Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.
- Hellen Keller
It’s the start of 2012 and I’m uninspired. Having dissolved into the calm, I walk and talk and satisfy my bodily needs without being able to pick up a book, write, or complete a paper. My room ages while I remain stuck in a metaphysical shell. The books beg to be dusted, and my closet wants to get itself together – although patiently so, since they do not squeal enough to jerk me off from this somnambulistic state of being.
As much as I’d like to kick off a year with a gleeful blog post, I can’t help but remain uninteresting. There is nothing special about the state that I am in. The Shah of Blah (Rashid Kalifah of Salman Rushdie’s “Luka and the Fire of Life”) would call this the place of Stagnation. With my bed and the Wifi as my beasts of the moment, I find myself hoodwinked second after second, which all I am left to do is concede, in an infinite loop, in an infinite loop, in an infinite loop of junky life oblivion. Comfort can be so deceivingly strong-willed that it beats Spirit out of me.
All I ask is Fire. I feel like wet leaves doomed to rotting. I’d rather turn into mad ember and set my old self ablaze to get back up again. My primitive forefathers, I’ve always imagined, had subjected their Spirits to Aimlessness until they chanced upon friction, through which they replicated the heat of the earth, allowing energy to flow in a cycle of creations and re-creations. They ate better food, dealt with freezing weather, survived the wilds, and gathered around to tell stories. In a quite similar sense, I roam my little territory – the place of self; my self in place – to find the answer to my coldness. They say friction is just about anywhere. Say a pre-college notebook of lazy scribbles– fossils from an age of fights and flights; a digitally stored photograph of younger self: angst-filled, dramatic, quasi in love; a book of discoveries by Lewis and Clark, the Pioneering Naturalists; my new Android phone, a wonder to my opposable thumbs; and many others. Yet I remain unfazed. I must have developed indifference. Maybe romance has escaped me since the day I met man and his hamartia; since nature rebelled at its peak; since the time I grew tired of people who claim depth to themselves – the Sages of Fluff. As I get older, my Zone closes in as a smaller, less-sociable circle, with a limited slot only for memories of my hometown (pre industrial harass) and childhood, a few best friends, my lover with whom I share a culture, and the dreams I have for the universe.
Tonight, while my room celebrates the New Year, I refuse to force myself into thinking. Since work resumes tomorrow, I will let friction come about un-coerced – raw, fresh, instinctual. And why shouldn’t this be my new year’s resolution? While I remain alive and capable of rapture, I should be able to ignite from within. From now on, I will need people, but only the best of people. I will need systems, but only the most sensible of systems. I will earn, yes, but not equate earning to progress. I will stay young, but not stay young in dreams and experience. I will love, but not limit love to humanity. I will read and learn and write and teach. I will stay myself, but be a better self. I will immerse and expand my circle, to find my existence in a wider place. I will heal and retrieve, react and respond, think and perceive, give and receive, flee and return . . . But before anything else, I shall break out from this metaphysical shell and respond to my room’s calling. Let love, books, teaching, research, poetry, art, and the whole realm of Magic gather into hot, dangerous coal.
By Tomorrow, I shall be on fire, and I shall never be dowsed.
