Jorge: In the confessional

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In the confessional J felt free and blind -- free because he was blind. Only God and Sam could see or feel his brain. (He himself could not.)

I think (he said) I have always felt a sort of sixth port of sensation -- a sixth opening for "impressions" and perceptions and anguish to come in. It was lodged in my back and from there poked a great gash in my stomach or somewhere a bit lower down -- one of those places over which one had no control.

And these "sixth sense" perceptions I could not describe, Father. And these perceptions I could not even share.

They could not be reproduced, codified or measured. Did they exist?

When everyone said they did not exist, what could I say to refute this? They (the sensations themselves) refuted this but publicly did not. Publicity seemed to kill them.

So they afflicted me but were silent.

I would be covered with sweat and my underwear would be damp with fear. I felt most duly out of control.

Tell me, Father Sam asked. Did you feel God speaking to you through this odd opening?

Oh yes, I said -- so much so -- so very much -- in part -- fully -- yes -- I don't know!

But also demons would sometimes grab the microphone.

But yes. Okay. God as well, God on top. So that even when my muscles became strong enough to close this down -- to close it off -- I knew I must not do so. Sam.

Sam? Are you there?

Si, escucho.

Je t'ecoute. Poor cripply little bean you are.

Sam, tell me. Have you ever felt something similar?

No I have not, Sam said.

But often my heart clamps down to the point that I can't breathe. And I wonder if there is a relation.

Was any of this feeling just repressed sexuality? No not even possile. In this epoch the only thing that isn't repressed is that. It always stands at the uppermost fringe, without shading, without mystery, oddly without fear.

So I don't think any of this is about sex per se, only one can't see the true subject matter through the thick fronds of sex but that is different. It hangs down and hides the true subject matter and the true fear.

Because now it seems the subject of God has all the intense forbiddenness that sex used to have. Dark and folded and furtively put away.

But how do I even know about it? I know about it from behind me. It is this electricity between my shoulder blades -- it rustles the little black hairs there and makes them rise.

It clarifies and illumines the network -- what network? -- the great big field of relations that lights up below the reason and then passes invisibly through the reason and then materializes like an impossibility before the eyes. Father, I am scared.

Don't be. This is important.

Well, there is this other way that things come to be, I mean it's not resemblance or contiguity or God knows cause/effect so Hume just plain missed out on the most important thing happening, which I can't even demonstrate or prove or put my finger on. A thing is there and it's part of the things of a larger expanse -- they don't resemble each other, they are neither "far" nor "near" in time and space and they don't even bother with cause and effect. Yet the meaning hangs as though it were pre-strewn and pre-threaded.

Everything is darkness. I wish you were my dad. I wish I had one.

Hey, Sam said. Name a single great educational experience that wasn't made out of darkness and pain.

With little points of light laid on it. Not knowledge but really something else.

As though knowledge were, well, sort of deathlike in its way.

*

Some orgy of sorrow.

*

Well, let it be that way then! Doesn't that just mean that you want the truth and not in some "bowing for my Academy Award" fashion but really want it, with your stomach and hips engaged?

*

Father I want to be free Father from the tyranny of justify justify. So much logic and no way to be any other person but the one who grounds things in reasons whether or not they apply Father. Because Father the only times I have ever felt suicidal Father were when logic like some fashion czar pushed me to it and said -- however you feel right now, reason itself has proved you to be a failure and a void so that logically it follows that you should do away with yourself. Like the inevitable acting out of a theorem. Then Father fortunately out of nowhere I see a loopity little dog trotting down the street or I hear a tune out of nowhere's organ (both hopelessly and hopefully out of tune and sinking) and then Father logic completely dissolves Father. It isn't even there, it isn't even not there. It was just this self-contained elitist little suburb I was in and now suddenly I'm not anymore. And so I can make a start.

There it is Father -- the tune coming from right behind my back. As beautiful as my mother's womb.

*

On the blackish street a white dog, a smudge of chalk, chewing a kibble with the same closed eye contentment that Carl used to show before his stroke and even afterwards -- another world, darkness. Each of Jorge's knees would show as white, a kind of phospherence, wherever he walked. When he pulled it back it would disappear.

The presence of the minister next to him, close to him, made J's own heart swing from side to side like a kettleball. So could a heart be good exercise for the heart?

Look up ahead. Mrs Scott was closing down her stall of hot cockles, a good sale day, the world is so hungry, 800 million people hungry tonight. Lord may I rest my bones after this day. But look he's crying she said and who's crying? I asked.

She pointed to the giant sitting on an upturned recycle bin. Oh what a heave -- the asphalt it surged like salty water, look at that, that was my heart. So hot, so very hot that heart. We were sitting in a sauna resting and the gentle giant took all the room. Not malice, that's just how big he was. Where the skin left off the hair took over and all of it was sad. They said he really was gentle but so impossibly ugly that no children would talk to him or shake his hand. They thought he was diseased. White as a ghost and covered with a Jewish brush, he did suck the air from the room and he cried and cried because all the other bears were dead now. Heart attacks or AIDS. Carl too. I would have consoled him Father but I too was afraid of him. Perhaps I was afraid of catching his grief and finding out that he was me. Then right on schedule the ship heaved, the good old Dancing Queen, and we all went on deck to touch the sky and recover. But zut alors I had forgotten my orange life vest! I wasn't wearing much at all, just my hesitation. Then as if ritualized came the familiar near miss as the land homed in for the ship till we swerved. Land! Who could have known that the land was sailing too! Land! the giant cried and jumped overboard and of course the rest of us followed, our quasi electroreceptors sensing the heat of our beds just a few feet ahead and yet a lifetime away.

This all was as weird as John Ashbery being an Episcopalian, which it turns out he is. Father, I need mediation -- quick like oxygen! I believe in God but feel the remoteness of God. I think it will have to be a human who semaphorically waves me closer to God. I can't, you know, just touch God on my own.

I am prepared to die if God is on the other side of what in that case would only pretend to be death. That isn't logical, doesn't make sense, but you know, I love senselessness, it has this homelike feel. It too is me. Reality is a place that you walk around, not this thing you argue about. Father, it is so refreshing to talk to you like this! Because you are there.

I can tell you everything but what you mean to me, which I cannot and must not say.

In the darkness all the people got separated and soon I walked alone. Or almost. You could say: alone like the hotel guest in the Nabokov poem. Everything was black with these lights punctuating it but not lighting anything, merely falling on the surface. Everywhere were warm African men that you could feel but not see. They all greeted Father Sam, everyone seemed to know him. So I was not alone. Nor was ever likely to be. We climbed the stairs to my apartment and he said goodnight with a blessing. He left me alone in the apartment but not alone. May I say that God was there like a tune you can't quite hum, a neglected hymn in the hymnal or a dance that has just one step that you never seem to master. When I practiced it the floor would roll under me. I saw the land approaching via diffusion through the porthole. My home was there. When I got home I would have time to pray again, to be again, to resume this existence that now I could only dream about, although the dream felt so solid that I could put it in my mouth and chew it until it completely dissolved. As indeed it just has.

*

Interlude: old dog, ice cream

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Last night, a night deep in July, my dog got lost facing the corner, trying to leave a room that in fact he knew by heart. It was as though the room had turned. Since he was a dachshund and therefore unable by definition to back up and start again, he just faced the cul de sac and shivered. He had somehow wandered and gotten lost. When he saw me he sadly wagged his tail. I picked him up and pointed him the right way but it still didn't feel right, in fact still doesn't. Once you're in one of those turned around

places you can never really back out. This is death. We all know what death looks like when it approaches. This thing is never just approaching someone else. The approach approaches everyone. So much scary solidarity is too much to feel. And yet earlier I'd been so mad at him for wandering when there was clearly noplace to go. Wandering compulsively -- but I too am that. Compulsive. And getting mad at the old is about the ugliest and most futile of errors. Then it made me shudder to

think how mad I'd been at my mother (July 4th 2005) for refusing the chocolate ice cream she loved, when as one now sees, she knew that she was dying and I of course didn't or by nature of my role,

simply couldn't. Proving that I wasn't really mad but deeply scared. I mean, I was in a corner too, sharing the feeling that I was required to deny. And really only fools can imagine that sharing emotions like this one can have any connection with assuagement. These are not better for being shared. I swear, there he was, shivering in the corner. No emotional response to this would be

of any help. Something else would be needed. Not "I know how you feel." Please not that.

I'd say I can't evade the horrible grip that that corner had. or has and had and has. The sense it gave that death had a beauty and a meaning from which the living were not only excluded but had chosen to be excluded. But so rule-bound is the fact of living that in fact when we the living "choose" to see death as a great evil it is not a choice we have made but the role we are absolutely ethically obligated to play and so this fear involves no choice at all. Neither we nor the dead have really chosen.

And so I was ethically obligated to insist that my mother eat, while she was bound (from a much deeper and, I will insist, a truer place) to resist and say no.

*

Interlude: the ship dream

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In July I was sitting in a suburban house waiting for my dead mother to come pick me up. The house was in both Palo Alto and Palos Verdes, the quiddity separating these 2 cities having been surgically removed with an ugly socioeconomic set of hot tongs. Everywhere the same. And as I waited in this land-locked house I looked out the window and saw "a" bay and in it a large blue and white ship heading straight for the house. At the last moment the house shifted to the left and the ship passed: to the ship's left and my own right, line-dancing. Jerky. And even my dreaming self could taste something distinctly non-Kosher. "It's an optical illusion," I was told. Okay. Time then to wake up. But I wasn't sure I could.

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