Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#33

Beshert
6:10 PM

Funny how you can be in two places at once, isn’t it?  Funny as in queer and queer as in shifty, dynamic and mercurial.  We both know that accepted realities and truth, sane and staid law and order, are harder to believe, and by belief I mean in the truest sense, in the deepest body—the difference between knowing and being-believing.  Why should I be in New Orleans on a pew, sipping chai in the Bywater, watching Bernard lurch like a bear with his shoes off, doze in and out in front of the small volume of Kerouac poems?  Why couldn’t I be in the court with you, stalk thin and bright, and those matriarchs of your youth?  Why can’t this bayou air, in this town below sea-level, be the same air, high and white and far away, at another time on another continent?   There is magic to be had, to grasp and be grasped by, as the small illusions dissolve, as a sword of presence can sever us from all we thought we were, until we’re falling into what is, what truly is—the grand and molting illusion.  The dreamer and the dreamed.

Bernard is asleep but awake.  Our nights are different but the same. Native Americans believe that Crow are the keeper of mystic law.  Mystic law is beyond contradiction.  Mystic law is and is not.  Neither and both.  Maybe there is no you and me, two sets of eyes, two pairs of hands as one and at once with this letter.  How can I be there with you now but still be sitting here, in the past, in the Bywater, Louisiana?  When Crow saw his shadow he pecked at it.  He pecked and pecked at it until his shadow became alive and killed him.  The Crow we see in this world is not crow.  The Crow we see in this world is Shadow Crow.  Real Crow lives in the abyss.   Shadow Crow can do some impossible things in the real world.  He can shift and multiply, appear and disappear.  The real world is not as it seems.  Maybe the real world is not real at all. Night is here. Like it always was.  My dusk in Zimbabwe is over. Fly to me.

Jim
3/3/16