I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M HERE FOR I don’t know what I’m here for. I just write. I just paint. Like breathing in and out. Inspired expiration. I watch the rain, blankly, sometimes for hours, washing off the dust from the leaves of the trees in the traffic. I stare at the comatose clouds through the grime on the windows and wonder what the stars are doing backstage. My skymind unfolds like a star map and I disappear into it like a nightbird with a message it doesn’t care is heard or not, because when I’m singing, I’m not singing into a mirror. Verbal expression isn’t thinking, and I’m not spider enough to hang suspension bridges between my words and my thoughts to harmonize the web everybody gets caught up in like packing tape as my bodymind tunes me up like a guitar to the electrical buzzing of flaws in my argument. I don’t know what I’m here for, but I often think it’s pathetically petty to go looking for a meaning to life like the light going round and round trying to catch a glimpse of the shadow it casts like a tail, when we’re the life of the meaning from beginning to last. One meaning for everything? One size fits all? The same collective death mask for every individual? I fall asleep dreaming and wake up like a mirage in the morning trying to sort out the grain from the chaff, what’s real from what’s merely the facts of the dark matter. But by the time I’ve rubbed the crumbs of starmud out my eyes and the lake mists still clinging like hungry ghosts to my visions of last night have been exorcised like lunar atmospheres, I can see clearly enough I’m just the space all these thought waves travel in, and as they say in Zen, the eternal sky doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds. What is space here for? Or light? Or water? Or the colour, red? And what meaning for love was ever necessary in the throes of it? Should this long, dark, radiant firewalk in our sleep along the Milky Way ask my feet what the meaning of going anywhere is, why we’re here extrapolating ourselves back into the past as if who we were yesterday is who we are today? Evolution’s given me a taste for the evanescence of a self that keeps on shapeshifting like space and time in the live-streaming dreams of a belated Etruscan watching the river turn like smoke in the air. Poetry is the art of expressing what you can’t define though it sounds as if you knew what you were talking about at the time as everyone listened sublimely in silence to a nightcreek babbling through the woods in the dark like the waters of life in the laughter of a child lost in the seriouness of playing opposite herself for awhile like a new moon. Ever wash your hands and feel somehow you’ve stepped far enough back from yourself you’re not the one who’s rinsing them off and something eery and intriguing overcomes you when you realize not even your fingers are your own? I don’t possess my thoughts. I don’t own my emotions. I’m a great creative collaboration with the unknown. I’m an unpaginated encyclopedia of minor miracles that come and go like sparrows to a tree. And when it rains, the eyes of the universe are upon me. But I don’t know what I’m here for. Does it matter anymore? When I die is it all that radical if I don’t know why? All my life I’ve fallen in love with less reason than that. And do I really need a philosophy to separate? A modus intendi to back up my alibis for why I’m not always loveable when I can see it in my lover’s eyes when she cries on a winter night like an abandoned housewell that the lightbulb’s gone out that used to keep her warm and she doesn’t know what she’s here for anymore. Nor do I. As we both agree to an honourable death as if death would otherwise rebuke us for disloyalty and the three quarter inch copper pipes slash their wrists longitudinally the way you’re supposed to when you’re serious enough about renewing your virginity sitting naked in a bathtub full of fireflies trying to freeze-dry your wounds. If you don’t know what you’re here for. Go for it. Or don’t. Maybe you can start a new religion of your sins of omission and the left-handed virtues of all the things you didn’t do, right or wrong, and won’t. Or win a prestigious literary award in a cherry-picked succession of unremarkable poets who hang out like flypaper at night with porchlights hoping among all the insects they attract they might find one black dwarf of a first magnitude star that sticks like a burnt-out match head to their chromosomes, a mutant cinder of genius that doesn’t get in their eyes so they don’t have to start crying all over again like a watercolour in the rain to wash it out. Can’t find any training wheels on why you’re here, and all the scarecrows you made out of your spare crutches to keep the birds from raiding your secret gardens, are chafing under their armpits like medical skeletons working on a cure for themselves that doesn’t come too late to do them any good? Maybe it’s time to walk out on yourself for once and stand up on your own among the homeless who have no one but themselves to rely upon. Or maybe you prefer a life that’s become a hospital where the healthy aren’t welcome, and only the worst atrocities of mediocrity are admitted by the emergency nightshifts to the asylums muttering in their dreams as if they’d been medicated by the full moon threshing short straws of genetically modified wheat? For the last two years I thought I was here to walk along the banks of this seance of rivers, late at night by myself, under the willows and the stars, revamping the images of old lovers like the wavelengths of spectral flowers reflected back like old radio programmes from hydrogen clouds in deep space that kept their ghosts intact out of earshot of the facts of my life. Somehow the candles have gone out in the bright vacancy of noon like the shadows of sundials and I weary of my purpose in life now like a compassionate man who has been overly generous with his lies at the bedside of someone dying inside. I’m waterclocking my way like moonset into a new abyss just to pass the time rinsing the blood off my hands of the hemorrhaging roses I put my heart into trying to save from the endless sacrifices they made of themselves on my behalf, but couldn’t. I hear the voices of dead singers from my past. Or You tube conjures their images like Merlin and I know they’re skin and bones by now and their fingernails have grown out like guitar picks, and their skulls are more oracular than fallen meteors, and I am overcome by the poetic sweetness of the sad shadows that once drove us to drink as we firewalked the whole length of our lyrical cremations just to fill our urns with something as inextinguishable as lace and pretty flowers, dragons in the lockets of angels. I rehumanize the simulacra of their fossilized remains, images of pixellated skin, echoes of the refrains I remember like the mantras of my youth when the dawn was as shrill as a killdeer in the spring, and nightfall was a hospital for wounded nightingales and washed-up phoenixes weeping on their own parades sat at kitchen tables long into the night ruminating like candles on the glory days of tragic heroes making a farce of their legends by living them like morality plays mythically inflated at the end by a lot of repetitious zeroes getting carried away in chains. How strange to be singing a friend’s song to myself long after the whole world’s outlived them, and their names are being ushered funereally like rare antiquities into grave robbing halls of fame. And who knows? Maybe that’s how legends are made, what we’re here for, born for, die for, like a vow of silence we made over the graves of tomorrow we revel in breaking like a curfew of sorrow today. Que sais je? Montaigne’s motto. What do I know? And even if you could. Me and my mantra. Who can say? PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 13:24:26 +0000
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