STARMUD AND MOONWATER FOUR

STARMUD AND MOONWATER FOUR

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

You might be crazy but you’re far from being mad enough to know how much bliss there is in freedom from delusion and reality alike. A cool background bliss that keeps you tuned up like white noise and oxygen, not the universal hiss of the cosmic afterbirth of creation. You’ve got a bad case of mystic deflation. Mystic nihilism. Something was there that you cherished but it got taken away. As if someone had robbed space. What could they possibly take? What windows could you have locked? What doors? You look into the cup. You read the lees and tea-leaves. And you defame the cup for its emptiness because it isn’t the grail you’ve been looking for. You play your luck as if it were the only fate left to you but you’ve lost so many times you’re trying to derive a negative nobility from failure. Not an anti-hero. But one who shuns war because he didn’t go. A draft dodger hung like a Christmas tree with medals in your vain attempt to democratize courage. There’s the compassion of the strong who disdain to use their power against the weak. And then there’s the compassion of the weak who delight in imposing their deficiency on everyone from below as if they were down to their last virtue in a foxhole at Armageddon.

              Anyone can tell what someone’s looking at by the way they live. Prophetic skulls bobbing their way to poetic islands on Orphic waves or siege-minds in a castle with the drawbridge pulled up like an impregnable rule of life. What you see feel think intuit and imagine are all mediums of artistic expression. Why lie to your self-portrait about who you are when you don’t know either? And you haven’t finished painting. A blade of stargrass stirs in the breeze and the whole universe is changed renewably. A sudden thought flys across your mind like the shadow of a nightbird across the moon and it’s not the same unified field theory it was a moment ago.  Go ask your council of mirrors. Anytime anything changes so do you. So show me something that isn’t orginal and mystically specific when everything is a work in progress that creatively collaborates with everything else. Atomic Tom against the Cosmos in a rematch that takes a fall everytime you place a bet on yourself. As the Zen master said. In the contest between the world and yourself second the world. And you might think you have a big advantage over him because he’s dead but he’s still practising a kind of spiritual judo a thousand years later that knows how to use your energy against you the minute he gets into your head. And every human who’s ever lived has already died for you. So take your pick of messiahs if you’re still looking for a quick victory outside of the ring by slapping your own cheeks silly like a punchy Christian looking to get knocked out like Paul of Tarsus taking a fall in the third round. Whenever a man gives up looking and asks to be guided to himself a gravestone is turned into the cornerstone of a church that squeezes the life out of things by demonizing women for their own benefit. You walk on all four limbs like a baby, two as a man, three with a cane and then when you die both feet are stuffed into one shoe on its way to the grave. Be brave. Try to win a victory that no one else but you had to die for. And remember that hate hates the hater first and worst. When you hate you’re reborn again as the semi-colon of an embryo in the womb of a cannibal mother that doesn’t hesitate to eat her own.

 

PATRICK WHITE