All Things to All Men

There is something underneath.

I said it at the door. I said it in the preface. I said it in every text without ever saying what it was. Because I didn't know. Because naming it is reducing it. Because the thing underneath everything I've written here doesn't fit in a word.

But this is the last piece. And if I don't say it now I never will.

I isolate myself because the world is loud and what I'm looking for is silent. I smoke because the smoke opens a latch in my head I can't open any other way. I run because the body in motion releases things the body at rest holds. I close my eyes because what I want to see isn't in front of me.

All of this to reach a place.

Not the island. Not the rock. Not the meadow. Deeper. Underneath my inner world there's a place that has no shape. No color. No edge. A place that isn't a place. That is a state. That is a presence.

The closest word is god.

Not the god of churches. Not the one in books. Not the one they teach you to pray to as a child. That one I don't know. The god I touch when the shell falls and the zones light up and the brain that doesn't calculate takes over, that god has no name. No face. No opinion on how you live your life.

It watches. And you dissolve.

Both at the same time. You are watched by something immense and at the same time you dissolve into it. Like a drop of ink in water. The drop doesn't disappear. It becomes the water. And the water watches it become itself.

That's why I run. That's why I smoke. That's why I isolate myself. That's why I spent eight years digging through strata, following mudras my hands made on their own, running with my eyes closed on a treadmill holding on to the bars. Not for the calm. Not for the flow. Not for mental health. For this. For this gaze. For this dissolution.

Deep-sea divers know a phenomenon they call the rapture of the deep. Below a certain depth, nitrogen in the blood begins to act as a narcotic. The brain goes numb. Fear disappears. Cold disappears. All that remains is an immense, cottony, total wellbeing. And the diver doesn't want to come back up. The bottom is so good that the surface loses meaning. Some rip out their regulators because breathing seems pointless when the silence is this perfect.

Every session on the treadmill is a dive. And every time I touch the bottom and every time I have to come back up. Because life is up there. People are up there. Noise is up there. The morning coffee and the emails and the smile and the routine are up there. And I come back up.

But the bottom stays.

It stays like a taste at the back of the throat. Like a frequency the ear no longer hears but the body keeps receiving. The bottom never leaves. It waits. Every morning it's there, under the layers, under the noise, under the shell that reforms in the night. It waits for me to go back down.

And that's what drives me crazy. Not the bottom. The back and forth. Going down and coming up. Touching and letting go. Seeing and forgetting. The entire life is a yo-yo between the surface and the depth and I can't stay at either end.

The little one on the rock, he stays. He's there every time I go down. Sitting at the edge of the lake. Feet in the grass. He never comes up to the surface. He doesn't need to. He's home down there. He doesn't know the noise. He doesn't know the shell. He doesn't know the suit. He is what I was before the world told me I was average.

Maybe what I'm looking for isn't god. Maybe what I'm looking for is him. That intact kid. The one who was never afraid. Who never said I'm fine. Who knew without knowing he knew.

Or maybe it's the same thing. Maybe god is what remains when you remove everything you're not. And what remains is a kid sitting at the edge of a lake looking at you and asking if you're okay.

We made our beds and now we hate where these beds be.

No. That's not true anymore. I unmade the bed. I burned the suit. I cracked the shell. I dug through the strata. I followed the hands. I listened to the thorax. I let the words leave. I looked the reader in the eye.

And at the bottom of all of it there's a kid and a gaze and a silence that has weight.

I learned chess late. Too late, I thought. And for a long time I didn't know where the queen went. The white queen on d or e. I kept mixing them up. So I made myself a rule. A tiny thing. The queen on d. The queen always goes on d. It's silly. The kind of thing a child remembers at the first lesson. But it became my anchor.

My whole life I held my queen in my hand without knowing where to place it. And this project, these texts, this music, this black site you're inside right now, this is the moment I place it. Not in the right square. Not in the perfect square. But somewhere. Because the real game only starts when you place your piece.

The queen is on d.

That's all there is underneath.

That's all there is.