Bananas after dusk

The night does not use me nor I it. Ours is a mutual pact of suspension from the rigours of lesser life, of one held in strolls through bright, plastic Walmart spaces in the thrall of the surreal nature of that world; or in a forced moment of stillness while learning the subtle art of withdrawing from honeysuckle its nectar. The mellowed decline of light, between day and night fully-formed in bruised shadow, is the eternal place of peace. I would dwell there always but must wait, bide my time, whittle away daylight and the night until I can have those precious minutes wherein all of me seems to only then live by any definition of the meaning I care to have. As I repose, restless and tossing in the bed shared by my lover, I know my restlessness is a mourning for that time just passed and the anticipation of its arrival after what will seem an interminable wait though only twelve hours might on the clock pass, obliviating with its relentless, at times comforting queue, the fabric of me.

My fate is assured. I spoke with her of the unease I feel. She cited my lack of literary accomplishment as defined through the approbation of others as the source of this malaise; and I could not argue that this trite vanity lay at the root of my urgency and my trouble. Never gratified, always listing away from the people with whom I aim to communicate and upon whose judgement I must humiliate myself and await, I find no communal spirit with my fellow-creatures. Everyone has a role, I assume, or used to. Now we seem, or I do, to have as a role a simple outsider status, one lauded, promoted, written of and shot in flickering imagery. The promotion I suspect having some hegemonic nature, a hint of Marxian confusion tossed with ample Gramscian remarks about control; about seducing our own oppression, there always posited an "us" and a "them." The whole of it fatigues, these dichotomies; but not less than alternatives of an oriental nature presented as the height of wisdom. People turn to Daoism, to mountains, to poets, to zennish blurbs, to theories of unity or dispersal, to incorporealism in one form or another; and we mellow into yellowed skin, crinkled features, only to find ourselves with a vast depression to have returned to the same confusions of old. The cyclical monotony of doubt recast and reasserted when spoken with new words supersedes mere ennui. We ask ourselves if there is something ours, ours alone, ours impervious to the machinations of theory or of mutual need, of reciprocity or deception or control. We ask ourselves in the smalls of the night the answer given only in that time of which I spoke-- twilight, the heft of day behind and the oblivion of night ahead. During then, alone, can we be alone, our thoughts subdued by some job undertaken, that of living, and the respite of sleep which in wiser thought offers none. Our construction of time compels us, stick and carrot, prod and yearning.

A blackening banana peel lays limp-limbed over an ashtray and the alarm clock on the nightstand, mute testimony to rapid decay. The physicality of it offends my sense of order momentarily, the kind of order that denies transience of a finalizing sort; this is the grand delusion of the world, our true and only mental disorder: to believe that in denying the simplest truth we overcome it; to be believe in an order that can armour us against inevitability; to thrust our faith, maligned now, in movement as immortality. The reasoning, a commercial outcome and enterprise from the start, we think sound: if we're moving we're clearly alive; if we buy things that proves we're moving and are clearly alive; if we are alive we cannot be dead; if we keep getting things by moving for them and have them in their daft motion appear to move us, we must be immortal as long as we do not falter in step, not for a second, not to breathe or to think. Most of us wilt like honeysuckle for want of water in the landscape of that delusion, the paradoxical place where, saturated with moisture, the very substance engendering life, we nonetheless cannot slake our thirst and die from it.

Only in the haunts and hollows of memory does the gleam of the elemental sometimes peek over the cusp of the insane march, of enforced linearity we deem life or, more appallingly, "having" one. A moment snatched when a girl's hair from far ago met with unspeakable grace a magical nook along her neck, the eternal resting place of that particular lock, that cluster of strands that bound like the strongest rope, rope pulling or anchoring ships, the roots patterning beneath the oldest forests--that moment, or one like it, or one that maybe never existed except through the ironic insidious quality or images ever-reformulated, stories told over and again whose authors imagine themselves saying a new thing, maybe that and nothing else. The question that must plague me until I am found in the grave of my skin, the one courting me from the outset, can only be whether it matters. And I know no sadder thought than having to ask it.

She rests beneath, behind, around me. Her consciousness enjoins mine. She dreams for us both now, while I hear the hum of air-conditioning, feel my wakefulness. I hope she dreams of having peace. I hope she dreams of a moment that was real for at least one of us, kept and secured against treasonous misapprehension.

Momentarily this computer will do its hourly shut down, a glitch in the operating system that I can't rectify nor care to since it seems a fitting reminder to put away the machine or my thoughts according to a timer. The flaw seems no flaw in some poetic sense. Thence to enfold myself in the blanket next to her and hope along with her in some dream we might share.

You told me to be brave today. I will try. Because there is at least one who listens and one is all another needed to redeem the effort, ourselves, dusk, a moment, the life and death of anything.