The love that binds, caring, laughter, the self, a pillory, and new truths

***

It is now such a preposterous predicament that even their love will bind you. Even their love. And how is that possible? Because their love is the fallout of fear and ignorance, and is not life, and only the living spirit is life, all else is a comfortable room in the house of death.

Oh, I knew somewhere deep inside myself that the day would come when everything would stop again, this time placidly: I would finish with my duties, lie down, say nothing, think nothing, care for nothing. I would be as dead. And laughter would well up from the torch of my absence- ribald incriminations born in the softened misery of joy- and the world would scorn against my mirth, and Eye would chuckle that much harder.

I saw what no one had told me I'd see- I saw myself in everything. It was terrifying. So terrifying that I remained suspended between disbelief and stupor, and I did not budge. I was riveted by the fabulous ubiquity of the self.

Hear me from mine pillory, gushing forth in bald contrition: the spirit is an imposter on earth; it does not belong, may never belong, and so, as such in the absurdity, it endures itself.

When you come upon a new truth you must for a while nurse it along until it takes firm root, grows strong against the wind, and bears its own fruit that it my never die again.

***

These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.