12/10/89

The soul of a nation are its poets. Individuals can't see their souls either.

12/24/89

To be presented with wise thoughts causes me to feel more comfortable in the short run- and more vigilant in the long run.

One thing leads to another. For something not to lead to something else probably means that it wasn't really something at all- it was probably a pseudothing.

12/25/89

So many people can't even commit themselves
to a house. They wander from country to
country, they exchange beliefs the way some
people change a shirt, they exit from and
enter into relationships, they make money
and throw it away with equal indifference,
things endlessly moved from place to place.
After all, there are so many kinds to
live in:- big ones and little ones, ones
in the city and others high above the sea.

The specific person has specific memories.
Some consist of ways of being with
people, knowing them, allowing them to
coexist with you and each other. I
remember long ago myself as a specific
person with specific memories. Now all
these memories consist only of words. An
indefinite calendar of dates follows
such people around. Weaving around each
other in a dance, as interweaving, a
setting and resetting of dates.

Eventually you stop short. What the emotions,
Gertrude, seem to be saying consists mainly
in finding the exact place where the paragraphs begin. These
places consist of freedoms- as many as
exist are the possible ways my steps can take
me places, always back to finding that
the same places where things meet is going to be
called a borderline, a boundary, something that the
Greeks called a god. This is the place where
paragraphs begin and meet.

Paragraphs begin and meet watching. They
begin, she said, with feeling, a specific
feeling. Somewhere beforehand, they fight it all
out with each other and come together to
a place.This is not a place of agreement,
but a place of coming to the same point.

A chain, a connection, consists of
links. Similarly a constellation consists
of stars.The shape of what occurs is
similar to what will come and what
has come before. Links of birth to life and
death to life; connections of blood and
minute types of cells passed from generation
to generation. countless trillions of events.
Bit by bit we stretch ourselves beyond what
we were.

It is all to escape from a trap,
to stay within this shape and elude all
the doors to terror and take the one to
freedom, each one, each nuance a different
kind of freedom. To escape from a
trap the stillness of time burst from its
shell of silence and flashed across a void. One
spark, one fizzle in all the cold emptiness of
no-time; a flicker of an imagination of
a jump, a sly beginning of sly suggestion,
gleaming with a suggestion of one possibililty
in all the black and ancient futility of
absolute nothing. Before there was any
something, endless nothing, stretching far
beyond an imaginary horizon of totally
imaginary nothings.It is not possible to
begin to imagine the doubt surrounding the
possibility of meaning of one tiny flash of
almost nothing in the absolute certainty of
endless nothing. What could one thing possibly
mean in an endless sea of zero? This, in
truth, is the pathohs of all beginnings. A
little fragile bubble blown in the face of total
nothing against a far more than
infinite totality of doubt that follows
the suggestion that this one possible anything
could mean anything against the total
nothing. So silently came this almost total
zero against the endless sea of possible
nothings and long forgotten possible somethings,
that almost as soon as it was something, it was nothing.

This tiny, infinitesimally miniscule something
existed so short a time that the pressure of
the universe's unblinking indifference, measureless
neutrality towards such a puny and brief possibility
of nothing. But in the eons that followed that possibility
multiplied itself so many times, that at
times the vast emptiness itself began to shrink
in its relative size to the equivalent of an
empty box waiting for itself to be nothing
more than a container of something, and at
first only the beginning of something.

The neutral, indifferent smiling separate
empty universe wouldn't begin to give even the
slightest attention to this minescule less than
significant beginning. For all the warmth of the
later neighboring constellation, for all the
heat of billions and billions of later neighboring
suns, this ridiculously meaningless venture into
the gigantically and ever growing nothingness rubbed
it the wrong way and it ceased to exist as
abruptly as the surrounding edge of the growing
universe could flake from the solid granite
of infinite pre-time's solid mass.

But something in the surrounding locale
of meaningless emptiness seemed to remember
the small glimmer, in a kind of reflection of
the glimmer that flickered for a moment in the
mirror of the infinite empty void, giving a reflection
on the silver screen of its infinitude that
resembled in some minutely small way, the
glow, the warmth of that first minute spark. the
reflection flashed again and again against
the infinitely broad expanse of the
horizon of endless no-time. Eventually, the
reflections passed each other and the image
of the original spark grew only minutely
longer. The reflection of the beginning repeated
itself endlessly in the infinite expanse of
almost beginnings. It was so slight it was
hardy to show against the
silent mocking, indifferent expanse
of nothing.

Over the trillions and trillions of eons that
followed this small spark began to be reflected,
began to be imitated. Certain resemblances repeated
themselves, again and again, while other variations
shot out across a vast expanse of time like
a comet, never growing in size, but travelling
and touching on such vast areas that they
acted as messengers, bringing this resemblance to
more and more places.

The resemblance was a fire, or a kind
of fire, but not yet with any head only
a kind of flicker. Yet the resemblence
seemed to suggest something new, something
endlessly smaller in size than the vast
empty universe that mocked and put to
shame any grand illusions on its part
of quasi-time, or almost-time. What
seemed to be covered was something, but always
seemed to be rocking against the magnitude of
endless expanses of absolute nothing.

--------------------------

12/30/89

When I read the above to Toni she said that
it reminded her of Samuel Beckett. I
had to agree, but I was puzzled. This was
on Monday, December 25. Tuesday, when I read the
newspaper in the morning, I read a brief announcement
that S.B. had died the previous Friday, December
22, but out of respect for what the author
"would have" wanted, the announcement was delayed, and
the ceremony was kept secret.

Kklebnekov's insistence that "spiritual"
dates be logged, when coincidences occur.

In the same week, the dictatorships of
Panama and Roumania collapsed.

But so much of life appears coincidental
only at times that press upon us the
connections between human events, when a
good part of so-called rationality consists
of keeping these things secret from ourselves, and
making the interpretations along the lines of conventional
expectation.