The ardor and peril of the self in the shoreless, infinite sea

***

In my ardor and peril, every moment was like furtively twisting about to see what had snuck up behind me, only to pinch my neck in the process, so that my eyes closed from the pain and ...I saw nothing; no rememberment, no joining, no glee. Only separation, amputation, and loss.

Come now, hold me tight. I am a man who bore false witness to himself, and then did not believe any of it; as if I never truly existed, and existence simply claimed that I existed.

Existence indeed. Of all the bizarre and stupid things that could be made.

I invented none of this. There it was, wham! Being occurred, and I staggered aimlessly about in the midst of it, imagining that I was me. I came to see the show and got pulled into the act.

There was no true being, no true me, only delusion; only not‑being amongst being (oh relax, and allow me these irreconcilable lucidities).

I suffered immeasurably from a spiritual handicap, a metaphysical disability- I had become detrimentally intimate with the all-encompassing mystery of being; like a pretend man who forgot who he was pretending to be; a somethingness lurking about, blindly lost within its own interminable shadow. As if I was the executor of a vast estate, but not an heir; the stepbuilder of stairs I would never climb. Me, just a little ha-ha puppet, brought out to entertain the yawning king; a tortured joke suffered out from the exiled Muse.

Oh, I was everyone's nobody. 'In', and 'of', and yet not-in, and not-of. I was continually meandering aimlessly about inside a self that was no longer mine, in a world that was no longer Thine.

It was all too much like a dream of my youth: I returned to where I was certain that my home had been, but when I arrived ...it was no longer there; in the place where once I had found belonging, there now existed only not‑belonging.

I was just a bottle without a message, floating absently about in the shoreless, infinite sea.

Who could breathe in life's thick, torpid densities? Where was the self that knew feeling? What of the manifest, in the glorious, unmanifest stream?

***

These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.