If You are Too Easily,
Dangerously,
Enchantable
I created a bed, a four-poster bed with skeletons on top, surrounded by shells and under the canopy I put a glass-covered box full of butterflies. Whitman, his beard full of butterflies, said Lorca, whose mind was full of moonlight.
Diego created a garden, more beautiful than any I’d seen, and created a home into which everyone could come. My Diego. He was never mine: he belonged to himself, and he was too generous, too universal in his love to belong to me or anyone and, in that generosity, the trap was set. A wall of organ cactus grew between us, and the fountains in the courtyard played instead of us.
In the beginning was the word, right? Wrong. In the beginning, I was. I sang one pure white note into the black silence. It was I who let there be mindlight—other light more magical than the sun’s, in those lovely days when the world was young. Young it continued to be for aeons: young it could have been forever. In those lovely days, he used to come to all my parties, he drank too much, he fucked, he jumped burning embers, he played, he stayed up all night and I beamed with pleasure, for then he was truly enlightened: delight lit him, he shone in my light. Now he shuts the curtains, walls me out, he will have no tryst with me. He did not leave me for another woman but for every other woman. This was his nature.
All those who are exiled look to me for their primal simile and I am pale with exile’s hunger, having no barley, no hops, no hearthside, no ruddy cheeks. I am sick with an exile’s thirst for the bucketloads, oceanloads of water tipping around in giant puddles on earth. Coatlicue is the goddess of all exiled women, all those who shine with too much silver, goddess of both birth and death, her skirts rattle with skulls as she walks and those skulls shine with moonlight and knowing.
My exile forced me to be nomadic, limping across the heavens with bare white feet and, since I never wore shoes, after several millennia my feet bled from walking. I leave bloody footprints now across the sky, and I leave bloody footprints on earth, across the world a million bloodstained bedsheets every month, the footprints of my nomadic courses, which is why still today you can see a million women by a million wells at dawn, washing out the bloody footprints of the moon. I am so tired of walking alone. There is a pair of parakeets at the gate, here a family, there a marriage, with a nest of children, and everywhere they lie in twos while I shine with solitude, bright with its utter light.
But if you look carefully when I am crescent you will see a strange glimmer, the faintest trace of light which only the most observant see at the edge of my circle, the low light of my liminal love, only just visible, only at night, my only intimacy described in shadow terms, like the moon in love with man on the dark side only, on the far and other, the only unlonely side, and only for moments, for when the moon turns a half-inch in her sleep she half-wakes and knows she is alone again, holding herself only in her own arms, morning after night in the bruised edge of the sky.
The moon was homeless, and how many there were who wanted the moon unhoused, hurt by the road, gypsy of the sky whose freedom they could relish only with envy and admire only with resentment. Oh, the moon’s used to it, she doesn’t need a home, she’s a natural nomad, they said, because they wanted her for a symbol of a life they were too mortgaged to lead. (Lorca knew the sadness of solitude, that gypsy grief, and we console each other. My Mexico understands exile, and has a proud history of giving a home to political refugees.) I am exiled from the simplest dream, to lie on a beach in the sun with my head in his plump lap, to swim naked with him, to hold his hand in a taverna in the evening and at night to feel his breath softly fanning my cunt to flame as one would blow on the embers to catch fire, and I can no more have this than the moon could crawl down a duckboard off the roof, balance her toe on the rainwater butt, and hop down to give you a quick peck on the cheek. So I must turn my face away and sing my solo to the cosmos.
I painted The Two Fridas, one of me in Tehuana dress, woven into the indigenous earth of Mexico, and the other in European clothes. (We both have hearts too open, and our human hearts are on the left, with its rightful political hint.)
Indigenous Frida holds a tiny egg-shaped portrait of Diego, attached to her heart by an artery which is also an umbilical cord. European Frida, meanwhile, is bleeding to death.
For Mexico itself, of course, it is the indigenous lands which are bleeding to death, and The Two Mexicos is the masterpiece being repainted now in the figure of Subcomandante Marcos, fusing the two. One Mexico is traditional and indigenous, speaking the language of land; the other is Western, speaking the urban poetics of the page. The two marry in the Zapatista rebellion of today, and together they write a message in blood from the open veins of Mexico’s heart, for humanity and against neoliberalism, calling all grief-surgeons of the world to help stem the flow.
I have to tell you, because it makes me smile, that Subcomandante Marcos had a crush on me when he was just a teenager; he loved my revolutionary nature and my art. I died when he was still very young, but I passed the baton on to him. Poet, revolutionary, romantic.
In the genealogy of revolutionaries, I was fathered by Emiliano Zapata, and I was born in Mexico’s earlier rebellion. In the register of births, Marcos was born during my lifetime but, in the register of revolutionary significance, Marcos says he was born in 1984 as the Zapatista insurgents moved to begin training in the Lacandon jungle. (We are all Zapata. We are all Marcos.)
I really only have one disagreement with Subcomandante Marcos, and even then it stems from an agreement. We both think that the moon has hope, but whereas he thinks that her hope is to escape her tie to earth, to fly away, maybe to Jupiter or Saturn, I think her hope is to be tied closer and closer by a sweet silk thread to humanity, and that her grief is because of the distance between them. Who is right, Marcos or me? Who knows? Well, without wanting to pull rank on this one—especially against the supreme commander of Mexico’s rebel army—I do. I am the moon, after all, in one of her incarnations. Marcos once planned to send a message, on a little satellite, to the moon, saying: ‘It would do her good to know that someone understands her.’ Yes, and you. It would do you good too.
‘It happened many years ago. It is a story of a love that was not, that was left unfulfilled. It is a sad story…and terrible,’ says the subcomandante, pipe to his lips, eyes to the mountains now. He speaks for himself, for me, and for countless thousands, but beneath one ski-mask is another, beneath the Zapatistas of today, that earlier revolution, when my story began, my sad story and terrible, my story of a love not yet fulfilled.
Marcos, they say, is the most wanted man in Mexico. I can quite believe it. Women want him hard in bed, eh, Don Durito of the Lacandon? Kids put on ski-masks and want to be him. But a small and horrible bunch of bankers, bureaucrats and soul-murderers want to kill him, not because he is a rebel leader but because he is a poet. To them, I’d say: Be careful. Would you assassinate the moon? All that would happen is you’d shatter her reflection in the lake, scatter it in a thousand pieces. So too, if you murder Marcos, a thousand shiny coins of priceless heroism will put on ski-masks and climb the mountain under a moon of vehement poetry. Like Lorca, the subcomandante writes the poetry of the toreador, and he knows how the bulls of Wall Street have gored the campesinos.
There are revolutionaries who dream of bullets and revolutionaries who dream of starlit guitars, on nights when the moon is all you have left to call your own. Tuck the moon into your saddlebag, then, with pipe tobacco, balloons and poems whose fuses are already lit, ready to explode like shooting stars on the skies of ten thousand minds. But all of this is in the future, all yet to come. In my present, I can only tell you that the cords of Lorca’s harp were cut with scissors, that my heart fell, the chords of my heart falling down through the octaves below the range of human hearing.
Diego divorced me, and I divorced him. I was entirely bewildered but still entirely in love. But in the terrible confusions of love, there was an eclips
e of the moon. How did it happen? Astronomers of the heart could explain it like this: I couldn’t take the pain. The loneliness of being flung out of his orbit made me demented for solace. I am a stray moon, and I would swing into the orbit of any consoling planet. So the moon was eclipsed by a passing star. I became exiled not only from him but from myself, and that was my one unforgivable sin, which I regret so bitterly now, because it was a fall from my own grace. I was fatally eclipsed, and I swung away from the truth of my own trajectory. My mind was born winged, but that was the one moment when I betrayed the gift of flight. The best of minds stay faithful to their flight, the wise women, the world’s shamans whose transformations are flights of empathy, of curiosity, of curing; whose translations are innocent; who dared to be innocent, who dared to fly, who chose their own soaring. I was unfaithful to my own flight.
What does it mean to fly? To dare to dream. To be deeply, highly happy. And to be innocent above all. I am guilty. I lied to him, pretending I wasn’t having affairs. But I lied also to myself, and I misaligned my soul. It is so easy to be guilty, like a goat tethered by an old piece of washing line to a cacky post. It is harder to be innocent. But courage is innocent and now is innocent and desire is innocent and flight is an innocent angle of yearning, aspiring to express the life force, and now I see his eyes shining with flight. Icarus soared, flying in the face of god and gravity. What matters is not that he was forced to fall but that he dared to fly.
Passion above all is innocent. Passion is the very wingedness of innocence, the finest advocate and the only one necessary. In feral tenderness, loving him, cock and cunt, the moon will not be patrolled and she shines free and fearless and there is no sin in anything that shines that fucking much.
I became only more beautiful for being so bruised. I would be a conquistador of pain. I painted myself masturbating and I dared the press to say so. One did. I was all the opulence of Byzantium, and all the spider monkeys of the rainforests. I was saucier than any tart. Like a nutcracker, I cracked jokes till the guests spluttered with laughter like the chestnuts I forgot in the fireplace, exploding like little bombs all over the room. Like, like, like, everything was like everything else. Except him.
I put my special diamond and gold caps on my incisors so I glinted wickedly in three places. Eyes. Teeth. Cunt. It’s a display, that’s all. The reality is that I hold my own hand, I cry, I drink, I sleep. Skeletons in sunglasses, skeletons in goggles tell dirty jokes around my broken bed until vines and tendrils spring up from my pillows, surrounding me in jungle, my death giving them fuerza de la natura. The force of nature: from death comes life. Everything is connected in life, everything spins me into it. There are caterpillars caught in a web which a spider has spun between a green leaf and my black hair. (‘Black? Nothing is black, really nothing,’ I wrote.)
We had a party one day and dressed the cardboard skeletons, some in my clothes, some in his, and hung them from the rafters so there was an alternative fiesta up there; in the commotion the skeletons jostled and swayed and gossiped of the dead and cast the glad eye with their empty sockets and drank shots of tequila through their jawbones.
Enchanting man, he was endlessly enchantable, it welled up, a spring which never ran dry. He was enchanted by dawn and by dusk, every leaf enchanted him, every moment, every river, every tune, every pipe, every wave, every moonrise, every woman. The earth gods enchanted him—as did Jesus, that lovely magician, who shared so many motifs with all the other earth gods, the death and resurrections, the turning worlds of life, death and life again. All of these deserved his enchantment, and were enchanted by him in turn because he was so open-hearted, so free with himself, that flowers crowded flirting into his fingers, rivers nuzzled their courses nearer to him, and for him the stars tripped over the Andes and fell shooting from the sky in the instantaneity of stellar love. He gave himself to the world and the world flooded in to him in turn.
White feathers fall across my window as another sky surrenders.
Do I mind?
Why should I? Like van Gogh, I stand in my own light.
And besides, everything that was ever created loves me. Moth, jaguar, sap. They rise to greet me and I suppose I need none of him, but I am saddened when I see the rainforests choked and rainless. The whales which used to sing for me are scarcer and more silent now. The ice seeps away—the ice which was my favourite landscape—for I was an artist of light before he was born, and I gave ice the brightness of sheer serenity. My sadness now is a cloud around me which I shine within, and no light of mine is seen by anyone else, creating a further exile.
Do I mind?
My soul is broken.
I will have to make shift for myself on the heath of my soul, knowing myself broken to bits and pieces, knowing a howl of utter and lifelong pain. Put out the lights. Put out the moonlight and the suns and stars and then put out mindlight everywhere. This is the Age of Yellow: madness, sickness and fear. How could I have turned from him? How could I? How?
But he did not want me any more. After millennia of tenderly cherishing moonlight, he took the moon out of his pocket and dropped it. So mind, too, slipped out of his fingers and fell on the floor: thought in shards.
And I walked away inconsolable till Walt Whitman whistled to me from the woods. You look like one of mine, he said, and hugged me.
I asked him, are we too few, we of the poet’s vintage? Are there simply too many of the others? Those who do not prize either poetry or flight. Who re-cork the bottle before we’ve finished drinking. Who are a herbicide to the idiosyncratic and a pesticide to difference. Who buy pasteurised verbs and keep them in the fridge, who check their hearts are sterilised, and who, seeing the very liquidity of love, would only handle it with rubber gloves. Who keep the garbage foil-wrapped for freshness but think a vegetable garden is dirty. Who think the volcanic is just another reason for dusting. Who like to titter but never really laugh. Who buy cut-price emotions, a bargain in the marketplace. Who are sociable enough to gather gossip but not kind enough for friends. Who keep their cash safe but freely betray a confidence. Who use their shallowness to scorn profundity. Whose incuriosity closes minds and books and conversations. Who never knew bewilderment or what it was to wonder. Whose self-certainty was as cruelly clean as their curtains, and as surely sterile. Who aimed for the average and scored it competently, who know ambition but not aspiration. Who opt for the ordinary and would sue a bird for singing.
Surrealism. They need it in Europe, I suppose. Their Aztecs are so buried that they need drowned clocks instead. My parrots and monkeys ransack the garbage for real, and jaguars roar from my bookshelves, so why should I look for dream puppeteers?
My Changeling Child in
a World Mad with
Grief
I know Diego of old. I know how his infidelities are a result of his generosities and I know it is who he is. I have watched him a long time, I have loved him, reproached him, hated him and adored him and I think, after all these years, I know him, all his nonsenses, his creations, mistakes and wonders, all his wrong turnings, wit, mischiefs and glories.
But what he did next shocked me more deeply than anything yet.
It was the Day of the Dead and I had taken my sister’s children out to the graves which were lit with lanterns and candles, and we ate tiny candy skeletons in their miniature sugar coffins. A merry death day it was, and the children were effervescent and giggly and I held them precious to my heart while we strew zempazúchil flowers across the graves and they tipped handfuls of petals into my hair and kissed me and called me mamá by accident. For one moment, then, my stomach heaved with grief, knowing that no child now would ever call me mother except by mistake. But the moment passed, and they told me saucy jokes, and we flicked sugar skulls into each other’s mouths until the night grew late. We left, turning for home, and burst into the house, the kids fizzing with coffins and candlelight and there was Diego, fucking their mother, my sister.
No pain like it.
&nbs
p; No time in hospital, having my bones re-broken, hurt like this.
My sister, my fertile sister, my sister of cradles, not coffins.
I cut off all my hair, as an outward sign of what he had done. I was shorn of what little I had. Take my sister, take my hair, take my sex, leave me only my coffin.
I had just about learned to laugh at the physical pain, the fracture of my pelvis and my broken back, the endless rounds of surgery, being caged in a hospital bed, but the moment I had almost managed to cope, he fractured my heart, making of me an Aztec sacrifice. I was still alive, goddammit, he could have waited. My body was chingada—it was fucked—and now my psyche was too. I paint in the poetry of blood and my blood feeds the earth to bloom and to blossom with art.
My sweet sister-earth. And yet he abused everything about her, her love for him, her patience, her trust. I know he didn’t mean to do it, but I see the effects. She is maddened with grief. Her rhythms are ruptured and her seasons sundered. Her eyes are bright with pain. And I am not only heart-broken but soul-broken. I would have stayed faithful to him till I died but, when he turned away from me, in my grief I also turned away from him and in doing so I lost my self. I lost my singularity, my wholeness, my integrity. I have made the seas grieve, those oceans which knew the miracle of chance before, the lucky coral as a lively chaos, now only know the dead chaos which leaves her bruised and jangling, and I’ve heard the seas shriek with pain as a terrible magenta covers the oceans already with the heave of a lifelong grief.
The seas no longer sway with me, but instead they bolt and stagger, they run cold currents where warm should be, measuring the rise of their grief in metres, overflowing with strange tears, as sea levels rise, flooding miles of coast and submerging whole islands. Hurt, the world’s waters rage, impotent for the most part but hurling an occasional tsunami of reproach. My gentle ocean is inconsolable and infinite in grief. The coral is bleached, the dugong is butchered and the songlines of the whale are so skewed that one, injured, distressed and disoriented, swum not singingly in the bell depths of the Atlantic but turned right at Casablanca and creaked its confused way to die by the Rock of Gibraltar.
A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Page 4
