STARMUD AND MOONWATER FIVE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER FIVE

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

            You were born with gifts you haven’t realized. There are presents under the tree you haven’t opened yet. You hide your lights and their shadows like stars in the sun at noon. Your eyes evaporate in your blazing like troubled mirrors of water. And you talk like a stagemother to yourself. You blow the ashs of your youthful charms in everybody’s face like the urns of your latest ancestors. And you long to be loved by those you’re trying to conquer until you’ve managed it. And then you quit. You finesse betrayal with a coup de grace to the heart as if love were the farcical art of a mystic Polyanna practising voodoo on a simulacrum of its desire. Some are born with silver spoons and others are born with wishbones up their ass. Or is it fortune-cookies? Regardless. It’s got to be uncomfortable. Better to be born with nothing. And let things pass. And try not to take what you’re missing out on everyone else. You can’t tease love out of hiding and you can’t approach it with stealth. You’re out in the woods at night lamplighting for deer and you’re fishing for exotic birds with illegal nets in the clear mindstream that pulls you into its moonboat on the silver hooks of words that come out of your mouth like the lures of a fly fisherman who’s just caught the prophet in the belly of Leviathan lying to himself again about what he’s running from. But one mile west is one mile east and everywhere you go it’s the same place.

              Why ask anyone the meaning of life when you already suspect the meaning is you but you’re too upstaged by the truth to admit it? And don’t wimp out around me talking about suicide as if you were clocked by death when in fact you’re balked by life like a boy with his nose up against a candystore window feeling deprived of his longing. And don’t tell me you’re on a grailquest with Gilgamesh pearldiving for the moon in the corals like a snakeproof herb of healing when all you’re really doing is looking for the next tit to suckle you with feeling.

              But I know you can shine. I know you’ve got light in there somewhere deep in the ore of the night that wants to get out like gold. And when you’re saddest. When there’s no one around to know how disappointed you are in yourself like a penny-wish in a well that didn’t come true. I see your true genius for compassion master you as if death were a lighter burden to bear than the life of one who cares that people are so deeply wounded by their own mental snares. Yourself included. And me too. And that fool over there in the corner trying to live through himself by regretting who he is when he compares himself to others that are just as unfortunate as him.

              Divine gifts come in earthly wrappings because we’re human with features of fire and water and light. God doesn’t give anything to the angels because they were created perfect and long for nothing. They don’t call out in the night for her to answer them in a way they can understand. They might have wings but holier the hand that’s blessed by an earthbound way of giving to those who have less than the perfect. Just look at the generosity of the planet you’re walking on as if your path were strewn with flowers and thorns and stars. Have you tasted the wounded blood of the rose that scars your eyes like the moon whenever you refuse to drink up? Have you emptied the cup of sorrows down to the dark lees at the bottom that lie prophetically to the fossils of tomorrow’s embryos about a better future than this one? Don’t you know by now that life doesn’t keep what it can’t give away? That it doesn’t speak of things no human can say until their mind is at peace with its own bright vacancy and happy in the dark abundance of a heart that’s empty?

 

PATRICK WHITE