To One's Self

Dear Self,
I was going to say that I know what you must be thinking but that really isn't true. I don't know how you view my pattern of bragging and mythologizing and then, for long periods, ignoring you. I really couldn't say if I've ever seen you clearly. I don't know what kind of attention and support you might need. Would you be just as happy to live in complete obscurity? Do you have ambitions? Are you lonely?Is there something that you need?

I've mainly seen you as a fire, sometimes as a useful fire, often as a dangerous or perplexing fire. I get very frustrated with you because just when it seems pretty clearly like the main thing is to control your hunger for everything, you get very dim and I worry that there isn't enough energy in you to keep me alive. Which is it? Or do I have this whole image wrong? I thought you were supposed to serve me; I guess I thought you were me. So what are you?

I now think that the part of me that is talking to you, maybe still trying to bargain with you, is sort of what can be seen in the visible spectrum. That what I would call me at any particular time is a function of how the eyes work and how I am focusing my attention. It changes over time, it always has some particular project or it falls into despondency, it is not still unless something overwhelms it, stuns it. This thing that is talking to You, is it You? Do you accept it as part of Yourself? I recognize the insistence and the prim method of this voice so well. God, it would rather be right in some narrow way than be with what is real. But it's made that way, made to do work, and it's really pretty efficient. Maybe I need to let it off the hook, clean it off in the evening like a gardening tool and lean it in some cool, dim place for the night? Except I don't know how to do that: it's always hungry. I would say I am always hungry, restless, watching. So would you come and be with me if I put the shrill voice away?

I began by approaching you and already I'm thinking about my own care again. But this whole thing is so circular, this whole question of how to manage alone, of how to care for us without any outside attention or stage. I really don't know if I believe it's possible.

All I can think to do is try to see you clearly and listen to you as I would listen to anyone else. Weirdly, your desires are really easy for me to dismiss as illusions. But maybe when you say you want things, even dumb shallow stuff, it means that you really want them. To go outside, to drink coffee, to talk with a friend, to pick up the guitar and make a D chord. I'll try to listen to you very literally. We need to start preparing, or maybe it's just me who does, for when the fantasies of greatness and importance have gone and the physical mojo is a useful, elegant reading lamp and no longer a spot light. I don't even want to plan for this, or think about it.

And it would help if you would try to be mundane, try to use your words. I do know, and I'll try to remember, that you aren't made of words and that words don't describe all of you. There's this image of you as a sort of primordial valley where you exist in an indefinite, inexhaustible form before you rise into the light and take shape become part of the discrete processes of the language world and the mechanical world. I'll try to think of you there and regard your peace and great lambent energy as mine. But I don't know if I can understand you without words.
Love, K