The stars in the night sky
appear to be listening to jazz. Soutine and
Duncan are lying out on the beach looking up
feeling the sand in their hair and a slight
welcome breeze coming off the ocean. Holding
hands lying side by side they turn toward
each other and embrace, kiss, and remain in
each other's arrns as they sleep. The tide
rises during the night and the warm water
laps at their feet without waking them.
Nothing in this world is more dlfficult than
love. The ocean has drowned people::::not the
people having drowned in the ocean but having
been drowned by the ocean. The black humor of
the insane world keeps us laughing. If we are
to join together to believe in absolute
nothingness. So what if we are surrounded by
emptiness, and at each of our centers is
emptiness? We undress and disappear; smell
our clothes::::we are perspiration::::that is
our relationship to the Universe, the Earth,
each other::::we are sweat. Until we drown
and crawl back out and walk erect again.
Humankind as a whole is insane; there are
sane individuals. All gods, apparitions,
spiritual entities, and imagined or real
deities hold humankind in contempt::::it
can't be explained any otlher way. If only
the Universe itself didn't breathe.
Tired angels ready for bed but with no place
to sleep in the cloudless blackness their
bodies float to the surface of the Earth,
which, once they strike the surface wake,swim
upward, sleep, float back down, over and over
until daybreak. Soutine wakes up first,
unwraps himself from Duncan, sits up and
gently shakes the sand from his hair, brushes
the sticky coarse sand from his side; Duncan
opens her eyes. Soutine looks out to the
horizon for quite a little while, then turns
to Duncan: "I was a whale once who
swallowed you by mistake::::why did you burn
my insides with your lantern?::::What was
there to see but flesh and darkness as if we
were making love?'' Once dead we continue to
live as organic material nourishing other
organic material; once dead we are lost with
the same disorientation experienced by the
newly blind, only it's not a matter of sight
alone, but of everything; once dead we are
the location of our dead bodies slowly
deteriorating until dust and even then still
deteriorating, deteriorating infinitely; once
dead nothingness. Here is one certainty: we
cannot procrastinate in death. You are
avoiding this as if it were a conversation
with a stranger about the evils of the world.
Most people do not understand that the
Universe is infinite::::they cannot hold a
conception of nothingness or emptiness or
infinity, and so when you attempt to describe
the emptiness inside each and every person,
they laugh it off, don't understand, confuse
what you're saying with their notion of God
or of the soul. Soutine stands, strips off
his tee shirt, walks into the ocean::::when
in up to his knees he dives into a small
wave. Once a war is fought over the
acquisition of drinkable water and breathable
air, then we will take a hard look at our
destruction of Earth. The child who you
spanked, who you spank, who you are spanking
right this instant is only language so you
tell it tn stop crying, stop, and you cuddle
until the warmth of the embrace flames::::you
burn a stick over this fire then with the
charcoal write these thoughts across the pure
white space of your memory. If you pretend
long enough you go insane, you go on living,
keep breathing, as clear as water, as full of
germs you cannot see, nor care to, you are
still in the ocean, you haven't climbed up
out of it yet. We imagine a credo to live by,
then stop thinking. Science is decorative;
Nature is functional. You have come no
further in life than the end of this
sentence.
Being human is feeling ancient. Humor through
tragedy to insight. Balloons have fun in
relation to our playing with them.