6.
Waiting, on the surface, appears to be inactive. It seems passive, filled with contentment, Zen like posturing, resting in the face of uncertain fate and action. My wait, the waiting of my heart, does not feel resigned to present-moment rest and relaxed joy. My waiting is one of expectation and desire. There is a great need and great patience, and a subtle background of pleasure and excitement. I am in anticipation of love, of someone, someone I do not know. When I consider the feelings, hopes, fears, and pleasures Philos has generated in my interior, my gorgeous, soft and open insides, where veins stream into heart and heart feeds into soul, I remind myself that I barely know him. Other than tasting his skin, feeling his lips against my body, sensing the expression of his soul, sourcing the movements of his mind through the subtle contraction of his eyes and face muscles, I know nothing about him. I know gravity. I know sensitivity. I know hesitation. I know hurt. I know his attraction for me. I know continuous, gorgeous attention.
I don’t know him, and I do know him. I love him for both his mystery and his revelation. I love him for his fantasy and his reality. I wait for his reach, his reach out, his reach forward, his response to my longing; yet, in waiting, I want and love him more. My heart softens in anticipation of him.
Waiting is both love and the anticipation of love. Memories in unsaturated video loops: the day I waited for mom to return. In almost cinematic memory form, the morning of her nonreturn sits in my soul, forever reeling nostalgic 70’s loss. She didn’t return. I waited, in anticipation for her, and she didn’t return. I recall sitting on the couch, alone, feet and shoes dangling in joyful excitement - life was only exciting when mom was there. In a burst of energy I flipped in the other direction standing on my knees looking out the window beyond the couch towards the front yard. In memory color dissolves into grey, white, and black – color dissolving towards the absence of color.
I waited, and she did not return. My dad finally pulled into the driveway. In exiting the car, my father, through his slouched and painful stagger to the house, shared with me everything my four-year old mind, and ageless soul, needed to know: my mother, my sweet, gorgeous mother, the namer of my body/mind, would never be coming home. He walked in the door, his black raincoat mimicking despair.
He sat on the couch next to me.
With his sigh, he affirmed my fear, a fear that I did not understand, but a fear I still knew. He placed his hand on my knee. Tears rolled down his face. I had never seen my father cry. To that point in my life, I didn’t know my father could cry; I didn’t know men could cry. With his tears, he created a brave new world for me. “You’re mother won’t be coming home,” he said. Where did she go? Why isn’t she coming home? Can’t we go see her? She’s my mother. What do you mean she won’t be coming home?
He reached over and pulled me on to his lap. He wrapped both of his strong, hairy, construction-man father arms around me. He cried, and I cried too. Mom was not coming home, and my father, who never cried, was crying.
Waiting, in desperate beautiful waiting, people sometimes die and people sometimes wrap their arms around you. In waiting for Philos, there was both death and sweat embrace.
There is great vulnerability in stepping forward. Most associate agency with arrogance, over-bearing pompous decisiveness not becoming of a 21st century man, that is to be the epitome of all idealized-testosterone-propelled super-cock, emotionally-intelligent Hercules, and expressing the most realized and idolized aspects of the modern woman, both empowered and submissive: this is what men must be. The most important thing about this modern man is he knows, or should know, in each moment which person he’s suppose to be: Dirk Diggler, Joan of Arc, Mr. Smith of Washington, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Betty Crocker, or Sandra Day O’Conner. The sad thing is, if he ever makes a mistake, if he ever miscalculates this almost impossible formula of heterosexual interaction, he will undoubtfully be stripped, hung, castrated and paraded in front of his beloved’s closest hundred female friends as an example of all that is wrong with the modern world.
In stepping forward, one steps onto the ledge of self-decapitation or worse. Agency is seen as a power play, and I suppose I can understand this, but in many ways, agency bears greater vulnerability than passivity. There is safety in passivity.
I sat, alone and sad, holding my phone, contemplating the great pull I felt. In my mind, Sophia twirled. Her dancing flow through my mind and heart, touching and punctuating every aspect of my current experience. Her sweeping, flowing, fluid motion stretched into every cavity of my reality and with her sensual soul I was filled. It wasn’t an overbearing experience, but one of subtle misting and dusted layering. It was the opulent dew gemming spring blossoms – so very subtle while simultaneously causing great affect.
Text messaging is a non-committed form of communication. For whatever reason, there is less liability on texting than on emailing or calling. Things can be said in text that cannot be said in any other form of communication. Text messaging breaks the ice and tests the waters. Text messaging, in its gloriously safe and pathetic augur of uncertainty, is the bedrock of the modern affair, without which the safety of commitment and dedication would be preserved. Text messaging is for pussies, the infidelitous, those lacking faith, discernment, and commitment. In conversation, what is said must be committed to. In text messaging, all that is said may as well end with a question mark.
I dialed the phone.
Many years ago, when I was young, I worked in a warehouse in Glendale. During one of our many cigarette breaks, we found an injured bird. I worked with Mexicans, mostly, and others that came from Central America. I liked this. At the time, I was profoundly committed to socialism, and the honest camaraderie of our honest labor felt like something close to this. My rejection of white-collar management and endorsement of labor: viva la revolución. My friends, in their jeans and dirty tee shirts, shared in this pride.
We felt a kinship for this bird, this dirty pigeon, this injured fowl. We stood in a circle, hovering over it and around it. Cigarette ashes flicked, we agreed the bird could be saved. We wrapped a dirty rag around the dirty injured bird, and snuck it inside, without anyone discovering it.
We named him (we assumed the pigeon male) Che.
Hid in a box with papers and rags, nested, we cared for him carefully for two weeks. Every day, it became a little less responsive, a little more puss soaked, and a little more sharp and pungent. After two weeks, Che would no longer eat what we brought for him from home.
One sad day, we took it outside in a cloth bag, and dropped a large rock on it. With a shrugging defeated stroll, walked back into the warehouse – so much for revolutionary defiance.
The phone pulsed back the sound of ringing, her ring. This is where our love story begins. Love stories are, in each moment, beginning and ending. And began again.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” I replied.
“I’ve waited for you to call.”
“I know. I was waiting for me too.”
This is where our love story begins. The impact of an evening, moment, glance, or taste, the moment when potent and nagging desire and love rise to surface, and is followed down destiny’s highway to sights and sounds unknown, is not the beginning of a love story, but the end of one. True beginnings, beginnings that alter lives and hearts, are made in the follow through, the choice to continue. Now, just now, Philos was continuing, writing, breathing our story – our love story.
I have loved thousands of times, perhaps, having made that choice to give myself a little more and offer myself a little further. I have also, perhaps, never loved at all – never having carried the love to the end, all the way, to where one dissolves, completely annihilated, not into the other, but into all things. Lost! is the cry of love’s victory, in her march for complete surrender. In her rhymatic step, she moves me forward, forever seeking her obliteration in the infinite.
“I like that, Philos, I was waiting for me too… Can I see you?””
“Probably not.”
“Okay, well,” I hesitated.
“I’m sorry. I suspect we were just talking about two very different things. I would really like to share a moment with you too.”
“Great, good,” I said. Thank you. Thank you, Philos.
“I want to see you.”
“I want to see you too.”
“I suspect you will soon.”
I sometimes think about the death of the people I love. That’s not entirely accurate – I don’t think about their death; I think about them dying or receiving the word of death. To think about death acutely is impossible, because we the living do not know death, at least death as the absence of life. Many things die, we know this, but I am considering the death of a human, a being, the passage from being into non-being. To think about death is to imagine in abstraction, and this generates no emotion or impact, and this is why I think about dying or the notification of death. It gives me something to hold on to, and allows for the generation and crystallization of an emotional field to be explored and harvested for all of its potent human content.
Parents are great death fodder, if they haven’t passed already, and thankful mine were still present in body. In the realm of conjuring loss related emotions, the death of a living parent works miracles. I think about my father’s passing more than my mothers. I think perhaps, in my mind, my mother lives forever. It is my father that must constantly die, but don’t misunderstand, not because I do not like him, but because I love him dearly. Sometimes they die together – this always happens in the reception of a phone call. They normally die in a plane crash; they travel a lot, so it makes the most sense.
It’s ashamed that we, that I, often measure someone’s value in relationship to their absence. Value in loss seems to mold a consistent pattern of human experience. In Sophia’s sort absence of the last few days, and in the absence of her prior to our meeting, her value was unquantifiable. She was priceless to me, in her further orbit, and it was in the consideration of loosing her that I wished to draw her close. It was in the recognition of her possible loss that allowed me to engage in her. In Galileo’s cosmic discovery, objects accelerate at the same rate, regardless. Aristotle’s assumption was different – he thought that objects of greater mass would accelerate faster. Galileo, in dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa and then rolling them down inclines discovered that all balls, no matter what their weight was, moved at the same speed. This set the stage for Newton’s laws.
Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules. And though Newton dominated the gravitational world for over three hundred years, before the idea of space/time, chaos and uncertainty became prevalent in the human mind there is really no clear idea what gravity is and why it happens.
We still don’t know why things fall.
Against all gravitional logic, two of the Pioneer spacecrafts in deep space are now slowing down, without any clear cause, in their fall of terminal velocity. Terminal velocity is now in question, even more than before. Like the Pioneers, my fall towards Sophia, which was accelerated in her absence, now began to decline – the force being, the possibility of her absence now reduced.
We still don’t know why things are attracted to other things.
“Is tonight too soon?” She asked.
“No, tonight is perfect.” I said.
Waiting, on the surface, appears to be inactive. It seems passive, filled with contentment, Zen like posturing, resting in the face of uncertain fate and action. My wait, the waiting of my heart, does not feel resigned to present-moment rest and relaxed joy. My waiting is one of expectation and desire. There is a great need and great patience, and a subtle background of pleasure and excitement. I am in anticipation of love, of someone, someone I do not know. When I consider the feelings, hopes, fears, and pleasures Philos has generated in my interior, my gorgeous, soft and open insides, where veins stream into heart and heart feeds into soul, I remind myself that I barely know him. Other than tasting his skin, feeling his lips against my body, sensing the expression of his soul, sourcing the movements of his mind through the subtle contraction of his eyes and face muscles, I know nothing about him. I know gravity. I know sensitivity. I know hesitation. I know hurt. I know his attraction for me. I know continuous, gorgeous attention.
I don’t know him, and I do know him. I love him for both his mystery and his revelation. I love him for his fantasy and his reality. I wait for his reach, his reach out, his reach forward, his response to my longing; yet, in waiting, I want and love him more. My heart softens in anticipation of him.
Waiting is both love and the anticipation of love. Memories in unsaturated video loops: the day I waited for mom to return. In almost cinematic memory form, the morning of her nonreturn sits in my soul, forever reeling nostalgic 70’s loss. She didn’t return. I waited, in anticipation for her, and she didn’t return. I recall sitting on the couch, alone, feet and shoes dangling in joyful excitement - life was only exciting when mom was there. In a burst of energy I flipped in the other direction standing on my knees looking out the window beyond the couch towards the front yard. In memory color dissolves into grey, white, and black – color dissolving towards the absence of color.
I waited, and she did not return. My dad finally pulled into the driveway. In exiting the car, my father, through his slouched and painful stagger to the house, shared with me everything my four-year old mind, and ageless soul, needed to know: my mother, my sweet, gorgeous mother, the namer of my body/mind, would never be coming home. He walked in the door, his black raincoat mimicking despair.
He sat on the couch next to me.
With his sigh, he affirmed my fear, a fear that I did not understand, but a fear I still knew. He placed his hand on my knee. Tears rolled down his face. I had never seen my father cry. To that point in my life, I didn’t know my father could cry; I didn’t know men could cry. With his tears, he created a brave new world for me. “You’re mother won’t be coming home,” he said. Where did she go? Why isn’t she coming home? Can’t we go see her? She’s my mother. What do you mean she won’t be coming home?
He reached over and pulled me on to his lap. He wrapped both of his strong, hairy, construction-man father arms around me. He cried, and I cried too. Mom was not coming home, and my father, who never cried, was crying.
Waiting, in desperate beautiful waiting, people sometimes die and people sometimes wrap their arms around you. In waiting for Philos, there was both death and sweat embrace.
There is great vulnerability in stepping forward. Most associate agency with arrogance, over-bearing pompous decisiveness not becoming of a 21st century man, that is to be the epitome of all idealized-testosterone-propelled super-cock, emotionally-intelligent Hercules, and expressing the most realized and idolized aspects of the modern woman, both empowered and submissive: this is what men must be. The most important thing about this modern man is he knows, or should know, in each moment which person he’s suppose to be: Dirk Diggler, Joan of Arc, Mr. Smith of Washington, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Betty Crocker, or Sandra Day O’Conner. The sad thing is, if he ever makes a mistake, if he ever miscalculates this almost impossible formula of heterosexual interaction, he will undoubtfully be stripped, hung, castrated and paraded in front of his beloved’s closest hundred female friends as an example of all that is wrong with the modern world.
In stepping forward, one steps onto the ledge of self-decapitation or worse. Agency is seen as a power play, and I suppose I can understand this, but in many ways, agency bears greater vulnerability than passivity. There is safety in passivity.
I sat, alone and sad, holding my phone, contemplating the great pull I felt. In my mind, Sophia twirled. Her dancing flow through my mind and heart, touching and punctuating every aspect of my current experience. Her sweeping, flowing, fluid motion stretched into every cavity of my reality and with her sensual soul I was filled. It wasn’t an overbearing experience, but one of subtle misting and dusted layering. It was the opulent dew gemming spring blossoms – so very subtle while simultaneously causing great affect.
Text messaging is a non-committed form of communication. For whatever reason, there is less liability on texting than on emailing or calling. Things can be said in text that cannot be said in any other form of communication. Text messaging breaks the ice and tests the waters. Text messaging, in its gloriously safe and pathetic augur of uncertainty, is the bedrock of the modern affair, without which the safety of commitment and dedication would be preserved. Text messaging is for pussies, the infidelitous, those lacking faith, discernment, and commitment. In conversation, what is said must be committed to. In text messaging, all that is said may as well end with a question mark.
I dialed the phone.
Many years ago, when I was young, I worked in a warehouse in Glendale. During one of our many cigarette breaks, we found an injured bird. I worked with Mexicans, mostly, and others that came from Central America. I liked this. At the time, I was profoundly committed to socialism, and the honest camaraderie of our honest labor felt like something close to this. My rejection of white-collar management and endorsement of labor: viva la revolución. My friends, in their jeans and dirty tee shirts, shared in this pride.
We felt a kinship for this bird, this dirty pigeon, this injured fowl. We stood in a circle, hovering over it and around it. Cigarette ashes flicked, we agreed the bird could be saved. We wrapped a dirty rag around the dirty injured bird, and snuck it inside, without anyone discovering it.
We named him (we assumed the pigeon male) Che.
Hid in a box with papers and rags, nested, we cared for him carefully for two weeks. Every day, it became a little less responsive, a little more puss soaked, and a little more sharp and pungent. After two weeks, Che would no longer eat what we brought for him from home.
One sad day, we took it outside in a cloth bag, and dropped a large rock on it. With a shrugging defeated stroll, walked back into the warehouse – so much for revolutionary defiance.
The phone pulsed back the sound of ringing, her ring. This is where our love story begins. Love stories are, in each moment, beginning and ending. And began again.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” I replied.
“I’ve waited for you to call.”
“I know. I was waiting for me too.”
This is where our love story begins. The impact of an evening, moment, glance, or taste, the moment when potent and nagging desire and love rise to surface, and is followed down destiny’s highway to sights and sounds unknown, is not the beginning of a love story, but the end of one. True beginnings, beginnings that alter lives and hearts, are made in the follow through, the choice to continue. Now, just now, Philos was continuing, writing, breathing our story – our love story.
I have loved thousands of times, perhaps, having made that choice to give myself a little more and offer myself a little further. I have also, perhaps, never loved at all – never having carried the love to the end, all the way, to where one dissolves, completely annihilated, not into the other, but into all things. Lost! is the cry of love’s victory, in her march for complete surrender. In her rhymatic step, she moves me forward, forever seeking her obliteration in the infinite.
“I like that, Philos, I was waiting for me too… Can I see you?””
“Probably not.”
“Okay, well,” I hesitated.
“I’m sorry. I suspect we were just talking about two very different things. I would really like to share a moment with you too.”
“Great, good,” I said. Thank you. Thank you, Philos.
“I want to see you.”
“I want to see you too.”
“I suspect you will soon.”
I sometimes think about the death of the people I love. That’s not entirely accurate – I don’t think about their death; I think about them dying or receiving the word of death. To think about death acutely is impossible, because we the living do not know death, at least death as the absence of life. Many things die, we know this, but I am considering the death of a human, a being, the passage from being into non-being. To think about death is to imagine in abstraction, and this generates no emotion or impact, and this is why I think about dying or the notification of death. It gives me something to hold on to, and allows for the generation and crystallization of an emotional field to be explored and harvested for all of its potent human content.
Parents are great death fodder, if they haven’t passed already, and thankful mine were still present in body. In the realm of conjuring loss related emotions, the death of a living parent works miracles. I think about my father’s passing more than my mothers. I think perhaps, in my mind, my mother lives forever. It is my father that must constantly die, but don’t misunderstand, not because I do not like him, but because I love him dearly. Sometimes they die together – this always happens in the reception of a phone call. They normally die in a plane crash; they travel a lot, so it makes the most sense.
It’s ashamed that we, that I, often measure someone’s value in relationship to their absence. Value in loss seems to mold a consistent pattern of human experience. In Sophia’s sort absence of the last few days, and in the absence of her prior to our meeting, her value was unquantifiable. She was priceless to me, in her further orbit, and it was in the consideration of loosing her that I wished to draw her close. It was in the recognition of her possible loss that allowed me to engage in her. In Galileo’s cosmic discovery, objects accelerate at the same rate, regardless. Aristotle’s assumption was different – he thought that objects of greater mass would accelerate faster. Galileo, in dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa and then rolling them down inclines discovered that all balls, no matter what their weight was, moved at the same speed. This set the stage for Newton’s laws.
Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules. And though Newton dominated the gravitational world for over three hundred years, before the idea of space/time, chaos and uncertainty became prevalent in the human mind there is really no clear idea what gravity is and why it happens.
We still don’t know why things fall.
Against all gravitional logic, two of the Pioneer spacecrafts in deep space are now slowing down, without any clear cause, in their fall of terminal velocity. Terminal velocity is now in question, even more than before. Like the Pioneers, my fall towards Sophia, which was accelerated in her absence, now began to decline – the force being, the possibility of her absence now reduced.
We still don’t know why things are attracted to other things.
“Is tonight too soon?” She asked.
“No, tonight is perfect.” I said.
