Walking out on the Corner

Walking out on the corner. To the fast street. I feel that if I am walking I am doing something. At another level, I know it is an illusion. Walk, walk, walk into the rain.

He walked, says the obituary. He strove for several years, as hard as he could, and then he perished. 

To strive, to attempt, and to fail, even through the pain and wilderness. Even through the silence. To write, in place of it. When the whole world looks to you mad and senseless, when the flickering images seem like dreams that mean nothing and cannot be interpreted, when the words on the page are like ink-marks, signifying nothing. You don't see the world behind them any more. They have no significance.

You pray of course, of course you do. You want at least something, the thing you want least is to fall behind. Sometimes I listen to the silence as though it were sound, as though it contained voices of living people. Sometimes I hear echoes.

I went downstairs. I wondered whether I was normal. I wondered whether good things would come. Good, banal, simple things, that I can tell the doctor about, and he can smile willingly along with me, and recognise each crystal-clear, clarion note of peace and joy. I wonder if it will happen. 

I go to the priest, and confess, perhaps. But I find warring within me, the old rebellion against the authority he represents. I find it strong in my viscera, and expanding outward. I am my own and not his. I am not another's except willingly, and I will not willingly become an object to be acted upon. That is not my way. So I petition the Lord with prayer, and I lay my raw emotions bare to him, and he knows my resentment, and how I am willing to eradicate it for a boon.

The boon shall be; that this weight and load shall be lifted from the pit of my stomach, this shadow that therein abides and this cramp upon my heart, this hatred and this palsy, this dimming of the eyes, this numbing of the tongue, that if I were an ancient I could write psalms to interpret, but since I am a modern, I can only endure mutely.

And the temptations of death linger always by my right hand, like a disgraceful secret, and at the same time like an intimacy more loathsome than the worst crime, and more final, because encompassing everything, because encapsulating myself as a corpse, as a thing surrendered, without that spirit of breath which is the spirit of rebellion. 

I struggle not to become a thing, and thus I reluctantly embrace life, meeting it, though, shyly, and with reserve, and also with disgust. It frightens me more than death, the last word, because it confines itself not to finality but only reiterates and utters strings and permutations of incident, effluvia and waste of phenomena, all of it subject to frightful exegesis or mortal indifference, and in all this not an ounce of joy. And I wander midnight streets, saying out loud, to myself, I am going mad.

I struggle not to become a thing. Not to become a corpse, or a slave. I strive, then, I fight. Combine your biology, your physical form, and your intellect, and your will, with the wise promptings of the heart and the counsel, the diamond-hard counsel of your human sapience, that trait from which your species takes its name. Fight, then, but without illusion, and never declare yourself beaten, for it is impossible to beat such a combination, such a dynamic thing as a heart coupled with a head.