Knowing Better
There is no doubt I’ve been growing up. I’m in my Saturn return, if you know what I mean. For nearly three years, I’ve been working on a book project, and it’s been a jealous thing. It has claimed me entirely. Now that I sense that the time the project and I have shared (in the composition stage at least) is nearly over, there’s more space inside me for this newsletter. I am reaching outwards, and yes, out into the world.
I’ve missed writing and sharing this newsletter but have had trouble finding the right words. “Right” being an adjective I’m trying to break up with. I named the newsletter “con alas” after a kind of romance with boundless, immaterial, even mystical forms of thought and being. It was in part a rebellion against what I thought was a cruel and unfair material world. Which, of course, the world is. But some months into thinking about immateriality, I began to see its trap. I was up in the clouds and slipping away. It’s not that I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, it’s that I didn’t know how to move these hands. There are things we don’t know that we don’t know. I thought I was headed somewhere.
Over months I wrote drafts and abandoned them. Everything seemed juvenile, incoherent, embarrassing. I’m not the only writer who has felt this, and it must be due in large part to the gift a piece bestows upon its writer—the gift of having gone through a thought and of having made it to the other side—of completing a journey in the mind and on the page, however short. My therapist said not long ago that a writer often gets more out of writing than a reader does, and it saddened me for a second (since I care about my reader!), until I accepted that she was right.
My intention has always been to keep these posts short. There is more I could say to you; there are a hundred thoughts inside me, looking for somewhere else to live. I’ll write to you about them soon. For now, I’ll leave you with an image from a film which I wrote about over a year ago, then let the draft mature, unseen, as I have also done.
In Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, the protagonist and ex-angel Damiel wakes up as a human, with his head bloody from the impact of metal armour falling from a random helicopter. He tastes the blood and smiles. He says, “Now I begin to understand.” It is an image not unlike what the past months, past year has been to me. Damiel has traded life as a witness for life as a mortal. And there is something in that metallic taste, the wet and oozing redness of pain, and also of life, that can’t be known from a divine distance. There are no fantasies or ideas more true than blood. For better or for worse—
yes <3