I must decide if my heart is a source of triumph or one of defeat. As I find myself becoming more and more attracted to a woman, I see myself separated into two distinct halves: one part of me is ravenous and insatiable, hungry and bent, a wild creature who must devour every emotion and experience in order to survive; at times I don't know what I would do without him...

The other half of me is quiet, discreet, and sedate, almost womanly and demure. In this half, I find it difficult to approach a woman or to advance further intimacies. I'd rather wait an eternity for a woman to make the first move, begin the conversation, suggest something other than small talk, than to leave myself vulnerable and open to pain or insult. Because I've secured my passions tightly on a chain, and made sure that chain is well-hidden, I've surrendered numerous opportunities to make contact, to experience something new and rewarding, opting instead to let most of these slip away without so much as a sideward glance...

Since I've moved to Seattle I've become a a recluse and a false-face. At work I pretend to be something I'm not, smug, cock-sure, and comical; at home, I hide behind the security of solitude, while failing to deny the truth of who I am. If I am ever to know myself honestly, I must someday confront all my contradictions and admit the personal impact of all my peculiar gifts. BB (from the Restaurant) said once she was glad she wasn't gifted, that she couldn't do the things I could do. In her case, as in the case of so many others, I'm glad I've kept my smug silence...

Far enough inside, say, where the optic nerves intersect and cross snug and cushy into the brain, I can feel the weight of awareness like a hard-pocked golfball, an invisible golfball some merciless ancestor birdied smack-dab into my consciousness from the distant past. The spot between my two hemispheres has been forever marked, where the two poles of the earth's reality magnetize and rub opposites, a polar competition, vying for supremacy...

When it rains, the human emotions become alert and tense. In the dry sweep of the sun's rays, the body becomes soft and lazy, lethargic, and moves as if in a stupor. Somehow the rain, that metaphor of every cycle on this planet, holds the power to loosen in life what is latent and dorment, in hibernation. The rain; it is a catalyst causing the spark to stir, to blossom full and defiant. It calls to life what is otherwise deep-hidden and asleep...

For an instant I feel suddenly alone and lost in the world, divorced from my own body, separate, distinct from my life, from that place where I'm used to being. I feel that I'm hanging on to life by a single thread and that one quick jerk, one tug however slight, will hurtle me away across untold dimensions, into shadowy realms unknown. I know I won't die if this thread should snap. I will have been made into two...

I sit suddenly paralyzed by fear and clutch the mattress until my knuckles are colorless and my muscles spastic. The air in my chest is solid and enormous, like a squat square stone, and I open my mouth to call out, to call upon TJ sleeping and dreaming beside me, but I am able only to hiss and sputter, and the sound of my weakness lays atop my tongue like an alabaster egg. I don't want to be pulled away to a place where I'll be left alone, where I can't be with TJ. I'm afraid for her if she is left behind. What will she do? And I am afraid for my soul if I must continue on elsewhere...

I close my eyes, and the wave of my fear impends, and the rush of my fear pulls me away, and then it pushes me back like a ragdoll onto the flooding shores of where I began. I drag and pull myself up weakly, and over to TJ, and touch her face beneath her silky hair resting against the pillow. WE ARE ALIVE. We are alive, and she dreams, and I dream too. But laying beside her, electrified by fear, I see a day when our lives/our dreams will be fulfilled, and then we'll never again be called on to sleep, to dream, to wake, to sleep again...

There is something perverse about the way we mature, grow-up and turn into adults...

[AFTER HENRY MILLER:]

Almost nine years I've been trapped here in Lynnwood. For some reason, a reason I haven't yet been able to fathom, I've chosen to both work and live here, to dance for my pennies...

I haven't any future, any ideas, plans, wits. In the midst of this existential hollow, I'm as content a fool as there ever could be. For seven years, eight years, I've been attending the University full time, a professional Kiss-Ass. (Pucker Up, Buttercup). Now, with a few degrees under my belt, and accepted into Grad School, I think it's time I figured out what it is I want to be when I grow up. And therein lies the rub: I don't want to be anything; I want to become Nothing, a Nobody. I want to surrender and find myself afloat and lost in the Eternal Now, swept away and carried like a leaf in a stampeding river. And when it happens, I don't care if I actually remember it or not. Because I'm not too clear about what it is I'm suppose to be doing in the temporal scheme of things, I stand here (or float) in a state of inertia, swirling round and round and chasing my own tail, killing time in the god-forsaken God City called Lynnwood. With raised and angry fists, I'm smashing the heartbeat of all its clocks, snuffing all the neon tick-tocks. It's all Maya, all illusion, and nothing means anything, THERE ARE NO ABSOLUTES! Yet still, you'll find me knocking superstitiously on wood and avoiding cracks in the pavement...

So: What's to be made out of any of this? Nothing; Zippo; Nil; Squat. None of this amounts to a towering Babel of beans. It doesn't mean a thing, not in the usual or traditional sense. This is nothing more than so much reside of idiot monkey fingers going click-clack-click across the soiled keys of a sadly abused portable typewriter, the bastard outcome of too many cigarettes and not enough coffee and too many empty nights of playing with myself and honestly wondering if there is anything better waiting in the wings. Whether sex, love, purpose, understanding; I don't care what label you tack onto it. It's nothing more than physical or emotional masturbation, playing with yourself and convincing yourself that your particular and peculiar or traditional fantasies are REAL...

It is sometime around June, that blossoming summer month. I don't give two shits about calendars ...I've already said what I'm doing to time. But what would you say about the Dream I had three nights ago (or was it four?)? I never told you what the Dream was about, only that I had it and you were in it. You were at it's very core, you were the nucleus around which the entire Dream was woven. There are perhaps periods of Time, but these exist only between dreams, called "waking Reality," yet either way (between Dream and non-dream) memories fade. My Universe is fluid and cannot stand still, cannot fall into frigid inertia, descend and lapse into the faithful realm of frozen certainty; because nothing is certain, there is nothing around long enough for me to point to or hang my hat on or proclaim as imputable. The Universe (and Time) is a long immense river carrying debris to the sea, the flotsam and jetsam of a trillion births tossed overboard at the gasping second of Death, all that miserly residue we wear like cheap suits. I am imagining that when the sea takes its quota and there is nothing left for it to capture, neither driftwood nor deadwood, not one solitary scrap, then everything everywhere will know finally the Victory of Life. When into the silent Void all things are finally hurtled, then Life itself will be unlimited ...It is limitation which gravitates the need of our being here. You, TJ, you are this gravity. You are the gravity that brings down my fists, causing them to drum in voodoo chorus, to strike out an awkward music, an ungainly rhythm. And this music isn't my own, it doesn't belong to me, but rather it is the swansong of the entire planet, hammering against the restrictions inherent in classical Time: Life - Birth - Death - Epiphany. I am here in this world, hammering inside your head, a dull and uniform throb suitable for saintly meditation; ("There is no God save [except] the God you always already are;" --Meister Eckhart).

And TJ isn't your real name. Nor is it Meg. Nor is it Lillith. You know who you are.

Who are you?

 Meditating in the closet, squatting atop hiking boots and huddled between woollen overcoats: The Mystery of Life. The ephemera, with its twenty-four hour existence, living out its entire insect life in a single day. Or the amoeba—from the Greek 'ameibein': To Change. Birds and fish and mammals with instinctive sexuality, thus: We struggle to bridle our 'animal instincts;' ..."And gloriously," writes Saint Augustine, "Men have risen above the slippery mire of the beasts." Gloriously? Yes, gloriously. Imagine Mankind, slithering around, doing whatever comes naturally, whatever is buried a millennium deep, and imagine Man doing it guiltlessly and effortlessly and with whomever it chooses. Foxes and dogs and cats doing it with a dozen mates ...and one for every month of the year. Meditating: A question coming from one of the waitresses at work, wondering if I'm still writing and working on my novel. Working? Yes, of course I'm still writing, like shitting bullets ...KaKa-pow, KaKa-pow!

Four o'clock in the morning. Raven black, rain sluicing down across the windows, the wind rustling through the eaves. The street below winds its way down twelve blocks to the waterfront. The Puget Sound opens its yawning mouth, ever ready to swallow whole the careless and the damned. It isn't Seattle. It isn't Lynnwood. It's a gigantic neuron fist tightening its fierce nails deep inside the shrunken brains of the dying. The street lamps lower before me, hitched against the throat of the night like a pearl necklace, like tarnished rosary beads hung around the thin neck of a repetent whore whom the parish priest sizes up, calibrating her celestial worth by assessing the blue veins bursting across her bruised and tender breasts.
     O Sanctus, O Kyrie!

THERE IS A WORLD PROPER AND A WORLD POSSIBLE and mine is the world most blessed by light. A wet terrarium hung on a golden fob from the sun, a blue crystal held deeper than dreams, here the angels have come and planted their seeds, and nurtured them properly, to foster coats of skin, the very flesh by which I am made. I have not been moved to rent this garment, to rip and expose the secret tissues. I have not been called upon to become that naked/that vulnerable, but to instead anoint myself with lotions and oils, that I might bear the light, bare myself. I am a remnant of the sun, but having been born twice removed, through stone first and then through soma, I share daily its potential holocaust, while heir to its estate, adopted into its circle yet not adopted, a child of its children though it too is a child. Everything on earth is auriferous, aural.

ON THIS PLANET, possibility sifts the air like a woman's musk, rich and humid, and creates at once a visage of hope, that I might yet make it, might succeed, and find the strength to smash those chains which incarcerate Prometheus, he who is entombed in all our lives. The ancestral gravity of our being here, tied to this stone called Earth: Prometheus, or Adam, our blood is our living history...

This morning I awoke, not to see the damp morning light, its orange throb through my windows, a light as common as the beating heart/ the swelling lungs/ the jumping eyes, but what I am. This vision, so clear and unqualified, unfolded mnemonically and I remembered a previous world, antediluvian or more ancient than that even, where there was no guilt nor a need to transcend it. I lived. I live again, if only through the illusions of space and time. Can I ever transcend a heritage as spacious and timeless as the Universe itself, or dare return to that moment when we all were the same thing, all substance of One substance? Truly, life is oracular, but now I am seeing through a glass darkly, and while creation is teeming with clues I am unable, even with all my learning and know-how, to see the forest for the trees.

What if (by chance) I stumble across the Truth and it sets me free? What of me might prevail within this new-born freedom? Toward what end might I strive without a certain risk of bondage? Can anything become that free, that unshackled, without risking itself becoming either trivial or arbitrary?

Perhaps the blood alive inside the body, endlessly circulating, constantly feeding and cleansing, is a symbol of everything else. In the blood all destiny roars. Perhaps I only need to look to my heart, that source and mechanism of my life continuous; if I can fathom its working, so base yet so intricate, then what else might I later comprehend. I am a working Model of Creation. I am alive.

What I sometimes forget is that I am alive in spite of myself. I am alive and in motion, and where I begin and where I end are not always boundries that can be easily discerned. We are like rivers flowing seaward, always different at any given moment, always transitory, never the same. Only that which is most basic prevails...

Like a tramp I step out beneath the Moon's borrowed light. I do not know what is most basic. I do not know where the true Self begins. I only know that I can be no more in this universe than what the universe itself can be. I can learn nothing other than that which is continuously known, which is the universe, which is already always with me...
I am moving through the night. I do not see a world proper. I do not see what is frozen and stagnant, concrete, immovable. Around and in me all is static, is reflexive, is as endless and timeless as I dare perceive it, the special kinship between night & day, earth & sky, the intake and consequential removal of liquids. I accept this natural working. I do not burden it with antiquated gods or worn testimonies. And why? Because I am unable to distinguish myself from the wind which blows and those things upon which the wind is blowing. All boundaries are whimsical, arbitrary, merely traditional, chimerical...

Ours is a realm of fluidity, never the same but always the same, able only to take the shape of the earthen vessel in which it is contained. Jack Randall in Berkeley writes: "My God is the God I imagine, and I cannot imagine anything more than the wisdom this world allows...Everything I know or can ever hope to know depends solely upon the physical mechanics of this world...I have nothing else for comparison...I am this world, internalized." Hence the Mystery of Life on this planet is also the conundrum of art, artifacts, the secret masks of the shaman, holistic medicine, New Age cancer cures, earth magick. The Conjuror calls forth only the effectual science he himself has previously experienced...

The sun boiling behind a fat blanket of clouds, the One Light given dimension through veils,...spread horizontally, made immense. Such potentiality squats on its haunches and rides our backs like an addict's monkey & does so forcibly. It is a premonition felt while its meaning is still hidden. TO SEE THE UNSEEN BEHIND WHAT WE DO SEE AND, WITH A SHRUG, TO MOVE ELSEWHERE FROM THERE...

This world abounds with insinuendos, inklings, tacit sensations, that punch hard behind the eyes, unascertained tensions, sudden pangs of doubt that reach right around causality, theosophy, uncaused yet real. These are only universal teases, seductive hints as to what lays ahead. These are what keep us doubting, testing, questioning, uncertain, even when we admonish otherwise, holding up whatever flag of organized religion, Jesus, Buddha, the Destroyer Shiva, like Christian saints speaking in Tongues and questioning the validity of their angelic language. It is not enough to see this world, to focus upon it so sharply and keenly; we must see that because of this world we are able to see yet another. It is to come to The Door, and to not stop there, to take the easy way out, but to burn down the Door, its locks & hinges, its framework, the entire building, and to know that beyond it something incredible awaits...

Would it surprise you if I told you I could be ready for marriage tomorrow? And without prior commitment? Without preparation? Without the deeper knowledge of the other person as is usually expected in the marriage ceremony? It's foolishness, I know. But I know that everything in our lives is foolishness, and where we get into trouble is by thinking things serious. I'm rambling now, of course; I have no excuse...

 Communication is simple when you're "in love." Sitting with TJ in my car overlooking Richmond Beach, and the radio is playing "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," I could say to her simply: "I think that song is nice, don't you?"

 And she could say: "Yes."

 But, and here's where it gets really strange and sticky, it could be the same with any other woman. The same niceness could be there, the same specialness, the same intimacy, closeness, feeling, which helps to explain why I haven't been ready to marry. I mean, if I could be with anybody, how could I ever decide on somebody? Unless I did so out of guilt or obligation, parental expectations or societal prodding. And then, what kind of marriage would that be? I would have married for all the wrong reasons...

 I keep waiting for that moment when it couldn't be the same, where I couldn't be with anybody else, but it never comes/it never comes, and though I've been waiting and searching, and holding out, I'm afraid I'll give in to all the pressures and marry, against my better sense, for all the wrong reasons. I keep thinking: "You could be anybody!"

And I'm afraid it is this 'anybody' I will eventually marry...

I look at you now, and my heart beats as if I am falling in love for the very first time. But that's crazy, because I don't even know you yet, I don't know who you are. I suppose I'm crazy, as crazy as this world, and I'm afraid I'm going to surrender to the world and marry the first woman who ever threatens me with marriage...

[AFTER RICHARD GROSSINGER]

It is three o'clock in the afternoon and the hot sun is fermenting. G is waiting outfront on a small strip of lawn throwing baseballs against his bricked apartment building. He greets us, TJ and me, with a bashful grin and we gather up the balls and bats and leather mitts and hike down to the tennis courts on the eastside of the UW campus by the Hec Ed pavilion. TJ has her homework, a book of poems by Ann Sexton (including "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator") for a class, which she has had trouble reading because the author has masturbated in the absolute extreme by having committed suicide. No one is playing tennis, so we lay out a new stickball field. The old field, with its overhanging elms/dropping the ball into the street for hits, has been sacrificed for student parking and about a square mile of asphalt. Here we create a makeshift field using the different tennis courts as Singles and Doubles, and the marked area beyond them for Triples and Home Runs. We wind the morning newspaper through the fence for a strike zone and begin to play. The afternoon is hot and TJ sits in the shade beside a picnic table and dives into her book. At the onset, neither G nor I can throw strikes, and all the hits are triples and in the weeds, and just as we're getting going some tennis players arrive and chase us out of the courts. We take our bats and balls and gloves and go further east onto the big field, freshly mowed and the dorms on the hill all around, with the varied voices of the rock-and-roll gods blasting out from what seems a million opened windows.

Now we are using a hardball, and against the dugout and scoreboard are Doubles, and Triples are one bounce over the fence, and Home Runs way over the fence without a bounce. I hit first. The sun is bright and G shields his eyes with his mitt to field. I loft some doubles over his head, pure luck, and then a single. TJ comes down over the hill and sits in the greater distance away from the action under an elm, further away than anyone can hit, and in the opposite direction. She lies down in the grass and takes up her reading again. G misjudges a line drive, yes!, and it bounces over the fence: a triple! Now the ball is in the parking lot and he must walk all the way around the chain-linked fence to retrieve it. I fall back into the grass and lie there for a long time. I see TJ, upside-down through the grass, reading her book of poems, far far away. I imagine she can her me and call out her name. A breeze has picked up and is blowing in my direction, and as I shout I am feeling the illusion that my words are scooped up and blown back at me over my head and shattered behind me like ice.

Now, earlier, hiking across campus: I was telling G, using the analogy of baseball, of the Jewish Qabbala, how certain scholars claimed that the Word of God, specifically the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, was to be taken literally; the Qabbalists claimed: "Yes, the Bible is the exact Word of God, and the only question remaining is how do we make use of it, and interpret into our lives the mystical purity of the Word? How are we to know what it is saying? Because the Bible is not just a book that you can pick up in the library and read through and attempt to gather all the Facts and the author's intentions, like a cultural history of the Northwest Indians. It is the Book, God's own Voice, explaining to us in the miracle of the Word, how the world really is. Every passage, every sentence, verb, noun, contains incredible knowledge. And, if this is the Word, how are we expected to hear it, and interpret it, for our specific expediency? If this world is really the Kingdom of God, as both the Qabbalistic Old Testament and the Teachings of Jesus profess, how are we ever to ultimately realize this if we are all, in fact, spiritually depraved? What does it matter if the Truth is written plainly while we only imagine we know how to read it? And if we don't really read, how are we ever going to see the Truth in the illicit scribble of words?"

The historical Qabbalists agree that the Bible and the Talmud (the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament attributed to Moses) are the Word of God, and the white spaces between the words are the Word, and the blanks between the lines are also written by God. The words themselves are limited to a specific history, and a feeble cultural history at that (because the Jews, being a historically Conquered People, have assimilated over time both the theology and local folklore of the varied cultures who exploited them), but between the lines, and following the commas and periods and semi-colons, and in spite of all the pensive mechanics of writing, the drawing of the pen and the scratching of the ink, the world/word has always existed before the Creation of the world, before the translation of this creation into a common tongue. This is the Bible written by God before language was ever transformed into history, before the naming of the beasts was transfigured into vital data, their Naming converted into specific species and the general population, before the atom of/or Adam (Mankind) impregnated Eve (Mother), and her children filled the earth with the extended speech of the Biblical passages. The Qabbalists are literalists, and the literal Bible is an invisible world we can never discover on it's carefully scanned pages. The Qabbalists return to the literal word, for in the beginning was the Word (Logos, logic), which is the tempered word they are doomed to seek, inspecting etymological corners with a magnifying glass, seeking but denying, refusing to acknowledge the influence of the Jewish Masters, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Romans, refusing objective history and history's archetypal command, in favor of the so-called fairy tale that everything began with the Bible, in spite of and impervious to the fifty million years of evolving Man. They would deny the dinosaurs if they had their say, and the timeless geological slashes into the earth, like the Grand Canyon (the Grand Canon?: including the Bishop Usher's manipulation of Biblical genealogies that "prove" that Man was fiat created out of nothing in the year 4,004 BC).

The Qabbala, which is rewritten from the Bible with each generation, and not the literal Bible, which merely contains it, is God's Own Word. For, according to the stolid Qabbalists, there is no way to lull in the summer sun lazily, to gaze upon the daisies in the park, to feel the wind shifting off the water of the Puget Sound. The Qabbala is not literal in that way. We can't ever achieve happiness staring at an unread text. We must penetrate the text using everything else available to us, history, anthropology, archaeology, even pagan myths, and in the penetration, which is called "The Work" by alchemists and mystics and fools, we must run at it full speed/full tilt and be willing to flush it all down the crapper if it proves to be nothing more than a superstitious exercise of apprehensive and primitive men attempting to make sense of their own mortality. Once we are willing to do this, to get to the meat of the thing, regardless of tradition and orthodox values, and be willing to throw the meat away if we find it rancid, or stale or as dried as beef jerky, then, and only then: a Gate opens, and the literal Word lies revealed just behind the blindness of the literalists. There is no lazy way to play the Game or read the Book, for the words are written just so. It's all paronomasia (wordplay), and talking about it becomes paronomasia's son, blood of its blood though once removed. The Son of Man. With a diligent and persevering drive we must dive into the Word/World and its history, regardless of everything else and regardless of all our childhood conditioning. We must find the hidden passages and the secret of their generation, for this is the way God made the World, leading always with matter, heaping matter upon matter (matter: Mater: "Mother") by mathematical operation, by occlusion and occultism. In that this is history, and each step historically occludes the obvious and previous step. Each motion is the tail-end of what it is, and remarkably begins a new world (the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Heaven/the New Earth/the New Creature). This is the way that plants grow, the embryo hidden in the ripe fruit, the ancestors hidden in serial homologies, each step of the homology reached through a different law. Sex is built into matter, and matter divides and changes sexually. Nothing is accomplished before we find ourselves turned-on. Until we're turned-on we just lie around, complacent, and go through the motions, and suppose that because God is in His Heaven everything is right and just with the world. And we cannot just merely look at the flowers surrounding us and be blessed and be happy. We must read the division that goes into the flowers, by which they come, the seasonal operation that works inside of them, every time a cell divides, the yellow needles bursting from last year's evergreen, the forest ferns swelling sexually with sori, sexual jellies pumped from the fields into the honeysuckle, the odors and colors drawing the bee who weaves a new text, also literal, scattering by accident in his wings the seeds, the letters of the natural alphabet, DNA, out of which next year's crop grows. This is not an easy text, nor is there an easy way in for pious old ladies clutching God's Word in their hands or a two-buck pamphlet of mail-order prophecies, ready to beat you over the head for your sins because you had the gall and impudence to step outside the circle of their parochialism and read EVERYTHING ELSE! The Holy Land lies behind everything else, but who can see it? It's easy to believe and accept and credit your philosophy with the so-called leap of faith; what's hard is to inquire, to ask, to explore. "Faith" is a lazy man's term, too lazy to dig, too lazy to read, too lazy to disrupt the status quo or step outside the circle or venture out alone and afraid into unknown territory. Faith is another name for fear...

(NIETZSCHE, 1865: "Is it really so difficult to accept...what is considered truth in the circle of one's relatives and of many good men, and what, moreover, really comforts and elevates man? Is that more difficult than to strike new paths, fighting the habitual, experiencing the insecurity of independence and the frequent wavering of one's feelings and even one's conscience, proceeding often without any consolation... Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.")

...because it is easier to believe than it is to inquire, to ask, to question. I mean, my God, what if you inquire and you discover that everything you believe in is something else altogether? Then where will you be? You'd be face-to-face with yourself and all your doubts, and that is the HARDEST THING OF ALL!

And that is why it is easier to believe in Jesus than it is to believe in yourself. Because Jesus has taken away the sin of the world, and without Jesus you'd have to deal with your sin yourself. And we mustn't have that, we wouldn't be able to deal with our own sin directly, because that would be too much work, too much uncertainty, and far too much freedom. Better for Jesus to do it for us in one bloody swoop, blanketing us in forgiveness, that way we never have to really examine our own dark sides, our own personal demons or the primal chthonic serpents that have woven a black tapestry across the collective loom of our souls. Because Jesus has done all the work, because he died for all our sins (excluding, of course, the sin of disbelief), he relieved us of the chance or opportunity to ever attempt anything ourselves, of ever having to come face-to-face with our own limited definition of God or asking of Him all the vital questions, of interrogating Him one-on-One, about Omniscience, Omnipotence, the Nature of Free Will, the Creator/Creature dichotomy, Pre-Destination, and the harsh Mechanism of Eternal Judgement. Thank you, Jesus, that I am forgiven in spite of myself and that I don't have to do a goddamn thing. Except believe. But Belief is a coward too lazy to inquire, too afraid to stand alone, or too timid to take credit for anything or everything he has ever done. How comfortable the pious old ladies must feel, embracing Jesus, sitting atop the given certainty of their salvation, without ever having to really dig beneath the abstract definition of sin and into the squirming black, primordial, and chthonic Nature of Sin itself, which dwells unbalanced in all our souls, borne out of freedom, and nurturing autonomy. We have a license to sin and sin gives us license, by validating our personal experiences and encouraging our independence, allowing our uniqueness and sustaining our liberties. The freedom to sin and the freedom that sin allows us is the ultimate emancipator. Without sin, without the potential to fuck-up royally, we would be nothing more than automatons, robots, mechanistic devices, wind-up toys, the Play Things of God. And that is the Great Mystery of Sin, the empowering Gift of Sin, that the pious old ladies and fundamentalists have been unable to grasp. It is our ability to sin that unites us with God, for in both (both Sin & God) we are given absolute freedom, the freedom of choice. It was not by accident nor by oversight that a guileful and crafty Serpent was given shared billing in the Garden of Eden or that a Tree bearing the ripened Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil stood so easily in opportune reach, or that Innocence was tempted and succumbed to temptation, and judged without leniency and sentenced so harshly, condemned to mortality and strife and pain, without acknowledgement of the Nature of Innocence or its implied ignorance (i.e., the implicit inability to determine Right from Wrong, lacking in both knowledge and experience, unaccountable and unable to make a conscionable decision), unaccountable yet accounted, as if the Knowledge of Good and Evil existed prior to the Tree, prior to its Fruit, and prior to its eating. Because Innocence was deemed conscionable before ever having the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and judged for succumbing to temptation while lacking the basic and fundamental understanding of enlightened decision-making, and sentenced to a mortal existence for acting without awareness, and condemned to death for finally obtaining the Knowledge of Good and Evil, then it was Judgement that called sin into play. For without judgement there can be no sin. And without sin there can be no freedom. And without freedom there can be no God.....

Now: I lie in the grass smelling where it bleeds chlorophyll from a fresh cutting, and I'm watching TJ eighty-yards across the field rolling over to a more comfortable position. "TJ, TJ, TJ!" I call out, but she has rolled over into the shade and doesn't hear me, and a new breeze is whistling about everywhere. WHOOO-HEEEssh.

Divided by a trillion blades of grass, WE ARE INSEPARABLE, I think in the mind's eye, and, SHE IS HERE...

And it begins to make sense.

G comes running back from the other side of the fence and heaves the ball in. But I have lost my rhythm and don't get another hit in my round at bat, and I sulk out into the field with my mitt dangling at my side and a two-nothing lead. Now G is up over the plate, and he's getting hits and the ball drops out of the blue sky at me again and again. I catch the damned thing everytime and throw it back in, much to his dismay. The wind growls, and now the trees on the hill are loud and the clouds are coming in; the backs of the leaves are turning, waves of white through green, and each single tree I look at is a part of the collective roar but no tree is a part of it alone, like the single waves in the Pacific Ocean crashing and sounding in.

And it begins to make sense, I find myself exhilarated by the late afternoon breeze and run like a monkey to backhand ground balls, sometimes an in-fielder holding off singles, sometimes an outfielder snatching flies in the leather webbing. I think, THIS IS MY BODY, and I AM IN IT, and THIS IS WHAT I DO, and WHAT I KNOW HOW TO DO, and IT IS HAPPENING RIGHT HERE and RIGHT NOW and NOT BEFORE OR AFTER and WHATVER IT IS IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN THIS WAY AGAIN!
And I find myself thinking about Carlos Castaneda and of Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman. The first time Castaneda takes Mescalito, he wakes hours later to find himself a human being after all, after all this time, and it is too much for him to bear and he cries like a lost child separated from his parent. But I think a thousand times a minute, I am human, and remember my humanity a thousand other minutes, like right now remembering the night before, climbing into the bathtub. How strange it is that this is my body, and this is the planet where I came, and this is where I am now fooled into taking a bath. As I run for the ball, the two of them come back together, the bath and the running, my humanity and my making the catch.

And it is all given to us. I mean, this is America, and Castaneda must know by now (enigmatically) that it is all given to us because nothing is given to us, and everything that we can't use is here, making it unduly easy, and what we do need is unavailable at no price, making it unduly hard. In my case, it is hard. And then I wonder: How do I know that? How do I know anything without an ally? Or is TJ my ally? Can a girl be an ally? Or someone else? Michael? G? Or something else?, as smoke is for Don Juan...

I bat again and score one more run. As G chases after the ball I try to make TJ look towards me by hitting two bats together, CLUNK-clunk, but she is too far away. Now I am thinking of her as an ally. But the banging of the bats is perverse, a compulsive undercurrent, like pulling up a dandelion too young to soak.

I go back out onto the field and the wind is terrific. I am totally distracted, the whole warm afternoon, and warmer afternoons, and their rich build-up of leaves, and clouds being blown apart almost faster than I can hear or see. I am almost happy; I am certainly guilty. What matter if this is an alien planet, and this ring around me, these trees, this city, is to be smashed like glass into fragments through entropy and my body is left broken for the vultures. This is my body. This is where I am now. I wonder using my brain if there is other inside me more than brain, a soul, merely using the brain as an instrument, a song to think through. It is an old game, from childhood, of trying to imagine my Self removed from my infirm body. The brain is complex and compulsive, with a huge backlog of references, like blackberries --hard to paw through.

I look around, and the ring is made up of letters appearing in the coats of trees; the ring is made of glass and the glass ball is about to be smashed, the sun broken, its yolk loosened in space, and here we still are, playing in the wind, in the Now. When I can see through all of this, the physiology, the psychology, the existential psycho-drama called "Living in the Material World," I am still here. Wherever I am, this is my world, and I am still Here...