A Mirror Floating in Water

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "oh here's a new blog post by DanielBenoit, I'm going to read it". No. Not until you've read the bottom post. If one of you walks out of the labyrinth, then you are permitted to enter this one, for it is of less importance.

Well, this time it's one single short story. An experimental one to say the least. The first half was written in the winter of '07 (you do the math) when I was fresh from my second reading of Ulysses (and you know what effect that had on me). The latter half was written about a year later, and then was put on the shelf for another year, until now it has finally met itself in its final form. Believe me, if this was just a string of unedited nonsense, then it would be much better (and less embarresing), but it's not that. It is admittingly highly edited nonsense and probably makes no sense to anyone except myself. There is a particuarly page-long sentence which wonders off onto meta-thought upon meta-thought. Do not disregard its errors, they are there for a reason (but in the case of errors I do not know about, then I don't really know what to tell you). Well, this introduction has been unsublte and long enough and perfectly admits the nature of the story, if there is one. I must say, that after observing this non-narrative at length, it is the work of a man whose been "thinking too much", as one of my readers once commented. Okay this is already getting off to sound self-important and pretenscious.

Just as a background check for coherence, this thing, whatever it is was inspired by a particular time in the winter of '07 in which I had come under the impression that I had cancer. Of course it was only my own paranoia and a little bit, if not a lot, is reflected in this stream-of-consciousness. Other than that, the whole of this narrative is purely fictional. And to just clear up a little bit of confusion, this is set in a hospital bed. Hah, like that would help.


The Allegory of Plot



There is a heinous deformity crawling within me. It knaws so voraciously at my bloodstream, it chews on its most tender parts, it jabs and stings little nerves. Whence my body can take it no longer, my stomach when it abruptly imbibes its rubber skin and stands itself erect, ready to regurgitate those rotten forms which it so craved, causing a wave of nausea over my body, blanketing the eyes with blood stained sand; it shall send off this black night to the mind.

Disease of the mind you now say? For whence the creature shall crawl through, its long serrated nails poking holes into the most practical of tubes and organs, shall cover my half-witted mind with the same blanket which covered my nauseas body, shivering from the ringing sting. And there you shall taste its true poison; its injection of delirium and disquietude, it shakes that thin connection between body and mind, shaking as the syntax of information delves into chaos. For now there are the hands that shake and the eyes that bulge, that cover the urban landscape of smoke and ash expounding into some ravish nightmare of a dream once had. And there shall be my ghosts which linger so much among me in the daylight. My human comedy of such forms is that of a circus, I dangling from some great height, my feet upon me. For the animals in their cages shall just laugh, laugh at the emperor who is afraid that he is hanging, with no clothes.

It is lingering, so sullen its cave, so muddled, so comfortable. It has found its home there.

The sky is falling, the curtain is closing. The walls are all that now hold.

Dreary sleep is no longer present and the sight of silence stands still, nothing moves. Nothing reaches out to touch me in my stillness, in the passionless integrity of immobility. Here all thought will stop.

Where was I? Where was I to be? Where was I to go? Yes, such a disruption that is. How I care or worry not about going.

Though, that might be true. Truth. – Oh I am afraid that we have lost ourselves in the library of useless simulations. What revulsion is there and here! But oh, what joy has occurred within me!

If such was the truth I would be. Though maybe not. I would be fake, a copy, I would be plastic. And we all know of the toxins which expound from plastic burning with amorous heat (though is that not entirely real). O, it would be was nice, especially in my cave where I hear nothing but the echo of my very own voice. Though sometimes I seem to forget that, or even indulge in forgetting, and speak with these echoes.

We can attempt something, we can attempt nothing, though I’m sure that we’ll never find our way out of the puzzle anyway. Anyway. Either way. I suppose that all which must be remembered, must be forgotten. And cast away.

Until then, we will never actually delve (as if such a thing is possible any longer), but not, not until we fall asleep, and we begin to probe into the stream of things. Real things. Things I only know. The only things I know.

No, now it must be surrendered to, it must be sacrificed to (though not much of a sacrifice that is) I must cut open my throat, heart and lungs and give myself to it. Eventually.

Though, you know, I probably won’t need to give up my lungs. For are they not the most vital organ in this ritual? Do they not create the rhythm, the music of breathing? Yes, I suppose so.

For, so, if, thus, now, then, not, will, to, what is this?

Oh, what problems they cause!

The days go by, with no indication of what is, or even if something is. I may awake one day, to not realize something, but rather say something. And in that silence, I will hear proof of my own existence. Will I be gratified? Will I be reconciled? No. And that is all that can be said.

So many things happen! What hustle and bustle, as the cliché calls for. But is that traffic anything, or is it just more considerable proof of my own non-existence. Certainly something exists, but I don’t, and with that, nothing exists but my own voice and what I can do to break the deadly silence.

I could say something, say something well. Um, I could say, well –you know, anything. But..........tout à fait un problème, tout à fait un problem. Aber das einzige Problem ist, ist das, ich wissen nicht. So, you see.

But here, I don’t see. All I see are these white walls. How they seem to shuffle inward, day by day. I am not allowed to see. Not with all of this white, this nothingness

Nell'inizio, tutto era bianco, allora il mondo si è trasformato in in tutto il colore e tutto è stato risolto e fatto stato.

Two questions (that which is required): where and when did this happen? How did it start? Though, now I hesitate, why, well, simply put, it is this; where did it all begin, quite a useful, quite an interesting question, but, where am I, what time is it, is it still now, is something so, is something not so, am I in fact disappearing, fading, into nothing, nothing which is what I am, I am not nothing, but I am fading into nothing (not exactly {in an entirely complete sense [complete in that never ending fulfillment of completeness, that, as I must admit, foolishness, for I am always incomplete, I must always justify every action, and yet, if such an obligation was to persist, then this trial shall go on forever, the jury would die, their bones would turn into dust, and their dust would scatter, and I would still be standing before the judge, justifying, not even, after all of the infinite seconds of time, would I ask the judge for his justification, I suppose, maybe, then I might be excused, for I bet his face would turn boyish red and he would steadily get up and shuffle out of the room, saying nothing, and how I would be free of my weariness, of the poverty of my being, of my disease I would jump for joy, free of all things which are typically destined and set out for mocking and depriving the moment of what it is for me, but this is not without the consequence of being unaware and aware of nothing, but at least it’s in an optimistic sense, I suppose, of course, of course something is, and thus honorificabilitudinitatibus, and if it not be so, then let God or whatever strange creature, or better put; thing (oh I don’t know, I have not been able to compute an exact method of computation, commutating, in and out, up and down; but how confusing that all is, I do not understand such things, such things are a distraction {if you may [if you will, but how are we to figure this out,--well of course we can speak of the thing-in-itself, I mean, of course, that is what we are speaking of, heh, is that not obvious (although of course we must make the very hard distinction of what is to be obvious and not obvious and blah blah blah {you see, I think we are beginning to realize the futility and in a much less pessimistic way, let’s just have fun let’s just go out yes out out and run run run run into the parking lot through the street into the woods until we reach some kind of peaceful silent calm but also exciting ambitious and young lake streaming flowing fasting with eagerness and agility excitement ambiguity vastness mysteriousness beauty energy rage elegancy insanity passion waves sweatiness sex; we have stripped down to bare pale soft legs and have jumped splashed into the lake the lake of sensuality and we flowed flowing freely fropishingise fropishinglose and our bodies jumbled waved weaved the air the water as we floated upstream then downstream always with the tide the flow the fasting of the water the lake the river the bay the ocean the puddle, we were free we were together, no dichotomy of serrated separation, just eternal sunshine unto our mindless minds, and I was fine, we could’ve been in the Garden you know, that time in which the two of us where in thoughtless paradise as we are now, but are we to know, if we cannot, then that it is very confusing, but NO that is Not so and of course it cannot, it is Not so, of course, and do you know why. . . . . .because we are here in the Garden and nothing matters, and so here we are here in the Garden floating down the river with its breathing breathe and heartbeat, do you hear it, do you hear its sound its song it sings for so long and stretches its clear clean blue shallows into infinity, infinitely around the earth’s surface, stretches forgetting calmly without hesitation nor conflicting questolitude.


Day by day by day by day by day by day by day by day by day, it has no way of stopping. What will it stop? You know very well, when it will stop.

If memory could stretch true, it would seem such that it was of the time of day or night. Was it dark or light, when they found me, scrawled up into a little corner, cringing, and took me away, they said they were going to save me, or something like that. I don’t know. The more I think about such statements, the more I lie.

Well, now to come to think of it, I think that wasn’t so and that wasn’t as it happened. I think it was more or less this; I had collapsed, yes, and I all had gone dark into delirium, I had lost all sense of time and place and feel (though I wasn’t aware of my unawareness at the time, of course), and then I awoke, and I was here.

But then again. And again. And again. It could have been something else. I could come up with a million reasons, explanations and never come up with how it was so. I could’ve just awoken, here in my bed already. I could’ve been born, right here and never had escaped, never had seen, the outside world, never had gone beyond the constraints of my chains.

But don’t worry. It will end someday, it isn’t really after all eternal damnation, just the same damnation of all mortals, with time ticking away and eternity expanding within every second. And yet, I suppose, with every passing second, eternity probably condenses, and thus it never really is able to go beyond its normal limits. It too is cursed to its own unchanging existence, its own stubborn principle.

I sit I lay here, the mechanic cyborgs mindlessly and inflexibly walk around, taking to their usual programmed routine. Speaking to the air, as if to themselves. Oh how the sight sickens me! Just the algorithmic thinking required in order to behave in such a way, so mindlessly, so mechanically. I find it that they have put me here in order to watch their unthinking routines over and over again until I can no longer take it. But even if it came to that point, I couldn’t do anything about it. With this my whole existence is now based upon the act of watching and waiting as I go insane and my body begins to decompose, even as it still breathes.

Anyway, it seems, very well to say, that I am here, sitting in a silence surrounded by the pompous scurrying of rats here in my cell, for which I am chained to the operating table. You know, when I first came here (God knows when that was), I couldn’t help but feel a lingering terror and paranoia that this was a torture chamber and that I was chained to the victims bed, it’s sheets which smelled of dry stains of flesh. Though I could’ve been wrong, actually, I am more willing to believe that my senses had failed me then, just as they do now, for I am no longer convinced that my life will end with grisly torment, but rather with a silent whimper, just as what that great prophet or poet said. I suppose that the only thing that I believe now is that all ends, just as all dies, in endless reiteration of things past and of things to be repeated, converged into a never ending loop.

How crowded this room seemed to me when I first arrived! Look at it now! It all seems to be just an empty cube, but that paleness has still not gone away. Everything is so Euclidean, how I would love to smoke a cigarette so that I could blow its mystical grey smoke into the face of every square shape, but of course they won’t allow me to, say it’s bad for my health.

I sleep I wake and then I sleep again and of course every day they bring me back to this world to give me some of their poison, to weary my head of the truth and drunken my mind.

And as for you, I can no longer say, what is what. Of course these are all lies. But what is a lie? What is a word, if I speak. Does music require semantic panoramas? or air, such waste of breathe? Time is golden, and I am in a gold mine.

*****

What do you think about things? Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah. Yeah I know. Yeah, let’s set it up.

A sunny summers day. At the ball game. Few clouds in the sky.

How does one live a life of non-existence, as a wandering ghost, a satyr in the forest, a lonely knight past his prime, knocking down windmills in his papier-mâché armor. I have lived a life of absence. In my younger and more vulnerable years, I had thought that I knew everything that there was to know. I even despaired in the fact that there wasn’t going to be anything new to know, that my brain had sucked up the entire fabric of the universe and digested it whole. No, I never knew anything. I still don’t know anything now, except that I know nothing. Maybe I can pride myself in my ignorance, my frailty, my lack of love. Yes, I too once thought that I had looked into the abyss and saw the secrets of the deep, but it was just a dream, and probably a more beautiful one than the thing-itself might be.

Why am I so young? I was once old, now I am young, and I cannot begin to imagine why. Well, I know why; childlike superciliousness.

I am with you. Sitting on in the grass. Looking on the outfield. He is pitching the ball too awkwardly, you say, that is why he’s getting everybody out. I think he was throwing splitters. We sit in the grass. I don’t know. Is it just me, or is my imagination failing me? Am I collapsing into the impossible? The impossible. Ha!

But I am no writer. I am a working man. No. I am too paralyzed to be that. I am a doctor. Ha! As if I adore the body! An insect? Yes, yes, I’m an insect.