staring at the sun
Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing as well as possible. It is almost spring here in Montréal. The snow is melting into gray slush and the sun is out twice as long as it was a few months ago.
I have found it difficult to write recently. Yes, I’ve been busy studying and doing other things, but I’ve sat down to write multiple times this past month and have found my mind scattered in such a way that focusing for more than a moment seemed an impossibility. I don’t know what I have been thinking about. I’ve been searching for something, but I don’t know it yet. I’m not convinced I will know, even if I find it.
I’ve been running everyday. I run on Mont Royal, usually around sunset. Exactly two miles into my route the forest opens up to an expansive park, the centerpiece of which is an artificial pond named Beaver Lake. From the path looking towards the pond, you are staring directly into the sunset. I know it’s bad, but sometimes I have to stare at the sun.
I met another man at another bar. He’s straight. Love is slippery. I’ve stopped looking for anything because I’ve been told that love will find me. My grandmother is trying to set me up with her friend’s granddaughter. She texted me today, “News flash! Jane broke up with her boyfriend!!!!” This must be the start of a recession.
It’s funny, studying religion, I am asked to confront my own mortality daily. The other night, my friend said something along the lines of, “No one remembers the moment they realized that one day they will die.” I told him that’s because no one has ever realized that one day they will die. No way to realize the unreal. I’ve talked enough about death for you to know that death is absence. I would like to say that I have been looking down that abyss. I wish I could say that I am grappling with my own mortality. I want to be struggling with my position in time and space, but I am not. I am removed from the stream of concern. I exist in a padded room, walls so soft, so thick, no one can hear a thing but my heartbeat. Blood flows so loud it’s a river of its own. I’m wearing a straightjacket counting dust particles. I’m making sand castles underwater.
I know I’m rambling. It’s because I want to say that I feel inert. An unmoved moveless mover, putting my finger in the spinning fan to stop the blade and wondering where’s the breeze. I plan for a future I don’t believe in. I am twenty years old. Ten and ten. Another ten, I’m thirty. Another ten, forty. Another, fifty. Another fifty, one hundred. Mom is fifty-five, Dad fifty-four. Time spent. I’m marking lines in the sand. The water’s coming in. Recently, I haven't been able to focus. I spend time, make time, lose time. Walk as fast as you can. It’s still cold out.
I often think about my great uncle Henry. My father’s mother’s cousin or something like that. He was a well known painter, topologist, and cartographer. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art, The Met, and various other museums and galleries across the world. His work is also in my bedroom back in Georgia. Honestly, I’ve never spent much time with his art. To me, it’s mostly lines and curves. He was known for the curves. The story goes, after Yale, he was conscripted in the US military for one of the World Wars. They gave him a gun and I’m certain he took it apart. They gave him orders I doubt he followed. I imagine him aloof. Finally, they learned of his cartographical skills and put him in helicopters, flying him high above enemy territories. Map after map, he perfected his topology. After the war ended, he made art somehow. I guess they used to be paid for that. Eventually he ended up a professor at New York University. Maybe Yale too. It is said that he got sick toward the end of his life and several of his students dropped out to take care of him. They lived in a large apartment in Manhattan, some kind of commune I presume. Dad told me he only wore black. He said he never married. Maybe he was gay. Dad said that Henry never said “goodbye”, only “see you again.”
I grew up in a house filled with his lines and curves. Drawings he would sketch on the subway to pass the time ended up on the wall outside my childhood bedroom. My conservative Jewish family flaunts his success, his lukewarm notoriety, as a testament to our lineage. No one else in my family really made art. I wonder where he got it. My family says I’m a lot like Uncle Henry. They say he had a big heart, but was very strange. I’ll take it, I guess. I have no memory of him. My dad insists I spent a decent amount of time with him as a child. Apparently my grandmother, my father’s mother, grew very close with Henry as he got older.
My mother’s mother was a concert pianist until she gave birth to eight daughters. After the kids started coming, she taught grammar to Catholic schoolchildren. She grew up in upstate New York. She had a pony named Lady. She told me Dr. Barrett bought the house she lived in. It had the deepest well in town. She said it was so deep that no one ever saw the bottom. She returned to that house a few decades back. It’s a highway now.
I’m tracing narratives, you see. I’ve spent most of my life trying to find my place in something formless. I cling to heritage, what little I know, in an attempt to grow meaning out of the dirt. Feuerbach said religion is a projection of the limits of man. Malinowski said religion is an attempt to alleviate the anxieties of mortality. Otto said religion is an experience with a religious object, a phenomenon. I’m staring at the sun again. All colors are in light. I know nothing of science, but it connects cause to effect, so I bite. Religion is something like that. I see the sun, no red, yellow, or blue, just light. But, I know they are there. Empirical or not, it’s all observation and deduction. Give me X and I will show you Y. Let it be red.
I’m still writing a play. The issue is, I don’t like any of it. I think I just want all the characters to smash their heads in with mirrors. I’ve created something terrible in every way and named it “Beauty”. I’ve thought about doing performance art. I have one idea called “Remains of Ritual” where I prepare heroin and shoot up in front of a crowd. “Prometheus on Fire” consists of me setting myself on fire. I won’t do it because my mom would be sad.
I spend enough time staring at one spot and am consumed by the woes of modernity. I stare and remember how I wish I could live in a time when half my brain would not be colonized by the Internet. I am a byproduct of modernity. I am scattered like confetti or arterial spray. I’d throw it all at the wall to see what sticks, but there is no wall. It’s just me and a million mirrors. I think I covered myself in tattoos as a reminder that the person I always wanted to be will never exist. It’s an impossibility. Surely I can fly, but only once. I’ve resigned myself to misery.
Were you there when my pants were off? I’ve started stripping at parties. I’m yelling at the sky. I’m running as fast as I can into traffic. Food and water were never enough; I need light. Throw me to the sun. I’m a moment away from something amazing. I was supposed to go on a date, but he canceled on me. I see my issue: I mistake physics for chemistry. I’m just falling.