A Spy on the Street Where You Live, pt. 3

But what can I say . . . to make it clear? How can I say that to her, when the groveling started sixteen years ago—or thirty two, if my stars really do point at her—was ineffective then, and has, it would seem, continued, to resurface now? How can I say that, which every brokenhearted singer has ever sung, that every adult has recognized for the screen-kiss kitsch it is, as a vehicle for commercial culture and greater need, to this stranger whose company I crave with a thirst I’d say anything to slake? Never trust a junkie or a crooner: My mama done told me, they’ll both do anything for another hit.

And, how, after all, if she won’t return my calls, who gave up writing weeks ago, who won’t be getting in touch, nor speak to me at all? If the sun refused to shine, perhaps she would return my calls; or if the moon plunged into the sea, perhaps she would call me. Of course, if that happened, phone service would likely be adversely impacted, not to mention low-lying coastal areas, and we, refugees, going nowhere.

If it were but a matter of faith,
if it were measured in petitions and prayer . . .
but it is not, nor do I care.

Barring the fools’ unforgivable sin of rushing in and talking out loud; even choosing not to tell her about it, how can I even think I crave such things, and continue to think of myself as a person? No: Must struggle, must ramble on; must . . . resist . . . compulsive . . . romantic . . . hyperbole.

The point of this digression has been to indicate the irresistible quality of compulsion that, in my case, points at her. Don’t get me wrong, I was made to love love, unconditionally, but am most moved as an ape when whose lover I am is embodied as her, or when she is near enough to permit me to imagine it is so. All that mystical unconditional love rhetoric meets its terminal condition in her present reality. So much for samadhi.

Why the gods above me, who must be in the know, think so little of me . . .

So she, living in a particular structure on this street, has much more impact on my deportment than whatever hypothetical liability my vegetable helper vendor may face.

To put it plainly, to turn my face upstream, across the tracks, and walk, arouses the memory of a moment of imputed legal reconciliation I had with a different estranged lady—as far as I can tell not a proxy for she, our object, except insofar as I loved her—during which, at the height of our characteristic mutual suppression of expression of passions, so often by the lover, by one another, beaten back, I was afflicted with a facial tic she did not see, but which, persisting, bothered me for my inability to control that spasming muscle in my cheek, and what that loss of control here, now meant about the pressure of the act in which we were engaged while so completely sharing nothing else. The memory arises of that incongruous, rebellious muscle, the utter desolate disconnect, the panic and stress it indicated, made me grieve, there, awake in the shadow of her dispassionate snore, lying against her warmth, for that legal fiction, absurd from my position as a witness of its ironic end.

Just that kind of spider hole exposed, zero at the bone, terror of the situation vertigo, before fight or flight or later mentation has a chance to take hold, is more like what I’d expect if any second she did appear. The aforementioned self-conscious suspicion of my own subconscious self, and hers or, perhaps, my delusion of hers, and that strange mammalian signaling with the angular lines of sight, wherein neither of us knows what we’re saying, but both of our bodies and postures respond to what we’ve been told. And likely struck dumb, all the words crumbled on my clumsy tongue, no salve for mutual pain but a twitching cheek in an expressionless face.

That fearful, cringing dread of the broken-hearted, of each aching arc of the anāhata chakra snapping mutely shut; this is not the heart breaking. The heart is a pump: It fills, it wrings itself dry, and fills again! That word, heartbreak, pronounced by the economists of the scarce resource, just refers to constriction, the plunge, the empty cycle, during which the love that was cherished and then sent forth into the world does its ephemeral work. It, or other love, will flow back to fill that supple pump again.

My heart is jumpin’, you started somethin’ with them there eyes.

Of course that terrible meeting is what I crave, like some fanatic rhapsodizing judgment day, and what I look forward to with questioning and suspicion and dread and the most secret most passionate hope, as I said, every time I leave my home and venture out on the street where she lives.

He dipped and soared, and in his frenzied trance
Both Self and fire were mingled by his dance –
The flame engulfed his wing-tips, body, head;
His being glowed a fierce translucent red.

Ah, music be the food of love, indeed! All the songs of love and all the music about drug addiction, and all the theosophical texts, the poets and the analysts, the cults and their cleansings, they have brought me here. I step out on her street, across the thoroughfare, a song in my heart, a low whistled tune on my lips, across the square, and upstream.

My feet are a self-rolling wheel that glides in any direction; but for a brief focus on each person I pass or any motion in my field of vision, and cocking my ear to notable tones, my eyes follow the pattern, like a student driver is instructed to cycle his eyes through, of landmarks and fields and angles from my course. The seven wonders of the way leading to the Man; the fourteen stations of her block; one thousand mindful paces and a prayer, then make the sign of the evil eye, smile at two faces, and head wherever, on my way. Or something like that, in theory anyway.

In fact, I’m not OCD enough to pull it off, although not for want of planning. As my supposition goes, I am a needle magnetized on her; she, pole to my concentrating current. The heart song and the whistle gone as soon as I notice them constraining my stride, then my breath does it. Eyes for every motion, for every other eye, ears for each dissonant interval, every eloquent voice, I pretend to be cool, but that’s the roof of her building rising just over there. Those are her windows—that, her beatific air conditioner! No love songs now. I sing the adhan under my breath, approaching her block:

Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar.
Ash-hadu an la ilaha il-Allah.
Ash-hadu anna Muhammad-ar rasul Allah.
Hayya ’alas-salah. Hayya ’alal-falah.
Allahu akbar !

God is great. God is great.
I declare there is no God but God.
I declare that Mohammed is His Messenger.
Come to prayer. Come to success.
God is Great !

But this heresy is no good. Qad qama-tis-salah—Prayer has indeed begun. She is the arrow I point toward. I have already come to prayer, and although craven, I have graven no images of her, but these in words, worshipful of the wonder caused by her Creator in me. And I betray that beautiful, haunting tune’s true orientation to submission and to Mecca to make it my diversion, when she is the East, when hers are the ears with which I would share each strange interval of tones. And you don’t really want to be singing to yourself in Arabic on the street these days, anyway.

Islam and blasphemy have both been passed
By those who set out on love’s path at last.

Of course, given my reflections on addiction and love, and the analogies of her as opiate, I cannot have failed to think about faith across about the whole breadth of creation. I have indeed, and the Thelemites, the argentum astrum, the Adventists, Scientologists and A.A. offer the same prescription: submission, honesty, apology, and daily struggle. Of course, I cannot apologize to her without knowing of the harms I’ve caused, for I presume to presume thereof. I cannot apologize while harboring in my heart this hunger for her without repentance, I think. And I cannot apologize without addressing her, without some time. Wait ‘til they hear that at group: apologizing to the junk, itself, for the ravage of the habit!

Of course submission! This is all about my will being the problem, isn’t it? Of course my will is not in control. As to a higher power, there is but the one I know of, that I cannot resist. The way I can submit, knowing my stubborn passions and mind, would be in cherishing her as friend, mastering these cultural lies of scarcity and of chattel and the implications they command, if she would have me there, and if I can. But they’d laugh at that idea in group, too: first thing you divest, after what pride you may have left, is the facilitating friends.

These reflections don’t help, my feet have carried me on, past the doorway where I would camp to worship her; my eyes, swinging wildly, driven on the waves of my thoughts the while, of course now rest upon the façade of her building. Anyone in there, her housemate, her lover, quite possibly her most terrible self, or in any of those adjacent and facing, and anyone anywhere else on this block, can see me here, taut with attention—I must glow with it, so great its force within me—and must know all of my craving and my shame. They must feel the humming tension seething within me, like I feel theirs, everywhere but here.

Catching my breath, probably faltering in my stride, I snatch my eyes from there and throw them quickly through the lane ahead – the driver’s side rearview mirror – the lane ahead – ten o’clock – two o’clock – the passenger side rear-view mirror—leaving them on the windows of the Safeway façade instead, and immediately catch myself hoping against hope to see her waiting in a check-out line inside. More scripture:

Tayata. Gate gate paaragate paarasamgate. Bodhi. Svaha.

Emptiness. Gone, gone beyond, gone thrice beyond. Enlightenment, so be it.

This one at least soothes the panic, stems the straining tides, calming breath and stride. No heresy here, we’re all suffering desire, the root of all our suffering; we’re all hoping we can all get past it. Beyond the desire, so we can talk, walking, working, side by side.

And we do get past it, this time. Today. And we will again, on the way back home.

And if we do not, we will wake again tomorrow, and sing out to the world,

Hello, is my name.

I am an addict of word, its tortured worlds, its love-fired imagination, an addict of poetry and song, addict of caffeine, nicotine, sometime addict of the many mineral and vegetable anodynes, and acolyte of her name and her image and her dream and the stars.

This is my pen, no nepenthe, as yet, but a record, lest I forget, and perhaps a path.

Allahu akbar! Bodhi svaha! Come; let’s sing.