The Beginning
My first memory of her is that of a confused bumblebee losing strength, bouncing between the two walls of the basement. Since my early childhood, she would enter my bedroom windows at night to shine alongside the incessant street light that poured in from outside. Naturally adjoining herself to the moon’s illumination, she found solace in settling her soul into mine. An ethereal body, a spirit spouse all my own—a parasite finally in love with its host. When her soul would dip its fingers into my sleeping body, our condition would produce the faint trace of honey that I would wear all around my lips in a smug and youthful smile. But this arrogance faded and the sense of entitlement began to feel displaced. Perhaps due to youth, I felt that this glowing archetype of her essence came to represent the oppressive force of my own voice.
To escape this essence, I enrolled in a university in a desperate attempt to grasp the weight of the emotion she ignited in me. I became an archeologist, an apologist anthropologist in search of the true authors—the ascetic apostles of humanistic fate. But she would not leave. As the years began to pass within her presence, the more our spiritual bodies would grow entwined as if we, ourselves, were producing the sap of decaying trees—O the sugar she would leave in the sweetness of the dream where sap feeds the bumblebees whilst sickening the sea fleas—Our school song!
Several uncomfortable years after college I found myself back in Brazil, working toward someone else’s unrewarding experience. Nightly, I would force myself to think of her presence before I dozed off in a feeble attempt to attain lucidity. I would chant to myself about her spreading form, as if it were neon gas in the night sky with glistening white teeth and pale blue eyes. It would never work. Nothing worked. Imprisoned in this insect net, I was completely trapped. I was out of luck. I couldn’t go to sleep. I couldn’t wake up. I needed a way out.
And then it occurred to me—like a crushing fist handed down from Ak’abal or Artaud—I must go to Momostenango.
The Pequoidian Voyage
For the length of the entire trip, I would awake at night to the muffled sound of her levitating outside my cabin windows. I would awake to the shrill call of this oceanic banshee in symphony with the sea. It only took moments for the sound of her voice to cause my body to relax and my thoughts to scatter. The motion of the small ship would then ease me back into a subtle sleep, into a new scene of submerged reservations and buried aspirations. In this alternative world, she would pass through the air-tight seal of the cabin window. She would enter the room only to once again enter my self. First with curious fingers followed by an ever-inquisitive mouth and mind, she began to pick at the very fabric of my physical being – the pores of my skin, the frame of my skeleton and the organs that sleep inside of it like chaste children. By a force of infinite energy, she pulled my body through the glass of the cabin window. Cloaked in a careless yet comforting sense of nothingness, by way of her soft arms I floated out of the motion of the ship and into the motion of the night. It is here that she held my body just above the surface of the waves as her form began to expand. At first glance her expansion was akin to the last time – like that of a neon gas with obtuse sets of eyes and teeth. She began to evolve much further with the gas only serving as an outline of all that appeared within her. The presence of other forms began to emerge from her as if she herself were water reflecting the constellations. Bodies entwined with each other as if on fire, others twisting as if drowning below the surface of the water. With eyes wide shut, I watched their metamorphosis whilst bodies converged together in tune to the shrill sound of their mother erupting her cries into the endless maritime midnight. I had set out on this voyage in search of medicine to cure myself of her. She responded with the instantly paralyzing vision of herself as Hygieia. In the dream, this turn of convalescence translated to me as an act of war – a challenge to defeat her expansion inside of me, to put a stop to the spreading of seed that she plants within me.
Reaching the full effect of Hygieia, she felt as if she could have been born of the deep black that blanketed the scene below. New arms grew from her torso as if she were handling nests of snakes, all of them holding me suspended in time. In this grasp she lowered me down into the water and fish began to swim into me. Cymothoa exiqua moved into my mouth to replace my tongue. Eels squirmed their way into my anus to lie torpid inside of my intestines. A giant squid began to wrap itself around me to replicate her form. She controlled the sea to speak to me – to share in the immeasurable sincerity of her love, to teach me of the balance of beyond, below and above. She then raised me out of the water, droplets weighing themselves down like sap. I began to purge eggs that fell effortlessly down into the sea as the taste of honey still tasted sweet around my mouth. As the two worlds of air and water began to combine, I could feel the reversal of hot and cold sensations burst through my nervous system. It felt as if tourniquets were tightening around my knees and thighs. It felt as if the cycles of life were turning inside of me at magnificent speed. The eels revived movement to swim up my digestive system and into my lungs where they wrapped themselves together to bask in the oxygen. It felt as if she was exercising my esophagus to become some sort of birthing canal for sea louse. At once, I felt as if I was now the chaos burning inside of the creature she had become. I felt the melancholy of her medicine, the frail mortality of her expanding ego. There were no longer arms suspending me in the air above the water for the sea itself now held me up at odds against her expanding form. With eyes wide shut, I began to scream at her desperate demands for sensible definitions of seed and egg, arm and leg, man and witch, tone and pitch, branch and twig, cotton and fig – anything to make sense of the mess that is waking life.
I woke up. I was back within my cabin with several members of the ship’s crew now beside me. Two of them, somewhat set back, spoke below their breath in the corner of the small room. The third remained at my bedside, dotting my burning forehead with a soaked handkerchief. I could still feel the pain in my legs and the chill of the ocean up my spine. Still stilted speechless from my dream, I let the man’s soft voice repeating the promise of land lull me back into sleep. “We are only miles from the Guatemalan shore, sir. We will arrive by daybreak.”
Guatemala
I awoke in a clearing surrounded by woods. The local men had announced me delusional and dangerous upon arrival resulting in a complete shunning by the villagers. They knew I was there to see him – the unspeakable one, the human ghost, the man that is to be hunted and found. No one truly knew of his specific origin or where he formerly practiced his profession. Ironically enough, this is why I had hunted and now found this man. The lore of his existence had spread greatly enough to reach my attention at camp on the Brazilian coast. A medicine man of discreet nature with no family, no home, no history; he was known only for his distinct mystery and ethereal presence. Only this man could understand and cure me of my complex condition. And so, I woke in a clearing surrounded by woods. My body was covered in large tree leaves that were so fresh that my flesh almost absorbed their taste and smell. The man hunted and now found stood above me with the darkness of his black body juxtaposed against the light of the rising sun. He hovered over me chanting French verse, spitting at every emphasized vowel. There was such beauty in the way he moved. It was as if his body was oil smeared on a canvas sky with the horizon forming an aureola around the movement of his ritual. Rising his thin arms over me, the energy surged through him until they began to appear as if they were thick ancient tree trunks. Introducing a leather rawhide whip from below his waist, he began to lash out and furiously lay the strap into my flesh. A strange stigmata came upon me as the elation of the pain swirled around in my blood. The palms of my hands and tops of my feet began to seep an opaque white sap that released steam as it trickled down to the Earth below. The man hunted and now found continued to hover above me, spreading his six wings like the angel at Mt. La Verna. As they cast their shadow, a hole that had appeared in my side began to expand to unveil the emptiness inside. Only then did I pass out from the pain into a dream that served as a continuation of my reality with the winged figure above me and the vastness of night abound. The hole in my side opened wider as she returned once again in the form of a small white light. It seemed so distant, as if quivering somewhere eternally deep within my own tenebre.
I awoke inside a small tent, possibly of military origin, with an oil lamp’s flicker giving life to a dance of shadows upon the nylon walls. The man hunted and now found was once again above me chanting, this time in an African dialect. A young boy entered holding a small cup. He explained “you must drink from this.” “But what is it?” “It is a solution. For one to truly understand, one must dissolve their knowledge into the question it faces.” At this, I stole the cup from his hands and filled my mouth. As it moved down my throat, I ingested not only its ingredients (honey, ceiba leaves, menstrual blood) but the process of how they all came to be – their creation – as the ripe fruit of nature’s labour. Immediately after consumption, I became dizzy and began to fall back into a deep sleep. My last memory was of the boy’s small hand in mine and how warm it felt against the cold of my sickness.
I dreamt of him instead of her. We sat cross-legged, face to face, in a wooded space much like the size of his small tent, or the ship’s cabin, or the insect net. He took his hands into mine, reciting French verse that now made complete sense to me. A third form began to appear between us – a miniaturized tornado of neon gas flittering its glowing wings like a night fairy, like a moth able to create its own light. As her form began to expand, it no longer felt like she was between us but among us, within us. The man hunted and now found began to direct his mantra at her and she started to flicker more intensely with each verse. A white light then began to flood out of her form, now barely recognizable as human, and pour onto the wooded ground. Both the man and myself then began to flicker the white light. It entered both of us through our feet (feet that were now bound with the Earth by way of vine and flower). After only a few moments, the entity had filled our entire field of vision with light as our original surrounding faded into obscurity. The man hunted and now found nor my own decrepit body found themselves able to exist, both disappearing into this blindness. The white light – it is the sun in my eyes. I am awake, and alone back on the cabin of the ship. It is the day of the solstice and the sun pushes its heavy hand through my window only to hold my head. What has happened? How long have we been back at sea? To what end must I follow this path of insanity? I can hear morning seagulls squawking just outside the walls and the movement of the ship once again eases me back into sleep.
The Holographic Dream
Back at camp in Brazil, I began to suffer from a range of irresolute feelings involving my condition. Scientifically, I felt let down by the inconclusive results of my shamanic experience. Spiritually, I felt pulled up by a renewed sense of self among my waking hours. No longer did the mosquito net feel so imprisoning. No longer did the cursed apparition of her seem to control me. I felt as if I now had the opportunity to speak, to alter the dream of her into something more real – something permanent. All the while there was a large piece of me that now felt missing without her presence. Instead of her, I began to dream of the young boy who had appeared in the medicine man’s small tent. He would approach me frequently in these dreams, usually with a casual challenge to play chess or engage in a slieu of other mind games he seemed to had invented. We rarely spoke to each other during these interactions as our sole attention was focused upon the menial movements and tasks that, collectively, made up the complexity of the game at hand. There was only one incident where we fell into a conversation. After I had forfeited to solving a complicated puzzle depicted before me, he motioned for me to follow him out of the clearing and into the rich and harlequin density of the encircling trees. Once entirely enveloped by our new environment, we walked alongside a small stream as he expressed his concerns about my mental state. The young boy explained that my condition was not one to be cured by any anonymous man hunted and now found. He stressed that I was not wrong in approaching the shaman for it had led to my introduction to himself. In our talk, he emphasized the energy of my fascination with my condition. The conversation quickly became one-sided with a long monologue directed at me. He spoke of how I should channel this energy into other fields. He urged me to take control of my mind, my dreams, my destiny. He spoke of “the impermanence of committing oneself to permanence” and “a collective unconscious unraveling”, ideas that left me feeling confused and at odds within my own dream. Eventually my mind began to wander back within itself, perhaps into another dream, and I fell out of the conversation completely. To where my mind wandered during this brief period is unknown to me for it is that moment in dream where even the unconscious appears lost. After an indeterminate amount of time, the young boy brought me back to the scene of our walk by the river. In retrieving my attention he took his small, soft hands to mine as our eyes locked into each other. He began to speak again, in a much more condensed and less evangelized way, with a soft tone that more fit his small stature. “Make her real. If she feels so real, let your mind give birth to the most physical sense of her that you can imagine.”
This is the point in the story where the most peculiar thing happens. At the moment of waking from the aforementioned dream – I saw a worm. As my morning eyelids struggled to open and embrace the light of the rising sun, my vision began to focus upon the stained pillowcase only centimeters from my face. The smallest of slightly curled worms lain upon the fabric, frozen in the frigid beauty of death. In all of my early morning existentialism, I could not help but feel plagued by the question of where the worm came from. I cannot fathom the hours I had spent researching and meditating upon, with only fingertips in the dark, the nexus of the mosquito net’s texture. Where had this dead worm come from? The first several months at camp were chalk full of sleepless nights imagining my bloodstream ravaged by the malaria of the mosquito’s kiss, resulting in a full day of inspection for any possible tears or disconnections of fabric. “Where did this dead worm come from?” I repeated aloud, asking both myself and the surrounding drone of nature’s dawn. The question of the worm’s origin quickly dissolved back into the heaviness of my eyelids. At certain times, the transition from conscious to unconscious can appear as the changing of a camera’s lens. In only a blink, I fell asleep to awake in a fresh dream where I was lain upon my back with my gaze toward the pinpoint of the mosquito net’s locus above me. Here is the center of all things – I am asleep and dreaming, holding lucidity no doubt, with my gaze almost projecting itself toward the center of the net’s height. With my unconscious body at bended knee, ready to spring from within me and out into empyreal space, I focus upon the locus. Though lain horizontal, my body then bends to form a diving motion. I dive out of my sleeping body and into the center of the net’s allegedly imprisoned universe. Like a struggling sperm splitting the skin of the egg to enter, instinctively I break through into the Other.
The Lily of the Valley
In the wake of the holographic dream, the intensity of the life around me began to unravel itself in the most magnificent of means. My nights had regressed to insomnia as I would stay awake for hours listening to the insect life outside of the mosquito net, paying close attention to note any variation of pattern in sound. Dreamless, at times I would appropriate their susurration to the lost banshee call I had once abhorred. My condition had grown beyond its psychotic state to now example physical symptoms. My constant nausea and tenderness of the liver no longer paid adieu to French novels and alcoholism but to an ever greater evil – that of the unknown and uncharted sea. My level of comprehending past, present and future quickly and quietly grew away from me like the soft black mold of a bathtub.
‘Tween the pinkest sunrise and the ever-drawing dark crimson of dusk, I found myself taking long walks through the lush Brazilian jungle that surrounded me in an attempt to organize my thoughts. Animals began to follow my sickened form: the marsh deer, the otter, the rare bush-dog. All three of these animals would meekly follow my trail with only mere hints of sound to reveal their presence: the deer’s stamper would crush the decaying leaves (those not yet absolved back into the Earth), the otter would slap its wet paw against every passing tree (those who feel they can only breathe briefly upon land), and the bush-dog would sniff, with that dry and suffocating snort that results in the slight seepage of snot surrounding the nostril, and sniff until it found nothing (those seasick yet still docked derelicts that make up you and me). With the passing of each night, my wretched throat withered more and more into a sick and pale trail of muscle. I would awake with not one worm but ten, all of them sprawled out against each other in an entomological orgy upon my pillowcase. My entire skeleton was emitting its admission to failure, leaving my self to feel like a depleted resource. And then, just as my soul reached its most torrid point, I erupted into a state of efflorescence upon a standard afternoon stroll.
The Poppy-Papaver Rhoeas, the Freesia, the Camelia Rose – each one began to speak to me. Perhaps it was the fluke of crossed waves of modern mediation confusing my intellect, or perhaps even it was the spirit speaking directly to me. It does not matter for they both serve the same voracious purpose. These flowers (the Rhoeas, the Freesia, the Rose) all spoke to me in the most monotonous of social tones. Their conversation made up all but gossip of the particular one I love: the Cattleya, the Queen of the Orchids. She stood there at the end of the line like a bride unveiled with an understood guilt in-tow. Like an angel of the Renaissance unfolding her oil wings, this specific Cattleya opened arms to emanate the light of life that exists beyond mere petals. Rosen limbs like inviting legs of a receiving lover, her genus swallows and digests me. It fills me with the immaculate strength of absolute liberation whilst only ants push other petals toward our same rising sun. Alas! this is the beauty of the regeneration of life. Again and again, and again, through every beautiful and recycled morning – the flowers begin to bloom. There is a streak of purple and a shriek of blue in the prenatal joy of impending doom. The Cattleya opens two bottom petals to exert a bulbed wing that appears as if it is a child falling out of a flowery womb, a child with not one face but two. Oh! it’s a twin! A multiplied separation of the Orchid itself! It is much like the freak-child born beyond science, the child that unties tubes and spreads its own original seed by way of its own carnival hands. A step-child to the whole of Nature, the once removed half human that fell out of the panoptic prison of lust with two sets of pursed lips. A precursor to a new perennial presence of love.
As beautiful as my ideas sound in retrospect, the simple point of their existence led me to a greater truth. I had to get out. I had to leave. Living in a foreign land had led me to lose a sense of myself. Living as an outsider, with etic over emic, the chaos of the local culture had infused its ruin upon me. My surrounding web was no longer made of just my mosquito net but of despair and insanities written by my own metaphorical jewels and pearls. I felt an overwhelming desire to escape my camp and seek out a new home. I am not ashamed to admit to the fact that I had dreams of the young boy, again, in a physical transformation. At times he would begin to grow breasts out of the tight skin that costumed his small ribcage with areolas serving as aureolas. He would become a she, quickly, just to flicker a slight of light toward me through the body language of transsexual torso (between his newly-formed breasts, a pattern of stains designed his chest by way of the salt and oil of his body’s sweat). In this dream, the boy spread his sun-smeared and sparsely haired legs like the trusting kid brother to the Cattleya in an attempt to divulge the very vagina that was so reminiscent of my floral experience. Upon this canonized clitoris is where I viewed my own face, in my own dream, hanging like a blossom of birth upon the plump flesh of female life. In all of my recollection, it was the first time I had ever truly perceived myself as ugly. My stained face served as the forced intrusion into a world misunderstood. Within this singular moment in time, I felt the oppression of all women inside of the very essence of my own individual self. At a loss for any language, the only thing I could do was listen to the swallowing of a dry lump of my own testes as it traveled down my esophagus and feel the way it slumped down the narrow canal like a miscarriage. I had to get out. I had to leave. The foreign land had led me to lose a sense of myself. Feeling like the bait of Bateman, I felt as if my mask of sanity was about to slip.
The Maternal Mourning
I awoke in a hospital bed confined beneath the tight formality of a white bed sheet. Enclosed in this salutary envelope, I felt myself quickly become only the language of my words in their state of deliverance…
The sunlight burst through the hospital windows to display a scene of shadows upon the surrounding walls. With this sensation of light serving as general audience, the sharp figures of the shadow became specific critics littered amongst the mass of observers in the classic tale of how one nurtures their other. A solemn faced nurse then entered the room with only one intention, that of injecting more morphine into my bloodstream. Alas! my sins are absolved once again. This is the beauty of modern medicine, this is how the living dead have learned to sleep. “And to sleep! To sleep! To sleep is to reach the designated destination of all dreamers for it is the entrance into the Holy Land of Unconscious Thought where individuals exist beyond their own selves and beyond the limitation that the Earthly Establishment is so well-known to enforce through its laws of convention and strict pattern” is reminiscent of the rants I would patronly break into, serving the role of drugged patient yelling at the solemn faced nurse. Within only the first few days of my stay, I became a prisoner of the commercial sanitarium that we moderns call a general hospital. I became the adjunct prisoner of a caste erection, with myself as the swallowed commoner in a rising well of water and she as the eastern ascension of our parochial sun.
Alongside all of these drug-induced perceptions existed the reality of all things flowing toward their own ends. My admission into the hospital was a direct result of my own actions. I entered the sanitarium not as victim but willing participant in a desperate plea to free myself from both guilt and redemption. By the end of the first month I accepted my residence within the narrow dwelling of the hospital’s humble abode with a warmth of content. I would spend the majority of my time basking in the ardor of both the sun of the solemn faced nurse and the sun reflecting in the framed window to which my bed faced. As the flesh of my body would absorb the heat of these natural lights, I felt myself begin to burn with an entirely new sense of insight. A nightly foreshadowing of my own death crawled up my legs like Wilde’s metaphor of drinking absinthe, that of lilacs tickling their path up inner thighs toward a beautiful culmination of desire for the ultimate end. My dependence upon each of my five senses began to blur into each other, coming together in colours heard through sound and the ability to taste the touch of the solemn faced nurse’s needle as it pricked my arm.
My parasitic twin was born amid one lavish afternoon in late September, ironically the same second of my own death. With the hot stare of the sun feeding my physical form in an overdose of nutrients, the image of my own annihilation crawled into my abdomen to enact an immaculate birth of itself. In a mere memory, a reality-cum-thought, every single one of my own experiences alongside the lightness of my imagination began to create a physical form – an entity existing entirely upon my exertion of love toward thee (the Lover, the Friend, the Holy Spirit, the Earth). The culmination of this appreciation of meticulous love digested into the development of this, this… this Parasitic Twin! That which bores itself from beyond the blossom of my heart like that of a splinter in the sphincter of an asshole. This twin, with my self as its root, unfolds out of me like a magazine’s centerfold. I give birth to the incomprehensible beauty of earthen limbs spreading legs and crossing arms that waver from their stem like the rise of writhing Nāgas. Agah, agah, agamawah! I utter senseless words for there are none that can describe the birth of the other from one’s own self. The hum of her song reigns supreme, resounding Beethoven sonatas and a television upon the radio. Once only a small sputter of light within my breast, this spirit spouse now bursts from my bottom half like that of volcanic eruption – this autumnal woman of the wind, this heiress of every said sunlit dress, this Venus in a fur hat. I birth the spirit of my own ghost in a female form, a Betty White in a Brigitte Bardot body with the haircut of – ah! I digress for these descriptions of her contemporary form in no way represent the infinity of her innermost beauty that exists within and surrounding it.
This Parasitic Twin, one who survives only as an idealized allegory of my own conception, exists in physical life for only a few moments. In a miscarriage of misaligned limbs, this new body juts out of me with both torso and appendage but no head. The immediate strain of two bodies sharing one heart then combusts into a mutual death of the two – one liver, three kidneys, with two sets of intestinal tracts swimming entwined like sprouting oceanic reeds. “To castrate Kronos is the only escape!” I shout as the solemn faced nurse’s forlorn frown turns upside down in the observance of my birth. Both the light of the nurse and the light of the parochial sun serve witness to my new found physiological truth: these interactions of everyday life are only a theater act in preparation for the next as hints of what beauty may come. The energy of our collective death eases its way out of the slightly ajar window of the hospital room, passing just above the nurse’s form to brush her shoulders in anemic caress. It flows out into the night to absorb itself in the hum of every street light, every passing car, and the downward drift of every falling leaf.
Behind the Wall Of Sleep
The afterlife? It begins with her as Galatea standing secret within the empty space of a desolate bathhouse. She poses stiffly beyond all beauty in an ivory form framed by the cheap porcelain of toiletry fixtures. With myself as Poor Pygmalion, I sit across from this spectacular display as the ugly artist drunk and drawn across the soiled tile of the floor. Staring at the statue’s cartographic chest, I recognize the pattern that I myself have manifested in the blotches of reds and pinks between each breast. The marks are an historical time line of our communing spirits, symbols of the stain of every summer sweat and coarse late-night comment I now regret.
A light begins to shine out of these sun spots as if they were the glimmer of a flashlight lost amongst the corridors of her frozen heart. In the utter brutality of this naked observation, I experience the ultimate realization that I am dead. I am dead. She is dead. Everyone formerly in relation to any sense of self I held is now dead. I recognize that I am not this Poor Pygmalion drunk and drawn across the soiled tile floor nor is she anything like an ivory figure framed by porcelain toiletries. She is Caligula and I am her slave. She demands me to feed her fresh sea urchin, moist and dripping. There is a certain violence to the scene that fuels me in my desire to kiss the smeared liquid of the sea creature from her lips – to render myself in complete admiration and respect for the superior ruler. The table before us is littered in field mushrooms and truffles, stewed snails slightly salted. The sun shines down upon us with suspicious eyes and a rising mound of copper-bound denim. Its commanding glare rises my spirit up in an immense beam of light and transfers me through time and space, delivering me back to the hospital bed by way of the rising shade of a window. I am Tesla, slightly rocking in a chair by this window.
There is a pigeon that flies in to sit upon the sill on a daily basis, looking for a bite to eat. I feed it with small kernels that I sneak away from the arranged lunch the nurses bring me daily. There is a light in this pigeon’s eyes that shines brighter than any form of energy I have ever observed. In this bird, there is life. In the glimmer of this pigeon’s narrow eyes is the romantic m-Other, the narcissistic m-Other, the m-Other from another Other. As I provide the bird with the sustenance of food, my mind ascends into the glory of feeling its own louse, its own host-lover, in imagining the fleas that scatter the depths of its worn feathers. As I lay dying, feeding this pigeon – this pigeon feeds these fleas and countless others as its lice drifts along the breeze.
Ah! I am now this lice, shaken from the pigeon down to the alley below to catch a strand of the long mane of a passing Arthur Rimbaud. As he returns home to his apartment, she reappears in the form of a callow and heartbroken Verlaine standing only afoot outside of the closet. As I remain hidden among the dirty strands of the young Rimbaud, I become the pan-optic cranial observer of this room and all who enter or exit it. Others begin to enter leading Paul to storm out of the room and the setting to become a portrait of artists akin to that of Fatin-Latour or Labisse. In this abrupt state of imaginary death, the size of my louse grows to that of a human being. I transmogrify. I metamorphosize. My lice holds the hands of Rimbaud and Eliot, of Rilke and Camus and Lautréamont and even Goethe, for the touch of their pen to paper has been proportionate to the amount of morphine and alcohol that has sent me into my own physical death. “A beautiful ink!” laments Rilke. “But what is the connection? It is not physical, it is problematic. It is not felt on the street or in the worker’s hand. It is nothing!” exclaims Rimbaud, drunk. Camus puffs a cigarette whilst Goethe stares out the glass window only to see Eliot’s reflection – Lautréamont does nothing because Lautréamont never showed up in the first place. Every single metaphor and element of imagery, every allegory and allusion – they all begin to flock toward each other to organise a new strain of singular existence. This is the communism of creative souls, that which works together toward a greater truth of life as an act of both crime and its inevitable punishment. The story has been told and it has been told one thousand times over. Why is there any reason for any of us to speak of it again?
Amidst this argument of the artists, my louse mouth opens to give life to an indiscriminate amount of eggs that have been (in the meantime) fertilizing in my jowls. They pour out of my mouth as if they were dandelion seeds catching an Eastern wind to fly high above a vast expanse of European soil toward a new home along the Rhine River where they shower down upon the landscape like pellets of rain, birthing my presence in a new point in history. Yes, O how abruptly! I am Martin Luther at court in the Diet of Worms. She is now the Holy Book on the high judge’s stand but she is also the wood of the podium which makes up the stand. She is the watermark upon the amateur finish. She is the knick left by an absent-minded altar boy. She is the floorboards of the courthouse that lead to the library across the courtyard where she erupts in an ever-evolving spiritual presence over every single printed word contained in every housed volume. She is both the convicting buzz of the buzzard that hovers above the central city hall and the defending croak of the crow that flies circularly around the city limits. She is knowledge. She is the sheer act of information being translated into an individual’s five senses. She flows through everyone inside of our surrounding metropolis, nurturing all of our hearts with an inviting embrace to open, to bloom.
A wind then pushes our blessed seeds toward another area of the German countryside. I am van Gogh’s sunflowers and she is Monet’s. We are in the back cab of a Nazi artillery vehicle, poorly placed upon each other. The heat of the parochial Sun begins to melt our oils and paints together. We become something beyond human existence. We become something beyond this or that. We become the incarnate of the basic idea, the simplest form of energy. We become that single synapse in the human brain that causes one to think differently – to think originally, to think artfully. We melt together and decompose into the ground to become new life. We stain the virgin ground only to reorganize as the root of a new imagination.
Sprouting quietly, we become a new species of Cattleya with two freshly opened wombs.
“In time,
No one will remember our work
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud
And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble. I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.”
Derek Jarman, Blue