Authenticity

Authenticity

Today I listened to Hole driving home. It felt enraged, real, starving, like I used to feel all of the time. It it is now a memory of my anger, it is not up-to-date but it was a shadow of something that has transformed now, or that waits, silent as an egg, for its final transformation. It was the kind of anger I have outgrown but there was no substitute, I don't have songs for what's in me now. It's not rage anymore, it's an acceptance maybe, but maybe a reluctant acceptance. Maybe a resignation, maybe a small and treatable wound. It's not as grasping. “Live Through This” has a Hunger. Now I nod and wave at it. I wish it the best. I am injecting its nostalgia but it's not the same. It's the decaf of rage.

Tonight I am listening to The Tallest Man on Earth, as it's a weekend and I don't need strength anymore, I need sadness, and he is mournful, he doesn't so much as invite tears as dig a ditch with his raw and bleeding hands, for tears to fall into. “Once I held a glacier to an open flame”. We are going to see glaciers again in a few months. Apparently I like things that are frozen, and it's true, I do. I like fighting against the cold. I like the resistance, I like feeling my heart fight for it's life, I like the Elements. I like the struggle, I like feeling my body generate it's own heat, it's own power, against an indomitable force. I like the exhaustion it costs me.

Right now, I feel sad about so many words, so much speech and all is Presentation, all is Angle, all is subtlety and Claiming: this word, that. All is: it doesn't matter as long as it makes everyone Feelgood. All is what is Graceful and nicely packaged, all is glib, all is the about The Big Show, when I feel a deep need for integrity in my voice. I want a silent retreat, I want Alignment, I want something behind what is always Crafted and Spoken and Presented. I want something behind the artifice. I am afraid of my freelance writing website because I am afraid of adding to the not-true, the chatter, the goddamned endless chatter, the Message. I don't want to use language that way, for those purposes. I am remembering a line from Anne Sexton: “I have to dig/I have to dig and dig.”

Once a teacher said that the 5th chakra, the throat chakra, the seat of our Voice, was what God used to create the Ethereal Template for the physical form of man. I didn't immediately understand this, until someone in the room became very excited and said that's exactly why it was so important to have integrity behind our Word, why honesty in our speech matters so much. This same teacher once told me that my chronic sadness is because of a separation from my spiritual home. Maybe right now both things feel like the same to me.

Silence

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so. --from “Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Let me enter fully
what lies between words.
No void, no space, no
unborn stars, only
voiceless prayer.

Let me be one
of the world's lunatics,
who seek dead air in earnest.
Give me my tomb
of smoke, and a filthy robe.
I'll sit out my years with only a spoon
and begging bowl to my unknown name.

Outside, let the sound of mind lay down
their highways of jabber
in every open airspace, ingenious
arterials of racket
to drown out the murmurs
of our immovable despair.
I'll stay indoors, my ears
jammed with clay and tallow.

I will hold whatever sidles
through the soundless black:
this ache, that anguish
each hot pang that comes.

In the end, when silence rises
and there is nothing left on Earth to do,
I'll step into the open air.
We'll stand together mute,
astounded at the knowledge
that the whole, nattering
world was so quiet underneath;

all this time, so still.

Only then will we hear the divine
hymn of our loneliness,
and how stunning
our song was all along.