Category Archives: self portrait

'The Mask of Innocence"     (Preface to Volume 6)

Volume 6 of Linguistic Trickster spans the time-frame of May 1996 through the end of 1998.  This two and a half year period of my life has been the toughest to revisit in many ways.  I was 15 1/2 when the poems begin, and have just turned 18 by the end of the period.  Most of the poems are not amazing in themselves, as works of art.  There are a few gems in there, and a few remain to this day some of my favorite pieces.  But as a prolific  autobiographical record of my own inner life they are precious to me, and I am so grateful to have the written residue of my young flailings, as hard as it is to read through them now, by the sheer force of their primal raw manic and disturbed inner confusions and contradictions. 
It is clear in hindsight that with the rise of puberty (I was a late bloomer and matured physiologically much later it seemed than most of my friends and peers) came an intensification of the Moods and Restlessness that had always haunted my extremely emotional and sensitive temperament.  I doubt that most who knew me in those days would have guessed at the dark tempest that always raged right beneath the surface of my more manic and enthusiastic side.  My wild side. My exuberance, playfulness, and barely containable readiness for adventure... along with my eagerness for mischief and mayhem... hid the despair and deeply painful Consciousness of Self.  Behind the bubbling frenzy of the smiling trickster was the terrible demon of darkness.  What I would call now my Daimon, the guiding figure of the Souls Pattern, dragging me through experience after experience, meeting myself in the mirrors all around me, in the world and other people, in dramas and dreams and the dreadful tearing of the seams of my inner landscape as I tried to find some foothold in a seemingly ever-shifting reality. How to remain tethered, I wondered, when each moment held an all-engaging presence of attention for me that fluctuated wildly from ecstatic flights of joyful ebullience to the deep abyss of misery; Making mountains out of mole-hills and Mole-hills out of mountains.  Subtle Impressions from everyone and everywhere and everything  gripped me constantly, pulling me this way and that.  I had and still have, a vast reservoir of vital energy, of LifeForce, and as it was ripening in these years, I had no understanding whatsoever how to tame it.  No model and no guide.  It seemed to me that most people who surrounded me, were barely alive, just stumbling half-numb through life, no real Juice.  I swore even then that I would not be one of them, that I would Live my passion one way or another.  Even if it killed me. And that meant, also, that when the Passion turned to Pain and Interminable Self-Reflection, that I would follow those devils into Hell itself in order to discover what they hid.  

After a lifetime of Obsessive Astrological exploration, as well as Deep dreamwork and shamanic soul recovery, I have a framework for all of what was taking place within my Soul.  But back then, when these words poured out of me incessantly, I had no tether or map.  All I had was the religious undertones of what I had absorbed through the normal programming of childhood that seeps in whether one is in an overtly religious household or not, and I judged and condemned myself harshly according to those standards. It seemed I went from one tortured obsession to another.  My hyper-fixations usually took the form of people in those days. I craved intimate mirrors to play out the internal archetypal motifs that were swallowing me whole moment by moment.  In AstroSpeak, I have a Fifth house  Aries Moon...Aries being the sign in which the Martian Vitality and lifeforce and adventure is projected out toward the world and all  It can experience and play with and consume and express. It is a cardinal sign, bringing with it Change for the sake of Change. Everything gets old quick. No matter how beautiful or real or pure.  My emotional reactions  were always  tinged with fire and dynamism and impatience and arrogance...as well as childlike innocence and naivete and curiosity.  Falling Hard and fast and quick, and getting bored just as easy. Like a toddler.   As a 'sort of'  counterbalance I have the Sun/Uranus/Asc/Mercury in First house Scorpio, also ruled by Mars (and Pluto in modern Astrology), but with that same fiery volatile Passion and intensity turned inward, but with fixity, to the existential abyss, the subtle psyche, the imaginal realm and the chthonic underworld where all our hidden shadows dwell.  I was drawn to the darkness and all things taboo, to all things hidden and hushed.  I needed to feel things so deeply and confront life so head on, whether inwardly or outwardly, I was unable to plant my feet on the ground in any solid sense.  I never really had any real 'plan' for things, never felt settled in my skin, just riding each wave and crest and then sinking to the bottom in an endless overwhelm.  
My entire life has been bound up in the question of What on Earth To Do With All This Energy and Passion and Drive to Experience?   Destroy myself and Others?  Channel it into something divinely inspired?  Transmute the raw and unbridled kundalini sexual and creative energy into Art and Alchemy? Aching to Pupate. Always.  Always. All Ways.  

Not everyone is so fixated on their personal Mythology, but for me, it is my Daimonic Urge and Reason to Be Here This Time Around.  It is all coming Full Circle.  The Fool Circling Herself Over and Over again......Spinning the toroid and surfing the tides. The churning of the cosmic ocean, with the poles of my moods, and obsessions.  Pluto/Venus in the 12th house underLooking all of it, smirking in the background, knowing that the entire Game of Life for me would be this never-ending battle between my unquenchable need and desire to penetrate all things and all people so deeply in the psychic reality that there would be a complete merging of souls and obliteration of the separate Self.........and my unconquerable need and desire for ultimate freedom and sovereignty and manic flights of hyperfixation into whatever new flight of fancy drew my eye and my mind and my fiery soul into its crucible at the time.  And Time was so unstable, it tilted and wavered constantly from one extreme to another.  It is easy to see this now and to laugh at times at the utter contradiction of my nature in its raw and adolescent attempts at individuating out of the morass of the yeasty culture-d glass of the collective.  If I didn't have this huge tome of proof of just how unbalanced I was I might have overwritten those files in my mythology with any number of placations and delusions of sensibility.  But alas, I have been leaving myself clues and codes for so long, lifetimes, that I feel my hamster wheel of existence is simply struggling each time to catch up with where I left off....so I can resume the Game.  Venus and Pluto's red velvet embrace taunting me on to dive again and again into the poison, attempting to discover the antidote within it.
The Fractal nature of Time and Space and The spinning Gyres of our moments and mires, brings us over and over again to the same drama in some different form, some different intensity, some altered frequency of awareness making the reVisiting of Episodes vary in just how destructive or cathartic or world-shaking each anniversary of annihilation is.  For me, the whole Scorpio season is rife with peril, but particularly when the transiting Sun each year has navigated through my 12th house and over my Pluto/Venus conjunction, and then straddles my Ascendant in Scorpio. November 1st  is the darkest Underworld Period in my private psychomythography.  Over and over 'abducted' into the realm of Hades, jerked from Demeter's springtime world of innocence and maidenhood and into the realm of the Dark One.  We who follow Stories through Time, though, know that there are alternate versions of the tale.  In some, Hades Pluto steals the Kore maiden away, against her wishes, pulled down down down into the depths of the Earth and the Chthonic underground, to be his bride.  Tricked and manipulated into eating that dastardly pomegranate, the poor naive Persephone is born anew against her delicate Will, initiated into the mysteries of life and death and sex and birth and death and the psychic reality, raped by the dark lord himself, and held against her will as her poor mourning mother wanders all the lands of the upper world refusing to let anything grow.  But there are alternate versions in which Persephone chooses of her own volition to leave her mother's spring-world and to descend inward and deep into the treasure-land of Pluto's psychic wealth.  Foregoing her innocence, and stepping into her role as bride of Hades and Queen of the Underworld.  I always knew, even during each cyclical 'Rape of Hades' that there was some element that had chosen to go willingly.  That had not hesitated with the offering of the pomegranate seeds.  'The red dripping juice, the blood ripping loose, as I lay within it' .  My first exposure to Greek Mythology in this incarnation, held me spellbound; And always it was the Story of Persephone and Hades that obsessed me.  We know, on some level, which archetypal assortment of ancient and future narratives we have come to spin into some new form and tapestry with our very life-blood and psychic substrate.  We know, deep down in the Marrow of Our Bones........what we have come to do.  Who we have come to form from the raw clay.  We know, when we feel the foreboding of the future, our  innocent child and adolescent minds reaching out toward that terrifying abyss and yet clutching to the apron strings of our Mamas, our Demeter, who weeps for the inevitable Loss of their pure maiden.  Confrontation with Self is Alluring in all Times and Spaces.  Indeed.

I used to think, when younger,  that my rendezvous' with Hades were the causal factor in my psychic splitting and fragmenting and my extreme lack of boundaries and fixation on the seductive spirit of the Lust for Life expressed through the only thing I had at my disposal, my body and my heart, and my soul.  I now know that I came into this realm with this blueprint, and I have been working on this theme in some form for lifetimes.  I swore, on the other side of the Dream, that I would finally integrate all of this.  I remember.  I remember promising mySelf that I am ready to burst through into an entirely new expression of SpiritAsBody.........a new Form, utterly different, as different as the butterfly and the caterpillar.  A transfiguration that cannot happen without letting everything that has ever come before, in all lives and timelines, turn to mush within my Sealed Vessel.  I can imagine nothing more painful than the crystallized imprints of all self-idea and frameworks of being, dissolving into an amorphous mass of pure raw material....... and with it the self-inflicted guilts and shame and terror of immortality. I know, because I have gone through the process on fractal levels.  And so far, it has been the most painful and humbling thing that I have ever experienced as a human playing at being, a  seeminglySeparateSelf, over and over and over again. 
I have clung to my own narratives and stories and miseries like prized possessions, time after time, during the catabolic process. The eventual release is the closest thing to surrender or bliss I know of.  And I descend now, into these psychic gulags that hold trapped fragments of the selves I have been and Am, in this and other realities, not because of any desire to drag the 'past' along behind me like a dead weight....but because I know What It Is To Create From The Compost Of Our Most Intense and Animated and Alive Moments.  

I sit now, after editing and going through over 600 poems from a small period of time in which I was both the most Innocent and filled with dreams as I would ever be again, as well as the most tormented and lost and confused and victim to my own impulses and out-of-control Eros as I would ever be.  I am listening to a playlist that I remade, from the mixtape my first love gave to me. Back when it was a process of recording patiently onto a cassette tape.  The words to the songs are eerily prescient, holding the fractal of what would become the mythology of our magic little world. I almost cannot bear it, feeling all of the things I felt then, so viscerally, and reliving the excitement and the hope and the innocence and yet also the turbulence of my own inner conflicts and clumsy attempts to silence the voice of denial that held me hostage, living in an ivory tower of dissociation from my most recent abduction into Hades realm.   And the recognition, the   knowing that over and over in my life, my own Nature, my own desperate clinging to the Daimon's Games of Power have led me to hurt other people  deeply, people I adored and felt such deep and abiding love and affection for.  Over and over again the wheel turns. And I face myself.  Just a different set and costumes for the same story.  And yet....the knowing....that each decision and each turn of the spiral has led to the next keyhole of destiny.  The flesh feels things differently than the mind does.  The Body and the Soul can twist in anguish where the mind and spirit simply evaluate from their lofty perch. 

I am loathe to admit that I have never really been hurt or left dark and cold by another, at least romantically, despite what my young immature poetry seems to attest to.  My abductions have been of betrayal of a different manner.  And how often have I cried so loud and so deep and so long, tears that really belong to those who have been left tangled in their own tapestry of pain, by my own actions and desperate restlessness?  Even those events in which, to anyone else, I would be considered a 'victim' have never left any real and lasting indelible mark on my consciousness  in the same way as having to hold the pain of hurting anOther.  In some ways I know that later tortures and entanglements that I drew myself into, were my way of punishing myself for things I have carried for so long.  It is We, who whip ourselves and flagellate, for every real or perceived indiscretion or misuse of power or passion.   We roll through Other's lives like steam engines, all of us, the same way they roll through ours, and we all leave marks and scars and broken hearts and broken pieces of mechanical parts.....we are mirrors of each other.  My whole life I have been trying to shatter the mirrors and free mySelf from my own psychic gulag.   There are some fragments of soul that have been trapped inside for Aeons. The River Lethe's waters are refreshing.....  

This is the End of the Innocence.  

Or is it?  

The Eternal Return........Some believe we are forced into this rotating wheel of existence, as a punishment, others as a great trick and trap of the soul by the nefarious overlord who created this matrix simulation.  Some believe there is no real point except to be pure enough and good enough and virtuous enough to get off the wheel and stay in the heavenly abode of nirvana and everlasting peace. I have inhabited those lofty and angry reality tunnels. I have been there. 
As a reaction against my naturally passionate and vital life-force, and my indulgences, I have swung to the opposite extreme. I have been so virtuous and unsullied and pure that I was basically dead.  You know the type. So dissociated from their  Soul and Body that they really believe they have no anger or desire or Eros......it is all painted white and hung on the wall of the ivory tower up there in the Heavenly Resort where God hangs out with his chosen ones........disgusted with the messy vulgarities of life.  Yes, those ones.  They have the most life-force in them, I believe, and it so terrifies them, that to acknowledge it and to dance with it and sculpt it consciously is such an overwhelming task, that it is never begun.  So the Angelic Choir sings on inside their deluded minds.....while their Body paces like a tiger in a cage, and their Heart fractures piece by piece to keep from exploding into some exuberant display of animal joy at the mere taste of air and of sunlight and of the senses shouting to every other thing in their vicinity that I AM HERE, BY GOD, I AM ALIVE!  I have been that starved person. Quite Literally. I started out as the Tiger, and when Lifeforce quickened within me I was on Fire with Life and Love and Laughter and Creativity. In a World where only the Living Dead are allowed to exist.  And I tried to shut it off and shut it down and because I could not, I hated myself, and It dripped mercilessly into a pool of dark molasses that clung to every failure and flaw of my pathetic human self and insecurities and lust and self-lies.  And then, I would rise again from the dreadful heap of suffering and spring into some new obsession and fixation and feel the well-spring of God in my veins again and rail against any or all who may have had the audacity to try and cage this tiger again. 
And in Truth......
It was always I, who caged Me.  I read now, through my past words,  my desperate projections onto Other.  I see how this raging fire within was threatening to consume me entirely, and was projected outward on any available mirror, anything that could hold the intensity of my Gaze for just a moment, long enough to rid myself of the demons. The Daimon. 

I see, in retrospect, and even at the time I had awareness of it, to be honest, that I was arguing and exclaiming with my own Self in most of my writing. 

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” ~W B Yeats

The various competing forces of my psychic configuration hashing it out constantly.  We all do it. But some are more sharply defined and more deeply accursed with erratic moods and depth of feeling and empathic undulations that make it impossible to know the difference between self and other, until a long initiation in the fire and the water. And then, perhaps, that curse is turned into a gift.  
The Innocence. That is why we play this game. Over and over.  We will never fore-go it.  Ever.  How do I know? Because Here We Are.  We go through all the tribulations and traumas of building a new infant body and making the journey through the abyss, into an often shocking and tumultuous young existence......all to feel, One More Time, what it is to be so smitten with Life and Possibility and Not-Knowing, that we cave under the weight. We drag Immortality behind us in a tightly tethered sack that we pretend is not there, for the experience of losing the Self in An Other.  Of having a chance to Play with New Rules and Discover again, the Ecstasies of Falling in Love for the first time, or of setting out into the Great Beyond to Make A Life For Oneself.  The Fools Journey.  Full Circle.  Circling the Square and Squaring the Circle.  While the I divides itSelf in Time.  Leaving Space for Ties that Bind Body and Mind. 
We leave Eternity over and over again Simply to feel the Innocence: we will give up all wisdom , endlessly, to look out thru the eyes of wonder and the unjaded heart that bleeds and beats …. We start out wishing for all the experience and the answers and the knowings, trying to race thru everything and the older we get in these human Characters, the more sure we are, I think, each time, that we will do it all Over again..::all the pain and all the sorrow and all the confusion and all the angst , just to feel that Innocence of Life First Seeing Itself In AnOther’s Eyes. And the wheel turns itself over again.
 “It was the end of the innocence” 
William Blake knew. The Songs of Innocence. The Songs of Experience.
And there-in Lie We. 
            Somewhere 
                         In-Between.
                               Worlds in Collision,
                                           Trying To Be.

We come into each others lives as Humans Playing at Being, helping each other See ourSelves differently so we can Be ourSelves differently. Whether we know it intellectually at the time, on some level we know where we are headed in this life. Even when we are still just an acorn, aching to live itSelf out into whatever Oak it can Stand to Be. 

🥀{“Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...” 

(Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)}🥀