NOEMAYA

To be human, to have words, and to make stories, to be cut in half by night and day, by light and darkness. To be this thing thrown hither and thither by the ebb and flow of violent streams, to be captivated and moved and frightened and inspired and lashed by one’s own tail.

To be human, to be a lost raft in the middle of the ocean, and to be the deep ocean beneath the raft. To be the whole and the part at once, and to have a hole in one’s center that’s deeper than deep, and to walk on a rope over the abyss stretched between two darknesses.

To be human, to be hidden and hideous, to be known and unknown, to be under and over, thrown from the throne and yet a sworn thorn to the saving reach of all redeemers. Dreamers we are, and even better, sleepwalkers trodding over our own feast.

To be human, to be determined and yet indeterminate, to be subject and object, to desire being seen and despise it in the same breath. How burdensome it is! To be christ and anti-christ in the same body! And that’s to be human: to beg god and spit on his face too.

To be human, to desire the other, to make mindless love with what is and fantasize with what is not. Wanting heaven more than the earth, to have no end and yet the inventor of ends and means, to press into the pain to numb the pain, to touch the paint precisely because the sign on the bench says not to, to lean into the mouth of darkness, to prefer to be devouerd and chained than be free.

To be human, to be and to have something and yet to want something else, anything else beats what is. Give him peace and he’ll seek war, and once he finds war he seeks another war, a peace stained with contempt and the right to war.

I have a disease, a viral infection, a helpless condition, and so much guilt. The condition I’m suffering from is as old as life itself. I’ve been sick for a long time, since the fall. I felt ill and onto this miserable condition ever since I gazed at the damned river, and I fall ill again every morning when wakefulness, a side effect of my dementia, overcomes the bliss of the underground oblivion. This condition, the human condition, is my pet leach, sucking the Being out of my flesh and into the river, and I have found comfort and a home in watching my blood trace out transient appearances on the surface of this flowing abyss.

To be human, it is for the spirit to be buried alive with its own fancies. I remember when as a kid I was fascinated with what I found under the microscope and spent hours trying to analyze and identify it. Soon after I realized it was the reflection of my own eye, my own eyelashes, my own retina. This, my friend, is the human condition: to alienate and objectify oneself for the sake of a moment of entertainment, to manufacture distractions so as to avoid facing one’s own indeterminate and intolerable existence. It’s an old story: to crucify the loud body in exchange for an even louder neurosis, gold for meaningless plastic.

To prefer a familiar prison to an unfamiliar freedom, to prefer to be in hell but still in control. And when you give him that, he still prefers that something else, that which is not. Man is always in love with something else!

So, what is this human condition: it is to be with Being and having an affair with Non-Being. But even knowing this is no cure of my dis-ease, for it’s the essence of my condition to desire and love this condition, to be invested in it. I, too, am a product, and in fact a fancy, of this very condition. The condition alone is real, and it does what it has to in order to survive and take up the field.