165. Questions Preceding or Succeeding Actions
Have you, in this cul-de-sac of abnegation, this purified realm drained of want because it’s filled with desire, have you found that locket stuffed with her lock of hair?
Could you, in the sense of losing, find a key to the life of living a life to the extent that you could remove the penumbra of self to reveal the self itself?
Have you, considering the restrictions required by the rules of imagination, infinitely detailed the limits of your ability to imagine what could not be before you right now without opening your eyes to reveal the fact of these presences?
Will you ever, in the theatre of life as it is actually but imperfectly lived, find yourself, as if you had been lost, in a, but not the, perfected state that allows you to realize but not to remember if you had?
Can you, if in taking the smallest bit of it away from the rest of it, discover that what was lost had led to a process of recognition that allowed you to see what you had seen so many times before but imperfectly so?
When you step, with the delicacy of a cat but through a storm of wind, do you imagine the thunder of your foot on the ground to those tiny denizens of the grass and mud or do you imagine your imprint and consider how long it will continue?
Would you, if allowed the opportunity to consider it and put it into action, be inclined to? or would you install a mediating system of diversions to keep your mind occupied like a rail station when people are moving furiously home?
Were you ever thought to be the one who had put that sequences of unexpected events into action, in the hope that only the process of attempting something, however outrageous, no matter how unlikely to succeed, could cause the changes you needed to see?
Had you the smallest piece of yarn in your pocket, say a thumbnail’s breadth in length and of a color so faint that all you could tell was that it was not white, and kept there only to remind you of the concept of sweater when the days turned cold?
Are you now imagining what the answer might be to this question even before you have heard it, because you are now filled with the anticipation of answer, as if it were a form of light that carried with it the warmth of what used to be summer?
Could you decide, even without provocation, to complete that project, what you think of as the project of your life, even if it seems now to be incomplete and potentially mawkish in its possible results, because it is what you want to do?
Were you surprised by the discovery that there was always something else under whatever you had pulled up to find what was under it, so much so that you realized the answer to every question was merely the beginning of the next question?
Have you found the time to extract from the various instances of your life the essential events of it, not the major events that seem meaningful but the tiniest ones that somehow had set the course and meaning of your life?
Do you see the broad expanses of this house, doorknob to ceiling, basement to lightswitch, and the way that it doesn’t so much hold you in as allow you to move about the world freely and unworried, and the way its windows open everything up to you?
Can you extract from a simple run of words the design of human consciousness and the barest outlines of what human thinking could consist of if allowed to move in the direction of the mind as the manifestation of the body?
Will you remember what you have willed yourself to forget at that point where forgetting becomes nothing more to you than the burden of the accumulated actions and events of your life imagined as a single weight?
Have you listened to the breath of a wren, not when surrounded by your restricting hand, but when it is within a bush and resting and it takes the greatest portion of your concentration to hear its small feathery chest breathe its limited breath in and back out into the air?
Did you ever consider that the sky is just the air, is just the collected respiration, in syncopated unison, of every plant and animal on the planet letting slip from lungs and through the stomata or epidermal cells of plants everything required to make the sky seem a tent of blue that blocks nothing but the darkness of space and that only during daylight?
Do you realize that our breathing consists of two parts, the inspiration and expiration of air, so that we could be conceived of as beasts in constant fluctuating states of being surprised by our sudden brilliant ideas and of being dead?
Where you are could be what you want?
How you might wish to imagine it?
Who you must always be?
Why you?
Could you, in the sense of losing, find a key to the life of living a life to the extent that you could remove the penumbra of self to reveal the self itself?
Have you, considering the restrictions required by the rules of imagination, infinitely detailed the limits of your ability to imagine what could not be before you right now without opening your eyes to reveal the fact of these presences?
Will you ever, in the theatre of life as it is actually but imperfectly lived, find yourself, as if you had been lost, in a, but not the, perfected state that allows you to realize but not to remember if you had?
Can you, if in taking the smallest bit of it away from the rest of it, discover that what was lost had led to a process of recognition that allowed you to see what you had seen so many times before but imperfectly so?
When you step, with the delicacy of a cat but through a storm of wind, do you imagine the thunder of your foot on the ground to those tiny denizens of the grass and mud or do you imagine your imprint and consider how long it will continue?
Would you, if allowed the opportunity to consider it and put it into action, be inclined to? or would you install a mediating system of diversions to keep your mind occupied like a rail station when people are moving furiously home?
Were you ever thought to be the one who had put that sequences of unexpected events into action, in the hope that only the process of attempting something, however outrageous, no matter how unlikely to succeed, could cause the changes you needed to see?
Had you the smallest piece of yarn in your pocket, say a thumbnail’s breadth in length and of a color so faint that all you could tell was that it was not white, and kept there only to remind you of the concept of sweater when the days turned cold?
Are you now imagining what the answer might be to this question even before you have heard it, because you are now filled with the anticipation of answer, as if it were a form of light that carried with it the warmth of what used to be summer?
Could you decide, even without provocation, to complete that project, what you think of as the project of your life, even if it seems now to be incomplete and potentially mawkish in its possible results, because it is what you want to do?
Were you surprised by the discovery that there was always something else under whatever you had pulled up to find what was under it, so much so that you realized the answer to every question was merely the beginning of the next question?
Have you found the time to extract from the various instances of your life the essential events of it, not the major events that seem meaningful but the tiniest ones that somehow had set the course and meaning of your life?
Do you see the broad expanses of this house, doorknob to ceiling, basement to lightswitch, and the way that it doesn’t so much hold you in as allow you to move about the world freely and unworried, and the way its windows open everything up to you?
Can you extract from a simple run of words the design of human consciousness and the barest outlines of what human thinking could consist of if allowed to move in the direction of the mind as the manifestation of the body?
Will you remember what you have willed yourself to forget at that point where forgetting becomes nothing more to you than the burden of the accumulated actions and events of your life imagined as a single weight?
Have you listened to the breath of a wren, not when surrounded by your restricting hand, but when it is within a bush and resting and it takes the greatest portion of your concentration to hear its small feathery chest breathe its limited breath in and back out into the air?
Did you ever consider that the sky is just the air, is just the collected respiration, in syncopated unison, of every plant and animal on the planet letting slip from lungs and through the stomata or epidermal cells of plants everything required to make the sky seem a tent of blue that blocks nothing but the darkness of space and that only during daylight?
Do you realize that our breathing consists of two parts, the inspiration and expiration of air, so that we could be conceived of as beasts in constant fluctuating states of being surprised by our sudden brilliant ideas and of being dead?
Where you are could be what you want?
How you might wish to imagine it?
Who you must always be?
Why you?
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