He never found it. He never learned to carve an angel's head. The dove, the lamb, the smooth joined marble hands of death, and letters fair and fine—but not the angel. And of all the years of waste and loss—the riotous years in Baltimore, of work and savage drunkenness, and the theatre of Booth and Salvini, which had a disastrous effect upon the stone cutter, who memorized each accent of the noble rant, and strode muttering through the streets, with rapid gestures of the enormous talking hands—these areblind steps and gropings of our exile, the painting of our hunger as, remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door. Where? When?
-Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward Angel
Today I bring you no news, no obscure metaphysical reference nor obtuse theory or tract that you can collect in your back pocket as we pass upon this proverbial street.
It's Sunday, wet, foggy and in perpetual twilight as I write this to you
on such a fitting day.
"All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?'
-Chuang Tzu
As a young boy who saw the world through an autistic prism, the existential set piece of a funeral, that was acted out so many years ago, by the various familiar and mysterious characters who, in the hindsight of memory, inhabited a vivid dream, imprinted by example, a secret whispered between the lines of their dialog.
As if I could penetrate the ghosts who inhabited the sundry masks of the jocular business man, the elderly aunt who sat primly in the corner,quietly unacknowledged as well as the overly obsessive chattering exchanges that filled an oceanic void,and that mask of my father, stolid and enigmatic.
I witnessed by that experience, an adult world of pantomime, a world I still inhabit.
Death was the host of that occasion and all the involuntary invitees labored with civility and courage to ignore that fact.
In some sense, I stand aside that young boy that was me, as an adult whose mainspring of time is now measured more by a receding view in the mirror of myself than in what lies before me as I approach being the center of another such occasion, my own death.
Our common role, now worn so routinely as if to become invisible to ourselves in this play, is one of perplexity masked by the familiar, as if the recognisable were a talisman to ward off the spectre of the para normality of existence itself.
One gift that autism provided was the ability to observe others, who had not even the remotest concept of who or what they were, but played their part to perfection.
Perhaps the pathological skeptic is an extreme example of this.
You, by the fact that I am speaking to you in the words you are reading in your own voice, anonymously entered into this domain, for what purpose?
We peer under every rock, we crawl through every bush, we analyse, compare and conceptualise the paranormal as an elusive rune of meaning that perhaps in some vain hope, this too shall apply to us.
Why, you ask? There is no other species of sentient companion that may share with us by extension, a defining clarity of what we are.
We have looked everywhere else.
At one time, Loren Eisley was our Poet Laureate, the unseen observer who, upon observing a row of pumpkins flickering on a Halloween night, and remarked on the resemblance both to himself and to all of us.
In an off line dialog I was asked by a certain, well known researcher, a question regarding the potentialities of extraterrestrial communication. I answered his question with my own. What would you ask them?
His wonderful and sincere response was he had not thought of this.
The process can mask to obscure the point of the exercise to the degree we may forget why we began at the point of origination.
For me, as a young boy, a funeral was the unintended invitation to walk behind the dark scrim, behind the litter of props and the false fronts of stage sets.
There must be something there. Perhaps it was the future. A future me who would be the one who knew. and could somehow return and tell the younger version who I was.
That was the way it was. I stood in the snow and watched as the bronze coffin that carried my beloved grandfather sank below the ground.
As someone once told me, I write this for you so that you will not forget.
