Legion: Stream of Subconsciousness

I own few things in my life like I own my demons. I think it's mutual. We're made for each other. I'm sure yours are endlessly fascinating, and sometimes I may even envy you them--they're probably much more interesting than mine--though they'll seldom have much use for me. Perhaps you call them by many of the same names I use for my own, but they are distinct. Even the demons we share are no more alike than are you and I. Their identities are defined by our own. Some are as protean and labile as quicksilver; some are as stolid and immutable as stone. But they all have voices. They all tell us who we are. Just not all that we are. Surely, I'll allow, they are too much at times; but they are not as enough as all that--all this. Me. Me and whose army? Mine, alas, all mine.

Sometimes, when I feel like clocking myself in the eye, I wish I had somebody else's demons. But I know: they'd never fit. Mine are made or grown, wrecked or spoiled locally. Yet sown or reaped, sewn or ripped, these dark little bastards are my own bespoke bastards and are, in my way, quite legitimate. So why deem them demons? Oh, make no mistake: their dual citizenship in hell is amply attested by the many trips they've made there with me. There was never the slightest fuss at the border. They are known. They vouch for me and I am welcomed with unsettling alacrity. I am never charged for passage or for lodging; they know that I always will pay in full measure. They will never starve. Their hunger is my own.

Of course it is not that simple. Of course it is simpler than that. That's the problem with communication: there is always another distinction to be made. There's always another layer of viscous descriptive membrane over the mirror. At each successive level, former opposites pair bond and marry ecstatically. Push through it and they repulse like magnets confronting like poles. Difficult, to be sure. Sure to be difficult. Sure difficult to be. Intermittently, I am assured that faith is necessary in order to locate my own meaning--as if it were a fixed point in a static landscape. I am admonished not to think, but to know. Don't I know? I don't know. Know I don't. But that's neither here nor wrong. Distracting abstraction. Clamora obscura, lensing the grave dance of the quotidian pinhead. What was my point? Only that what happens is always part accident; a failure or triumph of will; a firm resolution that never completely resolves. Forgive me, I was too flexible; I untied myself in nots. Not you too?

No, thank you, I will wait in my own cocoon. These demons are changing. This is so laborious--yes, I am in labor. I am being born. It is the only birth that matters: the birth from sleep. I grow in slow spirals into the ground, into the air,whether in resonance, resplendence or remorse. Temporary. By turns, I am an argument, then a song. I sing, I am sung; I wring, I am wrung. I am at home in this tangle, roiled and coiled and fastened and sprung. This is the only honest lie I know, the lying in wait for some patent, insoluble truth. Each withering ambush is beaten back by friendly fire. There is dissension in the ranks, insurrection by competing episteme. Capture, sequester and then: cell division. A virulent case of me-osis. Divide and conquest; re-parse and re-posit. I am A and not-A. Permute me to introduce myselves. System failure, then careful diagnosis. By nightfall, I am only a flag, indicating the momentary direction of capricious winds above a citadel besieged. I will look the same tomorrow. The song will be new.

But I will retrench for revanche. I will try this again.