PART THREE (for Kendra on her birthday)

Recalling the last couple hours is similar to waking, as is any attempt at memory. One wakes and remembers or remembers and wakes. The horizon between perception and consciousness shifts to accommodate these states, phenomenologically disclosing the worlds of present and past. Simply standing in a room, focusing one’s eyes on the small, quavering movements of one’s hand, the world of the present is continually disclosed. It is as if one has opened some sort of portal, a radius of activity wherein the world is performed to us. Except, in the last couple hours, this portal that we opened merely through the efforts of our own erratic perception, revealed to us an aspect of ourselves, already performing, in the travail of the hand. We woke to our hands. And once we began waking, it was difficult to stop. The intrusions of memory helped assuage us, but they were, conversely, difficult to hold on to. For instance, within the shaking a moment of the past would open. Something seemingly inane. A collection of words. Having been a poet, often the words that came to me were my own. If you consider memory as an act of perception this quirk loses some of its hubris, though I can’t say I wasn’t aware of some lingering embarrassment. Moment’s wing broke. Those are the three words that came to me. It was both the title of a poem and its last line. A sort of drug-influenced poem from my early twenties. If I profess little self-awareness within the actual events of the last couple hours, this small memory alone would seem to contradict me. So it is with the mind, even in the thrall of revelation it is convulsing with possible thought, self-commentary and game.

If anything seemed game-like in the last couple hours, it didn’t in any way contradict the seriousness of our endeavors. The idea of a game is a little like the idea of a joke. For years I had been completely preoccupied by my incapacity to answer the question, “What is a joke?” The possibility of a joke is activated by any number of subtle maneuvers in perspective. Part of the joke seems to be one’s intention of framing it as such. Same with games. Having been yoked for nearly a decade barreling my way through the subterranean commute of millions, I knew getting to work was a kind of game. As was work itself, not to mention showering or making coffee or waving to the woman behind the counter at the diner from the sidewalk outside as I hurried past. Seen objectively, an act that has become difficult if not nauseating, all limitations imposed on the body, when combined with some degree of repetition, constitute a game. And that’s the problem with objectivity—I can immediately identify a slew of exceptions to what I have only just hypothesized. All of this is beside the point, except of course to the degree that my divergences have themselves constituted a kind of game. The important thing is that gaming is something one does with the body. It is a way of expressing what it is a body can be said to do in the world. If it was serious enough for Spinoza it should be serious enough for us. And trust me, I know plenty of jokes about Spinoza. Perhaps the question, “What is a joke?” is the same as the question, “What is a body?” Certainly the humor of existence, its cloying absurdity, is rarely lost on anyone for long. And so games could be said to function as a countermeasure for the joke of the body. And so back to laughter.

In the last couple hours the laughter that was shaking that was the act of becoming oneself through becoming one’s hands did not stop. Like an object put to motion in an ideal, frictionless world, there was no opposing force to counteract the initial inertia of the shaking once it began. I use this example because it couldn’t be more wrong. Part of becoming the shaking that was one’s hands was relinquishing any and all remnants of the ideal that malingered by habit or convenience. And friction existed not as a force, but as all force. Friction was the engine of the real. It was friction alone that allowed the body to veer and zag, to refract and carom. This is why shaking was laughing. Moving included a necessary element of surprise. What was done was never known before the moment of its doing. The only inexorable force was coincidence: one body overlapping another. So it wasn’t an object traveling ceaselessly in one direction, it was the exact opposite: one body detouring inexorably through the surprise of its coincidence with other bodies. That is why I love you. And love, before, had been such a mystery. And it was still, but not an impenetrable mystery, an inexhaustible one. The very word love was itself, to quote Merleau-Ponty, “the surface of an inexhaustible depth.” Perhaps this was one of the mistakes about love before, that it might be without friction, or that it could travel in a single direction. As with any phenomenological enquiry, of which love was surely an example, it came down to attention. How closely is it that one looks at the coincidence of bodies? How well can one disclose the phenomenal aftermath of his or her collision with her or him. As with the revelation of our hands, its inexhaustible nature makes for a terribly exhausting undertaking.

For that reason, the last couple of hours were lovely. That is, they were characterized by love. I laugh and I love you. The Chinese and I love you. The last malingering ideals eviscerated and I love you. Which is one of the reasons, perhaps, that my lapses into thought so often consisted of you. One in particular kept recurring. The paradox is that it took place in a location where I know you have never been. It was daylight, just. The house was still cold and the grass in the backyard was arching with beads of dew. I tiptoed through the lawn, never looking down. It was my conviction that the several pinecones in the untrimmed lawn were only avoidable if one did not try to avoid them. So I looked forward, fixing my gaze on some middle distance between the far alleyway and myself, and emptied my mind of pinecones. My ankles were becoming very wet and the smell of the garden was growing heavier, but I was not stepping on any pinecones. Though this walk to the garden only took an average of seven or eight steps, when it recurred to me during the last couple hours it sometimes seemed like the length of an avenue, and I was so deeply engrossed by the process that imagining the end of the walk could never take enough precedent to actually end it. And all the while I thought of you. It occurs to me that even then, when I was only a young boy, crossing the lawn to eat snap peas and cherry tomatoes before the others had woken, I thought of you. Assuming you feel the same way, this shouldn’t seem at all improbable. Which, if we are to return to the notion of friction, would be perfectly acceptable even if it were so. Of course these things are improbable. Why else would we be here? Of course the pinecones are moving in accordance with your effort not to make an effort not step on them. Why else would they be there? That is why I love you.

PART TWO

I am using words like “beginning” and “last” and “hours,” but it may have occurred to you already that these concepts, even during the last couple hours, were vague at best. Not that our concept of time had been crisp beforehand, but there had been some collective understanding, however provisional. In the last couple hours, time, or the unnamable duration that was now describing the event, was suffused with a sort of drainage, a lessness. Yes, a lessness; as with the color that emerges from the drainage of a darker color that preceded it. The phenomenon that stood in for time was suffused by a lessness that recolored each successive movement of the event. This is my hand was not so much a thought as it was a sinking into the actuality of experience. I am my hand was not a consequent thought, but a further sinking into this actuality. I am shaking was both a continuation of this movement and a paradoxical veer toward levity. If one is shaking, I mean if one’s being consists in shaking, then how is one to remain a man? Why is I not a slow light, an eccentric form of laughter, a current of fortuitous noise? With the introduction of this ambiguous multiplicity, something about time began to dissolve. Whereas once time consisted solely in direction and number, it was suddenly contiguous with color and texture, and the separations of existence were slowly merging into some vibrant contagion.

That this insistence on merging was characteristic of the last couple hours was somewhat ironic. I had wished to be synesthetic for as long as I could remember. I had sat in some isolated place, at the edge of a lake or in the bureaucratic recess of some building, and attempted, always without success, to cross-pollinate my own sensory inputs. I suppose the desire had originally come from my fascination with Alexander Scriabin, the Russian Symbolist composer. Scriabin was a prodigious synesthete who was composing an Armageddon-piece entitled Mysterium when he died. It was to last seven days and climax with the end of the world. Or, not the end of the world exactly, but an end of mankind, and the replacement of our species with a verdant proliferation of higher beings. But now, I fear, I’m confounding my tangent on synesthesia with eschatology. Which is, I suppose, what was ironic about my sudden sensory overlap. There’s nothing like getting what you want when you no longer possess the capacity for desire. At least not desire in the acquisitive sense. That was perhaps the greatest gift of the last couple hours. It was no longer possible to desire anything for one was desire. But here I am definitely jumping ahead of myself. As Scriabin did. In his maniacal rush to compose the Mysterium, Scriabin forsook certain domestic necessities, or else undertook them with such headlong fury as to render them fatal. He died from an infected shaving nick.

Where were we during the last couple hours? That seems like a fair question. Even the Mysterium was intended to “take place” at the foot of the Himalayas. Where were we? Were we at home? But what would that mean? Relative designations, such as home, had largely fallen afield. Whose home? Which home? What aspect of home or how deeply embedded within said aspect? To be frank, these answers no longer seem within grasp, though the questions spring up effortlessly. Like excess skin they had long ago been gobbled up by some microscopic horde. The only immediate value of where one could point toward was the body. The only point was the origin. All other locales would need to be earned, and none before the reckoning of the body had reached at least the shell of the body, which had for so long been mistaken for the entirety. For years the body had existed as a sort of room, one among or inside many. It was a horizon. Inside there were rooms and outside there were rooms. None of which seemed to penetrate the others, though they did contain or inhabit. A line from a poem drifts in: Is there room in the room you room in? We placed ourselves in rooms, spent most of our inefficiently earned capital on them, their furnishings, the abstraction of their value. We placed rooms within ourselves, ideas and acquisitions of culture that ostensibly added up to a self. The body existed at the horizon of each, like a mirror reflecting identity back and forth, creating a whirlpool effect, the black and white alternating on a barber’s pole.

Thus the first revelation of the last couple hours was twofold. There is the body and there is the shocking bondage that is the interdependence of the body. This is what finally obliterated all the rooms. When we became the hand we became the shaking of the hand, which was inseparable from the muscles buttressing the back, which were themselves inseparable from the blood coursing and the impulses firing and the sweat that pooled unbidden upon the brow’s stricken strand. That’s where we were, each of us, stalled sojourning at the origin. With the dissolution of time, our where returned to us at the point our what demanded. So many years had been spent prostheticizing the body, extending it, augmenting it. The body that was a shell became a surface for which attachments could be fashioned. All this began, of course, by asserting that the body itself was a prosthetic of the mind. Where am I? I am blood. What am I? I am shaking. So the answers were not fled, they were simply endless. Where am I? I am falling. What am I? I am hand. I am red. Where am I? I am Chinese. I am kissed. I am scarred. Though it did not feel like labor, this new sense of the body, its being inextricable, simultaneously shrunk the world and expanded the possibilities of experience, pulsing in and out in throbs. Pulse in: the body is a cage. Pulse out: everything is singing. Pulse in: I will die without every necessary part. Pulse out: there is no end to the complexity. What was wagered in the humiliation of returning to the body was won when it was discovered, finally, that the body was enough.

IN THE LAST COUPLE HOURS

In the last couple hours, we did whatever felt most obvious. The idea of producing an idea, much less the correct one, seemed to us an act of intolerable gluttony. We at least understood that much. Production was consumption, making was taking. The nature necessary for such distinction we had long found lacking. When I say obvious, I don’t mean smoking cigarettes or fucking desperately. I don’t even mean fucking tenderly, though that would have been nice. The obvious we had in mind did not required a mind at all. Or, rather, it required a kind of no-mind. Not that these inaccuracies are lost on me. The obvious was purely, or at least to the degree that we were capable, corporeal. So, yes, the mind was involved, but its blithering tyranny had been subsumed into more apt tasks: folding, lobing, collecting and distributing electricity. We looked at our hands and we became their shaking. We felt ourselves contradict, subsumed into the cross movements of recoil and plunge, and soon we were adrift in the new hopelessness, a sort of cloud frilled with hope and bounded only by the vagueness or specificity of the moment.

When I say the last couple hours, I don’t mean to suggest that we counted them. The truth is…well, that is beside the point. When I say the last couple hours, I mean to point toward a certain topography of being. There is no way to know how long those two hours took. But I was telling you about our hands. This is how we initiated the new hopelessness. Our hands shook and we became it. The only thing I can relate it to is walking, or, the process of realizing that walking is only and ever a protracted fall. You are moving over the sidewalk, percussed visually by the regular perpendicular lines, and you say to yourself, “I am falling.” Perhaps you slow down. This helps. You are now falling slower. The abstract balance you were just seconds ago maintaining through movement dissolves and you are left with a miraculous disequilibrium, a shifting from one trajectory of disaster to the next, utterly fluid, proficient. Often this is when one stops altogether. The initial realization that one’s walk is more accurately a fall inevitably leads to, I hope you won’t think this an overstatement, the epiphany that even standing you are not still, or, you are still, in fact, falling. Not that facts are any less beside the point than truth.

So, the beginning of the last couple hours was spent looking at the shaking our hands were and feeling like one who has come to a halt and yet realizes that he or she is not halted at all. That was, at least, the beginning of the beginning. Which, I suppose, be the beginning of many beginnings. A vibration that simultaneously holds and is held. A pattern of veers that bring us into the microcosm of being, that field from which we’ve been so long absent. Of course, lesser thoughts invariably penetrate. At the beginning of the beginning of the last couple hours, I was intermittently shocked out of the vibration of my hands by a feeling of being elsewhere. I would like to say this elsewhere was a cosmic destination, but it was not. Every so often, a designation I realize is unhelpful and vague, I suddenly felt like I was waiting outside a restaurant. Not just any restaurant, but a Chinese restaurant. The kind one may find in a Woody Allen movie. I was with Ivan and we were waiting for our table, standing beneath an awning that stretched to the curb. I was looking forward to a beer, scallion pancakes, shredded chicken and tea. Cars drove by quickly, preceded and trailed by the desperate sound of their rush. Ivan and I held hands. Occasionally, he bent his neck sideways and kissed my hair.

If I was to say that the last couple hours weren’t haunted by countless of these intrusions, I would be missing something dire. Something I should have learned. Not that these episodes contained any particular significance, but…well…I’m sure we’ll get around to how the last couple hours served as an education. I was actually a little relieved by the Chinese scenario. The act of being the shaking that was one’s hands was extremely laborious in a peculiar way. The shaking itself was, obviously, there before the being of the shaking, so it didn’t count as labor, but the realization, the constant waking into the moment, verged on insufferable. When I was my hands shaking I was revelation. Smally perhaps, but it occurs to me that even this first small revelation could be equal to the last, not that there is such a thing. When revelation comes, or when one becomes revelation, its size is beside the point. It is always huge. One always feels like an animal. In time, it becomes clear that one doesn’t merely feel like an animal. If it wasn’t for the Chinese scenario, I don’t know if I could have perpetuated the revelation. The electricity, the transfer, the hold of the current, it all felt like opening into a fire. Of course, the Chinese scenario, its feedback spark, was another part of the revelation, but I didn’t understand that at first.