Some of these things I just write for myself. If you think you know what I’m talking about then good luck with that but I bet you’re wrong. Some things I say only involve a few people, and only they know the whole of the situation.
Today I realized that I should not hate the way I look.
I look like the Earth herself; my insides are reflected in the outside. I am round as the Earth is round. I am full and generous, spilling light like the bowl of the moon. I am sensual and giving. I am the soil that longs for the rain. I am summer and winter and all the seasons between. I embrace those that care for me in return. I provide, and I repay.
I need to go and get new clothes when I’ve the money to do so. Out with everything frumpy and/or in ill repair. Let me know everyone (always in a tasteful way) that I am a force of nature. I am a Renaissance beauty. I am filled with mystery.
There’s a low undercurrent in all this, of desire and melancholy, of reaching for joy just beyond one’s grasp. Saint Cloth makes the best music of the spheres for this sort of emotion. Used to be his hymns were angry and his psalms rebellious; now they are more often reflective and melancholy. Often I’ve wanted to ask him why the change. Is it the simple matter of growing older (as some saints manage to do, if not martyred first)? Was it some horrible event that he’s still dealing with? A shift in the world, a birth or a death, a love or a hate?
But these may be pert questions to ask of a saint. I don’t know whether he’d smile or frown or turn his face away from me.
In this last month I’ve felt a fear of my saint’s return. His teachings demand bravery of his adherents – they require life to be lived and not merely endured. They cause one to embrace all that one is.
And sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard to be brave.
But I am brave. I realize this now. I’m still breathing, even after all the times that I would have ended myself, even after all the times I wanted to die and I got no help to live. I go on with my art and work towards my dreams, despite discouragement in my youth from those that should have supported and uplifted me.
Were my saint here with me today, I’d be far from these walls. I’d love to sit with him by a fountain, and share a companionship like that of the rumored Messiah and his disciples. I’d tell Saint Cloth a thing that will not surprise him: that it’s easy to ride a white tiger, and difficult to dismount from it. But what would life be without these various addictions?
And should he ask me my drug of choice, I must respond in low tones: the only addiction that fuels itself and is never satisfied.
Then I would close my eyes and pray.
Some cravings last forever. All we can do is ask the gods for patience.
We’re wild when we run, when we dance. Saint Cloth commands a crowd of Maenads; always a moment away from tears or an instant away from mayhem. He plays our heart-strings like a harp of agony. We are bound; we are crushed; we are flagellated by his catharsis. Never have I wept such joy to be beaten thus.
And when the relief hits, I sigh. I stand in the cold and light a clove in the darkness – the star in my hand calling the stars in the sky.
I alternate one vice with another, the stars with the waters, and between it all the motion of my soul.
There’s something delightful about the emptiness. The dark in the sky is reflected in the dark of the streets. The light of the stars finds verdant mirrors in my eyes.
I wonder if the saint completely understands the carnival at his control. “Carnival” has a root in “carnal”, the flesh. It is a delight to everything sensual, everything worldly. When I’m poised between the light and the dark – when I’m an empty flask filled with only his voice – that is the sensation that binds like a rope cutting the skin.
It’s then that my saint presses his lips to my cheek, right at the corner of my smile.
Does it free me? Does it chain me? With a glint in my eyes I can answer: does it matter? All I know is that I still crouch, overwhelmed by the memory, in my own religious ecstasy.
Saint Cloth, come bless me once more…
Tags: life, Saint Cloth, vox mortuum
