Now you see me, now you don't

On Eros' greatest trick.

It was Alan Watts who I first heard liken life to a game of, “now you see me, now you don’t.” A sort of cosmic hide and seek. It’s a silly little game, isn’t it?

Silly, yet sometimes, I become Very, Very Serious. Heavy with the search for just the right words to express the inexpressible. 

I suppose, having chosen writing as one of my many beloved art forms, I put it upon myself to be eternally (yet delightfully) tortured with this dilemma that words are at once far too much, and not nearly enough. Though, who really chose? Not the fixed identity “I” once conceived myself to be. 

I, expressing Eros. An ever changing energetic form. Creativity incarnate, channeled through this body. Which, to borrow words from Sam Harris, is a space of consciousness articulated by the sensation of breath. 

Let me tell you a secret. Much of the time, I feel quite crazy. Even more so now that I’ve been focusing on laying my observations down on the page, right out in plain sight. “Here, Faye, take a look at your inner workings.” Linear? Pish! Tosh! 

It’s like a game of connect the dots without any numbers. Memories, sensations, ideas, desires, all coming forth at once and from every angle. 

Where are the reference points? I wonder. Where is step one? Where is step 2? Is that step 47 that came first? It might be easier if it was linear. I mean, surely that must be why we constructed a world of linear concepts. To make it “make sense.” 

You start here, go in a straight line, and you end there. Where you’re supposed to. 

Simple. Sensible.

Except it’s not. It’s nonsense. 

At least, I, for one, can’t seem to make sense of the linear. 

Beginnings I understand. (Do I? Now that I’ve written it I’m not so sure) At any rate, they seem easiest to locate. I begin writing. There. A beginning. Middles seem obvious, too, because they sort of wander around, looking at different things, exploring, taking it all in. Though beginnings can certainly arrive in the middle of things, too. But endings? Well, I don’t know. I’ve certainly experienced endings, but they were quite the same as beginnings. Conclusions leading to the next thing. No separation, really. Maybe a breath. But then, when does the exhale end and the inhale begin?

Lately, as you may remember me saying not too long ago, I’ve had trouble arriving at any sort of “conclusion” to any of my writing. It happens again and again. I wake up and write something and by the time I get to the “end,” the end is nowhere in sight. Maybe the trouble is I am quite profoundly in the middle, meandering around, taking it all in. I experience this middle just as I do when I make love, wherein I feel no desire to leave the warm, pulsing abyss of our bodies dancing as one; no desire to make the end come. Ha! It’s all coming, anyway. I yearn for this pulse never to end. Must it? I can’t say I know, having learned what I have about beginnings. Nonsense seems to say it mustn’t. Endless waves.

Right, then. The idea that “I” must conclude a piece of writing is infuriating. Makes me writhe in my skin. Blood boiling. Tears streaming. An absolute extravaganza of sensation. I feel and feel and then, wanting something to come of it, I sit and I think and, well “I” think “I” am the one thinking - and nothing comes. 

Thinking is happening. 

Thinking I am doing it - that there is a thinker separate from thinking -  is obstructing the process. Ah. I let go of my hold on the ending. I breathe. I open as Eros would have me.

This reminds me again of something Alan Watts shared: “There is a Zen poem that talks about ‘IT,’ meaning the mystical experience, satori, the realization that you are, as Jesus was, the eternal energy of the universe. The poem says, ‘You cannot catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it. In not being able to get it, you get it. When you speak, it is silent. When you are silent, it speaks.’”

Oh, Eros, you tricky bitch!