Thursday, September 30, 2010

ONE DAY I WILL TELL YOU WHAT IT WAS LIKE

 

ONE DAY I’LL TELL YOU WHAT IT WAS LIKE

 

One day I’ll tell you what it was like

to be so precocious in highschool

I was destined to be fucked up now.

One day I’ll tell you what it was like

to be a poor kid at a rich university

going through culture shock

in his own country

at the difference in the way he grew up

and other people lived.

None of it matters now

but back then

when there was nothing I had

or could do

that I could take for granted

like someone coming to the rescue

I tried to stay awake

sleepwalking through a snakepit.

I learned where everyone went

beside the dinner plate on the table

like forks and spoons and butter knives

and lives I could only marvel at

that had come down

through so many generations.

That they were born

into such good families

made me feel by comparison

that I was littered

by a great bitch sea wolf

that was sick of founding cities.

What can you say?

Swimming through quicksand

isn’t the same thing

as standing on a cornerstone?

A good education shows you a way

you never need to live

what you’re talking about?

Like a better home

than the ones

most people return to.

Or that’s what they want you to think.

Bitter existentialist frivolously revolutionary days

when every crisis

appealed to a sense of catastrophe

that lingered like impending pot smoke in the air

and flower power bloomed

like a garden full of antiwar placards

screaming for more freedom than there was choice.

The late sixties

when life was more of a lyric

than a conviction

and everyone spoke in one voice

about a better world

than the paradise

they’d just jumped from

just to prove they could

and be cool in the neighbourhood.

I sat in classical Greek class

listening to the tinkling of the happy bells

that hung from the necks of the children

who were too innocent to be good

and weighed whether it was a blessing or a curse

to be a feather of light

flying so close to a black dwarf.

I translated Euripides

and selections from the Greek Anthology.

All Corinthians are liars.

I am a Corinthian. 

I thought about Vesta

tending the home-fires of the hearth

and I remembered my mother

stuffing a dismembered armchair

into the basement furnace

when she’d run out of money for wood

to sustain enough heat in the house

to keep the ice from completely covering the windows

while everyone else

talked about the weather

knowing they had plenty of coal

as if it was just another day in Eden

with an unseasonal cold snap.

It’s hard to point out

where the black dwarfs are on a starmap

but there are dark constellations

with meanings and myths

of their own

that don’t show anybody the way home

or explain things that are better left unknown.

I wrote Sapphics in Attic Greek.

I got beaten at a student demonstration

against the firing of radical teachers

who wandered up the coast

like draft dodgers from L.A.

to look at Dylan Thomas in a whole new way

that didn’t sit well with the establishment.

I sat alone in the sunsets on San Francisco bay

like an eclipse of Isaac Hayes

on the backcover of a bestselling album

wondering what was real and intimate

about the cosmic events

of my generation

other than the words we used

to feel good

about our self-indulgence

like holy books

with unrevealed contents

like most of the drugs we did.

It’s good to be open.

It’s good to be cosmic enlightened and kind.

It’s good to cultivate your mind

like a Zen garden in Kyoto

and see your body and your mind 

as one excellence begetting another

without worrying about which came first.

And it may well be that karmically

as Rilke says somewhere

we take the material frequencies of this world

of seemingly tangible matter before us

and transform them through our imagination

into the spiritual wavelengths

of the next habitable medium

we find ourselves up to our breath in.

And maybe we’ll be living on light by then.

Who knows?

But if it’s hell.

It’s your picture-music.

You made it so.

And if it’s heaven.

Ditto.

It gets the monkey off God’s back

like the creationist theory of evolution

and puts it on each of ours alone

to teach it to walk upright like a human

in the awakening landscape of its own imagination.

That’s what creative freedom means.

You’re not walking with anyone but yourself.

You’re talking to the stars

but they don’t answer back

because they’re too busy making their own worlds up

to look up at you

and wonder if you’ve got a mind like theirs

the way you do

or whether you’re one of the blind

who tries to tear the eye out of the view

in the name of clarity

and blames it on its own painting

like the smile of the Mona Lisa

that there’s more darkness in the world

than there is shining. 

It’s good to listen

to the picture-music of the celestial spheres

as if you were listening to yourself playing

a guitar-shaped universe

on your own

trying to turn the stone

of a hard hard world

into something spiritual and light.

And it’s good to remember

that if you’re here

extemporizing as you go along

with the way things appear all on their own

like the events that are unfolding

before you even now

it’s your beholding that isn’t perfect

it’s your timing that’s always

half a note off eternity 

and it’s only because

you didn’t get it right the first time

that you’ve got an afterlife

that’s catching on

like two minutes with a hook.

It’s good to read a lot of Shakespeare

and then bury his books

where the Dark Lady can’t find them.

It’s all good.

Even in the way

we’re mostly wrong about everything.

Even in the way

our right hand

hasn’t learned to accept

left-handed blessings.

Even when

the lightning’s in the masonjar

and the fireflies speak for heaven

in the voices of distant lighthouses

it’s all good.

It’s learning to fall upwards.

Of being educated out of hell.

But what haunts me

and here’s the rub

isn’t so much the past

as the baffled unaccusing look

in the eyes of all those ghosts yet to come

of the tormented children

who have met no welcome on this planet 

and look at me

as if I were the one who were invisible

as if it were me who were dead

with a great education

well before them.

It’s hard to mill a harvest of ghosts like grain

on the stone of a conceptual brain

that hasn’t received any rain for years

to cut down all that spiritual starwheat

and turn it into real bread

and make the kids

turn their heads this way

and see someone

as dumb and destitute as compassion

the echo of a lot of books in an empty silo

and no one to read them

until the first and last word

of a higher education come together and says

the only moral imperative of an enlightened life is

feed them.

Shrink the bellies

of the hungry ghosts

that are swollen with want

and their minds will expand

like stars and planets

well beyond the bounds

of the unimaginable universe

that doesn’t share its deepest secrets with anyone

who hasn’t turned their spirit around like bread

like dark energy into mystic matter

like the invisible into something you can eat

like the relative continuum of space and eternity

into a mess at dinner-time.

The only revelation worth seeking

the only grail worth drinking from

the only insight

into the true nature of existence

that makes new strangers

from generation to generation

trying to know the truth

of what they’re doing here at all 

comes in the form of a child

that’s been saved from starvation

by an apple from the tree of life

that’s older and sweeter

than all these snakey windfalls

of human knowledge

that lie like the corpses of innocent children

all over the ground of our being

like a unified field theory

that leaves us out in the cold.

Dumbfounded by an equation

that missed the whole point

for excluding them

as a collateral term of life

we couldn’t factor in

like the square of compassion

multiplied by the mass of the human heart.

O

and there’s another part

that’s too often missing

and you can ask the light

if you don’t believe me 

there’s an equals sign

you have to cross like a bridge

to get to the other side of the matter

where spirit takes root in the starmud

to break bread with the body

and illumination tastes like the light

of a blue harvest moon

at the end of October

in a child’s mouth

when it’s full.

 

PATRICK WHITE   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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