A Prologue to Action:

His mouth hung open. He wanted her!
right then, he wanted her!
And she was not unwilling.

they fell to, on the ground
You've seen a baker rolling dough.
He kneads it gently at first,
then more roughly

He pounds it on the board.
It softly groans under his palms.
Now he spreads it out
and rolls it flat.

then he bunches it,
and rolls it all the way out again,
Thin. Now he adds water,
And mixes it well.

Now salt,
And a little more salt.

Now he shapes it delicately
to its final shape
and slides it into the oven,
which is already hot.

You remember breadmaking!
this is how your desire
tangles with a desired one.

And it's not just a metaphor
For a man and a woman making love.

Warriors in battle do this too.
A great mutual embrace is always happening
between the eternal and what dies,
between essence and accident.
-Rumi, Mathnawi

I missed her skin. Then. I wanted the molecules of her dermis to remain behind. The quiet residue of her existence that would mix with mine intermittently in the dustclouds of our small apartment. I missed that. When she left. I missed the thin hint of tine in her voice. The way that voice could cut through a crowded bar full of drunkenness like a razor. The way that thin hint of tin went all nassally when she'd call my name. At first.

Every thing changes. And everything we think and hope beyond all clear thoughts and true hope will stay still for ever in the magic of some moment or clarity or beauty or razor-like intenseness of reality, it will change regardless. Stillness is ephemeral. change is all that ther is. Everything else is pure illusion. Just a conjurer's slight of hand, making us feel secure in our own selves, in our own time. Yet still that security slips through the fingers like the grains of sand through an hourglass. Trickling slowly through the tightest grip. The tighter the grip the faster it slips. I'd say. The trick becomes more clear as more sand passes through the hourglass. There was never any self. There was only the motion of time.

When she left, I found myself surpringly feelingless. There was just a quietness and an emptiness. No tears or high emotion. Just a small apartment that suddenly and irreparably felt big. I guess that's why she left. I guess I know that's why.

I've always been curiously fascinated by the idea of interior lives. Whenever I read history or meet people, I'm always wondering what's going on inside. What in the world is their inner world like? Is it in any way similar to mine? Sure we can line up our thoughts, sor of. We can speak them out loud; but feelings are different. Emotions are like colors. Except with colors there's a thing out there that we can all point to to agress on what's /the/ what. I mean, I can say I feel sad, but what does that really mean? And how do you know that what you feel when someone dies or someone leaves is in any way similar to what it is I feel?

You don't. Not really. Sure we can talk it out. We can describe the minutia of the feelings. The nuances of that psycho-psyio response. If so inclined. If so inclined, we can delve into the literature and language of neuro or cognitive science and find the neural or psycho-neural correlates of the emotions, but what does that really tell us? It's just a color we can point to and say there, that's blue. You see it. I see it. None of thatmeans we see the same thing. It only means we're pointing at the same thing.

Which may be why I find subjectivity so curiously fascinating. And beyond that, this notion of the sociologists that our interior lives are, in a certain way, re-representations of our exterior, liminal, interactions. Intersubjectivity. And if you think about it, it certainly complicates things. For example, when you think to yourself thoughts about what you should or do feel, it can change the feeling. What was previously part of some undifferentiated, blog-like mass of feeling becomes sadness or meancholy or ebullience or sated happiness or what have you. And these thoughts form in the ways they do because of the previous conversations we've had or television programs we've watched. So, my unique color of emotion is the reslut of the way John Hughes used to write about life and love and high school.

I still find that hard to swallow sometimes. Regardless, still, I remain forever curious. I want to know what's going on inside of hter people's heads. What they think and feel in their most private moments. In the quiet times. When they/ we're all alone. Why they then decide to do the things they do. Make the choices they make. I mean, we see the choices in the actions or the words, but how they got there; what causes world historical decisions. Or delusions. It's gotta be the quiet, offstage moments. Those have to take primacy. And we can only know that through hearsay and logico-philosophical speculation.

Maybe I just lost my salt. Maybe that's what happened. that's what she said, in her way. That I wasn't there. That there was nothing going on inside anymore. That I waslost to the world outside, and was losing my interior world as a direct result. That was basically what she said. And there was truth there. She wasn't wrong. Witness, my reaction to her deparutre. Nothing. Nada, zip, zilch, zero.

that's not to say that my interior life was evaporation, evaporating. Well, in a sense it was, but it was for good cause. I'd become obsessively focused on the interior lives of my characters. I'd become so immersed in their lives that my ownlife had slowly then rapidly become inconsequential. And that was what became, had become of, my interior life. The immersion in their lives was my life. Became my life. And so I guess it's not wrong or unfair to say that I'd lost my interior life. Just not really the truth. I hadn't lost it. I'd just subsumed it in the lives of the others, in the other. In the lives of the characters. Hell, they were more important than I could ever hope to be.