The Script

Back in the apartment on the table beside the computer is the diary. It lays there as it has lain for over ten years now in various mausoleums. Shut and packed and shunned and darkened. In warehouses, in a box, under a desk, in a crawl space, in a firey attic. Closed. A dead story, buried and silenced. I return to it. I read through it. Read the journal. Scan the reports from the mundane and practical to the absolutely stark, absurd, raving visions and sad emotional currents.

The story about the promise. The story about the walk. The story about the stories.

I return to it in the afternoons. Evenings. During the long insomniac's hour. Read the hand-writ pages; the one after the other, a rich kaleidoscope of terrific madness and foot wrought journeying. A testimony of boundless illusory surrealism of being. A kind of record of a subjective "I Am The Center of All Creation and the Unverse". One human being, a self-proclaimed sovereign intergalactic presence of Being. Crazy. Almost like being God.

Which she would consider profane being of such archaic and devout rituals. Everything in her religiosity was ritual and form, unseen connections. Repetitions. There were the endless self-batisms in the names of all the slaughtered in all the wars and ways that people murder one another.

I don't think many human beings have undergone such a long, arduous and lonely journey of self-discovery and self-abnegation. Much less a woman. Alone. An emptying of all the weight of her identity. Escaping the confines of the body and mind and entering into a psycho-tropic state of pure hallucination and freedom of perspective. It isn't L.S.D. - It's schizophrenia or Bi-Polar Disorder in the extreme. in the mind of a genial poet.

A ghastly and intense experience to read and to know I am born of this woman. Of this consciousness. Thwarted, yet gleaning the full magnificent import of all history, all the connected tissues of time. A genius who can compose the most sublime sonnets and a raving lunatic who can lose all composure and reasoning in a moment.

The journal is rife with stories. Her recounting of locations and experiences is immediate, palpable. The look of things. Her maps and pens. The weather, the environment, the people who approach.

When she incurs a loss of perspective and place she is rescued - awash in harmony with desire and a wandering poet's hope for the love between two brothers who are an Old Testament Cain and Abel tale of eternal discord and detachment. My brother and I. As she walked and fasted and prayed. For our love. Our eternal misalocation, connection

Then there are the other characters. The other locations. The demons attacking her mind. Vociferous interlopers. The world we live in.

The script began and moved forward and leapt and then was abandoned for the wedding and the guest that came from New York for a stay. And now I have returned to it and go on with it.

There are yet about 180 pages of journal to read. The previously researched are all tabbed, in colored indicators for important facts, places, encounters. Move the story along now kid. No one wants to dabble. No one wants to sit still. Keep it alive. Back to work. Back to work.

You get the picture. Today is one of those bay days here. It reminds me of San Francisco. Cool breezes coming in off the river. There is water in the air and the sky is a field of fast-moving clouds. It seems the last whispers of this winter. Rain is due. Will soften the blow. Cool nights. Warm days mixed.

I am ensconced. I am alone. I am writing. I am.