This weekend, C and I went to Las Vegas, and spent some time with our friend, J.
I’ve known J for a long time, and we’ve gone through a lot together over the years. In a completely Bizarro/Opposite World kind of way he reminds me of my friend Amy, in that they are two people so like me and yet so incredibly unlike me – so like and unlike each other – that they operate as these odd, dueling self-referential poles planted on the surface of my conception of my own identity. They are my brother and my sister, and they could not be more different.
This, I know, says something about the divided, contrasting, and sometimes conflicted way I see myself, who I am. And really, at bottom, isn’t much of how we conceive of ourselves relational? I am my mother’s daughter, I am a part of this tribe, I am bound to this one person, enemy of this other, and so on, from the day we come into the world until the day we exit it. We’re all many other things too, of course, but if we do each have souls I know for certain that those two are among a small handful of flesh-and-blood reference points on the map of directions to where you can locate mine.
So this weekend I spent some time talking with J about writing, because, well, I’ve been over-thinking and worrying too much lately, and not doing enough of it. I’ve been bothered by this, and I needed to say a few rambling words about it to someone who might understand, but who might also give me a kick in the ass. At some point in the proceedings, J – in one giant, lanky step – moved to stand up on one of the chairs in our hotel room, and read aloud to us:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
I don’t think when he read it, he was even really reading it to me, that he meant it that way. That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t think he understood at that moment – though maybe he did, who knows – how much it was exactly what I needed to hear from him. That is, a little something about time, and how little any of us have of it to squander.
Point taken.
But we all sang together, joyously: I have two big hands and a heart pumping blood… Then, later: can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all. And a few times my eyes welled up, my heart was so stupidly, achingly full. Because there he was. And there C was. And there I was. There we were, together, in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, with Oz glittering before us and the desert at our backs.
