On account of my scheduled creativity being sapped or invaded by PhD rejections and MA coursework such as reading about humankind's coevolution with technology and textuality, self-reflective novels, and Derrida lately, here is a story.
I have these dreams about God. Where God is that majesty, and I am this speck. And there is a demon who chases after me, bounding over coal-coloured mountains. God does not move, and the only way I may reach him is to chase after, while being chased by that snarling and morphing being. The one whose energy reaches and claws at me is one that I do not want to be devoured by, and my energy is as if reaching toward a cool pillar, unmoving, and one that turns whichever way required to face anything but the curling tips of my own fingers.
Driving along the Highway of Heroes a few days ago, the overpasses were populated by what must have summed to be several hundreds of people, accomodated by firetrucks, ambulances, and whatever other municipal vehicles. I thought perhaps there was an impressively organized Olympics protest going on that stretched over a good number of kilometres. I wondered, while listening to Andrew Bird and then Rancid and then Interpol and then an old mix I gave someone, why all of these people were hanging or waving their flags and only facing the direction opposite to what I was driving. Why not both sides? Was I and the dirtied white Volkswagen that just cut me off not worth advertising to for protest? This was before I realized what kind of a highway I was on, and I apologize Northumberland. But I began to think of the forms one must take to be celebrated, the types of deaths required, the commitments one must make and keep. I passed the oncoming hearse, then, and the procession of unlabelled police cars. And considered the unlabelled velcro stickiness by which we keep our presentative selves.
Of course, those citizens were repatriating a young soldier and memorializing the goodness that his absence has produced. That would have been a related news item, if I were to have read the news. This worldly neglect of mine is one thing which creates such horrendous analogies. And that, of course, followed by a related dream where some ones I know were chasing me with bloody mouths, equipped with shouldered artillery and eyes like slits in an endless Team Fortress 2 sequence of ridiculous yet terrifying animation. My thoughts were that I was driving away from these things so that I could better understand them upon my return, but they followed me anyhow. So now that I am home, and that they are elsewhere other than their homes, makes me really wonder about my understanding. I can sense that there have been "meantimes" which have altered these situations in my absence--meantimes of circumstances that involve and are shared by myself, but which my self is not present to be interacted with--and am now sensing those meantimes as existent throughout all the parts of life. So there is my own present, then, where I can roll along for an evening and let my treads fix momentarily upon thoughts that have placed me in a sense I might previously have been unaware of. Because I am a part of some thing which is beyond me, where my reach, mine, is truer than my own arms' immediate wingspan. While I am gone and reading in a different city, people back home can be refereeing a hockey game, or getting surgery, or enjoying a movie with their siblings by an old windmill, or out dancing downtown, or at home cleaning the bathroom, and these are things that occur because I am gone. These are things that can occur because I am gone. And my nervousness for each of these, in being gone, is then without consequence. The gone-ness is a goodness, then, where the hope of my substantive fluidity can finally dissipate into another's. That is where the heroism is, at least for these next seven or eight minutes--in being bitten by the beast, to be gone for some goodness to go on.
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