Breath, you invisible poem! Pure
exchange unceasing between the great
ether and our existence. Counterweight
in which I rhythmically occur.Single billow whose slow degrees
of ocean take place
in me; most frugal, you, of all possible seas--
winnings of space.How many parts of this space already were
within me! There's many a wind
like a son to me.Do you know me, air, full of places where I used to be?
You, once smooth ring,
roundness and leaf of my words
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
...fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed, it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will hirself draw exhaustively from hir own existence.
--Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I'm not ready for everything, but I think myself able to cope. I hope. I will try. I want to live in relation to the other as someone, fully alive, subjective.
Acts of resistance are moral acts. They begin because people of conscience can no longer tolerate abuse and despotism. They are carried out not because they are effective but because they are right. Those who begin these acts are few in number and dismissed by the cynics who hide their fear behind their worldliness. Resistance is about affirming life in a world awash in death. It is the supreme act of faith, the highest form of spirituality.
Dream of dathun -- it was held in a wharehouse sort of facility -- all attendees had to find somewhere to sleep in their sleeping bags within the spaces available among the aisles and rows and racks full of things. It was kind of like a Costco, only more stripped bare, with no indication of what was in packaging. Also, there were hundreds of people, including my parents there. There was some kind of plush but old convention center attached -- rooms with brown couches, fake plants.
I remember stumbling around lost a lot of the time, trying to figure out why people were talking so much on a retreat, why everything seemed like a family dinner party or a convention. I could never find Reggie, and the only dathun coordinator I found had no information about the retreat, but she could tell me where the self-described queer space was.
I went to the queer space--it was full of older gay men, and there was no room for another person. I thought to myself in the dream, "they probably all snore anyway", and so I kept seeking a place to bunk down. I ended up sleeping underneath something, like a table.
I noticed that the Poet was there at the retreat, and I wanted to sleep near her for familiarity, but she wasn't talking to me nor acknowledging me. She was busy pulling materials out of boxes so she could write literal reams of poetry.
I sat and had white wine with my parents and a bunch of older people. We sat around a round table that was topped with one of those cloth-backed vinyl table "cloths" common in the 1970s. It was pukey green with a faint yellowish lattice-and-vines design.
At another point later, like a week in, I kept wondering when the retreat would start, and if I could bear another three weeks of this aimless wandering in confusion with no structure save for the towering racks of unlabeled boxes which rather resembled the hoppers at the Celestial Seasonings factory. No place to sleep -- I moved my sleeping bag every night, trying to find a comfortable, warm niche. No practice either. No stability, only the hard concrete floor.
Wherever I found clusters of friends, there was no room for me to join them.
Throughout the time there, I carried a sense of the presence of and connection to another who was there with me, but in her own separate experience. I never saw her, only felt her as if sensing the direction of the faintest breeze by sticking out the tip of my tongue.
I'm going crazy. Time is a simultaneity; the stone dropped in the calm pool creates ripples moving forward and backward, lapping back to center once bounced off the shore. I'm already on retreat; my mind is showing itself to me in the spontaneous perspicacity of my actions. I keep stepping forward into opportunity, all caution catabatic. Each moment of self-reflection in which I am stunned dumb by my audacity. Whose? What?
I'm already on retreat: I touch my heart and start sobbing with the feeling I've resumed from where I left off five days from now. I feel my body in the clenching depth of it and perceive no difference in how she feels from orgasm from convulsive laughter. Sobs/laughter/coming birth/sex/death.
I'm already on retreat: I feel each hug as if I want it to last forever; I melt into the other feeling body/heart/mind flicker discontinuously then merge past the typical resistance. Sweetness pervades the meeting of lips, the sharing of breath. In the space between breaths I hear the clack and rattle of sound/noise/music/movement making to the wrathful fierce protectors (devour them/me with ferocious delight). No one speaks of the pain of the Vows, but I recognize the glimpse/grimace of it in the undertone of humor/pain in DPR's voice. Can I really do that? Or is the fortunate circumstances of this lifetime enough to show me that I have already done that, that the vow is merely reaffirming what was said long ago? This life is so good; the sweetness kills me. The more love I receive, the more I have a soul-deep responsibility to give.
I'm already on retreat: I've fallen in love, breath in air, a jigger into the sea. I yearn to dive into the brine up to my nostrils, savor the scent and taste of you. Let you go when it's time, but oh sweet, not just yet? Hook into me, catch and release. Fetch me out into ecstatic evocation; say my name.
I'm already on retreat: my appetite has shrunk, my sense of alcohol and other intoxicants has shifted; all altered states of consciousness evoke the desire to practice. My guts in particular are squirmish at indulgence, meat tastes of blood unconscionably spilt. With each whiff of ego's usual selfish aims I feel a nausea, vertigo, unable to stand. I cannot continue forward in this broken way, applying salves to a wound insatiable.
Brokenheartedness. Loneliness. Sadness. No way out of this. No solution to the basic human situation. Still, I chase it but the chasing continually fails to satisfy.
Thorn-pierced, ravaged bleeding and flaming heart of yours/mine, open, sun-scorched and wind-seared. Love is most true when freely given, beyond the edge of grasping.
Some reminders from Reggie:
- Stay in your body
- Don't worry about other people
- Don't care about what others think
- Be very independent
- You are on your own
- Don't look to others
- Stay in your practice
- if you are a cool, thinking person, be you
- don't try to be someone else.
- Stay true to yourself, no matter what
- Listen to your inner voice, be who you are
- Do the work and REALLY be who you are
- No one will ever really understand you.
- The dharma is truly is about outrageous openness
- 99% of the journey is clearing the space
- Whatever is happening to you is the trustworthy thing
- You have to completely trust your own experience
I'm going crazy, but I'm willing to trust it. But can I ask you to trust me in that?
I would like to maintain the polite fiction of our mutual compatibility but
The truth precipitates like white sugar out of solution with
Vodka mixed with artificial cranberry drink powder
Seeping out of mix and balance into its constituent elements
Layering solid and white through reds, roses, pinks
Palest blush to clear
Sweetness is the last taste perception left to us in old age
Everything but water is erased when we die
Soon to be willingly drowning in the mess
Currently both shaken and stirred
Each discrete aspect gradually emerging within the sleepiness of
Perpetually moving broken motion machine of the heart
Incubating swirl of foetid bliss
The nectar of immortality is within this moment tasted just as it is
Regardless of the mix
Of late, I am all top-shelf bottles filled with bottom-shelf booze
Cosmopolitan on a midwestern girl's cheap
Who am I/are we without our combative projections?
Expectations
Misperceptions and apprehensions
Only silence will speak.
I'm leaving on Sunday. I was going to write something thoughtful and eloquent about the seeming acceleration of emotional energy in my life of late, but instead I'll just say: I trust it.
Tonight I'm re-reading the manuscript for my thresholding monologue, and grieving the passage of a year as sorely needed. Some snippets:
I create the possibility for more truth around me by naming my reality as candidly and fully as I can. (paraphrased/integrated Irigaray)
...
My heart feels full, open, rough-edged and mildly sore (a faint memory of raw). I'd like to bring that feeling into communication/communion with the imaginal other, but she is such a mix of projection and real person that she can't be said to exist, not exactly.And so there is self-process, there is sitting, there is trying to figure all of this shite out, and what to do with it, if anything.
Who am I in relationship, and does that sense of self change in different kinds of relating?
...
Who am I when I am free to be fully present to what is occurring? Who am I when I am free to be fully present to Her? Unhampered by fear/anxiety/pattern/habit, and full of longing, free from fear/grasping/clinging/solidifying/fixating?
...
Queer openly & intentionally engages the destabilizing, unassimilable marginalizing experience.
....
O, to drown in the feel of that fleshskinbodygaze, shudder as I do at the very intimation of a thought which does not ever reach it.
.....
I know only that I desire her and am terrified by her. Terrified both by how she breaks me open to the vertiginous experience, the void, the place where desire meets no object, no fulfillment. I am terrified by how I shall grieve when it is time to completely let her go, to release whatever this bliss this is, into the bliss that was.
....
How much of this “me” do I craft for the sake of the her that I imagine her to be, the her that I want so much to please? How much is a genuine emergence of who I am to be in this life? How much of how I act is a positive unfolding from my meditation practice?How much of it is neurotic manipulation?
....
What I want to give/receive/experience/share/be is unconditional presence, full immanence, total sovereignty. I am not sovereign when subject to the whims of my ego's craving for security, or my ego's self-distracting practices. So long as I use the Lover as a balm for my wounds, so long as I desire her as comfort and completion to a self that can never be complete, for the little self is full of lack, I am not sovereign. I cannot approach the Lover when she is part of the Order of Things, as they are ordered in my mind, or otherwise.
....
Will you breathe with me?
Schoolboy look, sleepy version.
