Sleeping with Myself

I was watching a lurid melodrama that didn’t exist. I was in love with myself but jealous of the other me that was sleeping with the me I couldn’t have.

I think it must have seemed like a long time to me as I let the current carry me where it wanted, but I don’t remember that. I remember an island where I built a house and was very busy taking care of the place I had made for myself on that island. Many visitors came, but none stayed very long. I was satisfied with that. I thought I was happy, and maybe I was, but it’s hard to remember what that felt like. I began to long for the pull of oars, but the rowboat I remembered no longer seemed seaworthy, and I built another one. This time I set out alone, pushing myself away from my own house, with my oar pressing into the sand. The oar let me go slowly as I pushed the boat away from the shore and was then pulled part way back with each effort. I had to pull against the oar I had just pushed into memory to retrieve it from the water’s clinging suck and continue edging out to the interior sea.

South Dakota, January, 1961, 6:30 A.M. I lean my bundled body against air, cold and constant, and chill-factored farther below the minus already there. It holds still. I have come to deliver myself unto this morning of the farther north against a wind so strong it holds me up if I try to fall into it, unless my knees argue and buckle, and then it lets me down like a wall, white with a relentless excess of something you could almost call purity since it does not contain us, but I contain it, and I have known no other kind of winter and have need of approval from parents and the makers of fat Sunday newspapers from Minneapolis with valuable coupons and news of others drifted over by this newest invasion of rest from ambition and prosperity that does not apply to newspaper trucks or those like me who must meet them. I give in and look forward and further forward towards an icy trip to the drugstore for bubblegum and the next Green Lantern and perhaps some imaginary small piece of summer camp deeply hidden there in the icicles that were just now my breath, before it left me and began clacking in shivered code from my iced ski mask. I try not to think of all the mothers who never have the checkbook when I arrive to collect or the fathers whose boxers flair, opening all the way till tomorrow, which is always payday and always further away.

First it’s big. Then you break it down into pieces you think you can handle. Then you handle those pieces, and then there aren’t as many pieces. Handling the pieces badly doesn’t help. Handling the pieces well feels good, and doesn’t help. So you try to break what’s left into smaller pieces, and now there are more pieces, and you can’t help comparing these pieces to those other pieces, the ones gone now, and it reminds you how small they all are. So you put all the pieces in a big hat, and put the big hat on your big head, and just think about all of it until the wind comes along, and then you find out how well you do things, things that didn’t seem to matter much, like putting your hat on your head and thinking about it, and then it’s small, and you can’t get to it with big ideas, and you can’t take it off without spilling something.

So I ask the sun to explain the dust it left on my hat like evidence of a crime. In the heated air there are so many things to do wrong, and they all lose a little of their bravado. With each success there’s a trail of increasing inertia and the bigger crime gets left behind. You have to listen a long time to wake the criminals, guilty as they are of collecting themselves from the unexplained air. If you have to be there, take along a little yesterday. Don’t expect today to fill you. I don’t really need a philosophy of moonlight.

Don’t listen to the self-taught crickets explaining why nearly everywhere is here, and we have a meeting later explaining why we have a later meeting. All the real criminals eventually fall apart and go to sleep though the sleep no longer belongs to them.

A local owl, in his puffy trousers, fluffs on his stump and circulates his vision, a far more local and piercing yellow than any child’s impression of sunlight. That’s the way it is with absence—

You have to take it in to be taken in by it.

This time the journey was longer, so much longer it was painful, and I remember it clearly. After a very long time, it brought me here. I wasn’t sure it was the right place. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stop moving across the water. But I was hungry and tired. And I wanted to talk to someone.

In my youth I entered the wilderness once more with only the wonder of freedom to guide me. Quickly I became lost, but I was not concerned. I still had plenty of time to surround me with possibilities and even the difficulties were pleasurable. I began to look for something I could not yet name, unsure if I truly wanted to find it, nearly satisfied with the search itself. A lengthy process of elimination ensued, and I felt a growing sense of importance attach itself to the journey. I began to look forward to the journey’s end, for I desired rest, but I was reluctant to let go of the fleeting, and therefore more desirable, pleasures along the way.

After many years of teaching each other, the two largest parts of my limited understanding had come to the plateau upon which our shared happiness lived, and we greeted each other as if we were strangers, which was partly true, for it was an even greater happiness living there in our meeting than was contained in the happiness we had known before it. And it was not long after this that the woman containing the current moment of my love said she would be leaving. I could not believe what I was hearing. After all our “success,” she was abandoning me?

I tried desperately, many times, to dissuade her. And it was in this way that I realized she had learned more than I had learned. I knew it without knowing what it was that she could have taught me, just as she too, I think, knew there was a lesson, but knew only that she moved in its direction, without knowing how to arrive at it. Finally, I grew to accept that she was leaving. It was only through my newfound happiness in discovering our love would be remembered by us both as the greatest achievement of our lives that I was able to come to this acceptance. It was not until I told her of my acceptance that she realized she could stay.

It is not by knowing the answer that I satisfy the hunger created by the question. I had to learn this lesson several times.

It is the weakness of one that creates the strength of the other. If one cannot see the weakness, one cannot find the strength, but if one uses the weakness like a donkey, to carry one’s load, then one’s strength follows behind on its path.

When the loved one departs, the love does not. There is no reason for waiting.

Love the one you’re with.

Love the one you’re with more when you’re alone.

What did the bear say to the holy man?

Don’t worry, you’re just as important to me as the sinner I had for breakfast.

What did one holy man say to the other?

I don’t know why we can’t just shit in the woods like everybody else.

What did one holy man’s buttock say to the other?

I’ve got half a mind to kick our ass.

No, really, what did one holy man say to the other?

If we all shat in the woods, where would the bear pray?

What did one bear say to the other?

Holy shit, the man is back. Let’s pray he doesn’t want to make a religion out of us.

No, what did one bear say to the other?

Scat, here comes the holy man up our endless mountain.

Once when I became ill, a fever lifted me from my concerns and held me in its palm like a god. Only in this way had I ever experienced time as an endless creation, with countless doors to the experiences I had had in the past, as well as windows through which I could see what I had not yet experienced, and these new visitors entered through the openings in my sickness, with no distinctions among them.

I lived a long and rich life in that house, which seemed as large as the world, but before I was to die, I ventured out onto the porch and saw that the world outside was not as it had looked through the new doors and windows, for several days had passed and in that time nothing of real importance in my former life had changed. As I realized this, the details of the long life I had lived in those days faded, but the feeling of gratitude I had experienced did not.