Allays 1075 - 1083

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

Life is pretty much life, and each day resembles the last, only I’ve been reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae again – this is one of my favorite books by a female author, and I will be looking again at Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury, which is basically idle gossip about Emerson and his friends. As soon as I finish writing the Emilegends, a collection of adventures stories for my 9-year-old daughter Emilie, I will attempt to publish it, as well as my dad’s Memoirs, and my friend’s collection of poetry.

 

Take Care, Caretakers!

 

* 1075 *

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation” – so naturally, my beamish girl, when you insist I redact this gift into themes and headings, I would remind you that the true meaning of the Allays is in the Rhythm. The gentle redundancies and familiar returns are like the kissing laps of sea to shore. I seek no stark definitions or formidable syllogisms – I’m not half as silly as Spinoza in that regard. Take what you will. The rest will take you – the pull of the vortex seeks you center.

 

* 1076 *

Pour your heart into your work, be fully present to your family, make your art from the flesh of your experience, love your god with all your being. These four lead to Ama.

 

* 1077 *

The secret weavers – the fates which are the fingers of Sovf – thread our neurons in myelin sheaths till the dark mother, the unconscious, undermines the ground, and the Truth springs to the light of consciousness. Ever our brain weaves, and as we knit long-term memories at night, seemingly random dreams echo out.

In any group, in any hierarchy, the secret weavers play their game, knit the skein of fate through the obstinate world. The world is what resists. Yet even in the pith of our will, these myelin sheaths knit and knot and also noose us to our fate. I say this whilst it happens between us now, Varuna.

 

* 1078 *

“Be careful what you wish for,” the old myths and fairy tales insist so drastically, you’d think there really were some danger in wishing for foolish things! Not at all. A wish is a desire without commitment. Feel free! There is no ironic god listening behind a bush waiting to answer your wish to the letter, as they do in Greek myths. Let your heart soar! Dare to dream!

 

* 1079 *

Bliss-throbbing Nivia, you’ve fallen into sighs, a graying of skies from a too-long winter. You teach me to call you “Srih,” and you intone your formula: “Woman must know her place. Her place is on top.” Indeed so, but how you trembled when I threw you beneath me!

Is it any wonder Mattria made us two? Two eyes, two arms, two legs, two ears – what faces danger doubles itself lest chance depresses us further. What have you lost that you frown so beautifully? How may I cheer you up on this day our today? You ask me to cure you, and so I shall. I will set up your altar at midnight and adore you there. Ama, teach me how.

 

* 1080 *

The way women hold their heads during sexual transport, as though they occupied a different plane from their bodies, tilted as if listening to the humming of the All – the same it is with me when you speak my name. This space between moments, this utopic exaltation, I find always at hand, always extant, as near as pulse – you live in my veins.

Cleverness is a saving grace in a young woman, and few characters in the Arabian Nights move me such as the bold and cunning Morgiana, able to dispatch most the forty thieves and even in a dance murder their captain.

I wish I were half as cunning. I’m far too believing. I just arch my neck, listen, and believe.

 

* 1081 *

These allays, a smattering of paragraphs, arranged like knots in a grand opening spiral, a line drawing, each lead into each other and upwards into the All. As a writer of paragraphs, I hope to make miniatures: the ocean in a thimble, the sun in an eye.

 

* 1082 *

What cat got my tongue? What sphinx chokes my throat with this her riddle? I’m a blocked dawn, cramped and aching. An artist is God – so long as he writes. Frustrated in his expression? Pitiful wretch! Few others need to create the way we do – must write to survive. Where is my boast now? O Muse, deliver me! O Ama, fill me full! Skein my way through mazy ways. See how I follow. We all must breathe each day until our dying breath. I press my final murmurance into you.

 

* 1083 *

We often complain most over what we wouldn’t for all the world change, and to suffer for what we love is the opposite of ingratitude. That worldly wisdom to “Never complain, for complaints will always discredit you,” sounds too muddled and monkish, and definitely too categorical. That you and I share the same complaint binds us, just as underlings grumble about their boss to vent a little as comrades. Don’t fault us for being human. Often if you complain in the right style, it comes across as the flattery it is, when direct compliments wouldn’t fit. Certainly, we do teach people to treat us well when we report how well others have treated us, but when I once complained, “You have to go to work early tomorrow morning,” my friend retorted that, “You get to go to work, what a wonderful thing! Many jobless people would envy you!” I wonder how cheerful it would make me to throttle an optimist’s neck?