When two things are touching,
says my fourteen-year-old, the expert scientist,
who is not quite an expert yet, by nature
of his fourteen-year-oldness,
they’re not really touching.
Between skin on skin, folds of paper,
words & silence,
ink & white,
between brick & mortar & brick again (a sandwich)
a scrim-thin wall buffers cell from blending into cell.
Between all matter,
what matters is not the imperceptible layer of suchness
but the layer’s dissolution
the advance towards inexistence.
And all distance is the slowly graduated widening
of this slim slim space between.
We put up a wall between Pre-birth and Death and call it Life (a sandwich too of sorts, my favorite kind, tastier even than a Turkey Reuben from Neal’s Deli in Carrboro, North Carolina or a French bread, grilled steak, Danish Havarti and chimichurri which I dogged on the beach the other day, looking northwards towards Scandinavia). We put up all sorts of walls, the ones that separate the sides of ourselves we try not to integrate – work self from Karaoke self, mother self from seductress, writer from engineer or traffic cop or grocery clerk or any walk of life that is forced to think rationally and behave logically. We put up walls that act as barriers to the realization of a higher self, a self united with everything and everyone in the Universe.
My family and I were recently in Berlin, an experience that had a forceful impact on me. Remnants of The Wall were at various intersections throughout the city, reminding newcomers of the dramatic course of events that had shaped this vibrant but long-suffering place. As I was meditating early on the last morning of our trip, my husband came and sat beside me. He whispered, “What are you doing?” (He’s not quite used to seeing me sitting cross-legged on the hotel floor, in the dark, next to an open suitcase with kids’ dirty clothes and stinky socks spilling from it.)
I whispered back, “I am feeling my internal walls crumbling.”
“I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside.”
-U2, “Where the Streets Have No Name”
I really do want to tear down the walls that separate the internal Me from the external Universe. And I think the best sledgehammer for the job is a pen. We writers, with story and poetry, with melodic lines and spoken words of passion, we can merge our distinctions and create bodies reinforced not by walls but by lack of impediments to freedom.
If it’s true that two objects can never close the infinitesimally small gap between them, then our challenge is to find a way to bond in that white space. Every time we write creatively, we fill that space with language that touches at the central human experience lying in the very crux and cradle of that emptiness.
The fact remains that there are walls everywhere. Walls that neither governments nor any amount of meditation can dissolve. But we must strive to find commonalities, to see across divides, to approach our own as well as one another’s realities. Merge West with East, yogi with pragmatist, writer with every facet of self. Seek to destroy the walls that hold you inside. Tear them down with words, advance in your understanding towards their very nonexistence.
