Retreat
"She could neither wake nor sleep. As if crushed between the past and the future, like a flower that comes above-ground to find a great stone lying above it, she was helpless." D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
I lost the Muji pen that's been my tooth for gnawing The Rainbow. Although it's tempting to taste and swallow it unchewed, I divert my attention instead to starting a journal, like I said I would on Friday. I have accrued many journals, and they've all become disgusting to me, so here's a clean slate.
I regret that the window through which my friends and I can call to each other has constricted so narrowly to public spaces at scheduled gatherings where we feel pressure to perform our roles within the dynamic. So in the pursuit of honest connection and full disclosure, I humbly offer your entry into this private cavity, which constricts in bright light and dilates in love and hot water.
Over the past year I've turned inward like a desert creature seeking shade. To my great relief, I've found that there is nothing of self left in the absence of company, just as there is no reflection without a mirror. There is only sensation and the emergence of awareness. When another subject enters that world of sensation, to compare sensations and cognizances is a source of endless fascination. As if sensing machines, we are activated by the sensations extended by the other from beyond our limited ranges. Only when awareness emerges of my influence over you, and yours over me, do I become cognizant of my self. That self has so often been revealed as the hook to catch all my world and sensation and cognizance upon one point, which point is identified with my name and face. I have to admit that, at this moment in my life, when I am reveling in tending to my own garden, I feel repulsed by this specter of a hook that calcifies and binds my senses at a fixed angle in the dynamic. When the subject is cornered and acutely blinkered, its whole world is narrowed to a static focal point. In this way, the introduction of other subjects can both limit and extend the world of sensations and cognizance.
How to keep fluidity in a dynamic? Remember that intention alone is meaningless without context, just as pedophiles are harmful only in the presence of children. Value emerges from the sensations experienced by a subject. A muscle interprets unfamiliar movement as pain.
Curiosity won out over dread of the hook yesterday, and the world opened a little wider. Madison picked me up, and we compared sensations on the way to the river, where twelve of us tied our floats together. Midway, I ate a mushroom chocolate, which activated an intense craving for sensory stimulation. I jumped in and swam the rest of the way, turgid with sensation and purpose in pulling the caravan around rapids according to Ri's direction, pumping my limbs through cold running water, the late afternoon sun bouncing among the exposed canopies. Curiosity is rewarded, as demonstrated by my still-overflowing aquifers of sensation.
Now it's getting late on a Sunday afternoon, and I have achieved nothing to dig myself out of the hole of delinquency that's formed around me at work, so be grateful that the inevitably over-earnest, wordy first post is done!