Originally published in Verbicide issue #7

In his head, the Kid slowly cycles towards half–speed, adjusting to the boredom of normalcy; a madman tone–ing down, sighting through shades of grey where once he saw psychedelic colors…

When had the change come? With familiarity, mainly. Hipped to the language. How true the world. He sees nothing at first, can barely see himself. Slowly actions happen around him and to him, his blinders begin to erode. His picture starts to paint. He moves into a bigger world.

He gets more and more caught up, his life becomes bold and rich. Yet he finds himself growing unsure, less able to see himself as clearly as he did when he was all there was to see. The earth trembles beneath him. The erosion of his self, he begins to go under. He makes love to the drug, his old visions recede into the past. He can’t tell if they ever really existed at all. He looks and thinks.

“I can’t keep control of my thoughts. Did I really ever think like that? Are those my thoughts I’m thinking? If my mind was a file cabinet,” he thinks, “I could pull the file on those thoughts, and check it out, in front of me.”

All he can do is think, try to think: what is the present? When was the past? What was it that happened there? Where are we now? Do we dream? The Kid stands mute trying to look down the street and he imagines he’s looking down the knife-like edge of the world. Cutting away the crap. He tries and he fails.

Now he’s a shell, caught up in the facts of his breakfast table. His ride to work. His conversations. He smiles and says: “We’re all working towards the same thing.”

He tries to tow the day to day images along, to place them end to end and see the continuity. The year to year cartography. Once he couldn’t love, now he can love and can also lose because of it, never knowing if love is on or off, yes or no, if he’s in ecstasy or near death. “I see you in a different light each morning,” he tells his wife, “how can i ever know you? You’re not me, I’m not even me most of the time.”

He looks down at his hands and then away, through the room to the window. Outside a cloud is slowly stretching, unfurling, between two very tall buildings. There is a beautiful deep quality to the blue of the sky. Has he ever seen it like that before? “Christ I don’t even know!” he cries almost aloud. “I can’t hold the image! I can never be sure!”

He breaks down into some kind of mumbling Ur–language murmur. Almost talking to himself, but not quite, not yet. He can’t make it back to level one, not at this point. He tries for a long time to finally comprehend this. His shallow surroundings are nothing at all like simplicity. Finally he crosses the line in one brave and blind instant. The skeins of former levels he sheds like skins. He floats between viewpts, he can see anything he wants, and everything. A great bounty fills his eyes, with the promise of an infinite stream of visions to follow. Endless pictures in need of re-vision, separation, interpretation. Endless non-sequiturs of happenstance and dialogue, events, thoughts. On through the levels, on towards the end.  at some point one hopes to mesh with the world, to slip quietly between the warp and woof, to live ‘in between.’

“Maybe every tiny thing becomes clear in the end,” he says. “Maybe I might know for sure.”

“Maybe I’ll find a true picture.”

“Must I break a chain to build a chain?”

“Maybe the images never cease.”

“Perhaps this smoke will never clear.”

(but)

“Maybe this dream just goes on and on.”

—

Lee Ranaldo’s Lengths & Breaths (2003) is available via Water Row Press. For more Lee, visit www.leeranaldo.com or www.sonicyouth.com.