Urban Haiku

Katabasis

It’s 8am and my world is quiet. I am an early-summer morning lake. My surface is flat and calm—reflecting the world but somehow separated from it. There are currents moving underneath but nothing frightening. These aren’t rip tides just cool unseen eddies.

Once again I seem to be dancing with life rather than battling it. It has been so long since this has been the case that I have forgotten the steps. I feel a little clumsy, but I’m having far too much fun to worry about how I look to spectators. They are just spectators after all—there’s only room for participants on this floor.

Robert Bly goes on a lot about Jung’s “katabasis”—of being brought low; the “road to ashes”. You will now be mocking me as a fucking hippie for quoting Bly, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t on to something. He says that men in their mid-thirties often experience this fall. They embrace ashes. This fall is either formative or destroying. A man needs to grope through ashes to find that little piece of iron.

Don’t leap to conclusions: I’m not heading to the woods with a drum, a feather and fucking song cycle about moose. But I can’t deny that Bly is stuck in the back of my brain somewhere, not Jung. Have I clawed through my own ashes and found that nugget of iron? Maybe. I am certain, like I have never been before, that I’ve changed this time. It’s not a fleeting feeling:

My happiness has become a fortress against the forces of darkness.

Christmas Waveforms

Put that oscilloscope away. You’re never going to be able to accurately map the vibrations running through me today. I am humming at a pitch and frequency unknown to the ears of mere mortals. I am sounding in the depths of the void like the motherfucking tuning fork of a god. All circuits are live and broadcasting out into the cosmos.

There have been trials and tribulations aplenty. There has been whining and bitching—the soft moaning of the fully whipped and powerless. I won’t deny it: you kids have seen the blood dripping from your screens. Some of the wounds were from flagellation, but the damage still looks ghastly to the casual observer.

But let me say this, there is some apparent order to be found on the other side—once you’ve portaged the chaos. All the parts seem to be reassembling themselves, clicking into place. The machinery has been cleaned and oiled and is now ready for the next leg of the journey.

If I felt any better, it’d be Christmas.