Hey you
I want to talk to you about our relationship.
I know it's been a long time since we've had a conversation but you know how life runs away from us sometimes.
It's been almost three years since I've dared ply my voice anywhere other than the Book of Faces. The empty Book that replaced you and our decade dance of epistolary romance where a poetic voice was born where a voice was intubated and choked a poem stopped your heart and eventually your voice but your word remained imprisoned on a page forever. And here I am living in a mad world that's gone madder on April Fool's day contemplating the fate of artists, dreamers, lovers and thinkers in a Sufi dance of dissolving ecstasy. I'm reading Anais Nin and Carl Jung and working on a hotline for domestic violence. I'm an emotional firefighter sitting around the station playing cards but ready to spring into action should I get a call. I'm dancing this dialectic between writer and healer, between witness and activist.
Do you really want to know where I've been? I promise you we will catch up later. I've fallen in love gotten married have a mortgage another zip code and another diagnosis. Did you know another thing we have in common? Did you know blogs are a new form of therapy for the bipolar?
But I have to begin in media res. I have to start where I am to make it ring true.
Outside the wind blows silky electric and I think this is one of those e.e. cummings Springs with the power to make you cry. Spring is a weird threshold of longing and nostalgia, where we fall in love all over with everyone we have ever loved. It's a chemical thing they say the same hormone that is in chocolate and in nursing mothers the hunger for touch, soft and ragged that leads you to tell me you were running in a dream. At first I didn't understand, having been born with the privilege to have limbs not made of rubber. You told me you had muscular dystrophy, but I had not yet watched you walked with the spidery grace of crutches bracing yourself against the world. It was that early-onset infirmity that made you describe yourself as a "young fogey" the turn of phrase on a chat room for Pantheism that made me want to get you know you better to entice you to spend more of your words on me. I already saw myself in you from my earliest days I was known as an old soul
Words are cheap they say, "futile devices" but words have always been my weakness. I fell in love with you without your face without the knowledge and imposition of your body in space. How eagerly did I receive your words electronic missives that are disappearing from my inbox what is the statute of limitations on ghosts in the machine? But oh how your words rippled and suggested and seduced from an infinite distance more than miles. I long for a vanished world of yellowing love letters in a box technology is a false immortality but still the sensitive omniscient web ripples on the day of your birthday do they have birthdays in the spirit world? The algorithms are still singing even if the mermaids have stopped.
I am trying to talk to the Jungian Alchemists who are in search of a new symbol about the Bernie Sanders bird, about Egyptian gods and internet memes and shamanic symbols weaving into American Politics, and maybe they wouldn't understand and that is why I am writing to you now, master mythmaker of these modern times. You and I began this conversation years ago, spelunkers diving into each other's Platonic caves, cartographers of each other's interior cities, articulate as Anais Nin and Henry Miller but graced with the ability to instantly interweave stories, to friend each other's friends and fall in love with each other's lovers, longings, stories and secrets, graced by the internet and by our own spectacular peculiarities of mind our own ravenous need for meaning and voracious appetite for myth.
They say that spring mix chemical is produced not only through intimate touch but by women talking to each other. That there is something in our brains that makes us bond when we tell our story, even to strangers.
Is that what makes us write, poetry, novels, blogs? At first writing was reserved for only the most holy occasions. The technology was held secret, in the hands of scribes and priests and oracles. Poets chewed the fat of slain bulls and wrapped themselves in their bloody hides and waited for the gift of the awen, the fire-in-the-head sent to them from the gods. Poetry, to the Celts, was a serious business, and the poet who was part shaman part war correspondent and part travelling entertainer and news provider was that quicksilver trickster whose value in society, measured by the number of colors allowed in his cloak, was lesser only than the king.
In the magic mirror online we are all storytellers, all with the power to bring the thunder from far away, to launch a thousand ships, to touch the lives of those we have never met or never even imagined. We are all the masters of our own mirror kingdoms, we are all echo chambers. We take this technological promiscuity for granted, these incestuous tentacles that sweep deeper than our own memories, enabling us to watch our ex's children grow up in increments and see our friends grow older and wiser and stranger and even the vast remarkable beings our own mothers are finding themselves to be.
A long time ago you and I seemed so uniquely transgressive. Now the story has grown old almost before it has had a chance to be told.
The words you wrote in their original format are vanishing. So I have to rely on my imperfect memory. It was good enough for poets, writers, novelists, who never insisted upon facts and figures and documents. It's kinder if the names are forgotten or blurred or if poetic license saves us from libel. Who owns the rights to a dead writer's letters? What is left for history? Poor Sylvia how the feminists fight over your bones.
I want to begin at the beginning but I have to start somewhere. I want to talk about our relationship. I want to talk about connection, about evolution, about creation and co-creation and the weird synchronicity between art and fate, between mythology and madness, the witches' brew of synchronicity the epileptic synapses snapping and crackling in a tropical wasp candy, sharp and sweet and stinging like the thorns of God in a Hafiz wind. Is it the wind that is whipping up your long-lost ghost that is making me forget myself and want to tell your story. Because it's become my story too. Because I'm the last one alive to tell the tale.
I don't want to dig in your remains. Bad enough that I scrambled so desperately to save all your words. Every conversation, every breadcrumb trail of dialogue every dream you shared in instant message conversations. Even the ones that I didn't understand, the ones that interrupted me when I wanted to talk about my latest crisis, even the ones that offended me.
I won't remember it perfectly. This is not a true crimes story not on April Fool's Day on a New Moon in Aries when the world shudders at the ranting sociopathic Jokers ramping up angry alcoholic Dads and joyously tilts at windmills with a socialist Don Quixote hanging with the hippie college students who have finally found their digital Woodstock. Archetypes run rampant in the street and we are all building our own ashram or launching our own jihad every day with the click of a like button.
I don't remember if it was something you told me or something I read. If the words were shared intimately or vicariously with the world. Our relationship had a running commentary. But you said you burned your Bible. Only a believer would have the temerity to actually carry it out. You had to be free of your parent's indoctrination. You started with burning your own Bible and then you began making your own Jesus. Devouring and discarding heroes from comic books and television. A geek's innocence and curiosity with a philosopher's discerning eye.
Your last Jesus was Doctor Who. Your last picture online. Your legacy. Burn your own Bible and start with the story. Make your own meaning, your own myth. But don't stop there. Keep sharing it. Expanding it. Open source religion. The ultimate eclecticism. It's ultimate goal to laugh at the Devil and make God take himself less seriously while the Goddess dances, changing partners at will, with the seasons, with the ebb and flow of life and death, the High Priestess with the Scroll of Wisdom on her lap, between the black and white pillars.
The bird that landed on Bernie Sander's podium is just a bird. But in this wild myth-making wonderland of armchair activists and hashtag bards means the story can go anywhere. The sparrow is a Native American symbol of the common man. Go ahead. Get it wrong. Myths don't quibble with ornithologists. We need a little more truth and a little less fact checking.
Yes, you. If I was a quaint Victorian I would say "dear reader". If I was clever with html I would give you links to lead you down new rabbit holes and references.
But intimacy is a dying art form. We are stretched too thin these spider-web lovers connecting over infinite distances but the thread never breaks, not even in the other world.
When will we wake up to our own monstrosity, our own miracle?
It's time to shake up the Shakti soda can time to invite the awen in the fire in the head that by the grace of gods will not become Sylvia's oven only the immolation of ego in the mythic rapture of story.
So turn the page if you are curious. I know I am. More Later.
Blessed Be
