ten thousand things

He wanted to say ten thousand things, but ended up saying nothing, or something like that. There were no transactions, no equivalences, no I for an I after all. He wanted to reach the still centre of mystery, but only reached the outer hem, and held on to it. Even then he was amazed, bewildered, as if he'd been here before, known her from some place else:

I sensed everything before it happened.

Was this real? Degrees of separation: glass, mirror, selfhood.

I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming and I couldn't tell him what was real, she said.

East and west it flows, taking up the ten thousand things; indifferent or in love, he couldn't tell. Once a fox had danced in, silver footed, red-tailed, and stolen the fruit, not that he'd ever actually seen her. It dragged the fruit all over the place so that it lay scattered, like an ominous warning in the early morning light of how the world would be turned upside down; he'd tricked it to a dark cupboard beneath the stairs and then boarded it up, making sure no light got in; made sure there'd be no mingling in his affairs. But when she'd gone, he was saddened for some strange reason, a reason he half-guessed. It was like he'd boarded something up in his heart.

It doesn't matter what his problem is, until he's fully understood it himself.

And then, out of the blue, when the trail had turned cold and he'd least expected,

the interior filled up with light so that for two seconds you could have read a book.

He didn't read a book, but stumbled across a line by a Romanian poet: I am me when I am you.

He imagined those fine Roman features, haughty, proud, generation after generation of untamed impulses caroming through her wise blood. Here they were again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God. Two hours passed, three maybe. He lost track of time. He'd wasted so much it already. Years had slipped by terrifyingly and he couldn't remember much: an act of kindness here, a joke or two there. But now all the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before he woke up, when he could see with all the clarity and truthfulness of the day, when figures first took shape, assumed a destiny. He felt the beauty of the morning, could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how the slave might become a friend to his master.

Perhaps it was too late, cynicism and arrogance shining through his eyes, his tone often harsh, his words falling short of their potential. Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart...It was only that certain important connections had been burned through.

---from Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son.