We, Silas:

[valiant (DELETED 8792)]

A sense of history is imperative to knowing what was before.

I know. My skin said so.

You must know past actions in order to predict future actions. Myself-outside-of-me tells me so in my remembering place.

I do not remember much before.

It's one of those things that I know that I know that I know: You must know past actions in order to predict future actions.

My skin knows this from a place called college, a class called statistical analysis.

It's one of those natural conclusions a man may draw from crunching numbers and sorting people into neat, little equations and exact algorithms.

I know these words and I do not know these words. I am sometimes okay when my skin talks. I am sometimes not okay when my skin talks. I am not a hush I am not a sh. I know I am not a quiet one but I am a hunger and I know this, because I have read these certain, 'exact' definitions. I know beyond my skin. My skin does tell me things, sometimes, but I must know things outside my skin, too, to re-member them.

Knowing with my skin is one of those very, very important things that I won't have to be re-taught.

My skin and I both know some things. Sometimes, we know different things, together.

This is something that we both know: You must know where you've been in order to predict future actions.

My mind functions just okay.

It functions very exact thoughts. I like the word 'exact'. It is a good word. I am not a good word. I looked up 'mess' from the note to Mr. Parkman. I am 'this mess'. This is an exact thing. Mess is a word that is also exact. Exact. I like things that are exact. I am working to be exact.

I am finding my ailment is mostly physical.

One of these things that I know, that I know meaning that I don't have to be re-taught, like how to use a fork, or how to use my hands, or how to make my tongue go -- one of these things that I know is that history is important. Imperative. Impetuous. I've been reading the dictionary.

My Maker has given it to me. My instructions are to read this book. I am to read this book and make my mouth make the noises the book says: His-store-ree.

I try it in the mirror.

I look like the parabola's ***. The paraphilia. The piranah. I look like the proverbial ***. Prov-er-bee-awl. A-a-a-a-a-ssssss. Ahss. Awss. Aeowowowss.

Personal history tells you who you were and what you were and when you were. It tells you where you were before. I would like to know where I was before.

I know college, because I remember some of it inside my skin, which makes pictures in my throat that flash to the roof of my mouth and films in my head and you-can-also-have but no-that's-not-right.

I don't remember all of it, because it isn't my college I remember.

The college I remember is not for me: I am not an analytics major. The college of analytics majors was for Saul before. Now, I am Silas after.

And we are Silas together.

I am sorry that We are Silas, now, and that I am not Just Silas Alone from before.

My late history -- from before -- is what I now refer to as the Old Testament.

This is my New Testament history and it is very short.

The history that I know with complete solidarity is very short and it's a history of violence.

Like most babies, the world is lost on me.

That is just okay.

I am told that, sometimes. 'The world is lost on you.' I do not know what it means, but I know it's what babies do, and I'm reading the definitions for things like 'lost' and 'you' and 'babies'. I know what they are with my skin. But I have to re-learn them, sometimes.

If the world is lost on me, what is found on me? I wonder if that means I am found on myself. What does it mean to be found on yourself?

But I do read my dictionary I have been given and I practice my words in the mirror.

I know with my brain, but my mouth and my tongue are kites' beaks. I read that in a poem by John Crowe Ransom. I like John Crowe Ransom's poem about Captain Carpenter, because I am torn apart, too.

I practice John Crowe Ransom in my mirror.

I practice Captain Carpenter.

I practice Winter Remembered.

I like Winter Remembered but I don't remember winter the way I think I ought. I might ought to remember winter with my skin.

My skin does not remember, so well, about winter. It quiet-tells me that, I don't give a **** about winter, Silas. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. and it clenches my body and hurts my bones.

My skin knows about what cold is, though, and it knows about long-ness and loath-ing and monstrous evils and absences. My skin knows what wood is from trees and about wind that goes through. My skin tires of my questions. It says I am like a baby.

So, that is why I like Winter Remembered, but not because I remember winter, like I think I might ought.
I practice, "Oo emose mofuf evah wuh apaw," and my tongue refuses to make the sounds my brain makes.

It hurts in my throat and stings in my eyes. I am frustrated. I know frustrated. I know frustrated because my skin shrieks and shrieks and shrieks and it gets tight in some places but not in other places. We have two skins: We, Silas.

One of those things I've lost is how to talk. I am all slurs and hungry whines, like a needing dog. My skin told me so. I sound like a dumb animal.

And I know that I sound this way, and it does bring me shame, but I know I can re-train my tongue.

I know this how I know things. I know this from a re-membering of re-learning French when my skin was not so big and I was so small, like a baby.

I am a re-membering, too. I know I am, because my arms and legs have been re-membered. I am done-again, together: We, Silas.

A sense of his-story. His-story is written by men for men: I know this, because I know it in my skin.

I know it in a voice that isn't mine and is not my skin's. I know it in a voice that belongs to a woman with orange hair. I know that this voice that isn't mine is called a 'memory' and that it has to do with re-membering. Re-membering is when you stitch together pieces of things so you can have a whole image, a God's image, a Silas Together.

[valiant (DELETED 8792)]

I know Hell from my Bible. I know Heaven from my Bible. I know deserve from my dictionary. I know reading with my skin.

I know that the memory of His Story comes from a place called 'college', a female teacher who thought herself clever [not to be mistaken with 'cleaver', though they both cut], who tried desperately to break the ice with her new students in her new post.

Mostly, I re-member desperation. I can relate to desperation. I know. I have read the definition in my Oxford English Language Concise Dictionary.

And I can put the feeling desperation with the word desperation, because that's how I feel.

This is I.

I am not desperate.

I am Silas.

I am Silas who feels very desperate.

Hungry.

These are things I know. These are things I do not forget.

Who that starves can forget hunger?

But there are some things that I do forget, some things I have forgotten, some things I have left behind.

I have left some of these things in my Old Testament.

I have left them in the before.

It is me who has left them. This is like an equation. Silas minus Some of These Things equals Zero. And zero is okay.

Therefore, I do not miss them.

Some of these things have left me behind.

I have lost them.

Some of These Things minus Silas equals Negative These Things. I am without. I am wanting.

I find I like exact equations.

They have gone on without me. And so, I do miss them.

It was not my choice to toss them away. But it was their choice to toss me away?

Or it was not their choice or my choice, but the choice of a greater and bigger thing that separated us. Some God who has taken the plate from in front of me, before I was finished eating. And I am hungry.

And who can change the mind of God?

The plate of my humanity. Has it been taken? Or did it walk away?

It is gone, now.

Who can change the mind of God?

Maybe history is not so important. Maybe now-story is so important. Maybe now-story is what matters: Who I am, where I am, how I am now that We Are Silas.

All these things I have lost must be re-learned in this way or that way.

This way: That I am re-born. I am re-born and my first taste of anything is pain.

It's everywhere.

I am reading about pain. My skin knew it and my words know it, now, in Winter Remembered by John Crowe Ransom.

I am reading about suffering. They are very important concepts to a man named Buddha.

After pain and destruction is the Holy Bible. It is a lot of books by many men about God. And God is one of those things I am re-membering but already know from before.

After I rip into this world from my Maker's womb or house, I rip into the street, I rip through everything. I eat it all. I am hungry.

There is more pain. There is blood. It is everywhere.

It is something I am not supposed to do. I am This Mess who is also Silas.

It is some of my blood and some of their blood, and it is now our blood.

Some of it is inside me and I am Blood and We, Silas.

I am bleeding through the streets and a red man with an angry face shoves a Holy Bible at me.

He screams at me but doesn't scream at me: He's giving me this book and he's screaming at the sky and the street and other people. I am a people, sometimes, I think. I have people hands and a people face. I am a puzzle of a people.

That is okay.

That is just okay.

The red man in the black suit says, "The end is nigh, friend. Do not let these sordid scum take your soul!" He holds a sign as red and angry as he is, and it has big black letters that say VAMPIRES and I can read it. This is how I know I can read, how I know that I know things from before when we were Just Silas and Just Saul.

I read parts of the Bible while I squat beside a streetlight. My mind is starving like my stomach. They are both empty and new.

I am so hungry: For blood, for life, for understanding, for knowing things I have forgotten, things I must remember, things I must draw up from the black waters of my skin, like so many cresting waves.

My memory is small, at first, like all the wailing babies, who sound like ambulances or Sirens screaming notes of, 'Somebody, soon.'

I remember sirens. I remember red and blue.

I do not remember what it means to die.

I do not remember what it means to be dead or to be dying.

I do not remember; these things I have lost; they are great silences on my quiet waters.

My body doesn't remember all of these parts that it has, now. Some of them feel very much and very bad. And some of these parts feel nothing, at all. Some of my puzzle pieces are very numb.

In my dictionary, I read autodidacticism and it means this: You teach things to yourself.

I wonder if I am teaching things to myself.

I wonder if I am teaching things to myself, or if Oxford, Galileo Galilei, James, Elijah, Jonah and Nostradamus are teaching me things, if Leonardo da Vinci is the one who is really teaching me about 'subjects in which one has little to no formal education' and if Job and Siddhartha Guac-a-mole-ee. Guac-a-mole-ee. That is funny. My skin laughs about it.

I do not.

I can not remember what caused me. I know there are deformities separating my skin, like many states on maps with many roads like people, their palms, like many spaces between lines of poetry and I wonder.

I have seen myself in the mirror. I have seen the pictures in the anatomy books in my Maker's library. I have compared myself to the men in those books, whose skin is all one skin.

I wonder if I am intrepid or dauntless like I have read.

I wonder if I am badly cut marble, born to be a rough and roaring storm. To be ugly and malformed, shaken by the rage of outside influence, molded by the hand of the Creator.

What does it mean?

Books are for teaching. I know this from the memory 'college'. The memory is not in my mind. It's in the mind of somebody outside me: It's from the other half of my skin, where Saul lives.

I know because I know. I have been told by my self outside. He says, "Jesus Christ, Silas, are you even paying attention? What's wrong with you?! SILAS. SILAS. SILAS. SILAS. SILAS." Sometimes, his screaming hurts my head. Sometimes, it angers me. Sometimes, it makes my skin hurt. Bad. My skin hurts bad and my body shakes hard like when people are possessed by demons. I read about demons. I read about possessions. I know words like possession from the poem Winter Remembered by John Crowe Ransom.

I don't like my other self. He's very upset about a lot of things, and often tells me I should kill us.

I am very not-so-upset and very, very busy being autodidacticism, which I think may be some sort of magic, because it seems to be rare, and rarer in men of prominence. All things rare are a-word-I-do-not-know.

This is with many things, where I know only because I know, and not because I have been taught. My outside self knows things that he tells me, but he is not always around. When he is around, he throws things across the room.

I know some things because he tells me.

I know some things because I just know from when I was Just Silas: Like how to read.

I know these things like how to brush my hair. I know how with my brain, but not with my hands.

I know these things.

These things are things I do not need to learn, except in my body.

Things like brushing my teeth and

breath
ing.

I know
breath
ing.

I know
breath
ing.

I know it like I know my fingers can curl.

I know it like I know my toes spread apart, when I flex them hard.

I know
breath
ing

like I know my face is my face my
fingers are

help.

I know
dark.

I know
dark.

I know this because I know it.

I know
under.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

I know how to under. I know when they have to put you in under.

And that's where I go between before and after and that's where I think I must come from.

When I am birthed into the New World where I don't know important things, only the things I knew before, I am afraid.

I was in the dark and the under and I was quiet, there, and still.

Now, I am afraid.

If you can call what I am doing running with my new legs then what I do is run. It is not a good running that I do but a running that is not really running. It is running with legs that make no sense, like I talk in my mind, at first, with words that do not add up. But I am re-membering my words like I am re-membered and my legs are re-membering how running works.

I run far and I run fast.

I run and trip and I fall hard and I fall apart.

My stitches come open wide like hungry mouths all over my body and I, too, burn in my stomach. I, too, am hungry. The more blood pours out of me the more I take out of them.

Babies do not know their lungs burn when they are born.

When I am re-born, I know my lungs burn.

I am not a baby.

I am not a man.

I am a hunger.

I know this like I know things that I do not have to learn, again.

I am a Hunger.