1-20-13

"But for repentance to emerge, a person must first despair with a vengeance, despair to the full, so that the life of spirit can break through from the ground up." --Soren Kierkegaard

Let one house contain all one's goods. There is room enough. Put everything under one roof, for that is life's method, and leave the editing for the evenings and the candle hours. Analysis is important, but experiment must come first. The wool precedes the knit and pearl; the ocean precedes the tide; and observation, wild and free, must precede conclusion, neat and orderly. So I shall put all my goods in one room, and all my words on one page, with nothing but dates as flag-posts. I shall write as I live.

The underbelly of pine fronds beyond the window are a-gloss with gold. I know they would feel frictionless to the touch, as plastic does, or waxed paper. I know this due to the distribution of light and shade, the clustering and clumping of gold and white along their spines. I deduce touch from sight, smoothness from coruscation. 

All my colors are muted; all my sounds are dimmed. It is as if there were a parasite within me, vitiating me, numbing me.  Yet no, not a parasite, not a living thing, but a non-malevolent band or shell of some sort, something that, being lifeless, cannot be killed, being without motive, cannot be indicted, and being without malice, cannot be fought. 

Love stories hurt. It was on account of love stories, I believe, that I fell to the floor, the lacquered floor between boots and fridge, and ached, and cried. Yesterday. I cried. Aye, cried. Was I a sorry specimen? Did I cut a commiserable figure? Do I flinch to admit these brined antics? Aye, I do. I do not want to be weak. I do not want to be the lass who cries in self-pity over love stories. I do not know why I am as I am these days; I do not know why I'm held as in amber, held by numbness and pain as in amber. Nor do I know how to overcome these blights. I only yearn for Spring and escape.

Here is honesty and a little practical description. This house is not good for me. Everything associated with him hurts terribly, and everything here is associated with him. The walls are paper thin and I cannot escape the sounds of my mother-in-law, my brother-in law, my nephew, and though the conversations permeating the wood and plaster are benign, nor even picked out with any clarity beneath shrouding madrigals and requiems, they go in like daggers all the same.

      The wood that he brought down remains unused beside the wood burner. He was going to show me how to properly construct a fire, how to arrange the logs and kindling to best effect. There was no instruction. The wood has become a symbol now. It cannot warm me. 
       The busts upon the mantle are of idolized authors, and have inscribed upon their bases love dedications from he to I. They are beautiful busts, ivory, exquisitely crafted. I am weak. The busts are apologies, pleas for forgiveness, bids for reconciliation. I would have said they were clay surrogates for animate love, but, if I am truthful, they are not even that. They are rather requests to delay, promissory notes for a love that could not be redeemed, that could never be redeemed. I am weak and would put them in paper, bury them in boxes. I do not, but I would, though they are beautiful and do not deserve to be hidden. For the present they sit on the mantle and ail me if I think upon them. 

      The guitar remains untouched in its casing. All the old songs were bound up with him, in one way or another; not written for him, but bound up with him. He slipped away from the wedding bonfire in Maine while I joined the six-string epithamalia. He slipped away to be with vodka and the stars, and when I finished playing, and, blushes obscured by night and flames, looked about the kindly ring, I realized my mistake. All gone. All gone. The hobbit hole, the friends, the independence. All gone. I went North as a hostage and I play my songs no more.

In 1848 revolution broke out, firstly in Paris, and subsequently throughout Europe. Country upon country, in quick, destructive bursts, toppled their governing regimes to achieve fleeting liberalism. There was much bloodshed, but little lasting political reform, and the Springtime Of The Peoples, as the events were dubbed, gave way to a renewed Winter Of The Parliaments. The fact that Winter returns is never so significant as the fact that it was once Spring. Yes, there was violence and death and horror, but there was also hope, real horizon-skimming hope that the drudgery of inequality was at an end, that a halcyon age awaited on the other side of the musket-smoke. Right now I would give my life to have something worth giving my life for. 

My despair is hesitant, lack-luster; the life of the spirit lies entombed in frozen ground that will not break. So much numbness. Entombed in amber. Yet in amber there is as much life as death, as much activity as inertia, if I would only view the thing aright. Amber, in its Greek rendering elektron was one of Helios's many monikers, meaning "formed by the sun," and is etiologically anchored to the tears of Phaeton's sisters, who, transformed into poplars, wept resin for their dead brother. Amber, as elektron, is the etymological spark behind "electricity," a term coined for the static charge generated by rubbing amber against other materials. Come Phaeton! Come Faraday! Melt me! Break me! Come vernal revolution! Dissolve Winter into Spring and let the life of the spirit tear through!