“He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty”
–Pasternak on Mayakovsky
Self-to-self: It was all I could do. Not to write. Not to blur the two worlds. Disturbing what the white of the page willed between them. For years I would draw off my own blankness. See to what was once canon-bound. But then saw nothing through. Until even this bores a resemblance to a wall. Or being play-grounded. All the unsound and dumb founded. Made into law. Non-mode.
*
Here I’m reminded to mention the brain again. And its take on the whole thing. Or this for instance. How it selflessly watched out for my interests, my stakes. And had me doggedly log all activity. Submit the latest in readings. All the supposedly seismic, the most highly of sensitive, blustery sighs (what A. might refer to as a “program for myself”). Selling me on even less than the last time. From the bottoming-out of them tomb-notes. To the mass-sameness of those from on-high. While off screen the rumors persisted. How my omnipotence was a cosmic comb-over. My epic-mindedness, diminished to a speck.
*
Self-blurbed: I’m no longer pronouncing that X is the true heir to the poetry of chronic agitation and turbulence–he, more than anyone of his generation, has continually come to blows with his own past at the very same time he’s back-slapping it. No one is clearer on the idea than X that the urge to record is nothing more than a virus. Verse, burrowing at the back of the throat, incessantly needing to come clean. Again and again and ahem.
*
A. first called attention to my ignorance. And it was there I’d begin. Weeding out my own slippery experiences, I zeroed in on my brain’s own shameless pantomime (“the point of view of the unconscious mind”—A.). Where less and less of me figured. An involuntary gesture with the unrehearsed nobility of a sneeze or a gag. Sounds inseparable from acts. The world overheard. And nothing I could say would keep it from seeping in, being enlisted again and again and (heck, didn’t A. sponge off Pasternak for his poem “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers” and Pasternak sponge off of…) amen!
*
Self-diagnosis: For years X experienced this sensation embedded deep in his chest. Like a thought long resigned to the further most reaches of his body. And then making its way back in. Where it coiled up around those first urges. Until it somehow emerged and was occasionally wrung out. More elemental than bone it spoke of some earlier home. Where two of them first met and negotiated. It was here, at this coupling, that creation had its start. This thing that’s both stunted and considering wings.
*
Does X = Being x Seeing (or A’s “experience of experience”?)? How I’ve shopped myself out again. Losing touch with the air strip between the soul and the mouth. Has X been reduced to mere flap? Hadn’t what had entered the mind with designs on flight ended up flattened, anesthetized by white? And yet wasn’t it the page which always promised us that other way out? Where we’re able to test out the sky once again only to be returned back to earth? (Which poem was it that I admitted to being X’s success?) No matter. More than anything else I’m that man. This most obvious of imposters. And nothing can be more certain than this simple assertion. Axiom.