To expunge earnestness and reveal an essential irreverence towards myself; excluding self deprecation--my primary self defense towards the “too stupid to live” messages received, implied, or inferred. About which it was common for me to encapsulate in the phrase “preemptive damage control.” Which, later, in it’s turn become “the dance of Avoidance.” In both cases I became mute, watchful, no, hyper vigilant for I knew the boarder between order was about to be breached. I was a mini death this short circuiting of myself.
In the cold light of sobriety sans my typical awakening with dreams, visions and dialogs--who in their turn become a sort orgiastic slow building orgasm of confluence, apparent to me, yet irrelevant to those who might read me with indifference. I can only say that even the Bible, at times, was merely defaced byproduct on dead tree flesh.
Writing began as an attempt to heal the insanity of grief. Not merely the lost children, the unlived life abandoned as painter, sculptor musician dancer or lover. All the things that impelled me to twitch and writhe in joy since infancy. Through the agency or device of journal keeping. My consciousness becomes focused like an ice pick thrust into the night; a lightning rod through which like Frankenstein I become vivified.
I was then and remain an ecstatic. How else can I reconcile the hammer blows as merely justified punishment. For what? Living?
It follows that I had my love affair with the nights alone, safely cocooned in the sanctuary of my bed. And of those nights the many pets who slept with me that I could stroke awake or in my sleep, of those blest friend I model my love for everything.
In my dreams, various and seldom populated with terror, there remained one repeated. Always initiated in a dark subterranean passage. What slowly, with repetition, became the basement of what I only came to know fully on the fifth and last occurrence.
Paved with large flat stones arranged in various levels, ramps, mazes, odd openings in the walls through which would be screams, cries for help a full spectrum of colored lights flashing or exploding. My cowering passage, at first was short, with each reprise came a few more feet gained. Toward the latter phases I would stroll cocky and knowing . . . in some sense the phrase “crooked ways made plain.”
Always naked I emerged through a basement bulkhead bifurcated door which I closed behind me and walked away. At some distance I turned and saw behind my course an enormous crenelated castle with banners gently waving above the battlements. Only then did I realize myself upon a trackless desert laved by moon light.
In recent time I’ve come to correlate my ‘great dream’ with my birth as described by mother. She claimed it was 58 or 59 hours of dry labor in Christ Hospital, a Catholic Institution. No mention was made of the whereabouts of my father. He may have been playing a gig or merely otherwise absent. I’ve only shared this with an emphatically trusted friend whose knowledge, experience and birth was equally hazardous and imperiled. The reply: “Impossible she would have died!” Resonates still.
In the not too distant pass I had my horoscope drawn and the insistence of a gay, nudist, Episcopal priest and Jungian psychologist. It too lays waste, someplace in the wake of my journey, as are most of my journals, publications in print, words and photographs--everything up to approximately 2000. Yet I retain some sense, the sight, mostly oppositions near vertical and the message I was to “speak truth to power”, had a poets mind . . . and . . . that is all, carry on.
My friend dismisses divination of any type with the simple statement, “put in a change order.” And then later would comment some verification the position of stars and planets influencing a general disposition or predilection.
I had from first to last, yet I live, a child’s simple faith in love. An ineluctable force that I could love people into loving themselves . . . if not ever loving me. Since it is love given without condition or hope of repayment we give to the Origin of All Things and motives and intentions. I love, nonetheless those who cannot, will not, ever love themselves.
Love your enemy as yourself, is a stone upon which I crumple my teeth, still, and so define love at it’s base rock foundation as simple acceptance, my enemy, my self, the right to be.
I pivot and twirl upon the spike finally convicted that the world in we which to live must have love possible. And in my leaving let me have the courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to, naked, thank my keeper, forgive my executioner and then have my head torn off; hanging by wire. . . .Slumped, headless and naked upon the cold, dark, stone floor--Nazi Germany very near the end of World War II--little did I know, until recently, he conspired to assassinate Adolph Hitler.
Or Emily Dickens: “Called Back.”
Equally: Gandhi blessed his assassin.
These heroes of mine, of and about them I have queried, my quest answered. We can ask all we want yet God is the final arbiter thus we must do for ourselves, in love, the only thing left--Love.
Odd conjecture: I once saw the Jews as sheep lead to slaughter shorn their dignity, yet now I see them heroic in love, their sacrifice possibly messianic for all time. Vengeance propagates vengeance. And the end of war will be the end of our species. Let their loss be not in vain . . . never to slay again.
I need not be RIGHT of left wondering since “vengeance is Mine, said The Lord our God.”
Of dreams, journals, ecstasy and horror, I can only say; pay attention to the height, width, breadth and depth of what you love and/or fear.
Perhaps, possibly, maybe, maybe not, I’ll have 1 Corinthian’s 13 tattooed upon my forehead inverso to read while shaving least I lend the impression I’ve had my face in a bag filled with sugar coated jelly donuts.
"I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself." --Michel de Montaigne
