by The Consul » Thu Jul 20, 2017 6:57 pm
Old friend years ago took “an experimental vow of silence.” He stopped talking. It was good he did, more or less, because he was in this process of “pulling off the wallpaper from what we really are” and would ask questions like, who do you think about when your masturbate and why didn’t we come up with something better than god if we are afraid to die? Maybe it was because he almost died of sepsis after a rare undiagnosed disease ravaged his body. He came to and his family was around his bed weeping, some were out in the hall, weeping. I expected to enter the room and maybe get in a farewell, a man eye to man eye goodbye. When I entered room 202 he was sitting up in the bed, all 80 pounds of him, his eyes shining like black diamonds.
I gave him a head check and he spoke:
“What’s weird is I had to go through all this shit to be this glad to be this alive and there is a chance I might never feel this amazing again. It’s beyond love. So soak it up.”
There was an aura in the room. A long shut door had been opened.
It was pretty much then he gave up speaking. After a while not talking was insufficient. Hearing words was too much. So up to the old mining cabin he went with little more than a book I loaned him, and the first time I visited under the promise of silence the only sign of words was that dog eared copy of “Freedom from the Known” by Krishnamurti. We fished, we hiked, took a leaky boat out on Cliff Lake. I swore once for a lost hook, and he gave me the evil eye, not for swearing, but uttering. When It came time to leave I pulled out the dented flask and he took a swig of bourbon and handed the Krishnamurti book to take back down the mountain. As I took it from his hand he looked at the cover as if he was saying goodbye to language itself.
He was trying to escape his conditioning, the feeling of being trapped at the bottom of a dark sea of lies. At least, that’s what I figured. He never said why he wouldn’t say.
There is a way away, but it cannot be motivated by any fear. He told me this in a dream, which I told him about and he looked at me the same way he looked at the book when I took it from him. You can take your piece out of the puzzle but it doesn’t change the puzzle. After a while the empty space becomes invisible.
You can take up the penny whistle like he did, and lose yourself in Irish reels. You can unwrap the onion of your mind and experience the nothing that isn’t there. The birds at dawn are all we need to hear. And as the light comes up and the sky turns silver, in that instant where everything seems to stop, everything simply shuts the fuck up, there’s a nano chance of being un-owned, un-owning and unknown.
" Morals is the butter for those who have no bread."
— B. Traven