The meowing bird

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes,
tastes we have swallowed,
bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom,
characters we have climbed into as if trees,
fears we have hidden in as if caves.
I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead.
I believe in such cartography--to be marked by nature,
not just to label ourselves on a map like the
names of rich men and women on buildings.
We are communal histories, communal books.
We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.
-Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

bio

I don’t believe people stop doing whatever it is that brought them purpose and joy after they die. I believe people still grow quaint secret gardens, still dance in mirror flooded studios,  or still create music that moves the water human beings are made of. This fearless force is greater than the marrow in our bones. It’s the rebellious neutrinos that tried to travel faster than the speed of light.  It’s the paradigms collapsing beneath our feet.

This is something I want to do even after I’m dead. To be like Ondaatje’s elusive desert; a place where water comes to and touch. To discover the enduring gulag orkestar of my life. To be the chemicals in a polaroid film that intertwines the fragile veins and colors to reveal the world through broken lenses of a photograph. To be tried for obscenity and burn alongside Ginsberg and Henry Miller to redefine the meaning of revolution for this generation.

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

-cs lewis


ps. i’m just a catbird