Thinking, and: Doubting

Thinking

I don’t think I know how to go about it.

I sit at the edge of the water. As if it were the right place for learning to think.

As if it were enough to sway with the current. Or indecision? Stay? Walk away? Give in to the horizontal or a quick push upright? If I can’t walk might I yet, like Parkinson’s patients, be able to dance?

My brain’s incessant activity seems fruitless. It can’t be thinking. I put it on paper to encounter it outside myself. An obstacle. A wall with a grain, with pores where I might discover a pattern. Then I’m recalled to my body by legs as if pricked by needles.

How can I think when I can’t even see, night falling swiftly, shifting around me like water. Can one look at nothing and hope for help?

Is it a matter of rocking with the dark? Monotonously? But I’m speeding or slowing down the long lane where thinking gets lost in layers of dust, failing precision. Failing to see, to embrace. The gulls circling. The vast empty space. Traffic noise borne in on the wind.

Should I take off my clothes, nudity being power? But would I know my body scattered among memories? Impossible to hold in the mind all at once.

If I let the night invade my eyes, all the way to the horizon? As if it had a body? Might I then see the cause of my not seeing?

It might be a beginning.

Doubting

for Aaron Kunin, who walked among these doubts before

Wanting to doubt as if it were liberating, a spectacular absence of obstacle over vast distances. Enough to make me breathe.

Accepting the cracks in the walls, the tightened silhouette. But do I have to refuse consolations and permanent address surrounding my body?

Comparing the coordinates of knowing, douting, believing—if two or more theories fit the facts? If the facts dissolve in multiple perspectives?

Will I choose the simplest, the most elegant? Or the one that satisfies secret desires?

Trying to justify my choice without shrinking the field into mere surface erosion I wonder, will doubt fill the whole body? Or will it open into a modulation in what does not exist?

Not that I want to destroy, ironize, or even slam the door. I doubt that it would be useful to know myself.

I doubt that I can escape doubt. That I can finish my work. Or even begin, having only kidded myself that I was working.

I doubt that the bits will fuse into a prism for desire or other forms of feeling.

I don’t doubt that I’ll die. I doubt, at least if I remain in Providence, there will be good weather for the funeral.