In the rainbow jungle the soldier said that you must make a friend of horror and moral terror and I listened, not because I understood but because it was Brando, and when he speaks we listen, and when he dies then god has died too and we are alone in the jungle at last with all the other monkeys who fight and fuck and sacrifice and feel feel feel in their hearts - sensations so real they can be weighed in ounces or metres or joules - the units don't matter, what matters is that the heart emits a measurable force that is not magnetism or gravity - the monkeys are adaptable and can swim through the void forces of this universe - but the heart-force twists them shapeless and wrenches time out of every cell of their bodies. the body is ash and mud and levers and sacks, it is a suit of armour, a cello, a computer. like the knights of god riding into battle waving the banner of the skull and bones, we charge headlong into the unknown journey of our lives with every breath reminding us of the end. Yeats said Man has created death - did he know, or was he just writing pretty poetry? I know what the mystics know but I am not mystical - I'm nothing but a flower falling off a winter stem. I understand everything but I don't have any words for it. I know who I am but I can't tell you. I've been spending my life trying to bridge the gap between the body and the mind - what we know and what we can communicate - and I think it can't be done. I thought if you closed the gap enough that we would pull sparks across it like a synapse but I've never seen it happen and maybe it will never happen. The body knows. The mind can never know.
Moral terror is an old woman lying in bed at night praying to Jesus to keep her from shitting herself while she sleeps. Jesus doesn't care; if he's listening I'm sure he loves her, but her shit and dignity is of no concern to him. He wants to bring her home and he knows she can't bring the flesh with her. Her body will die and recycle like everything else and no history will record her shame. She says that when she brought me walking through the park when I was younger she never imagined I would see her this way and she cries and she says that we are only clay, only mud - she cries, what are we, what are we? In her dreams she chases my rabbits to try to cuddle them. Every corner of memory in the house is emptying itself. The budgie died months ago and the empty cage catches her eye in the evenings, and she calls herself a little bird. In the bathroom as she takes off her soiled nightdress she says that it's time for her to die. I told her that she still had things to do and she smiled and said "Like what?" She knows what we are and there's nothing she can do or say about it. There are no words for what's really happening to her. She says that she doesn't know what to say to me, that nothing she can think of suffices. I am more and more quiet. She's dying, whether it's in a month or a year or ten years, and there's nothing to say about it because every pretension and hope and platitude is burnt to ash in the naked body.