NOEMAYA

Tell me, my angel! What lies in this hour for us? What are we missing out on and failing to see in this haste of ours? Is it the prairie and the meadow by our forgotten side, the rich milk of the heart? And yet our animal is galloping in haste toward the horizon where we think we are!  

There! “There” is an interesting phenomenon. For us humans everything is always there. There is a horizon in which is buried all the treasures of the world. All of our problems spring from there, this imaginary place that allegedly has our heart and toward which we haste, and in haste we live indeed. 

The lure of the there! That we shall find what we need and meet all our hearts’ desires in it, in the there! To make up heavens and afterlives, to erect religions and schools of thoughts, only to pamper the fancies of the minds of undeveloped men and women who needed assurance and an afterlife and a savior to mold their meanings for them, for they are too weak to make their own meanings and live them with all the trembling that it takes. There, that’s the place where all unrealities and fancies of such persons are held. Once they arrive there everything will be ok!

This man is a rider on a train destined to cross a collapsed bridge, and yet he hopes that his demise will be a gentle landing on the lap of a divinity. He even hastes toward it, to the ending, to there. And that’s because he is too fragile to tolerate the motion-sickness of his ride, and if he did and if he looked out the window and saw what’s here, what’s truly present, he would’ve promptly dispensed with all that there and there-ness and realize that all the gentleness is here.

Only if he could face and tolerate his own cowardice, that would give him courage to slow down and find his chest and his feet and the much forgotten gut. He would then find his banished body that was chastised so innocently on the cross of the weak and wicked men because they couldn’t take the glory of the body and instead made up a spirit and put it right there in there, and he started running out of himself toward that shadow he called spirit, outrunning the glorious body with all the impulses that are closer to truth than all lofty sermons of this earth’s preachers. This man is always a few steps ahead and out of his body. He is infatuated with out-of-body experience, to leave this earth and get dumped into the abyss of shadows. 

I tell you this about man and his uniqueness. Man is the only animal who has a horizon, and the fact that he has a word for it! If you think about it, a horizon is a nothing; it’s a border between Being and non-Being; but how can there be a border between being and something that is not! And above all his ridiculousness, not only is he a man of horizons, he also buries all his hopes there, in that non-existent there, in that receding nothing of a place where all shadows dwell. That’s where he seeks to find extraordinary experiences, visions of his gentle landings, or anything that is not this and not what he has and what’s given. 

So, what is man as a phenomenon? Is he a being that’s hasting toward non-being, a ghostly figure that has projected all the being he has and he can’t tolerate into and beyond a non-being horizon? Nay. Man is nothing in haste. Man is the very hasting of Being; he is hasting itself and not a being in haste. That’s why he’s always torn, torn in between here and there, for he can’t get that there out of his stupid head. He is as horizontally stretched between the opposite poles of embodiment and self-abandonment as he is vertically stretched between heaven and hell. He is everywhere and everywhen but here and now. He is a lunatic chasing shadows of himself.  

He lives as if his life is a series of discrete points and hops from one point to the other while thinking of the upcoming points in the horizon. He’s a hopper than a roller, and he’s dead and empty in between those points; so, he’s dead most of his living life. But a rolling being is always in touch with reality; he doesn’t hop around points; he creates all points by his continuous and not indiscrete motion. 

But I love this stupid man; to me he is like a silly dog that lives and jumps hoops for a treat. And when he wants something, he just stares at it hoping his master will read his mind and compensate for its incapacity to take care of itself. That staring is the dog’s prayer. 

But I say to this dog of a man, that only if he set aside his haste and panting for the bones he thinks are buried there, only if he stopped hopping and let himself roll through this prairie that is always and in every moment touching him, only then would the hasteful dog die to his falsehood and be resurrected as a true being, when he expands enough to tolerate the intolerable, to love the offensive, and to transcend all antithetic determinations which for all his life have squeezed  him into haste like a slippery fish in the hands a novice fisherman. This dog of a man that sees his body as so dangerous and alien that his life is nothing but a sneeze attack to spit out this glorious body. This man who is so allergic to the body that he is constantly outrunning himself into that horizon there.    

Oh man! What else can I tell you, that I too am a man, a hateful, panting dog looking for the very bones I think I buried there! To tell you that I am so alone that I should have come up with all of it at once, with the man, the dog, the here and the relative there, that I am all this and also the narrator and also the imagery and the disgust and the boredom that arises in your mind and your heart as you read these lines, that I am all that there is and yet nothing you can catch? That you mustn’t take any of this seriously or give it the slightest thought lest it keeps you from your very serious chase!

Yes, I fall upon men like an afternoon breeze that never becomes memorable. You too shall let these lines slip past your grip and go on with the play of shadows and be the good boy, good girl or whatever it is that you think that you are. Don’t even mind me and don’t let the dog in you take offense at my portrayals, for if you have understood a thing I’ve said, then both you and I were participants in the same story, bathing in the same river. There indeed is no narrator to this tale. In this train, nothing is ever said and nothing is ever heard but one’s own fancies.