Monthly Archives: February 2009

Write on behalf of your double who collides with the walls of life and bounces back into you through your words. He’s nothing without you, just as you’re nothing without him. Nor are they your words in those rare moments when the two of you merge and the ungrammatical ‘I’ is born and dies in the same instant. Twinned image, Narcissus transcending his reflection for a moment: his sentence. So go on, fail as well as you can. God, or the devil, will do the rest.

There were moments in those days when he experienced a concentration of body and mind in which he almost felt he could do anything, be anything. There were moments when he felt he was neither woman nor man, neither mind nor matter nor all of these things at once but somehow free of the differences themselves. He was ears that saw and eyes that heard. He let his thoughts and feelings pass through him like a train, or trail blissfully out of him like smoke: they were no longer his exactly.

The new way of thinking we learn here is not logic. Nor is it illogic. It grows in the gaps between our thoughts. It isn’t thinking exactly, still less feeling. It’s the thinking you’d do if you didn’t have to do the thinking you think you have to do. I look at you you look at me. What do you see? What we do here is rid ourselves of what we see when we look at each other. We try to free ourselves from the disguises we’ve been taught to drop over our faces, the forms that deformed us, the words that perverted us. What’s left in the mirror? Not our own faces exactly. The figures out there walking around the gardens, they are both there and not there. There’s no either-or. They practice letting go of their deformed faces. They wait for them to crack open like the skin of a ripe fruit. They know when it happens by not knowing it. Knowing is what got them into trouble in the first place. So they wait. Sometimes they leave. We don’t stop them. If they return we welcome them. We learn by unlearning, sometimes by failing and failing better. We let our faces peel off until we can see. Those two playing tennis. They’re not playing to beat their opponent. They realise their real opponent is themselves. They realise it’s a matter of life and death and that winning the match has nothing to do with it. See how casual their strokes are. They don’t trust the faces and feelings they brought here. They play over and over until they’re one with the game in a very literal sense… You can stay or you can leave…