Hoàng-Ân

LONG AND DEEP IS THE NIGHT


     The night is very deep, around three AM.  The coolness of the crisp air and soft comforter and pillows seeps through the pijamas into my skin.  I am sitting against the back of my sofa bed writing these lines. The tunes of BRAND X's jazz pluck the atoms in the air; movements, visible and invisible resonate through me. It has been years since I feel the palpable need to write. At first, sitting looking at the virginal white page, I didn't know how to start. I wish so much to describe how I feel so that I can find an anchorage for my turbulent state of being. Being able to verbalize, to give form to the uneaseness without apparent causes inside is always comforting. No wonder in the Christian myth of Adam, the first task Adam was given by his God was to name names to the participants in the Garden of Eden. To be exact in designation*was also the principle Eza Pound and Confuscius advocated.  All thinkers at first emptied all thoughts and then started out from the most basic axiom and elaborated their ideas from the root of an issue. Giving form, naming name is the effort to retain clarity and sanity.

     How do I describe my state of being now? My body is physically dis-eased and I am restless and cannot concentrate. It feels like a piece of beefstake being seasoned with hot spices. There is a longing and aching, impatiently arises from every cell of my body and brain: it is purely physical: being termed in psychiatry as psychosomatic symtom (psycho=mind; soma=body.)  I have been living withoud satisfaction with a certain amount of certainty for so long, it has become a habit for me to not know of or pinpoint my lacks: for I feel this way because I want so much for so long, it is a constant state of wanting and needing for everything and anything material or spiritual:

     Why can't I give myself the love I want from others for me: why do I depend so much upon the love that others, like me, withhold from each other: isn't it true that what I really want is to be the center of all of the universes, discovered and not yet to be?? Isn't it true that I am in every which way still bigger than my God??  If that is true then to whom do I pray now??


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*  Eza Pound: "exact terminology"
     Khổng-Tử: "thuyết chính-danh"