Photo courtesy of: ‘Terror…’ by Benito Valles – Flickr
http://tinyurl.com/y9ge8jmn
I used to have a kind of ‘spacephobia‘ as a small child, particularly around sleep and nightmares. Scary things lurking in a dark and silent not-knowing… leave the nightlight on and the door ajar… a wakefulness to cling to at the edge of an abyss of dread… of dreams of things that would end me… a breathless void…
Then one night, I faced the fear in a dream… confronted the snarling teeth and red angry eyes materializing from the formlessness. I stood my living ground and challenged it… and then, a fearful, snarling certain death slowly receded into the blackness never to return…
I let go of the fear of the dark, that ‘deficient emptiness’, and merged with it… I became the space I was terrified of… eventually I understood that space as my capacity to know… the essence of me, not the images and things filling it that I constantly and habitually identified with. I was more than all my stories, more than what I thought of myself…
My friend Ken seems to have faced that fear in time… moment to fleeting moment…
AMUSEMENT
By Ken McKeon
I think of death and the blue sky,
I’d scoop out a grave right there,
Daytime, sun lit, warm,
But nighttime all within
The circulating realms of starlit fabrications,
The orderly reeling of explosive life,
Dazzlement darlings,
The get-a-longs that bring about the whole array,
All of us in the service of its imagined gods,
Why not rest among them,
Bones of ivory openly buried
In the shifting timelessness of the whole shebang,
Trippy huh?
And just why not?
I have a child’s treasure here in my worn out wallet,
An e-ticket from Disneyland 1957,
It might be still good on a major Tomorrowland ride,
I’d take it once again,
I’d blast off from Anaheim,
I wouldn’t have to pack,
It’s come as you are,
And once up, I’d simply slip out a hatch,
Find an open furrow in the starry fields,
Dig in and plant a radiant flag,
Then enter this final slot and chill,
Dream on into a breathlessness
That lifts the last feel and thought
Of all that is up in a chalice, a sip,
Then formlessness at last,
The empty open givenness,
A mirror without a hint of breath,
A unseeded seedless presence,
A nowhere to be found.
