The Early Verdict On May? Guilty Of Something

Sometimes I feel like the days are a floor I’m crawling across, blind, with a dead flower in my mouth, trying to find my way to the other side, which is here, and a few body lengths into the darkness beyond here. It’s a slow business, often bruising.

Where did the flower come from? And where do I think I’m taking it? To the graveyard out back? As if the day were a desolate old country church?

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Try to speak more plainly. Please make an effort.

Often, I’ll admit, I don’t know what I’m saying –what I’m saying, or even if I want to say. I’m not really looking for words; I’m merely asking for them. I’m not even in a position to ask nicely. I’m afraid I’m going to have to demand them. Civilized discourse is out of the question. I’m in no position to argue. I’m not going to fucking reason with you. I didn’t come here tonight to entertain you, either. If you’re looking for something in the way of a bedtime story you’re shit out of luck. All I know how to do is not tell stories.

Words are nothing but beasts of burden which I must lash across the fields. When I am in no position to drive them –which is more and more often the case– they must drag me. I ask almost nothing of them anymore but that they drag me to the bottom of the day. Even our trek across the muddy fields is a charade. The fields are fallow. We are up to absolutely nothing.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged – the same house, the same people – and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

–Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak Memory, via Whiskey River