Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the man-at-arms now hears the Minotaur.
†
PROLOGUE. [NEW YORK CITY] — AUTUMN
One year hence, said the monster to the prince.
Every time I return to this city [indomitable labyrinth, beautiful monstress] I feel more and still more broken, more and still more humbled. What would you have made of me, monstress, if I had made it here? The maze doesn’t answer, only slouches out of the mist, offers no other comfort of whispers but the squelch of shoes and the rustle of rats. It costs you no small toll to trudge down Jubilee Street. Like wandering in a fog you find familiar, alluring; your cruelest lover, your most inexhaustible muse. You, however, the fog finds unremarkable. I am humbled at the edge of the world, at the heart of what I hold most dear and find most terrible still. Soaked through my black t-shirt and boots, crouched beneath the red lamp, then the cracked tile lobby; East Village time capsule, and every visitor’s the conduit. Where to next, comrade? You want to head right into the beast’s nest? What’s holding you back? What have you got to lose? You already gambled every other future for the one that snakes back here. Now here you troop, but only as Vapor, only as Ghost. What would I do if someone reached through the fog and clawed me back? If the illusion cracked and made me flesh and blood, I don’t know how I’d stand it. My going unseen protects my shield of pain. Don’t make me real don’t make me face what I did. On to the next! Another! Again!
Saturated with Beauty, the city sags beneath the weight, can’t help but overflow. The face of the man sleeping on the street is beautiful, the face of an angel. So many sidewalks. So much longing. The lights in the puddles bleed out into the streets. My heart merges with the fog, skims the surface of every arch. Where will this city receive me? Where will it receive me without having me first put up a fight? It is the labyrinth’s inherent nature to resist—and mine, apparently, to always grasp for what I’ve been denied. Thwarted, barred, sent down; and everything I have begins to peel: my carrier bag, the seats in my car, the leather on my jacket, the cover of my journal—flaking in scraps, leaving little black scales under fingernails—raining, inevitably, their way to dust.
†
POET’S LOG – ENTRY I. [THE BLUEGRASS] — WINTER
It’s been months now, reader; it feels like years. I do not like to be driven back here. I spent too much time alone now to escape it. The visions pester for release. [A release of the soul, yes but synonymously, a kind of void.] I feel like more of a vessel sometimes than a harnessing agent possessing my own will. Or am I possessed by my own will? The gates too long kept shut. All the words I’ve ignored now press between the bars; I feel myself collapsing, the first wisps of those glorious horrors come slipping through the mouth. Heaving life back into my horrible imaginings, the intoxicating swell of monstrous ink rushes through my veins, lifts the lonely song of present oracles portending dreams to come. —But how? But when? Silly man. You cannot know these things; you cannot know if you will ever find Love or Home again.
The Muses sing where the fields and the forests scratch along the path of my running feet. Hungry young mage, they puppet my phantoms’ play, little drama on the banks across the stream. Distracted by your Quest, distracted and detained, you returned too late. Whether the fault of Hubris or Fate, who can say? I have time only to watch the battle [cruel storybook pop-up, twisted lift-the-flap]—unpreventable, fixed—as the knight in onyx plates drives his lance through the heart of the king I’d swore to protect. Blood paints the leaves, and I am drawn only to the broken crown, ring of tarnished gold I cannot salvage, must leave for time to weather and earth to eat. I turn away. I find the sacred tree in the heart of the wood. It has my heart twisted in its roots. I take my axe and begin to hack. It is a long, unforgiving piece of work. Impossible to free the heart without blood and scratches, without slivers of skin sliced loose. Once loose the organ is ushered into the Crypt at the heart of the wood, taken down by torch to the tombs. Cast in stone again, returned to its chest, to the vault and the dark, the cold and damp. Another mold laid upon the altar, another candle lit. I begin again the silent chant of my eternal prayers.
†
POET’S LOG – ENTRY II. [THE BLUEGRASS] — WINTER
Tracing the closed circuits, are there no real beginnings and ends—only loops, endlessly resetting; cycles restarting; wheels that ceaselessly spin? How queer the month of January, met in showers of gold sparks, resolves, bright schemes—before we face the long nights, the biting and desolate days—given so much stillness and time in the cold and dark, we have no choice but to confront ourselves. There is a sick thrill about it: the raging winds that rip us of our false self-images, the howling storms bestowing such clear breaths—to release all that we are not—and see in the barren white—the simple, humbling beauty and horror of that which remains: in our remains / in what remains in us.
Cacophonous revel screams through the veil of thinly constructed peace, screams out your place in history, dismantles the frail barricades you hedge daily to convince yourself this age you endure is somehow unique. Easily shattered. I am cast back into a world of ghosts, hours of looped hauntings, all clamoring for the connecting thread in me / that makes me: the way I am / the way this is.
The ashes of the Wheel settle; the little iron hands point to the sea. Old spirit long lost, ghost of my Art, haunt me from some sad height. It too lives in the silk of the silver clouds, floating over the park I love, where the only magic in this booze-soaked city still breathes. I tilt my head back and beg for it to return my voice, restore my sight, take back the hex that has left me powerless these many long months. Cruel god of the Muse, splatter my tongue in silver again! Rustle your breath on the guttering coals of my dying dreaming. I am hungry for the blood I used to drink from this earth. I burn for the flames I once felt.
†
MANIFESTO. [THE SOURCE] — SPRING
To spend a life asking is the Romantic dead!
—If you must ask yourself whether the Romantic is in fact dead, we must assume the answer is yes — but only if you allow it.
“By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence.” — Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
In this case it is not creation through belief that I desire, but resurrection—or a sustained existence: to keep the spirit of an old world transmutable into this one. Resuscitation withstood beyond the act of resuscitating. But we cannot know whether our passions or dreams, whether the works of our time are meant to outlast us. We are not meant to know whether Time before us is meant to endure beyond Time now. Does it endure in us? Do we endure beyond ourselves?
Time and circumstance have demanded again and again that I be present—that I enjoy what little is given outside of my grand desires. This is my great challenge. I feel helplessly pinned between future and past—always running from my past to try and reach my future. Always running from The Future in an attempt to preserve The Past. I am caught in a perpetual limbo, in a constant state of what I feel to be Transition, because I cannot accept the reality of where I am now. A man out of time, in my restlessness I feed my disconnection.
It doesn’t help that I don’t know how to be a prolific writer in a digital world. It doesn’t help that the best minds of my generation have all been destroyed by gaining a following on social media—to riff on Ginsberg. Those that haven’t can’t possibly hope to share a distinctive voice unless they do—gain a platform for it. And how? By establishing a public world of virtual engagement. And so the voice is swallowed, diluted, dispersed in the constant chorus. And the monster is satiated. And thus persists the loop.
It isn’t all doomed—not if belief still wills the authentic Romantic back from its crypt of the nonexistent, and there are some who do a fine job of walking the line between the old world and the new. This distinction feels clearest to me in reality experienced through the immediate, tangible senses and reality experienced through a screen. I once would have been loath to call the latter a reality at all, but I think we can all agree this can no longer be ignored. The trick here, I believe, to maintaining a stubborn non-corruption, is to keep your feet as firmly planted in the earth as you can—to keep your eyes as firmly fixed on your immediate, physical surroundings. Publish your poems online, yes. Record your songs for a reel. Post your paintings for the world. But do not make this dispersion in an erratic, blinding sea of noise the heart of your art itself! Do not filter your entire world through this chatter box of immeasurable proportions. This swirling mouth, this technological Charybdis is always hungry, always vomiting what we feed it into a forever self-sustaining, self-numbing loop. It eats and eats, and its one great eye, always-scanning never-blinking does not sleep. Keep an eye on the charts, keep a finger on the pulse of what has become so much of the world—but do not become another vein in the incessant pulse yourself. It is all a tool, not a life. It is a means of community, a means of inspiration, a vehicle of expression—but it is not community, inspiration, or expression itself. Walk the line; keep your eye on it if you must; play the terrible creature’s game, but don’t let them trick you into believing that this is all there is.
I’m watching an entire way of living and connecting and engaging with the physical world succumb to something frightening—not merely because it is new and feels so different from what we’re used to—but frightening because it seems to grow inevitably far from the Authentic. If everything becomes performance, becomes edited and ceaseless and calculated and crafted for the best engagement, we lose the heart of what makes something endurable. So little is tangible anymore. Nearly anything that could have been done in a physical place, that required interacting with a physical person has been replaced with a few taps of buttons. You want to buy groceries? Tap. You want to deposit a check? Tap. You want to fall in love? Tap. How has convenience turned so quickly into a divorce from a tangible world that begs to interact with us? It cannot all be bottled and distilled through a lens!
But we haven’t lost it yet! Even as I watch us careening toward a reality all but entirely simulated, all but cultivated by the artificial or diluted experience, I still haven’t lost hope that the value of the tangible, the short-lived, the ephemeral will matter enough to enough souls to challenge the world from transitioning their way of life into an all but completely virtual plane of existence. Am I being too dramatic? I know it’s overwhelming. I feel crushed between my desperate attempt to maintain the marriage of the past to the future that I so often leave myself no room for the present.
Then I think about how precious art must have meant to those who created it before the days of the internet or the camera or any such tools of immortalization. In a time where fires, floods, enemy invasions were much more prevalent, and your work could be destroyed without backup or any hope of mass-producing it the world round—how much more precious was the Process? The value in this humble but magnificent, soul-carrying thing that bore no more assurance of survival than its creator! But now everything lasts forever. Everything is immortal. When we die, our Instagrams and our TikToks and our Xs and our Substacks will all continue without us; our algorithms will continue to churn more personalized content for our corpses. This isn’t to say that a legacy isn’t of value, even if that legacy endures through something digital—certainly every artist gives a thought at least once to what exactly they might leave behind [even if their final wish is for it all to be burned]. —I’m only asking that we cultivate a relentless and gracefully savage pursuit of the Authentic. The heart of the Romantic lives there. My aim would be to keep it alive longer than the short vapor of my own existence, but again—it isn’t my place to know. Does it drive me to despair on occasion? Has it kept me from this labyrinth of a journal for over a year, propelling me to live and love and leave the picking of the knot alone for one goddamned minute? Does it seem to me the very core of my struggle as a Lover of the written word in a world that slips further and further from the written and the tangible, the well-worn and the sacred?
I have no solution, only hope. I have no request other than you remain relentless in your desire to live—fully awake, fully immersed in the fabric that binds you to all that came before and all that weaves alongside you now. I have suspended the poetry to ask you this. I’ve put aside the visions and the riddles and the flowery language. Resist the spiral that would swallow you whole. Keep your spirit sharp. Reach for the desires that nestle deep in your soul. I know they live there, however dormant. Nurse them; love them; set them loose.
This world needs that tiny bit of Truth; however insignificant it may seem to you, I promise it’s the truest thing in all this world. Find the Romance that lives here still. The digital void is hungry. I promise you, your soul is hungrier still. Feed it without wavering; find the old wonder at the heart of the world.
True ecstasy isn’t extinct. The Romantic isn’t dead.
Listen to the song buried deep in the breast of this beautiful Earth.
Listen to it. Live.
a literary labyrinth 