A Psychic Weir

Nothing stays, this is a law and one I learned early, and even now pit myself against. The covers of romance novels in the 1970s.

 

There was sadness but also amazement, also a sense that order was possible – what else was reading for? How strange that we should suffer.

 

The idea that we can be better parents at all stages of our children’s lives feels important to me. The psilocybin was like skating very fast, so fast you left the ice and ascended, I remember the stars under my feet, I remember inhaling  galaxies. 

 

We hurry too much. I think Book of the Dun Cow was maybe the last work of fiction Dad and I read and talked about, this was the summer of either 1978 or 79.

 

It took a long time to learn that the void was in me and not the end. Alarmists of the world unite.

 

I stopped collecting quartz rocks about six years ago, began the difficult work of returning them. So much of what is beautiful ruins language in me.

 

Kids waiting alone at bus stops, staring into their phones the way I used to stare into the distance. Cars don’t help.

 

How easy it is to become dogmatic, a trap of some kind, a psychic weir. Aunt Muriel’s kitchen a kind of totem, as for my parents it was a rare happy place.

I remember looking for her in December 1990, finally finding an old roommate who told me she had killed herself in the fall, it was hard to breathe in that moment, all I could see was my mother folding laundry in the early seventies, the light so bright I had to look away. All kinds of hunger making us do all kinds of things.

 

Per Tarski, truth is a property of sentences, not the world, so long as we deploy a metalanguage to set the truth conditions (i.e., no language can be used to establish its own truth conditions). Later it began to rain, and it seemed it would rain a long time.