for starters (or, story for story's sake)

Four months ago, I met the Fool. KLJ was giving me my first tarot card reading, and said One sets out first to discover his/her indicator, the card that represents his/her self. She turned over the Fool-- funny, I thought, because I'd just bought myself a pack of tarot cards a month of so before this experience, and the card on the front of the pack's box? The Fool. I don't remember much about the actual reading, save that it determined the near future would bring one great opposition to the forefront of life: the personal, creative, whimsical V. the monetary, responsible, structured. KLJ said it sounded a lot like my recent gripes over how silly it seems to have to apply to Grad Schools to write and publish poetry, to get anywhere with poetry at all. I'd told her I feel it's like trying to fit some vast phantasmagoric entity into a filing cabinet.

But is the Fool still in the mirror somewhere, with me? Me? After this reading was given, I retreated back to my bluecurtain-dim summer room, sitting in an armchair on the island of desklamp light, shuffling my own Tarot cards when three fall (as I'd let my mind wander far from the cards, and fumbled), two get sucked up against the AC vent, faces against the wall, but the third fell face-up, staring at me: the damned Fool.

Now, signs are everywhere and are read according to the head of the reader. We know this. But I like it when I say I buy the Fool-- yea, yea, I'm naive. I obviously buy the Fool-- another sign, a web of sign? Walking off the edge of this... what? This. WHAT??! Staring him down, I felt myself tilting a pane of glass to fill it with light, or felt myself full of wind rifling my pages. And I wondered then if the Fool had any fear, any at all. Because I know the real reason he was all up in my shit those days. It has become clearer in retrospect: last summer was the last space of time and land where I could be comfortable ignoring Nothing, though I live in the midst of it. Now, I've taken a plunge into something more serious, more structured in applying to MFAs... but I've also taken a plunge of heart. I feel the writing-- or the whatever, the "art," the power of what I'm seeing and how and when and which way the wind is blowing, the swollen sense of light and divinity in my life, the overwheming-- to be most vital, the only thing. I mean, it always has been... but something's shifted, there's been a change. That summer I'd often told friends I felt I was about to "jump off a fucking cliff," you know, the idomatic expression of exasperation or despair in the face of something inevitable-- death, suffering, graduation, the like. So, I took a plunge off the cliff, finally, if you will.

Yet who was the dog at my heels? Did I hear once a warning? Should there be such a thing, in the face of a life of "Art," whatever the fuck that means? No... there is no more warning needed here than in approaching a life of any substance, any passion. Do not despair, do not give up-- those are the only warnings. Otherwise, there's been no need for warning, I think. There have been, however, others' whispers, the difficulty I've had to face in pressing on. There has also been a lot of scolding and snickering and gossiping-- shit I catch wind of days, weeks, months later, heart-breaking bullshit-- on the other hand. O, yes, there have been some who have left me in anger, in confusion, in misunderstanding... I cannot help them. I am subsumed in this; it is much bigger than I am. I rarely know what to do before it happens.

At the core of this, I feel nothing if not the sun on my face, some natural product of heat and light given off in these acts, blinding my own blindness to further whites. I am uncertain, hesistant even sometimes, but no, NO-- I have not given it up. It crosses my mind in those all too frequent moments of despair, when I am most alone and most barren of inspiration. But I will not give in. I believe in it. It is my joy, my liscense to breathe. So as I wander about, thinking too much of nothing, blahblah, then SMACK on my face is the image of a face in the carpet and an immaculate tale of Love-- it is done, it is done over and over. My life will of course be a feeling of freefall, over and over and over again.