CONFESSION

I

Speak the inner human: no more flesh but the soulflesh, a resonant body, a word, tapped into one another almost, also an empty nothing — and nearly dying of it. And then, later, really dying of it– ecstatically.

But everything about dying here contradicts. Premonitions deceive. Painful truths, perhaps, for the eternity-bound: this one life is not separate from its deceit, because, rushed there, one never quite gets there. There’s no truth to this death I can never “be”; and yet it carries me off as if I, in spite of it all, were death myself (all of it?)… as if I could feel everyone’s share of it because I could never feel it… as if I was everyone’s sharing its deceit.

As if I myself were carrying you to the precipitous I-am-not-yet-“dead,” as who you are. The “evidence” for such an opening is machined out in nonsensical articulations. And yet here I stand, justly sensed, with you (even from way over there!).

Already our existence is “verified”: your pain is worthy of you. It opens up what it needs to, outside all “necessity,” and is freedom, even if helpless. It gives consent to everything you do with your earnest share, even if abandoned. In pain, where we and the world dissolve into nothing, we’re already sharing each other, we already have something of the naked truth.

A painful confession: the splintering effect of being an absolute fragment, thrown across time and space, between bodies, nearly exhausted– but not dead.

II

Begged on by the buffonery of death, it’s all one big trip. Someone else is probably enjoying it as simply as one dancing. And we too have two feet– beautiful, buffooning bodies. They cry and groan, there’s communication and joy in all of it, all the way through to the end.

There’s a cool feeling in my gut and it calms me — almost. This trajectory of humanness cannot be thwarted, even if nothing of it will remain — save perhaps for the crossing-of-paths, the glances and the stomping, the fantastic address of it all. We want someone to see, to see all of us. To “confess,” as I purport to, for us all. As if I could, standing up in my own grave, bring you to stand up in yours. (I don’t assume this is possible, standing up, “confessing.”)

Perhaps I’m already reaching the end of what I can do in one life; and yet I know it’s not my life, nor one life, that I’m living. In fact, I don’t know (although I seem to see and sense and feel) who’s living me, or living in me, who’s living “me” out. And yet it’s not you, no God, nor anyone else.

Alive in me– what multiples, what infinities! I can’t help but conjecture that this “me” — this strange, upright death we’re sharing, confessing — is the most extensive endeavor ever undertaken. Perhaps even equal to history or consciousness itself. The inner human, parted out. What could be more destined to ring true?

And so this “me” seems to be yours after all– by now, at least. Or rather, it’s a question of an experience of community– sensus communis—  that cannot be communicated but communicates itself, in fact is what is for us– a feeling of identity-not-maintained, of  pang and growing, thrown back into the play of the world constantly, ever surprised by what it’s becoming.

“Me”: a most extensive exposition to what we are, everything. The inner human, rent along countless common edges, overjoyed in pain and with all the others. Nowhere, everywhere, and always.

III

These moments, sentences, flashes of identification, of sharing-community are not “hints.” They’re placards advertising what is always the case with existence. They don’t recruit. They don’t change anything. They’re immaterial, immersed in their distance from you, standing there plain and simple, being nothing more than an image of our unendingness– which gets gathered up in you as the unsolvable riddle of existence itself.

When all is said and done, I have faith in my/your/our irreplaceable part to play in what we unfold as together . Or at least I knew this: our life together was never far off…

IV

Long before the end, we have a decision to make: to be ourselves; to be the “perhaps” of self and community that we are without knowing it; to confess this…

I’ll say it again, we’re riven by it. It is like a death, but isn’t. It is the thousand-pocketed day, formed by decisions that escape us, splintered into a series of moments/identities that are in no way “connected,” “similar,” or “unified” — save perhaps to the very extent that they’re disparate or lost. As if each of us (all of “ourselves”) were a wound on all the others, but in this way became praiseworthy because alive absolutely.

To be riven: it’s what we are, it’s our nature. It’s the inner human, speaking, sharing, splintering apart. We love it just to know we’re there, what we are– never-dead and infinite…