This is an excerpt from one of my books titled “Dialogues with the Mirror” It represents a time when I had to take a really long hard look at myself and decide if what I saw there was something I could live with. It was the dialogue that I had with myself in an effort to make lasting changes in the way I thought and in the way I was, at the time, interacting with the world.
1. Life serves us the most interesting dishes for our guiltless consumption. Some demented cosmic chef grabs various ingredients from insane and unspeakable sources, slices and dices, chops and grates, mixes and melds it until some crazy hodge-podge which has no name and indeed shall remain nameless is formed. Well I have tasted life and swallowed its frightening flavors and returned for seconds and thirds, devouring it, reveling in its filthy mess, and rooting in it like the dirty dog that I have become. I have tasted life’s great culinary experiment and I have not found it wanting.
So why are we here? Why have I somehow persuaded you into sitting still long enough that I may force feed you the regurgitated remains of this dubious dish? Are you also a gourmand of this cosmic cuisine? Have you too, eaten of its cornucopia and fed until you felt full if possibilities, bursting with the fruits of creation that swirl in your gorge, making you sicker than you have ever been in your life, pushing you in turn to vomit out your spiritual guts and look upon the contents of your soul? My reflection haunts me. It stares at me unendingly without flinching, boring its black eyes deep into the hunger of within me that is reflected into the world within the mirror. It knows of my gluttony; It knows that I feasted on life and the fruits of other men’s labors, as I searched for a means to penetrate the mystery of the mirror. My greed has marked me; it has tattooed me, tainted me and scarred me with a dark and treacherous ink that bleeds into me, etching there the picture of my corruption, the portrait of my passions, and the painting of my lust for life, for love, and the dark energy that bleeds into the blackness of my spirit.
The mirror calls to me in my intoxication, as I ride the waves of shame and indifference that fill me in a rhythm that matches the beating, pulsing heart of the world that I am chasing within its depths. Yet it constantly eludes me, this world beyond the world, it taunts me with its incessant invitations and reflected parody of all the things that make me myself. It hurts me this phenomenon. Why cry out to me then reject me when I answer the passionate pleas that I see in the dark eyes staring at me from the frosted glass? I want to smash it, spit on it, scratch it, and punish it for torturing and tormenting me with a hand held out to me with a bloody rose, fragrant as it funereal. But I have understood the meal that life has served me. I have taken its lesson to heart and into the secret core that the mirror cannot see, that the mirror cannot touch and taunt me with deadly desire which can only destroy me. I shiver in anticipation of the promise to be fulfilled in that strange face that confronts me as I beg of it to hear my cries and let me into that world beyond my own. Perhaps there I could see again, perhaps there I can atone.
But life’s not about atonement is it? It’s about experience and tasting the many things which are thrown our direction so that we enjoy its goodness, its evil, its delicious array of flavors which can give us such sweetness upon the tongue and bitterness against the eyes. It sounds too much, this philosophizing about the nature of our existence, but sometimes it is part of being alive to wax poetic, to see the mouth in the petal of the rose, the finger in the drop of rain. I look to the mirror to tell me what it is that I am seeing in the bud of the flower or the wing of the crow, for its mystery draws me like iron fillings to a magnet, pulling my granulated roughness towards its heart and holding me against my will as close as a lustful lover. Infinity resides there and pushes out creativity which touches me like the delicate fingers of a forgotten companion who has come back to haunt me. How I missed that touch, how I wish that I could ride those waves back to its source in the depth of my battered other half who stands before me wondering as I do if the possibilities reflected here in this mirror can offset the pain that we both feel in our hunger to be united. I cannot kiss the mirror and hope to make it mine.
What do you see in the mirror? Is that the window to your soul, or are your eyes corrupt and hiding the true pathway to you secret core? I bury myself in what I see there, trying to describe what it is that haunts me so much about the face that I see staring back at me with eyes as wicked and hungry as my own. When I sleep I hear it whispering to me and in my dreams we touch each other and its ebony skin feels like stone. There are lessons to be learned in that reflection, there are messages that are waiting to be passed on to this vagabond trying to find his way home. I must learn to follow the sounds that the world is singing to me as I journey through creation blindly, blundering my way along, crossing secret paths oblivious and deaf to the melodies of Nature’s many rhythms which drum their staccato beats deep upon the taut skin of my proud intellect.
Dialogues with the Mirror 