The Journals Book II

January 18,1991 (10:38 p.m.)

And how has it come that I should be responsible for the survival of humankind?  People don''t even like me much.  Nor I, them.  No, untrue.  I am ambivalent.  I am neutral as to the doings of people.  I have no true friends.  I have not cultivated them with any finesse.  I do have acquaintances, people who transact commerce with me.  But money does not intimacy make.

Why pick a person whose best attribute has been to be invisible?  The person whose name no one remembers.  I am always the one about whom someone says, "Who was that guy... oh, what was his name?" or worse, I am not even remembered for having been there.  I am forgettable.  Eminently disguised and ignored.  I blend.  I am the vodka in the alcoholic''s orange juice.  I am the gray-brown trench coat in the doorway.  I have made a career of it.

So why should I step forward with these secrets, with this wisdom from the cosmic order?  I barely care.  I am not the one to embrace and bless.  I am one to shrug and yawn.

Maybe the perfect messenger is one who has small care.  Can it be true that I am the noblest creature to deliver the words because I have no investment, no ownership in the outcome?  Is it my distance, the void in my heart, that allows me to be the vessel?  An empty urn in which to put the flowers of redemption.  Can I be the nondescript vase that allows beauty to blossom and be recognized?  Perhaps.  A more mundane character, a more disconnected person than I, cannot be found, My life has been one of separation—from my family, from my country, from my god (or any god).  I have never been able to claim a deity for my own.  It never held my interest.

And what of it?  I am not the lesser for my lack of passion.  Am I?  Who among us does not feel this chasm, this gap of emotion, this incredible longing?  I think everyone feels it.  I think we''re all great pretenders smiling at the rain, or celebrating the sunshine, crying inside in fear as we stand at the edge of the abyss which drops a jagged thousand yards only inches from our feet.  We know it''s there, but deny it.  We look to the blue sky above desperate to ignore our trembling knees.

The rickety bridge built of distractions constructed plank-by-plank offers little comfort across the gulf between us.  Despite our attempts to deny the gulf—fancy restaurants, luxury cars, rounds of golf, night after night of television, designer drugs for the neurosis of the week, self-help seminars, books, pottery classes, sporting events, newspapers, magazines, masturbation, alcohol in all its inebriating forms, vacations, affairs, flirtations, cosmetics and cosmetic surgeries, idolatry of man-made stars and starlets, and an infinite number of other bemusements, including the latest war—it is there before us.  We stand at the abyss, listening to our teeth chatter and our anxious hearts pound, and tell ourselves we don''t hear anything—nothing at all.

But we know.  We know the truth.  We know the lies we tell ourselves.  We know the untruths we tell others.  We know we must leap in order that we save our souls.  We know that we must learn trust, that the gulf is the real lie; it is an illusion of our individual creation.  If we swallow our pride, if we silence our fears and leap, the gulf disappears and the world embraces us.

This is what we want to believe.  This is what we fear.  This is our continual spiritual test.  It is the source of our misery, of our distant longing.  We know it but cannot help to deny its truth.  And so we live apart.  And the gulf seems bigger now than ever before.