Amor Omnia

  

My dearest,

 My dearest:

I would think that our reasons for remaining on earth are as nebulous as our reasons for departing from it, and in either case one can sit with the interpretations given by reason indefinitely and get no nearer an answer…but I would come back from the dead for love. Amor Omnia. Not much else would make any sense to me.  There is my writing, to be sure, but it is only one of love’s multifarious expressions.  I would, however, come back for you.  Hopefully not for unfinished business though.  Once, and your name was Clarissa then, we ended rather badly.  That one time was quite tragic enough, thank you.  It is not a business that I would care to relive, even if only to finish it.  

Sometimes it comes about that I begin missing you terribly and today is one of those days.  It is when I get the sense that I have written you these things before.  I would like to say that I was blown in by the wind from another world in answer to your calling—that you yourself created me, conjured me from the whiskers of a cat.  But alas, you advertised on another group to which I belong .  Their endorsements are generally quirky enough to warrant investigation, so I decided to check you out. And liking what I saw, I settled in to stay.  Of course, there was not all that much to see, at the time, but your enthusiasm was decidedly encouraging.  Had it not been for your truly wonderful invitation, to which I returned again and again, I would not have considered posting though, seeing how I am wary of groups in general and downright mistrustful of groups that have anything to do with religion. 

But then, there was the deep magic--the penetrating warmth and sincerity of your welcome and what it told me.  I had been asking the Lady for some change in direction at that time, and Assisi provided me with a venue that would make that change possible.  As you know, when it comes to self-expression, I cannot and will not compromise the integrity of my vision.  I was beginning to discover, however, that my religious and cultural deconstructions where becoming progressively more and more tinged with the cold emptiness of outright despair.  The venom of my enmity towards evangelical Protestantism was beginning to swallow me whole.  I was losing sight of the light and of the precious beauty underlying all of my creative efforts in the direction of sanity and peace. I was not being heard.  I felt alone. 


 But I could no sooner be politically correct where my feelings are concerned than I could stop writing.  I needed, therefore, a safe place in which to voice my concerns for the world, but in such a way that I would not be destroyed in the process.  And so…there you where.  It isn’t like I was about to become activist, but I have little patience for willful stupidity and even less for bigotry, and the more bitter my war against fundamentalism became…the more I started to sound like…you know?  I was rapidly losing my perspective, my imagination and my sense of humor.

 And still, I would not have posted.  In the end though, I never did have a choice in the matter. Not really.   It was like that time on the train when I had to keep my appointment with a certain angel, and but this time it was you, and everything that I posted was addressed to you and only to you and to no-one else.  Also,  I was testing you back then.  I had to be sure.  I wanted to see how you would react if I actually took you at your word and dared to speak the truth of my heart.  It was as though I had entered the hall of a mighty queen with the intent of offering her my sword, with the tacit understanding, of course, that I serve only those who are my equals in strength and in honor, and thus also will I sit beside them at table…not at the other end of the room with the peasantry, hmm?  All that was before I knew you, my sweet baroness.  You have knighted me…a lawless lone wanderer.

 My sword is in your hand.  It goes without saying that I would never abide in such a court as would have me hide my true colors.  It was essential then to see right from the start what you would do with a rogue wolf amidst the lambs.  Of course, every wolf will have his day when he is finally welcomed for what he is, but I wasn’t going to get my hopes up.  Not that they could possibly have been any higher.  With every word I was all but begging for you to take my hand and bring me in to you.


 Too, there was a dream.  Two years ago.  It would have been late April or early May.  It was the day of my happy demise, and it broke through my participation mystique decisively.  How to unravel this?  There are so many fragments.  So many interwoven strands.  My life, the unfolding of a myth.

 You see, for Beethoven, as well as for Dante, Petrarch, Goethe, and Peter Abelard, to name but a few, the power of love was precisely in its being unrequited.  These men were in love with psyche…the eternal feminine who is Herself the Anima Mundi and the blue flower of longing for that which is ever beyond reach.  She was immortalized by the exquisite anguish of Novalis and by the opium dreams of Tennyson and Waterhouse, but her own story remains untold.   Or did remain untold.  I speak for her.  She chose me as her instrument and as her voice.  

Schiller said in reference to such as are holy fools that those who walk backwards through life begin just there where everyone else is headed, and end up in the place where the rest of the world begins (their spiritual journey).  In the end though, they have the very best of both worlds, provided they survive the oft times tortuous trajectory of their lives.  What sets them apart, of course, is their vision.  They are not outcasts—for these have their role to play within the social economy of every culture—but they are those intimate strangers intuited by the metaphor of the truly other.  Kundry was such a one.  Alastor, the spirit of solitude.  And I,  another…liminal, ever beckoning from the lavender  twilight between worlds .

Theirs is every heresy.  Strange teachings and visions and alchemy are the seductions they bring to the sunlit realms.  Their task is to destroy in the service of life—to make fluid all that which has calcified into truth.  Indeed,  they alone know and understand that which is hidden to many, namely that the sacred scriptures of the world were written for those who no longer have need of them.  The world is led astray by holy writ.  That is its primary function and its greatest value.  But that which leads astray is for those who cease to read with the mind the song of themselves, sung by the universe through sunlight and dream—the water drop world of the contingent and ever changing.  After that, language becomes a metaphor for the untranslatable.  Words implode to become efflorescent kaleidoscopes of infinite nuance and meaning.  At that point you either stop talking or start laughing, or you go quite mad in a vain attempt at holding life still so that you can fit it back into the brain-box it escaped from.  But once language does get loose you can also start to play with it.  What you can never do again is pretend that meaning is contingent on such things as constitute the fabric of language.

And so it is that I apprehend and experience the common and the mundane of our consensus reality as infinitely rich in spiritual mysteries. In many ways it is too raw, too intimate, too strange for me in the immediacy of its effect and the intensity of its demands.  It is rife with the dangers of the unknown, endowed with numinous intimations, transparent with radiant power.  My age, my income, my shoe size…simply terrifying, impenetrable kennings!  


I look upon the bare granite bones of all that forms the horizon of my existence—the common dross of many of its external manifestations—and, like everyone else, turn it into the luminous adventure that it is through my creative understanding of such things as are happening beneath the surface of things…to which all such, we bring our lives with greatest care and loving attention to detail.  The difference is though, I do this consciously and deliberately whereas most people are rather disingenuous about the tangled webs they weave.  Worse yet, perhaps, as an artist, I ever have one eye on posterity.  My life is, after all, my masterpiece, and to that extent does not belong to me.  I am given to allow my life to unfold around me as it will.  I am its steward, nothing more.

With the inner worlds of thought and imagination I am as familiar and as intimate as most people are with the intractable solidity of their existence in this world, so familiar and yet so utterly disparaged by religions.  I cannot, therefore, explain myself to myself.  Belonging to neither world I long for both equally.  I find my very awareness itself inexplicable—an impenetrable yet ineffable phantasm.  I experience life as fundamentally erotic in the most profound and beautiful way, but keep my distance from its enchantments lest it devour me—springing to wild and uncontrollable life all around me, and carrying me away—which is, of course, precisely what I most want and desire.  


Indeed, towards this end do I lavish attention upon the sensual possibilities of life within the glorious travails of the flesh.  And yet, paradoxically, physical life, in and of itself, mean little to me.  It is not where my life is happening. The physical world and my experience of it is that part of my greater psyche which provides for me a safe space and a refuge.  I focus only enough attention upon it as is necessary to maintain it.  The world is where I go vacationing, you might say.  Its concerns have so long ago become nonsensical to me, as well as incomprehensible, that I play like a child with brightly painted wooden blocks among the multifarious horrors and vexations.  Were I to be hit by a metro bus I would likely ponder as to what it could possibly mean, but ideas are as real to me as any concrete hallucination of objective reality.  That is where I work.  Hard.  Otherwise I flee to the sanctuary of the madding crowd.   Behind the gossamer veil of my physical life is the vastness of my spiritual auto-biography.

 

The reason my physical life can be both a refuge and an abyss of mysteries is because it is precisely there—in physical existence—that I experience god, though not fully.  There is, after all, my struggle with the transcendent function, which ever threatens to separate me from the divine biological and pull me back into that world from which I came.  And but, my love, if you find this somewhat abstruse…get used to it.  LOL.  I don’t really understand it either, half the time.  The best accounting of the entire struggle…if it is one…is the story of Balaam though.  Not Balaam himself, mind you, but his ass.  The poor ass of the senses, the body, is that which sees the angel in the road, and the imperious daemon of the Promethean spirit gives it no credit.  And so it goes.  And but now back to the dream to which this entire mythical drama is the background and the stage.

In the dream, I was given to understand in no uncertain terms that the unrequited longing of the artist, for that which is, in truth, his very ground and substance is felt by the psyche as a grievous wound.  What she asked of me, therefore, was to make her absolutely and definitively real—embodied.  To go beyond both fulfillment and longing into a higher synthesis…a synthesis in which god is lived.  She pointed this out to me with devastating clarity….but alas, to this day I am no nearer to understanding my actual mission than I was back then. There is something I am not rendering.  There is something I am resisting.  There is something I am evidently not returning onto the Lady which she emphatically requires of me.  I just don’t know what it could be.  Perhaps it is too close to me, and glaringly self-evident.

And then she brought me to you, because without love I cannot create, let alone live.  And yet in the very freedom that we have together there is concealed a rueful irony, is there not?  We are unfettered.  We are free to dream, and there to give to each other gifts beyond counting.  In every way that really matters we are given to fulfill each other with all of the richness of the soul’s  treasury and to a depth of the heart and of the mind limited only by our imagination and our daring. 


 And yet what do we have?  That which every spiritual tradition regards and teaches as the real beyond the veils of physical existence is the only ground we have to stand on.  What we do not have is the tangle, the deepening--that very enfleshment in the day to day which brings to earth the insubstantial, the ephemeral and the true.  We are free to love each other, precisely because we can never possess each other.  We are ever so safely out of each others reach, like all the great lovers of our mythology were.  Trapped…unbearably trapped in the chains of freedom.  


Do you see, darling?  The longing, the sadness, the unrequited…it gives us wings and makes us more beautiful to each other than ever the angels were.  And truly do they envy us—we who dare reject what they most long for.  We who find in love the beauty of death, and in the infinite sadness of times passage, the deepest fulfillment of love.

Aye, we Romantics.  You know all this as well as I.  We who exist for each other.  We who dare to speak each others dreams.  Is this our curse…this love?  Would we trade it for another, a lesser good?  We would not.  And it is that of which psyche spoke to me.  Of this she found me guilty.  We who dwell upon a baleful star—this world a hell of desolation and servitude—we would make of it a paradise by claiming that dreams are true and that love is real.  We rise like Lucifer at morning and make of age a mockery—we who are timeless.  Behold, the paradox of our being.  Through the magic of our burning we touch the very heart of all that possesses us…that which we can never make our own.  We long for the earth and all that we see we touch with that longing.  And in so doing we become the very thing we long for and lose it yet again.  Do you know why you love the sea?  It is because the sea itself is you.  You have dreamed it into being.

It makes us dangerous to the world and to religion both, for both would lay claim to what they see as real.  And to each other we are a sanctuary and a blessing and the sadness at the heart of life.  There are things we can help each other understand and keep safe from the ravages of truth. Too each other we are and effortlessly can be anything and everything we could ever desire to be for each other. You know, Suzie, sometimes I look at you and wonder why it is that we always seem to meet too late.  What does it mean?  How does it relate to what psyche shared with me about my struggle with the backward winding path?  Do you know why I wrote that piece on the celibate life?  It was an attempt at justification.  I wrote it because consummation has ever eluded me.  I have made love, yes, but I never lost my virginity. Physically, I suffer from sexual anesthesia.  I count this as a sin against the very life I cherish.  And yet as I noted…it does have its benefits…to have made of need and want the fruit of attainment itself.

 

What it does make me wonder about though is whether or not we somehow feel that life is unworthy of us.  Is this the great danger of Romanticism?  We are too good for life and we damn well know it.  We cannot take life as it is but inevitably add to that which was good enough for god but which we ourselves find wanting.  Or perhaps we see beyond the smoke and mirrors of that which our nightmare species has made of life.  We see beyond to what is real and to what is good.  We see the beautiful, and upon that beauty hangs our hope and our despair.  We would not have the one without the other.  And so we fall before ourselves.  Nothing we have ever accomplished but we have seen through it and beyond.  It is our secret.  We laugh.  We who have transcended the very world we long for…we laugh because we see through all of our dependences.  We have committed the greatest of sins.  We have made our bid for freedom and have won.

Well…that answers at least one of the questions you asked!

I bid you peace. 

 I don’t doubt though that you have even more questions now than I have perchance answered.  LOL.  I love you for that too.  Besides, making you happy is my happiness too.

Holding you in my arms, my sweetest baroness.  Forever for this day. 


 In love and in happiness.

Ever your

                       O