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[a-temple-in-unpeopled-land]

Theseus Asks Ariadne To Give Up The Act

If he withdrew one thread of vein, could slit and grasp through the aperture just one of the blue rivulets among that network of fine life-giving filaments, could he retrieve the whole of his body’s ocean, winding it back like unspooling the sweater of himself and finally escape the blankets of flesh that bound him to questions of god like unseeing bound to the corridors of an empty labyrinth?

When you don’t write a word for ten years the coil inside unfurls so quickly. I know these thoughts are only relatable in the way you might see a drugged-out sidewalk penitent rapid-firing tonguespeak and think to yourself, “They’ve really got something to say,” before shielding the eyes of your children and walking on. 

It’ll get better with practice. Think of this as the grueling physical therapy required to relearn how to walk after trauma-induced bed riddance. There’s trauma in a decade of silence. 

(Lispector reminded me of the toothache throughout the story, of the drum throughout the story She wrote her last novel to me. I remember when she told me about the cameras she’d set up in my body. I was charmed at her dedication to authenticity; preempting the toothache and the drumming was her small curse on me)

The emulative act of art as rendering, taking from life a finite piece of likeness, must always leave the puppy bald in patches. You couldn’t look my way a hundred times without stealing my attention. The mind is more a polished mirror than ever, not an interface for the actualization of self. What self? Is a man spliced from the organs of a hundred others really a self; is a student who walks on the backs of a hundred teachers really a seeker, or just an opinionated archivist? Polish the mirror back to sand. 

(There’s some anger in me toward god about the design of teeth and knees. Plants photosynthesize while we chew with irreparable, exposed bones? Birds take flight while the nexus of our gangly locomotion rides atop a knobby, calcified lump floating in a toddler’s cross-stitching of only the most fragile ligamenture— one fray and the whole contrivance unravels? Was this part of our Fall, god, or part of the plan? I ask you for all of us sinners, amen)

He never met someone, especially never a collective, that inspired in him a belief in the supremacy of humanity. His feeling on this topic soured with time and I haven’t followed him long enough to know if he could ever be convinced to bottle kvass with the leavenings of this loss. Where does one place the story of the heart if the life this heart sustains is poisonous? so he wondered, of everyone, as a grand projection of himself. He knew people didn’t feel this. They smiled at each other with a warmth that betrayed camaraderie to the Big Secret. Even with their cursing of god they loved each blessed inch of the scarred skin, every allotted tick of the mocking clock, the last drop of blood of every needlessly spoiled innocence— thank you, lord. 

He knew that the god of the trees was not the god of corporations, so he could not feel kinship with a world that recognized the personhood of corporations without recognizing the personhood, the divinity, of trees. There was a barking voice in his era which told folks that god created folks in god’s image. 

He knew trees were people more than corporations without looking at a single trunk. This he could see in his mind’s eye, the mind of god, which he was told he was created with.

[a-temple-in-unpeopled-land]

Baths

Now the thoughts are slow like the speed of a pen rather than the speed of a thought. Not every sentence needs to be completed so let’s begin there. 

A thought to present the bath as a setting, knowing that’s where I want to be having these reflections, but I’d always eventually tell you that I’m sitting at a desk just now and the bathtub in question is thirty-seven miles away in an apartment I’ll only have access to for another handful of weeks. That apartment and the matter of the bathtub are not part of this story. Not now. 

Thoughts I hadn’t recorded that occurred to me when I truly wanted to see the end of thinking. The overheating of my body in essential oils; not being the first one to think of a bath as a soup of self, this being of course related to the willingness to divulge the inner narrative as inside becomes outside through perspiring pores, tear ducts, and orifices which must become plumb with water (but to what degree? I’m not a medical expert). I simply pee in the bath this time with full acceptance. I will take a shower as I drain the tub, standing shin-deep in the residual drainage as new water rains onto me from above. I can’t live with my life at any time but I would not accept to smell like lavender and hot piss after what is meant to be a cleansing act. Life is meant to be either a comedy or a tragedy. 

So much easier to get lost in the jumbled mind of a phone than to follow any task to completion. What were we talking about? I will never reread what has been written. I do remember the tail-end, though, so fair to say you wanted me to veer from hot piss anyway. 

I keep social media apps off my home screen so to access them I have to pull up the search bar and type their names. My rationale for this procedure being that the mere labor required to access the medium, the less likely I would be to mindlessly wander in their reaches. I suspect I’ve only increased my daily mental effort by some degree— how many calories are burned to type “Facebook” while sleepwalking?— but whatever, you weren’t keeping track anyway. I assume you’re all online within each new fifteen minute segment of the twenty-four hour cycle and I assume you assume the same thing about me. Some habits exceed shame. Your phone started spitting those data points at you after some uncalled-for update and your inner child felt a pang like the numb thud of another fallen branch from a long-dead tree and you turned that rude notification setting off, as did we all. Or you’re one of those hibernating bears that only register subconsciously the judgement of those occasional banners and have swipe-snoozed them away for the past eight years. 

Average screen time: 6 hours

This really isn’t supposed to make you uncomfortable about yourself. I promise, this is a me thing. We don’t have anything in common and you know this well enough to void anything from your eyes and ears which might cause alarm. These are the thoughts of an anxious depressant who has not spoken to more humans in as many years as he has fingers and toes to count them (he has all of the expected numbers of fingers and toes if you were wondering) and the man just told you he pissed in his bath, so please do let go of any concern. This is all of the same nature as a TikTok feed. There may be a labor worker’s body mechanically separated into precise three-inch laminated layers in a land where warehouse regulations aren’t so tight, but the death was filmed on the shittiest CCTV trickled through The Feed on a seven-second loop within our two-hour doomscroll, so again, what were we talking about?

I’d want to know about your memory. What’s your sense of time? That dedicated piece of my brain is charcoal. Smatterings? Remembrances. Reels!— let’s keep the theme. Reels of light and sound for a precious few moments pass before my eyes. I never know if it’s a memory or a dream, or merely a projection I’m developing in the current moment. I see pictures of pictures. Not the memory of my father and I on a swing, smiling, with matching cowboy hats (which I’m sure we never otherwise wore), but a screenshot of the framed picture of that moment we had on a mantel or a table, a memory so poor it took years of passing the image to cast a single likeness in my mind. But there it is, something. Our two faces, the hats, an impression that my father’s face had more dimples then, or deeper ones, and a feeling that dimples in pictures are indicative of true happiness. 

I do recall driving out to go hunting with my father. Nothing about the presumable-several days we spent in the field, but just a wheel of guardrail and eclipses of shadows passing through its corrugation onto my face through the car window, then looking ahead at a straightaway of empty road with long green grasses on either side, and looking back at that turn we’d emerged from, at the tail of the guardrail, and thinking to myself, “I am going to purposefully remember this moment,” before turning my gaze upward to a hill of green on which peaked a slowly turning, wooden, blue windmill. Now why the hell would you want to have spent this time learning about that windmill, the turn, shadows, or guardrails, is a question to which I cannot supply an answer and I apologize for hijacking your attention to that end. 

There have been moments where the pores I sweat through become much larger and I diffuse into the bath everything inside, so that were you to intrude, the caspases released into my form would stain your eyes something biliously brown, yellow, and orange, as only the most primary life-sustaining cells commingle for a moment unguarded by structure. I’d simper in my soup while you vomit in the toilet beside me and we’d be as kindred as becoming allows. This scene, I know, is a horrible scene. I never promised I was in a very polished state of mind. Writing as an image can conflate the writer’s true estate. Why did you see words in a line within paragraphs and presume an order within their orderer? But how ugly to begin with preambled apologies for one’s inner state when the audience is here for entertainment. The layers are laminated, remember, just blood within plastic and no spillage. This will not get on you.