Beyond Thought

For Pride in New York I've gone to the edge of the city where Manhattan looks unattainably distant. It's a little queer world on Riis beach where I find sea porcelain: a broken piece of a black and white dinner bowl someone once ate out of, smoothed at the edges.

Two days prior the state passed gay marriage and the Bergdorf Goodman registry crashed from too many hits. WNYC tells me that half a million people will be celebrating "marriage equality" at the parade today and applauding Governor Cuomo as he rides by waving and waving and waving. Each block of the parade route is sponsored by Delta Airlines or Target or Skyy Vodka.

Beyond thought, beyond the carefully constructed restraint of my skull, beyond my skin and thin pulsing membranes is an instinctive joy - a reflex - so ingrained it need not be learned. Beyond thought, beyond where occipital bone meets parietal bone, beyond narrow capillaries and deep blue nerves is a question a(n) (un)certainty placed beyond thought by societal rationality and proper interiority and proper exteriority. To drill through and past it, to think deeply of what is beyond thought, beyond reflexes, beyond instinctive responses is a project at once meta/physical. It demands drilling through the shells of our bodies that move a certain way, think a certain way, feel a certain way, are a certain way.

On Pride I walk by the ocean. I have always feared it since it knocked me off my feet and held me down, pushing my head and back and stomach against the sand until I came up gasping and crying, heaving salt water out of my eyes and nose and mouth. I learned to fear the ocean by sheer force and fear and awe when my body was small and my skull not yet fused. Drilling past that fear, past the impossible contradictions of pride and law and monogamy and setting foot in the ocean and finding a chipped piece of dinnerware, reaching a point before fusion collided occipital with parietal with frontal with temporal - an impossible project - a call to think beyond thought.