Because the world I live in is not the world I dream of.
The coffee shop jukebox churns out techno German pop, which my airpods give an overlay of orchestral, organ-driven composition—making for quite a symphonic, existential mind-rocket. It invokes a time machine unknowingly built inside a carnival ride. Presumably pieced from the spare parts of a failed experiment, the circling, mechanical darkroom deposits its unsuspecting voyeurs into the carnivals of the centuries, guests of the past for a night, before reboarding and looping back the way they came when it’s time to return…
I sketch tiny, fantastical what-ifs as proof I can still draw on my imagination when I need it. Lately it only delves so far—but it’s been like this so long, I can hardly use the word ‘lately’ anymore. I have a sinking apprehension that the well is running dry. There was a time when it swelled, even overflowed, of its own accord. That’s the source I miss. Stories unfurled with the slightest nudge of a question or a wish. The trees breathed in twilight blue, and every sunset birthed some new nocturnal landscape.
Now the spirit of my soul changes as often as the music does, as often as the wind, pieces of inspiration held strung-together, briefly, before they dissipate. A new song might lift me high in hope, lift me to new perspective—only to fall bone-shattering to earth when I remember—Why do I feel hemmed in? Trapped by old memories, by some old way of life—one that isn’t mine, not anymore. How much is my resistance—and how much is simply the pace of the city—the design of its maze? No minotaur at its center—what then? Who is Ariadne? Is that what I’ve been looking for—but don’t know how to put into words, only symbols—the red thread to lead to the heart of darkness and back? Always some beast that needs felling, isn’t it? Always some truth that needs confronting—and usually beastly in form. Usually monstrous—with a bright red candle glowing between its horns. You can snuff it out, but never without facing its revelation gaze. For we never outpace our past selves, never shake off the people we were. Those younger years, those other selves dwell inside us still, nestled one in the other like a row of corridors decreasing in size, a series of Russian nesting dolls, hand painted in excruciating, glittering detail.
How to write a novel, then? How to take the shadow of the past and merge it with the self of the present? I always thought it odd when my mother circumvented stories of her young adulthood—but maybe she simply forgot them, the specifics blending in uniformly colored waves of fact and emotion. That seems to happen to me sometimes, to my own past. I remember what happened; I don’t quite remember how it felt—or vice versa. Is it better if the visions come in pieces, like out-of-place shots in a roll of developed film—or like some deformed creature, but seamlessly sewn together? I sow fantasies, fragments of fiction, untruths captured in symbolic ones. Always feeding the monster. Always seeming to repeat the same story, just in different forms.
They are the tales that appear to me, in the single-lamp-lit hours of the night, in the battle cries that wind over the rolling fields and echo in my ears. They explode in a swell of passion but never resound any further, seeming always to parallel themselves, like a pattern of ghostly Ophelias, bobbing on the ripples of a mirrored tunnel of rivers. I can never catch just the right shade; but certain it exists, hovering, just within the furthest panel of the mirror, I stretch deeper and deeper, my candle raised higher, wandering mazes of lost hours, chairs replaced by new characters, finding my way to decaying flowers… I am haunted by these in-between seasons, the nothing between the action. It stretches fruitless, dreams swimming behind a fog, flickering in and out. They are hard to hold. They slip my grip, and will they circle back around? I feel pregnant with creation, some dark fetus inside me, remaining shapeless, cocooned by shadow, wriggling. I drag myself through days, wondering when the life of it all will give way—or if I’ll keep it trapped inside, without birth, just taking up space. In an effort to forget, to relieve this non-physical pain, I try and draw myself into life—as a distraction or in the hopes that it will produce some absent inspiration.
At one time it took only sitting on the steps of a museum. The museum might even have been closed, but waiting in the shadow of a giant, metal-cast rose, I need only feel warm and happy and lost, like a set of keys in a jumble-tossed canvas tote. Now when the clouds weave and gather across the sky in their gray-blue currents and I test my resilience running long distance under their lawless pathways and feel my mood reflected—all my lust, anger, joy, and disbelief gathering and seemingly encapsulated in one song, one heaving swell of the wind, a single exhale—I don’t know how to express it. I don’t think I ever do. It’s always too much too soon—and vanishes just as suddenly as it comes; and after, if I try somehow to piece it together, it sounds stupid or psychotic or inhuman. How do I express these truths? That I feel driven—not by a desire for love, though I wonder if I ought to. But I already know what I would do, or perhaps keep doing, were I given the choice of that golden apple’s inheritor. Not to Aphrodite, would I give it. Not to Venus. You can never hold the favor of all three “fair ones.” At best, you gain only one. And in my heart of hearts, I know I would not choose love—but regard, or wisdom, or honor. The old Greek toss-up, that myth-pervasive Sophie’s choice. I don’t seek a generation of children; I seek a generation of words. But legacy proves a semi-destructive, overwhelming motivator. Ambition alone is not deep enough to stand at the heart of any story. Not without wonder, not without love. You can begin to piece together my recurring paradox.
And I remember how we sat on the beach once, in Venice, or was it the Keys? In my memory, our knees were drawn up, pressed together, the sun skating our skin, turning it golden, and I thought about how we used to whisper over our pillows as children, thrilled by the endless possibilities our pencils could make on our empty notebook pages. The road would inevitably split again, as all roads do, and the only thing I’ll hear from you is the sound of my own silence, punctuated in these vacant dreamscapes by the rustling of paper in the wind, the soft rattling of glass teeth in a yawning window. But I run back over those beaches, those cobblestone alleys, to remember you asked me once where to find the line between honesty and delivering all of your problems, thoughts, and emotions in a deluge of stringy sentences. I don’t know that I ever gave you an answer, or maybe I always have been. Maybe these fragments are my way of stitching up that line—sewing together that exquisite corpse, the overlapping fables of my searching, never-satiated mind.
But beyond these simple, meticulously curated pieces, scenes of reality overlayed with the obsessive precision of Wes Anderson caught in the wild noir landscapes of Tim Burton, looms the ever greater problem—what to craft after. It’s always after, isn’t it? Never now. Never any closer to figuring the great riddle out. These musings soaked in moonlight, what do they yield? A volley of self-doubt every evening. Questions of mortality. Time and place and all the subsequent goals—to say nothing of flossing and push-ups. I’d say some sort of aesthetic prayer-poem to the gods, but if the Fates exist in the same realm of religion, what good is that cause? They’d still pull on all my strings, knitting an age-old shawl from the loom of my fatal flaws.
At the end of the tangled yarn, these fragments prove only meager offerings to the raging Minotaur, the sleeping fetus, the black pool of my muse—of my musing mind. It demands a greater sacrifice, begs a wholistic work of form, of substance. So I return—return to the stars, to the star-dusted void. I shoulder another pack of rattling homes, scope out another malleable island, peel another layer of word-printed skin to paste on the papier-mâché dream-gasping ghost. The world I live in is not the world I dream of. But I like to think it could be, given time.
Yours,
Andrew
Cover photo featuring The Hand from the Tomb by Auguste Rodin
a literary labyrinth 