Real with No Name
Ril Gan Ainm. The reel with no name finishes playing and shifts into Gerrard’s “Shadow Magnet”, infusing the space with a deep, fathomless goddesshood. She is gaelic or she is sanskrit or she is arabic or she is yiddish, but she is language and she is sound and she is present. The incense and sage is thick, collecting in the shadows of the high ceiling, giving the room the feel of an opium den. I stare through this at candles beyond the rim of my focus.
I’m chasing the dragon now, lollygagged and tired from long nights awake. When it comes, it is sweet and open and vast. When it struggles, it is tough going, sandals over cragged rocks and a wash of self-doubt that I let slide away with a hush and a few chosen mantras.
But it is hard. Fiction is the curse of the microcosm, with each movement and change of light, with each thought and each subtle shading, endlessly repeating the first moment of creation. Poetry is ripping pieces of your flesh from your arms to fashion a reed raft. Journaling is expelling fluids from all orifices and divining them to see patterns and meaning. And then there is Music. And then there is the fire of Anima. And creation through any of them is a series of emptying and filling that you join in a continuum, knowing well that you are only the method.
It is hard, but Sher and Chodron are here. Goldberg and Cameron are here. Stein and Garroway are here. Mickie is here. The Blonde Swedes are here. And what’s more, there is something else here, something that I have roused from a far, far place, from a time long, long ago. And this thing, and all the other things have plunged into my dreams and my memories and my perception, opening.
When I talk to myself, one cat finds me and meows, thinking that whenever the silence is broken, it must be for his benefit. Whenever I laugh, the other cat leaves the room, for she cannot stand the sound of anything she didn’t originate. And I tell them things that I’ve forgotten, things like, “Hey, did you know that when you write a scene and you want a character to cross to the other side of the room, you actually have to write that? And when you want him to sneeze and rub his broken pinkie on his nose, you have to write that too??” And they meow or they leave the room and I smudge my fingers on the keyboard and drink more coffee.
The plane falls a few hundred feet through the cloud layer, and I can hear it’s cabin pressure adjust, the downshift rumble. I feel like I have ink smudges along my cheeks and sweat stains under my arms, and nothing is ever as close as it appears to be. The books lie, drained, on the coffee table along with fetishes and deities. A second round of them wait, their fruit seeds ripe and dripping.
The engine is engaged and the dervish swirling. And for all the fear to be soothed with lovingkindness, and all the self-therapy to be reinforced, and all the balance to be watched, and all the rock outcropping to let loose of and fall into the water honu-like… it’s good again, to be in the thick of it.
