THE POINT IS

THE POINT IS

 

The point is not to find yourself through your art or anything but to lose yourself so completely in whatever you’re doing you forget who it was you were looking for and what you hoped to achieve. That way the whole universe collaborates in its own becoming in every mystically specific moment of you and nothing’s left out. Yours is the secret name of God written on six million leaves and you’re the wonder of whose work this is. And who can assess the number of stars it takes to make one eye that can turn around and see them? Just don’t underestimate the creative power of extinction. Or forget that silence is the ultimate theme of the music that it gives birth to. And stop treating your questions as if they were a long chromosomatic line of impoverished relatives trying to save up enough to buy their way into one blue-blooded aristocrat of an answer that quickly forgets where it came from. Separation is evil. Severance and self-containment are the eyelids of death. You should take hold of yourself if ever as if you were cupping water in your hands you’re about to return to the river.  What did the Sufi say? Be melting snow and wash yourself clean of yourself. That’s the way to get back to the root of things. Life blooms from below. If there’s a painter left at the end of the painting to say I did this, or a poet who’s still a poet by the time he’s finished writing, or a lover who still knocks on his beloved’s door from the outside, burn them at the stake of their own delusion for not being heretical enough to be consumed. Extinction isn’t the end of things anymore than mammals are the end of dinosaurs. Or God leaves off where the devil begins. But you haven’t emerged here alone in this vast space to seek the eventual forgiveness of this long night that marrows your golden bones with dark matter. You’re not the skull-bound period at the end of a long spine of a sentence that’s learned to walk upright. Pour the elixirs and snakepits out of the grails of being at your feet like stale wine and the emptiness is charged with becoming again. Lighting it up and blowing it out; it goes into action again. Ask any candle. Enlightenment isn’t a long river that anticipates the sea. The wave breaks where it begins. And its greatest delight is in being the no one it always was. With no one watching in the shadows of insight. Consider how nothing amplifies. Put zero beside one and a feather becomes a wing that’s ten times bigger. That’s how you start a universe from scratch. That’s how you take to the sky. Throw yourself like a lot of nothing into the mix and there are stars strewn everywhere across space like a nervous breakdown trying to get a grip on things like starfish and galaxies. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Water doesn’t drown in water and fire doesn’t burn in its own flames. And when you get right down to it nothing isn’t the exhaustion of being that’s run out of thresholds to cross. It’s the original homelessness that set us on this path to everywhere like a direction that couldn’t leave anything out. So bury your name in the night and forget who you are in your solitude and let the torch of your blood flame out like the setting sun. And strange stars will appear to tell stories around their fires about whose house they think you were born in. And when no one can answer for certain. They’ll pull back their curtains of light and gape at each other like wide-eyed windows staring out into empty space as if it were your face alone that they looked through.

 

PATRICK WHITE