what have i become...
its been a long numbing summer. i owe many letters to good friends. apologies. the place i have been was nowhere from which to correspond with the well intentioned and concerned. ive read your letters with an autistic's frustration.
ive become rather feral. i warily squint at tomorrow's promises, remembering yesterday's lies. i know the weight and heft of brutus' dagger - in my bloodied hand and in my blameless back. ive put myself together so many times that i have forgotten where are the original breaks. it would be great to think to myself that i have been on some heroic haj of introspection. no. these are the uayeb times, as the mayans called those evil-bearing days, and i have been beat down hard, beat down until what was left of me was all that truly matters. i had envisioned a triumphator's return when i moved to my land. a new life, new love, an estate of vineyards and horses and a home in which to finally start a family. i had painfully ended a ten year marriage where the promise of having children was held out like a reward for yet another sacrifice. i was going to return to my land and become the man i gave up being - please, my friends, take this to heart; never become tame to being deceived. fight it. demand the truth, no matter the cost - but God and the Devil share a perverse sense of humor and they have had a few laughs regarding my scraped chin. you are never redeemed by your circumstances, only by your submission. ive always been partial to the myth of the Minotaur: a ferocious, primal, brooding force deep inside our personal labyrinths. you cant go too far forward without reckoning with that force. it was not enough to free myself from the circumstances that kept me from having a family and building a world on my land, i had to come to terms with the monster inside. therein is redemption. but the trick to that pony is that you cant destroy it, only deliver it. love it. its the only way out of here.
so thats what i did over summer vacation...
from an earlier post:
With a healthy swagger of a swig of gin, he leveled a grin on me, ‘Friend, trust me, the worst that can befall you in this life is to know yourself undeniably. Ive had the opportunity to understand the beast within mine self; charming devil really, as long as you don’t give him power of attorney or uncross your legs. Now, in your decent bland type, the true self will always remain distant and nebulous. Never clear. As long as your self is a fable or rumor or a slight tidal tugging on your decisions, then you will be safe and content and fed. A ‘distant absentee landlord self’ is the best you can achieve, one which drops in only at harvest time to collect the rent and leaves promptly with a polite flourish of his cap. When you really dwell on it, the majority of you out there in the world are only sharecropping in your souls. The worst, and never curse your worst enemy with this, is an arrogant, jealous, petty, micromanager Yahweh self. I shudder…’
‘I can tell you what the self is not. The self is not a haven or heaven. It is not an absolving rain, a parting of darkened clouds, nor a sacred bull, it is not a friend, it is not a lover, and it must never be confused as a Truth. It is a cold wall. It will give no purchase. You cannot climb over nor burrow under it. It does not care what illusions and winks you sell in your head. It is the immutable mute until you meet it head-on; from there it becomes the unassailable asshole. It has a light (or lie) bending gravity. You can step away from it for a moment, but at each further step the pull of that gravity increases until you can resist forward no further.’ Another drink, ice clinking ‘And you plummet back on your self. Insanity, in all its flavors and hacks, is nothing more than the peculiar way one has been broken on their self, from a simple garden variety neurotic broken finger to a full autistic paralysis.’
‘When a man is said to have met his destiny he has only submitted to his self. You know what the word Islam mean? Submission. The last act of free will is true submission. Where there is no escape, you can either break in half or relent – and neither will leave you a particularly appetizing creature. This is why I say that the worst fate is to know your self undeniably, because its undeniability will crush you until you submit and become irrevocably that which is yourself.’
He twirled ice in his glass. ‘And I will tell you something else. The most dangerous man in the room is the one who loves what he is.’
