And so, dear Cellist--mon amour fantastique, mon semblable, mon frère--being apprised now of my new direction, its shape and hard substance, its rigid outline and base form, no doubt you may be wondering next, inquisitive, smiling: "Why?" Why do this thing? Why climb this mountain?
But what is it you really wish to hear? Merely the immediate catalyst of this madness? Of failed relationships? The ended engagement? This sudden and unexpected need to secure for myself a new life away from a still-inchoate and aborted future--in towns removed, under a new roof? Ravens and foxes have nests and dens, but naive poets no place to lay their pens.
Well, this is all true enough. Every day, no doubt, worlds end--and some as unexpectedly as mine, I'm sure. Here, a diagnosis; there, a sacking; here, a mother learns of his affair, and there: old God is falling from a heartheld monarchy. A hundred causes for a hundred souls, disworlded. It doesn't take so much to pop the bubble of a wellset world. We live in snowglobes fraily glassed, and every flake: potential pinpricks, flurrying. The tumult of the seas bring word daily of drowned sailors; and who is left, when tempests cease, to bear the sinking's burden on? Unless the sea claim two, we build, from shipwrecks, second ships, and bear our burdens in their cargo-houses. We, we carpenters, spackle walls up with our losses, tile roofs from what has floored us, setting cornerstones with all that time has flung. We float in ignorance our spot of foam upon a wavy surface--till the wild tidal mountings crash, and break us open, breaking, broke open, there to float in chaos, lost in cold seawater; thrown open, naked to abysses--lost in cold seawater--possibly to drown...
Unless, by some proficiency (so token of our species), we find a way to blow a globe out of the molten sea, and take up shelter in it. Perhaps the Universe, itself expanding like molten glass from Zephyrlip, was started even so, and God, dovepregnant, brooding over chaoses, breathed all that is into an Adamsod we call the galaxies, then jumped inside, and Let it Be.
It is, and so it is, and all that is is what it is, and this, perhaps when better wisdoms fail (like promises), is cold comfort enough. And so it is that I have found myself in need of some new vessel, a captain without a ship, life all mutinied, and Pequod smashed to pieces in the sun. But from the shards that flotsam on the surf, I cull a raft, and set my ragged rudder legs to paddle Godward. Let there be light! And let it warmly flicker from a fireside. And let it soak into every pore of my poor cottage, soul a' tow in some old metal buzzard, where I can write, and read, and learn a thing or two from memory about the frailty of all worlds. Then might some wisdom pick me up, haggardly islanded, towards a land that is no land, but Brahman Atmanned: sea and land united.
And so, dear Cellist, mon amor fati, there is that whole part of it. These, the circumstances of my circumnavigation; contingencies of mission. And let those be as well! For all that happens happens; but "for a reason"? That's up to us. Aeneas wanders with a Rome in his heart. Odysseus, Penelope. And I---I you, or God, or Buddha; Jesus Christ; angels upon angels; wisdom; sacrifice; the mystic vision of the mystic crossroads; the Empyrean, and loss; experience and suffering; and the will, the holy will to Life. And hope is in there, too, of course (my badge and talisman); Transcendence; truth; enlightenment. And shall I couple Love? Yes, Love, which is all these and more, I think (but, how, I'm not quite sure).
Ah, but I've only scratched the surface, and already so much ink spilt. The rest in entries to come. The rest to come.
Adieu.
- Leaf