Walking through what seemed like groves and groves of tangled trees: whisps of willows, the yawning height of oak, the pointed slenderness of cypress trees, and above all the sun leaning and swaying through leaves and branches, peppering sunlight and heat. You can feel these shapes with no names of sunlight, never a true oblong triangle, never a perfect circle; all light simply nameless shapes and plots of warmth. I took off my glasses.
The leaves then seemed to take the invitation of a fuller bloom: no longer having those thin veins that move along from the spine of leaves, instead all greenery blooms into a fuzzy green orb. At the end of the road, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel looks back at me as I walk towards the house. The wind rolls by, I can smell the fragrance of flowers and beyond that the distant whine of traffic with the slight pungent sting of asphault and exhaust, but never enough to come into this small neighborhood of ecclectic homes, the oasis of a less urban part of Sacramento, it seems.
I put my glasses back on and the light at the end of the tunnel becomes the sun reflecting off of the bumper of a parked car. The leaves settle back into the small points of dangling leaflets of living things. There's not too many on the ground yet; fall hasn't reached the coast but it will and I'm sure it'll be spectacular. It's not something I'll see anytime soon in California, though. I've but three days left here, hardly enough for fall to roll in less like "cat's paws" and more like a thin blanket before the full-on swatch of winter starts to mute and take angles away from the sharper points of nature. We like snowdrifts and branches heavy with snow - it's easy to digest and no wonder so many people have painted pictures of it. It's not like it's less of a challange and therefor more feverently embraced by artists - it's just another way to view the world in bloon, not unlike taking the glasses off and letting leaves become color, letting the street become but a line, the gray somewhat out of place and ridged next to the smattering of color and vines that summer celebrates and autumn will punctuate with even more earth tones, more auburn glow.
Oh, but they're all earth tones, aren't they?
So I was thinking throughout all of these on again off again swells of color: passion, passion, passion. You're the only thing that matters, love. Some of you readers are responsible for the impossible number of flavors of passion that I've been lucky enough to feel, others of you stand like statues, not even pretty when the snow covers you or the sunset stretches the shadows of the cleft of a cheekbone or the swell of a breast: you stand like roadblocks. Taoism swims around you instead. Who knows how you feel. Then again, looking back at you certain few, you are but opaque and wavy, coining and humanizing the cliche "water under the bridge".
Last night, at the wedding I was at in Berkley, California, I took my digital camera and put it in movie mode. Shutting the opaque window to the small bathroom, I started the camera at the top and moved it down the frame of the window, recording the whole time. On that small LCD screen, all partygoers, dinner tables, lamplights and roof tiles became a fragmented slow blur. As the camera moved, so did the images, but just barely. Swelling out to one point, drawing in at another, just how that glass meant to hide people. When done, I played it back. Simply: a fire underwater. It will never reach the surface and what a shame that just another nuance of nature is now etched in digital stone of the camera's hard drive: you'll always burn as long as I save you.
Outside of digital fuckery like this, there are other people who burn even if I'm not there, even if I'm not the kindling that I sometimes find myself trying to be. With these people, pardon the second cliche, burning with desire, not just eros but as a part of their personality that always will be, the word "extinguish" becomes profane. No, Taoism is like water but I'd never ever ever put it on you. I want some of you to stretch like bonfires until you lick the bottom of clouds with your heat. Don't be a grassfire, as it were; there's too many of those people who are content to smoulder and die - ashes in a campfire in a nameless park lost somewhere in the midwest, smoke from you your last dying gasp, your last prayer that you hope reaches heaven, which may or may not exist but where us humans have comically placed just above the clouds. As if some omnipotent being has a physical home just above where the sun peaks. As if this being even has a gender.
Yeah, but we get close to that gender identification when we worship. No one loves a crucified man with a six-pack and white skin and flowing hair like a GQ fall fashion model. This/He is an icon, just like every other icon and sigul we use in what some of us is holy, to others, routine. If I could bow to a bonfire of some of my loves, or even just sample an ember, well, that's just as physical as a cross and just as fickle as a drop of holy water, but be damned if it isn't as holy to me as a thousand ressurections and two thousand feet treading across water towards a fishing boat with gaping men.
Somewhere in this temporary time, some of you became holy to me. This is not me placing you all on a pedastal, no, not entirely. I bring myself with it to worship because this is the difference:
With common religion we ache and wail for something so far out of reach that we can only embody it with our version of perfection. "Our" (read: not mine, maybe not yours, but a homogonized "yes, this will do") God is still one of sacrifice and love. Of course they go together. Of course they do. Christlike, this worship is perpetual tormet and temporary ease. For a while we are convinced that Everything Will Be OK. Sure. It will be OK.
You're missing the point.
Things have been "OK"
(a little more than OK)
with me on several occasions. Those occassions are things that I cannot hope to write about. Intangible comes to mind: draw a picture of Total Love - one that everyone can agree on. You can't. Not a picture of your lover, as there's billions who have never met her. Not a picture of a puppy. Not, god forbid, the hypergeneric scrabblings of a traditional "heart". Hallmark as it may be, the heart is four chambers pumping blood and just another metaphor. In addition, if the heart dies, which it will in all of us at some point, that never means that LOVE dies, now does it?).
These moments are instead always with me as long as memory persists. They are your lips. They are your laugh. They are your hair, your hips, your passion. No, you're not my God, but you're holy just the same. Why? Because in the din of paperwork and numbers and misfired intentions, you're the most beautiful thing. If I ever were to take off my glasses and look, maybe you'd look like that light on the car - just a shine. Vision; clarity; they're physical things and they're overrated.
People sometimes describe me as a hopeless romantic but what they ignore is that some of them put me to shame in light of their praise. I've kissed the lips of people who have taken it and moved on, storing it and adding it to a bonfire that could never hope to exist with just one generic moment of "love" or "passion" or whatever you'd like to call that intangible thing that millions of gallons of ink have been wasted in trying to describe. Thanks, poets. Thanks, writers. You're running in place but that isn't to say that you haven't gotten us anywhere. The opposite is true. The ground shifts more and more and when I die I want my fingernails to be rich with the dirt of my effort to get there. My landmarks, please I hope you know this, are you.
I took off my glasses this afternoon and the world was a cornicopia of wreckless color and flirting thoughts. Some of you came to mind. You've taken your passion, your fiery fierce passion that could turn away armies had it but just one physical form for but a moment. Weaponless, it could stand wide-hipped and sensual and the armies would fall and chant the mantra that maybe, at some point, political affiliation or not, we have asked: "What are we fighting for?"
This is far from political.
No surprise it ties into religion, these holy wars and jihads of the heart. I think we all want the same thing and it sure as hell isn't animal rights or appropriate teaching wages. We want home, we want ourselves to be so alight with awe and desire (not to be even remotely tied in with "need") that we are reduced to fireflies in a sunset and we don't care. We simply don't care because we go from tree to tree to shelter to home to arms that feel like, somehow, all of the above.
That embrace: that is home. It's a home we've never been to and we might leave eventually, but it's home, and in that one firefly-flickering moment, where the sunset is flooding every shadow and their lips on yours have no agenda but love, that one moment where, impossibly, the glasses are off and you could drown in the color, drown in the opaque orbs of everything and settle in these arms that you have had the fortune of being in: yes these are fragments of being alive and each kiss and each love and each raging cry of passion and exhuberation that doesn't even scatter the fireflies we've become, they are not the tip of the iceberg in any degree.
The iceberg is us and the ocean is our loves, frozen over at the top but with effort we break through and in the inky darkness of water we see the rest of Us, the iceberg: impossibly complex, impossibly huge and the potential looks back at us, glacial and expecting, and now with passion on our side, even in the subzero limbo of that water that holds us all, somehow, with passion, with love that we've seized or has siezed us, we as fireflies defy the very cold and vastness of an arctic stangnent ocean that we're convinced we'll always be in, and instead, not now impossibly, we fireflies burn, burn, and we burn. A thousand pinpoints of light floating in the giant sea of our potential and uncertaintly and loss and gain:
We are but a galaxy turned upside down and submerged and not drowning:
dwarfed by our potential but forever culling the embers of our love we've gathered: next to the vast frozen nonpermanent burg of uncertainty, loss, death, and fragility, we burn and burn and burn with defiance and joy.
From the bottom, looking up, all love is is a handful of constellations. I call myself a writer and I am one of millions trying, again, to define it. Instead, I'll swerve from the faux-responsibility of a definition and instead give credit towards love where all credit is due: to each one reading this who knows who they are.
Thank you.
September 2004:
Jared