OUT THERE

This post has my heart right in the middle of it. I've disguised it as an ordinary word which I expect to be read over without anyone's noticing. The purposes for enacting this little scheme were in vague terms described by myself to a fellow passenger on the bus yesterday. I had said to him, "So as to get 'out there' a little more and make more human connections, and also so as to severe the old and passe bonds between it and my body, I've devised this experiment. I intend as a result a final state of complete disillusionment, where I sense things as from afar, like in a remote control system. My emotion will belong to the chance encounter of this word with the various eyes that skim over it." The gentleman on the bus had paid no attention to my explantion, though if I remember correctly, it was he who had opened the conversation, he who had gained interest, as with mounting curiosity he had asked, indeed, why I was conducting this unusual experiment at all? Perceiving that he could perhaps be one of those odd sorts who likes to pretend he isn't listening when he really is, just so he can feel insulted when you ask him why he was reading the paper when you are talking to him - I continued in my explanation. "In the system, the heart is put in a game of chance equivalent to its usual placement in the human chest cavity. I experience what it experiences though we are displaced objects: the slow flit of an occasional eye skims past the word that is a disguise, and expects no more of it than any other ordinary word. It might be an article or a conjunction, a noun or a gerund, a verb or a preposition. What a profound moment of euphoria when that one little word is crossed over! Perhaps not only days or weeks or months, but whole years go by until at last the body quakes at that distant event, happening again. Imagine the productivity one could reach, putting this situation into effect! It isn't as though you're cutting yourself off - on the contrary, you can assuredly plough through your days with the comfortable knowledge that your heart is really out there making the most of the dice factor, but without your having to go through the endless fluctuations that come along with its being carried around inside you."