"if I ever cease to love"

"Can
you
give
me
sanc...
tu...
ar...
y..."

New Orleans--never been there. But I'll tell you where I have been--at the center of myth, in the veins of ritual, in a swirl of Catholic mysticism and grasping, gripping, faithless faith-wanting semi-despair--yet catechized into never relinquishing the last of belief; on darkest days, the tiniest of seeds fallen out of place onto cold marble, nowhere to root in the vastest expanse of empty echoless cathedral. The undertow of emptiness is lonely lonely until you recognize other drowners in your deep--and then it is heady, foaming with recognition.

*****


Green, gold, purple;
Mardi Gras in three colors.
Faith, power, justice;
nothing more compelling than a trinity.

Carnival season, farewell to flesh, from Twelfth Night to Mardi Gras: bidding adieu with a long, hot, salty embrace; anticipating forty days and nights of penitence and denial, to become worthy.

And what of those who never felt unworthy?

*****


"I must find
a place to hide..."

I never liked costumes, wouldn't wear masks. Never cared for losing myself, even for a day. Won't wear things that don't feel like mine; can't look in the mirror at a stranger primped for a ritual I did not originate.

"...a place for
me to
hide..."

Masques, parades, beads, and baubles; masks and costumes; torch-lit processions and liquor-lit revelers: the ritualized, orgiastic losing of self. Then here are we, too vain, too proud, to ever lose our selves in the masses--charter members of a secret society not unlike the Carnival krewes who cloak the season in mystique. And yet, a paradox: never being lost makes it that much more difficult to find the self when necessary. This we know too well.

Know we also: there are better ways to dissolve the self, if only holding out for a moment of personal choosing, so as not to be a one among the all. One among one, one among two, one among few well-chosen--these we can abide.

Remember always, the re-emergence of the self-lit blinds--blinds others, as the sun-staring had first blinded the audacious into dissolution.

Audacity is not a sin.

*****



"Can
you
find
me
soft
a..
sy...
lum..."

As I sit writing, in a comfy chair, in a homey chain-cafe, the time approaching closing, the employees that I'd befriended earlier cross their tolerance threshold for cafe music and find solace in The Doors. They start with "People Are Strange", though they may as well have hit "The Soft Parade", so engrossed in the mythic and mystic is my mind.

"I can't make
it anymore..."

Say what they may of James Douglas Morrison, entering this world on the Immaculate Conception, exiting via Paris on the third of July... but he knew.

He knew.

*****



We need not end life as he did, grabbing wildly at nothings, wishing density upon vapors and hallucinations, thrashing to fill the void, succeeding only in expelling the very air that shapes the vessel. What seems a vacuum is in actuality vast potential. 'Tis the void that's an illusion.

...And I would give you directions to the location of my soul, if I thought you needed them.