I am the first wife.
I have looked often in vain to history for an explanation for myself. More and more it appeared throughout my youth the meaning was not to be found in theology. As I got older I began to look within myself thus I began to write.
The heart is always involved with longing, wishing, wanting, possessing and losing and at the center of this all is a women. As Leonard Cohen once sang: "There's only one prayer/and I listen all night/ for your step on the stair."
Writing for me has always been a response to some necessity within my soul. Trying to listen to this necessity takes you to many places. It can lead you into a minor or major work or lead you into complete silence. This necessity, being attuned to it if your sensitive or obedient enough can produce even for a short time glory.
For all my domestic shortcomings I feel even for me on a small scale I have touched these holy moments. Sometimes lately I will sit down to write about someone, highlight their beauty, emphasize her charms, and stress the pleasant side of our lives and love for each other and a bitterness erupts and the disappointments and frustrations cascade onto the page. This book is a kaleidoscopic denouement of an inner life. I am often in crisis fighting for my life, freedom, integrity and often I am left breathless in a fear of losing yet again at love.
Nicholas Berdyaev said "God has laid upon man the duty of being free, of safe guarding freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that may be or how much sacrifice and suffering it may require." I have tried to live this myself and this book is a tribute to that youthful, courageous, and mystical spirit which continually challenges and beckons me.
I am a deeply sensitive person and in these writings I am trying to follow a path of forgiveness. It is a deeply schizoid state this loving and despising, of hope and rejection, of intense familial concern and desperate self expression.
I ask that each of the four women I loved deeply and felt very close to understand there our surprising rewards that follow in the wake of undiluted expressions of my at times hateful seizures. I am a very wounded person and as one of you said to me recently, "it is obvious you do not love yourself by the way you drink." I am an unhappy person but my life has been profoundly touched by your great beauty if I could only reconcile this passivity that left me alone to love you from a distance...even the last, the shallowness tore me apart, yet our lives overlapped. As I wrote close to a year ago:
June 16th 2011
I am happy tonight
I will not pick up the pen again
it is the summer I have waited for
after thirty four years
she is more beautiful then I deserved
I kiss her forehead every night
the curtains are still
I am drinking alone
so excuse the drunk talk
the tonic is flat and the limes dried out
yesterday I was so frightened
even if she left
I would always remember
her body naked by moonlight
I should get a grip of myself
writing on napkins
happy and frightened
I will give up the pen
and follow her beauty
inside of her
approaching peace finally
these last few years
I started working out more
so a man in the mirror
with muscles
could whisper courage to me
my devotion embarrasses me
& soon she may grow tired of it**
I would always remember
her body naked by moonlight
her mouth lowered to mine
it frightens me
**March 9th 2012 she leaves without a word
In my heart this great engine of energy I wonder if I ever really knew any of you or if any of you really knew me. Like reading of a death in the paper it has no emotional or intellectual effect in fact no one really gives a dam except for the family. Here is someone who may have rode the train with you or once made small talk with you about the weather or traffic. Yet we do not give a dam. Utopian societies talk of a brotherhood of people but we are too large its not feasible. Yet none of us who have so much in common with this stranger attended the funeral. So we become dependent on our little lives and relationships which for us form a version of the world.
Two things almost incompatible are united within me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament lively & tumultuous passions and at the same time slowly developed and confused ideas. I feel everything and see nothing. I am carried away by my passions but I am stupid. My ideas arrange themselves in my head with almost incredible difficulty; they circulate in it with an uncertain sound, and ferment till they excite me to action.
For every mean thing I have said I have attempted to apologize. For every mean thing I have said I can also show you forty pages of love and dedication even still at a distance.
So thank you all for your beauty and inspiration.
Writer in repose.
