Dearest Bleaders,
I don’t think it matters that we forget so much. There was a stage of about a year wherein the little boy lined things up: a collection of thread spools would be coaxed out of crowd formation and aligned in drill-squad. A year of the surprise of order behind every turn, like a line of cds stretching their rainbowed mirrors from the kitchen through the dining room, right to the mouth of the living room television. Then at some point the boy stopped lining things up. We still talked about it for a while, describing to friends the frequency of this linear art. Then at some point we stopped mentioning it, and now when we see photographs of stickers placed like a stocking-line neatly up the mother’s leg, or any other elongation of a theme, it’s a surprise reunion with another time. Oh, yeah, remember all those lines? The boy who had a face of gentle beauty and serious intent, surveying the job, is gone now, is now a small man who knows what television shows he wants to watch and what time they’re on. These losses are immense and yet they are the least of our poetic problems.
The most of our poetic problems is the will to persist. Behind every action of great courage is a delusion. The delusion is not exactly false, but neither is it quite true. You may believe that if you get the words all in the right order some kind of invisible confetti will descend and the actual attention of your father will turn towards you the way your wintery little town slowly but inarguably rolls its face towards the sun. Or you may feel that some inner wrongness in your outer organs, some mismatch of mental valves, could be laparoscopically corrected were you only able to get the text precise and perhaps win a prize for it. Sanity has something to do with recognizing reality, but the connection is loose, because reality bears out that this delusion of purpose is a delusion. When something comes true, something indeed comes true, but not the part we meant or even thought of. The part that comes true comes true without bringing anything else into being.
In high clarity is despair. How could it be otherwise? To be able to be in the world requires delusion, so the temporary displacement of delusion is a time out of ability. You are in a time out of the world.
Better to seek the delusionless delusion, the delusion that is no delusion? Or the delusion that knows it is a delusion? Not best is the deluded delusion because part of you always knows better, either deeply, in wisdom, or on the surface, vaguely noting that small tests of the delusion keep oddly failing. And that piles up and piles up until the whole thing comes down.
For many people the whole thing eventually comes down. For others nothing ever went up in the first place. For those who do not yet know what I am talking about, perhaps keep this as a caution in the back of your mind. If you ever find yourself lost and bereft of delusion, without even enough delusion to sit at the desk, and you think you are a mountain among mountains but suddenly crumbling, remember that it has been suggested that the mountains around you are ocean waves and you are only crashing because crashing is what waves do.
love,
Jennifer
