A brief vignette born of my private and daily existence.
In a recent piece, I dissected my fantasy in which the mind translates to a museum. Memories, dreams, anxieties framed in prominence or left to gather dust in storage all comprise one’s collection of existence. Revisiting these galleries—labyrinthine though structured—there is one piece in particular that holds me fast, faster than most, in the halls of my internal world.
If we are to step closer—as yes, I’ve invited you in once more, uncertain whether to feel greater pride or concern that you’ve returned—I step away from the wall to give you a full and unobstructed view of the piece in question, securely mounted to the annexes of the soul.
Here we find a fixed landscape and two inhabitants forever bound in motion. Vast stretches of water, sheets of rock or earth, extend beneath a sea of bilious clouds, between which the pair of figments haunt the course of my life in their ceaseless tangle. Now drawn together, now torn apart, they move like battering moths, like daggers of light shot through water and flitting an uncharted ballet upon the floorboards. Even in rest their robes ripple, their eyes burn, their deathless broad hands clench and unclench. This struggle they’re locked in, each seeking to overpower the other, becomes a conversation of limbs, a lunge and parry of wills, a joyous, heartless dance without alterations, without resolution. How can it be otherwise?
The first creature—cased in muscle drawn taut, in calloused, ruddy flesh—grinds its feet into the firmament, meets resistance with a fire. With hair coiled like straining ropes, robes cinched tight around the body, breaths full of desire and wicked passion and a biting, burning hunger, it draws from the strength found in the last swell of a death rattle. But this swell is extended, the dying flame held always in a crest—wavering, undulating, consuming as long as it still draws light to its breast.
The second spirit draws no light to its breast, though it is made of a kind of light. It draws all of time to its breast, holds all of time in its chest. Serene, unfaltering—though fluid in its movements, seemingly devoid of any solid matter, its grip meets no overbearance. Here is one who has never been defeated—has never been defeated and never will be. This knowledge, like the wealth of all knowledge to which its rhythmic, constant heartbeat rings, courses through the undammed veins of its unmitigated strength.
—I cannot yield, it voiceless cries.
—I will not yield, its challenger hoarsely replies—and braces its expiring form upon the rocks, braces its trembling but desiring body and raises both its hands to meet the white fire of its matchless partner, this light not-of-light and time not-of-time, the truth of whose very nature cripples its challenger. Like the grappling twins of beauty and despair they bend and wage, tilt and war for the space that twists between them.
—You cannot hope to topple me, breathes the white and deathless shadow.
—I do not hope to topple you, groans the red and breathless flame. But in the very press of my resistance, what spark of some lasting thing could I yet leave? In the wake of my destruction, what exhaled ember can I still hope will burn?
In this their vortex—spun of a hunger blacker than hope and a void sweeter than unknowing—they seek to snuff the reality of the other, though neither has yet to fall—and likely never will. So they surge on in limitless will, one in rage and the joy of attempt, the other in just and immeasurable dominion.
Famous for crossing both the expanse between the Twin Towers and that between the towers of the Notre-Dame cathedral, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit has professed, “My journey has always been the balance between chaos and order.” As we leave off our study of this personal tableau, perhaps to turn down another wing, perhaps to leave the gallery altogether, I tell you that this has always been my journey. Hardly a balance; no, my journey—limbs locked within their tangle in the caverns of the soul, spirits dancing their carnival across my shoulders—has always been the war between the breadth of an eternity and the breath of my ambition.
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Gustave Doré, 1855
a literary labyrinth 