It doesn’t begin with Koyaanisqatsi*, but with hubris. Purples and pinks gone all frosted. Summer filling up with rain. Killing frosts on a way wrong end of August, warm Decembers, people freezing in the spring. Way too muddy for nine men’s morris.
Not that I don’t relish a good fight, but it can be gone far too shrill, and that’s for the both of them. Shrieking and beaming versus sullen sanctimony. Him fucking everything that moves. Her. . .well, who knows? Maybe.
As if any small bit, any fragment of mortality might mean anything. Wild carrots (Queen Anne’s lace–often amusingly confused with deadly hemlock) opening white umbrella tops at the forest edges. Mushrooms. Smell of damp earth. Fish spawning on the margent of the sea.
We were always tribal, like the mortals I’m guessin’. Us, all different batches, varied loaves, pulled from the oven. Braided, seeded, some smooth and golden, egg washed, shining like baby buttocks.
When I worked the houses, the villages, I liked the maidens especially. How they could act mother one way but amongst the sisters or with friends still act and think big wicked. That was my seein’. Hardly my frighting. Them at variance with themselves, scaring themselves silly with their own thoughts. Funny as all the hells to see, them scaring themselves far more than any shape I could assume.
Of course, I could only ‘see’ part of it, which he would point out endlessly. Drag that one out again and again. Hear him talk. He could see mermaids, leviathans, even gods. He could see where the arrows of the sky would fall, where faded traces of desire would bloom in flower fires. How many times we’ve heard that one.
Damnsome jam, but how he dances about that seeing, waving his gift as if the only one. As if it made him better. ‘King’. Uh, huh. ‘Captain’. Yeah, right. Still call it him if him it quiets, if him it happy makes. Panting after tall, pale girls. Short tough girls. Warrior girls. Mortals. His type.
See. Fair enough. But he can’t go there. He watches from his invisible perch outside. Looking in a window at the action. Sad perverted voyeur and he doesn’t even know it. Watching those little slivers of life streaming away down the drain of existence like morning melted moonbeams.
What he can’t see though. Doesn’t see outweighs the see. Where he can’t go is walking, circling the globe, walking among them. Can’t know how desire plays out when embers burn away to ashes, when those dead tumble oh so less snug within their graves. Like a spaniel, she says, and so he takes her then and there. No, that’s not in the play. Both of them moaning and then her all smoothing clothes and him trotting never happened away. Neither of them mentioning it again. No one there to see it.
That’s a go-between’s job. More than just fetch flowers, and rub them soft as nightfall against the eyelids. Not just see the mortal fruit hanging on the bough, but taste that real mortal end of things all the way down to the bitter bottom of the cup. Seeing lillies in light gone far beyond the gilt. The guilt. Edges of the blossoms going brown and curling up. Not just seeing, but knowing. Knowing how their wanting feels to them. Blushing blossoms, love-wounded, purple fading quickly, mistress of boastful disappointment.
Racing to the grave. Fighting, breeding, disappearing. Soft rain in the night and mist by morning. Little scarecrows, soon enough stacked in boxes, weirdly buried near churches or in crossroads which I never understood. What damned good does it do? Them rising again to troop dissatisfied throughout the dark. Crumbling stone unnoticed. Pies untasted left upon the windowsill forever. Can’t eat the damned things now. Besides, it might stain the shroud. Oh, I can just hear it.
As though they had been made of fragile, vanishing stuff. Wanting. Dreams. Leaving not a rack behind. Fireflies. Ridiculous. Beautiful.
It’s not like that when you live forever, but there are different ways of understanding then too. Oh, I know what he be thinks, what they all think. When I dance as naked and proud, I don’t do silly robes or ringlets. No cheap ‘finery’ or pretense at formal aesthetic presentation. Dance purely as the stuff of life, as the expression of joy and nothing else. Yet, should we ever be like them, like those abbreviated trumpet flowers? An’ he thinks I’m a blunt. Lesser. Clock cog cream clot. Churn the maidens. Drop old women on their bums.
Doubt, for all his sport, he’s ever really seen a bum. His precious perception like an inkblot, focused on the ink alone, missing all the empty space around it. His space, his ‘Ma’**, remains just that, never meltin’ to Yohaku. Yohaku no bi.*** Missing forest for the trees, yes. Missing flowers for how brief they are. Missing the ephemeral because he doesn’t have to worry. Never thinking. Dismissive of the dead.
Whole dimensions gone from his sight. How that folding works–life folding into life–offspring, ‘issue’ related to but not the same as the original lovers. Each fold changing the original into something else. Passion fading into more fading. Vanishing succeeding vanishing, disappearing into the earth while still the worn trail glows just so in latening sunlight. Constantly darkling into autumn. Dead left behind but with them. Memory. Desire. Stirring together as April showers moisten roots anew, stirring shoots to new and wanton riots.
He can see what he likes. What he can. I prefer where I go. Being in being, not just in seeing. He lives at the edges of the world, the wood, the dawn, the moonlight. I know that eternal threshold, sweeping for ever present change, endless transition. Hobgoblins remains suspicious that anything or any aspect may be sacred, yet if there is something, it must lie in that.
*Hopi term for “unbalanced life” or life out of balance. Also a remarkable film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass with cinematography by Ron Fricke.
**Japanese (間) – the space between things, the empty space that is carefully expressed in all forms of art ranging from painting and flower arranging to garden and landscape architecture.
***Japanese (余白の美) – the beauty of the void, relating to the blank or white space deliberately left in a painting, especially an ink wash painting. This painting of a Shrike on a Dead Tree by the famous swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi, is often cited as an example of the power of empty space. (Musashi, who lived from 1585 to 1645, was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s although their worlds almost certainly never intersected.)
