My spiritual progress has been halted.

Yesterday I took a walk. When I went out I felt very lost, spiritually and emotionally, and then I proceeded to get myself physically lost as well. I walked over this large staircase / bridge -- just in the middle of nowhere, rising granite and steel. I crossed roads. I walked down dilapidated avenues full of dilapidated buildings. There was a tower, unfinished, rising like a sore into the sky. I wanted to climb, thought of the punishment for folly, falling. Wanted to climb like a romantic, like an errant youth, like the crazy boy formula for film who goes in and messes up everything. I continued walking. I saw people entering a building that said Soto-Zen on the side. Curious, I walked in. It was a Buddhist chapel. I meditated there, listened to an initiate with a young face, cheerful smile, shorn head speak about meditation. There was an older man there, of about fiftyish, the bearded husband variety, face wrinkled with smiles, and there was a rather abrupt woman. I asked about color coordination on the mat, and have you ever attained awakening? Paradoxes. The room had an altar with a statue of the Siddharta or the Buddha, I'm not sure which, and everything was symmetrical, gaping mouth above and a carton of soy-milk and ginger cookies. Here is the pagan altar. Prohibition against the worship of idols.

Then I walked home. It was what I'd always dreamed of -- the city, cars, little bars that were practically empty and didn't take up much space besides. It was night-time and few people were on the sidewalk, but everywhere there were restaurants, little houses promising souvenir-shops and expresso, a pattiserie with a cute waiter. I bought an apple that was in a stand outside of a Wild Oats. I went into Safeway and bought a loaf of bread. Then a homeless girl -- garrulous -- accosted me and asked me proudly with a chirpish confidence for money. I offered 37 cents and was ashamed, because it was her birthday. She demanded a dollar 37 so that she could go take her friends to a restaurant. Had she scraped up enough money elsewhere? She was dissatisfied. It wasn't enough. But I passed her, bought bread at safeway, was fully prepared to give her a dollar -- if there was the slightest scrap of truth in her account, it was fitting for her to enjoy herself, and I could provide that enjoyment. What good would the money do me? And if they buy drink, are they not happy? And by not contributing the means which we have readily disposable and available to their enjoyment which we do not need ourselves, are we not prolonging that misery? Is there not a moral obligation to give? Tzedakah is a Mitzvah. That doesn't mean good deed, it means commandment. I would have given it to her, too, but the bus-stop she had occupied was empty when I came back down the dark sidewalk.

I called Todd and explained to him my absence. I was supposed to call him at eight o'clock. The watching of movies was in order. He came and picked me up, nonetheless, at such a late hour, and we rented Igby Goes Down. It was okay. It was forgettable. Except for the character of Igby, his mother; one song and moment, "We live in a beautiful world..." it struck me. They kill her in the end. The mother. Senseless. I slept in a separate bed from Todd. But this morning...am I dating him? No. I don't think so, I don't know. Are we friends?

This hits me, it strikes me, a restless mind that wants, that grasps, that compares across ideals to ludicrousness. Overwriting there. Overwriting everywhere. I'm masking myself. I can't express what goes on around me. I see a lamp, but I want you to see it. It's slightly curved, art-deco, like an arm of glass reaching out into metal, growing up into a head, the covering of a large sombrero, protruding black nose. Is it the lamp? It isn't even a person. Merely an arm, formless, grotesque. Aside from the shape and beauty of words, I fear I can do nothing with them. "Words aren't very important sometimes," that was the answer to one of my questions at the Soto-Zen temple. There was a tape of a woman chanting verse, with caesuras and all other elaborations, blessed be the Buddha self. In the way of opposites, the Buddha mind is lost.

It bothers me how my words die. Words are slick, pointy, round pegs in square holes. They don't fit, they don't illuminate, they become an opaque darkness like ice that has to be cracked, broken through, by what? The nameless hands.

JD and Nick. The group. I'm so besotted with them, with that, if I could it would consume me. Every moment I would spend with them. If only to clutch and grasp. If only so they wouldn't slip through my fingertips. You hold an icicle close to yourself and it melts in the wet frame, warmth of your body. Icicles, droplets like tears falling on ice. The lake. Only in the creations of my imagination is the vision concise.

I am looking for God, if you name God whatever fills the insatiable pit of my hunger. No water, no fire, no ice, nothing can fill it. It yearns and it gapes, it wants to devour everything. It is the feminine -- it must be destroyed. In the revisioning of myself to masculine perfection, all desire must be eliminated, processed, closed off. The labia must be sealed -- it is a sign of the incomplete, the imperfect. Oh! Do I sew myself up? Am I to be the expression of ejaculation, always filling, always penetrating, never receiving? Life transfigures into sex.

Drama. I recreate myself as "le seul, le veuve, l'inconnue" and caught up in the cycles. Everything cycles and spirals back. These are heroin dreams, hallucinations, the kind of cold sweat spell created by too much injection. There was none. You needn't worry; but my imaginations, my hallucinations, the shadows that haunt me. God, where are you so ever very far away? O hear my voice.