Flaker of Flints

I lost my ability to read in the old way. When I open a book, the words sort themselves into narrow-minded single file on the page; the mirror-image poems erase themselves half-formed in my mind. I miss those poems. Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking. Like Jekyll I crave that particular darkness curled up within me. Sometimes it almost comes. The books on the shelf rise up in solid lines of singing color, the world drops out, and its hidden shapes snap forward to meet my eyes. But it never lasts. By morning light, the books are all hunched together again with their spines turned out, fossilized, inanimate.

So rests the sky against the earth. The dark, still lake in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high light of the morning. I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire...Content? No, no, no—but refreshed, rested—while waiting.

Where does the frontier lie? Where do we travel to in those dreams of beauty satisfied, laden with significance but without comprehensible meaning, etched far deeper on the mind than any witness of the eyes? Our memories of physical reality, where do they vanish to? While the images of this dream world never grow older. They live—like the memory of a memory. Now. When I have overcome my fears—of others, of myself, of the underlying darkness: at the frontier of the unheard-of. Here ends the known. But, from a source beyond it, something fills my being with its possibilities. Here desire is purified and made lucid: each action is a preparation for, each choice an assent to the unknown. Prevented by the duties of life on the surface from looking down into the depths, yet all the while being slowly trained and molded by them to take the plunge into the deep whence rises the fragrance of a forest star, bearing the promise of a new affection. At the frontier—

I am being driven forward into an unknown land. The pass grows steeper, the air colder and sharper. A wind from my unknown goal stirs the strings of expectation. Still the question: Shall I ever get there? There where life resounds, a clear pure note in the silence.

I am not equal to my longing. Somewhere there should be a place the exact shape of my emptiness— there should be a place responsible for taking one back.

I got a feeling I can't describe: I see this place when I close my eyes. Wake me up if we ever arrive. And tell me how did we, How did we get here?

...In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence...

"Homesick for a place I've never been." I want to go home. Not like my childhood home or the home I live in but the real home. The real place. Since I was little, I’ve gotten this feeling intermittently. It’ll happen when the light shines through my window a certain way, or when I’m comfortable in blankets, or when I feel like everything is ok. Sometimes it happens when I’m feeling neutral as well, but mostly it comes when I’m almost fully relaxed.

Borderline Personality Disorder Diagnostic Criteria: .... 7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.

There is no pain, you are receding: A distant ship, smoke on the horizon. You are only coming through in waves. Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying. When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse Out of the corner of my eye: I turned to look, but it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown, the dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb.

The little soul roams among landscapes, Disappears, returns, draws near, moves away, Evasive and a stranger to itself, now sure, now uncertain of its own existence, whereas the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.