We Are Not of This World
Consider the dramatic events that become ordinary people like us. We’re not feeling exceptionally valued, but well enough. Whoever amongst us is the most apprehensive and, similarly dictatorial, will understand the world by syllogisms: I am not of the world. You are of the world. I am not you. There’s so much more to say, but let’s say it later. For now, let’s think about the phonetic, the diagraphic stickiness that comes when someone wants you gone from their world. There’s more than a semantic difference between: I want to spend a lifetime UN-knowing you, and Say another word, and I’ll blow your brains out! The word is both a blessing and a warning. I could say I love you – but then I’d have to kill you. You say this with a smile on your face. To those overhearing our conversation: listen closely and they’ll hear you saving my life.
Your Words of Hurt and Holiness
Your words of hurt and holiness stretch me into an ever-expanding mode of interiority. Over here, there’s a projective experience to be had, a predicative mode of me drinking inside of me, even when I’m feeling outside my milieu, outside your window, outside this lake, which reflects the depth of the moon, the depth of all of our shadow-ness. Nightly I stand naked in the shadows, trying to understand the paradox that when drunk I can’t remember what I can’t forget when sober . . . making me leave this lake for the Waffle House. At the crossroads of life and death, this bellwether for the State of Emergency stays open, reminding us there’s damage worse elsewhere. What I’m feeling right now, when the waffles are flowing in the right direction, is a shamanic, discursive, omnipotence that comes from believing I’m right about at least one thing in this world – whoever you are / whoever I am – this is a deictic moment in delineated time and amorphous space. Feeling morphs into new feeling, requiring me to barf up the moon, barf up the lake, barf up the waffles with a logic that’s both fixed and denied, that turns my bones to batter, that makes my bones break.
Photograph © Björn Láczay
