I have driven through these lands with my eyes shut, wondering;
I have thought that nothing comes of dreaming if he merely dreams;
this place where I am — gone so far as to begin again, here.
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways,
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
– Bob Dylan
When a man really gives up trying to make something out of himself — a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman, a righteous or unrighteous man, ... when in the fullness of tasks, questions, success or ill-hap, experiences and perplexities, a man throws himself into the arms of God… then he wakes with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, and it is thus that he becomes a man and Christian.
I want to fall head over heels in love. I want to drown in it. I don’t want to be able to tell which way is up, dizzy to the point where I forget my own name. It’s been so long since I staked out such a territory in my heartspace, opened all the doors inside me to expose those inner depths. I am afraid of it, too, I must admit, for to leave oneself open like that invites so much the more injury if one is suddenly dropped, however high you have risen suddenly to fall that height. One wonders if I still remember how to do it, to let down one’s guard like that, to make oneself vulnerable to someone who is more stranger than not. Even if the chemistry makes it seem as if you’ve known each other forever and a day. But who is to say what comes of what? Where would poetry be without the hurt? Better to fall than never have been aloft, n’est-ce pas? And who knows, there is that chance it’ll work out, however miniscule it seems — miniscule unless it happens, and what you have then would it be to seem that the whole wide world is at your fingertips.
As if from within a flurry of angel wings, I heard a song — that is what I wish to say of where my poetry comes from. But it is as Gustave Flaubert said, “Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.†It sounds so much better in my head — so much better, in fact, before it is ever put into words. That is what many of us would desire to be able to do, is it not? Pour emotions directly on the paper? Perhaps then, there would be no separate class of beings called “artistsâ€... or is it that some of us have such a strong vision, that even when it is hewn by our (lack of) ability to render it in the outer world, something of it still contains a fire from within, and it moves all of us? But I claim not such a thing, myself. My song comes not from in the midst of angel wings’ flurry.
Perhaps it is not even a question of talent, for looking into history, one wonders how many things received as much attention as they did — for these things, however embarrassing to humanity, struck some common chord in so many of us. (And no one, by the way, escapes the zeitgeist his entire life: such a one who thinks he operates outside the time in which he lives operates under a very large illusion.) Perhaps there are many in the world who are van Goghs that never get discovered. I would like to think so. For we are all of us, the best of us, are beating a cracked kettle while the bears dance, trying not to think of the stars while we keep in time. That the stars stay unmoved by our coming or going, whether we made any noise or not. Myself, though: I desire to make the noise.
It may be, ultimately, that in our desire to create, from where it comes and to where it goes does not matter in the slightest. For in those spectacular moments of poetry, when cataclysms of imagery rise and fall, and I wield the word as if it were Excalibur itself, I am immortal. And I need not any validation of this experience, no one to tell me I have lived. Mayhap that is how one knows, in the end, that he has lived indeed.
1.
my dreams drink from the endless stream of whispers
flowing from the milky starlight night has spilled from her dark breast
i hear the liquid darkness pools where dip the roots of all knowledge
(all waters reflect infinity, however much they resemble your face)
the darkness shall evaporate from the shoulder of dawn
like a soldier over a hill, another day will rise and subside
my whisper drops into eternity, to be dreamed by someone else
It all comes together like a rushing of the four winds to a pinnacle. We, caught in the updraft of the coalescing airs can only brace ourselves for when the raging forces know some strange certainty, that which we cannot deny nor explain. Thus is the sound of prophecy alighting on the land: more elemental than the storm, throttling through the heart of those who stand in the face of the world machine. This is what can be imagined of infinity, all that we, the images of love itself, may apprehend of the vasty light above. It comes in words, it comes in riddles, it comes in rhythms that unease us. Though who is to say how it will affect any of all whom they strike? One thinks some would be dumbstruck in holy know, some disturbed beyond the extents of earthly concern. And then there would be the unbeliever, in whom there is no miracle, who smile and think they understand: how foolish are we to put our trust in a higher. But who knows? Even these may choose a side, unknowing the part they play in the grand destiny.
Then there is the magic renewal. This is a miraculous thing: when you think all inspiration has flown from you, there is splashed upon your spirit the waters of life. This is what it means to be alive: we grow tired of the greatest things, only to find newness in what is common. We must find inspiration where we can, even in things we would not be proud of, even in the hidden thoughts that no one but we will ever know — but if they yield some insight into the condition of being who we are, then we find meaning where we perhaps thought we wasted something of ourselves. For we know we are sinners, and that nothing that comes from us is free from blemish, but even the imperfect acts we purpose can be of true significance, and nothing, if it comes to it, is ever wasted. For we out of nowhere can experience magic, that sense that something right has come from the randomness. That we were meant to be here.
Let no one suppose that we may attain to this true light and perfect knowledge, or life of Christ, by much questioning, or by hearsay, or by reading and study, nor yet by high skill and great learning. Yea, so long as a man taketh account of anything which is this or that, whether it be himself, or any other creature; or doeth anything, or frameth a purpose, for the sake of his own likings or desires or opinions or ends, he cometh not unto the life of Christ.
a flash of illumination, what was it, exactly?
illusions, too, have much undeniable light and sound to them
dreams feed on real or no, sometimes to starve without knowing why
Where have I seen this before? A page in my imaginary history swats open, and I run my mind’s eye down the lines of worn text. There was love, somewhere, and I must say of myself that I have never been completely without it, however much I complained that I was stranded. But the lines of that face, the situational physics of this whole phenomenon, the interplay of light and shadow (like the world were specifically trying to tell me something of the nature of what we see, and what sees us): something in me recognizes something of the eternal bit of us that we have on loan from God. And then I look away for a second, and look back, and there is nothing out of the ordinary about anything here. Or perhaps that is the trick? To notice what we don’t notice, because we see it all the time, what memory stubbornly will not admit into its doors….
i am shook from the sky, fire from the stars
i am death that lives, the outline of a world
i am thought unthought, on the brink of myself
i am hurtling straight up, breaking the atmosphere
i am light in form, a shoulder of illumination
i am a vast, unclaimed forest at the edge of nowhere
i am wind that remembers, distance that knows
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