I walk to the kitchen and turn on the coffee maker. I walk to the bathroom and pee. I light a cigarette and wait for the coffee to brew. How do we learn how to stop waiting and be? But that’s an old question and I’ve collected a dozen answers by now. This too is living. That’s what that one is about. I remembered it again yesterday. It’s easier in these small pieces. You eat the whale one bite at a time. And Shel had more to say that they seem to know. We remember “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” We remember “Howl.” We remember “The Giving Tree.” But they won’t put them on the same shelf. But they should. And there should only be two genres – worth the effort or not. - 6:17 AM

Ten minute: But how would you know if it was worth the effort for you, until you’ve read it. And there’s the dilemma. Turn on the pen light in the theatre and take notes. The director, the critic and the actress. But that’s one thing and we don’t know where it wants to go enough to follow it. The daylight comes up. The air has cooled and we have to wake up and do something today that will add to the continuance of the years, the accumulation of this strange compound of things that become “my own.” And maybe there still is that fifteen-year-old sitting inside me that knows what I should do. Get married – have love and sex – everything else is just alongside. But I chuckle at the fifteen year-old. He is informed by the nineteen-year-old that says, love and sex are crap, what you need is money. But he doesn’t know the words of the twenty-two year old – money isn’t enough, you’ve got to earn it doing something that you love. (a synthesis that) And then comes the twenty-four-year-old, vanity of vanities, says the twenty-four-year-old, all is vanity; no matter what you do, it won’t be enough. Am I really all those people? But I am. I’ve over-simplified, but I am. There’s at least three more epiphanies between 24 and now, and a lot more between 18 and now. Until I lost my faith in epiphanies and they stopped coming. Ha! Yeah, right. Always the epiphanies, just not the faith and hope in them, this leads to cynicism. In seeking wisdom, you discover that wisdom is not enough. Hmm. But this is just itself. You’ve got things to do. Madman though you may be, you still have to eat and sleep. Close the book, get up from the chair and do those things. Maybe the next epiphany will be the one that takes you home. - 6:32 AM