Ah, and so, dear Cellist, laughing-eyed, kind--we come to the heart of the matter. For while all this is true, and all the perennial darkness of our days gloams over, still this:
Yes.
My goal above goals is just this Yes. To cultivate Yes-ness. To say Yes to all things. Not in some tepid bypassing of true darkness and misery, but in spite of and (here, Mystery) somehow because of them. This, the Nietzschean dispensation. This, the inspired madness of every Kerouacian hero. This, the final ecstatic exclaim of Molly Bloom in bedded (g)nostic glory. This, the daimon of every Dionysian maenad and initiate crying "Evoe!" to the open night. This, the stuff of bonfires and gladness--but also, yes, the dogged blear-eyed affirmation needed in all awakenings to the cold cold drear day one more day. The acceptance and, nay, indeed, assertion of what is as is, and to all Is and I AM: Yes. The commitment to rise, and rise again, and find, in rising, every scrap of blessing in the cold earth imaginable. This, the straw for "sucking the marrow out of life." Yes. Yes to all, to everything. Yes: my dawning catechism.
But how is this done? Hard wisdom. A notion only chipped off in discovery from the massive marble of experience relatively recently. For the Stone Tablets of the Hebrews gave us "Thou Shalt Nots" and the Church's doctrines "Mea Culpas" and "Nay, verily's"; even the bliss-eyed Buddha only "Dukkha! Dukkha is life! And desire its cause." And, sure, all these hard insights in their place and time. But the odd enlightenment I seek is only "Yes!" Yes Yes to the whole world. To slay the god of gravity, as Nietzsche said, and dance, not over abysses, but over vast vistas and open roads and even the immense expanse of ineffable space within my psyche. To look on love and sorrow and say "Yes yes, well there it is." To look on laughter and the joyous crackling exhalations of exuberant honking men in overalls squealing on saxophones at swirling fans and say "Yes!" to them, and thus Yes to life. And Yes, likewise, on the dark dimensionless loneliness of my own inner cosmos as it circles in uncertain turns and gyres before immensities of beauty opened up unaudienced but to my eyes, and say "Ah, yes. Ah Yes. This too. And yes, all this, forever." To be Faust forfeiting daily his fool's bet--to invert it with old dry Mephistopheles and say "My soul, if I don't wish every moment to stay. My very ghost, if I don't weep for all moments to linger, as if the very Insight, as if Transcendence glorified in every tip and stipule of the leaves, as if this Now were not all Nows, and Now was not Eternity." Ah! Yes! Yes Yes to the Spirit of Negation. Yes, to the Spirit of Gravity. Yes yes yes, to all paleness, and all desiccating brittle time. Yes to all and everything--yours, dear Cellist, Yes; and mine.
This, this Yes, is my Commandment, and Precept Numero Uno of my burgeoning catechism: Rule 1 for a new Order of Jolly Monks I'd be fathering: eager oddball seekers who shall live on Yes. A monastic troupe of cock-eyed sillymen-and-women (and-everything-in-between-and-onward). A Yes to live by for strange initiates into a fledgling ragtag temple diaspora, roaming America and beyond in little arks they sculpted from the castoff debris of a sunsetting civilization. Holy fools and mystics seeking Yes in every corner, giggling, smoking pipes in Thereauvian mobile shacks--an army of odd new spiritualists, engrossed in Earth, planting onions in their windowsills, dancing in street festivals; hippy idiots with GOD and sutras and bibles and Whitmans and whatever else inspires them under their arms, perspiring; stark, foolish, naked; spreading Light amongst lights, and illuminating with sod Truth the plodding ritualistic slog of the dull world. Whirring about over the face of the Earth, planting trees in odd places on never-ending trajectories. Loving and laughing and weeping and sighing and circling up up up in ecstasies to the angelic Vision, saying, "Heehaw! Hey now. Yes! That's it. Haha!"
All this I hope to chart, and bring such seeds for future gardens in my foolish ark. All this, Cellist, now just starting!
But--more anon.
Adieu.
- Leaf