mictlan

Monday, October 17

Sometimes it is difficult to keep track of my many voices.

These are the voices that come out of my mouth when I speak. There are at least six of them, and maybe many hundreds. I have been known to roar and bark and whimper, whisper. I have been known to echo, rumble and purr. I have been known to speak in the language of birds. I am the conspiracy of ravens, the unkindness of rooks; I am their sudden, capricious flight. I remember the sheaf of pelicans, and associate them with that deep, unsettling fear that comes when you look up at the sky and realize that things are not as they should be.

(Somewhere on a balcony, A. and I count crows on telephone wires. We argue about how many crows it takes to make a murder. He says that anything less than five crows can't be anything more than assault, or maybe even just harassment. I say that a crow, alone, is just a crow.)

I try to listen when the words come out of my mouth, I try to write it all down. I have many books and many pens to contain the torrent. My fingers are stained with ink at the end of the day, and my throat rough and ragged. I try, every day, to spend an hour in silence.

Like the rooks and ravens, we are congregations. This afternoon as an experiment I was five different people in sequence (sometimes two or three at once), and yet I don't think anybody noticed. After all, everyone I met was too busy being different people, too. We are dying, yes, and constantly being reborn, yes, time is a river, yes —old hat now, these bubbles and dips and swirls on the surface that we've learned not to consider part of ourselves— but there are some patterns that last a little longer by recurring periodically, and it is to these patterns that we give names and faces. Think of them as currents, if you like, currents that shape our course, whether they demand that we meander lazily across the flatland or thunder gloriously home to the sea.

But they are only patterns in the larger movement, and not rivers with borders and banks and bankers (life and time not being rivers, either, any more than they are magazines) — only seeming that way —like the deep currents that run in the secret hearts of oceans, rivers within rivers, streams within streams, ocean everlasting, sea without end.