Who can say?

Who can say that
life's bitterest nightmares are not
but its sweetest dreams
unfulfilled,
that life's darkest nights are not but
its brightest horizons
viewed as through a photo
negative?
Who can say that
the heart of most lives is not but
a series of
loosely
joined
decisions
made to justify one
inescapable past
decision,
a mosaic of tiles
aligned by all means
with one
primordial, now nonnegotiable,
tile
on the path of life?
Who can say that
this step,
and the next,
and then the next,
are not just
premeditated shadows
of a stance,
even a happenstance,
portrayed,
in resolute retrospect,
as a wise and lasting
decision?
Who can say when
looking at life through windows
stained with a beautiful dream
ends,
and looking at life through a hallowed photo-negative
from the past
begins?

And who can say that
pinpointing the past's one submerged anchor,
the one ever-sinking,
never-shifting
tile,
is not the key
to unlock
the secret
of each present moment?
Who can not see that
everything following
that one inalterable footprint
in our past
is but one complex maneuver to
justify its placement
in stone?
Who may not find
in the awareness of a granite past
the first lesson in unraveling
the intricate
yet monomaniacal
series
of
actions
we call
daily life?
Who will fail
to see that long knot
of forward leaps
and backward staggering
is but one
long
argument
to lionize,
or at least
to exonerate,
the fabric out which
it is spun
and to glorify,
or at least to shroud,
the hook
on which it sways?
Exhausted
and humiliated
by constantly revising our lives,
we may
suddenly
begin devising our lives
based on a shrouded image
we choose to call self-respect.
Self-respected self-respect.

Our freedom,
foibles,
tastes
and terrors
are but the images
that best align with,
and brighten,
that smoky negative image
we call regret.
The ego is
is but that image
projected in reverse
from the past into the future,
moment by moment,
frame by flickering frame.
We choose to play on a large, enduring scale
-- on the big screen of life --
the role, the roll,
which the microcosm of a
decision
cast for us.
What the moving image reveals is
is the dual error
of confusing being good
with having a good life
and,
in turn,
having a good life
with making good on every part of our lives.
Goodness by wholesale,
virtue by volume,
integrity by uniformity,
morality in monochrome.
Sleek
and fragile
as chrome
on the polychrome soul
Seated in the dark
theater of our souls,
we become
hypnotized by the images
of a past that
that we insist should have a better,
more explicable
place
in our lives.
Once
a point of regret,
or even of
initially
insignificant circumstance,
is transmuted
into a matter of principle,
well, then, then
even a skipping record
a recorded skipping over
can be called melodious
and even
and even vice
can be labeled as goodness.
For what really counts
under this baffling
baffling spell
is authenticity
and consistency,
as long as they apply to one's self
like the one-sided beauty of a blade
in every one else's self.
The magical error is
is rectified by remembering that
that regret is
is sometimes a healthy purgative,
sometimes
a means of liberation
from what too easily becomes
a hegemonic,
self-justifying
act
of sheer will
once upon a time.

We are,
most of us,
living
desperately
to explain,
understand,
unearth
-- or, then again,
perhaps
to dilute
and annihilate --
decisions
we no longer have a choice
but to make our own.
It only takes one
decision,
of a certain intoxicating quality,
falling
in a certain fertile time,
striking
at a precisely crippling angle,
to set in motion
the remainder
of a life,
whereupon one is
is thenceforth committed
with blind ambition
to prove,
to prove to one's self
as much as to others,
how his life is not
is not explained by,
not subject to,
a past
a past decision,
but rather is
is committed
to reconstituting it,
in clever hindsight,
as one's foresight all along.
May it not be that
from our most mundane scrabbling
to our most valiant achievements,
we are in fact simply
simply trying to look
ourselves in the mirror
with a lens
that finally unscrambles
the image
we bent into a certain shape
some time before,
some because-and-thus ago?
Gazing,
gazing into this mirror,
who can regard any action
as empty
and meaningless
when it is bursting
with the desire to explain itself,
and,
if not the whole world,
at least a whole life,
in light of an irrevocable shift
in the winds that we chose to follow
long ago?
But oh me,
who can see in any human
action
but a hollow, dessicated
corpse of freedom,
when we realize that
every moment is vampirized
by the haunting
awareness that you are
what you are,
you do
what you do,
you reject
what you reject, simply
simply in order not to retrace your way
and not to have to replace that incorrigible,
inaugural
tile?

The sense we make
of our lives may not
in fact make sense,
given the sometimes arbitrary bases
it tries to build from, but making sense
of our selves
-- predicating our purpose
on our predicaments --
is
is unavoidable.
One may either direct life
towards
a pristine,
but indefinitely delayed,
goal . . .
or lead it out,
like a rope
unfurling,
frayed,
into the briny depths
of mortality,
as consistently
and with as much decorum
as possible
from a starting point one feels
one feels obliged to make
one's own.
At some point, a
decision,
or even a failure to
decide,
takes on disproportionate significance
in the story
of our lives, and
every page
after that
cannot but be embossed
with the same theme,
the same image,
if only that
that we can read
our life as one,
coherent, progressive tale.
Pick your graven plate,
and press, then,
with care.