Tell me, how can I not love you?

29/03/2012....one more time

15/05/2010

 
 Funny  how things unfold...accidentally I clicked on archives...and started to read a few of your letters. Here is one you may have forgotten, they are all so very beautiful...how can I not  but love you? Perhaps its of some value to you to read your words. Thank you for opening your heart to me you are with me forever, as it was, so shall it be.

Suzie

My dearest Baroness,
                                   I seem to have been gripped by a deep, existential sadness.  This is most unusual, as I am on the whole, a rather cheerful sort.  Truly, I have no idea what on earth is going on with me these days, but then, I have always maintained that if we were ever really to know what ailed us, people would pay us to continue suffering.  And some of us would, no doubt, become fabulously wealthy on that account.  There is this, that I would be fathoms deep just now but find myself high and dry.  I am reaching for something with you—something which eludes all attempts at articulation. It is as though there where a vast gulf of silence between us which could only be bridged were this undiscovered self to be seen and understood-- to be loved and embraced and brought back home to ourselves.  I find this decidedly frustrating, and all the more so because what I am left with is the overwhelming need to tell you something…to form from out of the most trivial and mundane aspects of my existence a grand, unifying synthesis that would make sense of that within me which resists delimitation.

There is an ornate, golden key.  A circumambulation.  A labyrinth.   A secret.   A mirror.
I give you fragments of myself and despair of it because they are not the whole that I would give, and in giving understand, though each fragment contains that whole which I cannot express.
 
You reawaken within me a dream and a life that had been lost to me for many years.  A gentleness.  A hope.  The crying for a vision that echo’s through time, back to a hot and dusty street in a Wisconsin suburb in early evening when I needed to pray and did not know how it could at all be done.

You and I…we lived once together in Spain…in Seville.  There is the plashing of fountains and the scent of lemon trees.  The blood of the Moors ran through our veins.  There was the wild longing of the music of our people, entwined in arabesque.  And the shadow of a cross.  The bite of bright steel.  Our love was forbidden, then.  And rightly so.  Great love is transgression.

I want to talk with you about reality.  Where to begin?  I will think about that.  My conception of reality…a difficult matter to approach.  It is anything but simple.  It is far from innocent.  For some it has proven to be a dangerous seduction.  For me it is the gift of the goddess Tyche.

There are sharks in that fruitful commingling of our lives and the powerful visions that inform them.  I am wary of exploring our differences too soon though.  There is a yielding and a depth of human understanding and compassion in you that I fear greatly.  Perhaps I sense it as a capacity within myself—and mayhap I sense that it is a threat to the peculiar way in which I have been given to live out my calling.

My own compassion, as you well know, reveals itself in anything but peaceful ways.  Errin consoled me somewhat in that regard when she informed me that you were a fierce and formidable opponent who would not be crossed—which observation instantly made me feel safe!  What makes me decidedly wary and fearful, on the other hand, is the mercy and the patience you show in regards to the Annie Kendrick’s of the world. I am a born fighter, and I like nothing more than exercising that talent in the spiritual arena.  It makes me feel like a Hell’s Angel at a church picnic whenever I go to Assisi, because people like Annie are the lambs to the lion that I am.  They are my lawful prey, and regarding them I have no mercy.

The very fact that we are so remarkably similar is cause enough for alarm.  We have the capacity to change each other in decidedly interesting ways, hmm?  And I don’t like change any more than you do.  That you recognize the fiery brilliance of my spiritual light informs me about your own. You would not respond to my light in the way that you do—nor could you respond to it in the first place--if your own light did not match mine in strength and in clarity. Like Brunhilde, I have a ring of fire about me.  Only those who are unafraid of fire may pass through.  The fire is my protection against the world…and you matched me flame for flame.  Yet do I feel like the Beast to the Beauty that you are, and it is disconcerting to the Catholic in myself, who would do anything to conform to the values and standards of the world so as to be accepted and loved.  I have buried that part of me, and at great cost, and it is a part of me that I stand against and cannot love.  Do you see?  I feel the need to convince you that I am irredeemably bad…only in that way I can know with certainty that you love me for who and what I am and not for that which has been added onto me.

And I don’t know which part of me is talking to you now!  The little boy whom I hate and of whose conservatism and loyalty to a Faith that rejected him shames me…or the man that I am that would stand before the world as a heretic for god, come what may, and damn the cost?  You do this too.  I see it.  You try to convince me of how unworthy of me you are—and like you…I will have none of such nonsense.  You are indeed most worthy of me.  If you were not I would scarcely have noticed you to begin with.  Ah my sweet baroness.  I am a turbulent ocean and unless I can abandon myself completely to whatever I feel when I am writing I cannot write at all.  I am an undiscovered country.  I want you to conquer me—not for the cross or the crown, but selfishly and for yourself alone.

And yes, it is for myself that I ask this.  So it must be.  The heart is mercenary and love is the fuel that my muse requires if at all it would fly, as fly it must, or else it must slay me.  I will never be either tame or domesticated--but I will soar amidst the ragged cliffs and shining peaks of myself.  I crave ever for a solitude impossible to find.  I question if I even have a human heart, but I will be true.  I have given up too much to return to the world where it is meet to be otherwise.

You have met up with a most peculiar being.  That is a tribute to you, my dear.  As for myself...I merely am.
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                                          Olie.