When I was twelve, my biblioamour was Eowin, the warrior princess in Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings. Eowin dressed up like a boy in order to escape the confines of her
gender, so that she could go out and fight the good fight. Later it was voices on the
radio, like when I was ten and fell hard for Melanie. That was around 1968, and when she
belted out a chorus to, "Candles in the Rain," I understood why people sometimes
said, "I’d lay my life on the line"—for her, to protest the
War, to ensure that we can each love whom and when we want. At about that same time I came
to the realization that love can’t be restricted, at least not the way that, say,
grammar can be prescripted. If the culture I was born into seemed to insist that boys fall
in love with girls, I was certain, at nine or ten, that this must be some sort of
misunderstanding.
At some point during the turbulence of adolescence, my skin grew hungry. I inched out
of my books far enough to start falling in love—and all the rest—with flesh and
blood humans. I don’t think I was really aware that I had a body before I was
seventeen. The sounds we make when we are entrained and consumed by passion come from some
inner core of us, from some place where we don’t wear masks, wear nothing but skin
and nerves. Especially the sighs, those electric currents that come from deep within the
body. When our neural pathways are sluiced with the chemical brine induced by kissing and
caressing, time is stripped of its tyrannical clothing. Like a medieval carnival,
lovemaking restores the body’s empire, exalting the lowly and inarticulable, making
the uncontrollable fool king for an hour or a day.
My body is an uncontrollable fool. The fool, like the trickster, in many religions is a
sacred being, the one who can mediate between our quotidian lives and the divine.
It’s the fool in us that induces "alternate" states of consciousness, which
in fact aren’t alternatives but necessities. The fool is an open mind, the imaginal
desire that convinces us of our changes of heart—and the fool is the one who incites
to take the risks that make our hearts change. As an idea with a history, the fool has
many names. My favorite example from this history is that of Socrates, whose daimon
guided him to his own death as the proving, the refining, truth of his "foolish"
love of life. If we’ve learned to distrust our "foolish" intuition,
this ability to be instructed by some wordless inner mentor, it is because of our phobia
of the body and our fear of life’s uncontrollable topsy-turviness. Standing mute,
with an idiot grin on his face, the fool is perched on the edge of a cliff. If he thinks a
thought at all, he will back away from the cliff with a gasp. But if the fool is truly
foolish, he’ll leap, silent and trusting, into the void of the unknown.
My body may be wordless, but it speaks loudly. The powerful surges, the subtle traces
that course through our stomachs, knees, palms, and loins are the signs we must interpret
to know our bodies’ intentions. Like little proletarians, these signs do the work of
bearing the information from the inner stuff of us to our conscious selves trying to get
by in the world. Like proletarians, these messages from the body are often socially
unacceptable, impractical, revolutionary, life changing, messy. The body does not live by
the time of the clock but by the spiraling seasons of the sun and the gravitational phases
of the moon. The body is our creative well, and its laws often run askew to the axis of
jurisprudence.
If some of us are capable of negotiating a treaty, or enforcing a silence, between the
laws of nature and the codes of culture, I am not. I learned to avoid conflict early in
life, that the best offense is a good defense. My defense was to be silent in the world
and lead a noisy interior life. That’s where I break the laws of nature and transpose
the codes of culture. All sorts of biographical data could be offered to demonstrate the why
of my survival strategy, but for now I’m more interested in the what, the stuff
that this inner force has wrought. Because what happened is that I started writing. I
started writing to the girls in the books I read, to the boys and girls I fell in love
with, to myself, to the world. I stared listening to the voices.
Writing is a safe way to give voice to my foolish body, especially if I don’t let
anybody read what I write. But the latter is impossible, because, after all, I have severe
discipline problems. From the very beginning, I was breaking out of my vow of silence. I
had to tell somebody what was spilling through my head, so I wrote letters. To my
sixth-grade girlfriend down the street, to my grandmother far away, it didn’t matter.
And I still write letters.
A child of the TV and the telephone, I could never write a letter with quotidien news
in it. I’ve always thought that the news of the world was being told sotto voce,
taking place just out of view, and that this world news was really the intimate history of
our imaginations and our desires. The television drolly rolls on like an unchanging river
of garbage, the perps and victims of our human mésalliance, the background noise
above which I wanted—foolishly, perhaps—to find some meaning.
We think that writing may be a desire for communication, but I think this idea needs a
little refinement. We engage in any form of communication—indeed, we cannot help but
engage in forms of communication—because we desire contact. Some of us love
nature because it makes us feel connected. I love to read because I often become
passionately connected with the people and ideas I find on the page. This is why I am
fascinated by, and am a devotee of, the epistle.
Letter writing is, I think, unique among the forms of written discourse in that it
continues a conversation between two (or more) people by other means. In a letter to a
lover, a trusted friend, a parent or sibling, we often find a voice more intimate than we
can manage in person. Less worried about what our faces, our hands, our mouths might be
saying, we are freer to wander through the free-associational thickets of our
imaginations, to follow the meanderings of our desires and concerns. The intuitional
urgings of our bodies, if heeded, can invoke a trust and compassion that render the most
difficult truths and choices palatable.
This quality of voice is one I find strongest in the letters of Marsilio Ficino and
John Keats. Keats is well known, of course, while Ficino, for his soulful wisdom and
uncompromising counsel, is worth dusting off. He lived in the Florence of the Medicis, and
was the court philosopher of the elder Medici, Lorenzo. Under Lorenzo’s patronage,
Ficino founded the Platonic Academy, seeding the Renaissance flowering of Neoplatonism.
Ficino was deeply introverted, and remained celibate all his life. Like most introverts,
like many people, he suffered from depression, but instead of a curse he considered the
black ache a gift. So too did Romantic poet John Keats. He wrote his brother George, after
their younger brother Tom had died in John’s arms, that the world should not be
called "a Vale of tears" but "a Vale of Soul-making."
Neither Keats nor Ficino denied the terrible pain of depression, of grief, and praised
the blessing flow of tears. To fall, to let the tears fall, to let the body find its
emotional depths, is the way down into the wisdom Hades of the soul. From Heraclitus we
know that "the dry soul is best," and that there is no place drier of passion
and clearer of judgment than the chthonic realm of Hades. Both philosopher and poet knew
and loved the story of Socrates’ last days, with its epiphany of eternity and
compassion. Ficino was particularly adept at bringing this encompassing passion to the passim
citations of daily life. The most powerful men and women of his day sought him out for
political and psychological advice, either by interview in person, or more often by post.
Ficino allowed several editions of his letters to be published while he was still alive,
and these became models for a style of letter writing that persisted through the
nineteenth century.
When I started writing I didn’t know any of this history; no one had told me that
the romance of letters was an anachronism. In my efforts to lighten the burden of the
mystery of being alive, and in hopes of finding some comfort there, I dived head long into
the romantic spirit, and have never since found a reason to emerge. The world my
correspondents and I create in our letters can completely absorb me, until the personae of
our exchange become the truth of my life, turning actual living into a badly drawn sketch.
Fidelity goes flying out the window when I get involved in a hot correspondence. My
imaginal self overwhelms my quotidian perception. I cannot speak to the person in bed with
me because my soul is engaged in conversation with someone who, in a sense, doesn’t
exist except in my imagination. That this semi-existent lover licks a stamp and
mails me missive only serves to corroborate my feeling that "real life" is of
questionable provenance, because the person writing me the letters is making a statement,
in the very act of writing, that reconciles my desire for meaning with my life’s
unfathomable imagination. If we live our lives with other people—and how can
we not, in some more or less direct fashion?—then my "withness" is often
coupled to an other through the medium of the envelope.
Intense correspondences are marks of indigo periods in my life. The
periods—months, years—when I hover, liminally, between subclinical depression
and the deep black. The first one started when I was eighteen. I had met Michael the year
before at school. He was a transfer student, and had been enrolled in my first period
homeroom. When I walked into class, he was sitting in my seat. Within a few minutes,
before the late bell rang, before the teacher had arrived, we were out of there, fast
friends bonded instantly by our mutual discontent with the strictures of adolescence. We
inaugurated our friendship that afternoon by eating a small pile of peyote buttons.
Within a year we had gotten into so much trouble together—and lost our virginities
to a pair of girl friends—that parents and probation officers pushed Michael into the
Air Force. The girl friends had been a distraction, his accommodation of me: we all knew
Michael was gay, and that he and I were in love. He came out while in the Air Force, in
letters to me, and in a big way to the gay community in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Michael wrote me letters about sex, about drinking, about getting into trouble with the
military brass. I wrote letters about what it meant for us to be in love; I had nothing to
say about living, much less how to get by in the service. He struggled to respond, but
became less and less coherent.
When the Air Force kicked him out after a year, Michael came back to me. We moved in
together, and nearly drank ourselves to death. Reality came caving in on the world I had
imagined in my letters to Michael. My former best friend turned on me one night and left
me sprawled on my kitchen floor. Another night, a bullet came thicking through our living
room window, burying itself in the wall above our TV. I fled, back to the high desert, and
started shooting rattlesnakes into my veins. Down, down I went into altered states of
consciousness, down into the wishful dust of death.
Years lay down like strata in the face of a cliff, leaving their lines on our faces.
Gravity pulls, insistent as sin, and our muscles and breasts flow in the same direction as
our tears. Strangely, though, but perhaps not surprisingly, laughter appears to be an
anti-gravity device. Spontaneous outbursts of laughter recombust the broken-down
machine-prison soul-body, and we can feel the levitation of our spirits, the rejuvenation
of our self-image, the tangles of quotidia turning to webs of meaning. Laughter induces an
amorous blush of fate; it sparks a memory of the future.
Memory is like glue, sticking things together so they always come around again. Life is
a bowl of karma jambalaya. If I don’t learn something right the first time, it comes
back at me some time later like a recurrent boomerang. Things like French, or learning to
live and love. Like music, love requires constant practice—and access to an
instrument. Just as I am a slut for books, and have ravaged many a maiden therein, I like
to play many instruments. I like to experiment with love—or, anyway, it likes
to experiment with me.
In the summer of 1989, I was in a frenzied state of disponibilité, that French
word that means "availability," but in the hands of the surrealists has the
sense of available to magic, to chance. That summer I traveled north to redwood
country, to a summer arts program where I’d be writing poetry all day every day for
three weeks. My duffel was stuffed with condoms; I was full of piss and vinegar, and horny
as a hound dog’s full-moon howl. And I didn’t need a breakthrough or a jumpstart
to write poems: I didn’t know her name yet, hadn’t yet imagined how we might fit
together, but a muse already possessed me.
This possession-by-muse thing, it’s not something they teach you about in poetry
school. That’s because poetry school is really life, the school of hard knocks,
department of angst, contemplation, and seduction. Since my teen days hanging out on
Hippie Hill, I knew I was supposed to "go with the flow." A muse is just an
altered state of consciousness. But, because following the flow had me nearly killing
myself on repeated occasions, I no longer necessarily trusted my intuition. It may be
cyclic, but the muse’s flow never stops pushing and tugging, so it’s not a
matter of whether I trust or not. My lack of trust is only a form of resistance, and
resistance is futile.
And I can be pretty persuasive myself. Though I had no luck the first week. Which is to
say I wrote a lot, talked a lot, made some friends, but didn’t get laid. On Monday
morning of the second week things changed. New arrivals, who couldn’t make it the
first week. I noticed her immediately: the cascade of long blonde hair, of course, but,
too, the small smile that was both a veil and an invitation. And within a few minutes, I
was treated to the frank curiosity of her blue-eyed gaze. I guessed she was a few years
older than I. She never spoke, just observed the speaker with those piercing eyes. When we
went outside for cigarette breaks, she chatted with a couple of women I had learned were
students at San Diego State.
We got out of class in the late summer afternoon. I walked down from the campus on the
hill into the town of Arcata, seeking alcohol. I walked into the liquor store closest to
campus, and out strode the quiet blonde.
"Hey!" she said, and grinned at me knowingly.
"Hi!" I managed to reply. From three feet away, this woman seemed unbearably
beautiful. I stared at the crow’s feet around her eyes, revising her age upwards, and
felt even more attracted. As usual, I was tongue-tied.
"Want to come have a glass of wine?" she offered.
"Yes, I do, thanks," I said, and sighed with relief. Had it been up to me to
make the first move, I would have stammered something unintelligible and moved past her
into the store, kicking myself for not grabbing the chance, for being afraid of women, this
woman.
Sue and I spent the next two weeks together, exploring each other. We may think that
Mr. Spock’s Vulcan mind meld is a Star Trek science fiction, but in fact we
mere humans are quite capable of conveying to each other the contents of our hearts and
minds, even if only partially and slowly. But of all that has passed between me and Sue,
one idea has proved the most durable and important, one theme has kept me on my trek.
Having just completed an undergraduate education, I was hardened by the cynicism that
comes from immersion in the academic environment in which our body of knowledge is severed
limb from limb. To our first chance meeting, I brought my disponibilité, my
unquenchable thirst for alcohol, a backpack full of books and scribblings, and a rage
against the control-freak machinations that I perceived as being responsible for leaving
me intellectually torn and fragmented.
Sue brought much the same, except for the latter. She stared my rage in the face and
posed it an implacably put question.
"Where’s the body? When you read those scholars, those philosophers
you’re so angry at, do you ever ask yourself if a body could survive in the
theoretical world they’re creating?"
Scales fell from my eyes. A million threads of thought immediately began to move and
weave themselves into a fabric. Intuitive associations found legs to stand on, my
imagination was given fingers to gather with, and when in the past it seemed that some
idea had been swaying its hips, alluringly, I suddenly understood that of course ideas
have hips! And if ideas wanted to lie down together, copulate polysemously, and make
little baby theories, then by God, by nature, of course they could! I could
feel the OH molecules roaring through me, slam-dancing with my brain cells, butt-bumping
my liver, making me drunker than a whore on a holiday. What came next, I couldn’t
say.
Except that Sue and I wrote letters. Lots of letters, long ones, full of our poetry,
and news, and ruminations on that question. Sue’s ruminations were published a
couple of years ago in her collection of poems, The Flesh Envelope. In the title
poem of the book, she reminds us that the ancient Greeks knew all about the body and
the soul. Epicurus wrote, "The soul is a body of fine particles distributed
throughout the frame." Sue then offers:
Folded into this fleshy envelope,
this frame that eats too much, drinks too much,
loves immoderately, angers easily & seldom forgives,
this husk that drives stupidly & works erratically—
is a Garden & in that Garden a soul
that walks at a leisured pace
discussing moral existence with like-minded friends.
………
How can I bring my soul into the world
without bringing the Garden?
The Garden is the apple, the world is the worm.
Or the soul is wax, the body pure flame.
I wrote endless letters: now that I knew the identity of the central player in the
mystery of the human condition, I was full of theories. I’m still working on those
theories; Sue gave me the gift of an intellectual toy that lasts a lifetime. And slowly,
feeling, emotion, and the aimless wandering of a pleasant walk with a friend began to
creep into my writing, into my being. What could I do but fall in love, and let Sue fill
my poems the way she flowed through my body?
The rhythms of a lunar empire are in our blood,
and we sprout like mushrooms
in the burnt-out heart of a redwood.
You’re smarter than all the psychedelics of
my youth, and just like children,
we speak of a revolution in everyday life.
Everything leaks, I find you already here,
blue eyes undressed and beckoning
through this cloud of unknowing, welcoming me
with a gaze to anneal the passions of martyrs,
and a caress.
I want you in the dirt and the moss,
to make a mark upon the air with our breath
and the rhythms of our writhings.
We speak of the constantly breaking and rechaining
strands of love and knowledge, sigh,
lean into worldtree.
Through thick crusts, magma warms our spores.
Days later, in a dream full of the cool
and the shade, I noticed your absence,
and I turned, as if waking, I turned to touch you again,
and I’ll keep turning.
"The imagination is very powerful in creating another nature, as it were, out of
the material that actual nature gives it." –Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Judgement
There’s this ’60s kid’s song by the guy who taught me how to play guitar
which says, "Happiness runs in a circular motion." What is it with the circular
motion thing? We speak of vicious circles, while karma is a wheel in motion. Our emotions
recirculate, and move in periodic, cyclic waves and currents. Why do we so pervasively
employ the circulation metaphor to describe our emotional states? Do we feel as if there
is a flow, or current of "stuff," that circulates within ourselves, between
beings?
Motion was the first big question among ancient Greek philosophers, and never has been
resolved. In 2,500 years of physics, we haven’t been able to adequately explain why
things move instead of staying put. Our theories may well convince us of their truth, but
that’s what they remain: Greek theoria, "observations." The
Presocratic philosophers addressed the problem directly, and posited the existence of a
primal stuff, an arché, that interactively expanded and contracted as it heated
and cooled, thus initiating motion in the universe. The cause of this "condensation
and refraction," as the Greeks called this process, was never identified or
explained. By the time of the Middle Ages, and Thomas Aquinas, the problem had been, as
intractable problems often are, deferred and sublimated. To put it another way, it seems
the question of motion, like some childhood trauma, had been buried and ostensibly
forgotten, diffused and left to permeate, in shreds and fragments, ideas of
"essence." The idea of divine essence—a word based on the Latin verb
"to be," esse—took over the motion problem—for everything from
atoms to emotions—and became the will of God.
But as our vernacular metaphors indicate, the problem of motion has never gone away. We
still talk about this primeval movement as if it were some sort of mating dance, an erotic
push-me pull-you that does seem to possess some sort of will power, a tug-of-war, or
tug-of-sex, that keeps us open for whatever, whoever, comes next.
"The feeling of the sublime is… a feeling of pain arising from the want of
accordance between the… imagination and… reason. There is at the same time a
pleasure thus excited..."
While there is occasional gain without pain, old Immanuel Kant knew the score about
getting the good stuff. "This shit’s sublime. It’ll put your dick in the
dirt," I once heard a junkie say. I think it’s possible to die from the sublime,
from the pain of discord, from the lack of accordance between imagination and reason,
between heart and head.
"Go not to Lethe," John Keats wrote in his "Ode on Melancholy."
Don’t drink the waters of forgetting; don’t forget the reality, the reason,
of imagination. The reason being the soul, that inexpressible that so very strongly
desires expression. That’s the reason that particular line begins the Ode.
Doctor-philosopher Keats was giving us his best medicine for melancholy. Like Keats
pairing "the downy owl" in his rhyme scheme with "the wakeful
anguish of the soul," we take inward flight when gripped by depression. By the
summer of 1997, I was so flown I was like a black hole.
Or a snake pit, out of which I leaped straight up. Owls don’t like snakes, they
eat them. So I ate what was killing me and moved on down the road. Don’t stop
imagining, Dr. Keats advised. Heed your soul, said Socrates. In my leap, only a few things
and people stayed attached. Such shedding of skin is indeed painful, and arguably sublime.
One of the people who stayed attached was Nikki. That’s because she wasn’t
around, and never had been. In fact, we’ve never met, and perhaps never will. Indeed,
Nikki is not "her" real name. Do we have an imaginary friendship? Or a
friendship of the imagination? Is it possible to fall in love with someone with whom
I’ve only ever exchanged letters? So it would seem, and, both writers, we
leapt—or belly flopped—into a story so full of twists and turns it must be
written by fools. Still, even though we communicate frequently, I sometimes wonder if
Nikki exists. She has frequently claimed that she doesn’t:
"I’m a chimera. I am ink scratchings on paper."
Girl in a book. An interactive book, a story we write together, sometimes to amplify
our inner wildness in the damp of the imagination, others to refine our foolish desires in
the dryness of Hades. A worldly wise woman, a wicked writer, warped, worn, and often
weary—she was perfect. My soul flew like an owl across the continent to this woman
who does not exist as anything but a presence in the aether, that archaic meeting place of
fool-hardy lovers. For in my imagination nature had provided the very ingredients I needed
to survive. I needed to create a world in which imagination was my reason, as the
only thing that was going to lift that black fog was repeated bathings in creative juices.
So in I leapt, only to find Nikki already there. Our plot thickened. Here, I thought while
falling hopelessly, is a woman with a powerful imagination.
"That’s the trick to pain," Nikki wrote in the first story she sent me.
"It helps you break things down into essentials."
In a sense I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, while Nikki nearly jumped
off the page and into my arms. We created emotional turbulence in the aether and got up
early every morning with our boards to run down and check the surf. We both knew, Nikki
and I, that we were just telling each other stories. Making stuff up. To me, that’s
what it means to be a poet: to invent reality. It’s a dangerous, "foolish,"
practice, for what if I convince someone that the reality I’ve created is reliable,
can be trusted like gravity to keep that person’s feet on the ground? A home, I
confess, can never be a house of words. "Trail of broken hearts," k.d. laing
sings. John Keats was an optimist, incredibly: Sometimes I have to cry. Maybe that’s
a way of making soul, too.
I sent Nikki a picture of me. I looked good. She sent me a photo of her. She’s
stunning. She’s wearing sun glasses. To see her eyes would be too much, would burn
through whatever was keeping me from seeing her skin. In one of Nikki’s stories, I
kept rereading the line, "Stop wearing underwear. Buy lipstick. Have intercourse with
the notorious Will Craile."
Craile rhymed with Braile, so clearly Nikki wanted a lover she could feel but
not see. And Will was the name I had given my dead brother in my novel. Clearly, I
thought, this web of associations is meant to bring us together. We never budged, neither
of us, from opposite ends of a complex web of mail delivery. Instead, we both went a
little crazy, like the characters in Nikki’s story, Vin and Elsie, who are trying to
gather the courage, the strength, to get an HIV test.
One day I had a vision, or anyway a brain-state change. I fell in love with Ikkyu, a
Japanese poet of the fourteenth century. He was wild, his life was harsh, but he always
managed to keep his youngest face, his green side turned toward the world. As a poet
he’s ironic, bittersweet, and hones close to the skin of existence. In a footnote
somewhere, I read about his old-age affair with the blind minstrel, Lady Mori. This is
evidence, I thought. Of the fate of the recoursing soul, bodied and rebodied on the road
to bodhi dharmahood. In a fugue, in its theme and variations, I was Ikkyu and Nikki was
Mori.
And that was it, I was officially obsessed. The world was on notice: things, I, could
get dangerous at any moment. I was going to go knock on Nikki’s door, see if the babe
in the sun glasses was really her. Forget about friends, family, and contracts based on
mutual love and understanding: this wasn’t me invading, this was fate performing
surgery. I was really depressed. I retreated to medieval Japan, with Ikkyu the renegade
Zen poet, to search for the blind Lady minstrel. I was thinking too hard, and had
forgotten how to jump off cliffs.
The only antidote was stronger stories, fierce stories, to write letters foolish enough
to bend reality enough and give us room to breathe, to conspire, to "install"
ourselves, as the French say when they cozy into a comforting chair. To make our
imaginations work with instead of against the grain of our lives. To fall in love within
the possibilities, not with the possibility. Stories that would surround us with
the "radiant white light" of the fool’s leap into the void, the radiance
Elsie wishes for Vin, the music Ikkyu hears in Lady Mori. We need letters, written by
hand, placed in special boxes or under pillows, letters written in dialogue with the
lovers of our imaginations to protect us from a plague of cancerous narratives.