I miss that color now. I miss that picture of Monkey Girl – the red. It’s a good red. I’d like it for a wall. I’d like to have a room that color. I like ceilings to have color. Flat white- what is that? It’s an abomination. Well, that may be a strong word. Suffice it to say, it’s just wrong. But I find as I get away from that picture I’m beginning to feel that I am on a tether of some sort and I’m out in Space (the final frontier) and it is very cold. Back there – back at that post – back at my spaceship – I know that it is warm. A nice fire is going and King Crimson “Starless” is playing. I can smell the cheap bulk incense and the awful clove cigarettes. I’m burning candles – or, that is he is burning candles, the boy I used to be, burning the last bits of resin out of his pipe. I had this jacket. It was awful, too many colors. I don’t know why I wore it.
Yesterday my experiment with voice was an unmitigated disaster – unmitigated – that’s right, talk dirty to me – and I was quite frustrated with it by the time The Lady called shortly before midnight, talking about being high on life. But life isn’t high, is it? No, life contains plenty of lows, suffering aplenty, enough to go around so that everybody gets his fair share. But the day dawned rainy and warm, and everything is washed and fresh. And I wanted to tell her don’t bother trying to be high on life, like some kind of John Denver cool breeze on the mountaintop thing – it doesn’t really happen except in the addled mind awash in momentary sentimentality. It’s just a matter of love, and loving, and doing the right thing, not doing the wrong thing.
Time was we walked hand-in-hand together. It was the first time for me, the first time I ever walked with a woman that way. My wives were touch-me-nots as I am, and we only ever touched in the act of love. What an odd thing to call it. Those marriages were loveless; they were without love. They were about need. Love requires sacrifice, and the slightest hint of sacrifice, the merest whiff, gives abundant living to divorce attorneys. Blah blah blah, yes? If I knew then what I know now I wouldn’t know what I now know. And it wasn’t about being high on life. It was about being informed by experience, and if I could but explain that… but I can’t. It’s a lovely, horrible mystery. But I experienced something beyond the highest value then. It was like walking on a great plain of very green - impossibly green – grass above the clouds, and the past lay far below, along with my old ideas.
People fade from view in the mist of our growing blindness, and trees on mountains go on being trees no matter how hard we may wish they were giants. Being trapped in a body is hell. I think we spend most of our time trying not to think about it on some level. This isn’t me – this hunk of rotting blubber. I saw a songwriter I vaguely know down in the grubby little city to the south yesterday. She was sitting on the pavement in a light summer dress awaiting her turn to play. The sun shone down on her, freckled all over and with hair so brown it was like black – a Jute, surely – and I thought as how I would like to buy her a lemonade. But really, a body - beautiful thing that it is - is also a sack of muck. Sometimes that’s what I see.
A group of college boys were nearby, craning their necks each time she fluttered to try and see up her dress. I thought up a good punishment for them: to be forced to count and number and catalogue every single freckle on her naked body before they should be allowed to eat. They would starve to death long before they were done. Perhaps I’m channeling Dante? It’s a ghastly, awful thing to starve to death, accompanied by incredible pain worse than a thousand toothaches. Many are those in history who begged for the fire – even the fast fire – rather than starving. The fast fire? Well, the fast fire is far worse than the slow one because one actually burns in the fast fire. The slow fire was merciful because one would die of asphyxiation from the smoke before the flames could reach him. Don’t play Trivial Pursuit Dark Ages Edition with me, sunshine – you’ll lose.
I think of that priest being held back by the police with their guns when he tried to give that brain damaged girl the Body of Christ – that one a few years ago her husband wanted to dispose of. A lot of news stories about how merciful it is to starve to death began as if by magic to appear, and that because people live in perpetual ignorance. And I know a woman who lived for seven years on nothing but the Eucharist. She lived in a perpetual ecstasy in the Presence of Our Lord. Yes, saints are rather frightening. There are those in my local AA group who tell others not to listen to me because I am not really sober because I receive Communion in both species.
Others there are who are very confused about this matter of anger because they have no context for the understanding of righteousness, and so to them life is feel-nothing affair. A friend of mine wrote a story called “Boredom Zero” many years ago. It was about a man and a woman on a spaceship deep in Space who ate and screwed, and ate and screwed, with a computer monitoring their every thought and keeping their level of boredom at zero. What’s funny is we published it in a little college literary magazine and it came just before my professor’s essay on gratuitous sex in literature. He referenced the dance sequence in “Miss Julie” as an illustration of how much better it is to allude in such ways to the sex act. But many people seem to think that to be truly at peace is to be like a robot, and they hardly laugh, and they never smile except to see another person in pain.
Then, everything they say is monitored – or so they wish – and having certain thoughts is against the law. For instance, poetry must be illegal because poets sometimes deal with darkness. If a fifteen year-old girl writes a poem in her school about suicide there’s hell to pay with the nanny-state. The message? Be creative only in approved ways. And so-called ‘hate crime’ laws are of course really the beginnings of thought control. So numerous are my creations who think of death by their own hands, and as for me, I never seriously did. As a writer of fiction I make statements that if they were taken at face value might well land me in jail these days. Freedom of speech my speckled ass. A civil war is coming - coming soon. I, and people like me, are willing to kill you in defense of our liberty. God gets angry. I do too.
My father says that God loves us passionately. That’s a good word – passion. That doesn’t mean God loves us like a puppy does. To amend slightly the lyrics of one of my favorite songs, it is in such love that we are made, and in such love we disappear. And we are commanded to love one another, and that takes courage. To tell the truth takes courage. Love doesn’t tell lies. Love is nothing to do with tolerance. Forgiveness is nothing to do with acceptance. This Hallmark card way of looking at the world without passion is not God’s way. No marriage can last without that violence of passion, that longing unto death when the other is absent, that savage hunger to eat one’s fill of love. Christ the Bridegroom loves us no less, and that is how we must love one another – as He does. That’s very sexy and very scary, and for people who want a comfortable life it’s very threatening too, and they’ll strike any number of awful deals to keep that passion from ever being unleashed.
I can’t bloody find it – Funkadelic doing “Think! It ain’t illegal yet.”
Yes it is. Political correctness makes certain thoughts illegal. It’s a direct attack against creative intellect, the individualization of the Divine in man sometimes called the godhead or the crown of creation. Basically, it’s the way we are created in the image and likeness – or, as some say – in the image and approaching the likeness, that approach being the very reason for living. Like my songwriter’s freckled body God says to us “Come hither” and fires our passions. And like my New Age friend says when I ask her, “How are you?”
“I am Many Ways.”
I am fit as a fiddle and ready for love. Just like the song. I am creative.
Freedom, suffering, joy, passion. I am resplendent in divergence, like an angel who longs to become a man, who longs for the sublimity of having a body that will die, who wants to taste the divine flavor of black coffee in combination with a cigarette – like in “Wings of Desire.” He wants to be able to see in color, yes? Can you blame him for wanting what we so take for granted? Nick Cave has an appearance in that movie, by the way. “The Carny” features prominently. Some of you might like it.
So…
I woke up thinking about that picture this morning, and how I miss it because of its color. And one thing leads to another, especially in the morning, with me. I have this new poem, not yet finished. You will help me finish it this year, along with others. I guess this is the first posting of the twenty or so I have written since the last round. One of the reasons I wanted to get the voice technology is so that I might read it aloud to you. Be patient – I’m working on that.
In darkness we follow
Finding the hollows of
The worn down treads
Of His feet.
He is ahead of us
In darkness total
And up (ahead)
is the darkness
And down (behind)
Darkness is complete.
One by one we
Light our lights
And fall away.
I watched her smile
And I lived within it.
She lost her child,
And there is suffering
In Heaven
But it is not grief.
We fall away,
Or in darkness follow
And tread the hollows
Of His feet.
Give me but a little light,
Her smile, the warm,
The summer of life.
I cannot follow
In the darkness
Anymore.
I cannot see
Without the light
This dark road
Behind He
Who bears this Cross
For me
It is more than I can take.
I fall away.
There is suffering
in Heaven;
It is heartbreak.
