The Free List : Vol. 1, No. 7
A MORE PRIMAL GOSPEL
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You know that point where you get tired of explaining yourself? When you realize that no one has asked you to, so why are you doing it?
I’m at that point.
Since the veils thinned and the air crisped and the leaves bloodied and fell, I am coming to know death in various ways.
I am dying to myself. Leaves fall inward and compost in my intestinal tract. What they become is yet undetermined. Absorbed?
A couple of weeks ago, I said to my playwriting students, “I don’t know who or where I am right now, but I feel ok with that, because I know I’ll bring back new forms. Eventually?, on the other side.”
This may be true.
In a recent dream, I was in Canada on a large body of water.
I walked toward the edge of the water and a lifeguard with sunglasses beckoned me in. He didn’t speak at all, but he invited me.
I got into the water and started swimming alongside him. Swimming, swimming. Me and the lifeguard, the same rhythm. When I turned to look back to the land, the wooden path I had walked to get to the water was rapidly disappearing under the surface. It was being sucked Underneath by an ancestral force.
Although I felt perfectly safe in the water, was swimming fine, and had a lifeguard synchronized and adjacent to my body, I panicked when I saw the path disappear.
Shortly after that, I woke up.
Everyday that I’ve been awake since, I have swum farther and farther without the path. I know that’s the ask. I know that’s the medicine.
In the last several weeks {in ascending order},
I bought a copy of Tony Kushner’s, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes—which it turns out I already owned—and a copy of Ayi Kwei Armah’s, The Healers. I bought them just to have them close to my head when I sleep, not necessarily to read them. (Let’s say reading can happen in a myriad of ways).
I watched two white people with a tractor and some makeshift rubber pulleys lower a beloved friend into the ground. As the casket descended into the fresh hole and I walked away, I pinned the location of my loss of innocence on my phone. I can return to the coordinates or play with their numerology to decipher some understanding, but I think that is not the point.
I’ve recreated the sea in my mouth; gargling cup after cup of salt-filled water to ease a raw throat that is dying to its old speech. A more primal gospel emerges as the only thing that makes sense.
There is one more issue of The Free List this Pope Gregory calendar year. (Ethiopians, by the way, still observe their traditional calendar in which there are 13 months).
I’ll see you in the next one, whoever and wherever we are at that point.
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All of the work here is brought to you by the gifts of our Ancestors; seen and unseen, known and unknown. May we remember our rising, may we light the shadows. May we all together thrive.