I AM TRYING

I am trying to have a relationship with myself that doesn’t have any skin. I’m trying to flow and change, fluctuate in frequency and shine, shine, shine some light on something about myself that isn’t just another baby-swallowing Cronos of symbolic interpretation. Knowledge is its own worst eclipse. And it may well prove the vainest of absurdities to go on looking for an intelligent star whose every ray of light is me, is you, is this atemporal moment of insight, should you be reading this, or not. Now is the strangest of all familiars, but here I am, now, sitting out on the grey, wooden fire-escape that shudders in the wind, three stories up among the greening crowns of the trees flaunting their new luxuriance, bathing in their surf, wondering deeply why I would be brought to wonder in this desert of stars behind the day if wonder weren’t a well. Mystically inebriated by stars, I can’t help it, I can’t seem to stop prepping my own vein like a junkie compass everytime I am holy enough to feel the radiance of their streaming like my own blood. I am this strange, brooding fraction of myself sitting like a hermit or the unshaman of my own folly high up above the roofs in the eyrie of his vision, at peace with the wasps of his halo. Or are they my aura? And the question is, basically, what am I doing on earth in this boundless moment of light and life, aware of the fact? And why is the night the hardest, and darkest of sacred rocks I have ever come across to grace my blood upon like the sword of an honourable death? I don’t see the antennae of the wasps divining for lightning, but here I am, holding my little sticky snail’s horn up like a microphone to the stars as if they gave interviews for the clarification of the chronically mesmerized. And how often I feel the world is a thing and an event that is lost upon me, that I am not sage or wizard or wise enough to discern, that I am not innocent or loving enough to drink from the silence of its ubiquitous fountain and thrive on the open secret of its wholeness. My only hope is that the search is more sacred than the seeker. That if I turn the light around and journey deeply enough into myself, eventually, there will only be the looking. That the only road worth walking has always been as long and as wide as my feet. And the love that the world beams back in all these myriad gestures and features of night and light and life, within and without, all these transformative illuminations, trivial or profound, is such that no one can ever be astray. That no river of blood, or light, stars, water, diamond, or mind could ever flow the wrong way. That the agenda of the beginning is not corrupt, punitive, or indifferent. And it isn’t as if life isn’t a silo of answers, but humbled by the anticipation of approaching ultimate intimacy, I have spent a lifetime looking for a question worthy of the voice that would answer. Unspeakably me.

PATRICK WHITE