It's The Middle Of The Night And Dude Here's Gettin' All Heavy On Ya

There are surfaces you can’t get a look under. You see just a flat line, for instance, or a face, or the horizon, but that doesn’t mean there’s not something beneath or beyond them.

It never means that. There’s something behind or under everything, depths and layers and distance, and it’s a rare thing that’s simple enough, small enough, or that will hold still long enough for you to properly dig around and pin down what’s really under the surface.

Face value truly is the currency of our understanding, and of our trust and our faith. Human depths we infer from art or action or speech or behavior; we take people at their word, choose to believe in their sincerity or in the truth of how they present themselves or the stories they tell about who they are.

We learn all the time to our great disappointment (and disenchantment) how flimsy and unjustified this faith is; we are lied to and betrayed and deceived hundreds of times every day, and yet still we continue to believe and to embrace the idea of depth, and to wrong-headedly confuse this notion, somehow, with virtue, as if depths were not just as often roiling with darkness and ugliness and contradictions and mystery and even evil; as if one of the primary functions of surface and depth were not to conceal.

A wall is a surface, as is a facade, a trap door, a mirror, a mask, a voice.

Most of the time –an overwhelming majority of the time– we are left to wholly imagine what is beneath a surface, and this gives the imagination its incredible freedom, even as it serves as an open invitation to our basest insecurities and fears.

This is what gives our heart its hope, and allows it to dream and to love and to tell stories. And this is also how our heart gets trampled and broken and then put back together, again and again and again.

Do you think it’s easy,

not biting

the one you love?

Try loving someone so much

your mouth is only at home

in the place where your teeth

meet the flesh

of your beloved. Try

not tasting the flesh,

not taking in your mouth

the beloved, not

going all the way.

—Jim Moore, “Teaching the Dog Not to Nip”