Gospel & Universe 🪐 Ars Moriendi
On the Pageant Faded
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9:40 A.M.
The crows and seagulls trade barbs across the sky. The day is bright, and yet we know, in the end, the light must die.
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Beyond Whose Bourne
One day I’ll look at everything I’ve written here, and my 93 year-old mind won't be able to make any sense of it. Instead, it’ll look something like the angel and fish I took a picture of several years ago in a Brussels museum:
It’ll all seem completely illogical, the long web pages, the cloud-captioned photos of me under the arches of some quixotic portico in Guanajuato:
The gorgeous girls I dreamed about, Scarlett and Nina:
Scarlett Johansson at the Premiere of Don Jon, 2013 Toronto Film Festival, 10 September 2013, source here, Author: GabboT (Wikimedia Commons)
Nina Zilli, 27 February 2010, Photo by Monelle Chiti, transferred from it.wikipedia (Wikimedia Commons)
girls fantastic and real, poems to the sun, the solemn temple of agnosticism and all those therein that it inhabit, shall dissolve and leave not a period behind. Of course, the bard said it much better: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself -- / Yea, all which it inherit -- shall dissolve, '/ And like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed. / Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled. (The Tempest 4.1)
All poets are just de-based versions of the bard: What light from yonder window broke? / It was the West, and Shakespeare was the sun. We write on the cave wall that Plato turned to metaphor, projecting ever more fantastic versions of ourselves, fancy ryc dot websites, books of faces and pages of X names chosen to impress; we project these onto paper or screen, faint copies of the patterns imprinted in the deep currents of neurons that are themselves projected onto the stony interior of our skulls, while outside in the reborn air the bard whispers sonnets to the stars.
One day, under the stone arches of a memory-laden sky, I’ll enter that tunnel in Guanajuato:
and delve into the secrets of the earth, where I’ll find the narcotraficantes and the curved blades of ill-mannered ladrónes, mal educados todos on Calle Jésus María de Compostela del Cielo.* Or I’ll watch as Beatrice Portinari sips from the Fountain of Youth, which scientists will have finally proven sits invisible still, in some luminous square in Firenze. And I’ll ride with dragons and valkyries, drink the tortilla soup of the soul of the Bardo that awaits* when I have shuffled into the cavernous coil,* the entrance of the tunnel blown to smithereens beyond whose bourn
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* Narcotraficantes = drug traffickers, ladrón = thief, mal educados = badly raised, and todos = all. In Mexico City I was robbed in a market, ironically on a street called Jésus María. Compostela alludes to Santiago de Compostela, the famous pilgrimage site in Galicia, Spain. Del Cielo = of Heaven. — * In Buddhism, the Bardo is the realm through which the soul travels after death. — * Hamlet speculates about that sleep of death, when his body shuffles off its mortal coil, and he enters that country beyond whose bourn no traveller returns (Hamlet 3.1).
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Circle, Period, Dot
Isn't this what we all want: something to leave behind, some dot — . — some period that says,
This is the end, beautiful friend / This is the end, my only friend, the end / Of our elaborate plans, the end / Of everything that stands, the end / No safety or surprise, the end / I'll never look into your eyes, again — (“The End,” The Doors, 1967)
There may be no safety, and there may or may not be a surprise, but Jimmy was right about the final point: there'll definitely be an end.
If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come — the readiness is all. — (Hamlet 5.2)
But there’s also something else, something to mark the period of time spent on this spinning globe (itself a dot in space) once the pageants have all faded, and it’s not necessarily baseless. There’s also this being, this dot among millions, forming lines, from genetic codes to family trees.
We feel. We scent the air. We form meaning and new ways of seeing; collecting and gathering ideas and emotions, linking the invisible missing bits (32-billion-bit encrypted inside the chambers of our skulls and heart) of beauty, compassion, and awe.
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