WHAT A WASTE

What a waste of wide-eyed radiant madness to get serious about anything, what a conversion of the profound and unbounded to the dumb and confounded of the trivial. Who needs to tie little knots in the wind to remember when there’s nothing to forget? Isn’t a cemetery a family album of ghosts; doesn’t the mind have spaces for the fallen blossoms reflected like faces on the skin of the apple that deposed them? The phases of the moon bloom and curl into the slow fires of extinction, and yet nothing ripens in the nothingness but the longing to be overwhelmed by the longing, to be swept away or up or under the sprawling tides of its agony like the remnant of something disemembered, something drowned, something, inestimably, over. If the hurt goes on for too long, the whole world turns into an open wound, and the moon, the nurse and knife of a self-inflicted cure. What’s important is to realize that when you democratize your clowns, you raise a vicious king like a snarling bone to a petty throne. You bug your own laughter with spies to report back to a comic delusion that doesn’t think you’re funny. And there is no sanctuary in the absurd, no home in the circus, because it is the nature of the absurd to be without nature, home, and sanctuary. Me? I’ve sewn a tent together of some of the more enduring skies I’ve slept under, and, at night, by the provisional fire of a vagrant heart, I replot the first draft of black matter into a supernova. I turn the light around and return the shining to the stars. I break the breadstone of my flesh to reveal the gold within like grain and show the moon when it picks up its ax like the last crescent to labour away at my heart like a miner, I am wealthier than the substance of the world. My blood doesn’t run through me like a corrupt currency to replenish my diminishing inexhaustibility. Things make rivers of me like hidden metals on the moon, and when I weep, my tears turn into diamonds to cut my way through the glass sky that tempts my will like a brick I’ve cast in the form of my anger. At the end of anything, it’s always classier to cut a throat than break a skull. You can always arrange the blood on the mantle of a sentiment like roses to commemorate the purple passage of a lie. And there’s always a judicious blowjob waiting like a new aesthetic in the delicious ambiguity of the gesture.

PATRICK WHITE