Print This PostSo what is possibility? It is certainly no whore of failure or success. It is a feeling that you may be on to something–in the midst of something whose worth you cannot exactly measure and whose results you cannot predict. This was poetry for me, and music, and ballet, and art. I never cared that El Greco was a success. I cared about how he used blue and how it excited me, and how I wanted to join that blue.
This is what I find missing from my life to the point of wanting my life to end. Failure means not eating, and success means feeling empty even when you eat well, but that blue–Oh my fucking God! That means failure or success do not matter, and trusting you can live on the couch of a friend, and wake up with the blue still inside you. Without that, I would rather die.
In my worst moments, I roamed aimlessly through Manhattan hearing the insane voices of vagrants, and yet I never thought they were failures–for all their suffering. I thought they were prophets–and not because of some romantic myth, but because they were speaking beyond all failure, all success. I saw their spiritual reality and that made me write my poem, It was this transcendence of the binaries. All art was always post-modern in this respect. The binaries will never be enough for an artist.
Once, after having my heart broken, I rode the bus back to Binghamton and a young woman sat down next to me. She was insane, but, like many of the insane, gentle and kind. She asked if I would hold her hand. I was so broken, I said OK, and I held her hand all the way from Manhattan to Binghamton (She was going to Cleveland). She said angels told her I would hold her hand without trying to hit on her. She was black, very beautiful, and lesbian. She was also right (at that time, I had no desire except to die) and I think angels did tell her.
In the course of those three hours, she told me angels spoke to her all the time. She said she was a singer, and ran away from home because the songs grew so intense inside her that she could not stay in Cleveland anymore. When she told me this, I wept, and I said: “your mother loves you, and many bad people will take advantage of you. Go back to Cleveland and sing your heart out, but rest in your family. They are not perfect. No one is perfect, but they love you because no one can be as nice as you are, if they were never loved.”
She played me a tape she’d made. She had a beautiful voice, I mean truly beautiful, and this made me even more sad because I thought about insane artists who God had touched with the power of grace, and I was scared for her. She told me: “You are angry for all of God’s children, and you need to stop the anger, not because it is bad, but because people can’t hear you when you are so angry.” We hugged, and exchanged numbers, and she went on to Cleveland. She called me a couple times, and she said: “God knows your anger. God will forgive you, because it is not against God. It is against yourself, and God will not forgive your anger against yourself because God loves you more than you could ever realize. God does not punish us for our sins against God. God correct us when we do not enter our full glory.” Then she thanked me for holding her hand from Manhattan to Binghamton, and I never saw or heard from her again.
This is a strange story. It is liable to get me laughed at, but it is exactly what I was raised with when I heard Christ’s words. We do not know what has value. We do not know where grace will visit us. We must have faith that there is value and grace and it will come–from a fresh spring we did not even consider drinking from. I expect to be wrong in what I value, and, out of grace, I expect God to correct me. Sometimes, we can only feel possibility when we are dragged down into our worst moments. I wish it could be different. I never cared about failure or success as much as I did about encountering grace. I believe in it. Maybe I am a moron. I don’t know.
