Pieces of a Piece to be titled 'Fable of a Man'

I've been planning this piece for a while - here are a couple bits I jotted down somewhere back in October.

I was crossing a bridge, and an old man was crossing from the other end. In front of me, two tourists stopped to take model-pose photographs with river backdrop. A girl, I guess, was also walking behind me. The bridge was new, made of steel. Shiny and modern. The old man had on a driving cap. He wore a brown jacket, and his eye-glasses rimmed wellworn and wise eyes. I couldn't tell if he was looking at me. I turned and looked up the river. Saturday river docks, cranes looming mechanical future over new commercial buildings and beyond all that, the bay. I was still crossing, arms pulled down by overfilled grocery bags; like with two big suitcases, but more awkward and less impressive. I was quite conscious of the fact that I had only turned my head sideways to avoid the old man's gaze. He had stopped, leaning comfortably against the railing. He was staring straight at me. He had on clothes which befit his age and his demeanor. Or rather he had this demeanor of which his clothes, his glasses, his cap, and his white beard were all a part, and he leaned comfortably, lean and still spry, against the railing. As I approached I saw that he was looking at me. He saw something in me that I didn't know was there. He was watching it. His eyes had that aged wrinkled shape that is a recollection of younger less-seen days. He was young despite his white hair. Like old Gil, that wise old grandfather, young despite his age. He was watching that thing in me -- I supposed it was my nobility. I supposed he was watching and seeing, knowing what I was to be, seeing perhaps himself fifty years past. It then occurred to me that he may have been more discriminating, that he may have been condemning me, hating me even. I passed, and as I did I averted my stare to the steel floor below me. Twas the casual head drop which says "Whatever passes now is no care of mine, I'm just walking." He had watched me without remorse, without stipulation or concern. He is past the point where he thinks it is presumptuous to stare someone down. It's not shamelessness: it's abandon of the whole argument of shame. He stopped walking and stood and stared because he saw something he wanted to watch.

When I had finished crossing, arms aching from my bags, I turned and continued home along the river. After a few moments I turned back and looked at the bridge. The old man was most of the way across now. He walked slowly.

* * *

There are 400,000 poets (for poets we all are) searching for the perfect pop song. Or, at least, for a word of truth. 400,000 we are who stand by ponds and watch ice melt, making groundbreaking televised statements in our heads, reveling in our individual geniuses and then renouncing ourselves to the murky bottom of hopelessness and mediocrity. We are young, so we are apt to be idealists. Few of us in fact harbor utopian dreams, seeking the smile in every dead soul. But we all have our ambitions. We want to make the world as good for others as it is for us. We want them to see that everything really and truly is alright, we want them to taste the satisfaction that exists in every breath. Most of all we want to find refuge, or rather to make a hermitage where the drama of life can collapse, leaving us with pure Eidenic innocence. We want symposium, the fulfillment of that Greek sage's prophecy wherein man is completed in woman, and woman through man. We want the infinite availability of experience and adventure, but we want that one with whom the being of it all will be duplicated and, so rendered, absolute. For we are 400,000 presently alone. As the ice melts, and our eyes widen with glee, and childlike energy once more enlivens us and makes us want to dance carelessly, and hug and grasp the next closest person -- we turn to find we are alone. All has fallen, all has momentarily vanquished its tension within us... but for naught. 400,000 poets we are who wait together for the first bloom so as to sing its praises in the glory of regenerative Earth, and 400,000 poets asunder we shut our lips and remember our downward stare. We stand, each of us, around this same pond, surrounded by these same leafless trees, and we all stare at our feet. Why! The old man passes by, he sees us all standing pedestrian and self-consumed, and he does not smile. He merely passes through, white with wisdom, clothed with vague indifference. 400,000 poets stand aloof-- we, we stand aloof, and wait for the ice to melt.

The Pen

A very long time ago - so very long ago that it is not even remembered now, mostly because it was a time before memory, and before reflections and also before names came to be - in that time, there was a pen. And the pen wrote things. It wrote things, but not as I write them, because I write them perfectly. This pen wrote things imperfectly - do you know what that is, child?
Neither do I, of course. But it did it - and that is all it did - it wrote things imperfectly. It wrote in pages, but the pages were creased and ugly. It wrote in paragraphs, but the paragraphs were misshapen. It wrote in sentences, but the sentences were misaligned - and the words - well, the words were all misspelled. And the pen kept writing imperfectly for a very long time, and then one day it stopped writing, and it went up in to the sky like everything else which finishes.
And the people looked for it, but they could not find it and so they were sad, because they knew it was gone from them. And for a very long time afterwards - such a long time, in fact, that it is still that time, even today - nobody wrote anything. Oh, they tried - they tried again and again. They tried so hard that eventually their hands hurt - so they developed tools to help them write, typewriters and computers. But even these tools could not help them to write as the pen did, for they wrote perfectly, not like the pen. And this is how things are still, even today.
Someday, though, it will rain. But this rain will not be normal rain, because normal rain washes things clean. No, this rain will not wash things clean - this rain will be ink rain. And this ink rain will cover the lands and the seas and the cities and the people and all of the animals and everything else with muddy blackness. And in the mud, everything will be indistinguishable and everyone will see that it is the end of things. Everything will be so covered in the ink, that the streets will be awash in it - buildings and towns will be unrecognizable - and people and animals will not even be able to see each other or where they are going - but there will be no point in going anywhere anyway. And when the sky has rained its ink down so much that everything has turned into one big, muddy sea of black - then, and only then, will we forget. I will forget, and so will you, child. We will forget everything we have ever said to each other - even the murmurs and the whispers - even the beautiful speeches and also the ugly ones, too - they will all be gone.
How do I know this, you ask? I know it because it is the way it has always been and the way it must be. Tell me: How could it be any other way?

Some Good News

Heidegger has some interesting points about our, well, existence and life. Except when he's talking about existence, he says 'Dasein,' which in english means 'being-there.' So when he says Dasein, just think 'Man' or 'Humans'. And for 'life,' he says 'being-with-one-another.' Here's what it means to 'be there,' that is, to exist:

...Being-with-one-another has the character of distantiality... But this distantiality which belongs to being-with, is such that Dasein, as everyday being-with-one-another, stands in subjection to Others. It itself is not; its being has been taken away by the Others. Dasein's everday possibilities of Being are for the Others to dispose of as they please. These Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, any Other can represent them. What is decisive is just that inconspicuous domination by Others which has already been taken over unawares from Dasein as Being-with. One belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their power. 'The Others' whom one thus designates in order to cover up the fact of one's belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part 'are there' in everyday Being-with-one-another. The "who" is not this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all. The 'who' is the neuter, the "they" [das "Man"].

... In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of 'the Others', in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the "they" is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back; we find 'shocking' what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.

...It 'was' always the "they" who did it, and yet it can be said that it has been 'no one.'...

... Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. ...



Good stuff, huh?

When I close my eyes

I see a dark window. It is bobbing and swirling in my eyes. I go towards it, or rather it goes towards me. It does not open. It is blank.

I see a beach ball fading like a traffic light, one color over the other. I see it bouncing, overturning, joviulating. It jokes along its path without a punchline.

I see a raindrop fall, long and wistfull on its plunge towards the earth like a razor to pierce the air and hit kersplat!- on the ground.

I see a tree, stony and moss-ridden, standing proud at the front of a forest. And there is no saw sharp enough to fell its thick trunk.