SEEKING

Seeking is harder than finding. I tell myself everyday that I need to clean parts of my apartment. Parts of my apartment are really quite clean all the time, but other parts are dirty and maybe even necessarily dirty. My bathroom is dirty but I always avoid cleaning it. My closet is full of stuff, “stuff” being the apt description of what's in my closet, really the only word that describes what's actually in there. A lot of clothes, games, sheets, books, Christmas lights, boxes of Christmas lights everywhere, Jesus Christ Christmas lights everywhere, practically filling up the place, if only I plugged in an outlet and turned them on they would glow brightly and burn through their boxes, I'm sure. And of course then start a blaze that would hollow out not only my apartment but the whole building, leaving nothing but scar tissue—really just a burned-out brick foundation in which people used to live, love, crafty, die, probably not give birth but maybe get pregnant. This scar tissue would remain for a winter or a year or however long it takes demolition crews to demolish a burned out brick building, possibly forever, but actually not long, as the land is worth quite a bit of money and I'm sure there are developers who would love to buy the property and put it back together. A profit motive. I imagine it would succeed, I think to myself as I search for my glasses, being completely unsuccessful in finding them. The capability is there: there's plenty of machinery and tools and manpower and money; like ants on an anthill they would swarm through the burned out building and, using shovels or perhaps diesel powered machines, plow away everything burned down by my mistake of turning on my Christmas lights in their boxes, I think, even as I look everywhere for my glasses. Where are they? My glasses not not anywhere on the floor, I think, I've looked everywhere, even under the bed. The proper method is to start from the ground up and then look everywhere, knowing that at some physical level one will always find one's desired object. So I've started at the ground and completed that portion of my search to no success, and then without even moving on to the second level, which is just above ground level—somewhere around a foot up, but possibly somewhat lower or higher (this method allows for deviance)--I've given up and now I just think about burned out scar tissue. Thankfully the blind don't need eyesight to think, I think as I sit down in my chair, half-tired and half-mad, impatient and inept in my search. I'm not blind but I can't see right, something's wrong: I'm either nearsighted or farsighted, I believe near-sighted, though at the moment in my impatience I'm only half-thinking this thought, so I can't really be sure whether I'm really nearsighted or farsighted because I can't form the thought, really I'm only thinking about the scar tissue that would result if I turned on my Christmas lights. Thinking about it so much, in fact, that I actually get up and stand in front of the boxes and pretend to turn the lights on, snapping my fingers and pretending to start the fire. I imagine leaving the building. I have no desire to burn my building down but I imagine the possibility of it happening. Fires are terrifying , or at least I imagine they are terrifying. I imagine this as I sit in my large red chair, one leg resting on an arm rest and both my arms grabbing this leg together, and then in one motion I actually pull myself up and over so that I am actually standing in front of the chair looking at it. And then I sit back down again, only this time in a normal position. Scar tissue amazes me for a second, and instantly I start to think again about the burned-out building—but these thoughts quickly turn to the scar tissue in my gut due to my inflamed bowel. Basically somebody turned the Christmas lights on inside me, I think, as if my colon were an apartment in a multi-apartment complex in which someone like myself lived and had no motivation to clean his little corner of the building. Or even to clean a little corner of a corner. So one day he turned on his Christmas lights and cooked the whole place, only this time there was no developer and no profit motive for rebuilding the property, even the healthcare system gave up rather quickly as he couldn't afford to pay and in fact even refused to pay. And so the scar tissue stood longer than expected, a year, a lifetime. A lifetime of scar tissue, I think, due to someone inside my gut turning on his Christmas lights hidden away within a cardboard box. But would this even start a fire, I question, and I'm tempted to turn everything on, light everything up, illuminate the darkness of these boxes and see if I even notice anything, let alone a fire that rips through the entirety of the building. But rather than do this I simply sit and think about various methods for finding my glasses, which are still missing. I simply sit. And think. And I don't know where they could be. I've gone over every inch of the floor, I think, and of course I've gone over every other obvious place. Seeking is harder than finding, I think. And not only for the pleasure of the find, because everyone loves to find something. Seeking is harder for more insidious reasons even if I can't explain it. Seeking is a crossing, but also a separation. Separation is hard if we have a desired object and we are separated from it, but seeking is a crossing towards this object, always hard in itself but harder still if this object is impossible to find and no method of search completes our crossing. In fact, because of the nature of my own search (I can't see without my glasses—quite the cliché), I can't even begin a cursory search of my apartment, even the clean parts. For all I know my glasses are lost in one of the parts of the apartment in which I cannot clean, cannot even imagine myself going into and cleaning. My god the thought is loathsome. And so again I sit in the red chair and think, arms grasping at my leg. And so method comes in here: we seek a method by which to understand how to even begin seeking, and my method is as good as any other method for seeking, I should think. Seeking is a trembling before the infinite, I think, but then I wonder what I mean by that and of course I'm overstepping my thoughts, so I get up from the red chair and go looking for my glasses. The scar tissue inside my body due to my inflamed bowel doesn't hurt, but it can hurt. Somebody turned the Christmas lights on and burnt the place down, I think, and now I have a dilapidated piece of real estate inside my bowel. One wonders about the future; one always anticipates the future. The possibility of developing this piece of land is grim. I think acceptance comes into play here but again, acceptance is impossible, it's infinite due to something more insidious than we've previously suspected. Seeking is harder than finding. Seeking is a trembling before the infinite and now I think I've made some sense of this senseless thought—I really quite like that red chair, I think. Everything is encrypted in images and metaphors and deciphering is only a waste of time. Encryption can protect us from people by helping us remain undecipherable. But really we're an open book (really we're documenting everything, it's plain to see). Really everything's there in front of us, presented to us, but most of the time we're too lazy to connect the pieces and really read what's written. Everyone who writes makes monstrous errors—and we must always remember when reading that, of course, and obviously, seeking is harder than finding.