STARMUD AND MOONWATER EIGHT

STARMUD AND MOONWATER EIGHT

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

            I don’t underestimate the tragic flaws that are the sins of my birth even though I think it’s somewhat drastic to go as far as to say the moonwater in my mother’s womb was a demonically contaminated waterclock running through myriad generations down to me as I am now. You may have been cleansed by the golden showers of celestial powers amusing themselves with your disappearance. Just another case of apparent enlightenment with the finality of a ghost. Or as you would say with the weird happiness of a man who delights in believing that as he said God said all things human are cursed from the very beginning. I’ve just gone along with the mob thinking that some people are just too weak to lift the spell that they cast upon life like a shadow of who they wanted to be. But now when I consider someone like you sometimes I realize that it’s like looking upon a spring orchard and trying to find something beautiful about the blossoms of a toxic tree greening into poison apples all over the trusting earth. When I see you throwing bad meat down your neighbour’s well like a spiritual toilet to hell I want to break a branch of black lightning off the tree of my darkest knowledge like the evil diviner you say I am and rip you like a tree down the middle to show everyone there are no halos in your heartwood. No prophets in your whales. No signs of growth. No ripples. No rings. And no bird sings.

If there were one thing in particular that I would mystically confess distinguished me among clarities in a pellucidly dark world it would be that I sincerely don’t feel as if I need to be saved from myself for seeing the way things really are when you turn over the stone of the world. When you shine a light in the corners that makes the slumlord spiders wince. When you tear down their webs like camouflage starmaps and the architectural groundplans of a pentagonal Pentagon with an aerial view of what’s going on. And the laughable infallibility to enforce it into what they want you to see. And right there is the precise spot of the stake you would bind me to like a heretic at Halloween. Like the Medici at the Bonfire of the Humanities burning in your Savanorolic vision of sin as you will later because it doesn’t take a demon to know that hate hates the hater first and worst.

            I am what I am. What else? It’s a cosmic excuse. A way of saying everything and nothing without incriminating yourself. But you’ll never know how it feels to be no one enough to lift the veils of Isis and look into the Queen of Heaven’s eyes as if you were looking upon seeing itself. You cling to your remains like the fossilized skeleton of a creationist beside a road that evolution never took. And when you raise your cup to the moon and drink up you see your own reflection in the sacrificial aspect of a bloodthirsty Aztec in unholy communion with the sun and the moon and the stars and turn into a snake of black cool aid at the bottom of a Jonestown grail in the jungle. You want to christen the world in your name like an ark but when it gets right down to the rescue you’re just another fairweather sailor trying to jump ship like a lifeboat hanging on to the afterlife of the Flying Dutchman. You tried to found a church on the cornerstone of your heart like a disciple of Peter who turned into quicksand when he denied the human divinity of God. You wanted to be an ark. You wanted to build a church. You wanted to bring me to my knees. But it’s hard to squeeze into the tiny shrine of a goose-necked bi-valved barnacle in a dead sea of moonstruck shadows waiting for high tide like the empty cup of an impact crater to fill it up until it runneth over like a waterclock. Or the Via Cloaca. The sewer of sewers when you’re corrupt enough to be that way. But as the mystic Hindu poet Mirabai once said in the sixteenth century to her family who were trying to take her back into the fold with a marriage fit for a proper princess of life I have felt the elephant’s shoulders swaying under me and now you want me to mount a jackass? Try to be serious.

 

PATRICK WHITE