“He said to me, ‘recall me if thou canst; Thyself wast made before I was unmade.’”
—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno
“He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life, and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
†
My surname serves me well. As a maker of cords, I weave the ropes. I follow the thread through the threaded maze. It is made of the strings I’ve tangled—great walls of amassed ribbon, twisting, forever snaking; I thread them, then I follow—trapping myself in an attempt to be free. But let us see if we cannot pick at, perhaps even unknot some of those cords most constricting as they twine about the heart. Shall we?
The earth holds itself from me like a screen, projected on a far wall. So many silver-hot spikes of revelation swing about its intangible canvas. Moored before the masterwork, craning my neck beneath the unreadable stitches of time’s vibrant patterns, I drag my sword through the grand tapestry, have sliced the mural to pieces. Now I hold these strands—loose, multicolored—between my fingers, in my hands. My aim was to weave them into something new, some kind of remarkable revision, but they twist in so many shades; where does one begin? I follow certain strands as far as I can; they intersect, overlap, run in opposite courses, puddle to ghosts. Holding them I feel—one—two—how many counts?—that sharp tug of reckoning. Those insistent twitches upon the thread, they call me back. But to what? No truth, once unmasked, allows you to live without some cost collected.
Take my obsession with literary cycles, with works of art which, in ending, bring us back to their beginning. Why always the loop? A person ripped through change, through ‘ordeal’ –brought once more to the inciting threshold, knowing full well they can no longer exist there with any complacency given what they just witnessed and the weight of the knowledge they now possess. Dragged through the cycle again and again; there is some sick fulfillment in this—the repetition—coming back to the mouth of the change a changed being. Do we suffer the ordeal just for the high of rebirth?
By example, the last time I hunched beneath the glow of these auburn lights I was reading Dante’s Inferno. It returns to me now in the form of a record, which, like the sinuous patterns of Doré’s dark etchings, escape the confines of their frames and bleed into my pages, fill the shadows of my footsteps, follow me home, spill over my bed, I cannot escape. I want to believe the hand of God will lift me from the pit, will lift me in reverse, back up to the light from which I descended, that I might glimpse into each special hell cell of my past like an elevator rising up through a dollhouse, passing artful little one-sided dioramas, that I’ll pluck from each its essential piece and fashion them into a fragmented epic once I’ve returned to earth. Will I return? Do I want to? I never left Wonderland, you know; I just traded it in, traded the petticoats and the tea parties for pale fire, a poet in rags, the River Styx. The continual dialogue, the endless discourse remains the same; it only shifted; it morphed somewhere along the way. I still fell down a hole in the ground; it has snaked from a child’s confused dreamscape to a man’s prophetic hell. In either case, it is well. It is still well. It is well it is well it is well
I tried to catch at the loose threads but they evaded me, dissolved back into one great tangled knot, soft, slithering, suffocating ribbon.
A night in a city not known to me, following a lover all but unknown to me, led down through the door in the ground, up into the incestuous nest I’d oft heard rumors of but never actually seen, that neon-beating heart of all the ugly, insatiable want and need in the city. As much as it unnerved me, still I found myself captivated. What world was this where children of the night, dull-eyed and listless, lost all their inhibitions? They roved the life-sized puppet theater, the sticky hall of mirrors, hungry, oblivious. I caught the reflection of it all in the planet-strung ceiling, marveled at the vipers in their writhing and wriggling; though later, with the vision of this fixed in my mind, I mourned my own loss of community, for there is no one place that is familiar to me, in its people, in its rhythm. Where others I have met find their life is enough, in one or many of its various forms—romantic, rhythmic, logistic, mundane—I am never placated. Why is it never enough? I forge through every bend, drop through each spiraling level alone, leaving the pieces of each to each their own.
How quickly desire cools. How swiftly the creature crawls, once spouting steam and fire, back down into its ink green pool, snarling silent with milk glass eyes, no longer burning with hunger once the jewel it had so darkly coveted was caught, and it discovered, upon further light, it was not so radiant a stone as it had thought. So desire, once bubbling like some indelible geyser now drains back down and out; it does not altogether dissolve, but this is the state that feels more natural—the quiet, melancholic lust—the cooling, the hardening, feeling the sacred has slipped back out of touch. Or is it more sacred because of this? The pity party doubles as a worship service. And no matter the length of the reverie, I will always trade its golden field for this temple on the hill.
For my interior world may seep and bleed in depths of limitless color, but my exterior world dances in such a small circle, feels pressed upon; my feet, planted fast in the shore sands are also tossed, shaken, pummeled, drowned by the waves. Never mind the shallow bands of dolls to whom life is a carnal, short-lived and material waltz. If their hell is the eternal burning, mine must be this holding, this state of grinding teeth and pounding fists on steering wheels, ever in motion but helpless to escape. The curse of being fixed to a place, the state of reaching never grasping. If that is hell, hell is already here. When then do you allow yourself to feel grace? When do you allow yourself forgiveness?
I come back to myself in the middle of the wood. It is the heart of this city [arguable in a geographical sense, indisputable in a spiritual one]. With all this blood-soaked earth preserved, its spirits appear much clearer here. The wild fauns flit along close, close enough to touch, a galloping exhalation of the ancient world, and my blood sings with the echoing war chants, the elegies remembered only by the leaves’ midnight sighs, the meadow’s lissome dance. The rain on my face is the only tears I know, the branches at my neck my only caress. Where did it all go wrong? Can you pinpoint a specific place in the narrative where our protagonist took a wrong turn, maybe spoke the words they shouldn’t have—or was it written this way from the beginning? These in medias res scenarios have often proved as some tale’s start. This fact should offer a comfort, but we tunnel only deeper in the dark. Left alone, did I not think my impulsive actions would leave me without consequence?
If you follow the trail of dead birds you’ll find my crouched and contemplative form bent over the corpse of what must be the seventh this year—sent to me by whichever powers continue to play with the symbols of my life. What loss does this one herald? This trail has led through a gauntlet of soul, stolen baubles, routed dreams, the shame of exile; and it wasn’t until today that the truth of it all smacked me like the glass wall smacked the black bird’s brittle bones. This isn’t about losing pieces of life, whether cherished or inconsequential—but letting go of one’s little idea of control. It’s always the prying open of the clenched fist, isn’t it?
Even so, I find my wild will lifting up a vengeful prayer— Maiden of the wood, keeper of the search, Artemis, I think. It is her, her to whom my racing thoughts turn. If this chase is over, I silently murmur, if the prey be caught and with no to little pounding heart—send me another hunt. String one more arrow to my bow, let the pale plain of the moon swell again, breathe the forest back to mystery and some enticing rhythm. Set my eyes on a path ahead—into some unenclosed depths, not this twisting snarl of infernal circles. Send to me some beating, wily, guileless stag, a matched opponent in this dance—not more of these sifting shadows who, though solid at the outset, vanish as soon as you have brushed them.
Though how joyous for a single moment! for a single night! to commune with another soul that reaches for you, for another bright black flash in the void. Who can say I don’t bear all this temporal well? My life is filled with the ephemeral; why should that diminish the power of catching its eyelash fluttering wings, of pinning them to this velvet board? If I thank my latest love for anything, it is for keeping my soul alive just a little while longer, with just a little more poetry—and the recitations of our bedroom hymns; and the prayers without language we breathe at each other’s lips.
The winds shift. The seasons turn in their nebulous thrones; the gods of the summer bow out and collapse in idiotic stupors for the titans of winter to draw about the world their sharp and silencing cloaks. I would like to feel some promise in the wind, some reassurance. I do not. It is only nature. I am only filling the gaps with my desperate, thrashing poeticism. If I look at anything at all too closely, it drowns me in remembrance of where I am and how it keeps me. Everything must instead be wrapped in vision, and I know—I know I cannot live on prayers and prophecies alone, but I no longer have the strength to slam my fists on those metaphysical doors as I did so long last year. The wistful cupped palm of summer is melting away where it once melted me in its bend of grief and rest. The encroaching mist settles in to its emerald armchair, and though Persephone rides back down to the arms of her lover and all his endless, shade-entwined realm, still I remain on the weathered bench, in the empty park, under the barred chest of the pillared church—and still the seasons turn—and I remain, held—to the hills, held—to the formless deep, held—and always—ever still—without—Eurydice.
Only this moment at one is real to me. The devil smoking a cigarette on the neighboring mansion’s wrap-around porch. The crackle of his ashes. The minotaur on the billboard. Found me even here, the horn-crowned bastard. Of course it did. Its green-eyed gaze is not bound to the maze, even when I’m dead-ended out. Running myself sick, stopping to retch at the for-sale signed church on the curb. We put God up for auction, didn’t you hear? Only the rust-toned wail of the train horn, the discontented musing of thunder suggest any voice that might still hold sway from an age before this one. Did you know I wept when I beheld the sight of my salvation? [and didn’t it look just like the spread of Manhattan?] Or rather, wept as it slipped out of sight; and I knew without remorse—that all that hunger and steel was all that’d be able to hold me in any indelible comfort. The summer is over; the long dark settles in, stirring the ageless aching; I’ll give you my pulpy bundle of string just to let you unravel me again. I always mold a better mess of cord when I’m undone. It’s in my name. It’s in my blood.
I am as Patroclus was, incapable yet stubborn, caught in the terrible currents of powers so much stronger than myself. Still I chase after the golden feet of my love—not a love made of flesh and blood, but the flashing form of Beauty, that which is both mortal but carries the unseen core of the immortal. Ultimately unattainable, it invites you to reach anyway, entices you with dreams of what you may possess should you actually find your arms pulling it to your chest. It is this form which kindles the sharp and almost violent surge of creative breath in me, strikes the aching flint whose sparks drive my hands in the conquest of their dance.
The beast from the heart of the maze mocks me yet. What, what can you do? it asks. What will you string together with the threads you hold in your hand? You chase your lover, you follow your love to the fortress walls, unarmed and delusional as you are. It is the promise of glory, isn’t it? The promise of somehow getting to keep that immortal spark you crave, that from time to time you have even held. You think by defying the Fates you somehow live outside their reach; you don’t see that in this defiance you only fall into their seamless hands. You are playing a young man’s game by the spells of a young man’s magic.
Without my sword, with no hope of escape, I can but take the beast’s words, hold them in perspective. They too add to the work of my hands, as I hold the mass of clay, turn it this way and that. Something molded out of dark dreams, out of the flash of green eyes in the horned king; out of a prayer lifted to the swift, silver-robed hunting goddess; out of the blood of the slit throat goat; out of the waters of the fountain, pouring ever to the god with the cloven hooves. These fevered prayers and warring questions. I twist the red thread around and around the soft body of clay. You will yield something of meaning. You will.
My obsession fixes especially on those threads that snarl with foreshadowing, those footprints that measure the past—not in coils sprung but in coils set to spring long before they’re trod on. Which leads me to wonder whether others can sense these sightless tremors of what will pass. Did the woman at the tea party know—or feel—any ripple in the fabric of time—that months from then I’d find myself sitting in her house, twisted in the arms of her son, family photos smiling blankly in the dark? What unrevealed wisps of the future twine about my ankles now? I do not think I am bearing the temporal well after all. Wanting so badly for something to last—whether a thing I made or a thing outside myself—a thing that I can keep. “How enduring. How we need durability.” But it is this very wanting, and so badly, that asks the aim of your desire to evade you, that whispers, slip out of my hand. The Fates amass a hungry bitch who knows just when to tighten, when to loosen, when to dissever your too-tightly bound and treasured thread.
I will find the pattern, will find the arrangement for all those pieces that will not leave me be. Holding council with my ghosts on the corner of my street. A stranger who sees you from the start, who sits in the rain outside the bar and names the image of the war within your soul, going back to the place you dream of, unreal city! leaving you with naught but a book of poetry. Prophetic. A lover who tells you to spit in his hand, and wine-soaked it comes out violet black, and he makes you slick with that and his old world charm, because no one knows how to seduce anymore, and there he goes—and I am left to drown, still suffocating, still bound.
The monster’s snarls are founded in dark truth: I would throw myself on Hector’s spear again and again, because to robe myself in immortality if only for a moment, to reach for remembrance, for glory, is enough to endure any bloody, god-smitten end.
Haunted by visions of red thread unraveling out of me. Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife. Blood will have words; words will have blood. I pull on the string, attempt to find the source. It travels up my arm, unspools my hungry heart. Unmaking yourself is such an undervalued art.
It is the fear of the dead end! The inability to see past the forks in the maze—to suspend my incessant need to predict or chart the resulting twists based on this immediate turn. Words are the only current I know how to shape to my hand. I would release the rest. Let the labyrinth fall; let poetry with its nimble digits be the hand that undoes these terrible mops. This life demands motion, not the resignation of restricting my reality to a prison. Illusions are best left unexamined, I know. Always better not to glance in the still surface of the pool. I can’t help myself. There is only so much depth in a single layer of hell.
There you will find me still, sitting cross-legged from the floor of the labyrinth, enwreathed by lifebloods of thread, hands furious in their working, fingers frantic in their dance.
You will yield something of meaning. You will. You will.
a literary labyrinth 