Joseph Voelbel

 

The Author preferred to write by the light of a candle and from the form of his own pen after the sky turned pink with indecision. His work carried well past the hour of the wolf, when things became dark and bone cold, and the night turned ambivalent to the existence of sleeping vessels.

 

One eve, whilst the moon waxed along its parabolic course in the sky, The Author found his work had taken on the uncharacteristic nakedness of first person. Now, he was not composing, but instead, investigating his own unending capacity for introspection. It was as if a dark city had been pulled over his eyes, and there was no other recourse than to shine a light to see where he was coming from. He had the sneaking suspicion that he was not alone. Yet, the nature of the company also felt like an extension of himself.

 

Occasionally, amidst an array of seemingly innocuous activities, this sensation arrived within him. It inspired a sense of catching up to what he'd frequently thought he might become, and at other times, a sense of being behind what he hoped he would become. In a sense this sensation was always distant from him, like the ever folding paradox of Zeno, or perhaps as the countryside appears from the eyes of a hawk traveling this way and that along its peripatetic course, and yet it provided him a deep exhilaration.

 

For it seemed, as of late, that The Author had entered a corridor that ran parallel to his life, a hallway lined with glass walls; on the other side of the glass, his usual life as he had known it; the person in the corridor, one who is interested in this life that he is living. At moments like these, it was as if he'd stepped into his own observation, albeit unknowingly, and only for a brief instant, and because of this, became an unwitting observer of his own observation of himself.

 

This sense of an observer in his life began after he'd undergone, what western psychologists would refer to as a peak experience, and eastern adepts a mystical experience. This particular experience transpired after extensive contemplation of an illuminated script and was part of the unforeseeable consequences involved in such heavy metaphysical lifting.

 

Throughout his life these sensations occurred as eidetically as any prophetic vision. They happened in quivers, contained a not-there-ness, like the mutual presence and absence of a harmonic tone. Whereas, The Author used to fear there was someone behind the glass, looking, now he felt the heartbeat of the one who observed him.