This is the story here, the Land of Death, the shades of the living...
http://www.mythweb.com/odyssey/book11s.html
and episode with Nausicaa (after Calypso) in the wedding veil.
Bathing and olive branches and lots of oil. Mm hm.
And the release through Athena weaving a spell.
And Penelope weaves...
And Laertes, his father, lives like a peasant. (not a pheasant)
I have trained to keep my thoughts singular, so I could follow them backwards and forwards in time, like they were the lines on my own hand. But my hand is less than it used to be, and things have gotten out of order, and the events don't follow each other in the way that they once did. And those things of time that help the mortals to live their lives stopped applying themselves to me, and I lost the luxury of knowing this moment as singular, and instead am stuck in between spaces, where the threads between the past and the future are visible, and I see it the most clear when there is a full moon, and when there is no moon, I cannot see any connection at all. There are those who walk among us, the ones who have a strange glow about them when the day is on the verge of turning to night, who have what I have, that secret that shows the spaces between worlds. They are neither here nor there, all at once and not at all, and entirely willing to be torn to pieces, but they cannot be torn, and neither can I. I am that image of the thing I used to be, and in certain kinds of light, I am at once whole and present, but the light changes, and it never does last for long enough to find my way in the world again in the skin of a human being. I am somewhere in between the living and the dead, and not alone, and never lonely, but never, ever home. And I carry the shades in my chest, they move me from one place to another, and when the light is right, they are outside of me enough so that I can see them clearly as if they were still here, already here, born again here, come back again here, or come from the future into this place with a secret vision of what we are, but everything fades when the light changes, and I'm left with my own images in my own mind. Of what was, what is, what will be, but there is no order. And I suspect that this is that thing that poets speak of, that place where we live when we have learned secrets, lost ones that we love to death and madness, and not been given the luxury of losing our minds, or given the gift of a simpler mind and a heart a little less complex than what we have to carry. We are neither crazy nor stupid, then, and this means that we are supposed to do something. And the clouds turn red because the moon is growing fond of us, and wants to show us something about ourselves, something true, but it will be mixed with the things we have loved, and the things we will love, and there is no way of knowing which of these might be a direction to tell us how we can love in this place, in these shades of ourselves, right here, and so we always have the sense that this might be wrong, or not quite right just yet, but those senses are as much an illusion as anything else, and our task, then, in these bodies, in this space in between space, is to learn the way the spider spins the webs of our own minds, until the web becomes less important than the action of spinning, the eternal love affair between the spider and the branches, where the web becomes their poem to each other, but not the love itself.
http://www.mythweb.com/odyssey/book11s.html
and episode with Nausicaa (after Calypso) in the wedding veil.
Bathing and olive branches and lots of oil. Mm hm.
And the release through Athena weaving a spell.
And Penelope weaves...
And Laertes, his father, lives like a peasant. (not a pheasant)
I have trained to keep my thoughts singular, so I could follow them backwards and forwards in time, like they were the lines on my own hand. But my hand is less than it used to be, and things have gotten out of order, and the events don't follow each other in the way that they once did. And those things of time that help the mortals to live their lives stopped applying themselves to me, and I lost the luxury of knowing this moment as singular, and instead am stuck in between spaces, where the threads between the past and the future are visible, and I see it the most clear when there is a full moon, and when there is no moon, I cannot see any connection at all. There are those who walk among us, the ones who have a strange glow about them when the day is on the verge of turning to night, who have what I have, that secret that shows the spaces between worlds. They are neither here nor there, all at once and not at all, and entirely willing to be torn to pieces, but they cannot be torn, and neither can I. I am that image of the thing I used to be, and in certain kinds of light, I am at once whole and present, but the light changes, and it never does last for long enough to find my way in the world again in the skin of a human being. I am somewhere in between the living and the dead, and not alone, and never lonely, but never, ever home. And I carry the shades in my chest, they move me from one place to another, and when the light is right, they are outside of me enough so that I can see them clearly as if they were still here, already here, born again here, come back again here, or come from the future into this place with a secret vision of what we are, but everything fades when the light changes, and I'm left with my own images in my own mind. Of what was, what is, what will be, but there is no order. And I suspect that this is that thing that poets speak of, that place where we live when we have learned secrets, lost ones that we love to death and madness, and not been given the luxury of losing our minds, or given the gift of a simpler mind and a heart a little less complex than what we have to carry. We are neither crazy nor stupid, then, and this means that we are supposed to do something. And the clouds turn red because the moon is growing fond of us, and wants to show us something about ourselves, something true, but it will be mixed with the things we have loved, and the things we will love, and there is no way of knowing which of these might be a direction to tell us how we can love in this place, in these shades of ourselves, right here, and so we always have the sense that this might be wrong, or not quite right just yet, but those senses are as much an illusion as anything else, and our task, then, in these bodies, in this space in between space, is to learn the way the spider spins the webs of our own minds, until the web becomes less important than the action of spinning, the eternal love affair between the spider and the branches, where the web becomes their poem to each other, but not the love itself.
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