Sartre says, man first exists, encounters himself, then surges up. But he leaves out intermediaries. First man exists, yes—but in what sense? Then he encounters them, not yet himself—necessary; we would die very young without them.

The true test is a secondary non-existence, to walk into the woods, physically a grown man, but nothing in any other sense, and say to Her, “Mother Earth, am I you, or am I?”

Only thereafter can he surge up and define himself.

…

I took religion’s truth condition to philosophy, still ignorant of art—the true untruth.

I read Thoreau and thought I could make myself. I tried to scrub my nurture, and get at a raw starting point for rational existence.

…

I lost my mind in New York.

My hands gripped either side of the sink. I looked in the mirror over his shoulder at me.

6 a.m. on the subway. My wristwatch tapping on the rail.

Lunch break, in the windowed ground floor of skyscrapers, when the sun catches it just right I can see my Form morph into its potentials.

…

Blades of grass kept me alive that summer.

True meta is particular. A whole universe in an Adam’s apple. Size matters, relatively.

I thumb an almond. They say you can’t know even a fruit fly. The skin peels from its body, sticks to my teeth, and I feel what I don’t know. It becomes me and knowing matters less.

I learned it from the jabber worldly and the losiphizers who couldn’t tell me why.

Because it’s muddle mush: why use their language if we don’t follow their rules? How far beyond the golos before sapoth too can’t hear me?

Always search for meaning but sometimes neaming isn’t what we need, sometimes the call to our deeper selves uses sounds uncombined into dictionary words.

Then I discovered art.