MUSINGS

One of the Musings readers who has been kind enough to write to me about the column observed that my anonymity, my cloak of invisibility, was not intuitively graspable. It simply did not make sense that I did not reveal my identity. Now this was not posed as a criticism. Nor was it even posed as a question. This reader is so kind and polite, totally undemanding. I think the comment was really an expression of a sincere desire to know me better. And it is my faith in this very positive motivation that gives me the pirate gall to answer an unstated question with a stated question.

 

Here it is: What makes you happy?

That sounds like such a simple inquiry. But I am not asking for a mere listing of a few of your favorite things. You might want to start there. That might make sense for you.

But this strategy does not work for me. It only makes me heavy and fat, feeling like the greasiness of butcher's discards.

Each little favorite is a weight on a scale, another salt grain on my bird tail. The fleshing out of the essence of me, the biography detailed, carries the valence of Mafia victim, out for a swim with concretized feet. Each little favorite is a brick in the wall, a nail in the coffin, a debilitating burden carried with no destination in sight.

My reflection about my own happiness must begin with a totally different tactic, with a sensing that the footprints I leave behind on the sands of the beach are becoming shallower, a micron from annihilation. Even the little tracks left by hollow-boned birds skittering along the sand surface are deeper. I imagine that with the planting and lifting of each foot I am blipping in and out, between here and everywhere. I am body without organs (Gilles Deleuze's concept). I am approaching, asymptote-like, being a rainbow body of endless possibility and freedom. I am of the nature of an origami cosmos (Deleuze, again), folding, unfolding, refolding with no glue of permanence. Simply said,

I am blissfully free in my invisibility.

The cloak of invisibility I wear is not a barrier to intimacy. On the contrary, it is all the mess of plastic identification, personal history, and mistaken or momentarily justified attribution that conceals more than reveals. Without understanding, this concretized pseudo-revelation is the real barrier to intimacy.

Now it is time for me to contradict myself. For pirates, any point of view that is to be true or helpful must allow for paradox. Let's remember Freud's words: "He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." Freud's perspective here suggests the impossibility of invisibility. How can the impossibility of concealment and the impossibility of intimate revelation both be the case, simultaneously?

The best way for me to understand this is by making a visit to Los Angeles, city of the possibility of paradox, to see Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Antics have been going on there for more than 80 years. Body parts, identity props, and footprints have been assiduously collected and solidified. We can find Groucho Marx's nose, Roy Rogers' gun, Betty Grable's legs, Sonja Henie's blades. I could go on and name a long list of foot and hand print providers. Does anything get more solid than this? More cartoonishly limiting? Less intimate?

Let's look again. What is really at Grauman's is the hollowed out non-existent suggestion of all these entities. There is no fleshing out. Rather it is a kind of emphatic reminder that the real is missing. That is very much the spirit of tinsel town. And in that spirit we can see the paradox making sense. It is impossible to conceal. It is impossible to reveal.

In the best of all worlds, the one of continually unfolding blissful freedom and intimacy, that which reveals does so by proclaiming the impossibility of revelation. What is seen reminds us of what we do not get, what we cannot get. When this is comprehended, there can be no concealing.

We are most ourselves when we do not insist on the supremacy of the always changing details of our individuality. In ancient Rome, it was the custom to put a pair of footprints at the beginnings of roads taken. Next to the generic footprints, the opposite of Grauman's cel- ebrated particularity, would be written the Latin phrase: "Pro itu et reditu." This little poem means "for the journey and return," and wishes each traveler, in their identification with every other traveler, the best on the journey.

My barely-there beach footprints hovering on the brink of disappearing and the permanent shrine of the Grauman's prints point at the mysterious dance of concealing and revealing. My pirate cloak of invisibility, revealing most deeply in its concealing, is my happiness. It shows my most real, my most intimate. It is the essence of happiness.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse w ho hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx may be wearing a pirate cloak of in visibility, bu t emanating from within this shadow is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may even inspire the muse. Mak e contact if you dare.