My true name is not what I am called here

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Another bad night that bled into a bad day. Riding the bike to the library, thought: it's Wednesday. That means: 4 weeks. That was easy. Time sure does fly. Then, wait, I left Austin on the 8th of December. It's Wednesday. 30th. It was 3 weeks yesterday. What I said: the night was long.

Just want to step off stage for a moment, just for a fucking moment. Take off the mask, the face, the skin, forget the name of my character, step out of the role. Feels like spider web inside of me. And there is no place to go. There is no offstage, no proscenium, no audience. Everything that I know is this tired sad drama. It's not that I know my lines by heart. It is that I don't know anything else. I cannot speak anything but my lines. And I am so tired of saying these same goddamn words. This exhaustion I am experiencing is also part of the play, my role, how I am supposed to play my part.

But I know... I know that this is not real. I know there is another world, of greater meaning, of true beauty, beautiful truth, that contains this pseudo-world that I am acting in. I know this. This mask looks like my face. And this name is what I am known by. But my true face is underneath. And my true name is not what I am called here.

I just have to keep distracting myself or I am going to go insane.

I Stand in the Ruins of the Memory Cathedral

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It helps to keep my mind busy. To not let the imagination get up on the trampoline and start its tricks. The opium den dreams of all the wasted days. Desire lights it all in sepia shadowed nostalgia. It was all a movie. Even the worst days in the Haunted Houses at 24 frames per second start to seem like Truth. Got to keep slapping the idiot driving around inside of me to stop zoning out, pay attention to the road.

So, been re-reading a lot of the books that once mattered to me. Trying to remind myself of my mind. What I once believed to be of value. Most, like trying on an old pair of boots or the wedding suit. Memory in the bones - if not the flesh. Those other times: like wearing someone else's skin. Uncomfortable, cold and wet. Trying to keep the reading close to the fire, away from the edge.

Fiction mostly disappoints, the world behind the words is like that around a miniature train set: plastic, painted and pathetic. I read on to find some reason why I read it in the first place. Must have been something there, I keep trying to tell myself. Turn the page. Beats staring at the boots. Mostly.

Non-fiction holds up better. And some part of me is mightily amused to read non-fiction about fiction. The old man walking down the road carrying a mirror on his back. I guess I'd rather talk to the old man than look at the world reflected.

There is this from The Key to "The Name of the Rose":

Ibn Hazm (994-1064)      Andalusian poet, psychologist, philosopher, and theologian. Ibn Hazm, who spent his early childhood in a harem, wrote a fascinating treatise on love and lovers and on the apparent and hidden meaning of lovers' words. He also wrote perceptive comments on feminine psychology. In his Kitab al-Takrib, Ibn Hazm gives a summary of Aristotelian logic and in his Kitab al-Muhalla, an analysis of prophecy, Paradise and Hell. Linguistic theoretician and moralist both, Ibn Hazm stated that the evil of liars is that they use language for their own ends instead of serving it. Language has been instituted by God and contains in itself a truth. It is itself, moreover, the only means of discovering the truth and expressing it, provided it is not removed from its divine origins to become the pawn of human desires.

Got my attention. The part about "the evil of liars," that they do not serve the language, stand under it, understand, was right on the beam. A cancer of wretchedness has metastasized throughout my being because I abused the language, compelled it to serve my own ends, and thus deprived myself of being able to have the Truth expressed through me. It's hard. I am using words to try and explain - spread out before you - why I cannot use words. A man down in a grave with a shovel trying to dig himself out. A dreamer searching for his sleeping body in the dream so he can wake himself up.

You've got to almost torture the language to make it make any sense. Proof: there is a quote by Heidegger at the beginning of After Babel by George Steiner that says exactly what I mean:

Man acts as if he were the shaper and master of language, while it is language which remains mistress of man. When this relation of dominance is inverted, man succumbs to strange contrivances. Language then becomes a means of expression. Where it is expression, language can degenerate to mere impression (to mere print). Even where the use of language is no more than this, it is good that one should still be careful in one's speech. But this alone can never extricate us from the reversal, from the confusion of the true relation of dominance as between language and man. For in fact it is language that speaks. Man begins speaking and man only speaks to the extent that he responds to, that he corresponds with language, and only in so far as he hears language addressing, concurring with him. Language is the highest and everywhere the foremost of those assents which we human beings can never articulate solely out of our own means.

Strange contrivances, indeed. The Greeks invoked the Muses, whose mother is Mnemosyne, Goddess of Memory. The voice in the ear is no longer that of the Muses, but that of a deformed and deranged conscience. Those channels within where once rushed the breath of inspiration are now blackened and blocked. And that place of memory is now a place of aporia. There is no language here - only echoes.

I stand in the ruins of the Memory Cathedral and wonder: what happened here? Because this is what is at the core of my fallen-ness. It was here, upon the high altar of memory where the Pulse once burned, that it happened. Some sacrifice not made... something? I don't know. It was here that I was... struck down. Words are failing here like herds of buffalos running over a cliff. At the core of my being, I was wounded. It was not the drugs that did it. The drugs came after. Maggots that grew fat upon the flesh and kept the wound from healing.

I once knew a woman that couldn't help herself from wailing: "What happened to me? I've lost my mind. What happened to me? I've lost my mind."

The wound is healing. I know. But I don't feel anything. And the days accumulate around me like the scattered stones of this ruined place of memory. I am waiting for... just silence.

When I dream a hit, I dream what god thinks

Right on the edge of three weeks clean. Seems longer. No real hunger during the day to find a hookup. All the triggers have been taken off the guns. Is the desire there? Yes. It will never go away. You walk around with the hook in your brain for the rest of your life. But you find new props, ways to occupy your time. Behind every work of art lurks a spectre of boredom. Got to do something before I die besides stare at the tear in the curtain for five hours, watching the play of light, seeing caravels sailing across the Pacific, feeling the desert breeze in the shadows of the seraglio. You know, might as well write some of the dreams down.

I remember this comic book called Miracle Man. About this guy, Michael Moran, who feels like his life is empty, nothing seems right, has these dreams of being a comic book superhero. Then he discovers that by saying a particular "trigger" word - kimota (atomic backwards) - he trades his fragile human body for a superhuman one. Eventually, he discovers that the comic book reality was an allegory meant to keep him from realizing his true nature. He becomes a god and the comic book series reached a place where art and language come to a dead end.

In dreams, the drug is still there. The hook working its way around in the depths of my mind. Scenarios of "plenty", giant quantities, never ending hits, the pipe dreams of every junky. Elaborate arabesque deals are played out. The hunt was always part of the game. Laying it all out like a game of chess. Twenty moves ahead. In dreams, the triggers are still there. When I dream a hit, I dream what god thinks as he watches us go through the old bone dance of our sad grey lives. Cold wet flesh twisting in the wind on propped up skeletons. Scarecrows to keep the birds of appetite at bay, to frighten us not into waking up from the nightmare, but to keeping us asleep within it.

All of this lying empties the language out

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You can say anything. You can lie. You can promise. You can vow. You can defy all logic and reason. Those words that you say, those expressions that arise from your depths, are bound by no law or force to have any actual reference. Of course, eventually, your actions will prove your language to be false. But there is always another town, a sucker born everyday, someone willing to believe kind eyes,  a nice smile and the honeyed words.

But if you work in the Word, all of this lying empties the language out, hollows you out. That ur-language there inside your skull, that private voice of your innermost being, is diluted by lack of meaning until there is only silence.

Kafka wrote: it is not the singing of the Sirens that is horrible, it is their silence.

I would like to stand by my words again. But, tell the truth, they don't come when I call them anymore. I see them there on the verge of the clearing, whining like beaten dogs, some pawing to come back to my side, some looking to run off into the wilds, some wanting to rip my face off. I don't feel good about trying to chain them up. And mostly, I just sit and wait, hope a few might wander back over.

Everyone tells me to just pretend, to act "as if"... but I'm not even sure that means anything anymore.

A Holding Pattern Over the World

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Trying to find some traction up here. Feeling very serial killerish - at least, what I imagine that would feel like. Sort of not wanting to be around anyone while at the same time wanting some human intimacy. Easier, I guess, if you just trap a human and keep it tied up in the basement. But, ultimately, not fulfilling.

I look at the words I just wrote. Perhaps I am trying to be funny. I don't feel one way or the other about it. Just another instance of acting "as if" I were this darkly funny person named Charles Boney.

Mostly, I feel like a stranger trapped in this skull.

My family cares so much for Charles. They are trying to do so much to help him. They must love him a lot. For their sake, because they appear to be nice people, burdened with a son or a brother who has been hollowed out and broken, I pretend to be him. I say the words "happy" and "better" and "thanks" a lot. Seems to keep them from worrying.

Makes them leave me alone.

I don't have to trouble with anyone else in town. I workout at the Y. Read at the library. Sell books at Henderson's. Drink a cup of coffee at the Black Drop or a can of Ranier at the Horseshoe. Head back to the room. Sleep. It's all a holding pattern over the world. Not trying to make sense of things. Just trying to find a moment of reprieve from having to act like someone, I am constantly told, that I used to be.

I know I can't stay up in the air for much longer. Soon I'm going to have to find work and start a new drama, play another role, show the smiling face, trade the inane banter. I guess that I'll just deal with it when it comes.

I Am Acting At Being Myself

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Everyone has been / is doing so much for me. I really don't understand
why. I mean, I'm trying to understand. Some part of me tells me that
it's because they are family and they love me. I feel love for them
too. But I am kind of numb to it all. In many ways, I just want to be
left alone, to wander around the rainy streets during the day, read at
the library, find a place to sleep at night. I still feel
disconnected. Like I am acting at being myself.

It's been over a week since I've used. Can't remember when that's been
the case. Drinking beer and wine. Don't have any jones for anything
else - although there are those hours where life is just not as
interesting as it was. I suppose I'll get over it.

Working on a few things, trying to get all the dust cleared out of my
mind. Not sure there is anything underneath.