COLUMNS
|
Roris Coctis hunts for love in the penumbral body of the human animal (October 2013)
by Zack Kouns
Clawing. Crazed with hunger.
There is a cave in India called Amarnatha. It hosts the lingum of Shiva that swells and is engorged with icy blood in the month of August to illustrate the virile and cosmological nature of our existence before it withers away and becomes holy water rushing from a source that is sourceless.
We rarely have the courage of our desires. We're corralled into college, careers and family to make the violent and terrifying world a safer and more comfortable place for us to die in. Our bodies say “love” and we become concurrently entranced and deadened by the “feeling” of bodylove and lose something of the mysterious, agonized, hushed noetic call of a hidden organ that nestles in the nettles of our otherworldly organism for fear of being herded by the orthodox who forever harrows the path toward becoming awake and worthy of being deemed truly alive. Mediocrity, the cardinal sin. Mediocrity, the principle our civilization is ordered around. Pleasure, the dulling blade. Pleasure, the aim of pigs in a trough and humans devouring. Anathema to ecstasy.
Clara. Lost lover. Rise and return to me. Clara in my car, putting on lipstick. Clara smoking nude while I eat dinner. Clara. Clara, wind through prairie grass and hands on my body. Clara in the bathtub, reading Novalis. Clara experiencing God. Clara, speaking tenderly to a child. Clara in bed. My tongue and her tongue. My tongue seeking the ancient ecstasies coiled in her secret wound. Clara, her tongue, her lips, her dark areolas and swollen nipples. Clara, shameless and reckless as a girl raised by animals. Clara and I snorting heroin to die to the world.
Hidden from the beasts that bind and restrain, Clara and I are in bed and our bodies are strangling like a loving vine. Clara needs to piss. Clara pisses the bed. That piss is from Clara's body and I don't discriminate where the body is concerned. I love her darkness and her light. I love her poison and her remedy. Clara claws my chest and straddles me while light pours in from the hallway and illuminates our bodies that throb with longing for convergence. Burdock, ghosts of dandelions, yarrow. Our salvation, our balm springing from the underworld. The hidden worlds of roots that spring eternal from germinal cells. Our bodies. She's pressed against the wall and I ingress to seek our little deaths so that we can awaken to some other way of living and thriving.
Clara in my car, snorting heroin off the dashboard as we drive home through the dying burnt yellow cornfields of Indiana in the early fall. Clara rises from the drug and seizes. Her nose pours blood and she begins convulsing. She vomits a viscous white fluid and has another violent seizure. Clara is dying and I steer the car into oncoming traffic. She comes to a little and realizes what I'm doing. Clara asks to go to the hospital. Calling her mother, telling her that Clara has had an overdose. Mother doesn't love the innocence of Clara's world sorrow. Mother binds and restrains. Mother is the mediocrity of the world, the push that says progress without meaning or understanding, without love or mercy. The instinct that says walk through the forest paths of life stumbling, hurting from a wound that you can't discover because you're to move forever forward until like a broken horse you collapse from the weight of your undiscovered, unconscious agony. Clara drowned in the Clinch river three weeks later. Clara is in the tall grass. She turns around and has two handfuls of blue and yellow flowers. She kneels before me. She places them at my feet and gives me a kiss on the forehead. Then she disappears into a forest that borders the valley.
|
