39.

I appear to have become detached from my mythical origins. My advent is in principle explainable with recourse to routine relative knowledges like history, biology & physics. No longer can I just step out of a tree somewhere deep inside me & come into being here, a vision within a vision. The world has eaten my mythology & in its place I have been given a destiny, not something that it has been determined must happen but something that can happen if I am determined enough. Effectively, for the adventitious or non-indigenous person, for those who have had the rug swept or sold out from under their feet: your mythology is of the future. This is true even when, like the American dream, it might seem to be of the past. Regardless, you know what it comes down to. A here that is not here. A now that is not yet & so may never be.

For myself I have claimed a negative destiny, the sense of which is that there is something that ends with me. This is a difficult thing but perhaps through works such as these I am beginning to come to terms with it. I can say that for me it is already over, my most necessary act has been accomplished. Part of the difficulty is just in trusting myself to say this, for it is no success in the worldly sense that even the disagreeable may confirm & my peers in this matter are mystics of a sort, such that when I am able to put aspects up for review the most positive result is their silence. I had sometimes thought of it as taking something to my grave with me, like a hero managing to pull his enemy with him over the cliff that they both may perish, now I realise it was something I had to place in the middle of things, as if the nature of night was a seed you could sow in every blink. Indeed one way to talk about it is as a kind of edit, as if the centre of my life was made sharper than the sharpest knife & used to sever or perhaps simply punctuate something. I am tempted to comfort myself with the image of it as the first star appearing in the roof of the cave of death, a sign of the outside world as the structure begins to crumble, but such comforts also reveal the sense of suffocation they must seek to give relief from. My only real comfort is in the nature of its necessity, but even here I cannot rest for long, for it is not that necessity who partners with the possible. Indeed, perhaps nonsense is the only real relief, but of course only such nonsense as is the truth.

Certainly it changes how I read & must inform what I come to write but the act, as I say, is done. Even as it was undone. This is how I have placed my meat in the White Lady’s beak & why I wake between silken sheets woven from blackbird song to a morning without mourning I can call True Love, & promise to tell the tales of, without of course ever being able just to give the game away. But I feel I should say something of what it could mean for you. I can say there are some things you will never get away with & some things you ever shall, & that such a statement has very little to do with the laws of nature. I can say that however far we go, however far we get, we will never divorce the sense in which it was all right here. Was?

There is a was that may ever haunt us, that we may meet again when the darks get deep, but once a was always a was even when it will be.

There was a really bad story. It had great moments, in certain ways it was better for me personally. But over all it was a tragedy, in the end all that remained was whatever got lost. For all the glory of the getting there in the end it was just a person — no matter how many they were — standing looking back on it with their heart ripped out. By which I mean they couldn’t even recognise themselves in what they were looking upon. It was their story but they couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it, couldn’t put two & two together for all their infinite sums. I think it happened because they left before they were ready, which is to say they left a mess behind them & in the end somehow the mess caught up with them, became a gulf between… meaning & what might have been?

No, no, what might have been was just a way of showing what could not be, which was what it appeared to them they had become. You see there, I suppose, how this is not the kind of story that can be said to go, nor to have gone, anywhere. Even as that is precisely where it went.

I called for a kind of ship I suppose. For me it was a horse but I guess I always knew it could be something of a ship for my people. The ship came but it wasn’t the one I was expecting & did not appear in the way I expected. Perhaps after all it was two ships, only one comes cloaked in the blackness of its not coming, the other kindles gently in the heart, your own star to follow, the engine of whatever you need it to be, but again: that’s not an easy kind of necessity.

I am still here when the sun dies but I don’t know what that means, at least literally. I don’t really believe in the literal, it forms part of my disbelief in the world. You might say it doesn’t require belief but then why is it not incredible? Which is to say How do you prove it is a miracle? If the three of us are art science & religion you can see how we all come together here, recognise something like an aim. Perhaps that is why I can’t define the metaphoreal/what the definition is.

I can say that literally, had I not got on a literal ship, I would not have found my True Love Story, but I suppose it is metaphoreally I must tell you that my love was already true — no, I don’t mean it, I only mean that my True Love doesn’t make other loves false: it makes them All True. There are many ways to say this, & no real ways to fail it, still it is a test that has shook me to the core.