Sunday, July 20, 2008

An Unaddressed Letter.





Dear __,

I pick up the pen after many years of silence between us. I have always thought that perhaps something beautiful could come from that which has been destroyed. It only takes time, and I think of how the sea rose and ash and fire rained on the Minoans, and now the cliffs are crested by the most stunning white villages, and that caldera arches out like my two open arms over the broken water as I try to pinch the peaks of Therasia between my thumb and forefinger. Not so many thousands of years have passed since you and I jumped from the rocks and shot deep into the blue, against the wind. Odysseus slept there too, and the journeys across our ragged home town were no less a miracle, no less fantastic. I have nearsightedness; my past is always attempting to eliminate itself. I come upon my memory and find it shattered. Voicing your name sets rise to a strand of unfettered images, of night skies and dismembered streetlamps floating by, of fields with fires and people gathered about them, of the momentary, pulse-like pauses in conversations beneath the cross of the peninsula. Time scatters friends like a wind lifts seeds from their capsules, it nudges them over the edge and their descent is eased in the forgetful nature of the wind as they are carried along. I am eager to follow one of these mistrals down the complex of hallways which house the inhabitants of my consciousness. I am anxious to come upon a certain door, behind which sits on a darkly stained desk a rather large ledger of accounts.

Ash and fire rained into the sea, and the sea churned and frothed as in a feeding frenzy, and the water was red from fire and blood. In the primacy of my mind, in the outland where memories dissolve, all of this recurs. The skull of the sky and the skull under my skin are choked with ash, stinging my eyes as I grope my way from the epicenter. We are shot into the air and plunge into the earth or into the Aegean depths where the Beautiful One once lay like a bloodstone on a field of sapphires. A constant rumbling shakes us out of our youth, the scream of birds unheard. We wandered from our youth like the shocked survivors of a geological disaster, gathering what little gems we could manage as they poured from the belly of the land when the quake rent it to shards. Whatever of value we could collect from the rubble of experience, from our destroyed home, we carried under our belts in dusty leather pouches or in the flinching pain of certain recollections.

A ringing lasted in our ears, but after listening to it for some time we both realized that this ringing had always been there, from our very earliest memories, and it was just the disaster that brought it to our mind’s attention. The distracting ringing of something distant and intimate, something generating from the reaches of space and also from the veins, and vibrating and washing over all of the matter in between. And it eventually came to a point where we no longer heard the ringing, as our senses accommodated to this ever tremulant and buzzing reality. Our thoughts, too, simply began to oscillate and resonate with this same frequency, as a pane of glass shivers in its frame against the wind. The thing was, we knew this of each other instinctually, we could tell it in fragments of sentences and it would be fully understood. The violence of youth, the misunderstanding nature of our immature desires, the inherent awareness of some ineffable mystery linked to the understanding of our lives, all of this was clearly read in the face when it distorted itself to speak and the words became almost ornament. And now I take to searching for those words and they are absent. What I find are gaping chasms, distance that is mounting that will never be retread, and a body that seeks to eliminate itself. Days fall away and my meek utterances do not even agitate enough to cause concentric circles to ripple across the surface. I move to speak but I halt. What do our lives have to do with each other, besides chance proximity?

Unfathomable forces disperse everything from the center. The universe will expand until all the planets are cold, stars will exhaust their heat, even the black holes will whirl themselves into oblivion. Then there will be only time left alone to age unto itself, to eventually disperse, come apart at its seams, and fragment into tiny shards of the past, present and future. When time collapses, will we meet again, when the little broken mirror pieces of reality tumble and collide on the unimaginable plain? Were our lives only to fade into that secondary sonority, the other constant song, the past, whose waters are always lapping at the jagged rocks still lying scattershot where they fell when the sea rose and ash and fire rained on the Minoans?


I am reaching out to you, my friend, always,


Thursday, July 3, 2008

Signifier and Signified.


A dream.

Someone opens a door and steps out into the hallway. A character presents himself to me from a light wood-colored door at the end of the hallway of periwinkle blue and almost olive green wallpaper of an intricate, indiscernible pattern. At the end of the hallway is a bright window and through it an obscure city-scape and the intimation of an ultra-clear sky. The door opens and he silently emerges, this as-of-yet nameless character, and he pauses mid-stride as if he were startled by something. I am behind the wallpaper, and it seems he is looking for me, the unseen seer, and I think "Is he coming to report himself to me?"

At first I guess that he is I, aged decades, emerging from my cloister into the hallway of my own invention, pausing, distracted as I cross the threshold, feeling something, and involuntarily searching for the source of that feeling in the minutiae of the olive wallpaper and its intermingling lines. He is all but bald with tufts of white hair about his scalp and ears, his face is pinkish and shaved cleanly and he is wearing glasses. He emerges from his wood-colored portal, and what is behind that portal I have only hints of: a brown, thick carpet, a darkly stained table with an open book on it, a couch with a depression on the left cushion. Other than that darkness, oblivion. I am frightened at the possibility that he is I, and that I am realizing in that startled moment that I am being watched by myself. But I am the eyes of the wallpaper; he stops and stares into my eyes and I see that he is not I. He is a character that came to me from oblivion in the monstrous apartment complex in my dream, a monster himself, and a ghost, but he is not frightening in the least.

Another dream.

I am walking a street from my youth, the one where a lake sits above the ground and lily pads and reeds obscure the elevated water.

Katherine Anne is sitting on a bench outside of a small, white building. She is at a small, white table. Her brown hair is blowing in the breeze. We do not speak, but she returns my gaze. The paint is peeling in little ragged white petals from the table in front of her and on it is a child's game, a box with plastic colored blocks on pegs to allow them to spin. On each side of the blocks are letters and numbers, a different color for each letter and each number. When spun they form different words and combinations of numbers, possibly dates.

I become distracted and peer down the road past the elevated lake. The road loses itself in a thick green forest beyond, and beyond that I know is the home I grew up in. The forest is bright, the light is golden on the limbs as it is on an early summer evening and all around me is still and silent.