Excerpts from the pink book

Just beyond
yourself.

It's where
you need
to be.

Half a step
into 
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you'll meet.

There is a road
always beckoning.

When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far
horizon
and deep in
the foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,
that's how
you know
it's the road
you have
to follow.
...

Just Beyond Yourself

---

Mao had his little red book. These days, I have my little pink one. Rants and reveries, wails and ecstasies. My pink book started as a drug journal, became a book of lamentations, and continues to transmute regularly, closer than ever to being purely uncategorizable … and on its way ‘round to swallowing its own tail, I’m sure. For this project, a pastiche of excerpts from the pink book works fine. Low-key, in this reincarnated space, most of the feelings to-date have been pilfered straight from its pages. Illustrations¹ pilfered too, post facto and from the world at-large, but just as I had envisioned them.

---

On truth, that slippery fellow

We have our signature ways of distorting difficult realities. Fact-flexing. As light passing gravitational bodies bends so that the source never appears quite where it actually is. Shifty, the truth. Exhibiting quantum properties; can’t be observed without exerting effect. Can’t be transmitted from one place without showing up in two others. The interference pattern altering the fabric. Maybe this multiplicity of possibilities is our only bulwark against an otherwise too deterministic and entirely boring version of the world, devastatingly reducible to a few simple initial conditions. Initial conditions. That’s a solid memoir title for this life. Or the opposite: Skip intro.² A playful Netflix-inflected title for a different version of the memoir. Same life, but you avoid looking at the starting point so you can be surprised how things pan out.

...

The truth, the faultline-riven truth. The jagged spaces between the parts of the broken thing; is the negative space where the truth lies? Where the truth lies! I’m calling dibs on that title too (tell me you didn’t get there first!?). The truth puzzle is too fascinating, disassembling and resolving as you turn it about. Appearing whole when viewed head-on; decomposing from side perspectives into little floating bits. Every vantage reveals a different fracture and the truth is all to pieces. And left to be reassembled a million different ways.

...

Contemplation on mortality, with a side of schmaltz, vol. I

The consideration of death is my default mode. Alongside me always; a guileful spectre. That shady faceless reaper with cowl drawn and the rusty arc of a scythe overhead … clearly Disney has informed my mental imagery here. More playful than menacing; I like this relatable character and hand it to western culture for daring some levity in the face of the moribund. How creative do others get? Well there’s Yama, that purveyor of justice (ahem… that’s mostly death), astride a yak and wagging his noose. Implacable and not entirely unlikeable. Kind of cartoonish too, so maybe it’s a universal theme.

Fidgeting so with mortality, I’m in a kind of constant liminal state of mourning. Not a crippling, depressing kind. Nor lurid, nor macabre. A reverential kind. Elegiac. And festive in a Día de los sense. Recognizing that you too will soon be dead, whether you are in the habit of fixing on it or not, I mourn you where you stand. We are in the anterooms of each other’s funerals just now, waiting together. How lovely is that! I hold your hand and celebrate your life that is, and soon to be, was. Mourn me too won’t you please? I am living, but soon enough will have lived, my own little life. Our fingers interwoven, I lift your story up, and you mine.

We are spaces to be left. Impressions. The shape of a life - of a presence - is the size of a body, of a smile or a wink. But the size of an absence, that’s the whole blue sky and the void of deep space besides. There is no proportion to loss when it comes, so let us mourn each other now while we are still together and, described by finite selves, can take each other’s measure. Before that definition dissolves and we cross the threshold to infinity and no longer have hands to hold.

...

Lastly, what passes for a poem around here

Gathered up in the sameness of our energy,
concentrated warmth, shared heat.
Embers and coals. A massive fire.
Smelted in which, dirty ore.
From which, running metal.
Sticky, shining, precious,
grasping and clutching veins of silver.
Spent and cooling, rain falling.
Smeared in wet ash and grey soot. One body. Fatted calf.
Singed hair. Tear streaks, cleansed hide.

Down the neck the chest the legs, through the cleft, piercing the root.³

1. I’m reading Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn right now. He sprinkles images through the narrative. I find this appealing. And the chapters go so fast ...

2. Skip Intro was meant to be a potential band name, but I’ve gone and fired it off here. Oh well.

3. For my dear high school English teacher, Mrs Eastwood and my dear high school drama teacher, Ms Hutchinson. Legends, each. One or both lodged in my memory the sing-song patter of old English Canterbury and that indelible image of spring rains rejuvenating dry roots. "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote."