Thomas Lowe Taylor -- THE CULT OF THE REAL

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Dark surrounds the remaining sentinals, darker now than at other times the dark surrounds them in their own sentinals of themselves who they are to the sounds around them, moving into the terminals of themselves at the end of time, at the end of history, at the end of evolution and the beginning of time. The dark is moving into the easier terminals of what has happened; it is now that it is and no other, but who you are, you say, has nothing to do with it, it is to yourself that you are, and to others, nothing at all but what becomes you in the stridence of your emotions, clamoring as they do for their own kinds of attention, and who you are today is nothing more or less than what gets done between the light falling upwards into your eyes becalmed in their own intentions from the lesser forms of thought and the dark rising upwards from your feet, moving your organs left and right in the ascension of gravity and its meeting with the light. You are that.

Former elements are not there. And what happened was so slight and penetrating in its coming that only movies about slime creatures were made, evoking the fantasies of what was really going on. Substrata of consciousness evolve their own networks of light resistant intention; countermanded electoneering reflected on the passage of time without eloquence or design. Here and there, something is said to be happening, but there are no witnesses for mental events, and the streets always look the same, as over the years houses decay and pieces of stucco fall into the street, or trees grow larger and larger; nothing is known of the cataclysmic mental events occuring in the history of the planet, save for a dream of a crater in the woods which occasionally convulses out.

As you are this, you are still and no other to the ones you know. And it is no disfavor that they all clamor for unwillingness in the details of their hearts; where there is no clamoring, there is no heart to bear it out, but the single elements of light and dark do maintain their independence from the motives of others and the intentions of the dark. And as "out of rule", it comes to be that one thing or another is meant or implied that goes along from motive to conclusion without the intervention of thought, now that's fast! But you are your own best interest, and most observant participant, and moving along from death to boredom, there is a critical lack of urgency which leaves art for itself. There is no urgency about death; it is its own demand and makes no claim upon your attention for any detail that is too small to ignore.

And here in the midst of what is passing, you are still too long to be along and too soon to become the other being you remembered as your friend you met in the areas between here and there. No, there is no allowance too small to believe in passion over rememberance, and there is no friend too small to belittle you in the heart of your own admission. It is here in love that you become yourself, and here in the motive of the present that you call out for them to lead you back to yourself, the first and the second of them making the ways to your heart the one forest and the one mountain, and using simple words at that. In the times you marked out one aspect from the others, there was time to seek out areas of distinction and functions of purpose, things you meant to declare your own and the ideas you hoped for in perpetual silence.

This is the air around you, it is smoothing and blue; it is here that the air moves between you and you. There is something beyond desire that moves your arms and hands, and the sensations on your skin are new and fresh. It is not so much a matter of being intense or satisfied, it is not so much a matter of patience or absolution, but it is a beginning and it is something to be known against or toward. The heart is some small beginning in the air around you, and the air is not so much wind as presence. The day is something inside itself, and there are no motives too profound to be on the other side of who you are; it is now and then that the things that pass for light are born against the tides, and leaving color to silence, you mix your potions for your own attentive magic; passion eludes the others but finds you home.

It sinks. The lion is here and there in your heart; at least he has rhythm to his name and a syllable in his heart with your name on it. The doors are still something beyond either your imagination or into the intensity of cooler times to be the same as something in and out. It is still the time of passion and still the name of the day you arrived, fully clothed, in the images of your own being, it silenced them around you and kept the time still enough to becalm the doubters; still enough to calm the town into doing and being and letting the rest go by. You are still here among them, longing in the backyards of your meat for something unattainably new and profoundly light; but the hope of the day is still something beyond them in their sackcloth and cranberry hope for mankind and all the rest. No, to survive you just avoid turning into the wind and letting the trees knock you down. You watch.

Here is silence pretending to be otherwise in its continuing, and holding the rest at bay to become itself in the remembering of day after day the same noises rounding your ears into something unknown and strange. The first time you heard it, there was nothing but a roar, an induced perspective of absolutes, another room full of furniture without speech, another day passing for its opposite in the plenty of its own demands. The others pretend to be themselves, but fool no one at all; there are passageways into and out of the meaning you attribute to who you are at all, but the final determination is less than real, it is a perspective of the known thrown up against its angularity, up against its own wall, and turning from one side to the other, achieving definition. You are not alone.

I stopped along the way to mark my children one by one into their own lives passing the lines along the sidewalk without remembering anything at all, and when I emerged, I was still alone and knew no one at all; there were strange buildings along the way, there were women calling my name, but it was not enough for me, and I fell back into the darkness, moaning in my pain that I was all alone. They laughed at me and I took it like a man. Or so it went until the necessities of life were altogether too strong to be ignored, and we all went down together. No, there is no cure for it, and the less said the better, but if you want to continue, then go on and let them lag behind the walls of the fortress of their own mentality and forget that direct experiences are the only kind to reveal you to yourself in the midst of error and trial, and how you pass is another drama left too long for the others not to see.

I spoke to her about duration and continuing, how they are not the same but different sides of the same idea seen from different perspectives. Not that I knew what I was talking about, I just wanted to get into her mind and rummage around in among sensations of the erotic and the psychotic, and how you are left alone in fantasy the best way possible, and left too long to escape into the pseudo-real, not that there is any other; to name is to deny. To describe is to remove from experiencing the facet of a "thing" that leads it into being at all. Left alone, we become what we might be and let the randomness of actuality be called poetry or light or friendship or something we value beyond the need to control, and as language is the medium of detail, we march around the words themselves giving them the energies of the things described, depriving them of their own reality. Tough one, that.

But I wanted things to be as they are. And not less or different, or described, or even parts of themselves and not parts of other things. Too abstract, you say. Even so, the detail remits to presence and escapes its destiny on the page as another passing element of the animal in its domain, no, it is something else that presses forward into being in the pressures of thought that make you different from yourself and marked for life by the history of your own thought. It is light itself that marks you from your shadow; it is substance that brings the shadow to itself but light that is the opportunity of the moment in its obscuring of omission from the act. You are you, and leave the rest for the others. Following and details, those are the hints of the package to its own demise in the avenues of the real, there are no others.

So there is intention becalmed on its own denials to the real, obscured by the pressures it offers to become what it is in the first place, and after that, the elements of potentiality; that is as an intention becomes its own potential, it loses its intentionality, and as poem, the word becomes its own denial, becomes the new word in front of you, defined by its neighbors from the textuality that it had as an accretion or a distance, but left from "vocabulary" by position and design, reminded of its latitude in the present by the relevance of the whole to the rest of its distances. And that is a passage in the minds of motion, air in the solitudes of its movement, how we are thing and being at the same time, and contradictory to the speech we offer into the lights and darks of our own directions. That's a mark and a marriage.

Now you are descended into the present. The flow of the line has met you somewhere between hesitation and the future; the opening of your own systematic and eloquent definitions is all that remains of the place you started from and the arrival you meant to declare as a goal, but here and there there are passes to remit and claims to deny: the vocable and the defined as against the potential and the possible. This is too traditional to be a sign of the future. What you might have is motion against stasis as a definition of location. That would have all the variables of a situation included in the description of what is and what is not about it. To make static is to deprive. That's the clue here, and to move beyond and into the realm of the motive is to enter the poem and mark your own growth in the syntax of your understanding, making you a collaborator of your own ignorance and triumphs.

And in kinds of silence there are no absolutions, nor any forgetting, but the light in the heart which folds out into areas of thought and sign which cannot be ignored, but bear their traces too willingly to be left alone. And it is in noticing that the variation of your own thought patterns is altering in the midst of perceiving itself, and you reach into yourself for further notices of the day's rain falling, infalling and slight, and how you are moved along this row of seeings into another time of being yourself, and as walking along you become the pattern of your own poem, it is here that it is taking place, in the realer real than ever imagined to the flow and term of the act in its manifestations of itself.

Lassitude incorrect, and falling along the day, it is puddles and splash on the windowpane of your shades, here are the bumps along the walk to the top of the hill, and there is the reflected flash of something on the floor of your mind in recompense for the walk or in dedication to it, that something would come up and then be gone into the focus of which it was particle and calm, of which it was motive and stain; forgetting color for just a second, and reaching out with the tentacles of light which you are, it is here that a word or an even slighter harmony of presence begins to suggest itself into action from where it is now, to where it is now. Told to bed infirm, you hold tight and move into position to lock down and thrust it sure into its own molding and pleasance; and here you are stuck in the terminal, watching yellow pickets explode across in ever-bumping collisions with the darkness in front which has neither dimension nor exactness.

Something yet bending forward from automotive stillness, motivations alert to the chromium demands of the form and its motation in the present: you are here enough of the time to become part of the wallpaper, but there is none, it is still too soon to redecorate the starting gate with crepe paper and paper dolls, all along the highway there are no new signs to ignore, and what remains is no emptier than the shelf paper; you saw it years ago in the other store, he mentioned it again and slipped aside into the stall. No noise was expected and so there was none. But the day was too simple to be less than that. And where these allowances were made firm, the song elongated like your own nose at the time of musk and delight. And the elephant's song was hung in the air like a dance, like another day of whopping it out too long to remember.

Stuffed. Or a drab particle in your hair, where it sort of drags out and makes effects out of thin air. That trick was never too late nor imagined beyond now. What are we playing about but just to see, between the grids of the known into some celebration which is without character but is profound and complete. Now that's a dinner expectation hard put to miss out but too much to ignore. Too fast, perhaps, but not stuck but stuffed. And how he hears you breathing is beyond me, in the darkness of the room, in the silence of the age, in the light of the new tomorrow he scans the shelves for dented cans, or removes them and places them in cardboard boxes at the back of the alley, for less fortunate people to take, corned beef tins made into drinking cups and sold for pennies; slowly you hear again, and drag it into the next frame.

In the other silences, there are these tongues reflecting out and then making a stand in the lesser terms of what is there. And it is kinds of sentences that begin to take shape, reminding the straight line of comprehension that there are overtones to recall and doubt, and that the minitrampoline of perception sometimes stalls out of pure exhaustion, not recognizing any longer that different information is being ignored in favor of the familiar. Hoping that painters will use different colors. Watching the birds and the clouds at the same time. Cooking again. Scorning.

Still the houses are made again. And on streets where before there were none, signs in the absence of people appear. Walking through the construction project on a Sunday, you are reminded that only days before there were no tire tracks on the ground, and perhaps no human had ever stepped on that piece of earth before, as the sticks break in their dryness to make the fire there at the top of the world, and when you strike your match, the darkness is so intense that there is no light, but slowly the fire sputters into existence, and you lie down with the dogs to sleep in a fitful, shaking, dreamless emptying of emotion; and floating in the darkness with the glow of the dying fire and the heat of the dogs, you rest.

Days before the rest was new, there were no allowances for these elemental changes, there was no perception of necessity, there was no desire for remarkable circumstances, there was only what there was. But before long, newer sensations began to manifest, not so much as restlessness, but perhaps demographics and perhaps the technical, but nonetheless, darkness has reminders.

Light would recall them at the end of time and make it all right to stop here and rest. And hope for change could be bound up in not accepting the present as an empty vessel. But if you doubt too long, then the appearance of the real is just too frightening to be accepted, and you relax into forgetfulness and kicks. He hears them out and then sleeps on it. After awhile the novel fragrance of his words, elliptical as they are, begins to wear them down, and all but the sentinels are asleep. Too soon is the guitar stolen from the king of rock and roll. Too soon does the egg break open to reveal the sky. And too soon does he lunge after the french fries and ketchup, across the table from the others in the salt and pepper of today, resting among the other flowers. There are many others at the table, but it is fun.

Slowly, it begins again to dance around from day to day in some rescuing of youth from the decay of the flesh. And it is not remembering but less and less of more and more, or the reverse. I'd say "hold", but there is no reason to. In something like this or that, the release is just as important as the weather, or just as long to be between it and something else. But figuring that out took about as long as to write it, and you laugh a lot at that. Somewhere else, they will remember to call me and let me know that this is happening. Areas of the brain call words to be something that says this is this and that is that, but it is still all emotion that brings it around, isn't it? You'd recall this if something depended on it, a million bucks or something like that, you'd remember every word of it. No sweat. Try it now, and let me know about it the next time we meet.

Others less forgetful might call it this or that, might call it the color of the day, or a meaningful experience, or a total warp of consciousness itself. But this much is clear from the start, something is different about today than about yesterday, if you can sort that out. It is not so much a quality of knowing but the reality of the image, and if no character can be given to it, then that too is important, for something so large that it can be perceived and which still as yet has no character is perhaps too important to be overlooked and too immediate to any longer be ignored. It is in fantasy that the story holds, but it is in seeing what is there that it (the fantasy) is borne out into the open air and made something to be contended with, or aligned, or joined into something else, conflation.

Archaic, perhaps, but the known is still a pleasant memory of belief and a systematic betrayal of the image. Or it represents that and makes you into someone to be talked at. If there were no trees in the forest, would there be any sound at all? Only the dirt scratching and itching in the absence of any hair, or the wormy molecules of memory asking for another smoke before they pull the switch, and let it go at that. Where there is no longer any coherence, then the abstract definition makes you into someone who sounds a lot smarter than he really is, and the tactics of the sentence become the communication. And a good day for lying on the beach and thinking about all you might have accomplished if you'd been Alexander the Great on a good day with nothing to do but get a suntan and recall the good old days when an orange was an orange and everybody knew it and let you know what was happening.

That's that, you admit, and hold out for another wing or a prayer. Happenstance, or another way of being erect. And it is a little more than you'd care to think about. A cool tongue, a bunch of flowers and dinner at the Acme would smooth the lines along the highway into forgetfulness, and sing directly into the microphone; leaving nothing to chance, you call out for something to be released and a cool air sounds aloft and sudden, making the day into something remembered too soon and colored left and right, but left there for everyone to see just what it was. The structure of the paragraph and how much ground was covered. Filling in the lines themselves wherever you wish to. Being at one with the cosmos and still smoking a cigarette and thinking about beer. Lights along the edges of the horizon in the middle of the night with the car humming and screaming out day after day the light bearing on the beaches of your heart with the surf up and nobody in sight, at the end of the record with the speakers hissing, too many empty beer cans and not enough empty brown paper bags.

Reconstitution. There is the edge of the day and here is its beginning to be dawn. Over there is a drama going on and in here it is the same thing all over again, there is no difference. But you sense the smell of bacon and get hungry all over again. And in the morning, there you are again, with a feeling that everything is different again. Different again. But too slow is not the same as doing something about it. And the opened doorway is swinging on its jam, jammed out and swinging. Is this good enough? Is it what I meant when I came down here today? Or was it up and yet there is continuing and thinking and hoping.

A glow of light in the center of a cloud of steam, with water and sand boiling around and a dark edge of rock on one side. That's it on the left, while on the right, the coffee cup, some wood paneling and more space than to the left. The music comes from the left, and the staccato flash of yourself in the screen in front of you is somehow not terribly reassuring. But it goes on, and in the end, something is done, that's about it for that. And the next morning, you don't really remember what you were writing about at the time, but it got done, and that's what happened that day, or today, really.

So it is not so much that nothing is happening, but your patience is beginning to be tried. Trying. At the end of time, there is not enough time to go around, and everybody is short of time, or else just doesn't have enough to get everything done. When there's plenty of time, not everybody is even aware of it, but they let you know that they are thinking about it and not telling anybody else, just thinking about something and having the time to do it means that you are real. Wide ranging or narrow ranging, it is still the range. Like tunneling out, or like being in a tunnel.

I'd stop here and rest, but it's time to go on and finish this. You might recall me that I was here in another circumstance, just a few minutes ago, but that I've changed completely here and I'm trying to get you to think that that means something. But the serious charge out of all this is not what you'd imagine, it is something else being reminded by you that it is still here and thus to makes these changes now or be someone else, someone you might not know or even like that that you'd be.

More or less redirected into the light, there is a passage and a recollection of terminals more profound than seeming-to-be, or wrapped in the words and times of light, you are held against your will in the scarcity of what is there. This much comes across and holds onto morning again, and your clothes are still keeping you warm. It is still slow enough to read into things the energies that they have and still keep up with yourself in between "things". But any more would be too much, and the ripeness of the sunlight inside garages is like a holy glow in the time of birth. Your own perphaps, but still enough to be the whole world, petroleum clouds of steam-like substances roiling up over the glass-fronted office building.

Today is soon enough to be what it is, but still you don't remember your name again. You would ask, but who would respond? It is still the end of the world and no one noticing, but day after day the same appears to be the same and no other. Otherwise singular, there are penetrations to behold and namers to clarify the dark, but something holds them back or makes notice impossible; lengthening tides rewind toward doubt, but hold them closer than the day, into something cast beyond recognition and doubt itself, but coasting into view without any help. You would tell him at the door there is someone into whom he should leap and hold, but the smallest touch makes the day spin around and line the airs with energy and pulsations of emotion, and so you hold at the hours and make small signs, hoping for allowance and return, for forgiveness and release, for the others to call out in welcome and close in around you in the time of fellowship and new beginnings.

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