Slipping into the white blanket of my mind, the deceptive protection. The moment before creation must have been so: a white nothing. Lies. Light. Noise. Layers laid to the thickness of white. The fullness of every shade in existence consumed in colorless death: white culmination of eternity. The light must be prism broken to let loose the kaleidoscope of its composition. The last color in my remembrance was lost in a vision of loneliness. I stood atop a smooth pillar the shade of the Dakota Badlands, thin rays of the same extending in every direction. The paper-thin ray ledges connected infinite pillars the same design as my own holding a single figure on each. My eyes dwelt on the figure closest to me: one I loved. Unable to see my feet, I shuffled towards the ray connecting our pillars only to feel it crumble to dust beneath me. The span was infinite and hopeless; the scene faded into the glare. Finally, there was no hunger, pain, or sensation of any kind. The veneer of stilled light penetrated further daily, touching my lungs and heart, making them forget the delights of air. Eternal snow swelled every orifice demanding consumption or release. My mind, already lost in limitless spans and willing host to this presence, could provide no hope or relief. A craving born; penknife smiling above my papier-mâché skin. Slashes to the whitekissing flesh, a release of trickling red. Reflexive actions pumping blood and consciousness to feed the awareness of prematurely realized death. Months since last live thought leaving only the desire to kill my body if only to destroy the icy grip. The blade never ravaged my skin, but they locked me up just in case. Becoming someone that must have her shoelaces confiscated was too much reality for the buzzing in my brain. Life penetrated the fog with a scream demanding acknowledgement, yet submerged in the death sheet was the totality of pain that threatened hell for that life if listened to. With a glance upon my captors with their mascara-clotted eyes and watchful pens, the cry for freedom gained prominence even to the fear of the breaking. Do anything necessary just to wear shoes again and touch the snow falling outside. The last night at the hospital was the last night I had intended to be alive. Surviving let the first shade of hope cascade across my vision. Every day began a new entry into some part of the spectrum of existence. Drawing pictures to illustrate the barriers held within. Telling my story again and again until finally even I began to hear it. Each word and line bringing me closer to the annihilation of the haze. Annihilation or forgetting? I clung to each new color as the lifeline it truly was. If I could retain the vision of form and outline there would be no possibility of glimpsing eternality any longer. Two weeks of living bringing me to this moment. The therapist and I had spent the previous two hours sorting through patterns and frames, ink blots followed by still lifes to reveal my psychoses. Each picture was simple enough and expected enough with a scene set to tell its own story. Learn now the deception. I turned over the last picture only to feel a sudden plummeting within. The blank face of the card stared back with an absolute void that jerked my intestines. All the pieces I had dissected out of this scene suddenly present and words forever meaningless to describe. There seemed to be no passage of time between now and the moment I had touched my death. My mouth started forming the words before I saw them. “There is a figure swallowed in a blanketing fog, walking. He can neither see nor feel his face, but he concentrates on moving his right foot before his left in a slow-stepping tread. If he could find memory outside the enveloping whiteness he would see the house he left behind him time ago. His dog. His rusting car and mailbox. Step. Step. He would also remember his once held intention to walk a couple minutes just to clear his head and breathe. Just a couple minutes. There was no room for intention here, or memory. There was no space for Time here. “All that is left is the naked craving to move into the thick forgetting. A vague tincture of fear lingers in his throat. This vast death. This too being a mere transience to the encapsulating mist. After all, fear is only a temporary reaction to the encounter of one’s eternal reality. Nothing left but a stepping into oblivion.” Her pen kept moving well after I had stopped talking, providing neat refractions for a neat diagnosis to my illness. I hoped I was ill and all was a delusion of my madness. But I dared not look again at the blank placard I had tossed from me to stop the telling. I could still feel the incessant step and moist embrace within, and only focusing on the brown of her downcast, flitting eyes pulled me to the confines of the room. Again, weeks past, in another room. Coming through a tumult of color so furious it seemed the canvas could not withstand it. Women’s bodies twisted in artistic misogyny. Chaos. Fear. Somehow it is the space of this room that holds violence. The death blow after the harmless pummeling of the screaming halls outside. Four pristine panels hang almost indistinguishable from the surrounding white walls. I know and remember well the fullness I see creeping around the edges of the silent canvas. Yet I wait. As people continue to drift in only to leave so quickly, I fight the urge to follow them. These panels are painted with fear: the fear of anything possible. Sit here long enough and you will see the exact thing you long to avoid. You will see the outline of your soul with no lines or figures to distract this inevitability. Any writer will be familiar with this experience as the same as that which occurs with pen poised above an umblemished piece of paper. In the moment before touching the pen to the surface for the first stroke, there is something like a near death experience as the flashing pool of life expands without limit. It is all one can do to define and refine that glimpse with slices of ink, each mark covering the retreating vision. For this reason, people hurry from the room to the comforting arms of Dahli and Andy Warhol. This whiteness will not be forgotten. The only defense is to refract it to its elements. This is why I sit and wait. This is why I write what I see. Every word plummets through the blank canvas, obliterating the uninterrupted nothing. The stepping continues on, but see the trees emerging from the mists. B L U E
Caressing keys of black and white to a stream of music beneath my hands. At thirteen, the Moonlight offered a momentary entrance to the inscape of my life. Thick midnight, broken solely by a new moon, trickling through my fingers onto the cool of the keys. My choir teacher cried, and my parents glistened in vicarious pride. I sat alone before them, oblivious to the ripples beyond my closed eyes. None present could know where this would lead me. This remembrance finds me standing before a statue seven years and a thousand miles distant. Lit internally, just as the night sky, stone figures embrace within a pillar of granite. Below them is a placard declaring, “No matter how closely the circumstances of life bring us, we remain unknown to each other.” They are partially released from the stone, yet hopelessly caught still. Arms touching and linking, but no one’s face to another’s. Each eye is closed; each face carved in want. One man buries his face in his arms obscuring the woman he embraces. Isolation was no stranger to me. The workings of my subconscious produced a nightmare born from this acquaintance. Every color in the scene was a caricature of itself. A mercurious sky shot through with clouds racing hellishly. The green of the field blinding. Two bodies lay supine on the hillock, both obviously dead. I smelled the blood and wished my eyes open, yet I drew closer to the two instead. Hideously reanimated by stolen life after death, the woman pulled herself up; the man lay unmoving. As she stood, I saw the gash in her chest and knew it to be a work of her own hand. The man looked to have the same wound, and I understood that she had killed him as well, her love for him driving her to hate. He did not know her; no one knew her. Her web of hair and possessed eyes in blood-drained flesh. She screamed with a violence matching her death. “I wanted to be seen!” Insight held her tongue for months, leaving me breathless in blank apathy. The vision of an inscape now full-formed faced me one night in a church. Incense creeping from pew to pew, wafting incarnate holiness. My body reflected the satiated stillness of the place, only my eyelids giving their quivering betrayal. The hushed calm seductive and lethal. A Sunday school tale brought to horrifying reality: Lit evanescently, no more than by a splash of stars and shots of lightning, my body hung between surfacing breath and peaceful surrender. The sea my placenta of death. Only perceiving a gentle swaying led my eyes to the pock-marked thrashing of the surface. Surrounded by a cacophony of waves, two feet stood solidly planted above. A hand I recognized penetrated the surface, reaching toward my suspended frame. What He asked was intolerable. Grasp, breathe, fight. No. Here is quiet. Here is rest. The deeps found their hold on me the moment I discovered love grown cold. One took it upon himself to declare his loss of love. Two chose another and demanded my happiness regardless. I cared no longer to even think of surfacing again. Only vaguely could I distinguish the hand reaching for me still, pleading that I leave my grave. I closed my eyes, grasping instead the white shroud of forgetting. The angel of death wields beauty beyond imagination. A sheath of water falling, shade upon shade of shimmering twilight. Silent stream in a cascade of silk over hushed cliffs of stone. To stay in such a place is impossible. The rest it offers is a phantom in the viscera of life. Such rest is only that of death, forcing one to either surrender to or fight the shades there. I completed the details of my surrender with frightening precision. January 15. The Mississippi at midnight. I would fall beneath the water just as I had envisioned for months. The offering of His hand was completely forgotten if not despised. I was startled to find myself breathing still two weeks later. Not only breathing but sitting in a room of weepy adults all grasping at the straws of their existence. Support group where I was looking for absolute solitude. Ever since the moment I had signed away my will to die, I had been prodded by countless people to be happy I had survived. I pushed each away with a smile that told them what they demanded to hear but held little truth. Yet they were not deterred. Each touch alone was frail, but the mass of them lured me slowly to the One reaching for me. Again, I went to the church where I had seen myself submerged in death. Just as before, the silence pounded my body as the scene opened before me. Still walking in boundless night. Yet not alone. I first caught a glimpse of them in the now glassy waters at my feet. Stars as limitless as the sea that bore them. The limitation of despair is that only one thing may be seen at a time. My mistake had been forgetting the hint of light necessary for the existence of my night. A marriage of colors that must be forever true. Now it stood arrayed before me as it had always stood. My eyes opening to take it in.
Green
*** Mist breathing a newness of horror. Its first sighs swore beauty. A voluptuousness of silk and feather touched blue by a fading moon. The bird stretched the length of its neck, emitting the silent call of dreams. One gentle whisper to the cacophony of terror. With terrible precision, the creature suddenly sliced its throat with the edge of its beak, releasing a cascade of blood. I opened my eyes, gasping to the night.
***
This is the beginning. A night flashing britality across my surety. Pen and paper waiting. The fear caught the gasps racing to keep up with the running of my feet. Unable to shield my face from the reaching brambles and twigs for the panic that pushed me on. Ink catching the words I tried not to believe. And I heard his steps pacing mine in the shadows. One I loved. Pursuing not to defend but to destroy. Collapsing in a fetal crush to the unyielding surface of the bed, I found regret waiting. Nothing could reverse the forfeiture of life. Once seduced by death, life looks a mere pacification to existence. Now in a place that would only accept the denial of what remained to me: my need for an end. My instinctual strategy was to hide in the room until they forced me out. Clinging white shards of nothingness. My solitary broke with the door opening, admitting not only a nurse but what appeared to be a roommate for me. I sat up, embarrassed to be caught in bed at such an hour. Embarrassed to be caught in this bed. The new woman looked at me and gave me her title: “I haven’t slept in fifteen days!” She waited expectantly. Finally, “What are you in for?” The nurse was methodically removing and searching each item in the woman’s three stuffed suitcases, setting aside the Noxema, the pajama drawstrings. The dangerous items. “Suicidal,” I told her, tasting the title for the first time. The woman turned from her intent business of placing all her allowed belongings on the shelves and bookcases. Silent for a moment, she studied my face, weighing my merit of such a title. Deciding, she broke into a grin of welcome. The nurse left us, my roommate flittering around through room with some unaccounatable energy rush. Her face animated by the chaos that had kept her awake for two weeks now; her eyes glowing through the pale of her exhaustion. Suddenly, she notices the fallen corner of the drapes covering our window and scrambles atop a chair in her spiked red leather boots the next moment. Drunk from sleeplessness, she teeters dangerously while ranting about the whoresons running this place who didn’t realize we were all OCD and couldn’t handle shit like this. The outburst proves too much for her unstable balance, delivering her in a sprawl to the floor. We laughed until we wept. Twelve hours later, I found myself a solid member in the place. As in any system, one must learn the language and the method before freedom may become possible: let it be known, group therapy is the key. The newcomer was still stoned and drooling slightly as he sat clumsily propped between Michael the Pedophile and Jennie the Clepto. The therapist continued the lecture, undaunted by his less than rapt audience. On the smudged whiteboard he had written the sentence volunteered by Bill, the shakily recovering alcoholic: “I can’t stop drinking.” I could see the therapist’s eyes bright with what was to come. Gripping the eraser with unnatural fervor, he erased “can’t” with one swipe. Very deliberately, looking pointedly over his shoulder at Bill, he then wrote in “can” in its place. He spun to face us with all the flourish of a man in a cape pulling the white rabbit from a hat. The only response was a magnificent and contrived snore from Alice in the corner. In a brief respite between sessions, I stepped into my room, my shelter from the beginning. My roommate’s eyes fluttered open from her heavily drugged sleep. None of the laughter remained in them now. She reached out her emaciated hand in the darkness of the room and drew me, unwilling, to her bedside. Then, she told me her story. The failed attempts. Her mind and capabilities dying more with each try, but never able to finish it. The hospitals and the darkness. Life and death now equally removed in the infinite shadows. With one last effort, she gripped me closely and told me to either finish myself now or to leave the love of death forever. Her pale eyes unwavering for a moment, suddenly closing and her hand falling back upon the sheets. Upon successful completion of the various rituals of the place, they gave me my shoes and told me I could leave. Lacing up my boots, I felt a tremulous touch on my shoulder; Alex with a parting gift. An offering to one going back to the outside. Sunset and mountain caught in the lurid blur of still wet watercolors. The brights and pastels of a child’s first paint set. The giver, near sixty and a permanent fixture of this place. With the gravity of a priest in benediction, he handed me the crinkled, soggy paper. His eyes never left my own as he gave me this piece of himself. The breath of angels unmistakable in the chaotic shadings; only tarnished refuse beyond these walls.
***
In the shadows, the bird’s offspring drink, unknowing of the mother’s sacrifice. Even as her life flutters from her breast, the pain in her eyes is submerged in deep calm. That they should live.
RED
A dream. Countless people strewn across a sun-leached field scavenged rapaciously among the rocks. There was a figure drawing their need at the center of the vision, impaled on two crossbeams. Those closest reached to his body and pulled flesh in fistful fragments. The blood flowed from him in rivulets throughout the gathering, each person scrambling for a taste. Desperation thickened the saturated air. *** My first night and Victoria was streaking again. Two hundred pounds of woman running down sedated halls for the sheer joy of it. When they finally got the needle into her, she had roused all rousable and given those of us already awake a run for our money. Crazy. A safe term until I had occasion to meet her eyes my second night. I had found a piano, touching the keys at the very moment I had been planning to reach my death, the music pounding through my fingers and veins. My submerged soul found sudden breath filling every pore. Finally ending and sensing my solitude broken, I turned and found her eyes on mine. They were petrifying in clarity, undisturbed by any pretense or affectation. Fleeting or fixed: an irrelevant question. In that moment, that glance, the thread connecting our souls vibrated along the slowly fading music. Commonality, universality discovered. Not the beauty of ivory and string, but the contagion and attraction of a gasping heart. Two months later in a chilly room of silent paintings. “The Slaughter of the Innocents” stood before me, engraved in silver the taste of blood. Shapes and contours, the language of this piece, divorced from the oils and shades in the surrounding paintings. The text was the slaughter of women and children, their screams caught in the metallic sheen. It was small enough on the wall to escape notice, but once seen, could not be avoided. Those in the image already mutilated and dead were only grotesque, but those forever sculpted in the moment before the knife plunge formed the essence. In them was the ultimate representation of life in full realization of itself. The sheer definition of death revealing its equal rival in life. This was something only recognized, not imagined. When the moment embodied in these frozen figures is a remembered experience, the voices penetrate their timeless prison. The wails reverberate through the still-lifes hanging the walls. John broke through the doors with an entourage attempting to restrain him. His rage pulsed along the halls; I and the other patients watched in apprehension. I understood his eyes puncturing the contorted mask of his face and I loved him. Unadulterated desperation. He fought, not against the men grasping his arms but against the war suspending him between his end and his hope. The inferno of his eyes faded finally under a mass of sedatives, though not able to diminish the source. A mere postponing to offer manageability to the doctors’ hands. The vehemence in his being, caught in the struggle, was the violence of gaining the clear delineation of this existence. No tritism could speak of the chasm between deathly apathy and the clutch of life. If ever sight opens upon the absolute distance of life, a visible surface above our fathomless sea, the fight until death will begin. The fury in this man was that of finding that surface forever removed and the moss entangling the thrashing of his limbs. Our domain of taupe walls bore witness to the wails of unadorned need. Each depleted soul wandered the sun-starved halls craving flesh and blood. The phantom figure of dreams bled through each haunted eye, drawing ceaselessly to its faceless form. What flesh to clutch but our own? Knife edge to bring forth traces of life, yet only draining what remains. The embrace of another, together consumed in the paralysis of drowning. The chimera of our frames caught in each moment, desperate for the one breath of reviving sustenance.
***
It is a sacrament spanning the history of the church. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Each week, consuming bread and wine, the remembrance is not of twelve men the night before Christ’s death. It is the taste of need: the need for this man’s death to sustain each blood-drained soul. By the definition of his ravaged flesh could mine find itself awakened. The slaughter of the Innocent.
(Black?) The day hung dead weight, pressing itself into the earth. Each moment pulling a greater thickness to itself, subduing all to breathless dark. Suddenly, the sky breathes into itself and blows across the land with the force of a day held. A breaking new oppression not broken yet. The sun set green in a blood black thickness. Electricity riding on skin and trembling leaves. It starts as a game. Imagining his face twitching into a smile, his hands pulling into fists. The heavy black stone melting in streams to free the breath beneath. The moment I realize I cannot stop these chimera gestures, my own blood stands still. The next moment he will open his eyes. The next moment he will see me. Thirty-six stories above the sleeping city, the clock glows three. My naked form shrouded in the window hangings, hidden for a moment from his eyes. Eyes searching the pale glimmer of glass and steel. Uncalled and unknown, a silent breeze carries a voiceless song through the night. Dreamless death scatters before this euphony entering my vision. In a gasp of time, a whisper of transcendence, there was a More penetrating the unforgiving silence. He broke into the moment and brought conclusion with the touch of his hand. The window received my back as I turned again to his embrace. A couple months and a sea away from the hospital, I sat on a star-washed dock guarded by the hills of the Lake District. With disturbing simultaneity, moments of the past months layered upon themselves to the thickness of night. A couch, crimson candle, dying firelight, and his last touch. New-harvested corn bathed in moonlight, his face resting against me and etched upon the sky. Two in the morning and writing letters to my few lost loved ones of my death. All these things suddenly conflating to a great stillness in this new place. Love claiming every moment as its own, ashes gathered as gold threads. The night enveloped me as pain and hope found each other equal in the perfection of this moment. At the culmination of all existence, only black quiet remains. Every moment held in breathless anticipation of what must come.
The day hung dead weight, pressing itself into the earth. Each moment pulling a greater thickness to itself, subduing all to breathless dark. Suddenly, the sky breathes into itself and blows across the land with the force of a day held. A breaking new oppression not broken yet. The sun set green in a blood black thickness. Electricity riding on skin and trembling leaves.
The drops are tentative at first, then suddenly releasing the torrents from the sky. It was impossible to see through the windshield even with the wipers at full speed, so we pulled to the curb and sat with the rhythm of engine idling. A glance shared, a spark lit. The doors were open in a moment and we were barefoot in the grass and the deluge. Lightning exclamation points to the dance of our feet as we fought the chill threatening this still unsure spring night. Eyes kissing, laughter drowning the thunder.
"Mist breathing a newness of horror. Its first sighs swore beauty. A voluptuousness of silk and feather touched blue by a fading moon. The bird stretched the length of its neck, emitting the silent call of dreams. One gentle whisper to the cacophony of terror. With terrible precision, the creature suddenly sliced its throat with the edge of its beak, releasing a cascade of blood. I opened my eyes, gasping to the night...
In the shadows, the bird’s offspring drink, unknowing of the mother’s sacrifice. Instinct bringing a nightsong to their mouths as the life beats quicker in their veins. Even as her life flutters from her breast, the pain in her eyes is submerged in deep calm. That they should live."
It was impossible to concentrate. The priest's Tennessee drawl pulling each syllable like taffy. Three stair step brothers pulsing with uncontainable energy in the pew in front of me. My tummy rumbling loud protests at my neglect of it all day. Even with this being the time of the year that holds everything for me, I found myself disaffected and cold. Finally the priest found the end of his homily, seeming himself relieved to escape from the sound of his voice. Even as the ritual of footwashing began, there was nothing in me that compelled participation. Intention silent when it should be most active. But I watched. One elderly couple got up in front of me to wash each other's feet; the woman clutching her husband's shoulder to steady her weak hobble. Upon finishing, they returned to their seats with an unmistakable glow in their faces. Just to touch each other's feet in this symbol of sacrifice and service. Before sitting down, this couple that has obviously grown old together compulsively turned to each other and kissed. Before us all. I felt a whispery touch on my shoulder then and looked up to find the smiling eyes of an older woman that has always shown me kindness in this place. Gently, she reached for my hand, silently asking me to let her do this for me. With care usually reserved for priceless fragiles, she lowered my feet into the warm water. Trickling handfulls. I watched her face and saw her lips mouthing blessings on me and my existence, though she knows little more than my face. Grace streaming from her eyes displacing the white mist enshrouding my consciousness.
I found myself, in what is becoming a weekly occurence, searching for solitude. Back country roads leading to cool night air. It was all I could do to keep myself from driving on until even I could not find myself. The road blurred as tears streamed down my face, and I could not explain why I was crying. The tears just came. Thoughts of possible lives too numerous to understand and not knowing which should be mine. Just then, I saw the turnoff to the overlook; the sun setting behind me. The grief had me fully in its clutches by the time I got out of my car and sat on the cold stone bench. Journal out and scratching furiously of the unfairness of it all. Finding home just as I must leave. And to where must I go? Finally, the sun was completely gone and I could write no more. But I did not feel free to leave yet. As I waited for what I did not know, I saw a bloody light pooling on the far horizon. Slowly nudging her full face above the trees, the moon held me in her grasp. Demanding stillness when all I sought was a fight. Caught in her hypnotic stare, my rage melted into a pleading of this distant sphere. What must I do? Who must I be? Returning not the answer I desired but an enigma: to experience Beauty to the fullness of my being. To allow myself to be transformed at its hands regardless of the pain or confusion. And so I have returned here and can only pray that I will have the courage to do so.
Last night, I discovered a long-lost, long-forgotten journal I had written when I was thirteen. My name printed in huge block letters on the front with an equally forbidding statement saying "JOURNAL. KEEP OUT!" Vaguely, I could remember how serious I was then, how desperate to get my feelings out. The drama of feeling the world was going to end...because no "mentally capable or attractive (optional)" guy liked me. All that is left in the words for me is comedy; almost reading them as someone else's memories. Someone else's life. A decade removing me from those moments that once felt as if they filled the entire world. It does demand the question of when will my current importances seem only the jokes of my past? The limits of perspective in time.
"A couple months and a sea away, I sat on a star-washed dock guarded by the hills of the Lake District. With disturbing simultaneity, moments of my recent past layered upon themselves to the thickness of night. A couch, crimson candle, dying firelight, and his last touch. New-harvested fields of corn bathed in moonlight, his face resting against me and etched upon the sky. Two in the morning and writing letters to my few lost loved ones of my death. All these things suddenly conflating to a great stillness in this new place. Love claiming every moment as its own, ashes gathered as gold threads. The night enveloped me as pain and hope found each other equal in the perfection of this moment.
At the culmination of all existence, only black quiet remains. Every moment held in breathless anticipation of what must come."
To smell the sea was to love it forever. The grass brushed across my bare legs as I sat on the cliffside trying to count the colors of the ocean. An ever shifting depth creating kaleidescopes with the dance of sun and cloud. My soul stood still as the mammalic voice of the sea captured my senses. Crash of water on rock caught by the wind blowing through the grass and across my face. I felt myself disappear into the endlessness of its speech, telling beauty and magic. Slowly, its song took shape in me, altering my essence. Allowing the rays to awake the spark in my depths.
A kiss as good as screaming
Agony in passions' thick embrace
Commited the felony of needing
Forfeited adequate solitary
Would do it again, again, again
Just love, touch, stay, hold.
Let us be here. Now.
I was looking for the hilltop lookout just outside of town, telling myself I wanted to watch the stars. To relax and take in the moon. Of course, all I really wanted was a smoke. After half an hour on backroads, I passed a sign pointing to a remote cemetery, Lady of Lourdes. Somehow, spending the night near the dead suddenly seemed more perfect than continuing my search for the overlook. The trees hugged the roadside, canopying tightly overhead. Lacy branches thickly interwoven, allowing no light to filter through. Finally, I broke through the tunnel to my destination: a weed entangled outpost for the deceased. I pulled in, hoping not to attract the attention of the scattered neighbors of this place I had seen on my way in. Extinguishing my headlights, the vastness of the sky drew me out of my car. The air was laced with the acridness of country farm and pasture land; only adding to the fullness of the night embracing me. I lit one of my precious clove cigarettes, breathing the smoke and silence to the depth of need.
I listen to their music and I'm soothed. Their land is now my land but the secrets they know of it are lost to me. A lonely wooden flute played by some unseen hand filters through the stereo across the street to the dilapidated houses and forgotten people. I would feel better if someone told me I don't belong here, but they hide behind their souvenir counters as if they are the ones who don't belong. The flute dies away to be replaced by an Indian chant: a wailing, a mourning. One voice alone.
Gathering myself for the final plunge in this virtual non-existence. All for communion with dead musicians and widely irrelevant musical language. This should be where I regret my decision; where I finally realize it was not worth the consequences. Elsewhere I could have had a chance at living the valuable life within community. Friends here, arms to touch. A church to look for my elusive salvation. Yet I cannot claim regret as mine. My soul is alive as it never was before just to touch these cold white and black keys. The thrill of beauty destroying silence.
I feel the craziness of summer waking in my veins. (Going from days in the snow in chitown to 80 in the deep South might explain that). Desire unbridled and unfocused and pervading everything. Everything but the matters of the moment. My daily tasks fading in the haze of feverish anticipation. Of what? Never have I had so little reality to look to in my tomorrows. Applications and interviews sent out like impotent feelers in every corner imaginable; little hope substantial in any of these unlikelies. All the rushing passion streaking unchecked towards the precipitous falls of the future.
What I know is not what I have been taught. What I know is only what I have gleaned from casual conversations, magazine covers, the facadical constructions of television. How then can I feel confident in defining my heritage, what it means to be American? Southern? Female? Perhaps I would not even consider this an awful occurence did I not have a suspicion that there are others in other places that at least know what they are supposed to be. From birth, they know what rites they must pass through in reaching adulthood, whereas I still find myself floundering through the muck of post-pubescent chaos. There is no ritual or cultural marker saying "I have arrived. Now begins something new." In an existence where supposedly anything is possible for me, I still find barriers in my context with no explanation in my known tradition or culture; there for reasons forgotten and lost to me. How then can I hope to combat what I cannot even adequately see and define? There are rules, that is certain, but only discovered when violated. I can't help desiring the rules to be laid out clearly before me, so I at least have a choice in violating or obeying. Somehow I would prefer the strictness of generations of custom to the infathomable white void called "America".
Words irrelevant
To the ensuing demise
Of hope
Of desire
Arms wrapped around your frame
Praying sleep for the night
To wake again tomorrow
Breathing another day
Again and again
Reaching a day
You no longer
Find the darkness
Consuming
Reaching
Icy waters
Stinging
Sleep now
Tomorrow will come
Someday
Two guy from the West side
Brothers from the conversation
Diametrics to look at them
Picture: stalky kid, pale side of tan
White sox hoody and coveted sneakers of the month
The other: bittersweet darkness
Shoulder bag from Gap
Skull cap from Gap
Shoes from somewhere too nice
For me to even know about
The leatherclad settled a 2.5 million case today
The lean city kid
Interjecting his own lawyer difficulties:
Caught (allegedly) with illegal substances
Settling for a deal he can't
Afford to negotiate
Hanging on to his job
On a wisp of held breath
The downtown lawyer
Gradually melted to his
Old West side self
Only glimmerings of the Loop
Tainting his drawled slang
The effort well-rewarded
As the two became brothers
Reunited regardless
Of the economic excuse
Used so often to explain
The inexcusable
It should not be: country born and raised but hopelessly in love with this city. Yet how else could I, sleep deprived beyond my limits, find such rest and wakefulness simply riding the train and wandering the streets of Chicago? Whatever future I might have here is vague at best, but this does not seem to matter. Just let me be here, existing with these people and in these neighborhoods, and it is enough.
Incense saturated the air. Lingering long after in my hair and skin. The five of us gathered there struggled hopelessly with the ancient chants of the church; no voice strong enough to drown out the weaker. I could hear startlingly clear one voice I've spent endless nights trying to forget. Here in this place with no escape. Finally not desiring one. We gathered in a circle for the Sacrament; each passing the bread and wine to the next. With such a small gathering, the communion of this act was somehow more stark. Seeing every mouth that touched the cup distinct and unique; feeling the connection as I also received the wine. We had all been in the congregation the day before, all taken the Sacrament then. But now, the communion was a personal act. A will to connect with these particular people. Maybe I will not process any further in a direct manner with John, but it is enough to share in this rite.
To find healing in such blandness is a strange thing. Small talk, usually the bane of relational growth, suddenly the source of comfort. I decided before I saw him that I would not ignore him this time. Eye contact a pivotal decision. It was mere seconds and very little actual content, but peace on the other side. There is very little chance that there will be more in the future with the physical and emotional distance. Yet, I feel conclusion. Perhaps the night has finally found its dawn.
Past exhaustion dazed, I wandered through Borders tonight with no motive but to spend passing moments with the friend I never get to see. Thwarted, I found my way to the cd racks and found relief in the album samplers over the headphones. I listened to a soundtrack from a movie about miscommunication and lost people and let the sound envelope me and my tiredness. In a disconcerting fashion, I began to see the other store wanderers moving in sync with the music only I could hear. The ambiance of the piece in my headphones taking control of the entire environment. Of course, none of them realized that they had become part of my soundtrack. In fact, they had become inconsequential in my private listening, providing mere embodiment to the reality I heard. This is the precise experience I have every time I touch the keys, audience or not. The music becomes the only valid reality as all else is reduced to nothingness.
"...But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open. I could sing better here than i ever had before. As part of these people, even though I stayed in the doorway, I did not recognize my voice or know where it was coming from, but sometimes i felt like I could sing forever....I took a seat in one of the folding chairs, off by myself. Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgement, only that the music was breath and food..."
It seems possible to me that loneliness might be the single greatest factor in any of our actions. Willing to forfeit everything we theoretically value in our lives and in ourselves just to have another to be with. How unfortunate then that even gaining such companionship, we should still find ourselves alone. Daily, I am surrounded by a host of people; most of whom actually know more than my name. We chat. We discuss. And for those times in my day, I forget somewhat. Once away from their voices though, my own voices scream out in rage at being alone once again. Alone with the thoughts I cannot silence and the pain I cannot diminish. It is in these times that I feel the peril of loneliness. That I know such insatiable demands can do nothing but drive me to even more destruction than I have already known. One voice states through clenched teeth that I will not be dominated by this. Somehow, I will live as if I am normal. Happy. Another shrieks above the rest: give me rest! No matter what the penalty.
We all had blisters by the end of the first week. One girl had wrapped her feet completely in duct tape hoping only to kill all sensation whatsoever. We were all huddled around our breakfast fire hoping the dwindling pile of sticks would be enough to get our water boiling. Upon waking, our two guides had informed us we would have to hike farther today than we had previously attempted in order to reach our destination. They did not tell us that we were making a complete circuit through the woods rather than heading straight for the ultimate goal of Lake Superior. We did have to spend eighteen days on this trip after all. And we only got a map of one square mile at a time. As yet, Lake Superior had made no appearance. I felt the emptiness in my own eyes catching the exhausted emptiness in each person I looked at across the fire. We would not be having a pleasant walk today. I should also ammend the implication that "guide" gave to the two with us. More like dispassionate guardians. It became evident that their self-designated task was philosophical interpretation of our experiences in the wilderness. I marveled that one of them would be attempting one of her explications in the face of our present apathy. She began talking about the trees around us, the fallen logs some of us sat on. Point: analogy. Left as found, a log or a tree has no capacity for anything but its own fibers. Flesh. But with the heat of a fire or the sharp edge of a knife, it is possible to carve the pieces into vessels. Emptier in itself, but potential for containment. The greater the carving, the greater the capacity.
I remember very well sitting there and wishing I could desire such a thing. Meeting apathy where I sought ardor. Between then and now, I have known moments where the apathy receded. Praying for the scoring that might leave a greater space within me to be filled. Exhausted in this moment, all I see is the emptiness left in the blade's wake. What is to fill this? Where is the comforting promise in the moral of my leader's tale?
"No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-.ong; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing-
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep."
It was a strange dream; a dream of a dream. Waking within the dream, I felt the ghost of the man I had dreamt lying down beside me. His invisible weight pressing down the mattress; electric fear crawling my skin and paralyzing. The dreams used to be more explicit. I could feel his skin, the ridges of his fingertips against mine. I knew the face and the reason. Only after much unraveling of these nighttime mysteries am I now able to discover his persistent presence. Where shall I find the means of exorcism at last? Shall I travel across this country in an attempt to cleanse the various places of most concentrated memory? Of course, why should such a journey provide what two years of entirely removed experience have not? Perhaps there comes a time when the memories and the spirits of the past must finally be accepted as integral. As much a part of me as my skin. Perhaps healing does not allow forgetting after all.
On too little sleep and incapacitating stress, the crisis should be expected. Perhaps even disregarded. Yet currently, it may only be outwaited. Sitting heavy in my chest, reluctant to leave with my hasty arguments. Walking down the stairs outside, I avoided the glare of the full moon's direct gaze. Looking down, I found a miniature of Her perfect orb in the rainwater left from the recent torrents. This has reminded me of something. Not the solution, but the courage to say I am waiting this one out...
"Insight held her tongue for months, leaving me breathless in blank apathy. The vision of an inscape now full-formed faced me one night in a church. Incense creeping from pew to pew, wafting incarnate holiness. My body reflected the satiated stillness of the place, only my eyelids giving their quivering betrayal. The hushed calm seductive and lethal. A Sunday school tale brought to horrifying reality: Lit evanescently, no more than by a splash of stars and shots of lightning, my body hung between surfacing breath and peaceful surrender. The sea my placenta of death. Only perceiving a gentle swaying led my eyes to the pock-marked thrashing of the surface. Surrounded by a cacophony of waves, two feet stood solidly planted above. A hand I recognized penetrated the surface, reaching toward my suspended frame. What He asked was intolerable. Grasp, breathe, fight. No. Here is quiet. Here is rest...Again, I went to the church where I had seen myself submerged in death. Just as before, the silence pounded my body as the scene opened before me. Still walking in boundless night. Yet not alone. I first caught a glimpse of them in the now glassy waters at my feet. Stars as limitless as the sea that bore them. The limitation of despair is that only one thing may be seen at a time. My mistake had been forgetting the hint of light necessary for the existence of my night. A marriage of colors that must be forever true. Now it stood arrayed before me as it had always stood. My eyes opening to take it in."
Maybe it's been the rain, but I feel like I haven't smiled in weeks. Yet at the moment I find myself settling into a nice tired haze with feet sore as hell. This afternoon, I danced for the first time in...years? Dance used to consume me; ballet some of my earliest memories. It still does consume I think, just in a different way. There is simply some need in me to feel the fluidity of bone and muscle; the touch of a partner's hand at the waist. For whatever time the music is playing and my feet are moving, I love this body that I usually hate. Emboldened by beauty. Grace in the Ramba.
Driving down my street tonight, I found myself taking notice of a house that holds memories I have held deep in the recesses. Memories of my childhood that I don't make habit of speaking about. Or writing about. The garage door was open to the dark rainy night, with a fluorescent light illuminating the inside. I could smell my memory of that place as I drove past, and I could see her face. She lived on this street for such a short time, yet those are the days that come so vivid to me now. There was a dartboard on the wall of the garage, oily carpet pieces on the floor. She was telling me about the boy on the block who had french kissed her. We were nine? Ten? He was like that I remember. Wearing condoms to hide and seek games on the block...just in case. One time in my room, she shoved her shorts' leg up to show me the hand print burned on her thigh by her mother's spanking earlier that day. I saw in her eyes, this was not the first. But more. We stayed up nights giggling together, playing dress-up. Even still, my best friend on the block and I decided she was clingy. Decided we as "us" did not want to be with her anymore. Let her deal with her shit; we had had enough. And we wrote her a letter to tell her so with the excruciating cruelty that only children possess in such a pure state.
My parents saw her recently: a pretty, young waitress in a nice country cafe. Married. Radiant they said. And I know none of us can dredge up all the terrible things we have hidden in the unreachable realm of our childhoods, but tonight, I wished for a moment that I had not been that child. Knowing apathy and callousness in the raw stages of my development. Knowing tonight that these things had always been and will always be in my essence.
I have often left the Bible from my frustration with the endless riddles. Stories and images with no apparent solution, though obviously intended to mean something. From a 21st century perspective, I suppose I expect such a thing when reading through the Old Testament of course, but to find it most prominently in the recorded words of Christ is maddening. The one chance that God decides to give us to interact directly with at least some part of Him, and still we get metaphor and simile. Yet, what if even Christ was only able to perceive the words of God in these endless parables. Theologians maintain that Christ was fully human, so is it possible that His vision was obscured by these physical limitations? In point of fact, how could it not be obscured if He was indeed Man. Certainly there would be no sense of suffering or empathy if He was consistently immersed in the knowledge and experience of the eternal. The question then becomes, just how much was He explicitly aware of. Perhaps, He revealed simply what He saw, discerning only vague images of the destiny He was born to. Could it be possible that He shared in our humanity to the point that He was only able to see His eternal reality in the fleeting images given in the stories He told? Even as He said "I will destroy this temple and raise it again in three days", did He really know the temporal reality of those words? Knowing He was born to sacrifice Himself somehow, did He know what kind of death that would mean? Surely His struggle in the night was made so unbearable by the not knowing. Steeled to face whatever these prophecies and piecemeal revelations must mean for Him, yet driven to the point of madness with nothing yet clear enough to grasp. Later, standing in front of the boiling crowd, what despair must He have experienced with the first utterance of "crucify him!". Already commited, yet for a moment almost willing to abandon it all for escape and peace. And the utterances on the cross, a verse from Isaiah, another from Psalms: these always seemed contrivances somehow. But maybe he discovered them in His mind as He battled for meaning in His pain, only in those moments understanding His part in the riddle. Only then seeing that David's pen had captured centries before words for this moment, this moment when He discovered even the meagre glances of His Father completely removed from Him. Probably not even such a full-formed conception as he hung there, but words rising from the depths that He suddenly knew to be His words in that moment.
"Thirty-six stories above the sleeping city, the clock glows three. My naked form shrouded in the window hangings, hidden for a moment from his eyes. Eyes searching the pale glimmer of glass and steel. Uncalled and unknown, a silent breeze carries a voiceless song through the night. Dreamless death scatters before this euphony entering my vision. In a gasp of time, a whisper of transcendence, there was a More penetrating the unforgiving silence. He broke into the moment and brought conclusion with the touch of his hand. The window received my back as I turned again to his embrace."
A movie. Product of hollywood and one of its most successful stars. Never has the wake of a film brought such fanatical speeches from every societal element imaginable. One guy pays what would be the average man's annual salary to purchase each seat in the theatre because he wants everyone he's ever met to experience the epiphanic power of the Passion. And another guy compares the movie to hardcore pornography. Hoards swarm against the film as anti-semitic bigotry. Others deem it empty brutality. Perhaps the most pervasive question is where is the love? What could possibly be the point of this torturous portrayal? Having sat through the two-hour pummeling myself, these fierce outcries at first astound me. In the theatre, with uncharacteristic sobs rendering me helpless with each scene, I was only aware of the relentless will of Christ to complete this ultimate act of love. Love so fierce, I quail at the mere remembrance of it. The one uniting force behind every statement I've heard and felt regarding this film is pure extremism. Even if it is extreme apathy. Like a lover staring hard at the wall while his beloved walks out, trying to convince only himself that he does not care. It is not so much that I consider Gibson's work to be ordained, but it is certainly lighting upon an important thread. After all, people have killed and been killed simply for their response to this story. This, in fact, being the most accessible form of coping that history has offered us thus far. It is no wonder then that so many find the words of the fanatic in their usually reasonable speech. Certainly there is some fear of how the proponents of the story might behave, looking to how they have behaved in the past. A modern day Spanish Inquisition. But if my own experience is any indication, the biggest fear must be that the story might actually be true. Coping with that reality is a challenge beyond what most of us can find within ourselves. As our society is currently proving, a composed response is the last possibility.
"The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.' A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"
With such beginnings, it would seem that the only response would be the fantastic sacrifice of one's own life in return. The compelling fantasy of martyrdom. But to live in this place, to complete the tasks that beg the question of true purpose - somehow it is here that He intends to meet us. Yet daily I wake fearing that the quipping, chatting fury will finally obscure the Voice I have heard touching my dreams, interrupting my silent solitude. Tomorrow will be the day I forget what beauty I once dared to believe. As for today, hope has captured my eyes this little bit longer.
How dare He love like this. What human can possibly accept such brutal extravagance. We are saved, but to what existence. Living with the knowledge that we were His reason. The slightest understanding of such a concept is more than can be borne. Yet such is this Message. Such is the hope handed to us. To deny these hands appears the only way to quiet, peace. But I have grasped my fate, and I hear only the cry Yes and Soon. My tears are my ashes today as I beg for dust to dust. To see Him is all I have strength left to desire. Though the desire prove only pain to me here.
With even the best of ourselves - the secret thoughts treasured quietly, enshrined in hopeful blossoms - with even this the cause of pain in others - jealousy, love turned possession - how is it that any of us continue? Trapped behind only our eyes, we see our hands reaching out with benevolence and love at the fingertips, only to watch confused as the gifts are transformed to prejudice and selfishness even as they leave our grasp. This being so common that each has a tale to prove the maxim "we hurt those we love." In the face of this, who has the power to embrace another? Who can possibly trust themselves with the affections of another with one's own affections forever suspect? Perhaps only the ephemeral moments of beauty seen passing behind the eyes of another keeps bringing us back to the perils of love. The momentary glimpsing of the beloved in an other. For this, we seem willing to face the certainties of disappointment and harm. For this, we breathe another day.
Fingers of the dark grasping the
Shreds of soul left
From the picking of time's fancy
Safety the figment of hiding
Yet never hidden
From one who knows no
Sleep and seeks no rest
