Staying Alive – Imagination Error

Staying Alive is a collections of poems, a book I bought because the girl on the cover was trying to tell me a secret. Her eyes tattooed themselves in my mind… and I was very much interested to find out how to stay alive. The truth is that I don’t know how stay alive and according to quantum physics, I and any of us might not even exists. I recently went under full body anesthesia and one thing is bothering me to madness. I remember inhaling the gas and I was expecting to have a gradual sleep, like in the movies. Instead I went from being conscious strait to waking up. It’s normal you’d say but if dying is like this, I’m fucked! When I fall asleep I can feel my muscles paralyzing or my brain working slower, just like getting drunk to passing out. Anesthesia Is a deep sleep but death is the next level (believers, please keep you’re providence to yourselves). I didn’t have this enigma when I bought the book, just another clue to the puzzle. Is Carpe Diem the answer? More Joy or Satisfaction in my past days would have made my brain more powerful in fighting the gas? I want my last seconds of life to lasts forever, not to miss this intense experience of life. I don’t just want to die like an unconscious second.

I will try to answer this question by Carpe Diem my ass off. Let’s talk about that. I want to show you a poem from this book, by Alden Nowlan.

An Exchange Of Gifts

Alden Nowlan

As long as you read this poem
I will be writing it.
I am writing it here and now
before your eyes,
although you can’t see me.
Perhaps you’ll dismiss this
as a verbal trick,
the joke is you’re wrong;
the real trick
is your pretending
this is something
fixed and solid,
external to us both.
I tell you better:
I will keep on
writing this poem for you
even after I’m dead.

Isn’t it fantastic? For a moment there I thought I had my answer but reading it again few times I realized I don’t. The poem is intended for the ones with beating hearts and brain activity. Otherwise I too am going to write a self after-life poem to come (back) alive every time You read me. Sounds a bit like sorcery. The words of my voodoo like poem will be putting one minute of my life in a loop. Good news, I’d be getting one minute younger every time + 1 you’d reed it. What the fuck I just said?

What about losing my mind, my memories or double my personality? I’d be dead? Hart Crane might be on to something. He’s not giving me any good news but at least he makes me asking myself another set of questions. More work. Outstanding!

Forgetfulness
Hart Crane

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, —
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, — or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, — white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

So I wander: Am I dying or am I living?

Up to this point I only concluded my state of existence. I decided I’m in trouble so I must be alive. I don’t need to hunt lions in Africa to prove it to myself that I’m alive. I am comfortable… oh shit! I should erase this word, Comfortable, from my brain. Every read book is another life lived but from the comfort of the bed, or chair. There it is, that word again! Next time I jump from an airplane I’ll reed a book on my way down. Take that, Comfort!

It’s Good To Be Here

Alden Nowlan

I’m in trouble, she said
to him. That was the first
time in history that anyone
had ever spoken of me.

It was 1932 when she
was just fourteen years old
and men like him
worked all day for
one stinking dollar.

There’s quinine, she said.
That’s bullshit, he told her.

Then she cried and then
for a long time neither of them
said anything at all and then
their voices kept rising until
they were screaming at each other
and then there was another long silence and then
they began to talk very quietly and at last he said
well, I guess we’ll just have to make the best of it.

While I lay curled up,
my heart beating,
in the darkness inside her.