AND WHEN WE WAKE And when we wake we live the lives we exiled from our dreams. We enter the wilderness in the hourglass we drive our scapegoats into like a dumping ground for the waste disposal of our infectious sins. Cleansed of our inner incense and soot in the unlucky month of May. Poor bears, poor squirrels, poor scapegoats, poor brides, o hypocrites, munifikun, purged by a ritual bath in the saline waters of our own eyes, I ask you with bitterness and irony without malice, is our innocence not contagious? Time demonizes whatever we separate from ourselves, set aside, cast out, anathematize, consign to the lost animal shelter, or imprison in the spirit as if the spirit were some kind of warden that didn’t have to wear socks over his boots when he made the night rounds so as not to wake the cons recasting their nightmares in bronze like rodeo clowns on rocking horses before the Trojan gates. Especially in love we make gifts of the unknown to each other. Could be a curse, could be a blessing, whoever knows?---you take it in, you’re betrayed; you don’t, the fragrant indifference of your piety fouls the nostrils of God, as she turns away from you like sundials and wildflowers away from the sun. The scapegoat learns to live with himself like the dark familiar of a Renaissance demon tragically condemned to practice the occult art of an infernal kind of compassion in the world that transcends the absolutes of anyone’s condition, despite the self they have to keep on shedding like snakes and dragonflies or last spring’s tree ring in your heartwood to keep on growing, the death masks of the screening myths you see in the mirrors your eyes gather into like sacred pools of tears unveiled like the rain every time you pass by, estranged from yourself as if everything crucially vital about this momentary life, all the terrors and wonders of this mystery we’ve been dreaming like a waterclock, afterlife after afterlife, had been reduced, o how could we have impoverished ourselves so?-- to getting on with yesterday like the hidden agendas of busy, busy undertakers washing the starmud off our corpses for cremation like felled trees so we can die like fireflies instead of real dragons with ashes on our breath like a urn full of stars. O how feeble we’ve become that we have to lean on all these wise men like crutches we won’t cast away to do our time standing up on our own burning ladders of serpent fire climbing our spine like scarlet runners, to lead us to our mangers, like public beds in the shelters for the homeless or the barred cribs of our privatized jail cells. No winners, no losers, no villains, no heroes, in truth, it’s hard to tell the victims from the executioners, given they both wear a hood over their eyes, and the one isn’t a new moon and the other an eclipse, both bonded by the isolation of life on death row as the curtain parts on the last act of the play we’re putting on as someone turns down the lights on the swan song of the full moon in a tar pit to console the tragically purged witnesses something infernally compassionate was served by our death. Call it fate, justice, karma, see it as a morality play or the absurd theatre of life with no emergency exits for the actors or the audience, because as Mephistopheles said to Faustus when he asked as if knowing would make any difference to anything, ah, Faustus, why this is hell (can you hear the weary sadness of the compassion in his voice?) nor we out of it. And look at us now trying to genetically modify the doctor in order to cure the disease we’ve afflicted upon ourselves as if we mythically deflated what’s truly beatific about us into the candling shadows of pharmaceutical elves with gargantuan inferiority complexes in the collective unconscious of a time---was there ever a time?---when the angels mated with the daughters of men? Silly question, when it’s as clear as the windows of an orphanage on Heartbreak Hill, we’re the illegitimate children of now, not designated heirs among the children of then. Is there ever going to come a day when we’re disappointed by the disappointments we are to ourselves we live every moment of our lives, barring a few fools who think the way to enlightenment is just a matter of prying your eyelids open with a crowbar, like an ox-eyed daisy before its time to bloom, shucking the shell for the sacred syllable of the black pearl on its tongue like a fee for the ferryman with his hands on the wheel of a deathboat lowered into the waters of life as if our only hope of rescue were oblivion. Nada. Nada. Nada. In a sunamic Shangrila of dopamines? Even if you find yourself shaking like a persecution complex from withdrawal in the bitter dawn of your tragically flawed impotence as you watch the spy satellites transit zenith in everyone’s telescopic eyes, and there’s a circus in town but no one’s laughing at the pie-bald clowns like interventionists in disguise, why labour like an Oxycontin to yoke your gazelles of light to that apocalyptic deathcart you drag around with you like an implausible loss of heart in what you’re doing to yourself bleating like a judas-goat on a food chain for a morsel from the mouth of a tiger of wrath you’re hunting like a perfume in heat? If you’re living in expectation of never being understood by anyone, maybe you’re a star ahead of us and the light’s just a little late in getting to the rest of us, or you’re sorely underestimating the innate intelligence of your solitude to make a fool of you by insisting everybody mistake you real seriously for the mystic missing link that’s come to help us all like a starting pistol in a firing squad a legend ahead of your time to fill in the blanks with our last names first and you with your flashflood of a vocabulary, surfing your own thought waves and then announcing as if you were confessing something wonderful, a new blues riff to the lamentable nightbirds you patronize with compassion for their lack of range: I know you all like secret passwords you only use once, then throw away. Though, of course, you don’t. But that’s ok. The nightmares only lie to people that nothing can change, and that were the strangest thing about them. Their stem cells were never irreparably deranged by their metaphoric selves when even the inner potential of hell has evolved into a funeral bell that never rings true until it tolls for you. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:02:08 +0000
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