12/21/2002, San Francisco

The final moments of my life tick away: if this can be called a life. Does this sound as tired to you as it does to me? I am sick of metaphors, of the metaphysical this and that, of the perpetual need to speak in order to define myself.

we live in a cemetary
cold and barren place
and science runs risk
making us gods

There are any number of crazed people in this city. One of them, a fairly ordinary looking man, never stops talking. That I have seen him. I suppose he must to eat and drink and sleep, but I imagine him to be a perpetual torrent of words: an infinity of topics directed to no one in particular, not even to God. As Bach’s music seems to me, hopelessly postmodern as I am.

The doctrine of the Trinity was once explained to me as a necessary cause of speech. That is, a unitary God does not require the facility of speech to communicate: all other beings are creatures, are of a lower order, and cannot say anything that the divine has not already predicted, nor can we comprehend the speech of God in any truly meaningful way: all that we might need to know has already been given to us in the silence of creation.

I give myself away by my manner of writing: my style. I long to give myself away, to be found out, to be understood. That I may stop speaking: stop speaking at the least in this direction, to the end of being understood. Let my words carry weight as a table carries weight, hold the cracked and imperfectly repieced vase without knowledge of anything more than its substance. As one holds a woman just before sleep descends. The warmth of her body and her soul at last the same thing.

I saw Mara the other day. She still works at Vesuvio. She did not recognize me. Not a deliberate unrecognition: not the eyes too swiftly turned away, but the same exact look I got from her the first time I saw her, light blue eyes with a few streaks of sorrow, the smell of possibility she exudes.

I fear that if I stop writing you I will stop existing altogether, or become something new yet again.

johnny