Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
This being human is a guest-house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture.
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Rumi
She went home for a break to see faces that thought they knew her. They surely knew her history, so maybe they knew her too? She was to stay a week with her mom and a week with her father; her sister was to do the same so that they could see each other the entire two weeks. By that month, her father had moved five times, and his last adventure took him to an enormous city, with horns and noise and no privacy. Everyone shared the sidewalk and the underground method of transportation smelled as close to the stench of humanity as she had imagined that it would.
Her sister seemed nervous, as they walked amongst the humans: their disregard for one another, their fashion necessity, their realism.
And while the sister’s widened eyes made her laugh at how sheltered the sister must be, she found the faces as conformed as any:
The vicarious friends and fam
The lure of unimportant events
The entrails of gossip, distanced concern and criticism
And the peculiar vernacular
of learned phrases repeated on every street
The sound bytes —- colored passage
of morning and evening news!
The maze’s muse confusion and the mouse’s morsel;
Conformity and inclusion
More aware of brand name hegemony
The spoils of a feel good diet and self help religion
Mankind was once civilized; bill’s mother told her one day as they drank tea on the veranda. betty, was originally from England and moved to the states after she married bill’s father, buck, who was an extravagantly wealthy and depressive man. Mankind was apparently civilized in Europe, at one point or another, and it somehow didn’t translate when people became frustrated with their monarchial government (complete rule by royalty) and decided to cross a large ocean and form their own government (complete rule by making the people feel as much as possible as though they had a say in something in which they really didn’t).
But the ideas of far too many men caused everything to go amuck in the land of democracy, freedom of speech, and unimaginable wealth. In the long run a government will always encroach upon freedom to the extent to which it has the power to do so; this is almost a natural law of politics, since, whatever the intentions of the men who exercise political power, the sheer momentum of government leads to a constant pressure upon the liberties of the citizen. *
Yes, everything surely had run amuck in the land of the greedy and eternally unsatisfied. And as bill continued to drown, she wondered why exactly he couldn’t remember that he was a magician; or was it a chameleon.
Or was it a God.
She decided to move in with the nanny’s family; the town was charming and only a 20-minute train ride from the first town by the water. And although she reluctantly left the ocean view and quiet days on the beach, there was a far more important objective at hand: to not return to America and a human life of ease and zealous indifference.
But before she made the trip to her new home she traveled to Amsterdam to witness first hand an environment said to be even more debauched then her first year in college. Frankly, she didn’t think that such a place existed. When she arrived, she met a young Italian girl from Pisa at the hostel. The girl (of course) knew English, having gone to a primary school that required English instruction to graduate and after pleasantries, small talk about hamburgers and the leaning tower, they decided to room together and take to the town. They decided to do mushrooms even though bill would have told her not to; actually, he in fact, would have forbid it, as if he had a say in her decisions; he didn’t even believe that he had a say in his own. betty, on the other hand, smiled, telling her that if she had a bad trip, that she might meet Peter on the bridge, and finally see the coveted location and what people wonder their entire lives about.
The man in the mushroom shop told them two important things:
1. to shroom alone in the park, explaining that people will add paranoia; and 2. to walk around high out of your mind through the Van Gogh museum, explaining that it would be ‘hands-down’ the raddest thing they’d ever do.
So they took the little man’s advice and lay on the grass looking up at the trees for 97 glorious hours. She looked over at the little Italian, her hair blacker than the night, and asked, completely out-of-the-blue, “Is there a translation for the phrase- I can’t wait?”
“Non ho capito?” the Italian forgot that her new friend only spoke two words of Italian, and then said again, “I don’t understand.”
“Would you ever say in Italian… that you can’t wait for something?” she said, not completely sure how to even explain what she meant.
“I don’t think so… forse… maybe…um ”the Italian looked away trying to figure it out, “solo… only… Voglio fare qualcosa… I want something. I want to do something… but never I can’t wait… what does it mean?”
She nodded her head, smiling, “exactly.”
With time to breathe, she allowed the world in. And in an attempt to change her present condition, she traveled without concern of the currency; hoping to experience everything placed in front of her face. Beauty passed through her eyes, like it had through her father’s, and she finally realized what he had meant in all the countless times of describing things onto which one can never hold. Everything, that is.
Her parents had agreed to fund the first year of her adventure, but after that, she either had to return home and to school, or she had to find some way to make the money.
She sold a painting of a girl on the side of the canal for enough Euros to feed her for three months and five days and walking away, money in hand, she laughed at how gullible people were. If the American tourists had known that she was American as well, they would have surely paid half of what they had for the knockoff Degas rendition.
bill helped her paint every once and awhile, and it reminded her of her youth. And she made herself embrace those morsels. She made herself try to remember how to feel, or when exactly she had stopped.
But somewhere along the way bill had become a negative force and she missed the ghost deep in her belly. bill had told her, as they were standing counting the Degas money, that she was doing a fantastic job of building the lies that make up for all that she lacks.
She exercised her agency and threw him in the river.
I remember
What pleasure then to waking awkward
teeming with quiet, strained sensual silence
a voice in the woods
the voice of portrait, property and pitied secrecy?
She put down her pencil, thinking about bill as he drowned; unfortunately, after all her allusions, he still didn’t believe that he was in charge of his life, and seeing as she (as his creator of sorts) never told him that he knew how to swim, he was powerless within the water’s heavy current.
She giggled to herself and continued scribbling on parchment paper she had pulled from the trash can.
What pleasure’s the sleeping sea
if only it learned to speak by listening
like a child
to the muffled echoes
of a stagnant earth’s progression
and time’s rotation
while what was or wasn’t done
became reagent still worse
in the voice that finds its beginning
sang to the silent earth, in flowing
to the swift water speak, I am.
Speak as the world
moves, as we move without it.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. And wait without love. For love would be love,
of the wrong thing.
Yet there is faith.
But the faith and the hope and the love, are all in the waiting. And the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.
She stared at the wall thinking about her ineffective mother; thinking about what feeling could feel like. She thought about the Ghost and his similar sadness and difficulty with emotions; wanting to feel, but being unable to, is close to the worst thing that could happen to a human.
After all, humans are supposed to feel.
“And I was thinking about something this morning…really something I have thought about every minute of every hour of every day for the last eighteen and a half years. Maybe what doesn’t happen is better than what does,” she smiled, remembering the first night they had met, “and I think that was the first real thing I said to you or anyone for that matter-about Vonnegut’s parakeet, and his fantastically hopeful, wise, yet sad sad wish,” she laughed, shaking her head, “that if you leave things at that careful point of inception, before everything becomes real…” she was smiling though a tear fell easily, “then and only then can your mind have its way with the experience. That the imagination is both our greatest gift and, simultaneously, our greatest impediment. More powerful than anything else, more important than anything physical. The hope that is unique to our species- our hope is always better than reality.”
Looking into her eyes, matching her intensity, he whispered, “But then you will never live,” he finished, “You will only die.”
