there is a strange tapping coming from the rain drainage gutters on the house. it sounds like some animal is tapping in its sleep or something. occasionally, a nightbird squeaks in its dreams, hidden somewhere in the shadowed bower of a tree.

i am awake, but tired, anxious about yet another tomorrow. there is always so much to do.

i once wrote that, in the primordial situation, man, represented by sisyphus, confronts the boulder of the world, and is essentially equal to it. he in other words has as much sense as the boulder, resisting the inertia of it with his own being, and then helpless to counter its momentum as it rolls down the hill. with the advent of the word, man creates imbalance, and thereby asserts his own existence: the word is the lever that allows man to separate the primordial border from mother earth. the word, in essence, makes man "bolder" than the boulder. it frees the boulder, and it frees man for other things...

but there are other dangers, dangers beyond falling back into the smothering non-existence of primordial sisyphian existence. the modern dilemma is the nano-machine repetition of that original act of separating the boulder from its housing... the boulder, transfigured by the word, fragments repetitively, into successively grainier detail, until man no longer makes contact, or is even able to make contact with the world. words fall apart, over and over and over again...

the task of an individual trying to change the world is similar. the world resists, certainly, by its very inertia, like the primordial boulder... but there is an equal danger in man's "divisive" labors, his language, his organizing mind, his midas touch... the world and its tasks repeatedly fall apart right before his eyes, and right beneath his fingertips... the end, which once seemed conceptually so simple, withdraws, turns corners, dizzyingly disappearing, until man no longer knows who he is, or what his purpose was...

there is a reason why taoism favors the yin, and the simple. to follow the way of the world is to instantly fall apart into the ten thousand things... true taoists look stupid, but it is only because they understand that the only way to stay together is to follow simplicity, to hold to the origin via a second return to innocence...

***

i want a dream again. i want to feel my life, my waking life, to be like the flat thing it is, afloat upon a monstrous surge, upon the back of some leviathan mistaken for a wave. an unthinking thing, without purpose, but filled to bursting with the plenitude of the abyss and the depths... ALIVE.

i dream of the sea and the waters in all its incarnations. last night i dreamt of crossing the ocean on a decaying bridge with my father... someday, in my dreams, i will walk on water, unafraid and alone.

or else, i will become the waters themselves.