The dream from which I am arisen is a lovely poem of love for humanity. And equally my Swan/Phoenix song; no dirge. A prayerful hymn of thanksgiving for an unlived life, abandoned talent and sense of the genius of our collective will to love. The core of life’s psyche?
The trembling tear lingering at my eye is both sorrow and joy before I join the dust surrounding me of mountains made desert. . . . When did all ground, time and space become sacred? Where and when did fear flee from me?
Oh! Of course, my last conscious thought before slumber. An unconscious prayer about which I should have been more careful not to articulate: I love discovering talent and witnessing the nascent genius there . . . oblivious of longing to become the nurture for its growth.
Having witnessed, at hospice, the total of one family, in relationship to their dying mother, I ejaculated privately to her, ‘You made beautiful babies!’ Now sensing I should learn to curb my mouth as the street signs admonish in Manhattan regarding pets. . . . But she glowed so! But then again I now think I need a bag gag permanently affixed.
I am at times rude and express my urge to merge physically with a woman. And now find it not odd that the thought expressed to a very few, in later time my request obviously denied/declined, that I’d really rather merge with her soul for a moment to run my fingers through her psyche. Perhaps that is my true longing and lust to really know her. Instead of becoming the more common double backed beast for a brief time with both the creation of life or death implicit.
In recognition of my rogue consciousness. I recall taking my children, or was it child then? To the zoo and witnessing a bear lolled back masturbating in apparent boredom.
Another instance of masturbation: a pet dog where two Jesuits had hidden, with a Protest theologian, when sought for arrest for their acts of political protest. Masturbatory acts became common coin to me at the behest of a friend and teacher in high school. God Bless Jack O’Hara wherever you are. The last time we spoke, five or so years ago, he protested my choice of photography versus painting and I fell mute, my praise and gratitude killed. How could I tell him that the work we do creates the best part of ourselves. What would I now say? For most of us the vocation we sell our lives for is paltry and unworthy of our time, or life’s essence, slavery actually.
No one and nothing is for naught. To have been witness to genius is enough to know that what we call “God” is.
I now think God is within this alchemical retort we being rendered into something new. The metaphor expands and contracts in accord with the circumstance--no situational ethics or morality implied. I am torn between extrude and excrete. The hammer and anvil infinitely more apt than “between a rock and a hard place” . . . the pain . . . the process being a sword hammered into a plowshare. We who quiver as tears about to fall into the sea of oblivion know better that it is our drop of water we give. Our choice to die and give the wonder to the children who follow. Even the children of Darfur whose mothers die of rape and aids leaving them orphans.
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." --Anais Nin
PS At the moment I recall it is the birthday of a woman friend who shared her father’s sexual use of her beginning at age six. Ending when, at the age of twelve or so, she began to seek him out. He then abandoned her. At the time of her death from brain cancer, a daughter called in recognition that we were friends, ending her monolog with the opinion that her mother was mentally ill.
I gave no reply but share this because her mother was a wonderful person who cared deeply for others. Best of all, for me at least, she taught me in part, now nearing completion, that friendship was better; the ultimate goal of love . . . and this was after giving herself sexually to a series of “bad boys.” . . . this one excluded . . . solemnity be damned. . . . . image borrowed from Aaron Siskind
