Monito mágico

The monkey on my shoulder, at this moment, is as tiny as a spider. And magic. But, unlike the surly, and more than slightly rude (and smelly) Monkey King, this creature's limbs are long and elegant with dainty hands and delicately articulated fingers. As if el mono araña could gently pluck angels off the head of a pin or redesign, grain by powdery grain, the iridescent patterns on a butterfly's wings. This monkey shifts shape. It hangs from silvery threads invisible to the jaded eye. It sprouts wings and flits and flutters around my head catching me, enchanting me, in the gauzy web of its teensy tiny voice, singing ancient songs and new ideas into being with a whisper of a breeze, a mere wisp of a breath, barely audible beneath the ever so slight hum of its beating wings.
We all have these most intimate of stories, these tales of hope and desire, despair and horror, that are woven into the fabric of our souls. Sometimes we wear these stories like armor, or on our sleeve comme amour. Sometimes these stories are kept secret even from ourselves, and sometimes they keep secrets of our selves that leak out through the seams of our dreams and the buttonholes of our neurosis.
Rich with magic and meaning, here is a landscape where personal mythologies carry more truth than mere material details. Our blood sings the songs of generations and whispers tales from before our time. These are our secret stories where the mundane world is transformed in alchemical ritual, where reality is stranger than fiction, where ultimate truths triumph over finite facts. A moment when time is of the essence, where the snake swallows his tail, where it is always midnight and the moon is eternally full. Meaning is rarely mundane, it requires the magic of spirit, the grandeur of archetypes and the presence of mythical beings to breath life into the exquisite corpse of the tales we tell ourselves. The blood of the innocent is always spilled to nourish the ancient archetypes that inhabit the fecund underworld from which we are reborn as the heroes and heroines of our own lives. It is suffering that nourishes the roots of the tree of life, the very roots that form the architecture of the underworld where death and life become the flesh and bone of meaning, the gristle and ligament of purpose and place.
If we are not careful, if we never learned to care and have mistaken vulnerability for weakness, suffering can rot our souls. It can make us foul and cynical fools, gaseous and bloated with our own contempt for magic and innocence. Thinking we are adult and worldly in our disdain, we spill onto the threshold the sour milk of dreams and desires curdled by fear and envy. Too angry to cry, we bitterly demand the blood of the innocent be shed to ensure we don't suffer alone. Our pain is spread throughout our world with malicious generosity. For the suffering is never in the sadness, it is always in our loneliness and disconnection.
If we are courageous and reckless in the care that we give and the compassion with which we take, we can transmute our suffering. We can use purgatory's flames to boil our troubles until the turmoil has distilled our tears into a potent elixir. If we can hold within the chalice of our souls both hope and despair, if we can allow the depths of sadness and the breadth of joy, as we once again find ourselves lifted in the small hands of magical creatures and an innocence forged in the fires of hell, we are returned to the world larger than life. To a world larger than death. Where to be mortal, to be vulnerable and human, is the most heroic act of all.

Beware the monkey's tale

I've got a monkey on my back, and it keeps whispering incongruous words and sweet nothings in my ears...which can get quite sticky and unsightly at times. This monkey chatters away in idle moments, telling tall tales and trying on short stories (which barely cover its hairy ass). It most rudely interrupts my conversations with inappropriate observations. It misplaces thoughts, leaving them in odd boxes that alter all sense. It dances after run on sentences and dashes nimbly after escaping verbs. It gets into mischief, as monkeys are wont to do. Most alarmingly, this monkey incites me to undertake absurd adventures and quixotic quests. To dig for meaning, to disinter skeletons and record the brittle symphony of their heartless, bony secrets. The monkey drags me to the wakes of the freshly dead, dancing drunkenly over the open coffin as it cracks dark jokes far and wide open to reveal unspeakable truths and lies...damned lies. But the monkey also invites me to feast upon life, to ingest and regurgitate experiences like a bulimic overstuffed on cake and context. My monkey is a glutton. Death...life...the mundane...the divine...all are food for the monkey's insatiable appetite. The monkey pays attention to details while gesturing at the big picture (but only as a means to distract you while it steals your bananas). It plots and articulates action, it lives in myths and traps mundane moments in gilded cages. This monkey has a typewriter and sometimes, amidst the absurdity and nonsense, a page of meaning flutters to the ground...

I can't tell you exactly when the monkey moved from my mind to my back, when thoughts needed to be poured onto the page and contained rather than drifting like clouds through my consciousness. Perhaps it was the stormy weather, the hard rain that fell and the thunder that insisted it be heard. Or the river that overflowed its banks. Or the sun that burned too brightly, casting shadows so long that they loomed larger than the figure throwing them...shadows that took on such density and darkness that they condensed into a form with the heft to be thrown about. I started writing early and often, even when I hid my words or wrote in code deep in the heart of the night while hidden under the covers with only a flashlight to illuminate my experience. Quite simply, I had to write. To decrease the pressure. To release the pleasure. To tame the sweet lipped monkey on my back. To run wild in imaginary lands. To plant my feet firmly on the earth. To climb the tree of life and feast upon the succulent fruits the monkey held out so temptingly, so sweetly, so seductively, in his tiny paw. More than once my words came back to bite me on the ass (which, I assure you, is at least moderately less hairy than a monkey's). This is to be expected when one is immoderate, drunk on language and intoxicated by expression, stumbling and fumbling towards some truth. More than once I have taken an impossible vow of silence...but the monkey kept coming back. And, as I'm sure you know if you've ever met a honey-tongued monkey with a taste for human companionship and a perverse penchant for pranks, it's very, very difficult to ignore a monkey on a mission. However, for the most part, words and their monkey master have supported me and my habits in more ways than one.

Here, in this blog, I will share words and ideas with the hope that you, dear reader, will find some meaning and use for what I offer. Or a moment's diversion. Perhaps a random thought that pricks your curiosity, or that piques your interest. Or, most deliciously, that gives you some small pleasure in the consumption and visceral delight in the reading. But, beware, monkeys are terrible, smelly beasts. Greedy. Messy. They get into things they're not supposed to... They have no manners at all. They'll steal your drugs, shit on your carpet and fuck your wife. So, dear reader, beware the monkeys attempting to recreate Shakespeare on a 100 typewriters and that hundredth macaque washing its sweet potato in the Japanese sea. Beware the Monkey King - lord of the mountain of flowers and fruit - who was born of the cosmic egg. Indeed, beware the Monkey King that flies in upon a cloud with a bag of tricks and a magic wand. For the Monkey King seeks immortality and, drunk and disorderly on stolen elixirs, he would attempt to steal heaven and earth from the gods themselves. Indeed, beware even the monkeys who swing from the trees or the crystal chandeliers by the hooks and the crooks of their tales. For, after all, they are monkeys and wildish by nature.