As things are really picking up around here between my ears, and as in another month and a half to decade and a half you will all be able to read my monumental latest (which has garnered a five star rating from both my mom and my girlfriend), it’s only natural that I would reflect on my past. The events that got me here, now. Granted, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Yet, I am unmistakably shaped by my experiences. More accurately, by the people I have known and loved.
I’ll go ahead and use the trite yet universal symbol for love, the heart, disclaiming all the while that the mechanism for this mysterious phenomenon (love) is not relegated to this organ in the body. Rather, claiming it for somebody (at least in my case) is preceded by a process involving most, if not all organs. Most notably: skin, eyes (are these organs?), ears (again, organs?), lungs, uterus, spleen, brain (obviously), and heart. Blood is also involved as well as various other fluids, depending on the nature of the love — romantic or otherwise — sometimes not categorically opposed.
Thinking back, I can’t help but notice the quicksand quality of my heart: a deep mass into which (lucky) people readily sink. I imagine them each there, frozen mid-scene. Some memorable scene still gnawing at my ribcage, salting everything inside, sounding off like glass-and-chrome echoes. Not hazy memories. No. That’s not the way loved people get retained in my mafia, alcoholic, unfathomable, scattered, veins-like, weathered, stardusted, foamtop heart. Rather, they are monuments to themselves. Etched in such solid and intricate detail as to sometimes — when just tripping along not paying attention — get mistaken for the real thing.
There’s a buried town in Italy where a thick layer of volcanic ash and stone fell in the first century, AD. Pompei was buried so quickly and hotly that, when excavated hundreds of years later, a single moment in time was found perfectly preserved. People with upturned heads, busy hands, embracing arms — vivid facial expressions even — were preserved in situ. And so it is with me. All the people I have loved and still love remain. Sometimes, upon inspection, they drip like exit wounds. Sometimes, they exist in my daily life and remain isolated from their pyroclastic counterparts. Only time will unveil what gets preserved.
Separation isn’t required for preservation, as I have all of my siblings, family members, and many active friends turned to timber and fingernails in the infiltrated recesses of my heart. If any of you have seen the movie Cold Souls (really excellent movie, by the way), it’s like that only, instead of walking through a dank building or starkwhite room with dreamlike images from your life playing out before you, there are galleries of pyroclastics. Each of my siblings, for example, has a gallery. A gallery contains both perfectly preserved moments and a sort of distillation of everything into an archetypal form that reflects his or her properties, graces, conventions, habits, openings, celebrations, and all such fragments. These archetype-statues are not stone, but colored by dirty-gold. Or, better yet, star-colored against black night like constellations.
Kristen is something like Orion with arms wrapped around flocks of vulnerability while simultaneously hunting and slaying adversity in all its manifestations. Scott is Perseus, winning the ultimate prize for all to see while at the same time floating with his existential pain in a wooden chest through the sea. Katy is, of course, Andromeda, weighted in chains, both perpetually rescued and impossible to rescue. Steve is easy: Lynx, a giant seagull flying toward possibility with a heart thirty times bigger than the sun.
There aren’t yet as many constellations in the pompeiian galleries of my heart as there are in the night sky (officially, about 88 throughout the northern and southern hemispheres) but the correlation is poignant. The great majority of named star patterns bear little, if any, resemblance to the figures they represent.
Just like the heart doesn’t actually contain the mechanism for love — at least not exclusively. Also, perhaps, just as our bodies (faces, hands, hair, teeth, limbs) don’t bear much resemblance to whatever it is that they represent. The constellations and pyroclastics preserved in my “heart” point to something inarticulable and too big to fathom. As does this throbbing and tender skin bag I find myself in.
(“The penultimate sentence is hitting on the theme of your corpus.†– C.G.)
Recent Comments