And
now how to tell it, the metastasizing tale? However to render the astonishing
mutability, all the subtle varieties of shock? Slurs you've never heard before yet can intimately recall... There's no chance of mastery or any lasting form
of defense. But my heart doesn’t seem to mind right now, has ceased, however briefly, in this obligation. I
feel now often that I am mining my own life for material, that I am but a
poised and acquisitive observer: at once blood and fever and gossip and ink.
The challenge is in the daily framing, in deciding how best to dress the stage
of the mind. And yet the heart is no actor, cannot do the seeming for long
without faltering… without dreaming, without wondering. What do they laugh
about? What have they shared? What carried them in the first place beyond routine,
formality? And I suppose the reason that these questions persist, that this
doleful preoccupation endures, has something to do with love and also something
to do with ego. Love, for me, has always been tethered to language, to
expression, to the ecstatic security that arises from airing our most discreet
and cracked affinities: jokes, songs, abusive nicknames. How every moment but begs now for our arch, uncouth revisions... There is esteem in it for sure, and pride - an
only child’s sense of jester kinship: mirth that stands in for siblinghood
without the crucial other face of ever-ready, natural challenge. I have to
accept that so much of love for me is about laughter and entertainment, and
that perhaps my foolish ego has languished too long in a daily, nightly dream
of peerless glee. Perhaps I am to be undone at last by hilarity, unlaced and flayed: it is not at all impossible that she is funnier than me. Comedians are
cursed with heavy, competitive hearts, tremulous in their ambitions, ever
checked by clock and hook and fellow clown; we are abominably insecure yet
perversely righteous, incessantly tending to the lifeline of our act. You blink
into the boiling, prismatic spotlight and will that something, anything will
land, stand up. You are blinded and utterly beholden to the light. And then
something lands, finally, and you’re deserving of that place, and in fact there
is no you anymore or any other thing but laughter and the absolute tenet of a focused lens, a radio tuned. It happens all the time, so why should you feel special? Humans are social animals, after all, programmed on a cellular level to belong to one another. And if we are fortunate, we have many opportunities, many ways to feel replete in this instinct: families, schools, churches, pubs, volunteer fire departments. And yet, somehow, none of this is ever enough. You long for something closer, a counterpart, unfolding ally - lover, companion, cosmic match - that
trusted other who makes it all seem less fraught, who is for some
reason wired to bear you back to a time before language, before light,
before all your snowfall jokes. Hold my hand, dear tyrant, let our fingers
entwine as we walk along these cock-eyed small town streets. And let me whisper
to you in our precious, only tongue... But, nevermind - there is an alarm
ringing somewhere and the car guard’s dog has lost it against a mean,
loose-jeaned drunk. The cook at the German place has been clocked in a
fistfight and it’s ladies’ night at Mexicola. The goddamn sea will not stop
churning, again and again against the uppity dune. Your phone is ringing now,
my love. You have problems to solve, so answer it. Tomorrow, I will make you
smile, I hope. Tomorrow I will tell you a funny story about our days before
Babel, when our language was still private, before our laughter got so tired.
