Wine (Part XVII)

I don't know if anyone knows the meditation exercise where you envision yourself in the center of a circle of living beings. All the living beings are breathing out black smoke, representing problems, worries, suffering, the whole blasted lot. You're supposed to visualize your indrawn breath as taking in all the smoke and feeding it to your center, where it disappears into some kind of singularity. After a while when you breathe out, you're supposed to visualize your breath as healing rays of brilliant white light. I describe this beacuse of the comparion I want to make to my experience barflying at last call yesterday. Here we finally had a bartender with the air of understanding taking in all our poisonous words and deeds, and reflecting back at us nothing but the transparent glinting white-light glory of glass after glass of booze.

Walking back, I experienced firsthand that if you're on the streets at 4 a.m., it can't be for something wholesome. Crack rock, or hobbling. I didn't take the crack rock. The market is a very different place. It's where the flip side kicks in. During days we have people who walk around in self-satisfaction of something approaching wholeness, but their success is reflected in night-walkers. It is their archetype of the shadow, which I'm taking liberties with, but fuck you. Night-walkers swinging bike locks

Muttering my great confessions and putting the finishing touches on the opera of crazy, taking the hobbled hangnail and dragging it across the city in fruitless learning parabolas. Leaves skitter in newly discovered ghettos. You can almost see terrifying bathtubs through the walls: here the clotheslines of our hard-pressed mothers, there the toy chests of children on welfare, there the cabbage soup of the collective unconscious we have been eating in that time before the dreams even began. Revelry in debauchery not sin. Failure to engineer ecstatic (literally: outside the body) experience. Failure to illuminate the cheeks of rosy child. Failure to see the arabesque in the skittering of dead leaves (how? It's summer after all). There is something missing. Trinity, not quaternity. We all go back to the enveloping bosom of the Great Mother, call it what you will. The mother that births also eats her children. Heat death of the universe? We're quickly approaching nadir. Some time after the alcoholic call to action, and the Wise Old Man, and pointless trials , and the meeting with the Shadow (literally, in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the part in the Water Temple where you fight your shadow to get an extended hookshot). Howl half memorized, and through it all I need more willpower. Too much in denial to confront the terrifying passivity. Seasons change; job hunting and constant rejection is change; the writing of a research paper is change; the quivering meat-bag programming its meat computer. Houses collapse into ash and lava. I could go on. I need to collapse into ash and lava and then come out in Apotheosis. Back home though it was all changed. Dave becoming the Star Child. what a boring universe that entails! I'd hate to have the Secrets handed to me like that. It's like living off someone else's money. Totally counter to the only modern myth left: individuation, however hokey (note: the very definition brings together at least three avenues of my disparate interests).

I just need some reassurance I'm not crazy. But I won't get it. God doesn't exist because we've failed to grab the concept. Same goes for sanity.

Consider: "Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is."