To the Universe belongs the dancer

To the Universe belongs the dancer
Oh dear - my good friend, the one who roused me from my nobody-loves-me-everybody-hates-me-guess-I'll-go-eat-worms fit with his phone message last night read my blog and was upset that I was making myself miserable, and that my the Franz Wright poem was supposed to be some sort of goodbye. I didn't mean any of that at all. And so, I attempted to explain myself - an in case anybody else is worried, you can read it too:

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First - it's not a suicide note, and the poem is not about suicide - read again. It's about slogging through some shitty feelings and wanting to turn out the lights, and then suddenly, finding in that daily whorl of pain, that the fact you can even feel it at all might actually be that:
"secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
You gave us each in secret one thing to perceive."

It's awe-ful and transfixing to have both those feeling residing in you together, the death-wish and life-wonder. I've always had my share of both, and I tumble end-to-end through life, sloshing the amounts of each back and forth.

The poem is expressing how just the ability to feel these things is its own wonder, and how suddenly the lump in your throat becomes a polished stone to turn over and over and marvel at. The point of the blog is that I find myself soaring and crashing, choking on my stone and bringing it back up. It's about the truth of all the true moments that are stringing along, faster than I can count them, of all the experiences and extremes of being, each completely valid in their turn. It's a way of forcing me to be honest, to be genuine even in my masks and poses, dissecting them for what they're worth and discarding the rest. Did you ever really FEEL yourself being a poser? Without shame for once, like an indulgent consciousness on a high mind-shelf, noticing and noting the ways you try to deceive your little ego, the way your little ego puts on puppet-dances for people when you never really asked it to?

We all wear the faces we want to be seen, no matter how we deny it, and even the bold bare honesty of some people can be another foil for insecurity - and I want to know why. I want to know how I explain these things to myself, why I can feel so fucking alone when I have everything I wanted, why I can have everything I ever wanted when there are so many people out there, alone.

If I'm to have a closet full of costumes and occasion gowns and face paint, I want an inventory. I want to know if when I think I'm happy, I really am. Or when I'm sad, like I thought I was last night, if I'm maybe just deluded. Which one is real? Can I summon one to take away the other? If they're not real, and only masks, then I should be able to switch in and out, glide freely from one to the other. If they're not - what then? Just to endure, to weather, to be subject to? Against this I raise myself up in the melodrama that is the birthright of my youth and say "Fie!" I won't believe that anymore, or bow my head to suffering like an ox. What's it for? Where does it come from? Good old Aeschylus said "I would rather be ignorant than knowledgeable of evils." but he was being wry, he was being difficult, because he turns and has the chorus sing "Speak, tell us the end. For the sick it is sweet to know / what pain is still to come and know it clearly"

Why? It's not masochism, it's arming yourself for what is to come. I don't know yet why we need to taste evil - is it so that we may know it and spit it out? Or is it because in the bitterness is hidden the herb that will save us in the end?

In the Nag Hammadi gnostic texts, Jesus chants:

"To the Universe belongs the dancer
He who does not dance does not know what happens
Now if you follow my dance, see yourself in Me who am speaking
You who dance, consider what I do, for yours is
This passion of Man which I am to suffer
For you could by no means have understood what you suffer
unless to you as Logos I had been sent by the Father
Learn how to suffer and you shall be able not to suffer

The other gnostic gospel of Thomas has Jesus say:

"if you bring forth what is within you,
What you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
What you do not bring forth will destroy you

but he warns that it's not easy - that turmoil comes with this bringing forth, and pain, as my Aeschylus said, pain is necessary to learning. Jesus says,

"Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over all things."

You're right, and I knew you were right before you said it, that it is possible to "feel the love" from people and discount it, discard it ungratefully. Any time we're behind our black curtains of depression, scratching at our psychic scabs, and generally feeling miserable, whenever we're sad, we're choosing to give value to this shadow, and ignore the light. We're focusing our lens on some things and not others. I'm exploring these days - how much control do we have over our internal cameras? Why? Where are the buttons and knobs? What affects them? If I'm miserable, and so I point my camera towards the light, consciously, am I "faking"? If the controls are wrestled away from me in some bizarre mental melodrama, and I find I can only see the dark, as I felt yesterday (after days and days and days of blissfulness) have I done something to deserve it? When did I lose focus? At what point did I shift the lens? Can it shift by itself? Is that natural? If I'm looking at the dark, and I explore it, am I being self-indulgent? Are we allowed to look at the dark, or was that the First Fall? I mean, they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Obviously, they knew good - they walked with God. So what it means, is that they knew, they looked, and recognized the dark.

Why public? I want to get this shit figured out. I want all of us who are lying to ourselves about our self-hatreds and our insecurities and shortcoming and general all-around lamenesses to be honest with each other, actually, to have somebody look at what I'm saying and have their shame taken away. I am wretchedly ashamed of myself when I quibble and waffle and feel lonely amidst an embarrassment of riches, but I'd feel less so if I knew other people did, too. If I knew that some of the little old men who sit and smoke pipes in doorways were there not to watch the people go by, but to see if anyone noticed thm sitting there, maybe I'd administer a less harsh beating to my brain the next time I catch myself in a similar pose. Maybe if I catch myself at it when I'm in that benevolent inquiring higher-mind mode, I can forgo the peasant beating altogether, and let the scientist mind dissect it, and offer the innards to others to see what they can divine from the signs they find there.

These days I'm actually paying less panicked attention to the machinations of other people's minds, because I'm very busy being self-obsessed. I excuse myself for my self-centredness through one more gnostic teacher...

"Say then, from the heart that you are the perfect day, and in you dwells the light that does not fail...for you are the understanding that is drawn forth...be concerned with yourselves; do not be concerned with other things which you have rejected from yourselves."

Though, I may say, this: "what you want is to mainline someone's entire life, and to have someone else desperately crave your own" is one of the most interesting things I have read in a long while. Because you may be right - a lot of my early (and continuing?) pain has been born from an inability to understand why anyone would want anything less from anyone, in any capacity. Being raised on a daily diet of Thomas a' Kempis, who prayed:

"Inflame my coldness with the fire of your love. Illuminate my blindness with the light of your presence. Make all that leads me from you not worth thinking about. Make me forget it all. Lift up my heart to you in heaven, and let me not wander aimlessly about the world. From now on, you will be my only delight, for you alone are my food and drink, my love and joy, my sweetness and my whole good.
Oh, that by your presence you would set me fully on fire, totally consume me and transform me into you, so that through the grace of inner union and by melting in love's flames I would become one spirit with you."

I have prayed this of every soul I have ever met, on the subway, in the store, at my stupid office. As a young child I willed myself to stay awake at night and say a Hail Mary for every soul that ever was, felt a pain that came from being unable to encompass and love everyone properly, a despair that somewhere there was someone going unloved, someone going unprayed for, someone left out of the "god bless mummy, and god bless daddy, and god bless jenny, and god bless patches, and god bless...". I find myself succumbing to this still, feeling guilt each communte because my subway car is full of souls without witnesses, full of hearts without lovers. (do you remember when you scolded a drunken me for this, over Guiness in the back of Union Pool?)

When I got married, it was because I thought I'd found the answer - to love All was impossible - to love One, and as you said, seek to know everything about them, to be there to bear witness to everything about them, even (especially!) the parts that nobody else wants. Why would I do this?

I wrote a poem a few days ago, called Logos, about how we need other people to define us. We can say that someone or something exists because it can be experienced (on any one of countless levels) - which means in a way that it is dependent on having an experiencer. In a way, we are created and kept in existence by other people's experience of us, and who we are, through their inner words and names for us. And other people exisit to us, only through our inner words to them. In a way, we create them for ourselves. The longer and better you know someone and experience them, the more real they become, because each experience builds onto the others. When they leave, or die, our definition of them doesn't change, and our experience of them remains, and the two are so inseperably interwoven that they can't be separated. They exist to us in the same way they always did - it's just that we can't keep adding to our experienceof them. They're not any less real, not at all, they just can't get any more real. In a way you could say that death means a person has reached their full reality. (this idea first occured to me reading, of all things, The Velveteen Rabbit.)

As paper, I christen you Poet
And wait for your words
To fall and cover over me, this naked page
To fill up the empty space, the blank that shames
To grant at least the grace of interstice
And give me definition
Your consciousness will call me into being
Your thoughts, your words once written in
Will make me
Your word will give me meaning
I am starving for the ink of you,
The ink your words, your words a sacrament
"That which signifies and Is"
Your sacrament the truth that leads to you
I worship, and I wait
I imagine the matter of your composition
Anticipated creation, long expected, still unseen, unknown
To be conceived, conceived of
What begotten words will form
I wait for the comfort, for the force
Of your impressions pressed upon me
The strokes of your pen outlining what it means to be
What names you have for beauty
How beautiful the words upon each other building
Shaping the expression of my meaning.

But I found, as you said, that to wrap myself all up in the definition of One became a "nasty addiction" that fed upon itself, and calcified. There was no pars pro toto or synecdoche - though the part may contain the whole, it cannot stand in for the whole. I found it was possible to harm someone by focusing your magnifying lens on them.

Which left me again, without an answer. I can't love everybody all at once, and I can't just obsess and mainline one person - not everybody wants to be totally consumed.

But then I had that - bah, vision is a loaded word - but that perception, of the world being wrapped in dark paper, and each soul being a pinprick to let in the Light. And I realised that the job IS to bear witness, and to love entirely, just as I'd thought, but with stillness, and not frenzy - to simply look through the hole, as it was, and not to tear at the paper in a hurry. My own hole-in-the-black paper is the one that I can worry at and scrabble off the edges of, and the only one. My job is to widen it the best I can before I go, to let in the most Light, and to calmly let others look through when they wish, and to look bravely and clearly through each person's porthole as it is presented to me, from whatever occluded vantage I'm afforded.

I can't do it perfectly, yet, I fall into anxiety and despair, I choke off my own light. But I learn that there are many stages to reaching gnosis, and the path is hard, but it's okay to start and stop and have miseries and dark clouds as they come:

"...behold your blessedness...ascend to the Vitality that you will see moving. And if it is impossible for you to stand, fear nothing; but if you wish to stand, ascend to the Existence, and you will find it standing and stilling itself...and when you receive a revelation...and you become afraid it that place, withdraw back...and when you have become perfect in that place, still yourself."

The sin is when you stay afraid, and refuse to draw back, and deny yourself the comforts of the world, and deny the beauty and love of your friends.


Oh yeah, and this lady is my hero: the True Love Project