Five Excerpts from

A Diary of Dementia and Despair

Alone Again, Naturally Where the Flowers Have All Gone Time Out of Mind Cloud Musings and Postlude and Todinleben

Frank Feldman jazzdog40@aol.com 201.796.9296 2012

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Alone Again, Naturally

Year after year, countless dogs sleep countless nights, grief-stricken, on their owners graves. Lonely neurons shoot impotent transmitters across unbridgeable chasms. Solitary clouds are borne on indifferent breezes. The newly conscious fetus twitches in confusion, hopelessly dependent on the kindness of strangers. Parallel play in the gray, abandoned schoolyard. The blind mole rat, burrowing through its grimy hell, seeking its putrid prize. Children instinctively realize that Halloween is the the only honest holiday. All others are the strutting vanities of tribes, now become nations, paper-thin fantasies of beneficent tooth fairies and zombie used-car salesmen, the worship of charismatic, ancestral charlatans, shrouded in the mists of time. In Halloween, one finds all the childs grimly instinctive forebodings-the monstrous terror and absurdity of death, the frantically impotent grasping of the living. The schoolboy encapsulates in his fear of the vampire the gaping maw at the center of the world, waiting patiently to swallow both him and his loved ones. What he cannot yet see is what the vampire himself must endure, he who is condemned to eternally roam the insipid earth, in search of the vilest nourishment, though it be momentary nectar for him. All this, in order that he might experience yet another night of tedium, longing, and stupidity. We know him-he is one of us, the undead. He tells himself, over and over again, how sweet is the music of wolves, knowing full well he has endured millennia of its feral, melodic sameness. But all this subjective agony is merely the wailing and gnashing of rotting dentures, against palates crawling with malignant bacteria, as existentially isolated from one another as their unwitting host is from those he deems his most precious loved ones. What remains is this: the cosmic loneliness at the the universes very heart, beating mindlessly and stubbornly in a sea of nothingness. Everything vanishes there, folded upon itself into a hungry, makeshift placenta, which struggles to attach itself to something, anything-casting violently about for a non-existent mother universe in which to seek oblivion. A ruined world, in a minor, dying solar system, floating in a hopelessly bounded universe, expanding into a frozen, eerie silence. And yet, who is more unhappy-he who frantically scribbles his notes from underground, to a world from which he is hopelessly estranged, or he who stands

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on the precipice of the universal void-that wildly thrashing force that drives the agonized green fuse to its insipid destiny? The only salvation lies in forgetting. It swallows grief, rock, plant, animal, planet, galaxy, and the unreal self. Do not deceive yourself any longer. You must henceforth write with tears and blood. You must load your slippers with boulders, walk bravely into the lake, and drown the world. It is not nothing to live without hope. It is the zenith of bravery, heroism, the most dearly bought clear-sightedness. Observe the chaos of the passionate moment, the selfishly sputtering genes, wildly ejaculating their fifteen Roman candle moments of fame. Listen for the inevitably vigorous, cretinous, and naively sentimental applause. One finds ones hope elsewhere. The hope for wild, melatonin-drenched dreams, which coddle one in a milky gauze for a time, that time between now and ultimate forgetting. Is this hope, despair? Nietzsches grim end was no negation of his work. It was his final, and most potent affirmation of the gruesome, black hole at the center of the world, into he dove, willingly and eagerly, to voluptuously embrace the purest anarchy and madness. This, then, is philosophy! Cough up your arguments, your thoughts (though they be not yours), your wishes, dreams, and agonies. Choke on your phlegm and bile until your throat emits a ghastly yet ethereally beautiful music, until your eyes glaze over with a frozen and appalling film, until you no longer know that you do not now, and will never, know. Wink your way out of existence with a ghoulish laugh you yourself can no longer hear-for he who laughs best, and most heartily, is no longer aware of his own laughter, though it echoes eerily, and eternally, through an abandoned and frozen universe.

Where the Flowers Have All Gone

Is there a beast more miserable than Man? Animals suffer abject terror and pain, more often than not at our hands, yet their fear, loneliness, and depression are something quite other than our misery. We are never at a loss for flowery words to lament our fate-our existential tragedies, our fall from grace. Yet how easy and natural it is for us to avert our gaze from the beasts suffering, far purer and more intense than our own, as are their pleasures. Consider the predicaments and

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blessings of being suspended in an eternal now-yes, there are the spontaneous, winged, and feral ecstasies of the wild, but there are also the confused, terrified, and poignantly beseeching faces of factory farm animals hung upside-down from meat-hooks and flayed alive-unimaginable torments and anguish, taking place in that divine/satanic eternal now, moments which no clever, human, mental subterfuge, or hospice nurse could ever assuage, or palliate. Mans misery generates his narcissism, hubris, and, most ironically, his sadism-his fear of death his supernatural notions, and gods. Surprise! These gods, of his own invention, typically both excuse and encourage all the aforementioned. We do ourselves a grave disservice, ennobling the metaphysical breast-beatings of this freak of evolution, this language-possessing, death-fearing creature, possessed of a perversely, and accidentally overgrown forebrain, with such misplaced words as misery and tragedy. They are better saved for being itself, the mystery of the world-knot at the core of existence, in which all of creation is strangled. If our happiest moment is, as Schopenhauer suggests, the one in which we drift off into the oblivion of sleep, should we not, then, extrapolate further, and wish to be a flower, a plant-to exist in a pure, innocent, vegetative unconsciousness? Who amongst us would not trade all of history, all our ideals, art, complexity, and the dramas of life for a rapturously voluptuous state of ignorant bliss? Of course, dear reader, you, you of all people, would never contemplate such an exchange, sitting, as you do, on your privileged perch of hard-won sophistication, and civilization. Hold fast to this fantasy, until that horrific, pulverizing moment in which you are transfixed in a flood of terror, orgasmic ecstasy, or the ghoulish proximity of death, i.e., when you are free of the incessant nattering about morals, goals, achievements, and the tragedy of existence which the philosophers, and theologians blather on an on about. How cosmically absurd that we have grown sufficiently grandiose and articulate to monopolize the heights of achievement, and the depths of suffering, as our own, uniquely human, province. I am not proud to be a man. We prattle on about our ancestors, heroes, races, religions, nations, ideas, achievements, progress, and, to greatest comic effect, our Humanity. All the while, the best among us molest young boys, and slaves, ignore, condone, or perpetrate genocide, poison cats, butcher their adulterous wives in bed, and drive their nephews to attempt suicide. Oh, to be a noble bird of prey, bounded only by the horizon, to whom all human endeavor-our novels, our symphonies, our gadgets-are as nothing. To love, mate,

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and kill as wolves do-so unlike the neurotic, neutered, and ever eager to please travesties we have made of them. Let me live the life of every species which knows nothing of death, or to whom death means nothing. Let me revel in the frantic, meaningless madness of lunatic animal vigor, untainted by the petty thoughts and rationalizations of recorded human history. Would all this serve to reawaken in me the desire to once again be human? A second, blissfully brief sojourn in the land of fretting megalomaniacs and sadists would rapidly, and forever, quiet that foolishly misplaced jealousy. It is the otherthan-Mans grass which is greener. We all know this full well, when we are still, still enough to attend to our idiot breaths, and sadly beating hearts. Consider the plight of the insect, who wishes to become flower-of the flower, which desires to become rock-and of the rock, which would gladly return to the primal, fetal, furnace belly of its mother star, who now, mindlessly spinning, and lugubriously dying in the imbecilic vacuum of space, is blissfully untroubled by any artificially puffed-up thoughts of vanity, legacies, or meaning.

Time Out of Mind

Why the compulsion to live in history? Beethovens ultimate triumph was to step outside it, to no longer care for where or when. Though we lack his gifts to record the journey, none of us lack the means to sever ourselves from the bonds of space and time. History is a foam of free-standing, mutually inaccessible bubbles, progress a notion concocted by the death-haunted. Our own time is simply another lump of coal in an ill-fitting straitjacket, rounded with, and bounded by, chaos, climate, geography, and a little sleep. To interact with it conceptually serves only to suck one into a quicksand of imagined meaning, away from the sensuous experience of eternity, from an Edenic garden of blissful, vegetative oblivion. Do we pity those who lived before Christ, before science? Do we pity ourselves for being denied an imagined utopian future, ruled with compassion, in which superstition has disappeared, and men live for centuries? Lab rats scurry self-importantly about their opaque cages, lecturing feverishly to impress their contemporaries, while craning for a view forever denied them.

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Meanwhile, the eternity that lies within us, in our diseased livers and neuropathic extremities, rots, unattended and unknown. Our herpetic mouths babble on about hierarchies of time, lifestyles, and tales of progress, until our wheezing, cancerous lungs bleed violently, and finally implode. The secret of longevity and the keys to immortality lie in a boiling cauldron of dreamless sleep, of ecstatic forgetting. Jump in. One has no real relationship with history. Ones only salvation lies in embracing eternity-brimming, bristling, and bubbling over with life, death, hyper-aroused nervous systems, and corpses, all at once, beyond all sense and philosophy. Thinking cant get you there. The progression of life on Earth from plant to animal was an absurd, degenerate mistake, from the limbo-like paradise of gauzy, narcotic sleep to the frantic, scavenging hell of constantly seeking nourishment, shelter, sex, and, as of late, meaning. Consider the magnificently solitary oak, basking in its luminous, shimmering brilliance, its nobility unwitting and instinctive, gorging itself on the sun, rain, and nourishment its hungry roots uncover, in an ecstasy of communion and oblivion. Look there!-the squirrel, madly leaping from one of its branches to another, in a frenzy of manic preparation and constant anxiety, its neurons squirting desperately uncomfortable signals of the presence, or absence, of food, predators, potential mates, et al., its brain a constantly convulsing, tortured nightmare. Do you not, rather, aspire to be as that oak, as the soil upon which it feeds, as the earths crust, its magma, its fiery, beating, blissfully brainless heart? You prefer, needless to say, to touch and impress your contemporaries, to strut and fret your way through your pathetic penitentiary of time, to puff up your puny self with delusions of goodness, wisdom, talent, power, immortality, and, most comically, meaning, significance, usefulness. May these things serve you well, as the light leaves your eyes, as your mind sputters in terror, and finally stops, like a cheap, disposable watch. How you will wish you had, instead, spent your life soaring in perpetual dream, suckling at the breast of primordial stupor. Stop talking to people, and start listening to the mysteriously intoxicating music of the trees. When you are unable to sleep, devolve into madness-sex, drugs, risk-taking, music-whatever frantic lunacy most quickly exhausts you, so that you might live again, in slumbering, unconscious ecstasy. The meaning of Mans existence lies only in his unwitting kamikaze mission to cause a new, Permian-level extinction-to return the Earth to its previous,

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anodyne state of sun and algae-drunk ocean, blossoming coral reef, and Antarctic rain-forest, as, all the while, the languorously impassive Equator gorges itself on, and finally drown in, floods and torrents of animal flesh and blood. Will the terrified looks on our grandchildrens faces, as they succumb to drought, resource wars, colossal hurricanes and tsunamis, be more intense, more meaningful, than those of the dinosaurs, watching the lightning-fast fireball, racing to consume them? Are they not, both, cheesy B-movies in the fickle mind of God-to watch once, chuckle at, and discard? No one overcomes history in happiness and health, their facades warm and sensuously illumined. Only an all-enveloping sadness carries one off-beyond art, beauty, and love. Death is bitter one moment, sweet the next. Beyond contradiction and doubt lies no certainty, only release. One is tired of knowing, contemptuous of curiosity, floating freely in that boundless vacuum which drives the waves, and pushes up the daisies. Life and death are mere abstractions to minds long ago abandoned. Perhaps it was only suffering, or the fear of death, that caused one to seek eternity, forgetfulness, oblivion? A pointless, inaudible question, echoing faintly through the drenched swamp of primeval dream, through a still barely pulsing nervous system, freed from all time and conscious thought-lotus, mud, angel, corpse, galaxy, black hole, God, and the dead, frozen universe to come-together, at last.

Cloud Musings
An ambulance careens into a neighbors driveway, while the oceans burn, and the moon weeps. A beautiful young woman listens to Debussy, unaware of the malignancy growing within her. Your heart beats-a child dies. The simultaneity of disparate events is the ultimate absurdity. There is no world-only unbearable loneliness, hell, and madness. One must dangle from the edges of skyscrapers to understand. To retreat is a choice of ironic exhaustion. You are a fast decaying colony, a battered piece in an unsolvable puzzle. And yet you carry the entire world within you. You stand in the center of history-your

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existence and suffering are absolute. Tales of others agonies provide no solace, context, or perspective. Cease your false humility, your projections, and selfabasement. You are God. When your eyes close, for the last time, the world will die with you. Only in sleep does your brain relax its anxious, tenuous grip-its frantic search for sense and reassurance-and embrace the absurdity which drives and is the world. Absurdity is a private affair. We hold it close, so that our faces do not reveal our hearts, sick unto death, so that we do not incinerate the souls of innocent children we pass in the street, so that our secret remains safe from those we do, or profess to, love. Lest we poison the world, we vault over our suffering, embrace the cold, meaningless universe, paste over our rotting insides, and, in so doing, spare those near to us. We barely acknowledge such things to ourselves, much less others. We float heavenwards, dispassionate yet relieved, observing the carcass we leave behind, which once housed us-still busy smiling, conversing, and philosophizing. We watch it gaze into the mirror, confused whether anything of itself remainswhen, if ever, it might once again become human. One is hung between earth and sky in a noose of solitude. Above-the monstrous, uncaring universe. Below-the soulless, driven carcass, restlessly exchanging one mask for another-a puppet show in a hall of mirrors. The wisdom of the disembodied cloud, suspended between transcendent absurdity and pointless contempt. Who is this mysterious observer, buoyant, unconcerned, beyond laughter and tears? It is, finally, no less a thing than the creature from whom it flatters itself it has escaped. These are but cloud musings. There, on the ground, the overstuffed, the healthywith their appetite for life, which has heretofore fed them only charmed, ambrosial desserts, undimmed. They speak, with naive longing and fervor, of the spirit. Only he who has walked through flames, his legs charred, throbbing, misshapen stumps, knows the disaster of the spirit-its loneliness, terror, and devastation. He stands on the brink of the abyss, beyond empathy, beyond hope, watching the human comedy-its ludicrous aspirations and inevitable conflagrations-from afar. Entombed in a frozen lake of long dead galaxies and hopes, his eyes still flicker, now and then, feigning his presence and interest in a world to which he no longer belongs.

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Postlude and Todinleben

Squeezed into an uncomfortable self-consciousness by a self-organizing sack of bacteria, we nd ourselves in a peculiar dilemma. Poking its way out of this tube of sordid toothpaste is a head, upon which sits a face. And such a curious, bizarre face! The head has next to no sense of what it is made, unless, or until, the organs which support it misbehave, fail, or rot. What an outlandish protuberance, its lips and mouth constantly spouting the purest nonsense. How comical, how utterly insane. To be an unconsciously intelligent, mobile bit of vegetation, with a yammering little pinhead stuck on top, like an impotent birthday candle. Listen... The pinhead is rhapsodizing about its culture and free will-philosophizing, spinning tales of the afterlife! What queer fantasies slime molds have. They need only grow mouths, which speak, and hands, which can wield pens. Listen... Mr. Pinheads mouth is moving again-inventing stories to explain the activities of his liver and spleen, to which he is precariously, and quite accidentally, attached. Which comes rst-the thoughts or the anxiety? One nds the latter at the very core of existence-in the wildly beating heart, the frantically squirting amygdala, the constantly seething magma, which lurks just beneath the earths crust. How deep the experiences, and how eloquent the communications, of the creatures who abide only there. They use no long and owery words to desiccate the world-nor do they then go on to atter themselves for having done so. Scientists force the latest, deeply unwilling, subatomic particle into a momentary existence, silently screaming, and wildly careening, through the CERN accelerator. Horried, it immediately withdraws back into oblivion, its subjective experience of the world almost certainly as long and tortured as our own. If you penetrate this fatal mystery, even for a moment, there is no arcane wisdom, measured solemnity, or spiritual solace which can save you. There is the thinking manwho lets ideas bubble up from his pancreas, of their own accord, into his constantly prattling pinhead, and then proudly claims them as his own. And then there are the wounded children, the painfully sick, those whose souls are impaled on daggers, rubbing raw against the jagged, lacerating vulva of creation. What is abstract speculation to such as these? Lies drive most of the world-from the subterfuges of viruses and Venus y-traps, to the sordid manipulations of politicians and artists. But agony never lies. Where is death? In a transcendental realm, in a place other than life? Of course not. It is within us, immanent in the gross materiality of creation itself. Do you know these ashes, this dust? They are not different from you. One nds death in the agonies and ecstasies of our innermost, vegetative selves-our hearts, lungs, and genitals. They both rule over, and ARE, life and death, their self-organizing intelligence the ground and being of what we imagine and atter ourselves belongs to us. It is to them we must turn, when our sense of life is upended, and shaken to its core-when we are suffocated

Five Excerpts from A Diary of Dementia and Despair, p. 10 of 12 with the choking terror of otherness, when all our fantasies of the integrity and uniqueness of life have been shattered, and become a distant, darkly comical memory. Their is only one way in which men can go on, and retain their joie de vivre-to think and act as if none of this is so. The lucky cow grazes, unconcerned, in her pasture, up until those few dread-lled moments before her throat is slit. Consider her less lucky cousin in the factory farm, where the stench and reality of death surrounds her from the moment of her birth-a place where wisdom, nausea, and horror are indistinguishable. Who can retain their naturally pleasure-seeking voluptuousness, their naive enthusiasms, their delusions of accomplishments and legacies, while constantly hyperaware that they sit unstably atop their own rotting livers, with their eyes fast receding into their sockets? Who, other than the lucky who live amongst us, is soothed by idle talk of posthumous ripples, which they will not live to see? Such is the dilemma of the sick and deeply perverse, who must gaze upon the world through the lthy spectacles of their corrupted selves-consumed, day and night, by the savage electrical impulses of their unrelenting nervous systems, running riot with unending visions of the worlds end. Once seen and felt, these things gut the soul, exposing nerves, sinews, and spine to the deliciously ghastly nightmare of perpetual, violent stimulation. Look there, look everywhere (for you can no longer turn away)-the dead, the future dead, the last frozen gasps of a dying universe. But what of love-the ultimate deception, or the force which drives the moon and stars? Not romantic love, that hormone-driven lie. Rather that love which expands, and nally explodes, the self, lling the limbs and skull with an exquisite, milky delirium, in which the prison of the body, and ones eternal otherness, fall happily away. The love of parent and child, that magical symbiosis-or, even more astonishing, the love between species, all the purer for its not being so obviously genetically driven. One drifts into an apparent eternity during such moments-temporary balms for ones existential madness, isolation, and panic. Are those precious moments simply swallowed by time, or are they, rather, a glimpse into that realm which generates times brute existence? Is love a wistful, deluded distraction, a band-aid, a sip of sentiment-laced kool-aid-or lifes profoundest force and truth? Is love of this kind experienced by the naive man, the happy idiot? We have no way of knowing, for qualia are not directly communicable. Mystics are of no help here. Only great artists, riddled with agony and illness, can hint at its ecstatic, and often bitter, taste. What of the rest of us, the great mass of the ravaged and sensuously despairing, who havent the gifts sufcient to express it? Or who are so suffocated by pain and grief that they have not the remotest interest in doing so? The naive man still believes himself immortal. Hallmark expressions of love are accurate and adequate for him. Only despair links one to the metaphysical reality of death in life, to that love which cuts the soul loose from the body, and sets it free. Only the eviscerated come to learn the dark and secret lessons of their own entrails.

Five Excerpts from A Diary of Dementia and Despair, p. 11 of 12 Depression is not a turning away from life, but, rather, its negation. In despair, a man still inches and recoils, in paroxysms of pain, a San Sebastian of agonized heat, and, if he is eloquent enough, light. Depression, on the other hand, turns man hopelessly inwards, to a nal, but sadly impotent encounter with death in the very bowels of his subjectivity. Love can send weak shafts of light, and whisper its barely heard promises of solace, but never can it fully enter, understand, or heal the fatally inoperable wounds it nds there. It is only the still quivering, desperate man of whom love can make an angel, and, only then, through the relentless scorching and aying of the body. Note how this body, this vegetative unconscious, the primary organ of our intelligence, so often chooses to die alone, when its loved ones have stepped out, guilty and exhausted, to grieve, or escape into the momentary consolation of sleep. There are places love cannot conquer, in which it is not even welcome. There is, ultimately, only one fear. No clever Stoic argument can allay it, for its origin is organic, not rational. One responds honestly to it only with silence, trembling, despair, and distraction. Those who profess their equanimity in the face of death, in lofty speeches, and disingenuous works of art, fool no one. The anguish and dread which sear the insides of the despairing man, along with any pretenses of acceptance or resignation he might offer, contain no revelations. They offer no tools, or intuitions, of any practical use, either to him, or to those around him, whose lives he inevitably makes miserable. Who would not exchange a lifetime of faux-profundities for a few moments of silently cradling, and being cradled by, the warm body they most deeply desire? Is love real? Is it a lie? As we wobble uneasily atop our rapidly decaying bodies, face to face with death, does it matter? A lifelong preoccupation with dying is a telltale sign of previous, or ongoing, illness or abuse. Any insights to which it gives rise are only feeble, narcissistic rationalizations, attempts to explain what can never be explained-the incessant, pulverizing din of charred neurons, mangled sinews, and traumatic, preverbal, body memories. These things will relentlessly consume you, from the inside out, as your rapidly disappearing, still yammering pinhead, so haphazardly hinged to its generative, primordial body-intelligence, oats, bewildered and terried, on a blood-red, boiling sea, and, nally, undramatically and absurdly, drowns. Perhaps all pre-, or unconscious, vegetative moments of euphoria, terror, and oblivion are foretastes of eternity-or of that unbounded realm of love so many fancy awaits them. For now, there is nothing for us, but to soothe ourselves-to embrace, and lose ourselves in, whatever drunken, deluded form of distraction forestalls, or diverts us from, the relentlessly nagging dread. We are something, nothing, ux, process, emptiness, the eternal void. Every being clutches wildly at its mortality-the Bodhisattva and cancer cell both. Perhaps love charts the course of all existence. Perhaps it watches over us, and guides us, waiting patiently to greet us under an ecstatic blue canopy of perpetual consolation, forgiveness, and joy. When and if you chance upon love in this life, drink deep and long, dregs and all. For when you decompose (such a wondrous word, so pregnant with meaning) into the particles from which the vast, unknowable universe has assembled you, that innitesimal world, in which your befuddled and fretful life has taken place, will almost certainly die with you. For now, there are warm bodies, res, jugs of oblivion from which to drink, lled with art, music,

Five Excerpts from A Diary of Dementia and Despair, p. 12 of 12 poison, fantasy, and dream, and the dazzling, eeting roman candles of love, whether real or imagined, which illumine and warm, for an instant, the eerily silent, immense, gaping maw of the frozen, desolate, yet innitely ravenous night sky.