The Declarations Of The Ladder

Solitude and society must come together and succeed one another, to be green, to get green, to become green, to go on fasting, to go on learning, to go on going on. Solitude feeds the instincts with everything exultant. Because I don’t know. You’re alone. The world is by your side, stabbing the bureau. Clobbering it with light.

I know what to do. Hold this sentence a minute while I write it. Ok? Ok. I think it’s done. The crust is language, but the inside is totally shiny.

While someone is in danger of dying, I’m upset. But I try to take someone aside and explain it pedagogically, like an engagement ring. I get all sparkly and serious. Life is a whisper. We’re just whispered into this life and then we come out all goopy with blood and a doctor slaps our butts and then we spend decades trying to figure it all out. Or at least give it meaning. If you can find meaning, great. But a lot of us have to make our own meaning.

I’m on call two weekends a month. I accept it because I love what I do, otherwise I wouldn’t have struggled to stay in this very harsh environment, especially for the elderly. The bones are arthritic and the muscles are sore. But the benefits to be derived from achieving the religious goals of life or, in non-religious contexts, the search for ultimate meanings, is involved in the care of a person or a group or oneself, oneself in particular, and by that I mean the inner experience, the romance with existence which, by the time one is reaching old age, has become a constant web of sticky thread and concentrated activity, the structure of experience studied from the point of view of one’s subjectivity, which can only be escaped through language, but not any language, the language of éclairs, the language of sloops on the open sea.

The research that I’ve conducted on crystallizing the ambivalence of the world over a specific area of practice so as to ward off fear and uncertainty, all that escapes us in our lives, has been achieved by framing. Take the car, for example: it has four wheels and an engine. This is what is known in phenomenology as a temporal awareness within the stream of consciousness. The frame is made up of the contextual aspects of intentional activities. If the light is red, we stop. We might take the time to change a CD or look at the car next to us. But when the light is green, we press down on the accelerator pedal and our life assumes velocity, our dependence on the quantum-mechanical systems to which we may belong lead us to assume some awareness for the conditions of our experience.

The rest is clocks and closets and Independence Day. That can have many meanings. But the elemental drift of it all will sparkle like rails in the Mexican sun when the legs find their ground and the dotage of dream and duodenum become our eyes, our vision, our silk shirt and extreme modesty focused on the sinuous movements of a rattlesnake as it glides under a rock.

This is when solitude becomes aesthetic. When the incandescence asleep in the house of our mind awakens to the gestures of the dark, the spin of the planet, the declarations of the ladder rising into the first glimmer of stars on the ever-elusive horizon. You know? Over there, by the barn. The red one, with the horse in front. The black mare with fire in her eyes.