Love, the hegemony of being, a timeless palimpsest, and the soul's cocoon

***

Ah, but perhaps I am delving into the mercy and miracle far too early. Let me back up a ways. 

I can recall most of my old life fairly well now. Or perhaps not so well. No matter. After all, it was mostly a classic befuddlement, with all the hints of squirming and guise.

To begin with, I had no idea worth dreaming, no thought worth thinking, and no emotion for life. I had played in the world, loving its loves, fearing its fears, desiring its desires, and trying its trials. None of it worked. It was all wrong. The path the world had educated me to follow, led quickly and only to hell.

I had awoken (I called it waking), was conscious, but not lucid. I called it consciousness. For days and years I wailed and clung onto the hegomony of being. There were many disparate occasions of both furtive and calm, but hardly a moment of reason. What was it all about? I haven’t a clue. Nothing seemed to happen in life but a splash like of colors dancing in front of my oblivious eye. The pleroma and the profane were all but scribbled rubric, incongruously placed over the timeless palimpsest of being.

It was all rather a fabulous dull blur, although the bread smelled wonderful, the wine was nice, and the flowers and trees and sea were all gravy. I opened my eyes, looked about for a while, was filled with awe and dolor, and that is about all of which I am certain. So sad to say this, and yet so beautiful.

My return to earth, though very stark, was absolutely innocent, because I was, for most of my life, enveloped in a cocoon of blessed anonymity, metamorphosing obscurely away from the light. But when my wings were finally full, and my heart was frantic to return to the sky, I had to break through those defenses, or the butterfly in me would never learn how to fly. I flew.

And yet, as quickly as I was lifted up, I melted back into the sordid old thing, helpless to remain aloft.

I was still on the ground, and calling it ground, and thundering blindly about, sometimes on all fours, as if that might shorten the fall.

***

These fragments are taken from unpublished writings by Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.