Monday, May 28, 2007

The Dust That Takes Even Cities. To Garett.


Garett,

A flock of rain-laden clouds passed overhead yesterday-gray and thunderous- and the sky it left behind as it blew out to sea is crisp and clean and soaked in endless shades of blue and lavender. I lay for hours staring up at the glowing tip of the moon, growing brighter as the light around it dimmed. Birds fluttered through the intangible distance. An ancient church steeple pierced proudly through the heavens; and far off, deep in the city, the blocky top of a financial building rose equally high and yearning. I turned my face from the sky to the book I was holding limply in my hand and saw the mind of a man limited and confined in the strict black lines of logic and conjecture and yet also reaching. Does it make sense to you when I say that I want my writing to be like the wind that breathes through the treetops? When I was a child I thought it was the fingers of God that shook them. Now, as an adult, I know better than to attribute the gentle rustling I heard to some unknown specter. And I also know that the sounds of the leaves crinkling (like discarded newspaper) is only an echo of the words which become more and more fleeting until they have sunk beneath everything that surrounds them.

Have I responded to your last letter yet? Have I asked you if you can hold yourself above it all, if you can find the meaning that exists in each exhaled sigh? Have you really looked for it? I mean in the street puddles as they splash up against the wheels of the passing cars; I mean in the low swooping birds and in the buzzing bees and even (especially) in the deafening din of an excited crowd?

There is no other answer. You will live as you choose to live and then the dust will take you- the dust that takes even cities. They will kick the dirt atop you (as well they should) and they will pile their empty words upon you (as they should never dare). But, it seems now as if I am growing grim. But, I do not find it to be grim, my descent into the earth. Not when I can spend so long peering hopefully into the heavens. Because hope is real my friend, even when the fancies that feed it are not.

Hope lives alongside despair and they resonate with each other. It is always when I am high with hope that I can peer down into the deepest abyss inside me and gaze upon its infinite darkness with an objective and understanding eye. The abyss lives inside us all, Garett, we simply need to keep it in its place; we simply need to keep our eyes to the clouds and to the skies.

This is obscene advice coming from me and I am almost sure that I can hear you laughing already. But, don't mock me for getting carried away with my metaphors. There is nothing there in the clouds which doesn't also dwell on the earth, in our impassioned words and joyful laughter and grasping hands. Can I feed the love of life to you in spoonfuls of words? No. But I see it in you and I simply want to tell you, my anxious friend, that nothing is wrong.

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