TRYING TO LAUGH AT MYSELF

TRYING TO LAUGH AT MYSELF

Trying to laugh at myself to get out of a black depression. Mad. Angry. Sad. The way January is sad but cold. Lonely in a way that doesn’t call for company. Intense, but then so are the stars. Everything missing, but no sense of anything lacking. A desert, but nothing in arrears. Not a cynic. Nor wholly yet, the dupe of my own ideals. Truly impoverished the man who doesn’t have anything in his life to make a fool of himself over. He upstaged the waters of life conceptually and now he swims through glass. I pity him who doubts the echo of his own voice and can’t let the universe put its hand from behind over his eyes like the wings of a child from time to time and ask him to guess. Who’s this? It’s true that clarity can sometimes feel like your eyes had just been slashed by an edge of broken glass, but that doesn’t mean you take a scalpel to the eyelids of a rose to get it to see what you do. Why bother if everything’s as futile as you say it is? The truth can wound. There’s no doubt about that. But it wounds like the beauty of a black rose with crescent moons for thorns. It doesn’t stick it to you like a dagger through the heart. Insight. Compassion. Blossom and fruit. Moonlight that heals what the daylight burns. A feel for the living that goes beyond thought. Like this voice that’s come to me out of thin air as I’m sitting here without any oars, trying to make an empty lifeboat out of the ribcage of a great white shark with eclipsed camera lenses for eyes. And I don’t know who they are, or if we’ve met somewhere in the prelude of a past life that led to this one, or even if talking to myself this way were a sure sign that matter doesn’t just bend space but mind and time as well. But it’s enough they know who they are and I’ve let them have their say, as I’ve had mine. As you who are listening in on this are having yours.

How cosmically still everything is. As if something were about to shatter. As if the mute, inanimate objects in the room had finally found their voice and were about to speak in tongues. The orange lamp, the violet vase that spills over like a watershed into an Arum ivy, the blue glass skull on the windowsill smearing the red logo of the bank across the street like blood all over its face, not nouns, but the verbs of a universal language we each translate in our own way into a dream grammar of Rosetta Stones. Prophetic skulls talking in our sleep. It’s good to let a gust of stars get in your eyes like a mirage once and awhile. It’s generous to let the dead slip through the doors of perception you’ve left ajar for their shadows to come in out of the cold and warm their bones around your fire, and tell you stories of who they were in life. They seldom stay long. And then they’re gone. Like smoke from a distant farmhouse in the winter dawn. Been down so long it looks like up to me, Richard Farina said on the way to die at his own book launching, thrown from the back of a motorcycle, but what’s that but the mood swing of an hourglass that keeps approaching its past like the future of something that hasn’t happened yet? And if you know what I mean, then it’s quite clear that you’re here in this asylum with me hoping no one’s discovered you yet. But there you are. I can see you. All tied up in knots like a wavelength in the corner. An embryo that’s trying to commit suicide by hanging yourself from the noose of your umbilical cord. Who are you? Did you get here the same way I did? Or by some other road? And why do that? You know something to be afraid of that I don’t? The things I fear most are not in a world of forms and it’s the crippled spirits that I find most dangerous. Are you a lamia, a lapwing, or the orphan moon of an unknown world that’s been entrusted to me like a secret that keeps to itself? Poor thing. Get up. Brush the ashes from your hair. The sleep out of the urns of your eyes. That shattered mirror out of your mind that kept on lying to you about how beautiful you weren’t even when you were and didn’t know it. Mirrors are like snakes, you can’t train them to bite other people or kiss your ass. All you can do is defang them like crescents of the moon, thorn by thorn, shard by shard like a snakepit of highly toxic chandeliers that have fallen on hard times. You just take some pliers and pull them out of your heart one by one like porcupine quills from the soft wet nose of a dog that will never learn. You stand there like the child of Joan of Arc martyred in the shadows of your mother’s sacrifice as if you belonged to a guild of secret saints, and you knock that chip of a demon off your shoulder who keeps whispering in your left ear if your fire is so much holier than mine, why haven’t you, as I have, immolated yourself in it yet? Just as there’s only one part in a hundred and twenty-six that’s different between you and a tree, chlorophyll or haemoglobin, whether you’re hanging from a crucifix or burning at the stake, there’s only one jewel’s difference between a dreamcatcher and a spiderweb. And that’s you, sapphire, the difference between two antidotes. But you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. Denying one thing here is as good as affirming it everywhere. And there are no laws here except the spontaneous physics of metaphor that’s driven us both like storm birds into the third eye of our own weather seeking asylum from the madness raging all around us like Jupiter, or, if I read you right, your violent father. I don’t know where this is. It doesn’t have a local habitation or a name, though I’ve been trying to give it one but nothing sticks. But here in this place for reasons I don’t fully understand, if you don’t want to sever your lifelines from those kites that you’ve been trying to keep up in the air like constellations, you learn to play so intensely with your creative imagination, whatever medium your working in, you’re absorbed like a child into the immensity of your own absence from your previous state of starless affairs. You’re shining, but you don’t need to know it. You’re dancing barefoot with the wind on air listening to the picture-music of the willows waltzing to the sound of the river that’s as light on its feet as it is on the mind. And there are visiting hours for people to come see you like bees and hummingbirds and dragonflies, or voices out of nowhere like the call of Canada geese high overhead at night in the autumn who speak for the dead in passing a last few intimate words they want the living to hear. Someone blows into your ear like the opening of an empty bottle that sounds like a wolf howling at the moon way off in the distance, so you listen to the message, and you write it down, and throw it like a whale with a prophet in its belly back into the sea like a fish you didn’t mean to catch that just jumped into your moon boat one night without putting up any kind of a fight. Here no one tries to turn the fireflies into the fixed stars of an orthodox starmap. You learn to delight in your madness like a native ritual you’ve been invited to participate in like tourist who was passing through and decided to stay like a flightplan that was happy to be grounded for light years in the homelessness of a space with feathers in its hair. Either that, if you take yourself too seriously, you die of terminal symbolitis in intensive care on the night ward of a hospital ship in dry dock on the moon and you miss your next port of call completely.

PATRICK WHITE