The Quality Of Blue

There is an incredible freedom in letting go of the structures of dreams and the colors they used to be packaged in.

I almost made a sentence in which Frank Gehry and myself were featured in one single breath.  It couldn't be pulled off in the end, because my night is all blue and magenta and I would have come back later and been uncomfortable. 

My head is electric with little waves of shock like the way it might feel if you sawed off the top of your skull, open head surgery style, and poked it repeatedly with a sharp pencil or a live wire.  Don't worry ma, it's only Paxil clawing its way out of my system.

Celia Cruz is singing "Rie Y Llora" in my headphones again, over and over.  This song never fails to light me up like a Christmas tree and make me crazy-happy for a few minutes; or not happy, something less specific and more free.  It's just the drums and that voice with the slurred "r"s and Celia's laughter cracking richly in the middle of the track with the whole number never missing a single beat.  Not a breath not a hair not a shake of the hip is missed. 

Fitting song to crown the week with.

There were other things, fringe thoughts, I never expressed but which cleared with the same air that everything else did.  And now, here we are, and it's like my Grandmother's crystal after our house fire; chipped and scratched by 1200 degree heat and the manhandling of burly mustachioed men, yet still holding court with beveled cuts and curves of polished mineral reflecting the lucid desires of human beings in the form of unrepentant beverages splashing across skin, louder than diamonds and full of invisible poison lead.  Cut, chipped, and laughing long after we drag ourselves off exhausted.

Exactly so.

Contemplation of body was inevitable after so much life scouring.  This speech is all disjointed because I'm trying to let go of other things.  I'm trying to shake it all out like crooked dice doing the samba on an obscenely garish green felt table.

Everything is the quality of blue tonight.  Not sorrow, not slow tuberculosis death, not poison on a spoon full of honey.  Blue like electric energy that filters out the rude oranges and the sickly greens; blue like a match that strikes across shoes bursting into a fuchsia flare with a heart of cobalt.  Blue the way the light falls into watery dreams where you are drowning until suddenly you're breathing into the dark dark ocean and everything is midnight and cold. 

My ankles both hurt.  An occupational hazard of being fat and an unacceptable weakness as it prevents further movement which is the only way to change the whole balance of physical power.  Sometimes it feels as though my ankles are breaking and what then?  Do I crawl the rest of the way down to hell?  One imagines the devil lifting a hand.

The crushing weight of spirit, as it rises like rain steaming from the sudden break of sun through the clouds, is released when the rest of the dream is broken open like a snow globe shattered on the hot pavement of summer to drain away into dark gummed gutters.  Too many metaphors for one night, one breath, one prison break.  I swear I can't help it any more.  This is the floodgate wide open and change inviting the course of blood to blue itself.

What was impossible on Monday has become the song of Sunday.  I am writing as I go now.  Slinking down the waterway with no slicker, no boots, just a feeling that the point of no return has become a vast complicated joke and that we have returned already so many times we just don't recognize it any more.  The roses are choking out the enormous scarlet "X" that screams out the beginning of the whole story.

San Francisco.  Grey towers, neon "Jesus is the light of the world" sign flickering off at dawn, dusty doorstop human beings with paper bags for feet, and the pen working frantically where a typewriter or a computer might have done more delicate damage; the pen filled with the fluid dreams of young married life and gritty windows, falling ceilings and the cold thick crust of a fridge from 1967.  So many hours spent dreaming of owning a home, of settling and planting something solid, so many real estate papers read and careful plans laid.

Full circle is the the quality of blue.  When you've covered pink and puce until you come round completely all over again into the blue.  Always back to blue like the color of an infant's first breath.

Roots that rot and a trail of trees shed behind me like ghost towns full of apples and pears.  Love is like that.  Life is like that.  We built a tower of intentions from old brittle redwood and shake shingles until we reached the pinnacle which at the time was merely our every day stretching out to infinity with kindness and compassion until suddenly it turned hostile and a cannibalistic frenzy ate us from the inside out of our life.

Ghost towns full of apples and pears and human skeletons.

Some people get to keep the tower of life they built from magpie scraps and hints of passion and talents.  Others get a perpetual personal Armageddon of devastation, slow and cruelly intentional.  What do you have?

What have I got? 

I stopped counting or calculating or coloring or stapling skin back onto bones this week.  This week of clearing sight and cleaning vision brought on by a chemical peel to the eyes and the brain. 

We are back where we began, seventeen years ago.

Except that we are deeper now and we are more now.  We are three instead of two.  We have crossed fjords and cut ourselves on our own ambitions.  Stripped of that dewy persistence and the belief that what we're reaching for is better than what we have, I see it all differently now.  I see more in the shadows where I used to see only dust.  There is a velvet chocolate absorption of sound that comes with age and experience. 

With a spirit taking off again, finding flight for the first time in years, the body will inevitably follow.  No matter how slowly, how painfully, the body will always follow the spirit as long as there is breath left in the lungs and the capillaries. 

What was all that dreaming for if it only brought us back to the beginning?  Why all the work, the stretching past our comfort with the certainty that we'd be good for it, the promotion of our dreams?  Why spend our lives building an empire so fragile that the slightest change in atmosphere was capable of crushing our house of cards to pulp?  Why bother?  Why try at all?  What was the point?  All the tears shed for nothing seem so wasted in light of present degradation.

The point isn't the acquisition of anything at all.  The point is to try for growth, to try for something more, to work for something larger than your 700 square foot apartment in San Francisco and to find the earth under our nails in time to understand our own place on this crusty planet.  The point isn't to have and hold assets but to build assets that no bank can ever take away.  Assets in the coloration of your spirit, the strength of your love for your family, and the expression of your core beliefs which might never have blossomed without experience gone seedy or without falling down deeper than you ever knew you could with all the entrails of your life spreading out around you like scarlet Crepe de Chine; like lush jungle maiden-hair. 

We built strong bridges to forty.  The river wound higher and rushed faster than we could have built against.  This is the circuity of life at its most elemental.  We started here and we come back again because there is something to see, something to learn, something to surmount.  We can fight it, but it will keep coming until we submit. 

There lies the secret of sight. 

You have to drown in order to grow water lungs.

The walls around me shift constantly, they may be different in months, or in a year.  They may be different every single year until I die.  There must be some grain of peace in that, some expression that needs tasting, touching, and releasing into the wild.  Because it is my constant companion now.  The transient nature of my walls.  White and stark like the hopeless face of a mime inviting violence to itself.

I remember the resinous woods of my youth and I reach for them this week, the tart wild berries we picked in the rain and the tents we pitched in the sharp wet forest.  I left my richness there, snug in the dark hollow knot of a fir as tall as god and as reluctant to shed secrets as a shy virgin.  Perhaps you'll find it when reaching into the rot and the delicate weakness of old forest trunks.

San Francisco and then earlier to the Oregon wilderness.  It's eerily like my life flashing before my eyes.  A tallying of unrighteous breathing and lost children escaped from my lead heart. 

The quality of blue is permeating the skin of memory.

The only grace left is in the resting of a hand across a cold sheet like a swan about to skid across the surface of the lake up into a blue atmosphere with wings arched and stretched by turns in a sweeping streaking architecture of motion designed to close distances without sound.

I'll take that last grace just as I'll happily dive into the gorgeous quality of blue that has atrophied in my lungs and taught me to breath without air so that I can follow this light through the artificial stage of dreams into the heat and hell of living.