Where I am, am I?

I can't quite muster much imagination or wit. I've just seen that Health Reform will be made into law; it passed, in other words. I'm not certain what the implications will be. I suppose, like all aspects of history, this is something you must watch. Interesting, how history and writing/art coincide. And not in the usual sense. Just in the sense that you must be a spectator for both, a spectator who exceeds participation, only to participate in its happening.

Because I'm lacking quite a bit tonight, I am going to provide the end of Session Four from my second novel, The Life Of Dedrick Forrester. To the few (?) who read this, Proteus is a figment of the speaker's (in this chapter Rick) imagination, and really an extenuation of Dedrick's psyche, his subconscious, trying to come to terms with the death of his (Dedrick's) younger brother, at the behest of a man who called himself Proteus. This novel has been an extraordinary venture, if only because as I write about the immediate experience at hand, the hardship of losing someone you love, I'm also commenting on how we make a ghost of things. And turning this process into a metaphor for artistic experience and re-creation. More about this at a later time. Now, I'd prefer you kept your gaze on this bit. The first part, mind you, is from Rick's journal, the remainder the finale of his fourth session, with Dr. Forrester:

. I miss touch and tongue and the rungs I climbed to get here. They weren’t stars. But stones that would roll upon you had you not climbed them with the right touch. I knew I wouldn’t end up like Sisyphus. But sometimes when you’re climbing, you forget, and the fear of forgetting is like going beyond the pale, into the veil, not even grasping its sacrificial shroud.
And Proteus, you’re the angel, or daemon, who took me here. Took me away from living into this facsimile of being. And I don’t know if it’s right to hug or punch, you. I love you so much, your hand loves mine, but there are moments when I see your sinister smirk, and wonder if you aren’t more a work of heaven than hell…
So, that’s all I wrote, for the first entry. Forgive me if it seemed a bit long. But I’m trying to come to terms, with it all. Don’t you understand? Proteus was more a mentor than daemon. But it’s when he mentored me that I always wished he were the daemon hiding behind my soul.
Our session isn’t up yet, right? It’s so strange talking to you. I’m looking in a mirror, the glass is shattering to bits, but I can still grasp the outline of your eyes. I want to write about it. Do you mind if I jot something down?
Nothing extraordinary. Just, in eyes the mirror rages you, to break and find your iris; tangled in blue, entangled by the shroud that mirrors you. I usually write better, well, when Proteus was here I was quite prolific. I could feel more; I wasn’t so much a thinker. And I know thinking is tantamount to everything, that all we experience is an interpretation of being. But how can one be but to be the effect of everything? The nerves that tangle us, the molecules, the space, how can we be anything but the fruition of this, pouncing our feelings, without analyzing them to death?
I miss the truth. The way I was as a child. I’m still that child, I suppose. But, I miss the smell of grass, and the things I imagined living beneath. I didn’t think there were ants and insects and spiders, like every normal child does. I thought there was a little version of me, watching as I re-lived everything he had already experienced, his little arms reaching out to me, to stop me, from plucking the wildflower, which was his shelter under the rain. Or digging up the dirt, where at night he’d hide his eyes and dreams.
That thought, of being re-lived, frightens me quite a bit. Some say I’m doing it via Proteus. But I don’t know. I suppose that’s for you to decipher. I only want a break, to have that gush of feeling encompass me again. Not the one that came when Proteus did. But the one that came when I’d reach my hand out to that little man in the grass, and feel his fingertips as needle-points, and hear the welt of this, his voice, really, telling me where not to go.




BONNE NUIT, quoth La Somnambule!