“Yes, the waiting is delicious; getting drunk while waiting is delicious (I am, as always in writing, at once the scientist and the rat he disembowels for research).”
–Hervé Guibert
†
Everyone surrounding me seems able to build something substantial—a home, a love, a profession. What do I build? Fantasies, my own mythos, ghosts. I build metaphysical mansions full of fluttering spirits and the half-formed wisps of a thing that might have been magnificent. Never anything that feels whole—only fragments, tiny pictures, memories, letters. Things I can tuck in some box and carry with me when I go. And then what? What am I to do with them? Fashion them about my person to create some unstable shell of belonging? Stitch them into a patchy tapestry of abstraction? This amorphous place where lost things go, where dreams wander doomed loops of repeated motion and hope, is the endless undercurrent of the cello’s scratchings as it rises up over the piano. It is the gathered chorus that echoes itself in the words of an ancient tongue, unable to tell if they’re spoken or sung. It rises and falls; rises and falls again. Discord crafts an opus. It lulls me to sweet oblivion.
†
The irony isn’t lost to me—that in an attempt to become grounded I only bolster my mythology. If I want to feel close to others, I make them mythical as well. A wave of the mind and they melt— Another set of shining characters.
If unreachable, then immortalized.
If unattainable, then forever glorified.
†
These dreams have no end. They metastasize and bend, drawing a stage whose recurrent player shimmers the shape of dread Médée, commanding esteem with eyes lost to fervency, crown splayed, vague corpses of sacrifice draped in folds about her feet. Ah, she has met herself; she has found herself worthy, offering sacrifices of love in the art of her vengeance. She has hung the scales; she has weighed a passive life against some ruinous purpose. And I cannot now remember what stirs in all the vision’s rest, but clouds and fire and rhymes of darkness amass in inconstant tempests, bleed scenes of power and of my own sacrifices in their continued non-fulfillment to yield what it is I think I desire—though I never truly know until such a thing is gained. The curse of always needing something or someone to transform and build upon in a world that becomes more real to me than the one on which I walk.
†
I don’t believe in coincidences. Of any sort. The significance in reaching for Eliot’s Waste Land this terrible month is unmistakable. And that unreal city! And that wicked pack of cards! How now Mrs. Equitone? Shall we resurrect at all?
†
I try and ascribe everything some kind of meaning, some sort of symbolism. But well… maybe the human vessel of my longings did not reciprocate simply because he wasn’t interested, and not for any other reason. Maybe I’m not being held here in limbo to learn something specific, but merely because I haven’t found a way out yet. It makes the situation all the more depressing, but it grows exhausting trying to summon poetic, placating reasons for all this chaos. It’s mostly chaos of the mind, you know. Of course you know. In this modern age of the digital consumer, we all suffer from perpetual unrest. And unless I give it some grand, imaginative twist it’ll all adopt an air of glorious meaninglessness. Is this overlay I bestow in the bloodiest of colors considered an ignorance then? Do you think I’ve learned, after all these years, how to keep my imagination in check?
†
There is a particular concept that cannot escape me, though I’ve only just now identified it within the previous week. It is, unsurprisingly, a contrast, a question of duality. (Ah, please forgive me. Such an overused word, duality. No, no, please. Roll your eyes, by all means.) However, in this instance I’m referring to a specific conversation that exists in my life, and, I suspect, in many others’. This dialogue occurs within the space between the everyday and being confronted with some powerful, raw, heretofore unseen piece of art—whether a painting, a poem, a symphony, a scene of a film, a shot of a film, a small scraggle of words—met in the middle of the day or in the middle of the restless night—unsuspected, but there it appears—and it rips its claws through the fabric of your reality and speaks some message into the tumultuous landscape of your soul, causing all other queries to halt. Yet—as all-consuming as this beautiful creature of thought and imagery and emotion is—it does not obstruct the general flow of one’s life, as (at least at first, in the initial encounter) it bears only an internal effect or resonance. One must now carry it around—sloshing, unquiet, vying for expression, for understanding—in the midst of which domesticity and mundanity continue, wound like a toy soldier, unfazed. The laundry must still be washed, the errands run, the floor swept, the supper prepared—and all the while, there the piece of artwork, the spark of some profound thought or emotion resides, burning in the center of it all—at once making the task at hand both insignificantly pale and yet also giving it some kind of strange fulfillment. It is this changing of hands, this balance between what is glorious, grotesque, and altogether sublime (and often spiritually so)—and between the unremarkably commonplace (which gives this very visitation its background)—that has arrested my mind’s latest clamor of questioning.
But that is where the wondering stops.
You didn’t think I’d actually have any answers
Did you
†
Black bear, black bear, what do you see?
I see a hunter looking at me.
Hunter, hunter, what do you see?
I see a monster looking at me.
Monster, monster, what do you see?
I see a poet looking at me.
Poet, poet, what do you see?
I see
∼
A swell of bruising cumulus, a wine red frothing sea,
Rage rises unchecked in me
I do not ask for much
I ask for such a little thing
Your undying fealty to the fiction I craft—
Around us and everything
You monster of silence
Hear the monster screaming out of me
Let us be monsters together
And with holy kisses shear each other’s wings
Hold the bloody sword whose point I bare my chest for
Lover or executioner, pick a role at least
That I may place you on a pillar
And avenge these fallen dreams.
†
I search for the wondrously grotesque form into which I’ve been transforming, but I cannot see it yet.
It would seem I am still melding into that otherness.
†
All that I own is what I carry with me: my words, my visions, my faith, and my despair.
I feel the waves changing their invisible courses. I catch the coming alterations on the currents of the air.
†
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: [downstage left] You, he said—
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY: [downstage right] You?
NIETZSCHE: Are a terribly real thing—
DOSTOEVSKY: What could one more splash of blood—
NIETZSCHE: In a terribly false world
DOSTOEVSKY: Mean to you?
VIRGINIA WOOLF: [sitting at ancient desk—pensive, ponderous, the water at her feet rising steadily higher] Style is a very simple matter.
NIETZSCHE: And that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.
WOOLF: It is all rhythm.
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS: [from offstage] And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light—
T. S. ELIOT: [center stage, with feeling] O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— It’s so elegant! So intelligent.
WOOLF: Once you get that
LEWIS CARROLL: [contemptuous, as blue worm] You!
CHAMBERS: And as I fell, the radiance increasing…
WOOLF: You can’t use the wrong words.
CARROLL: Who are you?
ELIOT: What shall I do now?
WOOLF: But on the other hand…
ELIOT: What shall I do?
WOOLF: Here I am, crammed
ELIOT: I shall rush out as I am!
WOOLF: With ideas
ELIOT: And walk the street
WOOLF: And visions and—
ELIOT: With my hair down, so
WOOLF: —So on. And can’t dislodge them.
ELIOT: What shall we do tomorrow?
WOOLF: What rhythm is…
ELIOT: What shall we ever do?
WOOLF: Goes far deeper than words—
ELIOT: The hot water at ten
WOOLF: A sight. An emotion—
ELIOT: And if it rains, a closed car at four
WOOLF: Creates this wave in the mind!
A roll of thunder, tapering into the sound of rain.
CHAMBERS: Then I sank into the depths
ELIOT: And we shall play a game of chess
CHAMBERS: And I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul
ELIOT: Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door…
CHAMBERS: It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God!
WOOLF: Long before it makes words to fit it.
Pause. The low tick-tack of a clock.
ELIOT: [softly, the lights fading] There is shadow under this red rock. Come in under the shadow of this red rock. And I will show you something… I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
CURTAIN.
†
So you see, there is nothing I cannot romanticize. Nothing I cannot devastate. You say you love my mind? My mind turns all to fiction. We do not love a thing; we love the spirit of a thing. I strive to keep my heart from sheltering in its long familiar prisons. I hold myself from dreaming; home is also desolation. Where dreams wander doomed loops of repeated motion and hope, where repeated sentences coil like sinews and rope, discord crafts an opus which rises and falls, rises and falls; again the trumpet blares; the prophet calls. Make thee a way for the hands of the Living God! With needle and death stitching up this bed of desolation into art. Only a place where the lost things go; but there is light in the place where the lost things go. Come in under the light where the lost things go; and I will show you eternity in a handful of words.
†
a literary labyrinth 