“& if later, the horse is
Destroyed, & all that is holy
Is also destroyed: hundreds of bones & muscles that
Tried their best to be pure flight, a lyric
Made flesh, then
I would like to go home, please.”
—from ”There Are Two Worlds” by Larry Levis (full poem is below this post)
I have beloved people in my life whom I might not see for a decade or longer. I can feel them as I write this. Like the tall shadows of trees in moonlight, I feel them standing near me. They’re a presence without being—or needing to be—present. Like the markers of the Intracoastal Waterway I steered my boat by during my teenage years on Siesta Key, they don’t need to be positioned in quick succession. I don’t even have to be able to see the next one moment to moment. They guide by field. They emerge at the perfect time. These bonds are the gift of getting older. Several hold my childhood and I hold theirs. When they call or we meet, my entire nervous system smiles. When we part, it takes a few days for our souls to disengage. That’s how it feels to say good-bye to them, like a part of me has left with them and a part of them has stayed behind.
It takes some time for that sense to dissipate as I gently call myself back to myself. A part of the invisible me becomes like a borrowed cardigan they forgot to hand over before driving or flying away. They leave something behind as well, something shaped and scented like them. Row by row, the cardigan un-knits from them and re-knits on me and vice versa. I don’t forget them. I just recalibrate my perception. For, when they were here they were in my five-sense world, the reality of the body. After the process of de-knitting, they return to my psychic five-senses, the reality of the heart. Both presences are treasures.
Getting from one to the other is a process I find fascinating. The love we share dwells in a corridor of the universe when we are apart. We think of each other. We are reminded of each other by events and sensations. We say we love each other without saying anything out loud. No need. In that corridor, we are infinite and wear matching hats. We are always there. When we hatch a plan to see each other in person, everything must convert from that sacred corridor to one of our driveways. From chiros to chronos is much longer distance than we admit. To draw a material form from a realm means flipping all the switches of emotion from instinct to ego, and when we let ego go on a playdate, ego never obeys curfew. Ego can even skip town. Ego wants to stay here with all the other egos that make up an illusion so convincing it can’t even entertain the idea of it being anything else.
Folktales and myths are a handbook for this phenomenon, this crossing back and forth between material self and soul self. In a Greek myth, Theseus sits on a bench offered by Hades who has invited the guest to have a cordial. The bench is magic, though, and Theseus cannot stand up. This is the worst-case scenario for venturing between the symmetries of sense. When we say “we miss you,” it is because love is concrete, not abstract. It binds us on both planes. To miss someone is to see the world as a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece so vital that the puzzle makes no sense without. It’s amazing how literal metaphors become when we speak of two worlds, the surface and the within. Getting caught up in the surface and detaching from the within is hell. We can get stuck in it.
It’s not hell because of any moral judgment. It’s just what the term hell denotes, and yet without engaging it whole-heartedly its counterpart, heaven remains off limits. Like Dante, we enter, abandoning all hope. From the mythological standpoint, nothing is good or bad. Things just are. Hell is a sensory construct we can only disintegrate by learning all the lessons it had to teach us. Each lesson reveals another lever or pulley in the cause-and-effect game of cosmic gadgetry. When you’ve gotten hold of the gadgets, the gadgets open the doors and let Dante finally go on a date with Beatrice and Orpheus to go on a date with Euridyce if he can walk back up the staircase without looking back to see if she’s behind him. Of course, he looks back.
There’s a whole library of stories in mythology and scripture about the perils of looking back after crossing between realities. Turn to salt. Get stuck on a magic bench. Prioritize the animals aboard the Ark over the poor neighbors drowning. And probably not a good idea to look back once walking through a dry part of the Red Sea. When Jesus is in the desert the devil (of details fame) tries to red-rover him ont the illusory side of things. Jesus is smart, though, and is fine with having broken on through to the other side (alack poor Jim Morrison). The lesson of the moral? If you’re going to engage the labyrinth five-sense world after having leveled up, unravel a ball of string as you go back in.
After my friends go back into the unseen—whether it be return to pure energy or to Indiana—it takes some time to trace the string back to the entrance. One night, while growing up on Siesta Key, I took a cellophane dragon kite out to the beach and let all the string on the spool out, not thinking of how long it would take to reel it all back in. The only alternative would be to just give up and let the sky have it but then how the string would strangle a sea turtle. It took what felt like three hours and probably was. I’d stand on the beach for hours, though, if it meant I got to see and catch up with an old friend in person.
****
There Are Two Worlds
Larry Levis
Perhaps the ankle of a horse is holy.
Crossing the Mississippi at dusk, Clemens thought
Of a sequel in which Huck Finn, in old age, became
A hermit, & insane. And never wrote it.
And perhaps all that he left out is holy.
The river, anyway, became a sacrament when
He spoke of it, even though
The last ten chapters were a failure he devised
To please America, & make his lady
Happy: to buy her silk, furs, & jewels with
Hues no one in Hannibal had ever seen.
There, above the river, if
The pattern of the stars is a blueprint for a heaven
Left unfinished,
I also believe the ankle of a horse,
In the seventh furlong, is as delicate as the fine lace
Of faith, & therefore holy.
I think it was only Twain’s cynicism, the smell of a river
Lingering in his nostrils forever, that kept
His humor alive to the end.
I don’t know how he managed it.
I used to make love to a woman, who,
When I left, would kiss the door she held open for me,
As if instead of me, as if she already missed me.
I would stand there in the cold air, breathing it,
Amused by her charm, which was, like the scent of a river,
Provocative, the dusk & first lights along the shore.
Should I say my soul went mad for a year, &
Could not sleep? To whom should I say so?
She was gentle, & intended no harm.
If the ankle of a horse is holy, & if it fails
In the stretch & the horse goes down, &
The jockey in the bright shout of his silks
Is pitched headlong onto
The track, & maimed, & if later, the horse is
Destroyed, & all that is holy
Is also destroyed: hundreds of bones & muscles that
Tried their best to be pure flight, a lyric
Made flesh, then
I would like to go home, please.
Even though I betrayed it, & left, even though
I might be, at such a time as I am permitted
To go back to my wife, my son – no one, or
No more than a stone in a pasture full
Of stones, full of the indifferent grasses,
(& Huck Finn insane by then & living alone)
It will be, it might be still,
A place where what can only remain holy grazes, &
Where men might, also, approach with soft halters,
And, having no alternative, lead that fast world
Home – though it is only to the closed dark of stalls,
And though the men walk ahead of the horses slightly
Afraid, & at times in awe of their
Quickness, & how they have nothing to lose, especially
Now, when the first stars appear slowly enough
To be counted, & the breath of horses makes white signatures
On the air: Last Button, No Kidding, Brief Affair –
And the air is colder.