STARMUD AND MOONWATER THREE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER THREE

 

letters to everyone in particular

 

An accidental bowl of roadmud with rainwater in it from last night is enough to reflect a star. And Siamese fighting fish can live a whole life in the hoofprint of an ox in the rainy season. Everybody makes an impression like a five million year old footprint. Put a lot of them in a row and it’s a book. And then there’s the subtlety of the wind writing its name in water and sand and cell tissue one breath at a time. And the ghost dance of white fire that writes in an irrefrangible freehand. Everyone will be brought down by the thing they aspire to the most. It isn’t death that kills you. It’s life. And they’re both innocent.

              Love for most people is a way of turning their backs on their own darkness for someone else’s light. Things get brighter but the wrong flowers come up. And people are disappointed in each other when the weeds don’t bear apples. Your guess is that people who care the least in love are the stronger of the two. But that’s the kind of Nazi logic that’s still dreaming of winning World War II. It’s hard not to be angry at women when your identity has been smothered in love to make up for your old man not being around. Too much ground and mother earth and not enough lightning. The embrace of a mother for her son draws the boy inward and leaves the dangerous world outside. The father drives him out of the center of the circle. Teaches him to walk away on his own without a circumference. Mother-love is water. Father-love is fire. And it’s hard to know which of the two’s the better liar. Without meaning to.

              So you’re a moony child even at forty looking for another drink and a chance to get even with yourself for not being what you think. You’re a street lab of meds and booze but experience isn’t an experiment. To live as if you’ve got nothing to lose is just another way of realizing what you have. And every cynic I’ve ever met seemed like a failure of imagination. But that’s all right. You don’t have to haul everything out into the light. Not all the fruits of the mind are sweet. But it’s crucial to taste the difference when you bite into life like your very own private apple between the night and the starless darkness that’s afraid of the light. Most people don’t have the guts to be happy. Everybody keeps an eye on everybody else so there’s nothing to see. They drink blood from their own wounds to feel like a scar for a moment or two and then get back to bleeding with a real feeling for what they do. Is that you? Is that you? Is that you? Are you a winner? Are you a loser? Are you a snake? Are you a ladder? Do you live everyday of your life as if you were grateful for dark matter or are you a selfish light that turns back in upon itself like an ingrown solar flare?

              How could anyone in their right mind care? But, there, you see, that’s the twist in it, that’s where the polarities get spontaneously reversed in a chargled particle field and everyone who says they care will later say they don’t. You want to go play with the dolphins in the club meds of your indifference. You own the deed to your innocence. And it’s signed and sealed in blood from Shakespeare’s quill like the tragic sense of life he left you in his will. But the lower you fall in fact the higher you dream your way up to the top. And it’s a careers move on a ground of acrylic paint whether you become a crude atheist or a brutal saint.

              O what a bad exstepfather I would be if I told you what to do. Quit drinking. There’s no prophecy in it and you’ve got to pan a lot of wine with the full moon to find a nugget of truth. Let yourself be disciplined by your art. And let that discipline be the biggest ocean in your life. Better than a thousand acres is a little skill you can carry around with you. Paint. Sculpt. Carve yourself a new heart and hold it up like the bloody fist of an Aztec priest as a sign to the gods you’ve finally found one of your own. Mend. Heal. Cure yourself of yourself and let the snow thaw and what was solid become real. How long have you been apprenticed to your senses like a dog at a table in your master’s house begging for scraps as if your whole face were an anxious dinner plate?

              Don’t waste time on yourself trying to figure out who you are. Don’t try to psychoanalyze Michelangelo’s statue of David before it’s created. You ask me to give you what’s already your own the moment you let it live you. I try to but my powers are weak and it’s a fool’s endeavour to become the professional student of what you seek. And I’ve got ways of getting lost that are all my own.

 

PATRICK WHITE