Vastness
Point a pistol at your reflection. Enjoy the self while it lasts.
Soy un buen error. Cométeme.
Please change the world today. Now more than ever we have no choice but to continue to be our fullest and most creative selves. True connection releases tension and increases our power. I’ve seen that in how easily a muscle can relax under my hands. I’ve felt it in how ubiquitous the smile when I tell my clients that it is okay to look away, away from chaos and rupture and into the depths of their selves, their friends, their family, their lovers, their art.
Spirituality suffices, too. Since we first deciphered a gospel we’ve been expressing worship in art. A Biblically accurate angel is just a vision, after all, re- and reinterpreted after generations of translation. For all we know I could be an image of the lost rank of seraphim. Or maybe you. Maybe that’s why we shiver when we look deep enough into each other’s eyes: we’ve forgotten to remind ourselves, Be not afraid.
Anger is righteous, the sin is when we can't express it in a healthy way. Remember that every feeling is a message. Are you hurt or afraid? Or is it “and”? Release it. Scream it into the sudden winds and let them pull the tears from your eyes. I want to be loved. It hurts that I was born into a dangerous world. I can’t accept that no one accepts me. I deserve to exist. Let it out, let them all flow. Then find the next battlefield.
New York is cold, dark, ghostly again. My fourth eye (la luna) isn’t afraid to show its face before the sun goes to bed. Even she knows there really isn’t anything to fear that we can’t conquer. We aren’t artists by choice, but by necessity, destiny even.
One’s life is the greatest and most sustained of their art. Have you ever mixed Xanax with Adderall? I don’t recommend it, but I can report on it: somehow you remain awake and alert as all the layers of fear and worry get stripped from your eyes. The veil lifts. Everything is bright and everyone can tell your pupils are dilated and it stops making sense why you’re not rushing full-tilt towards your goals. Why you’re letting anyone disrespect or neglect you. Or why you think there’s anyone you can’t win over with the fire within you. You get frustrated by the weaknesses which usually wither you. I’m reporting so you don’t have to go through with it yourself, just as I do my brothers and clients. Skip the hardship and trust that the results are still within your reach. There is such vastness in us!
It’s all absurd. It doesn’t make sense because it isn’t supposed to. Remember also, the system isn’t broken, it’s working just as designed. We Americans voted — for what? We are outraged, confused, incensed — for what? The last time we felt such fervor, what happened to it? Fires sprung up and were extinguished. We marched in the streets and then went home. The mayor of New York exploited millions out of us… and what happens next? He retires, cozy and fat? The successor continues the role of corruptor?
Would that I could tear down the idea of diagnosing someone with a disorder because the world distresses them. I told a client today I think the Internet sabotages revolution, because it quells our anger. We see horrors and we write paragraphs about them and then put down our phones and go on with our lives. When speech was suppressed before, the energy bubbled and boiled and coagulated into guillotines and flattened earth. Change manifested. Now, walking the empty streets in the lonely night, seeing my blazing eyes reflected back to me, passing dozing cops with their thumbs hooked in their bulletproof vests, what do I see but nothing?
True suffering can’t adequately be put into words. I can no less teach you how to face it than I could instruct you on how to change the focus of your gaze. There are simply those of us born with one working eye who develop a tilt of the neck that centers our vision.
You could surprise your self with your own multidimensionality. If you’re brave enough to look at all of you.
Everyone anxious about the same things. Everyone remembers as soon as I say it: You’ll cross that bridge when you get to it. You’re strong enough to carry that weight. You’re no different from everyone else you persevere for the sake of: you are worthy of love and care. We have much to learn from animals, who are never unsettled by their own drives. The pathological is primal. Point a pistol at your reflection. Enjoy the self while it lasts.
Healers need healing too. A veiled vestal watches the tapping away of my hands at the marble. She doesn’t expect me to be perfect, she wants me to stop trying. Mystic Myrrhian rites: the moment I put my fingers down I channel a thought I can’t say that I came up with: that you can’t put your arms around a memory. So we need to embrace today if we have the wanting for it. Everyone is temporary. The duration of a connection has nothing to do with the potential intensity of it.
We are all potential energy. We need to live the lives we have today while we still have them. I’m planning my half-birthday party instead of my impending move even though I haven’t planned what’s for dinner tonight. I’ve been told I come across as consistently unsatisfied; always chasing the next high, seeking sensation over substance. The secret is that I am assimilating it all into myself. I’m not satisfied yet, but I will be.
So long as we create, we exist. Let yourself be vast in all that you are and you feel. Spread open your arms and take in all of your world around you: the good, the bad, the ugly. Life is not water, it may be overwhelming but it will lift you, you will not drown.
Tires tumble over the rain-slick streets, and a reflection of an eye is in my mirror’s edge. The moon tucked me in last night. Life has inertia. Beneath the dust of us lies… what?
My algorithm thinks I want to die. To you too I certainly must seem self-destructive. The critic and your virtues have no power over me. Restlessness, envy, difficult situations; they can be relished. I don’t feel a need to save my painkillers. The death drive brings equilibrium… that’s why the most brilliant stars burn out the quickest.
Midtown is mine now.
And a truth is that you couldn’t live my life the way I do if you were in my shoes. Joan Didion said: every day is all there is. It is possible, admirable even, to rip out a meaningful life during times of apocalypse. America is the new Rome: falling. I don’t have to fall with it. I refuse.
Keep up your distaste. I’ve got my fingers around a multi-star quartz from Sri Lanka the color of mahogany under dusklight. I’m not negotiating anymore. There’s lessons to learn in what we want; every feeling is a message. We didn’t achieve this life by coincidence.
Remember too that fulfilling and meaningful lives were lived through the fall of every empire thus far. The world has ended time and time again and it is still here. We are still here.
Anderson, your words don’t just simmer. They boil over, spilling into the crevices of everything we don’t dare say out loud..
That line about anger being righteous but its suppression being sin... man, have you ever felt it turn into something else, something quieter but sharper, like the edge of a blade that no longer swings?
And if we pointed the pistol at our reflection, would the vastness of our potental stare back or would it flinch first?
I couldn’t help but think of the moon tucking you in, reminding us that even in our smallest, most jagged moments, there’s tenderness waiting to claim us.
And if we’re really America’s Rome, maybe that just means there’s another Renaissance lurking beneath the rubble.
With re this, what if the sin is the fluidity in the definition of ‘healthy’ especially with respects to expressing anger? Anger is righteous, the sin is when we can't express it in a healthy way.