DAY FOURTEEN:
I
keep waiting for some mountain of gravestones to fall on me and bury
me in the valley of death, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not
terrified or paranoid about it, which may be folly on my part, but
I’ve been a poet all my life and so the habit persists of seeing
and being this way, buttressed by my almost hallucinogenic
fascination with the light as it flowers in astronomy and painting.
There is no way in the world I would ever discard my emotions, like
trying to cancel the weather of an ocean to save it from drowning as
far as I’m concerned, or to alleviate it’s fear of drowning in
itself. I entertain no boyish pretensions of cocksure, unambivalent
heroism about all this, but I do earnestly hope and am endeavouring
to walk this last green mile like a man, like a peasant king, like a
poet. You, see? Death hasn’t knocked the playfulness out of me yet?
Or I’m flirting coyly with it. There’s a transmorphic aspect
about its gender, nothing psychological, but in the way all the
abstractions about it metaphorize into a body of feeling-thought in
my mind, and in the way I perceive it, and look into its eyes. It’s
sometimes as remote as a terrifying father, but more delightfully and
more often, seems to manifest as an allurement I can relate to.
Unaccusing, unjudgmental, engaging. I think of Odysseus and Circe
more in this regard with a touch of mermaid just to keep my
attention. And no, I’m not tying myself to any mast this time, not
that I ever did much of that. I want to hear. Of course, you wonder,
and I do, if there’s some kind of subconscious death wish in all of
this I’m overlooking, and the last, cruel last laugh will be on me.
If it is, let it be, I’m still going to look. Habit of mine to
stare dragons into the eyes straight and see what’s there. Kiss
your dragons back into princesses Rilke says somewhere. Think it’s
got something to do with looking into a lifetime of telescopes.
Pointing them at the stars, my heart, my soul, my poetry, gardens
that came up in the night while I slept. Watching the mind walk its
own waters within me. Beautiful even when it’s horrible sometimes,
eerie or alone. I feel a bit like Chauncey the Gardener here, I like
to watch, and so I do, because for the life of me, I have not been
able to find any other mindstream within to sit beside. Nor am I
about to ask this great sea of unbounded awareness to pick out its
favourite waves and streams or direct me to those that are more
important than others to keep an eye on. Form through matter. Within.
The way a seed manifests a flower. I don’t impose it, and I sense
we’re all shapeshifters anyway. Vertumnus, Morpheus, where the
river turns. I’ve been meeting my life at one bend in the river
after the other for lightyears now. Good place to write in while I’m
waiting, musing on the stars, as Dylan sings, watching the river
flow. Deepening my relationship with the moon. Peaceful there, though
not always, calm most of the time, though I’ve known it to roil as
well. Let it. I never ask for anything, so it’s somewhat of a
falsehood to me to ever feel disappointed. This experience is akin to
that, or perhaps more of the same. Few clouds passing across the
moon, but they’ll pass at their own pace, and I’m used to that.
Cowboy clouds, you loosen your nervous system, you tighten your spine
like a bow some friend taught you to use when all the cowboys and
Indians went Zen, and you watch, perhaps that’s all you can do.
Watch. Calm, continuous awareness. Sometimes minutely, the mystic
specificity of the world, the grain of sand that contains the whole
of the universe in each detail. And sometimes macrocosmically when
your eyes want to be enlightened starmaps. Not an agenda, a menu, or
an expectation. The world like the flowers blooms of its own accord.
I let it sleep, if it dreams, and go on quietly contented to work in
an adjoining room, pursuing, as Blake so eloquently expresses it, my
persistent folly. Surprise it with a poem when it gets up. Even the
fool would grow wise if he would persist in his folly. That’s
Blake’s line, not mine, but isn’t it true? Once you’ve got your
hydra-headed ego delusion out of the way even for a moment, a
glimpse, a nanosecond, isn’t it clear every nervous system, tree
reaching up to the stars, dendritic notion of evolution and dark
matter, empties into a great, vast sea of unknowing, call it the
godhead, nirvana, the clear light of the void, dark night of the
soul, fana, baqua, the plenum-void, a dream, nothingness manifested
as being, or just a bad molecular joke some random, impersonal,
indifference played upon you without meaning to, whatever metaphors
you’re most comfortable in because they’ve broken you in like a
pair of comfortable boots you’ve walked a long way in, listening to
the stars jingle like constellations at your heels, for the musical
effect on dark nights that make you nervous enough to whistle in the
dark, not goading or spurring so much, if you’ve got a good horse,
and I fancy I have, you don’t need to do anything but watch it work
the herd, be they words, or thoughts or emotions, loosen the reins so
you don’t end up making a noose of them and hanging some innocent
man or woman in your despair. Not a philosophy, but my bumbling,
approximate approach. More intuitive than precise, but things keep
appearing out of the mist in the valley the moon’s saturating with
light, and I’ve spent a lifetime of agonizingly, intensely,
delightfully, mesmerizingly, radiantly, darkly, abundantly, brightly,
beatifically, demonically, vacantly watching these fireflies of
insight trying to make earthbound constellations out of white-tailed
does that step out from behind those veils. Usually after a
thunderstorm. I still can’t think of a better or more blessed way
to spend my time here. Alone with the Alone, as Plotinus phrases it,
but alone together with everyone else the Alone flowers in. That’s
you, darlin, you’re on. What’s this? Outside the green room.
Forgive the impertinence of my nomenclature, I like to pretend
sometimes I’m Gus in Lonesome Dove sometimes. But I hope I’ve
made the point clear. What’s this? Angels can’t answer that
question without being told, demons have more proficiency because
they’ve usually seen more, they’ve been to both places, heaven
and hell, but I’m still of the persuasion, that question belongs to
humans, indefensibly, imperfectible as they seem they are sometimes,
and even just to ask it is answer enough. See Montaigne’s motto
carved into his rafter. Que sais je? Perhaps nothing, but you know
it, and that nothing is human. A lingering cachet of us, a flavour, a
taste, a fragrance, a bouquet, a ghost as it pursues its aimless,
musical path among the stars as if they could hear a whisper of
flowers singing sweetly to themselves within it that reminds them of
a garden they used to tend like a woman as the sun goes down. And the
song she’s singing to herself. Alone with the Alone. Is it scary,
sometimes, you bet it is, almost inconceivably so, but then so have a
lot of things that have occurred in my life. And you know what? The
dark shines. I’ve always said so, and more than ever, that’s my
story and I’m sticking to it. I see that more than ever now, in a
soggy cigarette butt someone flicked to the side walk, and in the
roaring black hole engines of the galaxies. You want to see a star.
Look into the darkness it’s emerging from as if someone just handed
you a flower, and you’re wondering where to fix to your hat. Put
that rose in the skull of your rattlesnake hatband. Between the
fangs. Make it a wicked flower pot. It’s oxymoronic, isn’t it?
Union of opposites. Two wings on one bird. Actually there’s a
third, but we won’t get into that. But include it all, no part left
out as some Zen mendicant realized one day watching the moon and the
sun at opposite ends of the sky. Moonset, sunrise. The way we
breathe, the way we live and die. Do you see a discontinuity in it? I
don’t. What do you do with your life then? You celebrate it, you
say thanks, even if you don’t know what form of a host you’re
addressing in the doorway as you leave. I hear God doesn’t have any
characteristics. You might want to think of lending him or her a few
of your own. Thanks. That’ll do it, but you say it with your blood
and your eyes, and your mind and your heart and your soul. Thanks.
Quite a show. And the ticket was free, unless you got more glee
sneaking under the fence. But que sais je? What do I know? This is my
good guess. What’s yours?
No comments:
Post a Comment