Witness, I will not massacre Myself

The slaughter of the world, quickly excused as a prevarication, nevertheless introduced the usually deceptive and awkward illusory tyrant as greedy—indeed selfish. The subsequent laughter (by chance, surely) arriving at the weekly bridge club meeting did far less to restrain the man than encourage him to gloat: we are enough, all of us, we are enough. The hierarchy, it appears, has been replaced. Generally, locked inside the vision of success, concealed in normalcy and haunted by a primal glimpse at rebellion: there is a union, of sorts. Nevertheless, the immediate chaos which ensued (or, these are certainly not my possessions nor my principle worth) managed to unveil minor differences in the daily routines of sexual deviants versus star athletes, prosperous businessmen, teachers—doctors?...most certainly, doctors…we are not valued without value. It was tautological in its intent and even less pleasing or fulfilling in reward. The end, as punishment inadequate, misplaced the primitive suggestion: I am corrupted by the mere suggestion that I must conform. The potential option evades the eventual conquistador and he, alas he alone, is met with model success in an evaporating skin. Perhaps, by chance, he may even request his execution as a remaining reminder of his inability to adhere, to belong, to them. It is the vanquishing of such a identity the modern thinking man becomes: he is, no longer by chance, a chance to witness his only observable and owned being, his spiritual self, his redemption at the eager failure of all passage of development and advancement: his betrayal of only this, this skin. He is not the sum of markings and hair and canard: he is a resolution. There are no exclamations in the final burial of the driving mind that will not breed inadequacy into the un-sterile, fruited, existence that we have found as exception and as ours: it is not an arrival of acceptance and of approval, it is not a landscape of social adequacy, of recommendation, of networking: it is, on hands that are only hands, in skin that will un-become, the solemn promise, the blessing embrace--it is the spirit of the skin and the absolute passion of observance: to witness and not to force a world into it. They have, I suppose, the hardly misinformed tyrant suggests, asked--continually though not universally--bad questions. I am un-become at the insistence that I must become and there is an environment on which I will beast myself to pieces in one memory.

For when I was eighteen, I forced to memory (and have easily forgotten) my own self, the self-imposed and created principle of my life: in deep wells I gather water and feel the rhythm of the earth upon my soul.