The Write Thing

Suppose you believe that there are stories that have shaped our souls in previous times. Suppose that we are a collection of those stories, and that the gaps in between or inside each one of those layers that make you are to be filled in some way. Of course, such a “willing suspension of disbelief” exercise requires you to consider time to be circular instead of linear, so that each time a new phase of your present life begins, you will return to one of those previous layers or lives, hopefully to make up for your past omissions.

Runes were originally an alphabet. In Norse mythology, runes have a divine origin. Their reading can therefore shed some light on the task or tasks at hand in your present life. Some will say there are 25 lives awarded to you. The higher you are on the scale, the more evolved your soul is. Still, there is a learning process to be made from what preceded the present you. The wheel turns, the dice is cast again, and you are given one more chance to learn. Whether you do it or not could make or break you.

I once was told that Borges’s cat was named Odin. Whether this is true or not, I cannot tell. Odin would stand for a sort of Wotan — Wagner lovers beware — representing the voice of wisdom. The final advice will be given by the higher god, and you might find interesting leads in his words.

Reading an alphabet and telling stories is a gift. If you can interpret the meanings, they might be fascinating. You can also stand skeptical to everything, and that would work as well. Nobody forces belief on anybody, but I like to think that one can be open to different possibilities of learning. Sometimes there are stories that come back to haunt us, and sometimes there are stories that come back to nurture us…which one will you be? I guess the latter, because there is a reunion, and there is a circular time that binds us, and there is — above all — you and I.

Halloween. Wikipedia decorates its description with the legend of Stingy Jack. It is a night that many children may have used to offer a trick- or-treat promise on alerted neighbors ready to meet the traditional demands. It is a night for playing, even when tradition is nowhere to be found in a DNA that is carved straight from the Pampas, where everything grows to look just as plain as barren land.

It was my night for literature. A group of shining knights in armor with a literary sword decided to organize a cultural soirée, reading short stories written by one of them in candlelight. We were entertained with a good lentils broth (or stew, for that matter, I’ll never know what to call it for sure), some pot-smoking and literature. My two escorts — beautiful ladies with a coincidental birth date — looked excited to be there, and so was I, enjoying a little bit of hippie life after a Doris Day hiatus. The stories were not really good, or perhaps it is simply the fact that the whole idea of oral transmission of literature is a double-edged sword, exposing the flaws of a story that does not flow all the more bluntly. It does not matter. It made me want to write about this Halloween night, which in my French days of yore I arbitrarily baptized with the heading that crowns this posting.

Halloween is a good set of instructions to abide by in a cool spring evening. Last year, at Halloween, I was in Rome, absorbing and saying goodbye to Europe as I once knew it. Today my Jack -O- Lantern is blind, and I like to feel that it can start anew. It is a night to breathe, to fuck, to pretend that the next day means something different, to feel the smell of a strange skin in the heat of a capricious, one-night fire. A night to lie to ourselves, consciously, for there will be a morning, but we will have left her room stealthily in the small hours, long before we could remember the contours of her face, or recognize — were we ever to hear it again — the sound of her voice as she called a fictitious, ghostly name.

I have not written on this blog for quite a while. It has been a difficult month, full of retrospection and introspection, with some good moments but, basically, lots of inner self questioning, if such a combination of words exists in the English language. There has been pain inside and also outside, in my “circle of trust”, and it has had a very strong impact on me. I hope eventually the whole experience will make me a more insightful human being and a better person.

So, if I had to choose poetry to illustrate the moment — I recall mentioning poetry earlier in this blog as my foie gras in a world of prosaic corned beef, or something of the sort — there should be some Emily Dickinson. Sagittarian, tortured, passionate and suffering goddess of illuminated seclusion, her writing dissects the anatomy of feelings in a methodically simple way. I would say it is the kind of poetry where each word weighs a ton, and there are so few that missing one single element in her compositions results in major loss.

I read on a website the other day that the poem I quote below was allegedly written for her sister in law, with whom the poetess was apparently infatuated. Perhaps associating lonely Dickinson (the typical Puritan spinster, at least in form) with lesbianhood is an oversimplification, but let’s agree that as we read her it is impossible not to perceive that certain component which denotes someone as being really sensitive to the female world. But no more words from me, let’s hear it from Miss Dickinson herself:

What mystery pervades a well!

The water lives so far,

Like neighbor from another world

Residing in a jar.

The grass does not appear afraid;

I often wonder he

Can stand so close and look so bold

At what is dread to me.

Related somehow they may be, –

The sedge stands next the sea,

Where he is floorless, yet of fear

No evidence gives he.

But nature is a stranger yet;

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get.

It appears that the lesbian code can be cracked by replacing the word “nature” in the poem with the name of the undisclosed destinataire, Susan Gilbert. Regardless of whether it was Susan or somebody else the poem was directed to, I cannot but marvel at Dickinson’s deftness in portraying the mystery of others, the hidden self, or selves, of le grand autre. The well (the other) is a mystery, a lonely, perhaps exciting mystery. Sometimes, paradoxically, the nearer we get to it — as to nature itself — the more unfathomable it becomes.