This New Year's Eve Post Is Brought To You By ...

My silhouette drinking from a plastic cup at the Levitation festival. Cheers. It's been a hell of a year. 

Glow

Since I still don't have words for the things I want to say, here's some light in the dark instead.

One Year And A Lifetime Ago

I dreamed I was standing at a crossroad in the center of an empty town. I could feel but not see the lines of the world. An unknown voice said, "while at first there were reasons for doubt, as the months passed, the truth had become clear.'"

I knew (the way you know in dreams) that this was a portent of change. - December, 2020

One year later, was this so? 

It's true, I'm not the same person I was then, on that neon corner, in that colorful glow. But even a dust devil will lose its power when it grows too cold or moves too slow. And that's to say nothing of obstructions.  

What's that pithy saying, again? "The truth hurts, reality bites." 

Sun In Opposition

 My anti-birthday. Cold sun splintering 

As The Crow Flies

The crows have gone away to fetch it. 

Blink

It's darkest November now, and the signal blinks through the early night. It's faint and faltering at times, but persistent. It still shines. 

Interlude

I am still here, still being, still doing, even if half-hidden in a mirror on a dark and windy side-street. Loneliness and sorrow and even conjunctions of Neptune and Pluto notwithstanding. I have a lot to say, but it's hard to say it. Sometimes words...

Never mind. If it's meant to come, it will come in time.

Happy Halloween.

Flicker

 

The Unrequited Sidewalk

Please forgive my writer's block. I seem to have come to the end of part 1 of my life without any idea of what happens in part 2.

While I wait in this interval for some sign to appear, let us take inventory. What do I have left to carry me from one phase to the next? A few crumpled leaves, a cracked sidewalk, a lot of feelings. Not much, and only one truly belongs to me.

Sometimes you turn the page yourself, and other times you must wait for another hand to turn it for you. Sometimes you become acutely aware that you aren't writing this part of your story. 

This is one of those times, so for now there's nothing to do but wait for my chance to take back the pen.

(The title sounds like it should be an Edward Gorey book, and frankly, it would be better that way.)

Waiting Around For Grace

Saturday, nothing but the echo of blowing leaves. Wind caught in corners. Feathers float without a sound.

If there is anyone here, they give no sign.

Sometimes I wonder if it's my fate to know people by their absence, a procession of empty spaces.  An impression at most, maybe; a fading handprint in the summer heat.

It's not that I mind being lonely so much, though it would have been be nice to share the emptiness once in a while. It's not being lonely, it's the difference between words and meaning, being looked at and being seen. 

I suppose that's what I'm doing here, walking this threshold as I do. Trying to see and hoping that someone will see me. The grace that comes with something more than indifference. I know by now this is unlikely, that I might as well sit on this bench waiting for a dead friend or a phantom lover to appear, but the heart is persistent, down to its last agonized beat. Maybe even longer.

If I know myself at all, in a hundred years, I'll still be making the same plea. I was not just a thing, an image, an obstacle that blocked the light. I had a meaning. A soul. By then, I will be truly invisible, merged with the wind. Still pleading. Still waiting. 

Fever Dreams

Lying here ill day after day, I find myself pondering the way some people take concepts and fashion them into weapons. The way some omit facts to maintain the false superiority of knowing the truth. There is the devaluation of lived experience and independent thought. Insularity that breeds mediocrity. It's all weakness masquerading as strength, but if the last few years have proved anything, it's how easily we will buy into a façade. 

When I'm strong enough to stand up, I contemplate my image in the bathroom mirror, my awareness of -- the appearance of being -- an object without value. It may come as a surprise, but this hasn't always been the case. I've been a valuable object a time or two, and this is how I know that the difference between them is no more than a hair's breadth, entirely dependent on the whims of the one who thinks they decide your worth. This is not to say it does not hurt. If you care, then oh god yes, it hurts. Devaluation can feel like dying while having to stay alive. Self-objectification is worse yet. It's what happens when your survival depends on watching yourself through other people's eyes. 

I'm aware I'm not making a very good case for myself by telling this half -- my internal half -- of the story. I'm aware I could kick my image up a notch by switching the view. That requisite hair's breadth. I could convince you that I'm more worthy of your attention than you think I am. I note the impulse, see the shadow of it in my words (see, I've been valued, I've been loved, don't take me for granted!) but these days I lack much interest in self-deception. 

...

Last night I dreamed of a phrase etched on my own flayed flesh: "just because you've been given this doesn't mean it's a gift."

I woke up and realized it was true. 

The distance between seeing pain as a gift and pain as a punishment is a hair's breadth, too. 

These are the things you notice when you are sick.

(Illustration: Martin Ware, Donkeyskin)

Underneath

Cruel summer. Miserly summer. All steaming drizzle and sodden heat. Mosquitoes breeding in muddy puddles. There aren't enough baths in the world to wash away this malaise.

There's nothing to do but wheeze and cough and think about all the work left undone. The air is thick with both disease and disgrace and it's a toss-up as to which is more suffocating.

My ideas wither under that corrosive dripdripdrip, the one you think I don't notice. 

My thoughts are toxic condensation, collecting beneath an August that never really came.

All Birds Come Home To Roost

Early one morning in 2007 - it was in the Autumn, I think - I dreamed I was standing in the driveway of my father's house. It was early morning in the dream, too, the sky overcast, the smell of damp gravel rising into the air. It felt so real, as if I were really there, even though I could never imagine going back again.

In the way of dreams, my cat Misu was there, too, with her kitten, a silver tabby named Fog. One moment they were stalking a pair of mourning doves and the next - in the way of dreams - they were the doves, flying to safety of the telephone wire above, higher even than it could've really been, a dream height that could only exist in my mind. 

I woke with the image still in front of my eyes, the cat-birds ascending ever higher, cooing their melancholy song. The image faded in a moment, but the dream has stayed with me ever since, refusing to yield even a hint of its meaning.

Flash forward 14 years, and it's two weeks ago, early morning. I am standing in the driveway of what was once my father's house. The sky is overcast, and the smell of damp gravel rises into the air. I see two cats - the neighbor's, probably - a mother cat and her kitten. The baby is pouncing the mother's tail. Misu, an elder stateswoman these days, peers at them disdainfully through the fog. There is the sound of wings, and a pair of mourning doves land on the wire overhead.

At once, the dream-feeling comes over me. I am - as near as possible, dream illogic aside - standing inside the dream. I feel slightly afraid. What will happen next? 

Immediately, there is a loud crack in the silent morning. The birds and cats are off like a shot. Unnerved, I find the source of the noise: a birdhouse has fallen from a tree and shattered into tiny pieces on the rocks. Instinctively I begin to question how it could have broken with such force, made such a sound, but the knowing in the back of my mind tells me not to be a fool. 

That shattering was 14 years' knowledge landing with a blow. 

Things break apart.

All birds come home to roost. 

I See, So I See So

I see more than it might seem.

The Hum

I've always liked the sight of electrical pylons; the way they stand alert on the horizon, their hum suggesting things of which we can't speak. 

(They are a little hard to draw, though.) 

When It's All Too Late

A few days before my birthday, I emerged from an early morning dream of a memory.  It really was a memory, too, though not much of one - just waking up and getting dressed for school on a cool blue morning, a long time ago. How long? Tears For Fears on the radio long. 

Not much more to it than that, really, the morning and the song, and I woke into an atmosphere much like the one I'd just left. I shivered, though. The disjunct between then and now - or was it the lack of one? - left an eeriness that clung to me, as if I'd carried it over from the dream world. 

It was a curious feeling. I ran through my actual memory of that time (such as it is - who really remembers the details of such an ordinary moment?) Putting on my uniform and shiny penny loafers with dimes. The open window through which leaked the watery light. It all feels very alone, but then I always do.

Spring, 1984. Was there anything eerie about those days? No, I can't imagine so. They just were, in the way things are, and it's only in retrospect, or in the overlap of waking and dreaming do I have the sense of something vital that's been forgotten, some arcane gesture or fate now lost.

And yet, even now I can feel it there. The faint humming of time. 

Desolation Angel

1. 

I came across a picture of you the other day. The look in your eyes was soft, even tender. As always, my heart warms for an instant before the shock of cold truth freezes me through. A cruel trick of the mind. I never get used to it. 

2.

11:00  a.m. Concrete silence. That phrase sounds pretentious, but it's the only one I have. Lines of sun and shadow are creeping across the square, a slow and pointless chase that the shadow always wins. The severe geometry of this place suggests something, but what it is remains unclear. A vague memory of the afterlife, perhaps. 

My insignificance chafes at me. Not insignificance in and of itself, not in the Great Scheme of Things, but my inability to hold space in the mind of another. Do I really need to be seen in order to exist? Do I really need to matter this way? 

I curse myself for failing to fit the template, any template - if not desirability, then respectability - but this is a habit. Doesn't this free me from the risk of being an object, an empty stage upon which to act the same worn-out play? 

But I remember making this same argument, day in and day out, year after year. It sounds nice, but do I really think that one day my pure inner light will break through this grim façade and show me for what I really am? 

And what if - god forbid - what if your inner light had broken through and been found wanting? 

What then?

Then nothing, of course. Nothing. What is there to do? 

I might as well try to stop the sun moving across the sky.

I already told you. 

The shadow always wins.

In Memory Of Some Other Sunday

The Hawthorn And Jasmine Epiphany

It was the 12th of April, and I was weaving vines beneath  the afternoon sun. The day was strangely empty. I felt very alone. 

I paused for a moment, watching the finches and moths darting through the winter-scorched hawthorn. What would I do if I were so free? But no sooner had I thought it than I felt an invisible restraint tighten around me  A lifetime of training, my experience in a world of No. 

Ego-identity, woven tight as a corset. Woven by others, mostly, their projections and expectations, and now, I realized suddenly, I was confined by an identity that wasn't even mine.

It's not that what I wanted was wrong - I only wanted to follow the butterflies and be...I don't know...something that wasn't this collection of assumptions and do something. But there are things you learn out of habit, and always there had been someone to put up a hand to stop me. Always a reason why I couldn't, or failing that, an explanation of why I was somehow less than others who had done the same. For the first time, I think, I truly understood the reason why the freedom of my body depended on the freedom of my mind. 

I stretched out among the vines feeling so tired, enlightened but tired, and the same sun shone down upon us all, the moths and the finches and even something as small and pathetic as someone like me.

Pyromancy

I'd used the candle more than a few times; just a white candle, given to me by a friend. Nothing special about it, outside of the handmade label. 

As it happened though, night before last, I'd decided to do a candle spell - just a small one, in hopes of a little boost. I didn't add anything, just a petition paper to place underneath. 

The candle burst into roaring flames, spiraling so high and fast I thought the glass would break. It spooked me. Something wasn't right. But before I put it out, I set it some distance away on the patio, grabbed my camera and said "show me what's causing this to happen" Then I took this picture.

Can you see her? 

Your Ghost

For several months, a few plaintive notes have been haunting me, the briefest fragment of song curling up from my unconscious like a thin wisp of smoke. 

It was a cold night in October the first time it happened, at the curve of the walkway in the autumn wind. The melody was too brief and the lyrics were too fuzzy in memory to make out, yet enough to catch a distinctive, twanging ache. It was something I'd known very well once, but no amount of thinking would bring it back. 

It would come to me again and again at unguarded moments - under the garden archway or at the kitchen door at night. Shoot you down, were those the words I was hearing? Such an odd lyric, you'd think I'd remember. But maybe I had it wrong. There was no way to find out. 

I gave up trying to place it and instead let it draw me to where it seemed to want to go - the reflection that everything at last becomes a memory, even the most ordinary moments take on added meaning in retrospect. 

Last night, without warning, it came flooding back. The 3 seconds from 2:00 - 2:03 in Damien Rice's version  of Your Ghost. "Let him shoot me down" goes the lyric, and I saw how it had taken so long to retrieve. In the original, more familiar version, Kristen Hersch delivers the line with a slightly challenging air and doesn't linger. Lisa Hannigan's vocal, however, has no challenge in it, only mournful acceptance. It may be the saddest line in the whole song. 

It's not lost on me that my fuzzy recollection had changed the wording from the first to second person, becoming not so much a dare but a piece of melancholy advice. There are no accidents in matters of the psyche, nor in cosmic timing. I understand now why the line came to me the way it did, and why the source comes back to me now. 

It's our fate that we must co-exist with our ghosts. 

Things Left Unsaid

 

Pretending Not To Be

Psychedelicize Me

A little color for the new season.