He was up in his old bedroom though it no longer felt like his.

Those books, all those titles, holding all those answers, looked tired, hopeless, over…deserted.

For years he’d loved them, turned their pages so eagerly, thought so very hard.

Out of that window he used to gaze for hours, waiting for a chance, an opening for the answer to enter.

And now, it was as if he was looking at a past life, or even a life before that…entirely deceased…and as he walked over to the window that looked over the tennis courts, in the corner of his eye he noticed up where the frame joined the ceiling, a small yellowish sign of Spring…a spider’s egg sac, all alone, just bigger than his finger tip.

And he sighed.

“All those answers,” he thought, “all those things I never understood, all those obscure intuitions that never revealed themselves…yes, all of that magic I tried to make my own. But I had no right.”

And the books on the shelves seemed to shrink away and die, or perhaps it was just that they returned to being books, simple books, as he returned the secret he had never understood back to his old friends, the spider’s sac, the blue of the sky, the slate of the roofs, back to these things where all the answers lived, and could once again, curl up and sleep.

My disposition, my inclination, my leaning…is to complexify, to counterpose.

I examine a point there, from a point here.

A point of volition, of action, of guilt, a point always in development.

And the insurmountable difficulty in this relationship with life rests on the hard fact that life does not require my relationship with it.

I was under the impression that my role in this was to extract the mysteriousness of life to form a kind of experiential elixir that both I and life would rejoice in.

But, I am not the saving agent for life’s incompleteness.

Everything is simply the case.  There are no points within this fact.

So there is an inherent redundancy in everything I choose to say.

You must also have noted the fact that life is happening without your approval.

See how it has gate-crashed in on everything.

And its sheer “guidelineslessness” and “happeningness” and “possibleness” is what holds everything here.

And the suffering and the suffering about suffering and the way spirituality tends to butcher it to pieces is all held along with everything else that might arise in this constant full-stop.

 

Things are simply

The case.

Slouched on his bed, head resting to the side, 

Eyes, mind, full of that high tree in the neighbour’s garden,

Full, stretched, committed, no space at all,

Busy…busy beyond belief.

“We’re very busy” said the thin clouds to the commuter as they sped across the tracks, overhead.

The decorator Mr. McKay,

Retired

Term served.

The house on the park,

Extended

Improved.

The apple tree in Tustin’s garden,

Gone, only grass now

Tustin gone, too.

Grandmother,

98 not 78

Parents,

68 not 48

And no one says a word.