STARMUD AND MOONWATER ONE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER ONE

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

You asked me to write this. So I’m just going to write this as if nothing in or out of existence is a lie. No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea and there’s nothing more foolish than listening to one river tell another which way to go. It’s the same with your life just as it is now without improvement. Modes of water. Modes of knowing for all the myriad paths you’ve taken to the bottom of the world mountain there are no flaws in the sea. The only way you can fit into existence is perfectly. It’s as open and free as that. Believe me. Don’t believe me. There’s no issue here unless the issue is you and that’s enough to taste the rain on the moon for yourself and know whether it’s hot or cold. So there’s no one left at the end to believe in but the rain. And you’ve already transcended that. Like a star that’s already somewhere else by the time you can see it. Modes of knowing. Not thought. Not concept. Not idea or ideal. The cup not the wine. The Morphic shape of your knowledge as it’s constantly changing. Not the design that would hold it still and fixed like an identity by which you can be known not only to yourself but to the others who cling to themselves like fingerprints to a crime scene.

              To give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Shakespeare said that about writing. The airy nothing is you. The local habitation Perth. And your name is Everyone. There. You’ve got a locus. But who knows where you’re going? Heisenberg asked that. I suggest you walk down to the Tay River and ask the water for an answer if you can’t give one right away without thinking or opening your mouth. I’ve known you since you were a teenage boy trying to scam hamburgers off me on a skateboard. From fourteen to nineteen you were a gazelle of light able to leap tall buildings at a single bound or the wire-mesh fence at the back of the Giant Tiger parking lot without groining yourself. By comparison I felt like an old scarred warhorse. You charmed what you wanted from the world with a Puckish grin and an estranged demon that I suspect is what you made of the absence of a father so that you weren’t all light and no shadow. No doubt a counterbalance to the messianic expectations of your adoring mother trying to be more than she was as mine did to fill the blanks in. Too many mangers. Not enough messiahs! Your mother raised you to be Jesus. Mine brainwashed Lucifer in the ways of falling angels. I learned to jump toward paradise without a parachute. So I’ll meet you in this wilderness of temptations and we’ll discuss things as Bob Dylan sings as if life were not a joke.

              You’re always looking for fun but you don’t know how to play so profoundly with life your passion turns into a discipline just like iron ore turns into a sword. You don’t know how to pull yourself out of the stone like magic out of Merlin. Like something out of nothing that knows that nothing’s changed. Like being from non-being. Like gold from lead. Like the living word out of the dead rhetoric of Lazarus. Every tragic hero is a holy war that can’t be won. And what kind of transcendence keeps on surrendering to itself like a besieged town begging for mercy from its own occupants? The king wanders through the labyrinths of his water palace like a dumbfounded Leviathan with Jonah in his belly on hold bumming chump change from his baffled servants. Poverty’s a condition of money. Not of your soul when you have one. O Absalom Absalom my wayward stepson life’s not less of a journey just because you don’t know where you’re going. And freedom’s not the placard of a dry flower from the sixties however much you like the music. There are no gates on the high fields that roll on over the hills forever throwing wildflowers in the path of the wind.

              You say you’re schizophrenic. But that’s only two Greek roots in a psychological compound. A name you give yourself when no one else is around to explain your behaviour. The sound of a split personality clapping like one hand in evil glee that it’s the last tree standing. A cedar shake. A flood of dopamines from the neuronic chaos of the cataracts of the Upper Nile depositing the highlands of Punt like silt on the doorsills of  Egypt. Maybe you’re just another way civilization gets around. Not damaged debilitated or broken. Maybe you’re not Icarus but the two-faced god of hinges in the skybound doorway of a bird that’s always leaving home on a wing and a prayer. Maybe you’re a comet in a hyperbolic orbit that’s flying too close to the sun and not the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Not every change of species begins with an astronomical catastrophe. Death isn’t the only destination of birth. Or the direction of prayer. In a way you say you’re looking for god but haven’t you noticed the way nothing’s ever missing when you’re not there and when you want to hide from someone the best place to do it is out in the open?

              Time to get homely again. Down to earth. Put the pantyhose back on the anaconda

like a straitjacket of skin it just sluffed off and get back to the going before the going gets rough. But that doesn’t mean you have to imprint a logo on a cocoon like an iconic butterfly on a real asylum to know your imaginary place in society is lunar seas below the salt. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. There’s more space under the table than there is above. And more stars. You can see the universe in a grain of sand as Blake said. But your mystic specificity isn’t just the eternal turned cosmically inside out. There’s a lot less to it than that. And if you’re a nomadic monad like me (and who isn’t these days?) it helps to remember when you’re longing for something permanent that a tent is a lot older than the pyramids and that’s all that stands between us and the desert sands of our afterlives like an apricot blossom on a Viking rover on Mars trying to squeeze a little more daylight out of the sun to ripen in time to fall. Because as Shakespeare wrote, once he got Hamlet of out his system. Ripeness is all.

 

PATRICK WHITE