Phone woke me this morning, brash, strident, buzzing its secrets into my ear, digital tones, screaming, and it was awful, vocalese horror, wordless anger. It was the piano tuner again, he was coming over, he was going to tune the piano, it'd be such and such dollars. All right.

After he tuned it he played it for a while and I left my body and watched him from crouched on top of the bookshelves on the other side of the room. Music is real. If I am the world, if the world is me, then I can't study the world without studying me. And the scariest thing in the world is to move the ego out of the way and really see yourself, really see yourself maybe as other people see you, or worse yet, see yourself in a way that you've never let anyone else see, and that's what we're doing when we study the world, that's what science and religion and all the rest are doing when they pretend to be a big transparent eyeball and stare at the world without it staring back. They're just scared, scared to see themselves.

I don't know the piece the piano tuner is playing, but it doesn't matter; it sweeps across and up and down the range of musical sounds I know, and it is beautiful, in a very pure sense, so that the word "beauty" doesn't really describe it. And I feel the music pound down the doors of my perception and all of a sudden I am beyond. Beyond language, specifically, beyond the way language restricts me, beyond any framework I have created or has been created for me to live in, to keep me sane, to keep me from not dying of too much perspective. When Nietzsche went over the line, went beyond what he could handle, when what he understood went beyond what he had the capacity to understand, he went crazy, started signing all of his letters "Bacchus." And now I know why. He knew everything, right then, for one instant he knew everything and he was a god, and then when he came down, when his mind closed him off and he could no longer know it all, he had to live his life, had to close off some of his connections, he couldn't take it. He couldn't take losing that connection; couldn't take the knowledge that he'd once Had It and he might never Have It Again. Not even salvation could save him-after all, God was dead back then.

I need language, I need a framework to live my life, I need a society, I need a culture, but I know now that I am not those frameworks; if I have any spiritual connection to anything at all it is the knowledge that the world exists, and we can only ever see it in strange filtered limited ways, but outside of all that there is something, somehow, somewhere. I am a castaway. I am a stowaway.

I am lost at sea, lost in space, lost to myself, to my self. I float free of the world, I am of the world and not in the world.

I am found in the interior spaces, in the nooks, in the crannies of my mind, I am in him and her and it and they and I, and I, and I am...I am.

I am not afraid anymore. >