I remember poking a hole in the end of an oatmeal can to make a camera. I remember laying leaves and pieces of grass on photosensitive paper, then setting it in the sun to make silhouettes. In the yard was a septic tank with a square cement lid you could stand on. That night I slept on a couch in a room full of other children. There were sleeping bags and the heat of summer, the discomfort of a strange place. A few mosquitos, but it was the moths I remember, fluttering around the naked lightbulb, until I slept.

Perhaps this memory static and done is a retreat. Right now my mind is like that pinhole with everything focused in a cone through its tiny space. A desperate ring clenching down, a collar on confusion, these foolish notions of control.

I once saw life yawning before me, from my high ascetic perch. I committed to wander in Samsaara, to dive in headfirst and through transformation escape it. But escape is not a guarantee. It all too easy to get lost in the tangle and the noise. Until one pops out of History, one’s in it up to the neck. Horrible dreams, like waking up with empty syringes hanging out of your face. There are monsters here.

A mind under pressure steams off in unexpected directions. Lately the hallucinations have gotten stronger. They are more like waking daydreams, and they’re not at all unpleasant. The other day in traffic a passing truck became the giant vocoded voice of some ancient animal or machine. As it heaved itself fantastic from the soil, it let out a raging, yawning, croaking roar, so deep and powerful that every vibration was a separate thundering explosion. A wind rose up around it, summoned by its voice, or by the bulk of its rising. I saw it like some primeval nature spirit in a Japanese anime, roused by Man’s foolish intervention, by the call of the ages. And it took my breath away.

Silent John, backsliding after a stint in a Buddhist monastery, lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. His eyes burned from the smoke, and nothing seemed quite right. The knot in his stomach told him the six White Castles he’d gobbled down were in heated negotiations with his digestive tract, which was accustomed to a strict vegetarian diet. Right now the tract seemed to have all its cards on the table.

“Gonna regret that one,” he thought. He monitored the discomfort with the dispassion of a veteran meditator, acknowledging it but not identifying with it. “TRY not to identify with it,” he thought, acknowledging this second thought as he contemplated the growing ash on his cigarette. Trying itself was a false approach, presuming a goal and a path, not the eternal state of present Being in which the true Self can awaken. “Yeah, whatever. I feel like shit,” he said aloud. The admission lightened his mood a bit and he chuckled, feeling a degree of inner relief after months of privation. He thought back to the events that had led him to the monastery in the first place, and the reasons he’d left three years later.

“Another Pacifico, please,” he said, laying a couple of dollars on the bar.

[feel free to add to the story]

i’ve been smelling things. sudden brief bursts of scent when none are around: feces, rusted metal, apple pie. it’s like some other sense has begun to atrophy, and brain is compensating by producing forgotten sensations. olfactory hallucinations? or vivid memories?

I’m not concerned. it hasn’t happened much.

writing this i catch the pattern, though. something i did not register as present before. a development which writing helped uncover. the archaeology of the present through word-digging.

false prophets

groaning steel

geese in formation

and what have they won with their Control?