Soulnasium, or “Out in the Universe”
Part One: Resistance
The end of the affair is a ravene of tears. Salt-washed skin. The wound that draws the blood. Loud hurt confirming beyond doubt how life courses in swift rivers through an entity you call you. A sharp jab or a duller, searing ache that opens like a cold air pocket embedded and encoded to expand and pronounce a resilience steelier than late autumn skies. A thumping shudder beating in drums. Packing ice where heart was.
Far away from here, along taut-strung lines of clumsy weather-worn times, or sooner, you realise its ownership of you is no more. There’s no wave goodbye. No point of closure. Just you, but less. Nothing so rounded for the mind to process.
Growth is birth. The price of birth is death. And the cost? You cannot know the cost, yet.
I’m not talking about the loss to me of other people. Just me letting go of me.
How to resist me and my image of me and my perception of my needs and desires and my skills, flaws and voices and my earnest contributions, pleasures and entitlements and the way that being me is the only seat I can conceive of. My body. The space it moves through. My name. How it weaves across the sound spectrum and hangs, tagged like a cloakroom badge. The core of my identity. My reputation. To remove the “my”s and "I"s from all such sentences. What the hell is left?
If I am not behind the wheel, who navigates?
To summon the courage to defer to my blindspot. Who is the one that summons?
To conjure up an image, in this grasping, needy world of fame, of a blank canvas in a frameless frame.
Ah. I am putting this all wrong. I am making it sound like the big task at hand is to resist the ego. To walk from temptation - which suggests the stern determination by which a spurned lover, the echo of hurtful words still ringing, storms out into the brisk enveloping night wrapped tight in a proud defiance, away from four homely square cubes of yellow-green light. The meeting house where the final impasse trod the measure of its dance. A truth as cold as winter. Love’s last stance.
Real endings harbour no tact.
But it’s the other way round, in fact.
Your worldly desires and the carefully sculptured identities you have constructed and nurtured and fed are not to be resisted. That would be pointless. That’s just holding your breath. Sooner or later you’ll be coming up for air.
Beyond game theory, the real work is to detach from resistance. To intuit that the goals and the dreams and the mountains of stuff of your clutching, nesty mindset of endless acquisition (more, more more!) and all the names, images, noises and busyness you generate is but your thinly veiled resistance from the underlying bedrock truth of who you really are.
You’re not building anything. Broken down car.
And who you always were.
Never him. Never her.
And who you always will be, out even beyond this human embodiment.
Revolving emptiness. Fuller than the sum total of all your earthly clutter.
An immense velvet box of silence, megaphonic in revelation. Deep as old memories. The uniform point-blank inversion out of whence you came and from where you’ll continue after this sensational seasonal stint.
You are an illusion. You cannot even make a dint.
Your life’s work has been to cover this up. To run from that. A futile, childish tapestry of distraction. Seamless and cheap.
Pipe down. Your conveyor belt of spend and save is stealing away the tune. The words from your lips form a shallow stutter of denial. A resounding deletion. Further down, in the gaps between your thoughts and the piazzas of your princely courts lay an old, boundless non-state of pure completion.
You’ll never find it.
The soul makes a bid for self correction. Its dreams nudge at you while you sleep. But you’re not listening.
All your dreams are wish fulfilment. Not the gold that’s glistening.
And anyway. A wish that you could what?
Part Two: Cardio
Alone in the bright afternoon. Laying in bed. I become my heartbeat.
Beyond its classic territory of diaphragm it neatly claims the wieldy outer corners of me. A pulse eviscerates my shoulders and neck. Twitches in each arm and leg align. Behind my closed eyes the waning arc of daylight pulsates in waves and coloured lines jump from the blackness like the steeple peaks on an ECG or polygraph screen.
All to the rhythmic beat.
Nomenclature is misleading. For the source of the beat is not my heart. It arrives, for me, through that organ.
But it originates out in the universe. It is the beat of the planet as she orbits her sun, which in turn is the vibrational energy resounding through fathoms.
The bliss void runs through me. My wooden framed house.
And yours.
We are that.
….
gK
