Lucid Lisbon's Luscious Liquidity

Color and color and color: burgundy-brown, blush-pink, amethyst-pearl, flush-fuchsia.

Lisbon: A beautiful and mysterious mistress. One of the oldest in the world, yet she is immortally youthful, every hint of her accompanied by a cloud of tantalizing perfumes: jasmine, rasberry, fig. I explore her artistic curves with the temerity of a lover that knows they are temporary and secret. The old way is dying off and this sensual moment is all the more decadent because of its futility. Love is looking up at me from beneath the brow, half the pupil hidden, alluringly aloof. It sticks to me like another body cooled and catching its breath after the act is done and the sweat begins to dry.

The deep desert nights here whisper, they’re mysterious. There is a beach breeze and barely a moon. No stars. There is melancholy in the breeze, it sounds like the liquid bassline of an 80’s Balearic ballad. It’s got me thinking about that — liquidity — how something can go on forever and then finish, how difficult it is to put feelings into containers or define them distinctly. The ocean undulates into aquamarine. Our feelings like water. Our hearts like ice.

They are still alive, you know: those you’ve left behind, those you’ve lost, those who have left. You are not made up only of yourself. We are a composite of everyone we’ve ever loved. If you seek to truly love yourself you must also seek to love those who have left pieces of themselves within you. Flesh is temporary but the soul is forever.

Every time my plane lands roughly and someone gasps, I wonder, why not express my love, and loud? What’s there to be ashamed of? What’s all this fear for? There’s never as much danger as we tend to think. Cars are tens of times more dangerous than planes. I could have been killed last year on one of our many road trips or yesterday when I didn’t notice a car rolling towards me and no one in New York would have ever seen me again. No other post here again. I’d never learn whom my brother’s child resembles. What are we waiting for?

There’s something I’ve been afraid to admit: I’m running out of money. I know, I’ve said this before, in fact from the outside it probably seems like I never have much money at all. Which I’m sure is an interesting dynamic if you consider my lifestyle and my appearance. The truth is that I’m still learning how to fully separate from considering money something I should stress over. Clearly I’m privileged enough to live and live well and travel and eat, even if I’m subsisting these last nights here on kebab and coffee and cigarettes and Adderall. I’m still alive. I’m still loving my life. And the world has provided me with what I’ve needed. There is still in me though an awareness of class; I have ambition, I am not deaf to the preponderence of discourse and hard feelings about broke men, I am still self conscious about how I appear to others in terms of wealth and class and worth and so, yes, I admit it, I overcompensate, I probably seem tacky to those who have never had to struggle or dream of affording something. I don’t care. Or at least I’m telling myself I don’t care until I really don’t. I’ve been keeping this from everyone for the past month but, as I said, I was relishing my life and wondering, why? What good will this worthless pride do me? Where has it gotten me but alone?

For now, I don’t have the answers. I’m here in a room without a window. It’s quiet. There are others around but I don't see them. It feels like a jail cell. I don’t hate it. Ideas have been flowing. Mercury has turned backwards and I am moving forward, ever forward.

There is a new novel germinating within me. I will do my best to show it to you as soon as I can. The problem of the process of seeking eternity is: I could spend my whole life toiling to perfect a replication or interpretation of a single moment so that it lasts forever. But there is such an abundance of stunning moments that I never can decide what to focus on. Just as I get to work carving out a scene there are three more which demand my attention…

I’m watching and I’m wondering. Observing. Dazzle me, destiny. Seclusion seduces me. See in hindsight how easy it is to lose one’s self in the rat race. How common, to internalize ethics of shame, sacrifice, spite. Shame discourages action. And nothing in the world changes as a result of idleness.

The Portuguese streets are paved with masterful white tile. Easy to slip on if your shoes like mine are worn out by adventure. Indigo flowers yield whiffs of garlic on the air, reminding me of the honeysuckles I stole in my early youth. The fruits are so ripe they could burst. Color and color and color: burgundy-brown, blush-pink, amethyst-pearl, flush-fuchsia. Burning with the heat of passion, my etheric body is breathing easy again.

I met a Kurdish mystic in the city with a tattoo of a sun between her eyes; I told her it felt to me like a third eye, and I told her I know how to open mine now. When I unfurl my eyes into the dark and see nothing, that’s when I can see everything. A beautiful time, a beautiful place, the wind is easy, the creativity of life is abundant, the caresses are plentiful and soft…

Je suis devenue la solitude même. Could I write to you about the world without invoking myself? I don’t always want to but I want to be able to. I want to show you what I see — beauty summons the replication of it. But how can I know if you’ll find beautiful the same sights and sensations which I do? If we were to look at the same person staring out to the sea, would you notice the sunset setting their tanned skin on fire, or would you pay attention instead to how the curves of their body are just visible underneath their linen shrouds? Maybe you’d get stuck on their forlorn expression and wonder about the cause of their melancholy. There’s even a chance your nose would prick at the smell of the cigarette hanging from their lips, and you’d turn away in disgust and find the sight revolting. How are any of us to know what the rest are falling in love with?

Don’t worry, I’m learning this, too: You don’t need to continually define yourself. It isn’t necessary for us to be familiar with you. We need only see what you have to say. If it is strange, good, for now it will be memorable. If it is unrecognizable, good, for we will stare and try to memorize and eventually notice the beauty in you.

Because you’ve always been one way doesn’t mean you always will be that way. Unless you choose to continue the trend.

I met a French woman skilled in the art of the body. Movement mastery, intensely intuitive with intimacy. We had a staring contest for 17 minutes — I counted. It didn’t matter that my heart was beating out of my chest. Or that everyone else in the restaurant could see. I saw them stare but I didn’t turn away from her pupils and neither did she. The eyes are a portal as well. We had an entire conversation there in our private inner dimensions, with me making declarations and her asking questions, the both of us reflecting the sight of each other. And the answers we felt in our bodies, not our minds. In the end, of course, I lost, because a papaya fell beside me and I involuntarily glanced at it.

What is it about this place that enchants me? Is it the perfect weather? Almost perfect — the ocean is cold while the sea was welcoming and warm. The hours flow freely, no one is concerned about time as much as they are anywhere else. The people here are young, attractive, and much more diverse than any other place I’ve been to before. One can feel the reach of colonial Portugal, drawing in the rest of the world with its decrepit tentacles. The essence of the city is vigorous in the quiet way of a jungle animal, it does not roar or sing, but its eyes are always open, glowing bioluminescent in the dark, watching and waiting…

It’s always bright, even after sunset. It is all very calm. A smile naturally eases my face. My body is relaxed before I know why. I fall asleep following a line of thought or a question and it feels like I wake up immediately with the answer or the end of the sentence, better words having sprouted within me, and all that’s changed is that some hours have passed. No room for dreams and especially no nightmares when this is the life I’ve been gifted.

Can thought outlive a body?

Retrograding: smoking my grandfather’s cigarettes. The father of my mother. My Spanish works here until it doesn’t. Did my father’s side ever cross through this part of the world? All I know of my father’s mother’s history is that once, they had blond hair and blue eyes. They could have been from anywhere in Iberia. I’m searching for ghosts without a trail. What will I find when I catch what I’m looking for? How will it change me? A Filipino model at the beach tells me that one’s ancestry is THE DOOR to one’s future…

Astral ascension… I keep remembering little half-seconds of dreams, and what I think I see is a figure ascending (the stairs?). And so I am waking remembering lines from Louise Glück’s Descending Figure, I am turning over in my hands her approach of eradicating the personal into the abstract and the mythical, capturing how feelings and moments annihilate us into beauty, like statues which can no longer be softly caressed or smelt, only looked up at in awe… and of course I am remembering her words, “At the end of my suffering / there was a door…”

Did you ever think you’d live this long? It pains me how often I hear from my clients that they hadn’t even bothered to dream of life this far ahead. “We are a lost generation,” one of my new ones tell me, when they talk about why they don’t believe they’ll ever find love. “We don’t have any power or any purpose. Nothing our parents worked for is attainable anymore. Nothing we do has any effect on the state of the world. Why would I bring children into this?”

I drift into dreamless deconsciousness with a sigh every night. I fight off sleep until I can take it no more, then I surrender. My thoughts inevitably orbit the same few topics: what am I going to say about what I have seen today? What am I going to do with tomorrow? Could tonight be the last night I ever sleep alone? Why were we brought into this world?

We weren’t invited, we were brought here hostage, summoned from the silvery expanse awaiting behind the locks of THE DOOR, literally kicking and screaming.

We are born without our consent. It is a crime of passion. What are we going to do about all the messy evidence left behind? I’m choosing to spend it making the most of what I’ve got. I’m taking all my ghosts with me everywhere I go.

This isn’t my city. I’ve stumbled along with my Spanish, sure, but it isn’t the right fit. A piece of me still lives in blue diamond Barcelona. And even there, I doubt they want me, they just showed me a good face to admire. I will have to make my own city, I recognize, I will have to build it from marble and sandstone I’ve harvested from myself. And it will shine as the sublime do, obscure and overwhelmingly, empty but lustrous and filled with the shadows of Muses and mirrors. A Summer Palace from which to escape the harsh winter. Reproductions of myself and everyone I’ve loved in bronze, gesturing and acting out this strange drama which we’ve been placed into by God…

Beyond THE DOOR to this world of dreams is, for me, the dark, the mystery, my 12th House, all of whom I am which is as of yet unknown to myself.

“The twelfth house is the storehouse within us in which both our inner demons and angels reside. In order to move upward and contact the angels-the sources of our creative inspiration, spirituality, and the highest expressions of love and service to humanity, we must first move downward. We must face the ghosts of the past, the failures, the humiliations, and the painful experiences which haunt us. We must encounter our unresolved problems, and all that we dislike within ourselves-our anger, greed, cruelty, extravagance, vanity, as well as all the qualities in ourselves which we like and value but nevertheless hesitate to acknowledge.” — T. Marks, Your Secret Self: Illuminating the Mysteries of the Twelfth House

In the soundless still of the primordial Azores archipelago I am being born again. It feels like there is no one here but me and the moon revealing itself. Colored bricks and distant barks darken the nights even further. Cars whip by: no trains, no one walks.

Now, the tide is low. Tile and white awnings over outdoor seating like ship-sails, gutted, requisitioned. The sky above so vast, the ceiling of the world lowered, molded. I can see the moon cresting the sky again, bright and arresting and prepossessing. I can see more than that, too, and very clearly. I can see how the stars foreshadowed my journey years and years ago. I can see that I will never be average, I will never be world-famous but that is right and alright. If everyone read what I had to say, most wouldn’t understand or relate or even enjoy it. Often I hear that people ascertain the meaning of what I write weeks after I post it. And that is how it is. I am the eldest brother. I am the trailblazer and the visionary. All that I wanted to be, I already am, I always have been.

I am stumbling forward through the house of illusions and I am reaching out for hold and there’s nothing to keep me stable but the strength of my core. But there are others holding onto me. Following in my lead as I pass the threshold beyond which no one can see. It has always been this way. I am almost home. Returning to one’s home is a wound before it opens, a clairvoyant ache.

I know you might not know what I mean when I talk about THE DOOR. I’ll tell you about what I’ve learned from it, but not yet. Soon.