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He sat beside the old man in the darkness, the hole in the top of the teepee the only source of light.  The old man, naked, sat there quietly watching the fire.
“What are we going to do?” John asked, but the old man said nothing, he just sat, watching the fire.  John wanted the man to say something, wanted him to give a lecture about magic.  John felt comfortable in lectures, felt that someone was in charge and knew that he was going somewhere, comfortably, a journey from one idea, a core set of accepted ideas within the culture to some cultural or intellectual outlier, shepherded carefully by the knowledgeable guide who had researched and plotted out their course.  Here, there was none of that.  John was pressed up against the raw edge of discomfort, disgust, he felt it hard to take deep breaths and not just because of the smoke.  He was having a difficult time concentrating, focusing on anything, his brain was trying to take in all the information at one time.  He did not like not knowing where they were going, he did not like not knowing what they were going to do.  Doing his best to calm down and pretend that he was not in the middle of fucking nowhere with a complete stranger sitting naked and silent beside him about to take part in a ceremony that had no name or description.  John did what he did in situations like this, he framed it as fodder for his novel or a story.  He took another deep breath and closed his eyes, then opened them again.

He created a shaman, a real shaman, not this crazy old man beside him, naked and apparently dumb, but a skinny old man in animal skins with crazy hair and crazier eyes.  They sat in a tent much like the one they were in now, but it was heavy with scented smoke and hung with animal bones.  “What are we doing?” the main character asked.  “What we are going to do,” said the old wise man of John’s creating, “does not have a name.  It is the nameless act.”  “A nameless magic?” asked John’s main character.  “No, we do not even call it magic, for it has no name, and will not be named.  Speech is a magic in and of itself.  This, what we are about to do, is the power that gave us that magic, the power before speech, the light that came out of the darkness, that which gave us our soul and our understanding, our speech and the power to name, and with the power to name, the power to create!  But, there is a flipside to that creation, giving something a name can also diminish it, give it a limit, create what it can and cannot be.  This power that we are about to indulge in is beyond that, its is something that cannot be given a name, it does not exist within your net of words and will not be contained by any term or the craft of human speech.”  John’s main character was awed by this speech, taken aback by the crazy old man’s instinctive understanding of semiotics.

Back in the real teepee, he heard the old man next to him grunt.  It was only a grunt, an exhalation of air through the back of the man’s throat and through his nostrils, but John knew, immediately and certainly, that the old man had been listening to John’s thoughts the entire time, and that the magic that he’d created in his head did not meet with the old man’s approval.

“Well if you don’t like it, why don’t you tell me what I should believe instead?” said John angrily to the old man, embarrassed both that he’d been so easily read and that he’d been so wrong about something he wanted so badly to be right about.

The old man looked at John placidly, pointed to John, poking him hard in the chest with a blunt finger that annoyed John more than he thought it should have.  Then the old man put both hands over his eyes keeping them covered for a moment, then removed them again, looking directly at John.  There was no emotion in his eyes, just a clear-eyed observation.  His gaze withheld nothing from John and in return John could withhold nothing from the gaze, and in that moment he realized just how much unconscious artifice he was accustomed to carrying around with him, how much dancing he did with the information he carried around, how many walls and mazes he had erected to keep people from knowing what it was he was thinking and feeling, and how accustomed he was to walking the labyrinths that other people erected for the exact same reason.  He realized, looking into the open gaze of the naked, fat old man he realized how tired he was, how much energy this took to keep himself from the world around him, and to keep the world around him from himself.  How often he chose to see what people wanted him to believe rather than admitting to himself what he knew to be true just by looking at a person.  His brain tried and failed to launch into an academic observation of the social and personal selves, but something, some thing quick and dark shot the thought out of the air and it crumpled and fell like a crow crushed by a stone.  John was left with nothing but himself and the gaze of the old man and without warning he began to cry.

In his darker moments, the moments between ideas, between recollections and reminisces, the moments when he could do nothing but be honest with the weight that he carried around in the lining of his stomach, in the spaces between his organs, the weight of the shadows that he had swallowed and stored in the secret crevices of his body, he felt wounded, felt broken.  He knew that this secret was not much of a secret, that the track of his life through the snow showed a wounded and staggering man.

He felt he was the best, but had never found a way to show it, not for a long time.

He knew he should be content, that he had a good job with good friends, that there were many things in his life that by any standard of happiness should have been enough for a man of his age and stature.  That he was young and successful with many years ahead of him filled with unseen successes.  And yet it wasn’t.  None of it was good enough, because any stone that he might take pride in could be flipped to reveal a failure in disguise of success.  And he knew that given a certain kind of self-discipline he might learn to leave those stones lay as they were, to see only the successes, yet he could not settle for that, for he felt that kind of discipline was settling for the illusion of success rather than its reality.  He wanted a stone he could not turn over, a stone that did not have an underside, one that could not, in any light, be viewed as a disappointment.

He regretted, perhaps most of all, and perhaps this was the root of all his other worries, concerns and insuffiencies, his inability to give himself wholly to anything, his inability to truly commit himself to something, without reservation and without regret.  He was not consumed, as he felt so many of his friends were, by anything.  No, that was not true, he was consumed only by the need to know that this was real, by the fear that none of this was.  It was a cycle, he knew, that his passion undermined passion, that the one thing he was dedicated to unraveled anything good and satisfying in his life.  And yet, how could he trust anything that could not withstand the scrutiny?  How could he trust anything at all?

02.13

There is something fragile and beautiful, he thinks, about all of this.  Something ephemeral that I could never articulate with words.  He thinks of, but does not look at, the board behind him, filled with the symbols of his scrawling.  He sits in a suit of rough brown material, whose thickness has always reassured him, and a non-descript tie that he wears everyday like a piece of camouflage.  He sits with his feet on the desk, an empty desk, a desk for show, for resting things upon but not for storing things.  He sits at this desk, the lecture hall empty, the children with unkempt hair and untidy minds filtered out, never in a hurry, never in a hurry.  He sits at this desk, the clock ticking away from four towards five, academia emptying of its charges, its overseers still at their desks, their desks used for storing things and for resting things upon, dotting their eyes and crossing their teeth.  He sits at this empty desk and his feet are up, resting upon the corner, the bureaucratic chair, a pitiful thing whose upholstery, never much to speak of, is fraying to the point of tearing, allowing patches of bureaucratic yellow foam, the cheap kind that has no elasticity and flattens at the rumor of pressure, has begun to peak through, like a pesky, toxic fungus.  He leans back in this chair, his feet on the corner of the desk thinking that in another time, in another place he would be smoking a cigarette, a Chesterfield, he thinks, back when that brand name carried some elegance and represented something more than the nouveau-riche credentials of being smoked by grubby punks at art space openings.  But maybe that was his imagination, constructing, as usual, a time and a place that never existed, reconstructing nothing more than a myth that existed before he was born, or before he was coherent at least, which left him, perhaps more noble or more pathetic than his peers who, he thought, accepted and cherished the myths of the present day without reservation or regret, without the nostalgia that stained the majority of his thoughts like coffee or soda, that colored the light of consciousness that filtered into the glass-walled cathedral of his mind.

He sat at this desk with his feet in the air and no cigarette neither imagining that he had accomplished something, nor worried that he had accomplished nothing.  The truth, well, the truth was inconsequential.  This he knew from experience, the experience of striving for and failing to find anything concrete in his life, anything concrete in life.  Life, his life, since he knew that outside of empirical truth there was only subjective reality, thus he could, he would, only speak for himself and avoid with a meticulousness that his coworkers and friends found eccentric to the point of annoyance, speaking on behalf of anyone else, so that he had, almost completely, eliminated the word ‘you’ from his vocabulary, except when he was speaking directly to someone, as, he often thought in his habitual emotional deconstruction of important and not so important conversations, the word was meant to be used, and not in the universal sense, the way in which the word was almost exclusively used by the rest of the world.  This had the inverse consequence of creating an irritation that had not existed before, an emotional allergy to the use of the word ‘You’ when the person really meant ‘I’.  Thus, he thought, my life, not life in general, which was something else entirely, a sprawling mass of muscles, bones, blood, semen, sweat and shit that extended itself continually forward despite the poison that filled the air and the toxins that filled the seas, yes that was life, the insatiable urge to push forward despite the drawbacks, the primal urge to continue, drawn on by the unspeakable, the unknowable, the mystery that infuses the instant just out of site, the moment grasped for but never caught.  This is life, he thought, of which I cannot speak with any experience, but only construct poetic images that reflect my own desire for that urge, my own longing for that longing, because life, my life, does not feel full of fire and urges, but more like a shifting bog of emotional turmoil to be survived, at best.

Which is why, sitting in the quiet classroom, his feet up on the corner of the desk, the air conditioning still humming in the southern Californian autumn, he didn’t worry about whether or not he had taught anything today, whether any of the darts he’d worked so hard to puncture their minds with had found their mark and were, even now, as these slovenly children made their way through buildings, into parking lots, into automobiles and onto freeways, seeping their slow poison of curiosity and knowledge into the otherwise distracted and frantic minds.  He knew that he would never know, and in seeking to know only sought to undermine himself.  He had, in surviving the years of self-abuse and self-sabotage, learned to walk this path ever so delicately, to rest in the moment following a lecture, a class, a conversation and observer his reactions without reacting to them.  He had learned, through years of ritual scarring, to still his mind and keep from reacting to his reactions, to keenly observe his feelings about his feelings and subdue them before they spiraled out of control into a frenzy of self-loathing and regret over missed opportunities and social faux pas, which he knew, again from wisdom culled of pain and depression, were more of his own creation than they were a shared reality with the lecture, class conversation in which he had just taken part.

So he sat there, in the empty lecture hall, the southern Californian dusk threatening from the west, though invisible in the otherwise beige fortress that contained the lecture hall in which he sat, dancing very carefully with himself, allowing that animal part of him to obsessively review the last seventy-five minutes for signs of weakness or error, a paranoid sailor checking his knots, an autistic fisherman checking his nets, and at each moment of tension, at each discovery of some perceived stumble or misstep he relaxed, drew back and continued on avoiding becoming tangled in the net of his own making.  And when he had finished his imaginary cigarette, when there were no knots left to check he took a deep breath and exhaled, he removed his feet from the idea of a desk on which they had been resting, relieved the chair of its burden for another Friday, retrieved the belongings that he had brought with him and, like the children before him, made his own pilgrimage to the parking lot, got in his car and started the engine blissfully unaware that he would drive home through light traffic to find out that his father had died that afternoon.