A Pure Experience

I’m having a difficult time deciding how to format an explanation as to what is occurring in my life now. It is evident that I have wandered pretty far down a twisted path and I have not kept meticulous notes, so it is hard to know when to start this story, or discussing what. I will start it with this morning.

I woke in the usual lengthy and drawn out fashion that I have become accustomed to, letting my dreams flit onwards towards whatever conclusions they wish to draw. During these hours I like to think that things that are secret to me are being sorted out. There had been an uncomfortable dream in which a kitten was killed by a car and I screamed and cried for the moment to stop itself, to be reversed, so that this awful thing could be undone, but it was done. And then I wanted to destroy the car. I had a gun and I was going to shoot at it but someone stopped me. Because I am superhuman in my dreams I jumped to where it was now with my new sledgehammer and I hatefully destroyed it. In my conscious mind I realized that the kitten had been Caramel and the car had really been a truck that afternoon when Jess and I were throwing wallnuts at each other in the thick yellow sun, when that hillbilly came and gave me my first horrible memory. Our dead cat. In this dream I got to do what I had wanted to do then. So I let the dream go on.

When I fully woke I did not have the hate. What I had was an idea. Origami birds made out of Bible paper bonded in a sheet of Combat Paper. I knew right then that it was the complete thought I had been trying to have for years. The first real piece. The first thing which binds together that me and the me that I am now.

I allowed myself to remember the folding. The infinite folding. My fingers perfect machines… working… until all of that awful paperwork which told stories about what the hillbillies were doing in “the camp”. It was worst than what the did to Caramel the cat. All of them. In the thick yellow sun. And in my box I folded and I told people what to do. Sometimes we talked like pirates on the radio. I was funny then. I had to be.

The birds filled trashcans and sat on top of every computer terminal in the Detentions Operations Center. To think of them now I don’t understand how I got away with it. Of course they were my doing and of course they were too gaudy for the decorative habits of the United States Armed Forces during a time of war in a thing like a detention facility. But they let me do what I did. I do not know why. Perhaps it is because ultimately I was the best at what I did. Eggleston had trained me to be his replacement and his were big boots to fill. Everyone loved him. I scared everyone. I wore suicide to work and they could smell my fear. I was a continuous panic attack folding Top Secret documents surrounded by cat killers.

That is a part of me. Those birds are a part of me. They are my history and my thesis statement. They are the only beautiful thing my hands could think to do. They were my peaceful place. They were my prayer to God to make it stop. They were my little fuck you to everyone around me.

I didn’t understand why it had to be Bible paper. I went for a walk to figure it out. I did figure it out. In the cemetery.

It was God’s fault. Or at least I blamed God. I still believed in him then even though I said that I didn’t and my dog tags said AGNOSTIC. But I believed in God. In the same way that Lucifer believed in God. I hated God because God owned me and this whole disaster. God didn’t write the Bible or the Quran or the Torah. I know enough to know that. Men wrote those things and they used the names of the Gods to condone killing and torture and to control people’s minds so that they can control their lives. So like the Standard Operating Procedure of Camp Delta I will fold those foolish words into birds and bind those birds into our fibers.

But I didn’t have a Bible.

I went to the church to ask them if they had one. Nobody was there. I walked around the place for a few minutes. Deserted. I saw several Bibles in the pews. I made a hasty explanation to myself that I was spreading God’s word and before I knew it I was out the door with the book under my arm and a new pep in my step.

I don’t mind stealing from places like Wal-Mart or Target but I’d never even considered if I’d steal from a Church. My golden rule with stealing is to not steal from people. And that’s pretty much it. I’d meant to ask for it. I’m sure they would have given it to me anyway.

The zen came back immediately as my fingers danced the nimble dance they’ve danced so often in the past in the dimly lit rooms that I have called my homes and my places of work. They worked on their own frequency so my mind was free to read the words of terror that were exposed on slender necks and bending wing. It no longer surprised me that people do what they do. It makes perfect sense I suppose. In a certain light at least.

Pouring the pulp over the birds and disturbing the surface of the sheet by bombarding it with handfuls of water creating bomb blast craters amidst their sagging elegance, fibers sprayed over their bodies violently. It felt like bombing my past.

I nursed them as they dried on the sidewalk, anxiously picking at their coats like a nitpicking mother. The stone sucked the water through the mesh.

I left a place on the sheet to put the face of the woman whom I’d drawn on the dream journal I kept while I was there. I carved her face in linoleum and printed it on white Egyptian cotton and now it sits waiting to be bonded to the sheet with the birds.

I am impatient for it to be done, but there is so much else to do. I must build a frame and more glass has to be acquired and shattered and where will I put the blue paint on this piece? So many questions remain unsolved and every minute brings more and that is why I need art and that is why I know that I am doing the right thing.

I had a pure experience today.