I Am Trapped Beneath This Blooming Sky

I am trapped beneath this blooming sky, enraptured, eager to stay planted, unable or unwilling to move from this spot. My neck aches from looking up, my lids quiver from a reluctance to shut. I am the only one witnessing the world from this vantage point as are you from yours—all of you are. How many multitudes engaged in a singular and never again moment. I struggle to hold on as if it were the last, as if there were no assurances that the next moment will come. 

And really, there is no assurance. What no one knows (except, of course, those of us experiencing it) is that shortly before our time comes to be taken from this world, we are visited with a choice. We are given the opportunity for a glimpse into what comes next—an unveiling of mysteries, a revelation of what all this means—what all this was meant for, so that we may reconcile our passage from here to there. But we cannot reveal this knowledge and if we do, all any of you will hear from us are our words translated into nonsense. For us, the consequence of this transgression is the loss of what comes after and we will be cast infinitely into darkness. 

The starlit capacity of our sorrow (grief is not a line, it’s a constellation, as a friend of mine once said)

is illuminated by a million burning suns. There is no dark corner where our grief can hide, no cold banishment where it can simply fade away. 

The first morning of my purgatory lies upon me like a sheet of gauze that will not be lifted until my passing is in order. I will walk the world a half-ghost, seen but not touched, heard but not understood.

They will begin to feel the quivering of grief but will not know its depth or its origin. and my grief will be doubled by my own—by my inability to relieve them of the coming of theirs.

What we are told is that we will not hunger for knowledge after this life, that the opportunity to know the mysteries of the universe is simply a small gift to satisfy our appetite as we realize that knowledge, like hunger, will not follow us from this life into the next. 

But to be stripped of this hunger to know seems more hell than heaven. 

That which is beautiful and that which is apart from beauty become again united. 

Is knowledge always partnered with regret? 

Do we really want an end to the mystery, do we really want to know?

Everything is being revealed to me. I sit across the table from you. My reflection in the mirror behind you is incongruent with the clarity I see. But you look at me with sadness, sensing that my time here is quickly fading. I wish I could tell you, I wish I could reach you, but I knew this would be impossible when I agreed to this arrangement. I knew that I would be locked inside myself. (This is to be caged with a memory of our freedom. It isn’t the walls of the prison that torment us but rather the memory of the world and our estrangement from it—the memory of our nature.)

Both of you kiss me on the forehead before leaving. I try to speak even a single word to communicate what I am seeing but my mouth droops and does not comply. I watch as you pass through the door and into the hallway; despair glows in a halo of ochre, clinging to your bodies, compounding the gravity that pulls you to the earth. 

It occurs to me that this may be a hell I chose; the trading of connection for knowledge.

I think I understand, finally, what they spoke of when they spoke of original sin.

I am dizzy in this whirlpool of death and life, of being and not being. Even with this knowledge, I still do not know my fate and I feel more entombed, more bound even as I inch closer to my final disengagement from the world. 

I would not do this if I had the choice to make again. The secrets are less than I imagined, my mind, less settled. 

My choice has me shuttered away, my children had no choice but to arrange that I be taken care of, and they reluctantly followed my wish to never be a burden to them. They visit me daily, try to hide their sadness as they sit beside their disappearing father. There are others here who made the same choice as me. We recognize the anguish in each other’s eyes. 

My words don’t come out as I intend them. I may be thinking (and trying to say) “there is an intermingling of our thoughts, and the human race, and in fact all of the cosmos, is connected in this web of ideas and experiences” instead it comes out “I am stuck in a web made by a spider with a human face” And no matter how I try to will my words and thoughts into the form I want to communicate to you, I cannot do it and I remain stuck, as if in a dream where my body will not conform to my wishes. 

I sit by the tracks. I watch the trains pass in both directions. They are limited to the rails on which they travel, unable to deviate from a predetermined course, their destinations set, the only hope for deviation limited to a derailment, a tragedy; but if you are a train, where does that get you? But for us (we humans) the risk of disaster is worth the reward of release from the rails that hold us to this singular course. 

“Here is the train I told you about. It is silver but sounds like gold. It falls into me as I watch it pass. I am rewarded in the form of disaster.”

This is what you hear me say, these are not my words, my thoughts. These are the words my mouth deceives me with (my mouth corrupts my words) (this is how my mouth betrays me). I hear these words fall from my mouth like children released from supervision. It is all chaos and play, following no rules of faithfulness to decorum. 

Multiply this and then keep multiplying.

Multiply everything by everything and do this over and over until you are exhausted, until your life has almost run out. I think about what everyone does, my thoughts/worries/concerns are not unique. Most of what we do, most of what we are is distractions— distractions from the questions at our core. I wonder why we forget this, why we are so easily seduced by these diversions. The chatter calls louder to us than this inner voice that whispers perpetually, “why?” 

But I am trapped not only beneath this sky but also within myself, made mute and informed by a desire only to have this “why” answered.

But the cost is so great, the cost of everything is so great.

It is too late, I am aware that it is too late. I sit here captured in the trap laid by my reason. I am ensnared in the web of my inquisition. I drink water from a straw, have my soiled undergarments changed by people who resent my frailty, and blame me for their position in life. (it is difficult to tell you this, it is difficult to admit this is what has become of me) 

If I could be released from this place/state (prison?) for just one moment more, I would denounce reason and tell you both, my little loves, to abandon everything that doesn’t wriggle up from your gut. I am not unaware of the irony, that it took losing my mind to understand that I should have abandoned it long ago. Who could I have become if I had never cared who I’d become?

I am trying to will my words into some kind of sense; trying to steer clear of metaphors that only obfuscate and cloud my meaning; though I often miss the mystery and beauty of those cloud-filled skies. Isn’t the magic of language contained in its inadequacies? Every word and phrase something fragile, carrying with it an infinity of interpretations—unable to contain the truth of even the simplest thing—its meaning morphed into the world, the experiences, the perceptions of its receiver. 

Language is a map of the world.

I have given away everything I have and I live with my choice. None of what I know now has diminished my regret. Well, that is not true. I am full of regret but I would always make the same choice, no matter how many opportunities I would have to change it.

None

of what I know

now

has diminished

my 

regret 

But it may also not diminish the small hope or suspicion that it may all turn out alright in the end.

My regret has not been diminished by what I now know.

This is the story of the tree of knowledge, the banishment from the garden told over and over, always with different actors. A single line of dialogue, a simple “yes”

And god is the serpent who tempts, he always will be, he always was, even in the original story.

Opposites are not two things, but one. We cannot separate anything from anything else, or so I thought, before this. Contradiction is the engine that drives us; this is what I am discovering in this isolation. It is not knowledge that moves us forward, it is the perpetual shift between knowing and unknowing, an almost satisfaction, but never quite. And it is not a quest for knowledge that we want. What we want is to never really know, to always have a way out. I am waiting for the madness to kick in, is that what will happen before all this is erased? This is a torture to be aware of the contradictions and to be trapped within them. 

Nothing is as it seems, but everything is there, right in front of us. And isn’t this a contradiction? But I can think of no other way to say it. I can think of no better way to stay attuned to my surroundings, to my predicament. You come again to visit, as you do every day and I love you so much for it, but why won’t either of you shake the sadness from your faces? It is as if I am already gone, but for you, that is probably already true. I am so sorry for my selfishness, that I succumbed so easily to the lure of answers, the deception of knowledge. And the two of you sit here, each holding one of my hands, softly stroking my hair, holding back tears, thinking of all that never was, nor will be. And I watch and feel my body decay as my imprisoned mind fills with the knowledge of the universe. It flows into me with gleeful cruelty, as if knowledge had a mind of its own—as if knowledge was as depraved as man. 

And is this the choice we’re faced with? To be dumb and happy or enlightened and (but, yet) befallen with grief? 

Sometimes at night I wander the halls. I pass through halos of light, I pass through shadows of fear. The quiet compounds my predicament. I peer through doors, left open in hopes that something will enter and end the misery of their isolation.

I am sorry, my darlings, that my final days are shrouded in this darkness. I need you most now and cannot reach you, I feed the sadness that shrouds your hours, and I do not blame you if you secretly wish it would all just end. I know it is because you love me and your grief is only just beginning. But we also secretly long to hold on, we don’t want our pain to end because it can only end in nothingness. Our anguish ends only when we do. All I want to leave behind is your knowing that I love you, nothing else has any substance, nothing else is real except its tragic opposite. 

I have seen how everything works. It is fantastic but I have lost that excruciating and beautiful wonder of not knowing. The stars are no longer mysterious, the vastness no longer fills me with an equal vastness of the beauty I can not comprehend. We hold on to those we love because we do not know when we will no longer be able to hold on at all. We seek connection with what is ours, it is what makes us special or at least what makes us think or believe that we are. We require ignorance to live a life of meaning, of “knowing” because we must, not because we actually do. Choosing is what matters, and choosing in the face of this deafening unknowing—of everything that tells us we will never have a choice, is what makes us human, what makes us matter. Beauty was before we were, and will continue in some form forever after us. 

When the two of you were born I felt as though all the mysteries of the universe had been revealed to me, but also that all I did not know had been multiplied a thousandfold. I did not know what you would become. Every moment was filled with terror and I knew this fear filled every space inside me, that you had made bigger, merely by your arrival. 

I have always fought (resisted) the notion of being locked in time. Anything static was a prison, anything that could be named, a tomb. But it was not the unknown I feared. I feared what might know me, what might see through the construct of my reason. What we know tints the lens through which we see the world until its opaqueness becomes a mirror, reflecting back to us this knowledge as if watching a film of our own making playing on an endless loop. And we are blinded to that moment when it loops back to the beginning. Perhaps we always blink at the moment when that frame passes and we continue to believe that life flows in an uninterrupted and perfect line. 

But nothing is a perfect line, and grief is an atmosphere that fills our lungs with every breath. We breathe in grief, we exhale grief. The leaves rustle, the birds fly, their wings buoyed on the turbulent spirals and swirls of despair.

 Is a person’s future as embedded within them as is their past?  We can draw a line from a thing to its origin, but is the path to its future as clearly marked? I think it might be, though I have always believed, always needed to believe otherwise. But none of this makes any sense, there is no logic here. And here it is not true that “the more I know the more I realize I don’t know”, that is a quaint humility. What I know is that I am desperate to not know. I am the active author of my own ignorance, diligently and desperately editing out all truth, leaving gaping spaces for obscurity to fill. 

What I have come to understand, what I have been taught to understand, is that to become mature, to become an adult means to accept with certainty that you know. This certainty provides stability and a pathway to the diligent work of belonging. And even failure or profound deviance, if it is done, and repented for, within the framework of this belonging, does not strip us of this adulthood or maturity. We remain members of the preferred social structure and deeply woven into the fabric of what it is to be a person, a human being, productive and ultimately obedient, a member of the cast of a play written long before our ability to remember that it was not written for us. 

There are things that I wanted that I did not get, things that dissolved in the frivolity of childhood as I stepped across the threshold to becoming a man. I was a man who knew things. I was a man who belonged.

I want you to stop what you are doing, I want you to disregard and disavow all of this. I want you to stop believing there is anything you must know. I want you to see the world in the full abundance of your un-knowing. Revel in the mystery, my darlings. Frolic in the joy that you are free.