on doorsteps
There is something knocking at the door, every time I check it has vanished, it does not want to come in only to ask that I notice it is knocking, notice that it is taking up some part of the page that I have not flipped to yet. Perhaps I need to flip back to it, find it in my past. The knock could be from years ago, echoing forward, echoing towards me and my hidden folly. I’d like to greet it. Like to welcome it in and ask it to take off its shoes and stay a little while, become acquainted with some part of myself that I have not yet found but I do not know if it is there. The knocking could be my restless knee banging against the table, waiting for the waiting to be over.
I talk to Aengus about G-d.1 Always about G-d. He is religious today as I once was. I may one day find myself back with it, not with him though, our G-ds are Abrahamic but the interpretations are different. I have decided I believe in G-d. Believe in divine but importantly I do not believe that we as humans have any capacity to understand or rationalize this divine. This capacity for creation is something we can only play at, the world our stage but G-ds world is our reality. There is no stage left for us to exit off of. All approximation all approximation. I believe in a grand order but not one we have any right to know about, to fathom or understand or rationalize. Part of me thinks I am saying this just to agree with Aengus, agree with someone I’d stake my life on knowing for the rest of it. I know this not to be true though, I believe in a grander order because it cannot harm me, because I cannot fathom it. I could talk to him forever and I believe I will. There is so much to be said between our two selves.
I read a piece by someone in Mongolia2, living there due to the nature of their job. I think they arrived there from Britain but haven’t a clue what led them there other than what the essay told me. Their essay concluded with them saying that they wouldn’t be staying. I understand it. The world is vast and we are small until we grow so large and mythic by our actions that we wonder about how we ever became so bloated. We deflate so that we can squeeze through the cracks of every day interpersonality and we live like this. I don’t take myself seriously though everyone else seems to because I know that the me that they are taking seriously is only one half of myself I’ll never meet. The one that they’ve met is not the one they see in the mirror because their eyes are not my own. Nothing about this has to do with Mongolia but I’d like to visit everywhere I can. I went to Ireland which is far less distance and felt absolutely felled to my core, everyone is doing everything.
I have a lot of respect for the going somewhere, for the not knowing anyone and the going anyway. I have that respect because I respect myself. Because I intend to continue going to places where I don’t know anyone. Hearing about other people doing it just makes the bravery grow, makes the door broaden. It reminds me that I am not alone even when I very well am. The world is vast, strange and often more simple then we can fathom and I intend to become an utter fool in its presence for the sheer relief of life.
Writing, language itself is the only artform we have that at its base deals in full abstraction. The very nature of reading is of association, associations we make in our brain that serve us and only us. The words on the page only mean what we can interpret them as. To a florist a rosebud is occupational but to Charles Foster Kane a Rosebud is his childhood sled, his deathbed croak. To each his own according to his own ability to understand. In words we have everything, in writing we have the absolute freedom to speak absolute truth into every set of hearts that read it. Kant coined the idea of transcendental idealism but I was not there when he did it and I was very much there when I first formed that idea so I believe I have better reason to believe it was in fact myself that actually discovered it. Kant was a bit of a knob anyway.
In times of doubt or need I talk to Natalie and at some point later they respond and sometimes when our schedules both jam packed to the brim coincide we have an actual conversation though split up by the hundred or so miles between us. Natalie is important because they’re the closest I’ve ever come to seeing myself in another person. I wish I met them sooner but I don’t know if they wish the same though I know they wouldn’t say that, though they didn’t know me when I now am wishing that I then was wishing that I’d met them. I have spent a large amount of time hating myself. Knowing people who remind me so closely of myself dissuades me from continuing. Knowing someone who does not bat an eyelash when I tell them I feel not fully human, when I tell them I feel coyote or hummingbird, marzipan or coattails. One doesn’t need to know to believe. Words are truth in themselves.
Awe. It is awe that I feel most days when I allow my brain to be quiet, when I allow my eyes to just sit and see, my thumbs to perch and twiddle. Awe. I love the internet despite hating most things about it because the internet has brought me inexplicably closer to myself. Inexplicably closer to Natalie two hundred miles away and Aengus five hundred miles away and all the lot of you on here however many miles away. Knowing people is the best way to know oneself and though I feel jaded on principle interacting with so many flashing letters on my screen and pixels in the profile pictures I know that some of you truly do exist and are some manner of virtuous or some manner of honest.
Three months ago I became utterly convinced that everyone was lying. Everyone was lying because I was lying and if I was then how would I know everyone else wasn’t. I took my slumped posture as a hall of mirrors stretching out to the eight billion others as certifiable tangible fact. As if my reality was important or ethical or any manner of things that would make it important enough to apply it to the all of everyone. I then realized I was deluding myself, that other people had the capacity to feel, that we weren’t all playing at being human because there is a baseline some fire in every body.
Coyote most of the time, I spend my time not feeling human enough. I spend my time scared that my writing has been increasingly becoming more and more shallow, that my capacity is regressing. I tell Aengus this in the cold vacuum of the internet and he tells me that I feel this way because I am trying new things, because I am trying to push the boundaries of my abilities, push the awareness and the empathy and the talent. He is right only because I entrusted him with the reason behind the fears and not just the fears itself. He gets most all of my fears. He has reason to worry for me but he never seems to, he knows I’ll pull through. I think he knows this because I’ve told it to him and he’s seen it from me.
It has stopped raining outside. Midnight is a minute away and I am a minute closer to not falling asleep. I will blink a hundred more times and breathe a hundred more breaths and still not be any closer to opening that front door in time, nor any closer to knowing who was knocking. There are footsteps leading away from the door but I’ve no lights in the house that are suited for leaving their sconces nor courage to stow away in the part of me that’d go out there. No hopes in not being dashed against the shores of the scaffolding of self, of the enormity of existence and the furrowed brow of lilac flowers in the back window. Please knock again. This time stand in the shadows and let your feet be caught by the spilled light of the opening door. Let me know what shoes you wear.
God is spelled like this because I am speaking of the divine and not of the pharmaceutical god that they sell in most religious institutions, the god of commodity and profit. Oh instagram reels you have jaded me.
kant WAS a bit of a knob