14
« on: January 01, 2015, 01:38:05 PM »
I am simultaneously immobile and hovering
In a featureless interstitial place.
Unsatisfied with the answers
Available to me now, and there,
I did the only reasonable thing --
I sought a better answer
Here, before, after,
Anytime, anywhere,
Forever.
I have to live with the consequences,
Now,
Of having searched everywhere.
Having searched everywhere,
One cannot find a better
Or a worse
Answer.
There is only this,
And because I am its only witness,
I feel obliged
To evermore ratify my witness,
Though I will never appear more than inscrutable
To anyone other than the very last person
That ever will be.
And only if they are very well-read.
I HAVE READ FROM THE BOOK
I only remember as far back
As having arrived late to the Judgment,
And on the lee side of the throne.
Light and time broke against,
And were repelled by,
That pivotal point,
But it did not seem all that unfortunate
To live forever, even were it in the dark,
By means simply
Of having approached God from the back.
At least, I admitted,
When one finds themselves somewhere unexpected,
They neither expect to arrive there
Nor can say exactly how it came to be.
Whether it was a good or bad choice,
I resigned myself to blameless in having made it
And joined the rest of the lost.
It was a pleasant place, but only in
Occasional moments
From the outside looking in.
A crowd congregating
Where they never meant to come
Easily sees the unity of itself --
But only with itself removed --
As each quantum,
I suppose by the truism of their nature,
Arrived only because of another observer's
Intercession.
Life went on
As it always had seemed to for me,
The unwitting member of a clique
Where everyone else seamlessly fit
But I had no idea how I did,
And was wracked by the doubt
Of whether I did.
For an inexpressable duration,
I lived in a dark forest
Flirting by means of distance
With my companions-by-nature.
I cannot say
Whether I left before anyone else,
Or whether anyone left after me,
Because focusing on the totality
I could only judge my own membership,
And focusing on any other
I could only judge our membership
To one another:
The infinite, ephemeral subsets that
Somehow tower above
The infinity they arise from in the beginning.
But, I left.
I cannot say
Whether I left because it happened once,
Or whether it happened
An interminable amount of times,
But I do remember that I left
Because there was someone
I invested in the idea that they loved me,
But that when they came to know me,
Clearly made visible they did not,
Would not and could not love me.
Maybe it wasn't a consequence of
Aggregation,
But circumstances;
It was, simply put,
An offense
That in a timeless universe,
Someone would not love me
For who I was.
It was an intolerable offense,
And I immediately set about
Using the remainder of forever
Searching for by what mechanism
Such rejection was rendered possible.
Flying --
Because at any
Some point
Along any some time,
One obviously can fly --
I emerged above the canopy of the forest
Through the lowermost ring
Of a mall pavilion,
And stopped first in a Barnes and Noble
Close enough at hand.
It was wonderful, for a moment,
Seeing the books I had always at times seen
But never reflected on
Their nature of having existed
Contemporaneously with me.
The poetry that had been written in my time,
And before my time.
The addition of Gender and Sexuality sections,
To this and other bookstores,
In the extremely limited span of my life
Relative to the span
Books themselves have lived.
It was a wonderful and joyous experience
Reading the entirety of that bookstore,
Sharing at any moment I felt it
The experience of having read anything
Contained in those books,
With the friends that inevitably abounded
At the moments I envisioned them,
And disappeared at the times I didn't.
It was less wonderful,
After I had read every book there,
And discovered there was no one remaining
To converse with,
And traversed the endless shopping space
Extending through the
Frozen time of that universe.
Books were easy to come by,
And friends were always at hand
Whenever there was something new to say,
Think, or merely imagine,
But
New books
Grew, naturally,
Harder
And harder
To find.
By effective definition,
The bookstore following any bookstore,
Being an unexceptional bookstore,
Is less of a bookstore
Than the bookstore before it
When there was nothing preventing you
From having read every book.
Immortal, my compulsion drove me
Across the normal distribution
And, more painstakingly,
More sharply asymptotically,
Across every other conceivable distribution
Until every probability flatly converged
With the infinite convergence of all probability
That I had arrived, to my dismay,
At the last book I had not read
That existed in this frozen,
Never-progressing frame of time;
And it was, of course,
An anxious moment.
Having read all other books
Existing now,
I had not deduced
Whether reading the remaining
One book
Would answer my question,
Or would not.
I had deduced, only,
That after I read this book,
There would be nothing new I could talk about,
Think, or imagine,
And that by process of this
Damnable infinity
There would also be, therefore,
No one to talk with at all evermore,
As all talking will have been exhausted.
I hovered over that book
For a long time,
Even relative to timeless time,
Before I opened its cover,
And only
After resolving
That I would not suffer the outcome
Of seeming inevitability,
But that I would arrive at a better outcome
By simply having to do
What I had never done before,
Something that would bring me, more undoubtedly,
To a conclusion,
Happy or not,
On the lingering question of
The irreconciability
Of individuals
In a time,
In a place,
Where they might know everything
That anyone then could know...
Talk, analyze, extrapolate,
And imagine
Everything else possible with it,
For any duration of time,
Including all time,
And yet remain irreoconciable.
And yet remain physically in contact
But never touching.
And yet remain drawn into factions
That could never commingle
Over the subject of an errant,
Mistakenly-assigned penis,
When some other
Subsets
Of the one great set
Still could.
If all the books of this time,
I settled,
Could not reveal to me
The inscrutable nature of
Some particular people's
Inability to
Come together,
Meet mutually
Understanding,
I would simply
Not settle
For all the books of this time.
It was thus,
I remember,
That I came upon the necessary means
To simply go,
First within,
The last remaining book of my life,
And then without.
Walking past a race riot
On sunless streets
That was, itself, too,
Scatteringly
Probabilistically
Irreconciable
To some observers
Even in my own time,
Hundreds of years after the events described,
I walked the longest road out of town,
Between the trees,
Into the fog,
Until I had gone so far from the contents
Of that original book
That I was at equal distance
From the contents
Of every book
That would ever be,
At any time and anywhere,
Within the context of its particular time,
And I stopped there.
Simultaneously immobile and hovering
In a featureless interstitial place,
I took in,
In one gasp of a moment,
Everything ever written
At the time of its writing
As spoken by the person who wrote it.
The cacophony of one moment
Was not indivisible.
It was a sound that,
Taken as aggregate,
Did not yet -- impressively, to me --
Entail the utterance of all sounds,
And especially not in equal parts.
No.
The cacophony of
Everything ever written
For all of time
Was progressive,
Undulating.
In this one sense I could interpret it,
Individual words being lost to the noise:
Only as, at any given division,
Or combination,
The relation of human utterance
To what all, and equal parts, utterance
Would have sounded.
I had done much devising
And actioning
This plan,
But it was not as if I could do just anything.
To discern any individual word from
The cacophony
Of everything ever written
Would have only reflected my own unhappiness,
The nature of the quantum
Arising into its environment,
Understanding by nature it must
Belong,
Understanding by observation
How every other quanta
Belongs,
But never understanding enough beyond doubt
Its belongingness
To live without trouble,
And the nagging feeling of having been
Cast off,
Abandoned,
Pleasant from the outside looking in,
Only occasionally,
As I suppose the nature of life,
By the truism of this nature,
Must be.
All I could see was the essential truth
Of all time that preceded
My own universes's --
Very untimely, I thought, having looked
At the times of other universes that had
Lasted longer --
Final Judgment.
The essential truth of
All human writing --
The conversations we could construct from it,
The dreams I could have
After been exposed to any of it,
The attempts I could make
To imagine myself in your shoes
Using it as the foundation --
Was only that at no time
Did the cacophony
Ever even remotely resemble
The sound of all cacophony,
Especially in equal parts.
The explosive,
Incredible energy created by
The massive, incredible sum
Of every incredible,
As well as unremarkable,
Thought and doctrine,
Belief and idea,
Religion and faith,
Science and fraud,
At any given moment,
Did not even come close to approaching
The fulness
Of what I had observed
Over the length
Of the utterly-divisible
Utterance,
Even as that utterance
Did not even come close to approaching
The fulness
Of what I knew, by dictum of nature,
Truly full utterance
Would sound like,
And how it would be composed,
And how explosive,
How energy-connoting it would be,
To everyone part and privy to it,
Partially or wholly,
Traversing
Again
The flitting images of innumerable
Probabilistic charts,
Defining the
Reconciailility
Of any two people,
On any two points,
For the duration of a conversation,
Or their lifetimes,
Or the universe,
Or
A frozen eternity
They lapsed into by accident,
Having lived a life
Far-too-fraught
With errancy
And mistake,
And arriving, late,
To the Judgment,
And in the lee of the throne.
Having taken advantage of
All possible time,
I supposed I had to settle for this
Ultimate conclusion:
That the roar of any crowd,
Part to or the whole of a context,
And any quanta of those crowds,
Might simply find itself,
By no intent of its own,
In the innocent and
Blameless fashion
That inherently belongs to --
Is the entitlement of --
Every single person who arrives somewhere unexpected,
Having neither expected to arrive there
Or understanding how exactly they had.
I have read from the book,
And say thus --
Enacting a Judgment of my own,
Utterly ineffectual
Yet poignant nonetheless --
I cannot blame most anyone
For the irreconciabilities
We experienced,
Whether in words or at fists,
Gunpoint or the threatened
Or realized
Abandonment,
Because those irreconciabilites
Actually were,
And by no device of ourselves.
The irreconciability of any
Actually irreconciable position
Sits on the foundation of
Its particulars,
The era in which it abides,
The mind in which it dwells,
And that for irreconciliability
That actually was
There really was,
Though I am loathe to admit the powerlessness
Of either of us involved,
Nothing that could be done
To fix
What was broken.
That man really could never love me,
Even if this moment we shared
Stretched out forever,
And it was no fault of either of us,
And had nothing to do, really,
With the constituent parts
Of either of us
But with to do
With the cacophony we heard
From the moment we were born,
And attempted to divide,
Fruitfully as we might,
In the limited time we had to inspect it;
Sometimes,
Unfortunately,
Finding us holding in our bare and naked,
Craning and tense,
White-knuckle hands,
Only
A probability that,
In seeming contradiction to our common-sense
Nature
Of its nature,
Could nevertheless,
Truly never,
In any time,
Come to fruit.
Probability was not inviolable.
Only context,
And in such the way that I cannot blame
Earth
For the unhappinesses
Its inhabitants suffer
For having had their planet suspended
In an empty,
Soundless
And incompassionate vacuum as its medium,
Its context,
I could not blame anyone else I had encountered
In that time, before this time.
In that time I would go on to miss the Judgment,
Arriving late and
To the lee of the throne,
Ultimately fine with the outcome of that particularly
But unhappy that the remainder of eternity
Would play out, as it had before becoming eternity,
Wracked with a lingering sense of
Not belonging
Connoted at times just from the nature of
Having arrived at an unexpected situation,
And at others from the more intimate abanbonment
Of one relationship
Intimated by the natural --
And truly, having read from the book --
Irreconcilable difference revealed therein.
But, that was then.
And, well, that was the other then-which-is-still-now,
But, I suppose,
Having done something impossible to arrive
At this conclusion,
It makes sense enough I might arrive at new feelings
On how I otherwise felt forever.
It is not so bad.
I am not so unhappy.
It is so much easier, now,
Because I have read from the book,
To love you,
Even when you say you will not,
And actually could not,
Love me yourself.
It was a happy conclusion to reach:
Deeming all hating blameless...
Except, I had to suppose,
Hating that arose merely out of intention,
Somehow contrived in
Contravention
To the prevailing cacophony
In which that intention was made.
But wouldn't that be impossible,
Using the math at the root of all this?
Unfortunately, at the very end of the exercise,
I found even my conclusion,
My answer that I had formulated with
All possible knowledge,
Was itself incomplete merely
By the means I had taken
In having achieved it.
For, I had to admit: I cheated.
No one can actually do this. It was impossible.
So, having reached my conclusion
By means of doing something impossible,
I was left -- certainly happier --
But still to some degree unsettled:
Robbed of the safe refuge I had sought out,
That all hate was blameless
Because it was irreconcilable
Because were it not irreconcilable
It would be reconciled,
And that in the trueness of this model
Irreconciliation
And the hate,
The violence,
The paucity of love,
The abandonment,
Could not rise out of mere detesting,
Or spitefulness,
Simply-put and essential hatred,
Because such hatred was impossible,
When not blamelessly irreconcilable.
It was not provided for by the contexts!
But, having done the impossible,
I must suppose the impossible is true for others, too:
It seems I must accept nothing at all is inviolable,
And that some people may misrepresent
An amenable position
As one that isn't:
Injuring me across all metrics and axes measurable --
Because I have been injured across all those --
Simply because they,
In a fulness of culpability,
Had refused to take my hand only wilfully,
And cast me out just-as-much-so.
Well, cast out as I was,
My new greatest regret was that
By nature of your setting me so astray,
I had arrived late to the Judgment,
In the lee of the throne,
And was not privy to
Whether or not
You, and you, and you,
Were actually blameless.
Try as I might have,
Alas,
His book was not among those available to me.
I have not read from The Book,
So, reason failing me, even when impossibly extraordinary...
I will just give you the benefit of the doubt.
The thesis becomes so simple, I realize,
When I cut out the whole process of how I arrived at it
And explained it to no one, as there was, as stated,
No one left to explain anything to by this point.
It is easy enough that I can continue to loving you
Even when you do not love me
Because I know you are most definitely blameless.
I just extend you the benefit of the doubt
That you are not capable of something as impossible as
Moving without the interior of a book,
As in moving without the interior of your context,
Time and place,
To arrive at this station
Where I never need, myself, express a paucity of love.
I may always express its fulness.
Really, it's a serious regret
Having not been privy to that Judgment.
I would have liked to know
Which of us
Took which impossible positions,
And whether, even,
The rewards for them would be any different.
My personally-enacted Judgment
Probably does not entail the same
Depths and peaks of rewards,
But its wonder, I suppose, comes intead from its fairness.
Absolutely sick of how I traversed all distributions,
Where asymptotic distributions asymptotically outnumber
The far easier ones to move past,
This perfectly flat and fair model is simply beautiful to behold.
I don't care what you do to me;
I will love you, anyway.
And should loving you, rather than being wrathful,
Have actually been the errant,
Wrong choice to make,
Placing me in the undesired portions of The Book
I have not read from...
Well, large solace
The path my constituent parts must follow
Born into the context they have been
Will be absent, come Judgment Day,
Whether
Or was it because
Of the Judgment I myself, now, enact.
I do not need to be God to love you;
It is easily within my own means.
Pray you are as errant a soul as mine,
Though, if you had chosen not to love me
Not out of circumstances but rather
Bias
And wilfullness
Impossibly rising above the zeitgeist of your time;
Because then,
Had you deigned to hate thus,
The modest reward of my ineffectual Judgment --
That you were always entitled to my unconditional love --
Will be of small succor
When He reads from The Book,
And passes Judgment of His own.
But then again, maybe not.
I wouldn't know.
I was, after all, as far back as I can remember,
Late to arrive,
And in the lee of the throne.