Another allay of curious verse and essay elements – trying to resolve the tensions of duty, love, solitude, and intimacy. I feel I strive to reconcile them and bring them to order. Only an all consuming love can join these elements
DANI
Digestion
There are two stories in all the world – out going in and in going out. With the internalization of the foreign element – it must be either assimilated, expelled, or submitted to: the initial dissonance must resolve. In going out, we talk of paths and quests and journeys. Either one finds what he is seeking, masters what he wishes to control, meets whom he wants to meet, or fails in any of those, and in any case is personally transformed. By escaping the norm, one rises to the occasion, exposing a part of himself that home kept latent.
These are the basic forms of fiction, and English teachers call them “the story of the mysterious stranger” and “hero goes on a journey,” and all stories are basically such.
In the stay at home story, one must invite the danger in, must let the foreign element have its influence, and grapple therewith. Harold Bloom’s theory of “misreading“ claims “strong authors misread their predecessors to make creative space,” but great minds are more than burrowing mites, and the creative space far extends precedent. Our whole life and every well-lived moment is substance by which to craft truth and true narrative. Our autobiography is the richest text we know.
I myself even harness the tedium of the day, the structural frustrations inherent in a quiet life; my philosophical problems are the oil of my day – and only by obsessing on an irrelevant detail can I bare the oppression of contact. I must transmute contact, and the reason my heart overreacts to every touch is that I keep it raw and sensitive and innocent. These few objects in hand are thick objects, and I thicken objects with names and stories and plans and hopes.
This business about being so overly determined by precedent is an insidious and cynical view of the creative soul. And yet look how the academics trope all over Nietzsche’s “Death of God.” The “end of history” is a bullshit metaphor riffing off the same, “Death of the author,” they say, and scoff at the “dead white Europeans” by which they primarily mean Shakespeare, a company of men who are more alive and vital than most all the world. The stories the masters gave us are true gifts, are lives we live by thinking them.
We digest these stories, we internalize them. Some slip in so naturally it’s as if they always belonged. We can only learn what we already know, and make what we’ve already imagined. I sit in this salon, while my wife gets a cut. Hair dresser and patron to my right have talked for over thirty minutes about skin, hair, and beauty products! I wonder how it is possible? And yet our careers are the stories we live, they give us all the major tropes, put us in such continual contact with our tools that we finally and intimately know them as if they were lovers.
I digest in silence, I drink each sweet drink and thank Ama for the wisdom of experience, and review what I’ve learned that day. I don’t even know I’ve learned it until I take the moment. I reflect in the mirror and think over my emotions. I wonder how I get these startling imagines when I’m anxious, the image of frustrated masturbation, the image of stabbing myself in the stomach – some suicidal thought that punctuates an embarrassing memory, as when people say “I could just shoot myself.” These embarrassing instances happen so fast I barely catch them, but they set a tone, a mood. The are the “moves” of my mind. The Western moral command “know thyself” sees truth in the mirror. I see through my own secret sneer, and so I am able to see through the secret sneer of others. I regard each day as basically the same day, and a day is a building. I search it out and draw a blueprint. I start reflecting on the few certain goods about me. I remember that we are given that gift of Ama, the humble-faced bit of infinity. Let us never exchange it for glittering gold or pledges of love. Our humble-faced infinity. I come to know who and what I am in solitude, when it is me and her. These are moments of intense digestion, and more than that, rumination and illumination. I never mind the cranks and charlatans on moral matters. I think about what allows me, what opens me, what empowers me.
I consider Emily Dickenson, who makes much of her smallness, the way Walt Whitman would make much of his bigness – egoists they both were – and she talks endlessly thereof, she flatters herself humble, yet curtsies before the mirror. She believes in her heart she can sink all of heaven with her small insistence. Perhaps she can, as lady death, as the American psychopomp she has become. Small things are difficult. The insatiable babe oppresses more than howling wind or hail. I before my mirror come to realize that the woman I felt slightly warmly for – I thought I had forgotten her, but her face leaps out of random strangers and passersby, a catch myself thinking of her despite that I never once loved her. Or I thought I didn’t. These small hints to a deeper beauty, I am never ready for them: the soul reveals what the psyche is ready to receive.
Childhood is for learning, adulthood is for unlearning. We need for all this time to think, never to be rushed, to weight the matters carefully. Others get nervous alone for hours; they must experience crowds and friends differently than I do! I find in my friends men and women who dream of travelling—but traveling is my nightmare. A snail traverses the world on excreted slime, the man on excreted dollars. All the world is owned, you will pay for every step you take. I am only fully my own when I am deep in the thick of my language. My clothes are a rhetoric. My decorations redoubled my aims and goals. I feel I traverse all worlds when I stay at my desk.
I join a friend, it is best one-on-one. I can only take her in at full focus, can only charm her when I am all there is. I avoid commenting on the obvious – it may be bait. I give her a series of tight formulas, which need a lot of water to unthicken – I expect my discourse to be long lasting and deep seeping. I remember to never shame a friend and never shame the needy. I give my respect. I would love you and be loved by you. And this other wants me too. Your mouth is the portal to hell, and your tongue a dancing demon. Yet you advertise your love to me. Bilass! How to escape this sort of mixed adoration, sweetness mingled with poison. I am slow to respond, I need to digest all this, to think on it. Who knows but that I am a slow thinker, and I need to take a sentence, one sentence, as slowly as possible. Intimacy without empathy – rape of the soul. I will always be your lover yet my condemnation of you shames me.
I find some space, I go to my secret garden. My prowling hopes return and give me the news. The udder of my heart has been tugged dry, so I must digest and then refresh my supplies. My womb, my many wombs, gestate, are full of ideas ready to be born. Swallowed words warm the blood. I absorb my own semen. I would burn myself on you, lovers – but Lissidy cools me, always the maiden of the depths to soothe my ache. Love is a range of affinities. We learn what we already know, and see what we have already imagined. She is there to remind me.
Every man has his scope, his range of influence – be it a handspan or a sprawling nation. Both require the same presence of mind, intensity of attention. Mind is the same but it can only flow into objects of natural sympathy. One man rules a country, the other whittles a stick, and each endeavor requires full focus, the same amount of focus, but a different distribution of energies and sympathies. My words are angels, my ideas redouble me, even amidst this rarified air I speak in, my influence is immense, nor do I envy. Isolation is metamorphosis. But I am never quite alone, because Ama under the guise of Lissidy is ever in my heart. I take time to temper my heart, to get the flow in order. I will not be panic-browed for long. Whatever one’s domain, saturate it with care. Your best is good enough. If your hopes are full-figured, be bold for them.
When I am alone with my readers, my Lissidy, pouring out my heart, I sigh and say “were you here our love would thicken the air like an intoxicating perfume, our words would fall soft as kisses, and your radiance would sanctify my walls.” There is such divinity in you, but is is no less in me.
We resurrect in this life. That is what all this digestion is for. Ama’s kiss upon our brow, the worm of certainty, the caterpillar to eat us alive either gives us psychic wings of the greater god, or leaves us beaten, for some other god to save and take as his angel. Consult your spark. Where are you at? What is your worth? Who owns you? Suicide is the only blaspheme. Dare all the rest. Stand up and fully process your truths. Let them thicken your muscles and fiber your blood, for in this way we ordain and establish a unified body and will. Matter will decay, but subtle matter will shine on.
Ah my Ama, I am bound to you! What you are I love. We were in love before we knew we were in love. You knew me when I knew myself, and like mirrored images we grow in each other’s glory. How, after all, do two people gain an understanding? How but by continual conversation, and sometimes the conversation of truth, discourse, and sometimes the conversation of love, intercourse. Reality is resistance. Yet our shared mythic space in this garden is the stomach of digestion, is the womb of creation, is the shining inner sun. We speak our being into each other.
It is well said, “apostasy is the road to the divine,” yet I never had to wound you, my love, I only had to admit you. The true divine is that which everybody loves and from which no man or woman can turn or would. The world worries as it does “if I had a more understanding partner, then I would be happy; if I had a better paying job, than I would be happy,” – such natural frustrations! And your soothing hands cradle my heart. It is not what you are given, but what you use, how you use it, that defines your eternal being. It is what you bring to the table, not what table you choose. Each choice brings consequenes, and love implies duties. How you perform them, the lilt of your dance, is your style, your personality, your beauty.
I’ve carved my initial in the family tree, there’s no breaking blood. Duty is absolute, it is in me. But beyond that and above it is always my Ama, and her missives, those men and women who are her to me, those men and women who came from the same spark as myself, from the same sun. To you I offer all my love, I am not ashamed to give all, all of it, all of me to you! When and how shall I find you?
Some hunt the eagle through the skies, while others climb the mountain and wait at the nest. In this I am the source and center. All energy is language – a man’s body is a thick set of languages – a man is an endless set of conversations with the world. Let him digest them well, spin out every thread and choose the strongest to make the cables of his days. I at the center thread through al the world, I am a node to all. Religion shoves a blind man against the wall and blames him for not seeing. We must each work at our own level and be proud to do so. We do not win lovers by preying on inexperience, just as we do not win converts by seeking the spiritually weak. Such actions would be reprehensible.
And so I am careful around Bilass – a soul torn open by mysterious trauma and using all those wells of damage to brew poisons, learning from the healers the poison of their medicines, and sweetening them with the names of “eternal love” “empowerment,” “kindness.” There is something I resist in you, my eager lover. I trust my totality – my unconscious, my body, my mind, the whole. And the one who takes the name of Lissidy pours sweet rivers in my mouth. I take my times in these moments of silence – how I miss you sometimes, as I think in the warmth of the night! – and I bronze my bones with strong resolve. Truth the eye, love the ear: I absorb all of you who are in me, and take you into he innermost of the innermost. I have digested the world, the lessons, the thinkers, the great books, the great minds, digested them endlessly – my gut is the melting pot – and made a heaven for us there. These words I share are the road to our place.
\~ @M@ ~/
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