Trust Fall at Puck

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

I always fall in love with the girl in the book. When I was five, I fell in love with Sal, in Blueberries for Sal. She filled her pail with berries and then ate them all, saving none for later. That’s the sort of self-indulgence I can identify with.

When I was twelve, my biblioamour was Eowin, the warrior princess in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Eowin dressed up like a boy in order to escape the confines of her gender, so that she could go out and fight the good fight. Later it was voices on the radio, like when I was ten and fell hard for Melanie. That was around 1968, and when she belted out a chorus to, “Candles in the Rain,” I understood why people sometimes said, “I’d lay my life on the line”—for her, to protest the War, to ensure that we can each love whom and when we want. At about that same time I came to the realization that love can’t be restricted, at least not the way that, say, grammar can be prescripted. If the culture I was born into seemed to insist that boys fall in love with girls, I was certain, at nine or ten, that this must be some sort of misunderstanding.

At some point during the turbulence of adolescence, my skin grew hungry. I inched out of my books far enough to start falling in love—and all the rest—with flesh and blood humans. I don’t think I was really aware that I had a body before I was seventeen. The sounds we make when we are entrained and consumed by passion come from some inner core of us, from some place where we don’t wear masks, wear nothing but skin and nerves. Especially the sighs, those electric currents that come from deep within the body. When our neural pathways are sluiced with the chemical brine induced by kissing and caressing, time is stripped of its tyrannical clothing. Like a medieval carnival, lovemaking restores the body’s empire, exalting the lowly and inarticulable, making the uncontrollable fool king for an hour or a day.

My body is an uncontrollable fool. The fool, like the trickster, in many religions is a sacred being, the one who can mediate between our quotidian lives and the divine. It’s the fool in us who induces “alternate” states of consciousness, states which in fact aren’t alternatives but necessities. The fool is an open mind, the imaginal desire that convinces us of our changes of heart—and the fool is the one who incites to take the risks that make our hearts change. As an idea with a history, the fool has many names. My favorite example from this history is that of Socrates, whose daimon guided him to his own death as the proving, the refining, truth of his “foolish” love of life. If we’ve learned to distrust our “foolish” intuition, this ability to be instructed by some wordless inner mentor, it is because of our phobia of the body and our fear of life’s uncontrollable topsy-turviness. Standing mute, with an idiot grin on his face, the fool is perched on the edge of a cliff. If he thinks a thought at all, he will back away from the cliff with a gasp. But if the fool is truly foolish, he’ll leap, silent and trusting, into the void of the unknown.

My body may be wordless, but it speaks loudly. The powerful surges, the subtle traces that course through our stomachs, knees, palms, and loins are the signs we must interpret to know our bodies’ intentions. Like little proletarians, these signs do the work of bearing the information from the inner stuff of us to our conscious selves trying to get by in the world. Like proletarians, these messages from the body are often socially unacceptable, impractical, revolutionary, life changing, messy. The body does not live by the time of the clock but by the spiraling seasons of the sun and the gravitational phases of the moon. The body is our creative well, and its laws often run askew to the axis of jurisprudence.

If some of us are capable of negotiating a treaty, or enforcing a silence, between the laws of nature and the codes of culture, I am not. I learned to avoid conflict early in life, that the best offense is a good defense. My defense was to be silent in the world and lead a noisy interior life. That’s where I break the laws of nature and transpose the codes of culture. All sorts of biographical data could be offered to demonstrate the why of my survival strategy, but for now I’m more interested in the what, the stuff that this inner force has wrought. Because what happened is that I started writing. I started writing to the girls in the books I read, to the boys and girls I fell in love with, to myself, to the world. I stared listening to the voices.

Writing is a safe way to give voice to my foolish body, especially if I don’t let anybody read what I write. But the latter is impossible, because, after all, I have severe discipline problems. From the very beginning, I was breaking out of my vow of silence. I had to tell somebody what was spilling through my head, so I wrote letters. To my sixth-grade girlfriend down the street, to my grandmother far away, it didn’t matter. And I still write letters.

A child of the TV and the telephone, I could never write a letter with quotidian news in it. I’ve always thought that the news of the world was being told sotto voce, taking place just out of view, and that this world news was really the intimate history of our imaginations and our desires. The television drolly rolls on like an unchanging river of garbage, the perps and victims of our human mésalliance, the background noise above which I wanted—foolishly, perhaps—to find some meaning.

We think that writing may be a desire for communication, but I think this idea needs a little refinement. We engage in any form of communication—indeed, we cannot help but engage in forms of communication—because we desire contact. Some of us love nature because it makes us feel connected. I love to read because I often become passionately connected with the people and ideas I find on the page. This is why I am fascinated by, and am a devotee of, the epistle.

Letter writing is, I think, unique among the forms of written discourse in that it continues a conversation between two (or more) people by other means. In a letter to a lover, a trusted friend, a parent or sibling, we often find a voice more intimate than we can manage in person. Less worried about what our faces, our hands, our mouths might be saying, we are freer to wander through the free-associational thickets of our imaginations, to follow the meanderings of our desires and concerns. The intuitional urgings of our bodies, if heeded, can invoke a trust and compassion that render the most difficult truths and choices palatable.

This quality of voice is one I find strongest in the letters of Marsilio Ficino and John Keats. Keats is well known, of course, while Ficino, for his soulful wisdom and uncompromising counsel, is worth dusting off. He lived in the Florence of the Medicis, and was the court philosopher of the elder Medici, Lorenzo. Under Lorenzo’s patronage, Ficino founded the Platonic Academy, seeding the Renaissance flowering of Neoplatonism. Ficino was deeply introverted, and remained celibate all his life. Like most introverts, like many people, he suffered from depression, but instead of a curse he considered the black ache a gift. So too did Romantic poet John Keats. He wrote his brother George, after their younger brother Tom had died in John’s arms, that the world should not be called “a Vale of tears” but “a Vale of Soul-making.”

Neither Keats nor Ficino denied the terrible pain of depression, of grief, and praised the blessing flow of tears. To fall, to let the tears fall, to let the body find its emotional depths, is the way down into the wisdom Hades of the soul. From Heraclitus we know that “the dry soul is best,” and that there is no place drier of passion and clearer of judgment than the chthonic realm of Hades. Both philosopher and poet knew and loved the story of Socrates’ last days, with its epiphany of eternity and compassion. Ficino was particularly adept at bringing this encompassing passion to the passim citations of daily life. The most powerful men and women of his day sought him out for political and psychological advice, either by interview in person, or more often by post. Ficino allowed several editions of his letters to be published while he was still alive, and these became models for a style of letter writing that persisted through the nineteenth century.

When I started writing I didn’t know any of this history; no one had told me that the romance of letters was an anachronism. In my efforts to lighten the burden of the mystery of being alive, and in hopes of finding some comfort there, I dived head long into the romantic spirit, and have never since found a reason to emerge. The world my correspondents and I create in our letters can completely absorb me, until the personae of our exchange become the truth of my life, turning actual living into a badly drawn sketch.

Fidelity goes flying out the window when I get involved in a hot correspondence. My imaginal self overwhelms my quotidian perception. I cannot speak to the person in bed with me because my soul is engaged in conversation with someone who, in a sense, doesn’t exist except in my imagination. That this semi-existent lover licks a stamp and mails me missive only serves to corroborate my feeling that “real life” is of questionable provenance, because the person writing me the letters is making a statement, in the very act of writing, that reconciles my desire for meaning with my life’s unfathomable imagination. If we live our lives with other people—and how can we not, in some more or less direct fashion?—then my “withness” is often coupled to an other through the medium of the envelope.

Intense correspondences are marks of indigo periods in my life. The periods—months, years—when I hover, liminally, between subclinical depression and the deep black. The first one started when I was eighteen. I had met Michael the year before at school. He was a transfer student, and had been enrolled in my first period homeroom. When I walked into class, he was sitting in my seat. Within a few minutes, before the late bell rang, before the teacher had arrived, we were out of there, fast friends bonded instantly by our mutual discontent with the strictures of adolescence. We inaugurated our friendship that afternoon by eating a small pile of peyote buttons.

Within a year we had gotten into so much trouble together—and lost our virginities to a pair of girl friends—that parents and probation officers pushed Michael into the Air Force. The girl friends had been a distraction, his accommodation of me: we all knew Michael was gay, and that he and I were in love. He came out while in the Air Force, in letters to me, and in a big way to the gay community in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Michael wrote me letters about sex, about drinking, about getting into trouble with the military brass. I wrote letters about what it meant for us to be in love; I had nothing to say about living, much less how to get by in the service. He struggled to respond, but became less and less coherent.

When the Air Force kicked him out after a year, Michael came back to me. We moved in together, and nearly drank ourselves to death. Reality came caving in on the world I had imagined in my letters to Michael. My former best friend turned on me one night and left me sprawled on my kitchen floor. Another night, a bullet came thicking through our living room window, burying itself in the wall above our TV. I fled, back to the high desert, and started shooting rattlesnakes into my veins. Down, down I went into altered states of consciousness, down into the wishful dust of death.

Years lay down like strata in the face of a cliff, leaving their lines on our faces. Gravity pulls, insistent as sin, and our muscles and breasts flow in the same direction as our tears. Strangely, though, but perhaps not surprisingly, laughter appears to be an anti-gravity device. Spontaneous outbursts of laughter recombust the broken-down machine-prison soul-body, and we can feel the levitation of our spirits, the rejuvenation of our self-image, the tangles of quotidia turning to webs of meaning. Laughter induces an amorous blush of fate; it sparks a memory of the future.

Memory is like glue, sticking things together so they always come around again. Life is a bowl of karma jambalaya. If I don’t learn something right the first time, it comes back at me some time later like a recurrent boomerang. Things like French, or learning to live and love. Like music, love requires constant practice—and access to an instrument. Just as I am a slut for books, and have ravaged many a maiden therein, I like to play many instruments. I like to experiment with love—or, anyway, it likes to experiment with me.

In the summer of 1989, I was in a frenzied state of disponibilité, that French word that means “availability,” but in the hands of the surrealists has the sense of available to magic, to chance. That summer I traveled north to redwood country, to a summer arts program where I’d be writing poetry all day every day for three weeks. My duffel was stuffed with condoms; I was full of piss and vinegar, and horny as a hound dog’s full-moon howl. And I didn’t need a breakthrough or a jumpstart to write poems: I didn’t know her name yet, hadn’t yet imagined how we might fit together, but a muse already possessed me.

This possession-by-muse thing, it’s not something they teach you about in poetry school. That’s because poetry school is really life, the school of hard knocks, department of angst, contemplation, and seduction. Since my teen days hanging out on Hippie Hill, I knew I was supposed to “go with the flow.” A muse is just an altered state of consciousness. But, because following the flow had me nearly killing myself on repeated occasions, I no longer necessarily trusted my intuition. It may be cyclic, but the muse’s flow never stops pushing and tugging, so it’s not a matter of whether I trust or not. My lack of trust is only a form of resistance, and resistance is futile.

And I can be pretty persuasive myself. Though I had no luck the first week. Which is to say I wrote a lot, talked a lot, made some friends, but didn’t get laid. On Monday morning of the second week things changed. New arrivals, who couldn’t make it the first week. I noticed her immediately: the cascade of long blonde hair, of course, but, too, the small smile that was both a veil and an invitation. And within a few minutes, I was treated to the frank curiosity of her blue-eyed gaze. I guessed she was a few years older than I. She never spoke, just observed the speaker with those piercing eyes. When we went outside for cigarette breaks, she chatted with a couple of women I had learned were students at San Diego State.

We got out of class in the late summer afternoon. I walked down from the campus on the hill into the town of Arcata, seeking alcohol. I walked into the liquor store closest to campus, and out strode the quiet blonde.

“Hey!” she said, and grinned at me knowingly.

“Hi!” I managed to reply. From three feet away, this woman seemed unbearably beautiful. I stared at the crow’s feet around her eyes, revising her age upwards, and felt even more attracted. As usual, I was tongue-tied.

“Want to come have a glass of wine?” she offered.

“Yes, I do, thanks,” I said, and sighed with relief. Had it been up to me to make the first move, I would have stammered something unintelligible and moved past her into the store, kicking myself for not grabbing the chance, for being afraid of women, this woman.

Sue and I spent the next two weeks together, exploring each other. We may think that Mr. Spock’s Vulcan mind meld is a Star Trek science fiction, but in fact we mere humans are quite capable of conveying to each other the contents of our hearts and minds, even if only partially and slowly. But of all that has passed between me and Sue, one idea has proved the most durable and important, one theme has kept me on my trek.

Having just completed an undergraduate education, I was hardened by the cynicism that comes from immersion in the academic environment in which our body of knowledge is severed limb from limb. To our first chance meeting, I brought my disponibilité, my unquenchable thirst for alcohol, a backpack full of books and scribblings, and a rage against the control-freak machinations that I perceived as being responsible for leaving me intellectually torn and fragmented.

Sue brought much the same, except for the latter. She stared my rage in the face and posed it an implacably put question.

“Where’s the body? When you read those scholars, those philosophers you’re so angry at, do you ever ask yourself if a body could survive in the theoretical world they’re creating?”

Scales fell from my eyes. A million threads of thought immediately began to move and weave themselves into a fabric. Intuitive associations found legs to stand on, my imagination was given fingers to gather with, and when in the past it seemed that some idea had been swaying its hips, alluringly, I suddenly understood that of course ideas have hips! And if ideas wanted to lie down together, copulate polysemously, and make little baby theories, then by God, by nature, of course they could! I could feel the OH molecules roaring through me, slam-dancing with my brain cells, butt-bumping my liver, making me drunker than a whore on a holiday. What came next, I couldn’t say.

Except that Sue and I wrote letters. Lots of letters, long ones, full of our poetry, and news, and ruminations on that question. Sue’s ruminations were published a couple of years ago in her collection of poems, The Flesh Envelope. In the title poem of the book, she reminds us that the ancient Greeks knew all about the body and the soul. Epicurus wrote, “The soul is a body of fine particles distributed throughout the frame.” Sue then offers:

Folded into this fleshy envelope,
this frame that eats too much, drinks too much,
loves immoderately, angers easily & seldom forgives,
this husk that drives stupidly & works erratically—
is a Garden & in that Garden a soul
that walks at a leisured pace
discussing moral existence with like-minded friends.
………
How can I bring my soul into the world
without bringing the Garden?
The Garden is the apple, the world is the worm.
Or the soul is wax, the body pure flame.

I wrote endless letters: now that I knew the identity of the central player in the mystery of the human condition, I was full of theories. I’m still working on those theories; Sue gave me the gift of an intellectual toy that lasts a lifetime. And slowly, feeling, emotion, and the aimless wandering of a pleasant walk with a friend began to creep into my writing, into my being. What could I do but fall in love, and let Sue fill my poems the way she flowed through my body?

The rhythms of a lunar empire are in our blood,
and we sprout like mushrooms
in the burnt-out heart of a redwood.
You’re smarter than all the psychedelics of
my youth, and just like children,
we speak of a revolution in everyday life.
Everything leaks, I find you already here,
blue eyes undressed and beckoning
through this cloud of unknowing, welcoming me
with a gaze to anneal the passions of martyrs,
and a caress.
I want you in the dirt and the moss,
to make a mark upon the air with our breath
and the rhythms of our writhings.
We speak of the constantly breaking and rechaining
strands of love and knowledge, sigh,
lean into worldtree.
Through thick crusts, magma warms our spores.
Days later, in a dream full of the cool
and the shade, I noticed your absence,
and I turned, as if waking, I turned to touch you again,
and I’ll keep turning.

“The imagination is very powerful in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it.” –Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement

There’s this ’60s kid’s song by the guy who taught me how to play guitar which says, “Happiness runs in a circular motion.” What is it with the circular motion thing? We speak of vicious circles, while karma is a wheel in motion. Our emotions recirculate, and move in periodic, cyclic waves and currents. Why do we so pervasively employ the circulation metaphor to describe our emotional states? Do we feel as if there is a flow, or current of “stuff,” that circulates within ourselves, between beings?

Motion was the first big question among ancient Greek philosophers, and never has been resolved. In 2,500 years of physics, we haven’t been able to adequately explain why things move instead of staying put. Our theories may well convince us of their truth, but that’s what they remain: Greek theoria, “observations.” The Presocratic philosophers addressed the problem directly, and posited the existence of a primal stuff, an arché, that interactively expanded and contracted as it heated and cooled, thus initiating motion in the universe. The cause of this “condensation and refraction,” as the Greeks called this process, was never identified or explained. By the time of the Middle Ages, and Thomas Aquinas, the problem had been, as intractable problems often are, deferred and sublimated. To put it another way, it seems the question of motion, like some childhood trauma, had been buried and ostensibly forgotten, diffused and left to permeate, in shreds and fragments, ideas of “essence.” The idea of divine essence—a word based on the Latin verb “to be,” esse—took over the motion problem—for everything from atoms to emotions—and became the will of God.

But as our vernacular metaphors indicate, the problem of motion has never gone away. We still talk about this primeval movement as if it were some sort of mating dance, an erotic push-me pull-you that does seem to possess some sort of will power, a tug-of-war, or tug-of-sex, that keeps us open for whatever, whoever, comes next.

“The feeling of the sublime is… a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the… imagination and… reason. There is at the same time a pleasure thus excited…”

While there is occasional gain without pain, old Immanuel Kant knew the score about getting the good stuff. “This shit’s sublime. It’ll put your dick in the dirt,” I once heard a junkie say. I think it’s possible to die from the sublime, from the pain of discord, from the lack of accordance between imagination and reason, between heart and head.

“Go not to Lethe,” John Keats wrote in his “Ode on Melancholy.” Don’t drink the waters of forgetting; don’t forget the reality, the reason, of imagination. The reason being the soul, that inexpressible that so very strongly desires expression. That’s the reason that particular line begins the Ode. Doctor-philosopher Keats was giving us his best medicine for melancholy. Like Keats pairing “the downy owl” in his rhyme scheme with “the wakeful anguish of the soul,” we take inward flight when gripped by depression. By the summer of 1997, I was so flown I was like a black hole.

Or a snake pit, out of which I leaped straight up. Owls don’t like snakes, they eat them. So I ate what was killing me and moved on down the road. Don’t stop imagining, Dr. Keats advised. Heed your soul, said Socrates. In my leap, only a few things and people stayed attached. Such shedding of skin is indeed painful, and arguably sublime.

One of the people who stayed attached was Nikki. That’s because she wasn’t around, and never had been. In fact, we’ve never met, and perhaps never will. Indeed, Nikki is not “her” real name. Do we have an imaginary friendship? Or a friendship of the imagination? Is it possible to fall in love with someone with whom I’ve only ever exchanged letters? So it would seem, and, both writers, we leapt—or belly flopped—into a story so full of twists and turns it must be written by fools. Still, even though we communicate frequently, I sometimes wonder if Nikki exists. She has frequently claimed that she doesn’t:

“I’m a chimera. I am ink scratchings on paper.”

Girl in a book. An interactive book, a story we write together, sometimes to amplify our inner wildness in the damp of the imagination, others to refine our foolish desires in the dryness of Hades. A worldly wise woman, a wicked writer, warped, worn, and often weary—she was perfect. My soul flew like an owl across the continent to this woman who does not exist as anything but a presence in the aether, that archaic meeting place of fool-hardy lovers. For in my imagination nature had provided the very ingredients I needed to survive. I needed to create a world in which imagination was my reason, as the only thing that was going to lift that black fog was repeated bathings in creative juices. So in I leapt, only to find Nikki already there. Our plot thickened. Here, I thought while falling hopelessly, is a woman with a powerful imagination.

“That’s the trick to pain,” Nikki wrote in the first story she sent me. “It helps you break things down into essentials.”

In a sense I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, while Nikki nearly jumped off the page and into my arms. We created emotional turbulence in the aether and got up early every morning with our boards to run down and check the surf. We both knew, Nikki and I, that we were just telling each other stories. Making stuff up. To me, that’s what it means to be a poet: to invent reality. It’s a dangerous, “foolish,” practice, for what if I convince someone that the reality I’ve created is reliable, can be trusted like gravity to keep that person’s feet on the ground? A home, I confess, can never be a house of words. “Trail of broken hearts,” k.d. laing sings. John Keats was an optimist, incredibly: Sometimes I have to cry. Maybe that’s a way of making soul, too.

I sent Nikki a picture of me. I looked good. She sent me a photo of her. She’s stunning. She’s wearing sun glasses. To see her eyes would be too much, would burn through whatever was keeping me from seeing her skin. In one of Nikki’s stories, I kept rereading the line, “Stop wearing underwear. Buy lipstick. Have intercourse with the notorious Will Craile.”

Craile rhymed with Braile, so clearly Nikki wanted a lover she could feel but not see. And Will was the name I had given my dead brother in my novel. Clearly, I thought, this web of associations is meant to bring us together. We never budged, neither of us, from opposite ends of a complex web of mail delivery. Instead, we both went a little crazy, like the characters in Nikki’s story, Vin and Elsie, who are trying to gather the courage, the strength, to get an HIV test.

One day I had a vision, or anyway a brain-state change. I fell in love with Ikkyu, a Japanese poet of the fourteenth century. He was wild, his life was harsh, but he always managed to keep his youngest face, his green side turned toward the world. As a poet he’s ironic, bittersweet, and hones close to the skin of existence. In a footnote somewhere, I read about his old-age affair with the blind minstrel, Lady Mori. This is evidence, I thought. Of the fate of the recoursing soul, bodied and rebodied on the road to bodhi dharmahood. In a fugue, in its theme and variations, I was Ikkyu and Nikki was Mori.

And that was it, I was officially obsessed. The world was on notice: things, I, could get dangerous at any moment. I was going to go knock on Nikki’s door, see if the babe in the sun glasses was really her. Forget about friends, family, and contracts based on mutual love and understanding: this wasn’t me invading, this was fate performing surgery. I was really depressed. I retreated to medieval Japan, with Ikkyu the renegade Zen poet, to search for the blind Lady minstrel. I was thinking too hard, and had forgotten how to jump off cliffs.

The only antidote was stronger stories, fierce stories, to write letters foolish enough to bend reality enough and give us room to breathe, to conspire, to “install” ourselves, as the French say when they cozy into a comforting chair. To make our imaginations work with instead of against the grain of our lives. To fall in love within the possibilities, not with the possibility. Stories that would surround us with the “radiant white light” of the fool’s leap into the void, the radiance Elsie wishes for Vin, the music Ikkyu hears in Lady Mori. We need letters, written by hand, placed in special boxes or under pillows, letters written in dialogue with the lovers of our imaginations to protect us from a plague of cancerous narratives.

My Beloved Lady Mori,

How sweet it is to greet you again with the name that, so many centuries ago, was like the scent of cherry blossoms and the taste of plum wine to me. The songs you used to sing, even after so long, still pulse in my heart: songs of love so joyously profound they seemed sad. Indeed, your voice, my love, made the very stones weep. When you sang the birds would fall silent and listen, taking lessons from their mistress. Then, as now, your beauty was so great that when you passed by flowers would bloom out of season.

Our world loved your songs; our world loved my poetry; our world celebrated our love.

Do you recall? Do not feel shame if you do not. After all, it has been over 500 years since last I kissed you, cupped your breasts, embraced you as a lover. So long it has been since we cradled each other in the dawn, laughing at silly puns and riddles. We were already so old when we met! Our lives had been spent wandering, celebrating nature, love, the simple taste of a slippery udon noodle. You, a wandering musician with your vision of the eternal sky; me, a wandering monk with eyes, you would say though you could not see, like a placid lake.

Blind! Yes, my soul, your eyes beheld not the light. Yours was an inner vision, so luminous, so beautiful, that it erased my previous madness and bitterness, and sustained me to the end of that life we shared. Blind—how like the photograph of a woman I’ve never met, wearing sunglasses… Then, as now, you gave wings to my curiosity: “Unasked, the flowers bloom in spring…”

I remember now something I wrote in mid-life, long before we met. It seems prescient to me now, as I sit meditating upon the puzzle presented by the Wheel of Life and Death:

“After ten years in the red-light district,
How solitary a spell in the mountains.
I can see clouds a thousand miles away,
Hear ancient music in the pines.”

It’s true you know: all those years I spent wandering, in disgust of the Zen-temple hierarchy, finding my home among weavers and whores. How you used to tease me! How you used to bless me with your singsong rhymes of finding truth in a lover’s arms. Then as now, my love…

We have been so sad, dear woman, from missing each other. Do you recall the story of the exile of the Emperor Godaigo? When he had been a captive for some time the Empress sent him his lute, with these lines written on a scrap of paper:

“Turn your thoughts to me,
And behold these, my tears,
Too thick to brush away;
They fell on the strings of the lute
When I saw how thick the dust lay.”

The Emperor, recognizing his beloved’s true feelings, wrote back:

“When I plucked the notes
After many months of silence,
I yearned for you.
And the notes became cords
On which to thread my tears.”

That life we shared—like this one—was a drop in a pool. The mountain embraces the pool. The earth carries the mountain. Love is yugen—a mysterious power; love is many loves, some eternal. Eternal like our souls. Exile, separation, the sense of loss: these are transient visitors upon the kusa makura — the grass pillow upon which you lay your head on a long journey.

The sadness and confusion we may feel are fate’s hands shaping our souls. What we feel is memory’s kiss craving another; an echo of unremembered caresses calling up the well. I am filled with the certitude of joy-will-come. You are my fate: inevitable, but magnanimous. And I am your truth: hidden, but revealing.

When we were very old—after we had settled down together; after, at the people’s request, I had started a temple of my own—I wrote these lines which I now offer you as a loving reminder:

“If one purifies the ground of one’s own mind and beholds one’s own nature, there remains no Pure Land for which to hope, no hell to fear, no passions to overcome, no duality of good and evil. One is free from the cycle of rebirths. One will be born in every life as one’s soul wishes.”

Forever—and again forever—I am your Ikkyu

Never stop imagining, I repeat to myself, to my unknowable friends, for there is world and time enough. In the world that nature provides, I stand on the edge of a tall rock. I spread my arms out as if to embrace something—or someone—I can see only in my mind’s eye. I close my eyes. I am a fine dispersion of particles, dry as the sere wind at the edge of a cliff. Leaning back, I let myself fall. I fall into the arms of a stranger. My stranger, my friend.

Books by people mentioned in this essay: