Unnamed


Dear Eugene,

What would you do with yourself when you get restless?  What did you do?

I suppose one would first need to be aware of the restlessness and give it a name--not the name, for there is no generic, collective state of human agitation.  I could feel for another person's unrest and find in it a way to speak about my own, but heaven help me if I need to be Herzog to read Bellow.

I would usually reach for a book, to answer my own question.  I don't know if that's healthy, when restlessness means I couldn't care less to rest on one book.

And of course there's also writing, which can be downright self-defeating when the point I want to make is that of the Kohelet, how pointless any life-making can be.

Modern life robs us of our emptiness, and we welcome it, hunger to be hungry no more.  God takes us to meet a strange creature and asks us to answer to our human vocation by giving it a name.  But we were too busy staring at one screen and then another, going down aisles and joining line-ups, that the thingamajig ran away before we could catch a glimpse.  We can't be held responsible for what we're distracted from.

Then there is walking.  My all five points of Calvinism: unable to make sense of much, I go on this chosen path, redemption as limited as grace is irresistible, I persevere day after day.

Everyday I'd see my walking self, once and then twice.  There's this little flatbed truck of a stonemason parked outside I presume his/her home on this same street I'd walk everyday.  I startled myself when I first saw this fleeting yellow figure flashed across the big right side-view mirror, larger than anything I would expect to appear within my breathing space for I was the only one walking and it was still dark.  Then right after I startled myself again when the same yellow shadow gave itself another quick showing but now in a much diminished form in the fish-eye blind-spot mirror right below the first.

Of course I made sense of all these--that the yellow was my jacket, the images reflections, successive and ephemeral because of my walking speed and the two particular mirror angles--only after the shocks, quick enough an apprehension, of apparitions nonetheless.

And I was spooked all over again the next day the exact same way, as if I didn't learn anything from the past.  It took me about three times to get used to the company of demons and stare back in their eyes until they lowered their gaze as I lowered mine.

You who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears

Dylan's words this morning to me when I was walking.  Not much power to you now, Eugene, they are just words.  They need to be sung out, like Psalms, sung like the way Dylan sings them.  I mouthed the words to make them mine.  And you need to be walking; a song of ascents it is.

Maybe it's not our emptiness that's being robbed but a deeper oxymoron: we are emptied of our emptying.  We can't be held responsible for what we can't even name.

Yours, Alex

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