When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

Right now, as we speak, I’m on a plane bound for Belize. I will be there for a full month. Yes, indeed, I will learn.

Yes.

I process my crazy in little projects. I depend on systems and spreadsheets and tasks and responsibilities and checklists in order to keep me sane. And when I pine, this becomes a system in which I have to figure out how to exist.

When pressed. When pressed about my crazy. About the reins I’m pulling taught around the spiral of my thoughts. When pressed about all of that, the thin membrane I’m desperately trying to keep in tact degrades, erodes, decays and any semblance of control is deflated.

I’m not the type of crazy to set your car on fire.

I’m the worse kind. The kind that will sit in a bar, silently, mulling, over a glass of something brown. I’m the kind that you don’t want to touch. I’m the kind that won’t be fun in bed. I’m the kind that might just bum you out when you end up figuring out that there’s someone else on your mind after you’ve been with me for a few hours. But I’m a time filler. So what does it matter.

I’m a self-depricating kind of crazy that men love to say, “Awwwww,” to before planting false kisses on my forehead. Because they believe that the right one is out there for me. It’s just not them. I deserve someone better.

In the meantime. My crazy consumes me. These four walls close in. The eight corners cast shadows. My memories become more significant. I regret. I pine.

I would rather brood. Apparently, that makes me less attractive to the opposite sex. Well, I’ve tried everything else. So I’m just going to brood. Because I’m okay in this space. I don’t need to tell anyone anything about myself in this space. I can be quiet in this space. I don’t have to win anyone over in this space.

I will leave the country in a few days. I will run away. I will remove myself from the situation. I will go far, far away from everything here that makes me so comfortably uncomfortable, so lonely in a crowd of my nearest and dearest. I will know myself differently. I will be working.

Everything will be different.

Your love has taught me, my lady, the worst habits
it has taught me to read my coffee cups
thousands of times a night
to experiment with alchemy,
to visit fortune tellers

It has taught me to leave my house
to comb the sidewalks
and search your face in raindrops
and in car lights
and to peruse your clothes
in the clothes of unknowns
and to search for  your image
even…..even…..
even in the posters of advertisements
your love has taught me
to wander around, for hours
searching for a gypsies hair
that all gypsies women will envy
searching for a face, for a voice
which is all the faces and all the voices…

Your love entered me…my lady
into the cities of sadness
and I before you, never entered
the cities of sadness
I did not know…
that tears are the person
that a person without sadness
is only a shadow of a person…

Your love taught me
to behave like a boy
to draw your face with chalk
upon the wall
upon the sails of fishermen’s boats
on the Church bells, on the crucifixes,
your love taught me, how love,
changes the map of time…
Your love taught me, that when I love
the earth stops revolving,
Your love taught me things
that were never accounted for
So I read children’s fairytales
I entered the castles of Jennies
and I dreamt that she would marry me
the Sultan’s daughter
those eyes..
clearer than the water of a lagoon
those lips…
more desirable than the flower of pomegranates
and I dreamt that I would kidnap her like a knight                                                      and I dreamt that I would give
her necklaces of pearl and coral
Your love taught me, my lady,
what is insanity
it taught me…how life may pass
without the Sultan’s daughter arriving

Your love taught me
How to love you in all things
in a bare winter tree,
in dry yellow leaves
in the rain, in a tempest,
in the smallest cafe, we drank in,
in the evenings…our black coffee

Your love taught me…to seek refuge
to seek refuge in hotels without names
in churches without names…
in cafes without names…

Your love taught me…how the night
swells the sadness of strangers
It taught me…how to see Beirut
as a  woman…a tyrant of temptation
as a woman, wearing every evening
the most beautiful clothing she possesses
and sprinkling upon her breasts perfume
for the fisherman, and the princes
Your love taught me  how to cry without crying
It taught me how sadness sleeps
Like a boy with his feet cut off
in the streets of the Rouche and the Hamra

Your love taught me to grieve
and I have been needing, for centuries
a woman to make me grieve
for a woman, to cry upon her arms
like a sparrow
for a woman to gather my pieces
like shards of broken crystal

-Nizar Qabbani

Attempting to mentally prepare myself for what I should expect in Belize. Garifuna is the name of a particular group of people of African descent unique to parts of Central America, particularly in Belize.

I could get into this.

*Thanks to warasadrumschool for the clarification.

And not a week to spare before I’m headed to Belize.

My life is not linear. I experience my life in a montage of flashbacks and flashforwards. Memories and hopes drifting back and forth, pushing up against each other, influencing each other. I expect that I will remember my life differently with each new and important event.

Say, for example, in this moment, I am feeling completely and utterly alone. In the future I may have built a family and when I look back on my current loneliness, I will remember it differently. I will remember the adventures. I will remember the friendships. But tomorrow, I will look back on today and think, “My God, will this never end? Will I always feel so hopeless?”

Sometimes I believe that I haven’t evolved from a precocious sixteen year old. And other times I feel I’ve evolved so much that my brain can’t wrap its head around what has happened to me and what my purpose has now become. Sometimes I see myself as an 80 year old woman, looking out at her garden through thick spectacles, laughing at herself, holding onto her precious memories. Sometimes I feel that this is not real, this life I’m living, I’m a character in a story, unaware of the audience watching me who are enjoying my shortcomings, identifying with my hubris, waiting for catharsis, relieved at the denouement.

I don’t think life is linear. I think everything that has happened and will happen and is happening actually occurred when time and space were created all at once. There is no such thing as the past or the future and the present is just what our consciousness has created for us. Our life experiences are a fractal of mirrored images replicating themselves over and over. We will never know the end, our memories are sentimental, ethereal things, all we have is what we can see and touch and feel. The only kind of truth there is is the kind of truth we create for ourselves. Whether it’s the good kind of truth or the bad kind of truth might just be up to us.

I want to create some goodness. That’s the kind of truth that matters to me.

I don’t remember much. I remember laughing a lot. I remember smiling a lot. I remember a beautiful man who I’ve known for years and swoon over spending a lot of time talking to me. I remember waking up in my bed.

What I wish I hadn’t blacked out was the fact that Beautiful Man kissed me. He Kissed Me. In all the years that I’ve been a total teenager about him, I’ve dreamed of what that would be like.

AND FOR THE LIFE OF ME I CAN’T REMEMBER IT.

Life is wasted on the drunk…

]]> http://hellodance.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/bacchanal/feed/ 0 hellodance Bacchanal