On the other hand, a sheet of paper, when a pen’s in hand, can be enough anchor home a mind adrift, the scratching pen like a bird’s claws scrabbling for a perch. Even if the writer is just plagiarizing their own unconscious.

Do you think the Wright brothers, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong wanted to storm the heavens, or just to escape Ohio? Citizenship is a shameful proof that we haven’t yet taken residence in the sky. When aliens come to earth, what will they think of the state of its development when they find out the most widely spoken language on Earth doesn’t even use phonetic writing? Having searched in vain for God outside, above, I’m starting to suspect that I’ve been swallowed and digested by the cosmic spirit.

Maybe it has a point, since I’m starting to doubt my mind in general. A few years ago I started remembering my dreams much more vividly than before, if not always the complex prowlings of my mind within them at least the general atmosphere. I often find them disturbing, not generally for what transpires as much as, for example, the fact that the dominant impression is almost always of the light, an eerie subterranean glow that has never mixed with light of day, the light I imagine illuminating No Exit. But what right have I to feel more at home awake than in my dreams, when dreams are the mind’s own fire, while it is the waking world which is the outside Other? But so it is, and I feel that dreams mark the progress and continual failure of the mind to replicate the beauty of the outside world. I’m like an insecure immigrant, continually convinced of and embarrassed by the superiority of my surroundings to the homeland in my mind.

At the same time in any human relationship the two people become parents in which one impregnates the other with the phantom child, the image of themselves that the other bears and carries in their mind. These attenuated offspring multiply vastly and promiscuously in almost any life, and give birth to their own spawn, which at every remove become thinner and shallow, more and more a matter of word and rumor, and finally, and this only for the lucky at that, the final descendants will linger only as print, whose characters slightly resemble blackened twisted bones mummified in the preservative white desert of the page. And at this point they will finally fulfill Kafka’s necessarily premature statement that “I am literature.”

The atmosphere was already dangerously askew. Would I even see my friend at all for the next two days, or would he just peace off to his basement Hades with his willing Persephone, abandoning me to two days of the barren winter of really awkward conversations with strangers? Fortunately it didn’t turn out that way, since the two sisters turned out to be as smart and vivacious in a sort of acidic way as the girlfriend, and in fact in general their voices and mannerisms were so similar to each other and hers that, as with siblings is sometimes the case, talking to them basically felt like an extension of my relationship to her minus any shared experiences or knowledge.

A couple of hours later we went off to a rodeo, where the announcer claimed that the guy with the sparkly American flag shirt beating a horse with a whip until it bowed down to him, then got up on a little pedestal and chased its own tail around in a circle symbolized the perfect working of American democracy, which I suppose after all it did. Six years of continuous living in the eastern U.S., Paris and China almost convinced me that I’m a real Westerner, and maybe I am, since that whole spectacle had the alienating effect of two magnets with the same charge coming together.

The next day the weekend got completely T-boned by one of the sister’s boyfriends, who the others definitely didn’t approve of, showing up on short notice. He was supposed to arrive at mid-day but was late, so we left her to wait for him and set off to go swimming as the sky was thickening into rain clouds. Within an hour of arriving at the pool rain was pouring down, but we stayed, since the girls weren’t going to let such untoward events make them abandon the outing. So naturally when we got home they tried to make conversation with “the dude,” as they called him, but now, with two couples, one of which only semi-welcome, out of six people, the gravitational fields had become definitely unbalanced, with random areas of the house becoming off-limits at a moment’s notice, like the highways being repaired in the summer, and no one satisfied with each other’s respect for etiquette in this regard. It left me alone a lot with the similarly unpaired youngest sister, whose birthday celebration the whole thing was supposed to be after all. I wondered whether I should be making a move on her or something, for the sake of symmetry as much as anything else. The whole mood was threatening to go all Chekhov at any moment, tipping from anticipation into regret before the weekend was even over, confrontations slipping away or left hanging in the air just because they were too tiring.

But the next day came at last, with a long early-morning horse-back ride north of town. The countryside was extraordinary: a wide valley under a rich blue sky, surrounded by a mixture of rounded and jagged mountains covered with the delectable white parchment bark of aspen trees which, all being connected underground into one super-organism, had a beautiful but disturbingly homogeneous appearance and, unlike most of the evergreen trees around, hadn’t been killed off by the current plague of pine beetles. So the forest appears to be going the same way as the rest of America at the moment, since under assault the ones that herd together in a clump are surviving. I sometimes think people are like aspen trees: an invisible subterranean mass of connections that only poke above-ground into the definite forms in which we see and hear them at the moments we run into them, and thrust up in other, similar forms at different moments. Maybe the price of being a perpetual traveler is never to be around long enough to get a reckoning of the totality, like I’m just channel-surfing other people’s lives.

But as the late great Bill Hicks once said, beliefs are odd. Most property rights exist so people can make use of something without being disturbed, but this one seems to exist exclusively so that no one can use it in any way whatsoever. I admit I can’t think of a whole lot of uses for a lifeless body, but it’s still a strange belief. I suppose in a sense most bodies wind up serving as fertilizer once they’re in the ground, but it doesn’t do any good since they’re buried in huge swaths of land that are also set aside precisely so that no one can ever use them for anything.

Or maybe it’s more for the sake of their friends and family, who still believe that in some strange sense the body still is the person. Of course, if that’s the case, why they burn them to a crisp or nail them shut into a wooden box and bury them in a hole in the ground we may never know. Still though, this idea seems to persist that the body is so close to you that it is in fact a part of you. But then why is it that a disembodied head, if it could be kept alive, would still presumably be considered the same person as if the head had a body?

Besides, in many ways you have a lot more control over ordinary possessions than you do your body. If you turn your computer off for the night, unlike when you pop off yourself, it won’t move around or wander off, or flash twisted fantasies across its interface all night and reveal in the morning that it has used your bedsheets to pitch a big-top tent. And maybe other people can enter your apartment or even take it over, but at least you have a choice to move into it, and if you move out you can still move back later. Life, on the other hand, really is a blessing, after all, at least in the sense that you have no control over receiving it or not, and it generally seems to maintain itself with about as much regard for the sound and fury of consciousness as a communist country’s legislative assembly gets.

Still, it’s probably for the best. As much as humanity brags about its vaunted consciousness, which apparently confers the right to murder or destroy anything not possessing it in the exact same form, any task that both the unconscious and conscious mind can perform the unconscious generally does much, much better. Just try consciously regulating your own breathing for a couple of minutes. Maybe we should hope for less consciousness, not more.