5:59 p.m. 2001-01-22
So I stayed up until six last night / this morning. I didn't feel like living here anymore. I stayed in the library. I read half of Crime and Punishment and my art history reading. It was what I wanted. I didn't want to sleep. But I did, some, even though I felt indescribably dirty somehow.
I don't know if that disturbs me, that I felt dirty. Partly because I was sleeping. Partly I just felt impure. Not morally or sexually impure or something -- artistically impure. I wanted to purge myself, to be empty, which is something I almost never am, but when I am, it scares me and fills a need at the same time. Those are the worst times in my life, the times when I feel nothing deeply, see nothing but clarity, and, most of all, want nothing. You see, I always want something, even if it's just a cookie or something. But there are times when I want nothing. Those are the worst times.
Around this time every year I get this yearning for purity. Purity for me means deserts. I have a fascination with the desert. I've never been. I flew over the badlands two summers ago, and it was so thrilling I couldn't take my eyes off the window for going on an hour and a half, because I might glimpse more of them. But I've never been to a desert.
I don't actually mean a sandy desert, like the Sahara, although I wouldn't mind going to one. But the deserts I really yearn for, the ones I dream about and that begin to multiply in my thoughts every midwinter (until I reach spring, and it breaks), are the rocky deserts. The parched, cracked ones, filled with silently impossible rock forms or simply endless indecipherable rocky plains, on and on into the horizon. Deserts like the skin of my hands when they're dry and raw -- filled with tiny, painful lines, secret and obvious at the same time.
They're completely inhuman places. No one can live there. Not for long. Any human being in the middle of the desert is going to die. That's simply it. And the thing is, they don't care. They don't care about people, they don't care about humanity. They're not cruel, they're complete and dispassionate. They're not human, deserts. Forests, coniferous and deciduous, and rainforests all seem somehow much more humanizable. Trees rise upright with limbs, like people. Things grow wetly, full of moisture (as we are). Most of all, we live there. But we don't live in the desert. Not really. (We don't live on the tundra either -- I suppose I might be as attracted to antarctica if I didn't so abhor cold. But I do. And deserts, though cold at night, are warm warm warm -- to the point of deadliness -- in the day.)
The desert in my dreams, waking and sleeping, is filled with small, white rocks. They cover the ground. It's flat, completely. Everywhere around you there is nothing but the white and the heat and the absolute purity. In the distance the rocks fade to a faint gray horizon. It is not a dead place, but is a place where you are dead to yourself, where you are taken out completely from that which is remotely like you. There are bits of scrub, insects that can live there.
I think about myself lying on my back on the rocks. Alone. Silent, my arms extended, feeling the hardness and the whiteness that is almost cold, except that it is hot. The sun is not terrible, I do not sweat. But I am purified. Empty, but not dead. Filled with small white rocks. They press into my back in small, uncomfortable ways, but I am not uncomfortable. I am pure.
It's a place I want desperately to go sometimes. Maybe it's a kind of death. I don't think so. I think it's a longing for a small death. In summer and spring, the greenness and the moisture and the growing welcomes me. I can live in it and it makes me cry I'm so happy to see the warmth and the growing. I love it. I am beloved. I am part of it. But winter -- it's alien.
Like that desert. It's so far away from me. You know how the sky looks so high up and far away in winter? And the sunlight -- sometimes when I see it on my skin, I'm horrified. Somehow, I don't look right. I don't look like I have life making my skin glow and pulse and be soft and living. I look like I'm dying, or I'm old, or just somehow, wrong. Life is far away from me then. Winter is like the desert in that way -- it will kill me itself (not like warm, wet, humid summer -- if anything killed me there, like an infected mosquito bite or something, it wouldn't be the season. It would be a fellow organism). And it doesn't care or understand me, my kind of life. My kind of life is sleeping. It's far away.
And despite all my alleged hatred of February (the depth of winter, really -- always the coldest, the worst), despite my perception of it as hostile and malicious, I wonder sometimes if it's only really alien. If those laughing voices I hear in the terrible gray wind are crow-jokes. If they're just death coming through, for once. If maybe, all this winter means is that I don't understand what it is to be dead.
And when I long for the desert, for the heat and the purity, I wonder if that's my way of trying to understand. Of trying to make my peace with the cold and the dead and the inexorable fact that with every winter I am closer and closer to my death. And death, like desert, like winter, is the cessation of the living-human. It is alien. And maybe my dream-desert is a way for me to fill myself with that knowledge and be at peace with it.
And yet, when I realized last night that it's still months before the spring, that I'll be colder sicker farther from light for months yet
I nearly cried.
So I stayed up until six last night / this morning. I didn't feel like living here anymore. I stayed in the library. I read half of Crime and Punishment and my art history reading. It was what I wanted. I didn't want to sleep. But I did, some, even though I felt indescribably dirty somehow.
I don't know if that disturbs me, that I felt dirty. Partly because I was sleeping. Partly I just felt impure. Not morally or sexually impure or something -- artistically impure. I wanted to purge myself, to be empty, which is something I almost never am, but when I am, it scares me and fills a need at the same time. Those are the worst times in my life, the times when I feel nothing deeply, see nothing but clarity, and, most of all, want nothing. You see, I always want something, even if it's just a cookie or something. But there are times when I want nothing. Those are the worst times.
Around this time every year I get this yearning for purity. Purity for me means deserts. I have a fascination with the desert. I've never been. I flew over the badlands two summers ago, and it was so thrilling I couldn't take my eyes off the window for going on an hour and a half, because I might glimpse more of them. But I've never been to a desert.
I don't actually mean a sandy desert, like the Sahara, although I wouldn't mind going to one. But the deserts I really yearn for, the ones I dream about and that begin to multiply in my thoughts every midwinter (until I reach spring, and it breaks), are the rocky deserts. The parched, cracked ones, filled with silently impossible rock forms or simply endless indecipherable rocky plains, on and on into the horizon. Deserts like the skin of my hands when they're dry and raw -- filled with tiny, painful lines, secret and obvious at the same time.
They're completely inhuman places. No one can live there. Not for long. Any human being in the middle of the desert is going to die. That's simply it. And the thing is, they don't care. They don't care about people, they don't care about humanity. They're not cruel, they're complete and dispassionate. They're not human, deserts. Forests, coniferous and deciduous, and rainforests all seem somehow much more humanizable. Trees rise upright with limbs, like people. Things grow wetly, full of moisture (as we are). Most of all, we live there. But we don't live in the desert. Not really. (We don't live on the tundra either -- I suppose I might be as attracted to antarctica if I didn't so abhor cold. But I do. And deserts, though cold at night, are warm warm warm -- to the point of deadliness -- in the day.)
The desert in my dreams, waking and sleeping, is filled with small, white rocks. They cover the ground. It's flat, completely. Everywhere around you there is nothing but the white and the heat and the absolute purity. In the distance the rocks fade to a faint gray horizon. It is not a dead place, but is a place where you are dead to yourself, where you are taken out completely from that which is remotely like you. There are bits of scrub, insects that can live there.
I think about myself lying on my back on the rocks. Alone. Silent, my arms extended, feeling the hardness and the whiteness that is almost cold, except that it is hot. The sun is not terrible, I do not sweat. But I am purified. Empty, but not dead. Filled with small white rocks. They press into my back in small, uncomfortable ways, but I am not uncomfortable. I am pure.
It's a place I want desperately to go sometimes. Maybe it's a kind of death. I don't think so. I think it's a longing for a small death. In summer and spring, the greenness and the moisture and the growing welcomes me. I can live in it and it makes me cry I'm so happy to see the warmth and the growing. I love it. I am beloved. I am part of it. But winter -- it's alien.
Like that desert. It's so far away from me. You know how the sky looks so high up and far away in winter? And the sunlight -- sometimes when I see it on my skin, I'm horrified. Somehow, I don't look right. I don't look like I have life making my skin glow and pulse and be soft and living. I look like I'm dying, or I'm old, or just somehow, wrong. Life is far away from me then. Winter is like the desert in that way -- it will kill me itself (not like warm, wet, humid summer -- if anything killed me there, like an infected mosquito bite or something, it wouldn't be the season. It would be a fellow organism). And it doesn't care or understand me, my kind of life. My kind of life is sleeping. It's far away.
And despite all my alleged hatred of February (the depth of winter, really -- always the coldest, the worst), despite my perception of it as hostile and malicious, I wonder sometimes if it's only really alien. If those laughing voices I hear in the terrible gray wind are crow-jokes. If they're just death coming through, for once. If maybe, all this winter means is that I don't understand what it is to be dead.
And when I long for the desert, for the heat and the purity, I wonder if that's my way of trying to understand. Of trying to make my peace with the cold and the dead and the inexorable fact that with every winter I am closer and closer to my death. And death, like desert, like winter, is the cessation of the living-human. It is alien. And maybe my dream-desert is a way for me to fill myself with that knowledge and be at peace with it.
And yet, when I realized last night that it's still months before the spring, that I'll be colder sicker farther from light for months yet
I nearly cried.
Labels: death/mourning/corpses, ghosts, liminality, nature
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