December 24, 2000



  • In Xanga-du did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…





    No, wait…the geography has changed. Let me start again:





    In Xanga-land did not-a-prophet a stream of consciousness unleash…



    where words could flow as truth unhyped



    and interiority meet light as typed



    for all the world to see….





    OK: so start with bold aspirations, then live up to expectations…or die in the search for meaning.





    I am going to run up a mountain. I am going to run up this mountain and back down without falling, without stopping. As Jack Kerouac observed in Desolation Peak: you can’t fall off a mountain…. So let me imagine this mountain:





    Even before getting to the mountain, there is a long, long run through civilized constraints of asphalt-alley weaves and overbearing institutionally-slabbed hotels and artificed informational checkpoints that read: “Keep off the Grass” , “Stay off the Mountain” , and “Etc.”. The run up the mountain will be the real, physically-demanding torture once I get there, but the run to the mountain is now the ultimate mental anguish. Just getting there seems an ordeal comparable to the notorious WALL that overtakes marathon runners—the 23 mile or so letdown, comedown, slumdown. It is almost like the known-world wants to keep me off that magic imagined mountain and double-weights gravity to that end. So legs seem like lead and the head is slogged and what started out as a spirited sprint-run degenerates into a decelerating jog. “Oh shit, I quit!” remarks the little-walking-man inside my head. (oh-no little-walking-man, cousin to King’s garbage-can-man in The Stand!) It feels like on my road to my mythical mountain oz, I have encountered some mental poppy-like fields of forgetfulness, of sleep, of fatigue and release. But instead of beautiful fragrant poppies releasing a scented narcosis on a golden but dizzying road, I am encountering huge structures, massive architecture, and constructed trapments that pull in a jovian-fashion upon me and energetically yearn for me to linger…forever…among them. “ Stay here! Don’t go!” the mutli-faceted mausoleums that I’m struggling to pass seem to groan-sing. I reflect: I really could reside without ever wandering and die easily in such grandiose structures. After all, Kahlil Gibran pronounced: "The house is thy greater self!” And Emily Dickinson had need for no more than a farmhouse and plot to discover her cosmos both within and out… But in choosing the freedom of my mountain over the security of mapped terrain and known-world, I am letting go of—to be honest, losing— all that. You’re damn right I’m losing it…and just one thought is my last hope: if I could just get to the mountain….

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