All-Gifted; Hindsight
He was in my dream last night. My Pandora, the one who opened the world to me, gave me access to everything but hope. The Prometheus who made me Phaeton. He was in my dream, as callous and detached as he was in our time together, but in that dream he had a blog, a diary where he listed all the ways and reasons and metaphors he still pined for me. Something about mowing, and about me smelling like eggs — probably the quiche I had last night asserting its gastronomical supremacy. But all of it came down to his longing, to his real and final regret, to his realization that he casually discarded A Good Thing.
And this dream bothers me, because I fear it is wish-fulfillment of the crassest sort, the sort of simple-minded dream that projects our desires for people onto them, that turns them into the automatons we crave. I don’t want to be the sort of person who seeks affirmation in such coarsely gratifying fantasies.
This dream makes me uneasy, also, because of its implications for my own feelings. Because this dream by its nature and texture and feeling implies that I am not over him, that I will never be over him, that I will always carry this damned torch. That this torch will never go out, that it is Promethean fire after all, salvation and damnation flickering on the branch: Fire is what saved man; it is also what doomed him. The gods could never forgive that transgression into their territory, could never forget our encroachment onto the domain of their unique power. In appropriating fire we robbed them of their primacy as the Saviors, as the Givers and Renewers of Life. We became as gods, knowing what is good and what is evil, or at least what leads to living and how to avoid what leads to death. In the drama that divides all parents and children, we took their agency and their secret knowledge and their power. Once humans aspire to godhood we are doomed by our own hubris. And yet enhanced by it, saved. It is the only way to grow.
It is the story of the tribe who received fire; it is the story of Adam and Eve. But what am I to do with this flame? I cannot quench it but I cannot keep it. It illuminates but it also consumes. What happens when there is nothing left to burn? What happens when it consumes the fuel intended for other altars?
Serpentine
It is so much harder to write happily, but over a week has lapsed since the last post.
He said today that I am molting. Truer words have not been said of me in a while. I’m shedding an old skin and growing into a new one, testing its shape, its colors, its powers. Its toughness and its stripes. Wondering how long I will wear it, how much it will withstand, and wondering at the shreds piling in my wake — examining them, by turns surprised and nostalgic, reminding myself of forgotten things and allowing myself to forget things too long remembered. It is liberating. Perhaps it would be a good time to get a tattoo of a snake, or a cricket. For once I am not an ouroborus. Not whole yet, maybe, but not constantly looking back or retracing my steps. I can wonder at these bits of myself being left behind but I also sense the time is coming to move forward. That I am moving forward, that these pieces of myself, once examined, can be set aside, that I am becoming free to walk the path before me.
Steps, now — baby steps tottering, uncertain, and thrilling — but maybe even someday, wings. Span, coast, soar, riding the currents, a creature cresting the freedom of air or maybe water, swooping where I stumbled, looking down and through it all with the pleasure and the thrill of one who may return but does not have to. I am slowly growing free of my obligations, tasting the air, testing freedom. Shedding the old skin. Crawling towards birth.
Space
We are drifting, and with that admission the anger grows and festers and lingers, clawing to smother the grief, struggling after rage to forget the loss.
I fought so long against losing, but that battle is only the fight against admission. You can’t hold on to people. It’s taken me so long to realize that. Persephone would have been taken from Demeter eventually — there’s no getting around that. Not by death, maybe, but love and violence and the drift, the space between people that grows steadily but unobtrusively, the way the universe expands — atom by atom, until suddenly gravity fails, gravity betrays us and baffled antimatter occupies a once-human space.
Such melodrama over a moment. But it is never a moment. There is no moment to pinpoint, no instance to seize from the aether and accuse, entreat, refuse. The drift just happens. Imperceptible, but irreversible. Irredeemable.
This is what it means to be people in time: we cannot escape from the past, but we cannot hold on to our present, because what we think of as now, the things of which we are aware, are already past. As soon as we can see something it is behind us. Who said that? No immortal — they were slaves to their passions instead, because Time could not govern them. Neither Kronos nor Dike nor the Erinyes could hold the Olympians. Maybe Nemesis — but she appears only after the commission of a crime.
What manner of people conceives of such gods?
