Destination Infinity

I once knew a man

who could put words

into images,

and images into words.

He had a glass box

full of ants that he studied.

Music was playing,

and he was dancing,

but his dancing was more like twitching.

His twitching was in time to the music.

He was losing the images in his head.

And he struggled over whether or not

the ants

should be experimented upon.

Then the box was smashed,

and the ants were everywhere.

He felt they were inside him,

and he stuck his tongue out rhythmically,

so they could come out.

He told me

about Alpha Centauri and the Aquarian.

He told me 
how far the earth is from the sun.

He said,

“You have to move your body to the funk.“

He could talk without moving his mouth.

There is a world of sound.

There is a world of vision.

Sometimes the worlds come together.

His glasses had two-way mirrors

so that when he looked out,

he looked into himself.

He represented a collision

between matter and anti-matter.

There was too much energy

to be measured in candle-power.

He made me ask myself,

“When a rocket

accelerates through the atmosphere,

what determines the boost factor?”

When he talked,

he  created an electrical storm.

When he cried,

his words were raining.

The storm windows

were smashed, and

the power lines were down.

The cables were swinging

into epileptic outcry.

He gazed upward,

and looked

at the burning holes in the sky.

A bat was hanging on a wire.

The unconscious became conscious

with the smell of noseblood.

He taught me

how to see people coming out of the shadows.

They were doing a new dance routine.

They tried new top hats on.

Their melancholy

could not be measured with a light meter.

Their faces were expressionless,

and they couldn’t feel anything.

They were practiced

in the art of the poseur.

They said that everything

was a copy of something else.

They were on a platform,

and the floor was tilted.

The shoes of those that passed by

were all I could see.

I could see no higher.

He asked me,

“What world do you want to live in?

The world of lasers and starships?

The world of clouds,

where you float in the sky?

The world of water,

where your boat is tossed

gently by the wind?”

I said to him,

“Are you talking about

the present or the past?”

But he answered,

“When you finally get ready to act,

it will already be too late.

Your life will be over.

Your time will have passed.

The nuclear rockets

and the guided missiles

will already have been here.

The thunderclouds

will have broken.

The next man to be killed

by another man

will already have died.

Today’s newspaper

will already be old news.

Tea will have been served.

What you thought about yesterday

will not be done tomorrow."

So he climbed a rope

to contemplate his theosophy.

I couldn’t follow him,

because I wasn’t skilled enough.

“What is the reverse of God?” 

he asked.

“Maybe the reverse of God is God,”

I said.

But then I thought,

“Isn’t there a presence in absence,

and an absence in presence?

Isn’t there a disorder in order,

and an order in disorder?

Doesn’t the absence of meaning

mean something?”

The meaninglessness of something

may be defined 

by what gives meaning 

to everything."

I went places with him,

wanting to find out who I was.

But my rainbow break was shorted out.

I couldn’t hang it on a gliding board.

I knew where I was going,

but not where I’d come from.

Australopithecus was picking his teeth

on the bones of my ancestors. 

I went to a graveyard

and slept with the dead.

The tenth book of tombs

had been written

before I entered in.

I looked around

at the gravestones.

The aurora was following 

the midnight sun.

The land had footprints on it.

It had been lived on.

I laid down on the earth,

and had visions.

A man with a trumpet was playing jazz.

A nightmare was sitting next to him.

The nightmare was a man

whose face couldn’t’ be seen

because of his hat.

He was wearing a trench coat,

and had pockets of blue.

He spoke through an alto saxophone

that didn't need to be translated.

I found myself in a bedroom,

looking at a chest with brass handles

that had a mirror over it.

A magus was hiding in the back drawer.

His kidneys weren’t functioning properly.

He had endured many tests

on his kidney function,

and he didn’t want to be tested anymore.

I lifted him out of the drawer,

and we went downstairs to the backyard.

He’d invited people over for a cricket match

that he didn’t want to attend.

People were standing about silently,

waiting for him to show up.

There were gate crashers

whose attire clashed with the others.

Garden parties were out of season.

The art of mime was in rehearsal.

The rain from yesterday

left tears on a jonquil.

I had to learn more

from the man who’d told me

about the present and the past.

He told me about life and death.

He said, “I’ve already had my death.

This is the afterlife.

So anything in death,

I’ll have lived as life.

I’m one of the living dead.

What’s been given birth

will have death and rebirth.

And what is, will always have being.

As long as I have life, I’ll know death.

And what I know of those who have life,

I can know of those who are dead.

I can learn to know those who are dead,

just as I can learn to know

those who have life.

To be one with life is to know death.

But to commit oneself to death

is no longer to know life.

What I can say to the living,

I can't say to the dead.

And what I’m concerned with

is not death, but life.”

He took me walking on a rock.

He told me the planet was dividing.

The rock was split

by a force moving.

All movement was faceted,

and anything that could fly

had struts in its wings.
The trees were bare, 

and blood was spattered 
across a black sky.

I saw his fingers stretching out

in a network over the scorched earth.

Thousands of locusts

were coming in and out of the invisible.

We went into a house

where we met an old man.

He opened a closet door,

and there were incredibly dirty rags inside.

Spiders were regimented

into an attack force.

We went into the closet

and my friend asked the old man

to let him sit in the electric chair.

The clamps were placed on his skull,

and the message was transmitted.

An array of cubes over his head

was organized spatially

to generate controlled acoustics.

The walls of the closet fell away.

We were standing on a glass floor

as vast as a convention center.

There were prisms sliding back and forth

across the axis in which he stood.

He was in an arcade of spheres

that was orbiting over his head.

Whorls of dim stars

signaled him

like sidelights on a marquee.

Pulsars and quasars

were contracted into him.

Searchlights were swinging

in arcs of increasing complexity.

We walked to the edge of the platform.

We stepped down and walked to a door.

The door opened to a small dumbwaiter

and he climbed in.

There was a smell of garbage inside.

His vision was iridescent,

and he saw infrareds he’d never seen before.

The birth image he had

was of being born in a walnut.

It was burning,

and some of the ashes

were clinging together and crawling away.

He moved over,

and I got into the dumbwaiter.

We crawled down a tunnel

and came onto a stone floor.

There were vertical steps

projected out of a wall onto a parapet.

It was sunset,

and the clouds were ascending.

Someone was coming toward us,

and we couldn’t tell

if it was a man or a woman.

We climbed upward

and found ourselves 
in a city at midnight.

Thousands of kilowatts 
had been snuffed out.

Mortuaries were brighter places.

The street we were on

was a corridor

that led toward an edifice.

The lines that were drawn

were demanding a definite conclusion.

In front of us, 
a man stood next to the monolith

that stood at the end of the street.

The inscriptions on the obelisk

told of something that was unknowable.

The man had a visor over his head,

and inside his helmet nothing could be seen,

no features were visible.

He had a creed that was one for all places.

It was really calendar-gone.

I asked the man

who told me 
about the present and the past

if there is light 
that doesn’t produce light.

Is there light 
that doesn’t travel through space,

and that travels only into itself?

Can there be light

that doesn’t have 
the physical properties of light?

Somewhere there is someone

who has such a beam of light.

    

He tried to tell me what the bottomless was.

The place where there is no light.

The bottom of the soul.

The bottom of the world.

The abyss without a bottom.

The bottomless underbelly of endlessness.

The beginning of the bottomless emptiness.

I couldn't come up from the bottom.

     

We walked around the city.

It was dawn.

A new day was coming.

A wino was standing on a street corner.

He could see train wrecks,

and was on a bender

that was rocking his mind.

He just let the scotch

run ‘round his mouth,

and said he could do

the mashed potato.

He had a friend named Shortwave

who was into mainlining.

She said she wanted

to cut us some smack,

give us a taste

of what would rock our minds.

Let us see a backdoor man

playin’ a funky blues piano.

Even if he could see,

and we were all blind.

     

We came to an iron works.

A furnace was burning.

Clouds of ash

brought the hydrocarbons

that were making the rain fall.

Axes to grind

came from the blacksmith.

He swung his blade against a wall,

and plaster chips fell away.

The fathom riot

of his drunken speeches

founded a liberal paganism.

     

Miscreants were throwing

rolls of toilet paper

into the street.

We talked with a poet

who wrote

about what they were doing.

She took us to a printing house.
The assistant editor 
was reading a manuscript,
and was asking, 
"What are the ambiguities?"
The apogee of the grammarian

was his triumph
over sentence structure.
The psoriatic stenographer
put camphor on his wounds. 

There were amazing 
structural possibilities.
Shamans were talking to ex-bankers.
The cause that men died for
was given the once-over
by a brilliant ideologue.
Band-aids were made ready
by professional pundits.
The bunions of the Manicheans
foretold concepts of destiny.

     

I told the man who’d told me

about life and death

about a dream I had.

It was a dream

about faces of people

I’d never seen.

People with no faces

were talking to me.

I looked into a mirror,

and saw that I had a face.

In fact, it was inescapable.

But each day

I looked into the mirror,

I saw I was losing

more and more of my face.

I became one of the faceless.

I no longer had a face,

and there were no more faces.

I couldn’t remember my name.

I couldn’t remember who I was.

I walked along the street,

and saw other faceless people.

We were all faceless people.

I knew the only way

I could regain my identity

was by remembering

that I’d once had a face.

I did things

that weren’t approved of

by the faceless people

but they couldn’t show me

their disapproval

in a way that would change me,

because I couldn’t see their faces.

I saw that the only way

to regain my identity

was to express myself,

to care for others,

to love and share

with even those

who’d been faceless to me.

And the more I was able to do this,

the more I saw

that I was regaining my face.

And then I was able

to give faces to other people,

who, in turn, were able

to give faces to others.

And then

there were no more faceless people.

     

We met a little boy

who wore spectacles

and had dirty smudges on his nose.

He was in a sheet,

playing a ghost story.

He held a clock book in his hand,

and asked me what was in it.

There were suns inside the sun.

He opened his mouth,

and it was the sun talking.

He asked me

how long I could look at the sun.

     

I walked to school,

and went to class,

trying to find out

which class I belonged in.

I didn’t belong in History.

I didn’t belong in Math.

I didn’t belong in English Lit.

I ended up waiting in the hall

until all the classes were over,

and then I went into each one,

and apologized for not being there.

     

The wind was blowing

a stack of papers away.

I was trying to run

and catch hold 
of each sheet of paper,

but I couldn’t catch them,

and they were all blowing away.
I knew that each sheet of paper

that I couldn’t find

would be a part of my mind

that was lost.

     

I walked into a seminar 
on existential psychology.

The instructor lectured

on the history of ideas.

Besides politics, her interests

included psychiatry

and the philosophy of rationalism.

She said the course of history

was changed by logic.

There were no inner truths

to be marsupialized.

I asked myself whether it’s logical

to say there are no inner truths.

Isn’t it better

to labor under the illusion

that there are basic truths?

To say there are no basic truths

is to try to state a basic truth.

     

She let me visit her apartment.

In her living room,

she'd painted clouds on the walls.

She'd been doing cartwheels

in a photographer’s dream.

She opened her pocketbook

and showed me a picture

of a blind man with dark glasses.

“He used to be my lover,” she said.

She took a mirror out of her pocketbook.

“We're all mirrors for each other,” she said.

“I’d rather be my own mirror,” I thought.

     

We went riding in a sedan.

We arrived at an estate.

I talked to the motorman.

He sat with his legs crossed.

He’d been to the petrified forest.

His white jersey was freshly laundered.

He described accidents

for which he’d written a tone poem.

Collisions of belief.

Thrusts on the brake pedal of his hostility.

The kindly

wicker basket carrying lady

of the black shroud

at the estate had requested

letters of introduction

to his great-aunt.

She served spaghetti

in an uncontrollably

steamy deep dish

that hardly demanded

any inquiry

as to what

it was laden with.

Her masseuse had showered her

with a sense of longing for former protégés.

Her rusted carriage

was a silhouette of afterthought.

Her smile was simple and uncalculated.

She was in love with the motorman.

     

We came to the sea,

and walked on the beach.

Our feet were wet.

Lights were glowing in our eyes.

My eyes were like headlights.

The philosopher who was with us

had taken so many tranquilizers

that his face was numb.

The griots were far away.

They had asked for a day’s journey

to the place from which reasons

for unreason come.

The rational man

had observed that patterns

always intersected each other,

so that the conclusions

that could be drawn from one plane

could be drawn from another.

But the philosopher said

that to find the answer

for anything,

you had to enter

the realm of the imagination.

He said the only drugs

he took were freebies.

His only drug was experience.

He said,

“Where the known becomes unknown,

that is where I begin.”

     

We were in a place

where all the colors

were reds and yellows.

The sky was yellow.

The water and earth

were red.

I was dark red,

and my eyes were yellow.

There were only two colors.

We didn’t have bodies.

We only had forms.

All concepts were two-dimensional.

There were only two planes in space.

If you walked through a door,

you walked

into the plane the door was in.

You always walked in the same plane.

     

We walked into the other plane again,

where we had bodies

and not just forms,

but were human beings.

We were with many others.

Everyone was naked.

We were all naked.

There was no thought

of hiding or concealing

anything from one another.

We didn’t have to touch one another.

We all accepted our nakedness.

There was something impenetrable

that proposed our honesty

to one another.

The fact of our nakedness.

We talked and accepted our bodies.

No one belonged to anyone else.

Every individual

was accepted as a human being.

     

I asked, “What is the meaning of our nakedness?

When you're naked,

is anything changed in your identity?

Do you become a different person?

Maybe the more naked you are,

the more that others know about you.

But if your nakedness is known,

what control do you have

over what others know about you?

Do you lose something

of yourself perhaps,

when others 
know your nakedness?

When is it good

to want to make yourself

naked in front of others?

There’s no way of taking back

your nakedness,
once it’s known.

But if you're naked,

maybe the more naked you are,
the more you know yourself."

     

We walked

into another part of the city

that was in ruins.

Architects were trying to reconstruct it.

Wrecking crews were deciding

in what way it would be a finished product.

The remnants of a lost deity

were collected for description.

The people who were there

piled stones to their creator.

The Myrmidons

who bent their backs to an overlord

were summoned by an agèd paraclete.

Everyone had found out

how to put the fragments together.

The thorn brake of ontology

was broken by one mind redivivus.

     

I gave cards to all the people in the street.

I wanted them to know

where I was to be buried.

The tombstone sank into the earth

deeper in February.

Alabaster columns

were in front of all our tombs.

I wanted to talk to the funeral director.

He felt that a casket should rise

and expand after it is closed,

like a French crescent roll.

I went to a funeral.

There was a graveyard for crucifixes,

but not for the dead.

There was a hearse that had

beaming headlights

and was a radiant black

and had curtains in the windows

that looked like white icing.

But I started to smell an old smell,

and I told myself,

“I have to get out of here 
as soon as I can.”

     

We came to a sacred place.

It had been erected from rocks

that had fallen out of the sky

from another planet.

The coloratura of divinity

outdistanced all thoughts of being.

The parson’s testimony

was mostly not taken.

His findings were inconclusive.

The answer that he found

measured zero on the Richter scale.

He didn’t know whether God was dead.

He lectured on the meaning of faith.

The evangelist had a marble in his mouth.

The heaven that was browsed upon by agnostics

was condensed into a tin can.

But the parson didn’t know

that they couldn’t be taught

how to run quickly.

Meridians of varying densities

were what they exalted.

His only remonstrance

was the subject of a baccalaureate.

He told us that answers were being given

by people with no questions.

The nature of divination

was characteristically arcane.

By way of metaphor,

he turned from cerebration

to seminars on how to cope.

Basic mechanics

were as necessary as grocery shopping.

     

We sang the Agnus Dei

and the Sursum Corda.

The life ever after,

and the resurrection.

The dogs were dead.

The curses of caves

were echoed with songs of faith.

The strumpet put on the mitre

of the archbishop.

Her labors brought her

to an altered epiphany.

The beauty of her ugliness.

The ugliness of her beauty.

     

I asked the parson about his sermon.

“If everything living were dead,

would there still be God?

If God is what has created life,

and there were no more life,

would there still be God?

Is God being?

Is God meaning? 

Is God a condition?

Is God a state of mind?

Is God the creator?

Is God in the past or present?

What does being closer to God mean?

Why do some people think

they're closer to God than others?

Who can tell someone else

what God is? 

If I ask whether this is God,

is that the same

as asking whether there is life?

If there is life,

does that mean there is God?”

     

I asked whether there is a point

at which life starts

in the physical structure of things.

Is there something mystical called life,

other than what is defined

by the physical structure of things?

Is there a point

at which an object in itself

becomes a living thing?

And who can define that point?

And why that point

and not another?

The man who had told me

about life and death

asked me if I had found out

where to start to look for life.

I said,

 “When I’ve found what I’m looking for,

I’m not sure I’ll know I’ve found it.

Because I’m involved in

a struggle with death.

Yes, I’ve seen death.

But I can’t hold death in my hands.

I can’t really know

what I’m struggling with.

When I’ve found

that I’ve lost the struggle for life,

death will already have taken that life.

I’ll have nothing to struggle for.

I want to find out

if whatever has lived will always have life.”

Time was traveling incredibly fast.

The frequency of radio waves

was all I could hear.

My brain waves

had become only alpha activity.

I was lost in heat, light, density,

time, space, numbers of events.

There was a new day,

and the time was coming.

I lived in a prehistoric forest

with an old man,

and we made a soup

with crushed plants.

The water we used

was heavy water.

The old man tested it

with a strip of litmus paper.

The litmus turned a color

that wasn’t defined by acid-base.

The old man drank,

and he was at the dawn of life.

He sharpened a stone

that he used to make a fire.

His invention was tested

on a frictionless wheel.

It was a time

when humankind

had not yet started

its history on the earth.

There were mud skulls on the ground

that had real teeth.

The eyes in the skulls were watching us.

The old man had a book

that was filled with recipes for truth.

The halo that surrounded his head

gave me a migraine.

He rededicated his parsimony

with an aspirin.

The outside of my brain was burning.

It was burning

between the pia mater and dura mater.

There was no ectoplasm or endoplasm.

There was no white matter or gray matter.

I felt as if I could do anything.

I could make myself invisible,

disintegrate matter

and reconstitute myself.

The flash uncoiled a spring

of orgasmic feeling.

I felt that if I were the dealer,

I could throw down.

I went to the school of mother wit.

I did improvisational dance steps

to boring speeches.

I grew images in a bouquet of flowers.

I copied mathematical equations

and subscribed to a philosophy of poverty.

I lived in a tree for twenty-three years,

and grew very dry.

I was an aesthete,

fascinated by denying myself macaroons.

I knelt on the floor of a cave,

and played marbles

with the stones on the floor.

I let vultures pick at my liver.

I denied there was any such thing

as the thing in itself.

Destination zero.

The beginning and the end.

And death infinity couldn't do me in.

I asked myself,

“What impulses do I want to control,

and what do I not want to control?

What impulses do I have?

If I controlled every impulse,

what would I have left?

Where would my impulses take me,

into a method or a lack of it?”

I was in a world

where smells, tastes, sounds,

images, and sensations

were all interchanged.

I could feel colors

and see sounds.

I could see

whatever colors I wanted.

I couldn’t shut

any doors of perception

without opening others.

We played with gyroscopes and radiometers.

The concepts of quantum physics

were totally within our understanding.

All computers were constructed 
in the image of Man.

Dirigibles collided in the air.

It was the earth that was moving,

and the sky that stood still.

The farmer opened his almanac.

He said, “If you’re not watching television

at the right moment,

you’ll probably not know

when the missiles are in the air,

and you won’t know

when there are a few minutes left

before the world is blown to smithereens.

The eclipse will be rhythmic,

and right-sided,

and soft caramel.

But the land masses were moving.

The waters were opening,

and the surface of the earth

was totally changed.

There were numberless continents.

The clouds that covered the earth

were only in one hemisphere.

The earth was spinning and rolling.

It had no orbit in relation to other planets.

There was no day or night.

Hardly any people were left.

The earth had no force of gravity.

Everything was vertical.

The surface of the earth

became impenetrable,

and as hard as plate glass.

Those that were left behind

clung to the earth with picks and axes.

The others had fallen off.

I lived in a realm of space

where there were no directions.

To travel in any direction

was to travel in all directions.

There was no here and there.

To be there,

and to be infinitely far away

were one and the same.

If you reach the center of things,

is there any other place to go?

If the universe is infinite,

doesn’t that make any point

the center of the universe?

I reached critical mass.

My circuits were connecting.

I reached someone else in the universe.

I was going to go off

with the force of a hydrogen bomb.

I told the man who’d told me

about life and death

that I thought I ‘d found life.

He said, “To be given birth

is to realize there is no death.

It was birth to come to life.

But before birth, you already had life.

Your being given birth

means that

there had to have been something

to be given birth.

Your life is a rebirth.

Birth, life, death.

Is death the end of life?

There is something in life

that doesn’t end in death.

When you’ve seen what death is,

then you’ll know

whether you are one with others.

When you become one with others,

then you’ll have found life.”