shade_fane

We, as human beings, cannot exist outside of our cultural context. In Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy, Philip Cushman (1995) states that

People can exist only within a cultural framework that is carved out of the sensory bombardment of potential perceptions and possible ways of being. The carving is done thought the use of cultural artifacts during the exercise of social practices, especially that of language (p. 23).

The cultural framework is carved out of a bombardment of perceptions and possibilities and is likened to the clearing in a forest: a domesticated space where a particular culture exists surrounded by this forest of possibilities. In the center of the clearing are the most well defined and accepted norms of the culture, the margins contain the least defined of the cultural standards, the fringe elements if you will, pushing slowly out into the forest of possibilities.

I wonder how this system looks once the individual element that each of us represents is focused into the equation.  I think of how this system, this interlocking of cultural norms, would resemble a holonic structure, each part a whole in itself and each contributing to make up a part of a larger systemic structure. These structures in turn complete in themselves and contributing to a yet larger structure. Completeness nesting within completeness to create the body of the culture, the beast that lives in the confines of the clearing in the forest of possibility.

Each of us, as individuals and members of larger social and community superstructures, influences and is influenced by the whole. Information and power flows bidriectionally, from smaller parts to larger, from larger to smaller, and rhizomatically, contagiously, in a horizontal manner from individual to individual, community to community. We vote for politicians who make the decisions that empower or disempower us, we meet in community circles to share and experience transformative practices, to share, to heal.

Some of us as individuals, and the communities we are drawn to, are in the center of the social clearing. Safe people, they seem to me, although I know they are not. Their lives fit neatly into the social mold. They are straight, white, male (or a female firmly standing by her man), middle class, church going or blandly agnostic and scientific. They work, they own a house, they marry, they have children, they are grandparents, they buy a motor home and travel about, and they die. But some of us are on the circumference of the circle. We inhabit the ever and slowly changing edge between the possibility of the forest and the certainty of our collectively created and safe clearing. Weaving between the trees and the margin of the meadow we are sexually diverse: gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, gender bending. Our religious beliefs are not the norm, not handed to us, but hewn from our experiences, our observations.  We may marry, we may choose to be alone or celibate, or to engage in polyamorous relationships. We push the boundaries, becoming aware of the atrocities in which our collective culture participates. We strive to see the imbalance, the ways in which we participate in the disemboweling of other countries, the infection of the environment we ourselves inhabit, the dismemberment of the world, the greed and power mongering and rape. We object. We cry. We cry out for change.

I wonder what we will do to pull ourselves, our community, our culture, into a balance that respects all lives, and all manners of being in the world. How will we expand the circumference of the clearing? How will we communicate the ideas that will save us, and our descendents? And what will they do to keep us from taking action? 

The assignment:

For Psychologies of Liberation the professor, Mary Watkins, Ph.D., has asked us to keep an Animus Mundi journal. She describes such a journal in these terms:

In James Hillman’s The Thought of the Hear and the Soul  of the World he reminds us that soul was not originally thought of as something residing only in us, but as something that surrounds us. Gnostics, Lurianic kabbalists, Meister Eckhart, C. G. Jung and others have spoken of each and every person, animal, thing and aspect of nature having a spark of soul embedded in it. From this perspective, soul work involves us in both inward and outward (toward the world of others, plants, animals) reflection and engagement. Begin a journal that will help you focus on this path between the supposedly inner and outer, self and world; a journal that will help you discern and develop your community/ecological fieldwork (Watkins, M. (2008, winter). Syllabus for Psychologies of Liberation, DP-781. Carpinteria, CA: Pacifica Graduate Institute).

I have been a journal keeper off and on for many years, but I have not ever been able to muster any sense of consistency. My thoughts often seem scattered in unlikely places: scribbled in the margins of books, scrawled on napkins, embedded in lecture notes, or written on the back of odds bits of paper. Here, possibly, is a better format for those thoughts, those musings into the nature of soul, the nature of the world.

What is the point of writing these things down at all? Certainly they benefit me, and looking back over these writings I can see an evolution of self, of thought, of being. Oftentimes I am stunned by what I read, and I find myself wondering where that mental process could have possibly have originated from, as I seem far to dull to have produced that shred of brilliance.

And then there is Flame. I share a lot of crazy ideas with her, and her universal response seems to be, “You need to write this down! Are you writing all this down?”

Sadly, usually the answer is no.

Well, so the Animus Mundi Journal serves another purpose: it records all those thoughts, regardless of profundity or triviality. I have to laugh. Such is the light and shadow.

I also have folks that want to keep tabs on what I am doing since I am now far away from them. It’s hard to keep in communication, and although I have the best intentions, my ability to do so is rather pathetic. It seems to me that this idea for this journal could also serve this purpose, and keep me connected by building a community of thought, or shared experience, perhaps even of intellectual interaction.

So I embark upon the journey, I embark upon the journal.

            Thorn writes that the “silver mirror can hold the harshness of the light. The black mirror can help us to see beyond the surface. It shows us what is hidden in shadow.” Used together this creates a chiaroscuro, a depth of vision, which reveals to the eye of the beheld a more complete and more complex face. C. G. Jung, in Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, reflects upon the dual nature of this consciousness, and how it colors and orders our perceptions of the world:

How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?

I think that Lewis Carroll’s Alice would have seen these as appropriate maps lending guidance to the alternative realities she seemed so accidentally prone to traverse.

Here again is the mermaid at the water’s edge, between sky and sea, presenting the mirror that reflects the stygian depths below. What wonders are presented there? Writing, it seems to me, has a similar reflective quality. Pablo Freire says that

…reading is not just to walk on the words, and it is not flying over the words either. Reading is re-writing what we are reading. Reading is to discover the connections between the text and the context of the text, and also how to connect the text/context with my context, and the context of the reader…

Freire’s words here are convoluted, and to this I would add an additional twist: to be the writer of those words is to examine and re-write the text/context of the self. To write is to create a syllogism of words and meanings that inquires of the self, reflects the depths, and recontextualizes our being. This is, in my mind, exactly the work of the dark and bright mirrors.

            Rather than replacing polyvalent, visual reflections of the self with linear, linguistic modes of thought I seek to join the two modalities together. The images within the black and silver mirrors are fixed and fluid, inner and outer, subjective and objective. Working the text of the visions into the specific and restrictive linguistic format allows the images to resurface in a conscious form. The images that appear within the mirror are the seeds of thoughts that I must elaborate upon in words, unfolding the image carefully, all foliage and flowers, without damaging the primordial content contained within. The visceral, primal, shadowy imaginal content of the dark breaks through the surface into the bright, etheric, conscious reality, and written language helps in both its definition and containment. It is important, however, to not fix the images in place, but to revisit them frequently and allow them their own distinct life, encouraging theme to unfold in other directions, other dimensions, in an effort to honor the polyvocal elements of such depth experiences.

            The mermaid holds the reflective mirror and the comb. With the comb she teases out her tresses, those emanations of her thoughtful brain. Lacking such luxuriant locks I must resort to the pen, the plume, to unknot the unruly strands of thought.

I figure when we are around eighteen, maybe younger, we make it onto the dance floor. Up to that point the only relationship we really know well are those our parents engaged in. These relational experiences that we witness as children and adolescents become, for better or worse, our first dance steps.

So, we get our dance card, our stump of a pencil, and we are out in the shadowy margins of the dance floor, searching for partners. We wave the card over our heads and cry, “Anyone for the dysfunctional mambo or codependent salsa?” We find a dance partner, one that matches what we know. When the music begins we dance.

And we dance until we figure out the steps, making them conscious, until we know the moves well enough that we can give them up. We thank our partner and get ready for the next dance. We break dance, we tango, we waltz, we square dance, we Virginia Reel, we dance in circles, and sometimes we simply dance with our shadows.

An argument could be made that we are almost always dancing with our shadows, our projections onto others of what we expect, desire, the roles we play and the roles we require of others to support our way of being in the world. Here is the dark trick of the dance, how we progress though the dance card: we know we have completed any particular dance when we can see our partner for who they are, and not who we chose them to be. When we can honestly honor the other, see them as doing their best to work though their own issues, their own dance card, then we can go on to the next dance.

Eventually, if we are lucky, if we do our work and engage the dance floor, we come to a dance that becomes more profound. The steps take on weight, and that moment occurs where the world spins away, the focus narrows. When this partner is seen, revealed, witnessed, something different happens. The dance does not stop. It may change, slow or speed up, or the rhythm change, but the partner does not. It is at this point that we truly begin to dance together. The shadows are still there, but we see them for what they are.

We have to engage, we have to move our bodies to the music of life. Otherwise we simple do not move forward. Life is a dance. Move your feet.

It begins with a ship wreck, and a young, beautiful man slipping into the sea. I can see this young man’s face before me as he slips beneath the waves into the depths. His jaw smooth, touched only with the fine first beard, his eyes closed, peacefully, as if asleep, all tinted by the colors of sunlight dappled though the colors of water. It is not the face of the persona – that has been disabled by sleep – but the demeanor of the Self in repose.

So the Little Mermaid first sees him. It is not the deceitful, confused, rationalizing and greedy waking ego that she witnesses, but the deeper beauty of the soul, the potentials that can be engendered when one submits to the unconscious sea and descends. The mermaid is not exclusively a creature of the great ocean, but a hybrid thing, part belonging to the world of the upper air, her human self, and a fishy part that sounds the deep. She is at home in both worlds, the conscious and unconscious, and she facilitates communication between these worlds. Her symbols, the comb and the mirror, tell us more of her nature. With the comb she untangles the unruly thoughts of her head, smoothing the tresses of discourse and perception. With the mirror she reflects her visage from the depths below, so that she may know herself completely.

How is it that such a creature looks upon the face of the sleeping youth and forgets herself? Nevertheless she does. At first I thought to damn her altruistic act, the saving of the young man by seeing him safely ashore. He is the one in danger, the one that slipped into the water, he is the one that should have the strength to struggle or submit. But he is helpless in his unconscious state; she swims his half drowned flesh to the solidity of the shore. When he awakes he barely remembers her: she is an oceanic dream, far removed from his waking reality.

But she remembers him. The peacefulness of his face haunts her, engages her, and obsesses her. The mermaid, once so complete, now must strive to be with the vision of love. So she goes deep into the sea, deep where the archetypal forces dwell, and she seeks out and aligns her psyche with the sea witch. A deal is struck: she can give up her scales, her fins, her depth, trade them for two spindly limbs, and walk only upon the land. If she makes such a deal, she may never return to her native waters. And, as part of the deal, she may not speak. The siren’s voice, her means to bewitch and enslave, is taken from her. If she is to forge a relationship with the object of her affections, it is to be though honest means, and all supernatural abilities are stripped from her. She is challenged with creating a connection of heart. The dreadful caveat is that if she fails, she is doomed.

I imagine her walking upon the shore upon her new legs, clad is a garment of weed and bladder wrack, wind blowing her dark hair behind her. Eyes of blue and green and gold glint in the morning light, her mirror and comb left behind upon the sand at the surf’s edge. Embodied, but voiceless, it is though the use of arms and legs and eyes that she must win love and the carnality of his desire.

When she finds the prince, when she makes it into his presence, she finds he is not alone. He sits with another young woman, one complete with a voice that giggles and cajoles. She is spoiled and coiffed, a confection of femininity, a mask of kohl and rouge, and a glitter of jewels. It is this other woman that commands the young man’s attention: she is a reflection of the culture’s norms, but divorced from the power of the actual life giving feminine. The mermaid has none of these wiles, only the gracefulness of her bargained limbs, the primordial flow of the liquor of her veins, the honest smell of the sea upon her skin.

The mermaid dances in an effort to win the young man’s affections. Such a dance I can only imagine. It must speak of tides and deep currents, the waving of golden kelp in blue green beds, the music of water, the flash of fish, the undulation of tentacles and eels, and the flash of silver eyes in dark shadows. There is a brilliance is this, the medium of dance as a carrier of meaning: communication is effected, but each person who views the dance does so from their particular place and time. The young man must remember, must recall the face in the waves. If he does it is the touch of the familiar woman at his side, the beguiling sound of her voice that makes him forget.

In the story the mermaid, defeated, returns to the sea. But I do not think it is a defeat. I believe, that in engaging in her dance she has remembered herself. Embodied, she has become the image in her mirror, the waves of her hair upon her head: she has put herself together. She knows her movements, her face. She is, at last, complete. She has ascended into consciousness, she has been seen, and now, no longer needed the manifest flesh of her form, she throws herself upon the crashing rocks. Bones and flesh and hair and eyes of blue and green and gold transform into foam upon the sea. Her form, although transmogrified, returns to its original function: between the unconscious ocean and the manifest land the froth of the sea represents the churning together of the two. She is the liminal space between the ego and the Self, the axis of the soul’s communication. The mermaid continues to mark the divide between the waking day and dreaming night.

            I found I was telling the story aloud to the waves. They rushed up sand toward me, frothing, to where my feet dimpled the sand, as if eager for the words, and then returned to the depths from which they arose.

Sol Niger. It is the image of the black sun. It is the sun that scorches, burns and destroys. It appears in people’s psyches, in people’s lives, as an image of destruction: an inversion of the life-giving aspects of the sun. Blasting. Coruscating. Destroying. A divine and poisonous brilliance. It appears, catastrophically, when we descend. And as we descend, we begin the becoming.

I am metal being tempered by such fires. As the metal twists and screams within the forge, as it is hammered upon the anvil, it finds a truer, stronger, sharper form. The inferno of the black sun becomes a womb where life is reforged anew. I am waiting for this blister of the sun to burst.

            It might seem that I have been overly negative of late. Like I have stated elsewhere, it is all a process, and undertaking that process is what is important here. We must change, all of us, and that change is not easy. One of my reasons for posting this things, although they are raw and challenging, is to show that it can be done, that none of us are alone is this alchemical process of solve and coagula.

So, what is it I want? Obviously my damage involves relationships, sex and intimacy. It is what I fear. And for all of us what we fear, oftentimes, is what we yearn for with all our being.

Thus:

I desire.

I desire to run my tongue across your skin and taste all the places you have been, both bitter and sweet.

I desire to meet you toe to toe, eye to eye, mind to mind, and relish both the caress and the clash.

I desire to see you as your own person, and value you for such, and to see the same in your eyes. I am not your other half, nor are you mine, but together we are three: you, me, and the presence of our passion.

I desire to come to you with my hands full: the texture of my experience slipping though my fingers, the need for your beauty dripping down my palms.

I desire that you should look into my peacock colored eyes and see all your glory reflected there, and to know that you are beautiful and beloved.

I desire that the curves and angles of your topography should be my unknown country, always stunning, surpassing, never completely familiar.

I desire that as we age the channels of passion deepen, darken, and complexify. Our becoming our unique black hearted selves is mutually supported.

I desire that the bird of your heart perches next to mine not out of familiarity, or habit, but out of choice, one moment after another.

I desire.

Thus.

I falter, I fear, I fail, I fall.

            The horror of the holocaust flows through me. Guilt and complicity in the flash that annihilated cities in Japan radiates in my bones. Ecological disasters, rape, homelessness, molestation, rampant consumerism, technology that further removes us from the landscape of reality, all the horrors of war: these I can observe with the eyes of one who is part of the warp and woof of the tapestry of our times. But when it comes to my own inability to engage in intimacy, I falter, I fear, I fail, I fall.

            I am impervious, impermeable, shielded by the hard shell of the falseness of my protective persona. This serves me. This keeps me safe.

            I am caught in the riptide of marginalization between the expectations of the dominant overculture, and the counter cultures I might claim identity though. The identities to be had in the counter cultures are not so much different from what the overculture dictates. So I am myself, my own being, watching and choosing for myself what I want to involve myself in. The riptide gulf yawns and I falter, I fear, I fail, I fall.

            I have this habit of choosing men to project my affections upon that are unavailable, or broken. I spent years loving men who were unable to give to me sexually because they were heterosexual, years chasing after men that were addicted in various ways: alcohol, marijuana, sex, role playing games. Some have had other maladies: blindness, obsessive compulsive disorder, ADHD, various traits of sociopathology. Many of them have been sexually dysfunctional. They were all doing the best they could, and I hold them blameless. I can no longer extend that courtesy to myself. They were all chosen for a single reason: so I would not have to face the intimacy of revealing myself, of being authentic, honest, and beautiful within the course of a positive, sustainable relationship. Strangely, not only was this what I feared most, it is what I yearn for with all my dark heart. I falter, I fear, I fail, I fall.

            There are men that I am attracted to. There are men that are attracted to me. This generates such fear and anxiety for me. The gay counter culture expects certain things when it comes to sexuality. We are encouraged (sometimes required) to identify ourselves as top or bottom, in reference to being entered by another, or being the one that enters into. This threatens me deeply. I can function on other levels. I love oral. I swallow. I give a great prostate massage. Where are the toys? But I will not be fucked up the ass. I will not be entered, explored, exploited, claimed or conquered. Neither can I bring myself to put another in that position. But to not meet this requirement is to disappoint. I falter, I fear, I fail, I fall.

            I am the virgin. None may claim me. Should you trespass upon my sanctuary the dogs of the hunt will tear you, sweet feckless Acteon, flesh from bone. There is, however, this desire to be seen, to be touched, tasted, and to come into conjunctio with another, and other, a lover. Between these two magnetized poles I am suspended, spinning, revolving, evolving. I hold these opposites, one in each hand, one in each eye, one on each side of my heart. The tension is agitating my being into action. I falter, I fear, I fail, I fall.

            The primal waters of the unconscious, that thin plane that separates the light and air of consciousness from the depths, has become chaotic: ripples have given way to waves, waves to churning. Archetypal beasts swim in these depths, and the harbingers of these beasts a rising up though the waters. Mindfully, I am reaching out, reaching down to touch their slick and scaly hides. To hold the tension of the opposites, of the yearning for sex, love, pride, law, self, knowledge, power, liberty, passion and wisdom, and to the submitting to the same in another’s soul. This is the transcendent function, this descent, this holding of the tension of the opposites, and I must submit to bring forth the third road that unites the opposites. I must falter, I must fear, I must fail, I must fall.

Parsifal, upon witnessing the Grail procession in the Fisher King’s castle, has leap into his mind a burning question. But Parsifal has been taught his manners, and that a good boy is seen and not heard, and does not ask the burning question. Consequently Parsifal must wander the wilderness, saving maidens and slaying monsters, for the next twenty years, because he would not as the question: Who does the Grail serve?

I walk the margin between the ocean and the land and think about the circular rim of a cup. Like the edge of the land it restricts and contains the contents of a cup, defining the boundaries, holding it in, limiting. The fluid contents of an ocean, of a cup, conform to the contours of the container. Without the cup, without the shore, there is endless depths and drowning. If the cup is empty, there is thirst and drought. Who does the Grail serve?

My circumambulation of the land reflects inward, and I walk the edge of ego self, my persona, where it meets the ocean of the personal unconscious, and I am aware of the unfathomable depths below. My body, and its resultant consciousness of time and space, hold the fluid of being, the aqueous and mutable psyche. My body is the chalice, the spirit the wine. Who does the Grail serve?

And then there is that moment when the realities become a singular whole, each unfolding into one another. On the shore, between the foaming surf and the glistening sand, there is a single, large, and hopelessly blue mussel shell, the nacreous inner surface facing upward, full of salt water. My thoughts, manifest, confront me. Who does the Grail serve?

Twenty years in the wilderness Parsifal returns to the Grail Castle once again. He watches the procession: the spear that bleeds, the sword, the paten, and lastly the Grail pass before him. Finally, two decades later, he asks his question: Who does the Grail serve?

The ocean laps at the edges of the world.

My blood thrums within the cup of my skull.

The water in the mussel shell reflects the glory of the setting sun, vermillion, scarlet, golden.

            The Grail serves me.

I have searched on and off for ten years. Last night I may have found what I have been looking for.

When I was twenty two I was in love. The relationship lasted less than a year, and was tumultuous: passion vied with hatred, depression with joy. It defies my understanding how so short of a period of time could have left such an indelible imprint upon my psyche, composing a profound woundedness of spirit, deeper than I can fathom, that I fail time after time to illuminate. It sits in my darkness and seethes.

His name was Russell, and I found him beautiful the first time I laid eyes on him. He was a dancer, with a dancer’s lean build and grace, and an effervescent joy. We were both working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was playing the part of Quince, one of the lowly but humorous mechanicals, and he was one of the courtly dancers of the Duke’s entourage. It was, I suppose, only a matter of time before we caught one another’s eye.

What psychological projections were there in that catching of those eyes? What made me, in his eyes, desirable? Short and frail as I was then, I had been described as greasy, although swarthy may have been more the term that was needed. I never saw myself as beautiful, as desirable. I didn’t see myself as deserving of love, or capable of providing any sexual satisfaction. I felt rejected by God himself. So when this angel danced into my life I was overcome. We all so want to be loved when we are young.

So the courtship began. Strange, looking back, how I can see a string of broken people that preceded me: a grieving woman who loved him, a room mate who could not understand why he no longer had the angel’s attention. But I was in the grip of love, and these things were peripheral, incidental. Love sometimes makes us stupid.

And there was the distraction of sex. Never had sex been good for me. In the past it had, at best, been tentative, explorative, fearful. This was different. We had sex before class, before his work in the dorm cafeteria. It was bliss, and such bliss so often wipes clear any point of view that can keep us safe and out of harm’s way.

            Over the summer he went back to Sacramento. We had found a place to rent, a room in a hundred year old house. I moved in over the summer and lived there alone for a month or more. I haunted this house, lonely, and Russell, in Sacramento, slept with other men. I knew without being told, and carried that poison in my heart. Russell confirmed it when he returned in August. But he said he loved me. He said he wanted this relationship. We made love in our bedroom, on his pieced coverlet of velvet squares, on my antique iron bed.

            But this became a pattern with diminishing returns. He courted the attention of other men, and then made love to me to make up for it. But soon the attention of others became more important, eclipsing anything he may have felt for me. Only a few months later he had a date over and cooked him dinner. He told this person that I was nothing, that there was no relationship between us. I was distraught. It caused a spiral of depression that was dizzying and devastating.

            It would have been better if he had just left. We tired sleeping in separate bedrooms, and later separate households, but he held on to the relationship just enough to give me hope, and I held on with an anguished grip. The facts are difficult to recall though the hallucinatory terrain of grief and pain. Eventually he moved away to Los Angeles, that City of Angels: the Chariot of God had ascended back into the sky, leaving wreckage behind.

            Half a lifetime later I am sitting at the computer, gazing at a set of residences and phone numbers. I mention to a friend that I have looked up a lot of lost friends and contacted them, and how ironic for me that they never thought to find me. I am that unmemorable. Or perhaps I am forgettable. I guess we just get caught up in our own stories and the rampant materialist consumerism of our time. Except for me; I guess I am stuck. Or unstuck. Opinions differ.

            So, what do I hope to get from making this call, from hearing Russell’s voice after two decades? I think there is closure, certainly, but there is something else. I need to make the angel of my memory human. If he is human perhaps I can heal the grief, the rejection, the unworthiness that has haunted me. And then again, perhaps I am a demon reaching upwards to pull him down, to pluck off his wings and hurl the halo into the abyss. To reveal the sociopath for what he is. And, in revealing the demon in him, I set free the light in me.

            I have only to dial the phone.

Her name was Yoshi. I am terrible with names, and yet, thirty three years later, I remember her name.

I was fifteen at the time, and my family was on holiday, spending two weeks between Japan, Formosa, and Hawai’i. Yoshi was our tour guide on the Japanese leg of the trip. She was a small woman, with carefully coiffed black hair and nondescript one piece dresses that never had sleeves. She was, as many Japanese women must appear to Western men, poised, controlled, gracious, and meticulous.

It was the first summer after the rape. I call it a rape, although there have been people who disagree, seeming to think of rape as something more violent, or singular, or merely by not admitting that young men can be raped. It happened shortly before my mother’s birthday in January, and had splattered my life is savage hues. It colored my mind, tinting it with anguish so all my actions became tentative.

Tiny Yoshi carried her shiny black handbag on the stump of her left hand. The two bones of the arm ended in the flange that would have supported her hand, but where palm and knuckles would connect here was only a smooth skin. There was no scarring cicatrix, no severed savagery of the extremity. It would appear that she entered the world half handless. Yet the handbag hung there, balanced effortlessly.

At fifteen I walked wounded. Something had been taken from me, and my innocence spoiled. My sexual awakening had been tainted and tinged. At fifteen, I simply did not know how I would continue, or if I would ever be complete.

How did that hand come to be missing? Was this some shadow of Hiroshima or Nagasaki? Some radiated robbery occurring within the womb, resulting in the smooth skin that covered the absence over the bone? The beautiful grace of Yoshi has haunts me to this day, and the delicate suspension of that patent leather bag.

On the bus back from the Great Buddha I commented on the courteous mannerisms and kindness of the Japanese. One of the many older Jewish men on the tour cautioned me. He pointed out that the United States was the victor in the war, and that beneath the polite surface of the smiling Japanese faces there was hatred and resentment.

As, I surmise, there may have been for him toward the perpetrators of the Nazi atrocities. This man, whose name is no where recorded in my memory, was no stranger to what he was illuminating. He was an initiate: a blurred blue number on his forearm the sign of his initiation.

Yoshi, with her shiny black handbag like a secret flag, and her shiny black eyes concealing pain and anger toward her undeserved mutilation, smiles politely. She is the courteous tour guide of my youth.

My resonant pain and anguish was not so very much different. But, as an ungraceful youth of fifteen, I lacked an elegant handbag to carry it in.

Litany

I am afraid.

This is the litany of my fear

To try and love

For the currency of men

Lies in their loins

And not their hearts

I am afraid

This is the litany of my fear

To be bought and sold

Piecemeal

And forgotten

Once acquired

I am afraid

This is the litany of my fear

That age

Marching

Will erase what could have been loved

And a veil of loneliness

Will descend

Like dust

Strange elements occurring in dreams, including what appears to be an image of Ana and Arddu...

I don't actually appear to be in the dream... at least not as myself.  Of course, in dreams all the elements are shadows and iterations of our self.

The dream is set at an elementary school.  The school is built an a hillside, so the playground is down below, and the classrooms and other buildings are up the hill.  A concrete stairway connects them, with a iron gate at the top of the stairs.  The playground is fenced.

There is some sort of assembly of people going on, like a back to school night.  There are a few people of note.  The first is a pretty reserved woman dressed in tailored clothing from the very early 1960s, including a hat and a pair of silver gloves with a bit of lace at the cuff.  The gloves are important, and seem to be one of the few things that take focus.  At one point she holds her hands to her face in a look of surprise.  The second figure is a elderly black woman in a wheel chair.  She is dressed in a similar fashion with a pill box hat perched upon her white hair.  On looking closely at her I realize there is a second figure: an elderly black man actually sits on the chair, but he is covered over in a veil worked with a swirling silver pattern.  The elderly woman sits on his lap.  He appears to be the one who turns the wheels of the chair, and she seems to direct him where to go.

And there is a boy.  Maybe eight years old.  Think Opie from Mayberry RFD.

During this assemblage of people something unseen enters the playground.  Several people react to it, and the boy begins to run for the stairs.  He must make it up the stairs before this unseen entity shuts the gate.

The action of the dream is as simple as that.

After dinner we did a kind of underworld ritual with Ana and Arddu, and they took something from us as sacrifice.  I am still surprised how easy it was to give up the crap I have carried around since infancy, the shit that has poisoned, dominated, and directed my life for 45 years.

Of course, I did not so much as give it up and it was identified as the sacrifice.  It was... hmmm... taken. The visual was like unpacking and enormous wound, reeling out yards and yards of stained, stiffened, filthy linen packing and leaving the cavity open... just open.  I felt about twenty pounds lighter afterwards.

Ana and Arddu wanted it.  When we talked afterward they had collected many horrible bits, and were completely delighted with them.  They wanted all the things we carry around that weight us down, but no longer need.

Coming home there was this 'moment' where my past was like this wrinkled white table cloth, and someone began pulling it from one end, and all the wrinkles, which were all the hurts of love and failed relationships over my lifetime, beginning with my relationship with my father, flattened out and went away, leaving this white, pure, brilliant expanse of fabric.  Then a voice said, "Now you are free to love."  Suddenly I did not completely know who I was anymore, because I have always been so defined by my pain and loss.  I almost wrecked the fucking car (because THEY don't seem to read the cautions about operating heavy machinery....)

I confess to feeling a little lost... but that is ok, as almost any directions but backwards is good.  Dealing with the partial loss of identity that is the aftermath is disconcerting

It seemed so effortless.  I thought about that last night, and 'They' pointed out that the work up to that moment took 45 years.  That's so important, always to remember what came before had to come in order to be in the new place now.

Within the Eye

I

Discarded in the garden of delight
Amid the fragrant grass, reflecting night,
An ancient shard of endless ebon space:
The same that once enticed creation’s light.

II

Of creation’s moment remained a trace:
The face of God Herself, reflected grace
Embraced within the mirror’s dark fragment.
The Peacock enters Paradise apace.

III

Left and right the scaly claws of potent 
Melek Ta’us, iridescence acresent,
Around the Gods’ oasis paced in pride,
His beauty temper’d with acharnement.

IV

Among the blooms the mirror black he eyed.
Within the depths he bent his head and scryed.
The image of his brilliance met him there,
Array’d in glory. Blissfully he cried,

V

"Within the glass what visage does appear?
This image of blue, green and bronze austere?
A thousand eyes of God spread wide? These are
My own lineaments my eyes revere!"

 VI

He raised his voice, his vivid fan aflare,
In pride, magnificently self aware,
His Peacock clamor: "I am Beautiful!" 
A peal of truth and power solitaire.

VII

The hue of thunder filled the world past full,
Rocking firmament. The celestial
Vault echoed with exquisite brazen might
With every feather shimm’ring worshipful.