City of Legends

And it is a question, as visitors to my Amomancer blog clearly see that I am not currently writing to a single central inspiration of the female persuasion.  The fire is there, the focus is not.

Huerta the other day sent me a frowning emoticon, , when I expressed that I need to find a new major muse.  The fact she frowned tells me that there is much ignorance, even amongst my closest circle, as to what a muse is to me.

God, or rather, Goddess.  Simply put.  But with an explanation.

Not to replace the one true God, but to give me a focus as a writer, which is, perhaps more than man or human or liberal Democrat who has been married and divorced twice, my most evident self-definition. 

The furnace of my passions burns as hot as ever just as the core of the Earth itself is a molten mass of radioactive isotopes and stone.  But without a path for release, what you (and I, and the world) get are small volcanic outpourings, just enough to keep me from being torn apart.  They are impressive in and of themselves, but they are not Krakoa.  And I, personally, am a big fan of Krakoa-sized eruptions (see Psyche, Panther, Brigit, The Goldenheart, Aubergine and even the Leopard).

I am, by my very nature, a monogamist.  I believe in, I celebrate, I enjoy having one person that I can revolve around, like the Sun for my planet to orbit.  I find no shame in that, in basking in a radiant glow that warms and nurtures me.  Without it, my "planet" dies a slow death.  Not just from the lack of heat, but also the tidal forces that pull and stretch, toss and catch me as I spin through a remarkable universe.  Those forces rip me up inside and keep the heat burning, the magma churning and I, myself, learning what is good and beautiful and foul and fair and truth and illusion.  These are the reasons I get out of bed in the morning, these are the reasons to lay down beside someone else at night.

And I have to admit, I miss it.  I’m not looking for a fling, but an Olympian thing.  Someone strong enough to push back when I am half-mad (I never fully get to the whole mad).  Someone who isn’t going to bullshit me about their status and the realities of their world just because they want a taste of the ambrosia that gets flung around like cheap beer at a Steelers game. 

I’m not perfect, God knows.  I can, and have, put up with a lot from people who seemed to get in the door a little too easily with the password "I love you" and then started trashing the place.  I hate playing bouncer in my own heart and soul.  Hate it.  Someone who I can write about their beauty and virtues without having to lie to myself, that when I go back and read the works they inspired, I don’t have to ask "what was I drinking?"

The muse is a sacred thing to me.  It allows me to be who I am.  Without artifice, the vessel of my craft and spirit.  I have made myself Ronin, by choice, and the voice I hear when I speak is diminished as I strive to learn enough about myself and the nature of life that I speak no more blasphemies of the gods of love.

I’m not looking for sympathy.  I don’t need it or even deserve it.  I have been very fortunate in this life to have seen glimpses of beauty and passion and talent of the magnitudes I have seen.  There are those who would say I am being greedy in asking for one more, perhaps one final, run of the Chariot of Apollo across the sky.  If this is greedy of me, then I am greedy, and selfish.

But not dishonest or disloyal to my faith in love, to my unnamed Goddess.  I would rather die for a single, simple truth, than live for a lie. 

Aside from trying to squeeze in a viewing of District 9 and making sure I do not miss True Blood Sunday night, and with a tip of the hat to Nancy (the first one, Psyche, the Electric Lady, etc, etc) as two days ago was her birthday, two days from now is mine (we used to have a joint celebration on the 14th to split the difference), I am looking at a brutal weekend.

And loving it.

I have to finish final engineering on blister, the virtual CD I am uploading on my birthday…got my final contributor’s files yesterday.  Gonna be fun.  The cats have gone into hiding.

Still editing the new book.  Anastacia, my old, dear friend, got in touch with me and is feeling a bit down in the dumps and wants to hang out this weekend.  I have no less than three proposal efforts I am working on, aside from some quality program audits in the next week to prep for…

Yeah, it’s going to be crazy.  And I love it.

An older poem of mine, back before there was air and sunshine and opposable thumbs, was entitled across the stars and lovelost.  It was about the hollow feeling I had after my breakup with Psyche.  It was stark, ragged, jagged and brutal.  And cathartic.

Those were simpler times, the world seemed much less complicated to me, then…and it was.

Now, having made it through five years of elective celibacy (okay, not completely elective, I would have ended it for one right person…but the fates have a sense of humour that even I can laugh about when the wounds begin to heal) I find myself no less fascinated by love and romance and the urge to merge.  I had thought these years would purge me of that surge of adrenaline and testosterone I get when I see or hear or imagine or smell a woman (not taste or feel, mind you, that would be going over a line…).  They haven’t.

My powers of intellect and emotion seem undiminished.  My writing seems as on point, if not more so, than ever.  But I find myself strangely becalmed.  Jazz, the other day, told me that I could and can do anything I want, have anything I want in this life (she went further than that, but let’s keep this sane) and she wondered why I was allowing myself to dwell in the grey.

I told her it is because of the nature of this beast.  Whether by nature or nurture, I need the seed, the inspiration, the muse, to kindle and sustain the fire.  To write the arcane equations that will trigger the mad reaction that will spark the conflagration that becomes the immolation in which I dwell in my purest, surest form.  There are some, as we speak, dancing at the edge of the circle of light the fire I dimly shed at this time sustains, but none have stepped into the light and declared themselves.  As couer rage is a requisite in a lover, I can not go and drag one into the light, they must step of their own accord.

And thus I wait.  Perhaps until the next moment, or next day, or next year or even unto the next life (where there is one who has sworn she’ll be waiting for me, but she had a problem with keeping her word in this life…not counting on it).

Until then, I am once again across the stars, looking for something dimly lit in the soundless vacuum of the space between dreams.

Not possible.

To move beyond memory, one must forget who they are, where they have been and what they have experienced. A persistent vegetative state might make it so, but that’s not a status I have devoutly wished for in this life.

Today is August 14th. It is a crossroads date (someone with my sense of time and history has man) as it is the anniversary of one or more events, that cross paths in my understanding of the world I live in. My birthday is August 16th, Psyche’s is August 12th. For the five years we were together, we tended to celebrate on the 14th as a compromise date.

There are other things that have occurred on Thursdays, on the 14th of a month, even on August 14th, and in my morning contemplations it is remarkable to remember some of them and close circles and utter words to keep promises (I may be slow, often, as I forget or am distracted or given rationale to forget, but I generally get around to those oaths I have made) that I have made, in good faith, altered only by the external forces I have no control over.

In that context, you may want to check out a new poem I posted this morning on Amomancer entitled the mantra of severing, which is about keeping promises, even ancient ones, when they are recalled. There will be those who believe they know of what I speak, but to imagine that, in my entire life, I have only walked one road with one companion to one end and made one promise…that would be a very blissful life, and chaos still calls.

I once wrote that "memory is the curse of those who care". It leads us to a terrible and an arrogant place, where we think the world sees with our eyes and feels with our hearts, and knows us. When I was a child I used to blow my mind by trying to contemplate infinity, but one day I hit upon something more incredible to contemplate: There are billions of people on this planet, most (if not all) of them leading lives as experientially, intellectually and emotionally complex as our own. That many thoughts, that many emotions, that many dreams, and God knows them all, and I can never even know for sure my own heart.

We never move beyond memory. At best, we acknowledge the sprained ankle of life and adjust to the limping.

Blow out the candles, my electric lady.

Think I have forgotten? You inspired so many of my most revered works:

• My Electric Lady
• Monument
• Sons of Soft Sin
• the sorrow of past errors
• tread softly
• I should have been immortal
• Nevermore My Steel
• the lingering haste
• theocricide at Mach 10e6
• last night
• and many, many more…

You were perhaps more my midwife than my lover, the one who pulled me out, smacked me on the behind and set me on the path. There is no doubt but that much of what I am, for good or bad, as a writer, as a poet, as a man, came from you. You opened my eyes, taught me many things I still cling to, fed my intellect, my soul and my spirit, and taught me my first lessons of love and artistic conflict. If in the sphere of Venus I learned war, you were the advance scout and the general who sent me.

I can still name the time and date of our first kiss, our first touch, of the last time we spoke and when I heard of your mother’s death. I know you will hear of this because I know you have people, if not you yourself, who visit this site from time to time.

Happy Birthday. I hope you are well, strong and happy. You are missed and celebrated. I always told you, be first, last or best at anything you value. You are immortal.

I’m going to answer a question I have gently side-stepped in many interviews over the years, taking the polite and diplomatic route, treating my works like the children they are to me, showing no favouritism.

I am often asked what is my best, most memorable, more important work.

That’s a tough question for a poet with my catalog to respond to, as I can give reasons for a hundred to be considered each, in their own season and reason, the one most important work. But I decided to ask myself the question. What poem has had the most impact on your life?

That’s an easy question to answer. It is an older work, often obscured by the popularity to its generational sibling "Monument", "I should have been immortal" and "The Unicorns".

It is "My Electric Lady". As with most births, there was nothing outwardly auspicious about it. I hammered it out on Psyche’s typewriter in her study on South High Street in Morgantown, West Virginia, when I was 18 and did not yet understand where the spirit, the muse, the creative force came from.

It flowed in one draft, no editing, no clever assimilation of random nodes into a single entity. The "Electric Lady" of the title was Psyche, my first real love and perhaps the one that will haunt me all my days. The source of the image: She had a shirt, deep blue, with the tracing of a light blue Japanese lady with a parasol on the front. We had nicknamed the shirt the "Electric Lady" shirt, as it looked like the woman was glowing with neon-blue energies.

One evening, as Psyche (her real name was and is Nancy, but it is simpler to keep the totem-muse consistent) was studying, I sat down at the typewriter, as I would often do, and tapped out a poem.

At the time I could not tell you where it came from. It seemed to tell a story, but a story I did not think I was writing. It was perhaps the first work I can recall that came without conscious action on my part, from the preconscious.

When I was through, she and I read it and she became very upset. It foretold a parting of the ways, where I would have to choose between her and my place as a poet. It seemed ludicrous and terrible to comprehend.

Four years later she told me I would have to give up poetry to keep her. And the poem was fulfilled. Whether she was consciously or preconsciously fulfilling the prophecy, or whether my preconscious knew, just knew, that someday the choice would be given to me, I knew the choice was not a choice at all.

And a few weeks later, as I visited her at Central Missouri State University, where she had already met the man who would eventually take my place in her life, a man of undivided loyalties, the final lines came to pass.

My Electric Lady

dance for me, my electric lady.
sing a song that gently soothes my soul.
tomorrow I must leave your world again, my love…
as I strive to reach this endless journey’s goal.

I once gave up my poor and mortal birthright,
so that I might touch the sky and see true things.
my love, I’m not so sure I would have started,
if I could have seen the pain this voyage brings.

once again, my electric lady,
touch me and bring forth my too-rare smile.
for the moment I am just another mortal-
and a little love will last me quite a while.

if we had only met before the present,
and what is gone had made me what I am,
a love would be that all who live might envy-
but I cannot come back this way again.

for the final time, my electric lady…
give me all that I may take within my vow.
tomorrow is my child and a gift to the stars-
and the night is just my brother here and now.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

This work, both in the manner of its writing, and the breaking apart of my person to be what I believe I was supposed to be, by nature or nurture, truly was the most important work.

Without the tapping into the preconscious, 95-99% of my later works would have never come to pass.

Without the pain of that parting, which still is like a knife in my soul, I would have never grown out and beyond my shell of experience and there would have never been a Valkyrie, a Leopard, a Panther, Brigit, a Southern Siren, a Mad Gypsy, Nightblooming, The Wisp, Arachne, a Goldenheart (who was, in part, an echo for a return to the moments before that poem entered the world).

I would have been, perhaps, happy and loving and loved. But I would not be who I am today. I would have never fathered the three wonderful children I now know. I would’ve never found my home in Venice, or friends of the brilliance and joy I have had.

Perhaps I would have been a greater writer, or perhaps at least a better person, but I know of no one with a richer legacy of poetry and I am content that I have thrown myself on my fair share of spiritual hand grenades long the path, trying to help others (perhaps even out a sense of unworthiness I am trying to transcend, rooted in my loss of Psyche).

In any case, there’s my answer. There’s the poem. Next question?