We come out of the darkness, no, we enter;
– Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies.
For only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently do I know the world.
–Rilke, “Fragment of an Elegy” (translated by Stephen Mitchell).
my last entry here was november 3rd, 2023. this was before i got the txt and then made the phone call that would Re-Order My Life. there are so many things i want to say to you; things that cook in me i want to share; life sweeps me into Other directions, other explorations, other descents. it has been two months, now, since the little sister of my college ex-boyfriend, one of the great loves of my life, died. it has been two months since the first time i accompanied someone through the multi-realm reality of Their Own Death. i am okay and not okay, everyday, all the time.
[…]
what is coming to me tonight— this morning, now, as it’s literally almost 4:30am as i begin writing this— has to do with applied mythopoesis. the practical, tangible form of physically engaging with myth in our everyday life/modern world. one of this ways it comes into being, for me, is Ritual. accompanying my ex’s sister through her death felt like something similar. the not-fully-knowing while also Knowing. the one-foot-in-front of the other; i’ve never done this before, but this is what i have to do.
**
it was late summer/early fall 2022 at my friend’s place in beacon when i formally wrote about entering, for the First time, as this adult person— into a revisited exploration of my ‘lifelong issues’ with my guts, my digestion. and what i discovered and rediscovered was entwined with it— my sometimes increasingly disordered relationship with food. it’s been a year and a few months since then and i Understand Again and Again— the time things take. to Happen. to Reveal. to Learn. to Move. i understand why the masculinized curative orientation— take this and fix it, quick— doesn’t, and has not, Fucking Worked. and i understand how much Harm has come to myself, and continues to come to myself, when i make that orientation My orientation for the world.
these past several years since being released from my last full-time job in spring ‘21 have brought this question to the forefront, over and over. what is my Orientation? what is ‘the norm’? what is the center point on the compass around which the arrow spins? What Happens each time i change that orientation— each time i question what is held at the Center? each time i pause to consider, reconsider: Do I Even Believe This, and if so, Why?
i wish to share with you, without abundant explanation, a progression of photos from a ritual i walked backwards into the day before the new moon, january 11th, earlier this month. i am fascinated— how could i not be?— by the edges of revelation and madness. how one informs and spills into the other. where the idea of madness Even Comes From— again this question of Orientation. if i am designated as mad, then what is designated as its counterpart/opposite?
[…]
in recent time i have been blessed by the wys-doom of a txt thread for sharing and ruminating on the intersections of myth and suicidality with two west coast teller-friends. i talk about my own story with suicidality over and over— designate my ‘active’ crisis time as 2015 to 2019. reached a one-year mark last july of ‘1 year without wanting to die.’ i was surprised to find, recently— that i like being able to refer to this story like a specimen in a case. it happened Back Then, and i am Here, now. the One Who Survived. the After-Lifer. i can point to my mythic recontextualizations, frameworks, guides and guiding spirits that have brought meaning to the cosmology of chaos and collapse.
and Then. and Then.
a New kind of descent, Comes. that day before the new moon, this month.
thankfully (…?) i had just watched the dev patel version of the green knight and the intensity of its images were still with me. flashing in my mind were the scavengers tying him up and leaving him for dead. saint winifred asking him to dive to the bottom of the spring to find her head. i couldn’t make sense of what was happening— the last thing i scrawled to myself the next night (because it continued)—
this vision of the temple of the stranger
sitting at a stone gateway/doorway
why would i need to be dropped inside the illusion of all this in such intensity
“the illusion of all this.” kind of feels like that specimen in the case. safe-distance. not that this was actually Happening. Again. my words from that page:
the seer woman asking me to pull 4 big cards. Labyrinth, Death. i can’t remember. they were Dark. […] me on the bridge. seeing myself jump. seeing detail of it. but seeing the verticality. how it didn’t end— a feeling that if i wasn’t unconscious in hitting the water i would’ve fought for my life. a sojourn in hell. it’s a Game. […] last night feeling my trappedness abt digestion. how it is like a feeling of FAILURE. fear. the voices have come for me again. […] last night the minotaur was there too at the center of my guts.
The Labyrinth.
this thematic arrived to me in the Most affecting way, thus far— i don’t even remember how, now— last winter, 2023. perhaps, honestly, it was the return of This incantory song about ariadne by asaf avidan that i had been given that past fall. as i explored the fullness of the myth, that i had never realized also comprised the story of icarus and daedalus— the troublingness of its crisscrossing ecosystem of actions and reactions became the unexpected perfect Holding-ground for the tenuous emotional space i found myself in. life circumstances had (d)evolved in such a way that i was facing the unexpressed grief and rage from my childhood for the First time in an unadulterated manner, as an adult.
this past october after a trip to california to see my brother, more painful digestive explorations emerged— and more labyrinths. physical ones i walked with my own body in san francisco outside the cathedral and after finding them hidden in the desert-landscape of the sibley volcanic preserve. something was telling me about the physicalization of Moving The Energy. how the labyrinth pathways, all wound and curled tightly— actually resembled my intestines. my innards. what did it mean to Walk them? to Move The Energy along in way i felt was impossible in my own body?
[…]
the labyrinth returned, Again. and this time the minotaur arrived in that new moon darkness, in Presence, in a way he never had.
the david bowie classic labyrinth is my favorite movie since i was 11 or so years old. my family has kept this wooden labyrinth from our grandpa raymond expressly because the first time i had seen one was in the background of sarah’s room in the movie. for whatever reason, in the many (many) piles of half-forgotten-life-detritus in this house, the game was sitting in the hallway, right outside the front door of my apartment.
it was the physical Thing i needed, to accompany me.
the ritual Begins/Continues—
from sophie strand’s the flowering wand (thanks to a reminder/reco from my friend ben).
from marie-louise van franz’s alchemy. a theory i am having now, that the suicidal urge is happening in tandem/relatedly, to the alchemical coniunctio, the coincidence of opposites.
also von franz; this Stood Out To Me. after i was able to share, initially reluctantly, with 3 of my closest people the hell-scape in which i found myself in the night(s) before— something began to Move.
[…]
and then, Later. this week, Later; almost the full moon, now, Later.
there is a particular memory i have, from childhood time— before-time. involving a knife. after so, so many years in summer ‘21 i was unexpectedly led into ritual with this triggering and almost dream-like memory-image, on the kitchen floor in manchester in my then-partner’s apartment. there was something of it Here— as i wrote back then: a memory in which you are not a little girl anymore. that morning, earlier this week— a flashing in my mind of the live-action 80s alice in wonderland movie in which alice is running from the roaring, drooling, fearsome fire-breathing dragon, the jabberwocky— and the guiding spirit, the owl in the painting on the wall of the castle— tells her that if she doesn’t face her fears she will always be a little girl and she will never grow up.
the end of david whyte’s poem, ‘no one told me,’ included in the book dancing in the flames by marion woodman and elinor dickson.
“the grace of that suicidality. the complexity of an ecosystem that can hold it.”
salt and plugged-up oubliettes (the holes in the labyrinth that are actually real-life medieval dungeons/places of imprisonment and death— where you put people to forget about them). sage and palo santo smoke along the passageways. fires lit in each corner of the maze. an offering of a tiny cup of honey— to all the gods, honey, to the mistress of the labyrinth, honey, writ as it is on the linear B tablet found in knossos. in This world— this ‘reality’— and the Other one, simultaneously. back and forth, and overlaid. in my mind and heart’s eye, Visioned. and in my kitchen, my back bedroom. All Over The House. the minotaur, the Watchman. the sword, the axe, the knife. subverting the long-held Violence into a ritual of boundary-setting. of space-claiming. of Life-Giving. similar, as ever, to that day, now years ago, i went to the bridge and stood against the edge, daring the malicious spirits to push me— some part of me Knew that i would be Immovable, so full-hearted was my want to be Alive.
this tangle with hungry ghosts.
the mere uttered phrase in the midst of all this, again by a friend, sending the synapses firing and threads newly-weaving. addiction. food addiction. disordered eating. unwell ancestors. starvation. past lives. violence. DNA. imprisonment. scavenging. not enough. Never Enough. hungry hungry hungry hungry ghosts.
How To Take Oneself Seriously, doing This?
in such a moment of worlds in communion and in collision— there is no other way, for me. no other way Out, and Through, and In, i mean.
i ripped the labyrinth apart, tonight. after All of This.
this is its empty base, now. filled with So Many Things that have helped me, to Live.
the frame of it, severed from its housing with the same knife; threads tied to springs, one now balanced atop it, candle of saint jude Burning alongside. and a piece of paper with these sharpie-written words in front of it, on the rug:
Deceiver, I thank you.
Betrayer, I bless you.
You can’t imagine
the labyrinths I travel.
I am entering into such music,
you seem no longer a giant.
Time pares you down
to a roadside post,
a place I had to pass.
— from ‘ariadne thanks theseus for abandoning her,’ by ioanna-veronika warwick.
[…]
there are So Many Other things i could say.
for now, Again, i am mystified, humbled, rent apart, and sewn back together with the golden threads snaking through all of this. Community. Connection. Associative Alacrity. Other-Worldliness. Forgiveness. the Ecosystems. of change, of Hope.
a sojourn in hell. it’s a Game, i wrote.
was it?
may These Things, these Explorations, continue to break into and through me— in supposed madness Always revealed, the courageness of my Soul, mySelf.
**
can i make enough space inside me for the stone maze to become dancing-ground, for the monster to become the Guiding Spirit? come, god, in your utter blackness. into this exactitude of Wretchedness— the curling sprig of life in one palm, bone-dust in the other. tell me a New story about something i swore, i thought, i entirely, Knew.
this won’t be, can’t be, a place of suffering anymore.
not because it’s over, because it never is.
this won’t be, can’t be, a place of suffering anymore.
because it’s not over.
this Revivification in Imagination.
it never is.
— my writing based on this experience from 1/16, full piece on instagram here. {thank you always lyssa for a safe ~writing jacuzzi~ space to write. <3}