UNDERSTANDING WHICH SURPASSETH ALL

10. UNDERSTANDING WHICH SURPASSETH ALL:

(Along the Palisades)

Time did seem to have gone away – and it passed – and I felt perhaps as if I were dead or willing to be anyway and something like the feeling of radio waves in window shops or waxen elixirs running down sorrowful streets took over my feelings as I instead watched the sky and realized that BEFORE MY EYES were passing the souls of the countless others who’d been here before and I wondered at that moment if there was any energy left for anything worthwhile or if even that chance encounter with ‘meaning’ was worthless and the one response I kept to was the responsiveness of silence and I saw the grass that had died beneath me in the long haggard dry days which – desert-like – had just been passing if that grass like every other soul and person and being had died and withered for some value unknown to me and NO MATTER at that moment I was unsure still what even I was experiencing and how anything of this had occurred but as I watched out I saw people walking and sparring in groups and the sightseeing guides of the razor-sharp day were looking out over cliffs moribund with rock and the flight of vulture falcon eagle and hawk and the passage of air was the passage of wing and as opposed to THEM was myself – completely listless and totally without energy and willing to die and be forgotten and done at that moment yet complete and fulfilled and needing nothing more for the ‘understanding which surpasseth all’ had certainly arrived and been here and came and left and if FULFILLMENT such as that couldn’t do me now then it never would and I did not want to be here nor did I want to be anywhere else - neither Libya China Chad or Maine to spread a few about - and in some singular silence of mime and pathos and fevered haunt and the want of meaning my very SOUL itself flew outward from me to join all the rest : the strange little man in corduroy the girl pushing the wheelchair the two old people sitting on plastic chairs drinking lemonade while they read the children learning to listen the people with dogs AND the dogs with people EACH in their way became themselves and the laughter I heard and nothing was any longer a language nor a reason nor a meaning nor a fault - for ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL to their excess and in their richness they each did overflow.

“Do you have a voice?” someone asked “yes I have a voice but I will not speak it” and they asked “do you have a will?” and I responded “yes but I choose not to use it” and they went away from me trailing some remnant of light (a light I’d not seen this way before) and I stood up to stand back and shouted out “everything that I have I will willingly impart to you too!”
and a voice echoed back : “you need not for to each man are ALL things given if ONLY they can see them.”

I have seen that what it all comes down to is fate.