Infinity Begins Here

Something cold was hanging in my closet my sensitivity was too alert, the monster of darkness prevented me from seeing what it was, but it was in my closet for the emptiness exuded from it, crawled out from there with cold nails to rip at my heart.

I sat on my hands to prevent them from attacking me, to prevent them from giving me death, I fought death while aware that life is the most horrible thing that can happen to a person. You may doubt it, I certainly do, but I was alive and ready to die for life, for life does nothing but prepare us for death. It is the ride of the tamers that are tamed. We jumped on this horse that will know no rider, it bucks, it kicks, it jumps, it twist, it gorges its weight, pounds and pounds, and wrestles our bodies without grabbing but through inertia into gravity, we hang on, we want to conquer, to tame! But we are resigned and confined to failure, when we feel conformable it is not because we have mastered anything no! It is instead an acceptance of the terms and conditions, death!

Infinity at both ends, knowing life makes us want to live forever but irony has it that life is only worth living if what we live for is worth dying, if what we live for can get us killed. This is even dramatized and more enjoyable if what we do may cause enough consternation in others to inspire mutiny. Many have caused the slaughter of thousands or millions only because it was that difficult to inspire someone to assassinate them, some dictators were so unfortunate that they could not anger enough sufficiently and so they eventually had to commit suicide. And dictators are not the only ones, remember the philosopher that talked an entire city to command him to take his life because he talked too much or the religious leaders that refused to listen to abundant warnings from indifferent politicians. The Clown’s formula for this was: Go ahead kill me! This formula being true to life did not allow for calculation the person making the statement could not calculate the results. That kind of twisted I want to live I want to die makes life worth living, then our horse bucks, somersaults and doubles over a triple leap of faith, and we pursue the ground while our vantage position permits us a close up view of the hoofs that concentrate a lot of the effects of gravity on too a small space, resignation.

Much is made of this thing life, its cruelty to often ignored, its ignorance sublimated by a mystical nature, its insignificance reduced by cosmic endeavors. We forget names and remember images, blood is oxygen, guts become brains, odors intuition, agonizing pains passion, death takes a breath but not through our lungs, yet death feeds on life and sucks us out of existence. We are not aware of this, and you should tell no one, but we are raised like cattle so that death can feed on us!

Infinity is in the opposite direction. Morning in front of the mirror, another grueling interrogation but this morning my eyes did not surrender to my imposing stare, they did not acknowledge that other me as a mirror image but as a separate self that was going to receive an ultimatum. I had always felt that the me that lived in mirrors did not live or suffer through any of my ailments. But this morning I crossed my arms and stared directly into that careless other that only lived life as a reflection, and I spoke with a solemn voice that seemed to be prepared to give this other self a knighthood, but in reality I was placing an Albatross necktie around its 16” neck.

I spoke “I am not going to accept this condition any longer, I like you, I like you a lot, I may even love you and so I may not want to but I am going to have to kill you.” The image did not quiver, it became stiff solid as if it wasn’t really floating on a liquid coating, larger than I was, and with its arms crossed, a cheap imitation of my pose, just stared back into my eyes. This was the moment which I had feared, the image was accepting its destiny, negation was not obtainable, I felt his confidence, his acceptance. Once I be dead his image was not going to show up in mirrors, whom would it hurt more? I left the mirror, leaving the other self, for it walked off the mirror as I walked away.

I drove to the ocean contemplating a futile attempt to swim across it, I watched the breaking crest of waves, a sign of their breaking arcs, and I felt my spine shiver as if below their thrust. I drove through the mountains measuring altitudes and obstacles. I saw my car go off a cliff, I saw it smash into a boulder, I saw it sinking slowly into the deeps of air. My car my coffin.

I had decided that my death would be accidental so that no one would feel burden by it, people seemed to be able to accept accidental deaths better than suicides. Also I wanted to cheat destiny not to give it the option of causing my death but Destiny still managed to confuse me and it presented a confusing but well formulated argument on my condition. Here is how the disingenuous fellow addressed me.

Hardly bothering to use diplomacy Destiny formulated self consumption, fear of life, fear of death, irony and senselessness in one fine bouquet of black roses, with black violets, and red carnations, no orchids. “Why it is inevitable that you shall kill thyself. You are a cynic. You believe in nothing. You want as a man to be autonomous and therefore vacant, with ideas as guest or tenants that are constantly being evicted for unjustifiable and capricious reasons. You fight with in yourself to be pure but to be pure is to be sterile, to have nothing inside is to be nothingness... is to be dead. You will kill yourself not because it is your destiny but because it is your way of life. Now you say I, Destiny have all the cards and that I know which ones I will deal next but I say on to thee that the deck reshuffles itself according to each.”

“Now you talk about denying existence all future labor by refusing to fertilize a seed on earthly soil yet you expend long rigorous hours pondering questions and answers that have no context or meaning unless life continues. You write philosophy which is the rudimentary block of existence, which is in fact the only real creation by human beings that is actually capable of fantasizing beyond nature. If indeed not outright the fundamental breakup, split, division, cause for complete separation from evolution! In short the only real future of humanity, something which destiny needs.”

“Of course your actions speak drama in volumes, shallow waters you surf but this is because drama in its deepest sense touches beyond our immediate existence, drama in its truest sense is a kiss on the cheek of or from another state of consciousness. So you are screaming “Destiny is raping me!” Me! Why me? You poor thing not so loud or is it that you want someone to hear you? And if they do come and rescue you from my clutches so what! Seemingly you can not rescue your self, victim! To cowardly to act, to cowardly to kill yourself, you call on external existence but that’s the damn existence you so fervently dispute!”

“So now you want to kill yourself and your are paying it much thought forgetting that the Clown has said that To Live Is To Act To Think Is To Be Dead. Why? Is it because you suddenly became aware that to live for a second one has to believe a thousand lies. So what! By your own standards everything is useless, you mark your idiocy in your apparent concern for others, how noble, but it is you that needs guardian angels, that clamors for the existence of something independent of you that is real, vital and moral while ignoring that we are all here to complete each other, even at times ignoring that there is no longer a God because we have found a grander purpose.”

“I know you want what is real, vital and moral to create the magic you keep on searching for but let me remind thee that the self is the ultimate judge of all standards. You just want the creations of a just universe to protect you and to carry out retribution for all the wrongs that have been perpetrated upon thee. Like the Clown laughingly says “There is justice not because there is a God but because there is revenge!” And you want revenge!”

“So please kill yourself and don’t bother to defend the others that unlike you have demonstrated that they have the guts to stomach life. Oh please kill yourself it is so pathetic to watch you like this confessing to a mirror image of yourself what is public knowledge. Ha, but there is that other problem, your predictability appears to you not as lack of originality on your part but rather as the hand of me Destiny. Not at all my hand you are just a simple little man that got caught on the tangling net of thought, better to have been a spider so that you could have walked on it. And so remember this in your cavernous mind for you have filled it full of holes, filling it you have expanded its emptiness, remember that you have always despised the weak, the needy, I mean by that thyself. And remember years back when as merely a child you decided to become a thinker but with a promise, a promise that the truth would not blind you or cripple you, that it would not cause you to go mad like all the others, that you would face the monster, stomach its guts, and come out to tell all. Remember that promise? The victory of thought long thought never obtained, so many like you have jumped the bridge so that the truth can continue hiding, and so here you are so close to the truth that it is brutal, grotesque, a putridity repulsive sight and so thee is overcome with the need to run away. You may be about to break your own promise which can not be too terrible for you brag of your lack of moral fiber while keeping warm with a morally prickly blanket. Remember your promise!”

“Now as a reasoning man you use the terrifying concern that people that commit suicide are forced to live the very same lives over until they naturally complete them, implying that suicide is an unnatural act, and therefor not a possible means of escape, merely a looping mechanism of forever returning and it can only be broken by doing one’s time, by tolerating existence, performing one’s act until a courageous natural or accidental death.”

“You have nightmares in which spirits posses your body, easy to supplant your fragile soul. They enter your body which sits two souls comfortably because yours is so feeble, weak as a ninety year old man’s body. One is the spirit of a man he grabs you from behind and tells you that those that commit suicide are locked as spirits on earth forever too crawl the dirt, but he, himself suffered a heart attack which you relive from his perspective as happened after he entered the hotel room you now inhabit. He collapsed and as he was falling you see little girl dresses, colored in deep green, hanging from the closet. You realized he was a child molester, upon this he rips away from you. You see him posing in front of the mirror, with his green underwear, like a weight lifter. You wake up but you had not been sleep, you calm yourself but your vulnerable and a female spirit possesses you, she comforts you, and promise’s to help you if you help her but she leaves before you can say yes.”

“And following this lucid reasoning you conclude that you can not tolerate life so maybe you will kill yourself so as to fool the universal judge, me, into thinking that it was not by your own hand. And I say you call it reasoning I call it madness. I say you call it logic I call it metaphysical vomit. Hire your own assassin, tell him at which street corner you will be, what ever else you do here is inconsequential, the exterminators will only notice you after you are dead. At last my friend, and I say this to thee as your companion, you gave up the magic awhile back and she is never coming back! Regardless of how long you wait she is safe. Go fight a glorious war, find a gold mine and dig it until it collapses, hope that the Indians eat your heart first and not your damaged liver. The Orchids are for you, the Indians will place thy heart firmly through the stem of black Roses, you will pour Carnations. The desert is a dry place but you will not need any water, no water for you for you loved too much, your feelings were not wrong! Not wrong! You were right to listen to them, but they were criminal!”

I was not prepared to roll over and play dead on the premise that there were many reasons leading to the same conclusion hence the conclusion. Inevitables are the very things we needn’t worry about. Not a question of intent but a question of methodological implications. Approach life through the rear and something always guides you but it only comes into being when you get to where it is. Always in front of you but it wants you to catch it and you want to catch it even more. In between your mutual passions the speed gap speeds, it grows and you occupy it right in the middle between the nearest and most distant points, dashing static space.

My problem was very simple when offered choices I took all of them. Wanting to find their different endings , only to be confused among the many by all the choices within a single choice and then preposterous to find that the ending were the same. Chose your act but in the end we all get and end in the same pot. Guided by any science, philosophy, religion, artistic or political endeavor they will all, if they pursue their cause with earnest, they will come to the same conclusions.

But I will tell you this, no matter how insane I may seem to you, and forgetting my confusing and tragic incessant approximations to the truth, if I have trusted my feelings, and if my feelings have spoken their feelings, and they have sincerely felt these feelings, and these feelings place me in self defeating situations, but my feelings are true to me, they have not lied, thus I have trusted them and liberalized their expression, only to be trapped on three sides by geography and rushed upon from the fourth by a horde of barbarians prosaletsing tragic altercations, then may I forsake my feelings? No! Never! If my feelings have deceived me, if they tell me awful lies then that is best and my best may well be terrible, but to lie to myself by not allowing my own deception, never!

Destiny was accusing me of having willed my existence an accusation that if believed could only serve to hide destiny. How possible was it? I remember that as a child I was quiet incapable of distinguishing my right side from my left side. This was cause for irritation and often it made me feel stupid but the whole problem was resolved in a most interesting manner.

Around the age of ten my little sister and I were amusing each other by playing with fire and plastic, ignoring the toxic fumes that were being excreted by the fuming, flaming plastic, we were lighting an inexhaustible supply of matches and throwing the plastic on top of the blaze. Laughing as we did I found it amusing to retrieve a piece of the plastic from the fire, not to rescue it but instead to throw it at my sister or actually near enough to her to invite a frighten reaction. Unfortunately for me my little sister was a quick copy cat, she picked up the plastic and flung it back in my direction only instead of it landing in the concrete it seared itself to the back of my left hand. Reacting to the pain I used my right hand to forcefully remove it for just in a few seconds my flesh and the plastic had become Siamese twins. The plastic managed to retain a good size portion of my flesh. Water was incessantly poured on the wound that would become a highly visible scar.

Now from that day forward I never had to deal with the anxiety of not knowing right from left, a simple visual review of my branded hand would immediately advise me which direction I needed to follow. Destiny would argue that I had subconsciously staged the entire incident so as to resolve my right left dilemma. Don’t ask me why I did not choose something less painful like a simple tattoo. Destiny would say that I had done it without consciously admitting it to myself a and that that was only an example of the importance of plausible deniability, for those times when we have to carry out actions that are immediately unpleasant yet have long term benefits.

This to me sounded like a good argument and in fact not wanting or being able to argue with destiny I simply extrapolated from it that I had also coerced the invention of digital watches for I also suffered from the inability to grasp analog time. The little hand and the big hand on the face of a watch with those markings or numbers around them and going around had always require much calculation on my part. It was very difficult to me to draw the required geometrical relationship between the big hand and the little hand, why this two could alter each others meaning, and why they depended on one another to mark the progression of a second and its impending implications resulting in hours was mentally challenging. This was why I suffered from severe anxiety every time that a stranger would pop that horrible question: “Do you have the time?” I wondered if the stranger rated my intelligence by timing the amount of time that transpires while I searched the face of my watch for meaning. This became such a debilitating situation that I finally resolved to stop wearing a watch. Don’t have the time.

But that issue was fortunately resolved when digital watches were introduced. Again the introduction of digital watches was a deliberate, even if subconscious, action of mine. I had in fact good reason to believe that most everything in existence, including you and specially you, was, is and will be, in some way a product of a subconscious action on my part, with a maximum amount of plausible deniability, so that I will not have to be responsible for your actions. If I don’t exist what matter your existence? Infinity ends with me!

I kept on writing and you might ask why if he is trying to keep it all from destiny would he continue to do that? Well because I understood that while I had to keep my works away from destiny they were also my only bargaining chip. I had to produce in order to be of value to destiny, not producing would jeopardize my existence which is another way of saying that I had to lure destiny and keep it away, the lure would guarantee my life regardless of my animosity towards destiny, the more I was worth the more I could get away with, the closer to kill destiny.

Destiny was watching all of my actions, I knew that I needed to keep everything a secret but that was probably impossible I begun to understand one thing clearly if I tried to kill my self it would be pointless, destiny wanted my thoughts, it was not in the cards that I should be permitted suicide, I was temporarily committed to shaving with electric razors, I was to healthy to ever have a lethal dose of prescription pills. The impossibility made me test my theory.

On a Monday, Mondays are good for suicides because the rest of the week still seems ahead, I tested my theory, I checked the train schedule found one that would be crossing near my apartment before lunch, suicide is always best on empty stomach people that are full have less guts and less to complain about so they tolerate more abuse hence the middle classes. The train would cross 18th Avenue at about ten fifty nine I walked there and laid on the track. Now you might think I was scared and perhaps I was but I suspected that if destiny was a fact I could not die the day before I further suspected that my dry sense of humor would get the best of destiny and force it to save me which if I was correct was in the end all a part of the overall plan.

Eleven thirty I was tired of waiting for the damn train, unless a dictator is in power trains never kept their scheduled, I was very upset! I waited another twenty minutes then decided I was to hungry to wait anymore. My back and neck sore, I walked with a sense of anger to a bar and grill that made very good medium rare hamburgers, stuffed with onions and lots of avocado. I ordered as usual, a post suicide almost victim that I was, I also ordered a bottle of wine and told the waiter that a glass was not necessary. I would finish the bloody bottle without any help, my germs would not be there long enough to change its character. As I bit into my medium rare hamburger the news came on over those obnoxious sports TV's that I've always hated. Headline news: “A train derailed north of our wonderful city only minutes from the station, one-hundred-and-thirty-nine injured, forty-eight feared dead.”

I had made the assumption that destiny did not bother with us because it supposed that given enough time most humans would self-destruct, it appeared that in my particular case destiny was modifying the rules. It was willing to slaughter hundreds to keep me alive but one does not lay ones body on railroad tracks without getting some insight into the meaning of things and it came to me then that what destiny wanted for posterity was my thoughts, and my problem hitherto had been my willingness to think, if I was thinking I was doing destinies dirty work, I needed to cease thinking, I needed to abort thought I would run towards action!

I slept very well that night, though my throat was making a coming cold felt. Oh I may have forgotten to mention that all the time while on the tracks the sky was heavy with clouds, that poorly held their water.


Years begin to pass...