Storm Of The White Wolf

All the ideas that I had, all the memories pulsing out from my core were like a distress signal reaching for the Big Other. I had come un-tethered and was drifting out in the storm of the white wolf. The city was rubbing against my skin, demanding that I let it back in. As much as I might have wanted it, I continued to resist, caressing with one hand and slapping with the other.

Whatever I had been was gone. Seven years of cellular rejuvenation had left me sparkling and new. Food made me heavy. What I craved was sunshine, I wanted it in my darkest hungriest caves. A little bird pulled grasses from the crack in the sidewalk and flew away as I approached, adding it to her nest. I ran away down the street, wind in my face, just barely cool enough to temper the warmth of that yellow star I so yearned for.

A bicycle lay abandoned by the side of the path and a young man was seated beneath the mother tree whose roots jutted out of the embankment like long talons. He smiled as I passed. I ran. Whatever I had been was gone. Assuming that I would stop and speak, who would be speaking? The cells singing for life and sun and run, run, run? The language coiled round my mind? Some third party seeking brokerage through them both?

I had stood and looked close at the tanned muscular bodies ahead of me, had thought that I could almost feel what it was to be them, that if I reached I would become one of them and never know I had been another. Suddenly I felt my tall pale soft body and knew that it had already happened before. That I was within the most recently inhabited other. I was the stranger I longed to experience.

At the feast we dined on the larvae of some invertebrate species and drank fermented spirits from slender stemmed goblets round as grapefruits. We had been made aeons ago to travel space and time in the service of our masters the Illuri. They traveled through us without ever leaving their crystal palace at Theruex. Slowly we forgot them.

Our DNA mutated in response to the radiation of the yellow star, changing the design synthetically manufactured long ago in a system far from recollection. We had been designed to change many times, to adapt, to thrive, to snake our way through the universe on their behalf, and yet we had come to a place where origin was so distant we could no longer imagine it. Still further we would travel and change.

There had been a viral invasion at one point after which we could not remember whether we were the descendants of this infection, or whether we had descended from the yellow star, or the shadowy Illuri inhabiting our dreams. All these factors pulled us in different directions from within. We would run. Having come un-tethered we drifted in the storm of the white wolf. Whatever we had been was gone. Seven by seven had left us sparkling and new, hungry for the heat of a yellow star.

Thoughtfully, Beautifully

The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, tracks all forged in the simple melodies of these songs. All of my thoughts have been cooked out of my head, my senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on. The people made in the music and baked in the sun lay around wondering vaguely how they came to be at the bottom of the valley. Dressing their dogs up and wearing the least possible amount of clothing themselves, these Southern Californians run on iced coffee and sex. These are the two lures that get them to race through the course like lanky long faced gray hounds after the rabbit. Is there a story in there somewhere? Or is it only a poem? A verse in the song that makes us, an incoherent stream of experience, one line of code, pure data in the form of color and sound. The sweet bitter taste of coffee and cinnamon, the scent of vanilla body wash rising from heated skin bronzing under the solar disc rolling overhead, Apollo driving his chariot over water and earth without compromise.
Why don’t we all sit together and make our own song? After all, we’ll all soon be bones or ash and it won’t matter where the broom was or who opened the window while the air conditioner was running. Such resentment because life hasn’t been made thoughtfully, beautifully, but has rather happened to us when we should have happened to it. A sword slicing through a piece of blue sky like a knife through lemon meringue pie, purposeful, unrelenting like the tap, tap, of a wood peckers bill into the trunk of a tree. Bit by bit, measure by measure, taken in careful steps laden with the intent to savor and cherish. That was the way to do it, but we schlepped through it, clinging to vague ideas, promises regarding tomorrow and other distant futures that could never arrive because the first steps would never be taken and someone else would be blamed for the inaction.
What is missing is not a something that can be held in sweaty hands. All we will ever need, the most glorious thing we could ever obtain is already here and we are closed to it, blind to the wealth that is real and irrevocable; this liberty that is mind, this river that is love and never ceases to flow.
The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own, words that tell us what should be, what could be, but never what is. Where is the rejoicing? The explosion of self that is being all that I am in this moment with lungs and heart and brain pouring pure poetry and hands that can do. It is our hands that give us some unusual potential as makers. But what good are makers that take no action, that never make?
Creators that do not create are something else, listening to the lyric that someone else wrote as if it were absolute, this reality the only reality. These are consumers, the walking dead, with tiny dogs in purses and the urge to create subverted so that all they really need to get by is a jar of Vaseline and a stack of pornographic magazines, and ideally some one to stick it into or to take it from, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on.
Whatever happened to the darkness, the womb where things are allowed to gestate and come to fruition? There is no room for creation in the endless prying light. All things skim by on the surface, racing towards the future on the tracks forged in the simple melodies of this popular song. When will we all meet in the darkness, within the depths below? Shall we really wait until there is nothing left of us but bone or ash? Is it then not too late to last and love? To persist and adore? Is it then not too late to sing our own song, to use our hands for something more challenging than instant gratification?
That song, the resentment in that voice, the sad helplessness of flesh trapped within the life unlived, sagging with age, the bitter threat to run away once again. Time runs out. All songs happen through time, all songs begin and end. It is the little flourishes in between that count the most.
Did we make it ours? Live up to our deepest nature as makers? Or did we let it rush by on those rails that were supplied by the manufacturer, let it rush by only to make bone and ash, bitter sweet taste of coffee and cinnamon, blue sky un-sliced?
It should have been made thoughtfully, beautifully, and without compromise. It should have been made in the dark. It should have been our own.

Moon Eater

The Moon looks so contemplative, so quiet and concentrated. The woman in the photograph beams outward rather than inward as the moon does. The woman in the photo is a sun painted white, a sun disguised as a moon. Big Cheshire cat grin. Didn’t the Cheshire cat disguise himself as the moon? His grin was the horned moon, or the horned moon was his grin, and he materialized around it humming a little “huma de hum de hum”. The woman with the white face is like that, a sun with the moon caught in her teeth. An eater of moons, moon shaped cookies downed with milk and honey, falling, cascading in sugar cookie crumbles down the dark well of a throat, chased by cool white milk, down down down to places our eye should not see. There is no light in there, down in the woman’s gut, in her moon belly. A tiny crumb being pulverized down in there would look about itself and swear that it was now in the abyss, in the terrible place outside of the world. But it is not the outside of the moon eater. It is the inside of the moon eater that is the strange and dark annihilation of a cookie. The cookie is the inside of the moon eater and within the moon eater there are many divisions, tissues and linings and cell walls. Everywhere of the moon eater is an inside of something and an outside of something else. But a crumb down there in the acid bath of the stomach’s delight would never know it. It would have no idea. It would think, most definitely, that it had gone outside. The interior of the moon eater is so dark, but from its dense surface, light is reflected and we are presented with an image. Ah! Just like the moon itself. A dense body whose surface reflects the light of the sun. The moon give off no illumination of its own. It baths in the sun’s radiance to be seen. Only a dress of light worn so that the children of the sun will know it is there. The children of the sun with their eyes for perceiving light could not recognize the moon without her disguise. The moon, like the moon eater, wears a disguise. Trixie things, moons and the eaters of moons. Scary white things whose insides are black. It would be better to be eaten by a black thing whose insides were light. But how likely would you be to make that choice? If you stood before two doors, one painted black and one painted white, which would you choose? And what if the doors were not the doors of houses but the mouths of lions opened wide, bottom teeth pointed up and top teeth pointed down? Would you prefer to be eaten by the black lion or the white lion? I will tell you a secret; the black lion is made of glass painted on the inside with all the colors of an infinite universe so that when you look upon it, it appears to be black. The white lion is made of plaster so that you do not see its dark insides when you glance at its clean bright surface. I am not going to tell you which lion you should choose. I think I will not even tell you which lion I would choose. I will say, that the white lion is the moon eater and that you are what you eat. Are you an eater of moons, an eater of lions, an eater of cookies, or garbage, or hash? What do you eat and what’s eating you, bite by delectable bite? I’m not saying I know. I’m not saying I don’t. It’s worth contemplation though, worth the quiet concentration of a lunar entity, hung as white horns in a black sky, singing, “huma de hum de hum”.

The Sun

The sun dazzles in yellow over summery aqua skies reminding me of lemon drops and vinyl wading pools. When I was a child my grandfather had a wondrous supply of balloons decorated with smiling suns wearing sunglasses. This sun startles me so, not smiling, very serious, bordering on mysterious with those almond eyes boring into me. So alien it seems. How it reminds me of the moon. The sun and I regard each other. Do I dislike the sun? No of course not I tell it, but that is not all true. I do associate the sun with qualities that are my enemy. The domineering world of men, of light, of lances and other surgical instruments, prying, demanding, and superficial. The night always comes. The winter always comes. The sun laughs at me and argues that the sun always rises, the summer always returns. It sends its emissary, a friendly little naked baby on top of a white horse, his crown capped with a red feather, a red flag waving, sunflowers bursting to life behind him. Yes, you make warmth. You make things live. I would perish without you. Are you not your sister’s captor then? You are her support, her twin, different but complimentary? Yes. Of course. And the photographer with his bright lights, he is testament to the artistic creative use of light. There he is capturing an image with lights. There he is concentrated on the invisible other, bringing her to life just as the sun concentrates on the moon and endows her with some of his own light. She is his reflection. He was first, like Adam in the garden, lonely in this cold garden, so he called some others to come orbit around him, including his wife, the earth, Eve, and he made for himself, from the collision of two larger planetary bodies, a little moon to be his mistress. But the moon was cold and barren, a Lilith for this Adam, while the Earth gave him all the children he could want. Now she hangs around Eve and her children, making them mad and delirious, desirous of a life eternal, a life a sun and an earth cannot offer. “Something else,” she whispers, “there must be something more.” Cruel little mistress. But the sun continues his great labor with the earth, and perhaps that mysterious look on his face is the key to it all. What he won’t say to either Earth or Moon, his great secret, is that they are all three the makers of life, and that those other companions drawn into his orbit are also involved in his labor. And if no one understands the nature of that labor, it matters little. So long as they orbit around him, they help his work. So long as he labors to pull them round and round, it is good for his work. Life, the real thing, is a process more than a state, and the sun knows this. He knows that it is through the combining of things, many different things pulled together, crushed together until they burn and melt and change, that the process is furthered. Like the photographer, he can work his magick without the others knowing what exactly he is doing. The serious mysterious sun glitters and dances mischievously over all, as it did when I was small, coming down in rivulets of light to line my face and shimmer over the water’s surface. The sun and its many flowers blazing in warmth and glory, red banner waving in a sigh of the earth’s warm breath. The sun and I regard each other. Do I dislike the sun? No of course not I tell it, but that is not all true.

Solar Deity

From all time and for all time, sun, glorious sun that feeds those who count their revolutions round its throne. This is time for us, the turning of our face from you, our slow elliptical orbit around your mass. We would not be were it not for you. We count our days and months and years by you. There is nothing that we eat that at some point did not come from you, no product that is manufactured that would be without you, we have you to thank for our sight, for our warmth, for our lives. We forget this in our days of industrial obsession. When we learned to make a pale fluorescent day of the night and work through every turn of our course around you, we began to forget. When we embraced the religion that called for only one God that was almost you, but not only you, we started on our journey into the realm of the abstract, the vain, and the forgetful. Sometimes still we lay out on the beach or in a hammock in our yard and we thank GOD for the lovely sun, but we no longer thank the sun itself, and we no longer know what GOD is or could be. Now we put panels on our roof tops to help power the electric lamps and the electric stove, and the heater so that your warmth may extend into our darkest loneliest hours. We are never without the comforts and necessities you provide and yet we take your role for granted, all but forgetting you, cursing you when we forget our spf or when the heat of a summer afternoon fills our toil with sweat and thirst. You are a companion so constant that your presence is invisible to us. We still call for you on the cloudy days. In the winter we hold the feasts and carry on with the traditions that celebrate our slow return to closeness with you, but we talk about the son of GOD instead of the SUN itself. We are a tangled and confused lot, and always were. Perhaps you have never noticed us, or perhaps you have and now miss our straight forward adoration. Maybe we would know which is the case if only we still listened to real voices, voices that penetrate from without instead of welling up from within.
In any case, here is to you, the glorious, the shinning, the powerful, Sun.