(2)
It's something rather amazing, the feeling one gets on the first truly
warm days of spring. There's a sense of luxury in the gentle,
wafting heat, as if the memory of some half-forgotten pleasure were
hidden away there, waiting to be reawakened in the heart and in the
mind. I go about all day in my shirt-sleeves, and
although the windows of my house have all been opened I stay
outside, enjoying the fresh air, until evening comes. The
crocuses, I notice, have all withered – but even the murky nebulosity
of encroaching night cannot quench the bright yellow of the
daffodils; peering close, I can still make out the tulip buds' flush
of red. The bushes and trees are tipped with tiny furls of
green, and these cast their own peculiar, sweet scent into the
air. What is it, I wonder, that I sense in the unfolding
luxuriousness of spring? What memory is it that I feel secreted
there? I pause, probing the internal realms of thought and
emotion as actively as I might otherwise probe the world around me
with my senses; and the answer, when it comes, comes as suddenly as
the appearance of stars in the darkening sky overhead:
it's death that I am thinking of; death whose memory beckons me;
death that I sense, cradled within each new bud and leaf. Life
yields ever uncomprehendingly to death – and yet it is through death,
uncomprehendingly, that new life engendered. Such is the
paradoxical nature of existence.
It's because my mind is unable to grasp infinity that it formulates
these ideas of paradox. The mind can only conceive of infinity
through means of the relative – that is to say, through the
recognition of its own functional limitations. Fate and free
will, meaning and meaninglessness, chaos and order, objectivity and
subjectivity . . . Like the flip sides of a coin, each half of
these paradoxical units may be seen as absolute; yet each half can
only be understood in relation to its opposing side, or its
functional capacity will be lost. Question: What
is the relation between reality – which effects by virtue of its
cyclical nature the appearance of infinity – and the truly infinite,
by which I suppose I mean some elemental unity both preceding and
transcending all paradox? I do not know. Perhaps I cannot
know. Perhaps I can only experience.
When I was a much younger man, filled with confusion over my social
and sexual identities, I used to sometimes dream of moving to the
city. There, I had heard (it was given to me as a warning), one
could easily become lost; but I thought there might be a blessing
hidden within that particular affliction. For I had the idea
that it was in just this kind of lostness that new, more valid social
and sexual personae might be discovered. I made several visits
to nearby cities, staying briefly here and there with old friends of
mine who had moved away from our small town. But I did not
enjoy myself. I was much drawn to the plethora of museums, art
galleries, and theaters that I found, but the pervasive atmosphere of
noise, brutality, and violence found in the streets overwhelmed me.
Survival in this environment, it seemed to me, required a protective
shell of indifference, an aura of numbness, to one's fellow human
beings; and I had no time to develop, during the brief tenure of
my stays, that thickness of skin, that toughness of attitude, I saw so
often evinced by those who called the city their home. I
remember, for instance, of one day coming upon a man lying sprawled
out on the sidewalk, face down, blood trickling from a wound to his
head. Somebody nearby was yelling that he'd just been mugged;
his attackers had hit him with some blunt object, they said, taken his
valuables and run away. I remember watching people step over
the bloodied man gingerly, skittishly, as if they were stepping over
a mud puddle; then scuttling off hurriedly down the street.
They were frightened; they were appalled; but they were not moved to
help him. I myself edged cautiously away, taking my cue from
those around me and not knowing quite what else to do. But as I
did so I found myself overwhelmed by a longing for home. I
missed my own small town, where such violent acts were the exception
rather than the rule. I missed the trees there. I missed
the hills. I missed even the weeds, with their unexpectedly
lush spring and autumn blossoms, growing in tangled profusion beside
the country roads. If it is true that the choices available
to those living in small towns, when compared to those possible in the
city, are narrower, the range of cultural activities less broad, the
allowance given with regard to personal expression more closely
circumscribed, I am not certain that the underlying value system
differs all that much from one place to another. Such
differences as exist seem to me more a matter of scale than
content. The one thing small towns have to offer that cities do
not is a closer relationship to the land. Even this, in the
end, is only a matter of scale; but that particular difference was
enough to decide me. I came back home. I decided I could
be as lost here as anywhere else.
And yet I still have lingering doubts about the life I have
chosen. I have lingering doubts about my unwillingness – or is
it my incapacity? – to join in with society, to take up the fight to
change the status quo in such a way as to better allow for my
inclusion in it. I sometimes suspect that my failure to engage
in that battle reveals in me some fundamental lack. Or is it some
fundamental recognition, perhaps, as to the difference in opinion I
suspect to exist between myself and society concerning which of us it
is that most needs changing? I do not know. As to sexual
insecurity: it is certainly true that love is never wrong, that our
constitutionally ingrained desires cannot be fruitfully denied, and
that self-acceptance is, to my mind, the primary prerequisite to
enacting social good. Still, does not the homosexual represent,
in some broad yet essential sense, an extraneous element of the human
race?
But I turn my
mind away from such strictures as these thoughts imply.
If they yield a utopia, what an imaginatively sterile utopia it must
be! As like as not, in this world full of paradox, I could not
(could I?) be anything other than who and what I am.
*
*
*
POST-SPRING
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Every day and every day it is
I wake up thinking:
Life is good.
But the world's going wrong.
Maybe it's raining
I hear a distant thrumming
Maybe it's windy
the windows rattle with an impatient sound
Maybe it's sunny
a streak of yellow warms the thin brown carpet
Maybe birds are singing.
I drag myself up from pools of sleep:
the day is innocent – ignorant – raw;
light a cigarette and lightly sip
the poisonous smoke as through a straw.
Prepare myself, for love and pity,
to tell the restless, streetwise throng
that swells the heart of this desolate city:
Life is good!
But the world's going wrong.
Somewhere, somewhere,
where memories dwell,
in some painting on some museum wall,
daffodils and tulips grow.
A child, a woman, a man,
are wading through a sea of flowers
under a chunk of a magnificent blue sky
where distant clouds are stilly woven
and the sunlight glows forever golden,
somewhere, somewhere,
where memories dwell.
But
leave me to my life of mazes,
room to room via hectic streets;
fill my lungs with fumy breezes;
leave me to my desperate feats.
Blown up against the business suits,
the bums, the beggars, the homeless ones,
I'll exhale my words of ecstasy
through clenched and smiling teeth
as automatically as bullets
or any spring bird's song:
Life is good! Life is good!
But the world's going wrong, going wrong. |
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