Falling

Posted on March 17, 2009 in Class Journals & Notebooks Mania Spirituality and Being Writing Exercises

More from my writing-practice book.

It is the exhilaration not the crash, the rush of wind not the ground or the stone. Though doomed to catastrophe you’re not dead yet. Mania is a long fall, sometimes so high it’s an orbit. I don’t think I’ve ever lost my sense of being tied to the earth completely. In fact, my relationship to the soil has been one of hostility towards it. Ground causes pain and boredom. Is it a wonder that I resent being buried in it? What an ugly phrase – “being well-grounded”. Sounds to me like being properly and permanently interred. I never liked well-grounded people because they often turned out to be accountants, a profession that I was obliquely pressured to join. Listen to the sound of numbers was the theme of my childhood & adolescence. No sense in my adolescence. The theme of the tears. Everyone having to form neat rows, phalanxes of values. If you couldn’t be assigned a number of some kind especially a salary, you were a nonperson, an invisible man. March ye figures into the zeroes, but always have a standard a head of you. And let that standard be an integer or more because that is who you are. So was it in the age of the Yuppie. You were because you had a well-paying job. I learned that the earning of money was spiritual. I tried to find the zeal for that religion but it only came to me in insufficient spurts. I never advanced so I felt rejected by Mammon and Moloch. They bore plenty on their warty, hirsute backs but I was not one of them.

(I honestly wonder what I would be if I hadn’t been blocked in my desires. I always wanted to be a prophet but in the Age of the Yuppie prophets had to have clean, well-tailored suits and a portfolio.)