Archive for June, 2009

Waking Up

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

06.28.09

I want to write. I want to say something. I want to have something to say.

I had something to say once, or at least, I thought I did. I do not know if it came easily, or if I did not mind the difficulty of the coming. I am not the kind of writer who is any good at artifice; my falsity is seen through immediately. It is why I am not an efficient writer (an efficient anything, perhaps) because I have to understand it before it is real. There are people for whom this is not true, I suspect, but I am not one of them. It means, though, that what I do produce is wholly authentic, having been created and remade again and again until each piece of it is understood.

Oh, but it has been so long since something has been created, so long since something has been understood. Standing at the cusp of something inchoate and powerful, I imploded. Wrestling with what it meant to write, to create, to construct I fled myself for the ease of another, abandoning for a long time the set of passions and predilections that I called myself. Five years later I am resurfacing for a handful of breaths to clear the water from my eyes and look back on a dark string of years behind me where the lights flicker and dim, not extinguished, but not exactly shining either.

Now, reading Michael Chabon’s recollections of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (as retold in Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands) I am captured by the passion and fascination, the ambition and the impotence that he talks about, of stepping from one side of a line to the other, being willing to pour out pieces of his soul into a structure he isn’t sure will hold. There is something amazing about the amount of faith and trust it takes to make that happen, a force of will to carry that through, as well as a kind of need I haven’t felt in a long time, and am only beginning to remember as I remember what it’s like to read, read regularly and read deeply.

There is, I think a certain amount of self-destruction in my favorite artists. I think it’s what’s most compelling about the best stories, even if we as readers, viewers or listeners can’t see what it is of the artist that’s being destroyed. I don’t mean just the drama that surrounds larger-than-life figures like Hemingway or Amy Winehouse, but the kind of direct honesty about the things we think and do, about the things that our friends and loved ones think and do that threatens the way that they live their lives. A good and brave writer likely threatens her existence with every word she writes. That is a very dramatic statement, and I don’t mean it as literally as I would like to, but when I imagine the construct of my life and how much my writing threatens to tear it down if I am honest about myself when I do it, then certainly I risk much in even beginning to contemplate what I do and why I do it.

I am, I suspect, starting over. There are things I must relearn, but really, when I am honest, there is no learning involved. It is a rediscovery of passion and self, a rediscovery of purpose and intention. It is a coming home, a waking up. It has not been easy, and I suppose I wouldn’t want it to be, but it is a struggle, using all the tools I have in order to claw my way out of the darkness, the numbness and back into the chariot that will carry me to my ultimate destruction: scattered black fragments against a pale sheet of perfect white paper.

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Happily, the Tower

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

06.06.09

I feel like the Devil tonight. To be more specific, I feel like one of the poor souls who has chained himself to the Devil and willingly remains bound to the demon despite the fact that they are free to go at any time; that they may lift the chains over their heads and slip away. I am that man, naked with a fiery tail standing ably and willingly next to that which dominates and destroys me.

I have, for so long, been bound to and dominated by a set of rules that I have no memory of creating. They have always existed, as though by divine mandate. This set of rules is just The Way Things Are. It is a grid of steel rebar that exists within the misty darkness of subconscious, a twisted and powerful maze that I know and navigate without eyes, only by touch; a maze that can never be escaped. Within this system of passages I have no power of my own, but must constantly be wary of the use of power by others against me. Only in self-defense may I have access to power, but even then it is often misspent or misused; poorly timed ripostes that have none of the cool power that I crave.

One of the basic and fundamental rules of this maze is that I have no power to reshape the maze, and that others always do. The maze is in constant shift around the desires and expectations of others. It can be a roiling mass of sharp rebar, in flux to the silent emotions of whatever companion I am with, willingly or otherwise. It is why I choose gentle and careful friends. It is why I do not like crowds. It is why I have a hard time in new places with new people.

On some level, for some time, I have understood that much of this was my own doing, that my presence in the maze was my own choice, and that awareness and that responsibility was not empowering, but rather disheartening, because I knew that I had a responsibility for my powerlessness, but I did not have an answer or a solution for it. It doubled the anxiety in a way, because I was still at the mercy of others, and could no longer be resentful at them for it, since I knew that it was me who was choosing to run their maze.

Only recently has my perception of the situation deepened. Only recently have I understood the depth of the construct in which I have trapped myself. I am not trapped in a maze of someone’s construction, I am the maze-maker. I am not choosing to feel guilty about someone else’s disapproval, I am the voice of disapproval. I am the ultimate arbiter of what Is and Is Not. I am the man behind the goddamned curtain. I still do not understand the full profundity of this, I still am not filled with the great power that the man I perceive myself as should have in finally understanding the scope and grandeur of the prison he has built for himself, but I do feel relief. I feel as though the myopic awareness of the maze I have so long run has widened and broadened to the point that I understand that not only can I choose not to run the maze, at some point I can choose that there not be a maze, and it will disappear. It is the spiritual equivalent of Neo asking Morpheus, ““What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?” and hearing Morpheus answer “No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.” My awareness that I was running a maze for someone else’s pleasure didn’t even begin to allow for the scope of the situation. “Are you saying that I don’t have to run the maze anymore?” “No, Adam, I’m telling you that when you are ready you will shape the maze.”

I still don’t understand this; the concept of freedom is still too large to really get. I have lived in the maze so long the idea of a place without walls is both unreal and frightening. There is not yet power if my freedom, in large part because I still don’t believe it exists. I have never had to make my own maze because there have been so many people in my life to make it for me. I understand, on some paper thin layer, that my dependence on others to shape my life is an intense form of laziness born out of fear; that this maze is not a punishment of other people, but a burden on them, and my relationship with them.

My first image of escaping the maze was that of the Irish monk on the currach cutting himself loose from dry land to float as God would carry him. But I do not think that is my path. The 10th card in my tarot reading tonight with Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, the outcome card, was the Tower, a card that is superficially very negative. But I found tonight that I was buoyed by it, that it really was hopeful for me. Crowley called the tower, “The manifestation of cosmic energy in its grossest form” (The Book of Thoth page 107), and I find that satisfying. To have any energy manifesting as I make this change (much less the major arcana energy of the Tower) is incredibly satisfying.

I know that this will not be easy, that the reshaping of the maze, my maze will be clumsy and brutal, hence the presence of the Tower in the outcome card, but I cannot live at the mercy of others for much longer. I know that willingly allowing myself to bend to the will of others merely to avoid their inconvenience will eventually destroy me. It has already cultivated in me many unhealthy habits for dealing with my fear and resentment, and will likely continue to twist me in uncomfortable ways, and I do not want to spend my life twisted. So, as dangerous and difficult as the destruction will be, I welcome you into my maze that we might remake it into something both useful and beautiful, which is the highest praise of a thing.

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Black, Red, White

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Black. In the beginning it is always black. It is the absence of everything, the emptiness of space, its infinite distance stretching lightless in every direction before a single fire is lit, balancing for a moment on the tip of her finger before pouring through the nothing-becoming-something in a single silver flash. It is the color of separation. It is the fullness of everything, rich black soil turned by the steady silver plough. It is the warm, wet black of the womb, wherein the child turns and grows, floating in the darkness growing, waiting for a chemical signal to flood through the membranes and the fluid, compressing the darkness and then, finally, piercing it.

Black. It always begins with black. Black running to red. Black running to green. Black is the color of potential, the box in which all things are locked. Black is the color of rest and growth; the shadow in which I find respite, the long and restful slumber. Black is the color of potential, the color of secrecy and code for the unknown, all of which are related, moving back and forth between each other with the fluidity of shadows. Black is the color of waiting. The color of perfect patience, balanced delicately on silver strings, waiting for the sound of panic to come running up its legs. Black is the color of before.

Red. Red is the wine pouring from the chalice, red is the blood pouring from the yoni, red is the color of our fingers traced against the blazing sun. The color of fire, the color of life, running through our veins and through the earth. Red is without hesitation, the color of seizure and war. The color of anger and friction and burning. Red is the color of movement, conflict and collision. The color of tongues in conversations, kissing lips and pricked fingers. Red is the color of now.

White. White is the color of passing. It is the color of age and the color of bone. White is the color of faded paint and faded fabric; white is the color of the forgotten, the form that no longer holds its color, the material that no longer holds its form. White is the color of age and disease, the creeping reminders of physical frailty. White is the color of God, the color of return, the color dissolution. White is the loss of importance and the color of understanding. It is the color of release and renewal; return and rejoining. White is the moment after now, the one we assuming is not coming. White is the color of coming home.

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