Cosmic love and loss, misery and miracle, and life

***

Proximity itself is what destroys anyone who knows how much love is lost. And even to find where it lies hidden is not to then necessarily possess it. 

For anyone whose memory goes back before the ruthless withdrawal of cosmic Love, life will be little more perhaps than drudgery and loss, though still, in the end, it is worth it- to live through the joy and hurt of being, to stare it in the face, and to find the heart of the matter in matter. 

And yet, it's as if I could see not only the misery but the miracle of life as well. Everywhere I looked were the opposites of pain and wonder, stretched in differing directions, but emerging from the same confusion. Indeed I saw the beauty and magic which is always and all around us, and yet how thoroughly we suffer the endless pains of their absence; in fact, if truth be known, we live in heaven even now, but that heaven itself is in hell; life is both horrid and beautiful, and thus we dwell in such exhaustion and dreaming.

Life offered this torturous blessing to me: I came to understand eventually, as I always have, in every life that I have lived, when I was alone in the middle of nowhere, for reasons I cannot remember, drunk or sober, up, down, sideways, or what have you, no matter.

No one knows me now. No one. What seeks to contain me is death, what seeks to define me is blind.

I have not so much of a further story to tell, but a lie to untell.

***

These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.