The Theollectual Circuit

It is wholly correct to use the word loopy when speaking of the insane.

We are referring to their broken record conversations, the all too human trait of specific obsession we call a falter on the brain. Perhaps the crazy just can’t come full circle, from the silence before to the silence after (and they are both and always the silence that underlies), but are caught in a broken version of this inevitable circuit, the rail on which the consciousness rides, that nucleus about which the synapses snap and spark. In an almost tactile way the length and resonance of this bio/spiritual wave is what differentiates you from me, us from them, the crazy from the insane.

In my underlying silence, I spy him through the hinges of his half-open bedroom door. His back is to me. His hands are clasped before him. The light streams in from the rounded window through which he stares.

"What are they looking for?" He asks of the tipping hats below, whether Jew or gentile, we knew from a casual glance at their cars. He shakes his head. He shrugs his shoulders. He may or may not know I am there . . .

This image of my father, this amalgam of weekend mornings, I’ve always held warm. It speaks of eventual French toast, of staying in our robes well into the afternoon, it says on this day we may regress back to our beds, in that towering home for the relentlessly self-possessed.

There mounts a genuine desire, a bio-imperative to set the scene; word picture the old Church, the reform Temple, my Father’s thinning hair, giving time and place . . . context and link . . . but ultimately it is my parents’ bedroom, my father’s back, the quiver between his shoulder blades and my odd sense of detached complicity that are what is seen.

There is some truth in it after all, Father and Son, Sisterhood, binding relations forming this or that percentage of our combined acknowledged selves, telling the World we are first and foremost this and you can call it that if you like, but not to my face. This is who I am born and bred to choose to be . . . the whole inevitability of the Mother, the way it all seems so obvious in the fresh Millennium . . . .

Yet.

Yet it’s nothing new.

I imagine that’s what my Father saw through the exaggerated clarity of the rounded window. Marx laid it out. Nietzsche exposed it. This Orwellian nightmare insipidly embodied in a brilliantly sunny morning, bearing witness to the faithful re-turning to their determining cars.

Of course I didn’t understand it in those terms back then. Almost, but I wasn’t quite past the discarding of that particular veil of ignorance. I like to think I didn’t give it any thought back then, give childhood the ol’ idyllic twist, the light, that moment, those countless moments of my Father and I unmoved by the hovering dust particles, a ghost in the sunlight between us.

It’s really about wondering if there’s something in the blood or brain that protects us from these airborne Narcofic-tions. More simply put, what do you do at a Pep rally if you don’t have genuine pep. You raise your arms with the rest of them and glance furtively about, hoping maybe to connect with another of the disjoined . . . yet dreading it. Fearing there can be no true fraternity of those who do not feel the helping invisible hands, are unable to give credence to this possible fourth dimension, spend their lives waiting for the lifting of that specific veil of necessary lies. There is some wisdom in ignoring the creeping sense of the soon and inevitable stumbling insurmountability of the third step.

Still, my Father’s back remains a proof of being and extension.

It’s funny how I am now moved to tell myself that he knew I was there. At nine or eleven or thirteen, it was of the utmost import that he not detect the nose-breathing spy outside his door. What I thought then to be of the Silence, I am now proving was no such thing. These exposures only work in retrospect, I suppose, when you realize just how clear the coast has always been.

Still there is something missing, a more primordial link.

I have often and truly joked, while in the bliss of scratching a purring cat or an attentive dog behind the ears, that all inter-mammal relations are based on giving head . . . People just take it different, that’s all. For us it has become religion. It is a prayer to ecstasy, a disclaiming act, a muffled cry of God.

I find myself again in my parents’ bedroom, leaning back on the cherry wood chair, the two enormous long-haired tom cats, Black and Wenge, swirling betweens my legs, jumping up on the dresser, nuzzling my nose with theirs. This is my mother vision. I am an ageless child, leaning back on the chair. She is cocooned in her myriad of blankets and pillows, crumpled Kleenexes sprout from her fertile bed. It was here, I think, that we became friends, in that first and uncomplicated way. This is how I picture her, the vision I hold when my phone rings and it can be no one else . . . and always the sun gleams through the rounded window in this homescape of my mind.

Still, it’s difficult to establish or even reestablish intimacy by telephone. There are hotlines and psychics, of course, and with them those willing to believe. Willing themselves to settle for being touched in that way, for whatever amount. Then there is meeting someone again and seeing a certain new light in their eyes, a beam you believe is affixed to you. There are messages on machines, can’t really talk now recalls, blind silences . . . because it is the light that you are both seeking, the light that can never be seen through this medium or that device.

But then you take old Joe Campbell, immortally dead these fifteen years, he still seems like such a nice man, so able to connect, describing the perfect courage of the soldier acting beyond thought, relying on the underlying, that which reverberates, transcends the circuitry inside. All this despite the medium, the constant PBS pledge drive interruption, the impossibility of actual touch or answered question . . .

With this my loop returns, if it ever left, to the crack in my parents’ bedroom door, the space between the hinges, my father’s back, the sense of enduring weekend mornings that speak of French toast.

"What are they looking for?" my father hisses into the thin air as another car, Sabbath clean, revs its engine under the foot of the Necrophobe inside. I spy my father in crisp slow motion as he unclasps his hands and places them on the sill of the rounded window.

"What are they looking for?" he asks again, looking for archetypes and ending up with animals in the light sublime.

"They‘re never going to find it," he finally answers, all the malice gone from his voice.

Yet, there remains that light between us, this light in which I see his perfect courage, always thinking, completely afraid and utterly alone.