I’ve not written you in a while, Mark. I’ve been fighting the battle again, and this time doing nothing more than holding ground. It’s difficult to talk about it; if you will pardon me, I’ll express it more as allegory.

I, body and mind, am a labyrinth designed by Daedalus.

There are none other like me; there never will be again. I am a singular thing. Beautiful, complicated, intertwining.

I contain a living Minotaur.

Misshapen, misbegotten creature — unholy offspring of human and animal, half-royal, demanding and desirous of sacrifice, fed on human flesh. Send the best and the brightest down to it, drawn by lots. You will not see them again.

It cannot be escaped. It cannot be stopped. It can only be contained.

I was born with the Minotaur inside me, curse of my heredity. It nearly destroyed me in my childhood — I was a very sick young girl. Then my health seemed to steady and I grew to the age of twenty-three, appearing physically, outwardly, normal.

Then it gathered its strength and struck again in earnest.

I was very sick, for a very long time. I lost employment. I lost relationships. More than once I came quite close to losing my life.

Dante in his Divine Comedy encounters the Minotaur at the entrance to the Seventh Circle of hell, among those damned for violent natures. I can believe it — the Minotaur for the better part of a decade has taken almost all the good out of my life worth having.

Sovegna vos al temps de mon dolor… “be mindful in due time of my distress”.

I am reminded every day, in the choices I must make… in the dreadful vigilance and constant care I must take.

Eventually this your Humble Prisoner, through reason and wit, found encryption and incantation that would drive back the monster — bound him up, lock him away, send him into sleep.

It is a never-ending battle. Any little mistake or treachery can wake him and send him galloping on dire cloven hooves again through the corridors of my body, snorting fire, eager to trample and rend and devour. He gobbles down my hours, my vitality, my motive force, my wit, my very soul.

I’m not charming in those moments, Mark. I’m sure I must be very difficult to love. Thank the gods that some have found themselves still able to manage it.

There will be no crafty duplicitous Theseus in my world, to bring peace with his sword. No one will save me but myself. That has been a lesson years in learning; I know it by heart now.

All my armor is still on, however, and I *am* still standing. Tomorrow I get up again, Mark, and this time I will be pushing to regain more ground. I will be writing more. I will be posting more. I will be working more.

I have not forgotten you, no matter how long I may lose mankind’s deceiver — Hope. I have kept my eyes on the stars and what I aim for, I hit.

So I am pleased to sign myself once more for you

Warden of Nightmares,

Vox Mortuum

Tags: Dante Alighieri, Ever-Fixed Mark Letters, Minotaur

Dear Mark… what is it about a quiet clove cigar on the front porch in the chill of a late autumn evening that can bring some clarity to my seething brain?

First I thought of Simon and Garfunkel, as I often do:

Time, time, time, see what’s become of me
While I looked around
For my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around, leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter…

And then as the nicotine took hold I thought of the Platters:

Heavenly shades of night are falling, it’s twilight time
Out of the mist your voice is calling, it;s twilight time
When purple colored curtains mark the end of day
I’ll hear you, my dear, at twilight time…

And then I wished I could see one of the stars (because they remind me of you, Mark) but the night is overcast. The smoke in my exhalation writhed up, distinct and fragrant, to join the clouds high above.

So I feel like I should mention e.e. cummings. I did go to all the trouble of buying a collection of his erotic poetry. Why? Because it amused me — written smut by the same gent whose dada-istic poetry we were all forced at gunpoint to read in grade school, only half-comprehending.

And I feel much the same about it then as I do now, even with an erotic bent. Several things come to mind: “he wins often at scrabble”, “like falling down a flight of stairs — whilst naked”, “it’s like a telegraph had a seizure”, “anyone with a magnetic poetry set from Spencer’s could do as well these days”, “unexpected euphemisms, for the win”, “the included drawings weren’t necessary but add that extra touch of creepy”, and “I really wish you hadn’t written so many about your favorite prostitute.”

Don’t think I do e.e. wrong — I respect his body of work. Especially his prolificacy; nearly three thousand poems, according to wikipedia? Holy hell, man! Alas — in general it’s not my cup of tea, whether PG or R rated.

But there *are* some gems in here; practically everyone’s read the “i like my body when it is with your” poem and it *is* a good one. But I also care for “my youthful lady”:

my youthful lady will have other lovers
yet none with hearts more motionless than i
when to my lust she pleasantly uncovers
the thrilling hunger of her possible body.

(it were not well to be in this thing jealous.)
My youthful lust will have no further ladies.

And among a few others, foremost the short one that brought the title of this entry, that still has the power to make yours truly (however jaded she may feel herself to be) blush:

wild(at our first)beasts uttered human words
—our second coming made stones sing like birds—
but o the starhushed silence which our third’s

Even if I feel that reading his poetry is a bit like looking at life through a shattered window, I can respect the purity of the colors that shine through.

Well. I must back to my craft go; the remaining hours are slipping away from me. So I sign myself once more

Your searching sextant (don’t snicker; I know you know what it means!),

Vox Mortuum

Tags: e.e. cummings, Ever-Fixed Mark Letters, Platters, Simon and Garfunkel

Dear Mark — I messed myself up last week.

On Thursday, my workplace had a fire drill. Now, let me explain: I am in my new position on the 15th floor of my office building and feeling all the passive snobbery that the height gives me. There are only 18 floors of that part of the RealJobCompound(TM) and, as everyone in the corporate world knows, the higher up you go the more important you are.

So I went into the stairwell, like a good little employee. And your dear Vox got a brilliant idea, being that she would go down all 30 flights of stairs and head outside to a safe location instead of sitting in a cold iron stairwell supposedly pressurized for the dubious safety of physical cripples like yours truly.

I wasn’t entirely trusting of safety measures.

But the worst part is that I had no signal on my cellphone. Visions of 9/11 are going through my head and here I am thinking that I’m high up in my benighted building now and I’m going to die and I can’t even tweet about it. No one will know where I am. They’ll identify my remains two weeks from now by dental records.

Thirty flights of stairs, but it’s down. Down and I are friends. Gravity likes me ever so much.

So I climb down thirty flights of stairs to go outside to a designated location… for about 5 minutes and then they call us all back in.

I took the elevator up.

But before the end of the day I knew that my top half and my bottom half were no longer on speaking terms.

Today is Sunday and my legs from hips down to ankles are still weak and agony-filled. Standing or walking is difficult. Shifting position in my chair still brings new spikes of pain.

Pain is so personal. Pain stretches time and compresses it; hours into days, or days into endless moments. Pain is a constant companion. When all other friends and family members leave — when even the nurses turn the lights down and retreat to their station, Pain remains. Pain fogs the mind, destroys the memory, dulls the senses, dampens the soul.

I was asked this weekend if I was having “fun”. It doesn’t mean the same to someone living in a prison of their own body. This weekend has been *good*. I have enjoyed it. I was glad it happened.

But it’s not been “fun”.

Normal people may not immediately understand a distinction.

Oftentimes I think of people that live pain-free lives who experience a few days of discomfort as “tourists”. They can take some pictures and send some postcards but soon they’ll be leaving it again, while we natives dwell here permanently. Full-body anguish and significant loss of faculties is a state of being that few can understand without experiencing.

I spend all of my days in some level of pain; so much so that I’ve got a new and different level of “normal”. I ignore with regularity the pain that would send someone else rushing for medical assistance. I know there’s not much they can do for me.

But I got so used to my new “normal” that I had come to believe (for a while, at least) that I could be “well” again.

I don’t think that’s the case, Mark. Not after this weekend.

I will never be all that I could have been… but I could become a new thing.

Let me give you the bon mots of a man that knew Pain like I know it: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his sonnet “Pain: Composed in Sickness”.

Once could the Morn’s first beams, the healthful breeze,
All Nature charm, and gay was every hour: —
But ah! not Music’s self, nor fragrant bower
Can glad the trembling sense of wan Disease.
Now that the frequent pangs my frame assail,
Now that my sleepless eyes are sunk and dim,
And seas of Pain seem waving through each limb —
Ah what can all Life’s gilded scenes avail?
I view the crowd, whom Youth and Health inspire,
Hear the loud laugh, and catch the sportive lay,
Then sigh and think — I too could laugh and play
And gaily sport it on the Muse’s lyre,
Ere Tyrant Pain had chas’d away delight,
Ere the wild pulse throbb’d anguish thro’ the night!

I don’t know if this letter has made much sense, Mark, but it’s what I’ve got to give right now. So I sign myself

A pilgrim of Tyrant Pain,

Vox Mortuum

Tags: Ever-Fixed Mark Letters, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Oh my dear Mark… too much has been happening. Where can I even start?

First, my new job position is wonderful. It challenges me every day and promises to do so for months to come. I spend all day busy thinking and I come home with my brain spinning. My team is perfect: intelligent, polite, considerate, treating me like a valuable human being and a treasured addition among them. They’re everything I could ask for.

They are everything my old management team was not.

It appears that my old supervisor, in a complete lapse of sanity into career-suicide pique and whimsy, had my badge terminated after I began working for the other team. Tuesday morning was quite exciting. Eventually we had it all straightened out and it became clear that this was his last little love-tap. A fitting farewell from Monsieur Merde…

But I had an absolutely lovely conversation with HR and forwarded them, oh, all sorts of emails today that I’m sure they’ll be very concerned over, about the *previous* time I had to complain about this manager’s behavior.

I’ll stop right there, as schadenfreude is best shared in person or so I find. But I will say that I’ve inherited my mother’s motto, sometimes: If you can’t say anything nice, come and sit next to me.

Annnnnnnnyway.

To take a bit of a breather this week I was rereading Chuck Palahniuk’s “Invisible Monsters”. I do love Chuck’s writing style; it’s a bit like whispered playground conversation where rumor and hearsay are presented as gospel truth and half-understood jokes are retold to laughter and unease. Chuck can make you believe that dogs can’t look up and the stuff inside golf balls is deadly poison and if you put a penny on a train track in just the right (or wrong) place you can make the train derail…

“Now,” those Plumbago lips say, “You are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night.” That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me. “When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.”

What do I draw out of that book? There could be so many things — I think his work is a different well for each reader. But for me, it’s that life must be a struggle or it’s nothing. The self is disposable and transient — “it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever.” Being pretty is not sufficient for the sake of one’s soul, but too many people think it is. You should do what scares you. The psyche is something we reinvent every new instant, and one’s past is far from written in stone.

And that love is, sometimes, a choice.

I’m giving you my life to prove to myself I can, I really can love somebody. Even when I’m not getting paid, I can give love and happiness and charm. You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.

I couldn’t do Plumbago lipstick, however, as we’re discovering that many lipsticks awaken the Minotaur inside me. More on that later — I promise to someday explain.

But just now the evening grows later and I’ve other obligations to keep, so I sign myself once more

Your ongoing social experiment,

Vox Mortuum

Tags: Chuck Palahniuk, Ever-Fixed Mark Letters

Dear Mark;

The weekend’s seemed so short and I spent much of it the captive of the minotaur inside me — the minotaur I hope to someday tell you about. But in its effects I can be plain: its ravages made me puny and tired.

Still, I have triumphed for the moment, and so I have found myself pondering bravery.

Bravery is not the absence of fear; any idiot could be brave if he were too stupid to fear. Bravery instead is to continue on in the full and present experience of fear.

Two quotes from the ages are in my mind, thinking this: “Fortune favors the bold” (which, unsurprisingly enough, has been the last words of many bold as they die of something incredibly stupid) and “Faint heart never won fair maiden”.

Nor did it deserve to, I think.

The other thing that I think of alongside bravery is contempt. I am doing a number of brave things now, and will continue to do so — and a side-effect is feeling contempt for people who either think themselves incapable of bravery or simply cannot manifest it.

They do not deserve to win. Fair maid, or anything else.

Contempt is a destructive emotion all too easy to feel, and even somewhat enjoyable. When I notice myself in possession of it I try to turn it into pity… unless it’s for an ex, in which case they deserve what they’ve gotten.

In other news I’ve rediscovered Robert Frost, despite my old middle school’s best efforts at making me hate American poets. I especially love his “Once By The Pacific”:

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last ‘Put out the Light’ was spoken.

I look forward to reading more of his work soon.

And I also feel that I should give Miguel de Cervantes a go on my Kindle; if I’ve explored the nature of quests I should also delve into the anti-quest and other quixotic experiences, since there is every chance I will be making a colossal fool of myself for you in all of this.

Yet a Fool can still be useful — in some kingdoms they were thought to be touched by the gods, and were allowed to speak unfashionable truths without punishment. The Fool card in a Tarot deck also moves through the Major Arcana in a journey of discovery and eventually transitions into the World card, complete.

And isn’t Lady Luck herself said to be green-eyed?

So I sign myself tonight

Your lucky card,

Vox Mortuum

Tags: Ever-Fixed Mark Letters, Robert Frost

(Originally written around 6AM on 10/16/2012 but was shoved in my pocket until I had time to transcribe it…)

Dear Mark; in the dread false dawn this morning, feeling full of despair, I find the main problem I had with “The Once And Future King” — being that the first couple of its sections are full of energy and action and the last sections are much like Greek plays, with all the action occurring “off stage” and then being relayed to the audience via messenger who can color their story with their own point of view and opinions.

Because of this we see none of the pain that Galahad and Percival may have experienced on their quest for the Grail.

Did they really carry on so easily?

Did they ever have moments of true fear or temptation?

Did they ever spend a restless dry-eyed night second-guessing themselves or their choices?

Did they ever feel hopeless or despairing?

Did they ever pray like the carpenter’s son in the garden, pleading “Take this cup from my lips”?

And towards that final chapel, did either of them hesitate for even a heartbeat on the threshold?

For some quests, there is no going home again. Some vital portion of the soul is changed beyond recognition.

T.H. White doesn’t tell us and I don’t know if I can brave Mallory in an attempt to find out. I can read heavy prose and I can “rede thee kynge’s Englishe”, but I suffer under both at once.

On something of a side note here, I’d wondered about rereading the complete and original Arabian Nights and crafting a flow chart of all the nested stories. It gets a charming amount of recursion.

Yesterday was rough; I received good news about a big project of mine (part of this quest, actually) and the scale had a good number on it… and then my mood imploded and I lost almost every shred of self-control.

Don’t let my normally calm demeanor fool you — I’ve put myself under a lot of pressure for this quest and I am holding myself to a number of very high ideals.

In the harsh light of false dawn, I learn to forgive myself the momentary lapse. It may even have been in some ways a blessing in disguise. It sharpens my resolve.

One of the hardest things for me is that this quest will be changing me permanently, in ways I cannot fully foresee. I don’t truly know what I’ll look like even one year from now.

Sometimes I am afraid to find out.

But the show must go on, and it will.

So I sign myself once more

The unknown chrysalis,

Vox Mortuum

Tags: Ever-Fixed Mark Letters, T. H. White

Dear Mark — I’m up at an ungodly hour this fine Sunday morning, because I’ll have to be up at a worse hour this next week. You’re probably already up, what with turning with the planet half a world away. My thoughts turn with you as you turn with the planet. I wonder how your days are filled, and if there is any particle of grace that I could bring to them. You deserve every good thing that the universe could offer you.

Forgive me please my forward speech; this past week I read all of A.E. Housman’s work I could lay my hands on and he has been reaffirmed as my patron saint of inappropriate love and despair. This entry will be heavy on his works and why? Because I find myself able to speak no better bon mots than what the man himself wrote.

A.E. was a closeted gay man in a time where men were still being hanged for the “crime” of loving unwisely. He fell in love with his best friend who rejected him and married a woman without inviting or even telling him about the event. He also lived through a few British wars and watched all these beautiful young men be shipped away and die on distant shores. So that gives you a bare-bones background on his feeling and environment, which you may have had already.

My first experience with A.E. was back in high school, where I read a collection of Star Trek short stories (yes, I am *that* sort of geek) where the following was quoted in part:

I to my perils
Of cheat and charmer
Came clad in armour
By stars benign.
Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her,
But man’s deceiver
Was never mine.

The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.

This poem could be a prime example of his work; A.E. was a poetic millstone that ground slow but exceedingly fine. It could have taken him months to write the sixteen lines above but they’re as sharp as a thrown dagger. Altogether the poem is as precise as the delicate clock action of a fine pocket watch, yet still conveys entirely the sense of solitude and separation he felt from the world.

A.E. is good at painting emotion in few words.

Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.

But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.

Now that is a NIGHT, let me tell you. Love, death, peace, war, and sleep — all themes that are constantly woven together in his work.

On your midnight pallet lying,
Listen, and undo the door:
Lads that waste the light in sighing
In the dark should sigh no more;
Night should ease a lover’s sorrow;
Therefore, since I go to-morrow,
Pity me before.

In the land to which I travel,
The far dwelling, let me say —
Once, if here the couch is gravel,
In a kinder bed I lay,
And the breast the darnel smothers
Rested once upon another’s
When it was not clay.

And poems like the above are why I say that for those with ears to hear and eyes to read, A.E.’s work should be sold in a brown paper wrapper. In the first two lines he evokes the Song of Solomon and all the frustrated love and sensual longing therein, then goes on to beg that since he believes he is going to his death (i.e., being shipped off to war the next day), his lover should take pity on his fate and make love to him that night.

And yet for all he wrote of love and lust (or *because* of these things), he also wrote achingly of despair:

Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.

Lords above but I could quote his whole catalogue here and barely be satisfied. Because he gave each piece such struggle in its birthing each one is like faceted gemstone. And I’ve found one that reminds me so much of you I nearly cried upon first reading it. That one I’ve written in my personal notebook… I hope some day to have a chance to read it to you. In its place however, one other suitable work that perhaps doesn’t rip my heart nearly as much:

The half-moon westers low, my love,
And the wind brings up the rain;
And wide apart lie we, my love,
And seas between the twain.

I know not if it rains, my love,
In the land where you do lie;
And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,
You know no more than I.

I hope some day to make a pilgrimage to A.E. Housman’s grave in Shropshire, and to read him the sonnet I wrote in his honor — but should I be delayed or turned aside in this by my questing for you, I know he would understand. He, above all others in this world, would surely understand.

So today I go to the deeds that need doing, bearing jonquils in my heart — and I sign myself for you, Mark

The traveler upon the long road,

Vox Mortuum

Tags: A.E. Housman, Ever-Fixed Mark Letters

Dedicated to A.E. Housman, with the utmost of respect…

Ancestor of my soul, you lived in times
That did you great injustice; though forgot
By most the world, I still revere your rhymes
And find my goals the same as what you sought.

Untouched by age, your eloquence is clear;
Your lines as poignant now as long ago.
The echoes of your pain from yesteryear
Ring in my chest, more true than you could know.

You, half in love with death but more with life,
Lost life of loves in wars that would not cease
And now in death share sleep that mends all strife –
Your lowly student hopes that you found peace.

My heart is torn by words that worthy wrote;
Betimes, a broken flute plays sweeter note.

Copyright (C) Vox Mortuum 2012

Tags: Ever-Fixed Mark Letters, Sonnets

Because I am Vox Mortuum, who gathers up the winds,
who races hares with oxen,
and who swims against the flood waters…

Please — show no shock to find me stranded here
Tormented by the sins I’d done before;
Call Purgatory naught, with you so near –
Behold me now: your once-loved troubadour.

So I be damned for surfeit of desire?
What of it, then? I craved it, more than air –
To thaw thy frozen heart in carnal fire
And, phoenix-like, was proud to perish there.

Now go, my heart, and leave me to my fate,
To weep and sing on borderland of Hell.
Should Heaven query, to that Host relate –
I loved unwise, but always loved thee well.

All I could beg of thee I cherish best:
“Be mindful in due time of my distress…”

AND THE VARIANT VERSION (containing the original quote):

Please — show no shock to find me stranded here
Tormented by the sins I’d done above;
Call Purgatory naught, with you so near –
Behold me now: the lady you once loved.

So I be damned for surfeit of desire?
What of it, then? I craved it, more than air –
To thaw thy frozen heart in carnal fire
And, phoenix-like, was proud to perish there.

Now go, my heart, and leave me to my fate,
To weep and sing on borderland of Hell.
Should Heaven query, to that Host relate –
I loved unwise, but always loved thee well.

All I could beg of thee I most adore:
“Sovegna vos al temps de mon dolor…”

Copyright (C) Vox Mortuum 2012

Tags: Ever-Fixed Mark Letters, Sonnets

Oh, sing to me of castles in the sky –
And poet, spin me tales of wealth untold,
Of Sultan’s ransoms, staggering to eye;
A dragon’s hoard of silver, gems, and gold.

The writer scribes a dream of distant shore.
The painter brushes stroke of opulence.
Were all these in my hand I’d still crave more –
I’ve made a virtue of intemperance!

Stendhal Syndrome, they call it in the Louvre;
This storm of passion lit inside my brow
Like Dante’s soul for Beatrice did move –
One glance from you would overcome me now…

Too much is not enough! Oh, sweet the pain!
Were I the sea I’d still long for the rain.

Copyright (C) Vox Mortuum 2012

Tags: Ever-Fixed Mark Letters, Sonnets