Free Write

You wake up, call in sick to your school, and then have breakfast. A letter arrives. It is pushed underneath the door by someone who is not your regular mail deliverer. Though intrigued, you are also somewhat confused, afraid to open it. You set in on the table.  You begin circling around it. Then you pick it up, hold it against the kitchen light. You think it is safe. Though the type is small, it isn't very long.

You decide to read it.

In contact with a sharp surface phenomenon, white pages with words on them, a non-erasable reality that evokes images of a body in communication with another body, you remember an amorous affair, an exhaustive tactile sensory encounter, that now serves as the yardstick by which you judge all real or imagined sensory experience. It ends with a colon: a silent and tragic dissolution of the relationship you were imagining.

Now you are into the third paragraph. You find that the words flow, create story out of nothing: solid shapes and vibrant colors, a formless soft voice that leads but does not command. Presence, an invisibly visible force before you, so present you can feel it moving, moving in and through you, around you, while also existing as something not you. The words, one after another, over and over: the presence inside them gives you life, shapes you, twists and turns you until meaning appears. Then it disappears. Re-emerging, it playfully teases you out of a shell, releases you from the constraints of a textual economy situating you as passive consumer. And there is something else, something not in, but around, a floating. But you don't know what it is. It is silent, something to move through, something that allows for movement. It is warm and strong and good. It fits tight, and you like it.

Because it reminded you of a story from your childhood, the one about the geese or rabbits or funny cat, you feel safe. The story from your childhood is precise and quantifiable, a story whose minute details you already know, a story you tell yourself when you are hurt or in despair. You begin telling yourself this story. But then the dialogue changes: a new character, one that wasn't there before, an alien, an anomic force, tears up your story. Mocking you, it pretends to be the story you were remembering. A deeper memory rises to the surface: you received a letter in the mail today and now you are reading it. You become lost, withdraw in confusion, into confusion, into something you can't quite describe.

Thankfully, a new paragraph begins: you come forward, annex yourself to it. The very distance between surface and structure, form and content, sign and referent, interpretation and fact, keeps it together. It begins to surround you on all sides, slowly at first, naturally, as if it knows you. It is understanding personified in the form and shape of paper with black markings capable of, but not limited to, telling a story.

Or: inciting riots and overthrowing governments; acting as a communicative technology representative of the so-called intellectually, spiritually and ethically superior instruments of the universal advancement of humanity; and mediating to you through a broad range of institutions and organizations, including think tanks, business schools, management consultancy firms, business media and political parties, that it is capable of, and willing to, construct a world of shared, common human lineaments.

Or: relaying multiple and purely contingent different realities altogether; producing alternate spaces and times; and building dissimilar worlds of multiple forms of apprehension where formerly you thought there was only one conceptual and material plane of understanding, such as: forms and ideas, energy and space, or books and yogurt.

Or: inventing objects of knowledge; techniques of discerning what those objects of knowledge are; and how those objects should be used, classified, categorized, and conceptually mapped and integrated alongside other forms of understanding.

Insinuation: these are methods of seeing that actively manufacture reality from the unorganized phenomena you lack access to outside of the conceptual systems you are embedded in, are unable to step outside of, separate yourself from, such as: hidden assumptions and presuppositions; intra-psychic mechanisms; cultural biases and superstitions mediated through metaphors, similes, metonymies and meta-languages; various interpenetrating ethico-politico and socio-economic structures; daily practices grounded in habit, conformity, and tradition; and subtle but increasingly destructive disciplinary techniques you actively consent to because they disguise themselves as forms of pleasure and freedom, as socially acceptable work and leisure activities.

These methods, and many others the letter itself cannot describe or see, constitute discourse and power imprecisely defined: the ruling system of assumptions, meanings and values that shapes the way things look, what they mean, and, therefore, what social reality `is.'

With grace and skill, a soft interface, it first concealed and contained, yet now you know the letter releases and reveals. You start to look up to it, begin asking it for advice, what books it thinks you should read.

But it remains focused. Though invisible, it refuses to let you look away, refuses to let you pretend you do not understand what is going on. And then it grows angry, starts indexing and adumbrating smells and places, things and memories, events and names: park benches and long-term involuntary unemployment, gas stations and OPEC, household appliances and contaminated bodies of water, street lights and military spending, bars of soap and napalm, ideologies and paper clips, political pamphlets and sports equipment, dictators and random pieces of clothing, remote areas of countries you've never been to, symbols you are afraid of. Cutting back because it senses your fear, it realizes it has run aground, slammed into a wall of confusion and sensory overload.

It erases the map and starts fresh, from the ground up.

Problem: you were not ready for the division of territory, for a midnight positional reconnaissance with no obvious strategic or tactical purpose, a undeclared guerilla war on your psyche, a war of hegemony in which you had not yet delineated clearly a moral geometry allowing you to speak "for" or "against" whatever is being referenced. All you wanted to do was read your mail.

Suggestion: adopt a philosophy or set of principles that could serve as resources, ammunitions and foodstuffs, in a protracted, intellectualized war of either negative or positive maneuvers between you, the author, and whatever is being fought with or against.

Changing topics, it decides to open a new path for you.

It separates into two sentences: one sentence beneath you, giving you somewhere to stand, a solid foundation, a sidewalk with cracks and grass spreading out in all directions, and a second sentence slightly above you, coyly smiling, showing you its fibers and threads as if it wants to impress you.

No longer wanting to stand still, anxious, self-conscious and uncomfortable, you realize you were tricked: it was one sentence, not two. You look back: one colon and five commas, no period. Now striving for clarity, true clearness of mind, you cut through the rest of the paragraph, immerse yourself in concentration, your attention now completely fixed on the words appearing before you. You want to know, gradually so that it does not blind you, how it works, what makes it tick.

Finding new words and feelings, the setting seems to change. But the geography of the text, its breath, its body language, its modus operandi, moves forward too fast. You begin to feel as if there is no plot. A void fills you, makes you cold, gives you sensations without sense, a biting hardness and lack of receptivity, a broken mirror of backwards, fragmented images brings pain, suffering, and disease.

And then there is a dull yet burning sense of existential dullness. Perhaps you are you letting the experience you wish to have manipulate the experience you are having.

Question: is the self that experiences in conflict with the self that interprets experience? You imagine them fighting it out in a hotel room.

Or: another self watches both of them from the window that is consciousness, the window you are now looking at from a new, higher window you created while you were reading this sentence. Ad infinitum.

Disarticulated, confused, afraid of being hurt, still annexed to something you neither know nor understand, you see that the two selves you temporarily forgot about, the bony "surface" phenomenon and the "deep" self of consciousness, the self that interprets and the self best likened to an invisible and unphotographable camera, have now stopped fighting. You are whole, unitary, at one with the world. Your journey is complete. But the letter you received in the mail keeps going.

No longer feeling disconnected, like a bottomless multiplicity, you are inside your home, alone in your bedroom, safe and comfortable. It makes a promise: a new sentence is on the way. It is close by. A great hunt begins shortly. And you are invited. You look forward to it. Coming up from behind, you didn't see it. It had its own key.

Now it is in your bedroom, behind you, running its hands up your backside, beginning to undress you. One of its hands moves to your front, runs its fingers along your stomach, then downward to a warm spot, moving in soft circles with little laughs. Tiny waves of pleasure ripple throughout your body. Feeling warm breath on your neck, you like your body next to this body. It feels good. Muscles tighten and breath shortens. Turning you around, slowly, in anticipation, it offers up wetness, reaches out in longing. You close your eyes and lean forward, aggressively push back, and then take in. In your bed, it begins to happen. It is brand new, at first careful; but now, thoroughly oiled, working you over, on top, it is more than your equal. Closer and closer, in shared symmetric movements, wanting you to finish, whispering over and over in your ear, it silently screams: climax. In preparation for your release, you pull in close, and then let out a low sound of pleasure where before there was only the silent and intimate movements of two intertwined and interlaced bodies.

Putting the letter down, you realize you are content. If you weren't so full, yet peacefully empty, you would feel used and betrayed.