☆ STARSAILOR ☆

AS I HAVE DONE A HUNDRED OR MORE TIMES BEFORE . . .

. . . today I again awoke at noon on Monty’s couch in Ridgewood, New York . . . I was flanked by two black cats in an otherwise empty apartment. The sun shone faintly through sheer curtains on the other side of the room. I was picturing McCabe bleeding out from his wounds in the snow, while across town in an opium den, a far-gone Mrs. Miller gazes emptily into the colored patterns of a marble egg.

These images had been burned into my memory and now my brain had retrieved them for me, was showing them to me again as my first waking thoughts, for mysterious reasons I somberly wondered at.

After a little while, I sat upright and began reading about the Watchers—the original angels sent to look over mankind, who later betrayed their Master and their purpose, and were thus subsequently bound and chained in the darkest depths of the abyss till Judgment Day, and maybe even longer than that . . .

I got up and began making coffee and a smoothie. I ate a toaster waffle while waiting for the kettle to boil. I avoided looking in the mirror. I thought about my affection for characters in books and movies who are Protectors. I tried to remember as many as I could. Something about that archetype chokes me up . . . what can I say: I like them and look up to them. I have many protectors, and sometimes gladly find myself in that role, probably because I’m spiritually unemployed and don’t sleep much. At any rate, I never take it for granted. It is a kind of honor to help someone in that way. And yet it is just true and necessary that in being a protector for someone else, you get hurt, sometimes a great deal. You are, to some degree, absorbing pain in place of the other person. When I think of all the people who have done so for me, who have shielded me from harm because of the love they felt for me, love which I never had to earn but which was given to me freely, I weep. I try every day to be that sort of protector too. The pain is worth it.

(Protector Virgil, shielding Dante from a host of demons who had descended upon them, cries out into the dark valleys of the Inferno: “Be none of you malignant!”)

Still: as the kettle whistled, as I wiped away the bitter tears of Ryan von Starsailor, I childishly wished I were a 400-pound cybernetic organism with living tissue over metal endoskeleton who was sent from the future to protect the would-be liberator of the human race. At least that’s a straightforward mission, I thought, with a beginning and an end (ultimately being lowered into a vat of molten steel while giving a thumbs up), and no “real” pain involved . . . plus I’d get to ride around on a motorcycle shooting tractor trailers with a sawed-off shotgun and unloading a gatling gun into a police helicopter over the skies of Los Angeles . . .

Dollars damn me, and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar . . . yet among my problems, of which exist many, I am always in PAIN, a different pain . . . a pain which is mine alone, be it bodily or psychically or spiritually, or worse: all three (and then some) . . . I live within an endless cycle of hurting and healing and hurting and healing again. How many times can a wound scar atop a preexisting scar? I reckon we will all find out together . . .

I recall now the words of the old master:

I was born, I suffered, and yet I did not die. They tell me I cannot be killed, and as any STUDENT of LITERATURE will tell you, any character touched with immortality eventually comes to find it a sort of curse . . . but I suppose the SOLUTION—the way to REVERSE the CURSE—is to FIND or CREATE purpose for yourself to best utilize that time . . . that infinite highway of time which spreads out before you until the sun absolutely sets on time itself.

What is my purpose? Why was I brought back from the abyss where not even time exists? And why have they now made me unkillable? I have wondered this for some time. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. Now strong at the broken places, do I now offer up my mind and body and whatever strength and courage exists between them to any of my friends who need my help? Do I spend my Endless Days protecting them, if any should need protecting? That does not sound like a bad way to go about it, as long as I don’t give in to the allure of martyrdom. I am no martyr . . . I’m just some freak who cheated death and possesses now the hard-won capacity to tolerate great discomfort when there’s a good reason to. If that reason is to make the lives of the people I love slightly better, then of course I will do it. As I mentioned above, I’m trying to do it now! I do it whenever necessary. Listen: I’ll take your part when darkness comes! And pain is all around!

Kafka said the meaning of life is that it ends. He was dead wrong. When I thought I might perish in the back of that ambulance in Tokyo, I thought of many things inside that strange place I occupied in my mind just then. I have said as much elsewhere on this website, but what I remember is that I felt no regret for what my life had been. Already referring to myself in past tense, I thought: I had met a lot of people, visited a lot of places, done a lot of things . . . I’d had no enemies and no unfinished business. More than that, I felt confident that, at least for the last few years of my life, I had woken up every day and tried to be as good and helpful to everyone I knew as best I could and as often as I could. I was imperfect, to be sure, but I had always acted in good faith, even when I had failed miserably, which I did plenty of times. And of course I had still been capable of hurting people, but I always made a point to make it right. I mean . . . you’ve gotta!

As the little Japanese ambulance rocketed through little Japanese streets in the direction of the hospital where doctors and nurses awaited me outside to save my life, I thought finally: “If I make it out of this, I will surrender myself, once and for all, to good. I will do my best to protect people.” It was, YES, the easiest decision I’ve ever made.

McCabe died alone in the snow with poetry still in him. And Pancho met his match, y’know, on the deserts down in Mexico, and nobody heard his dyin’ words . . . aw but that’s the way it goes. As for me: I walked out of the emergency room and breathed the evening air. I came down from the mountain and found my way through the dark wilderness. I conquered the abyss. And I said to the grim fellow who had met me in the gloom of it: “I’m right here, baby. Come and hang out sometime!”

And now free of that prison I find myself once again sailing through the stars at about 100,000 miles per hour. And from that vast and beautiful and glittering place which is my home, here are my LIVING words:

I KNOW NOT ALL THAT MAY BE COMING, BUT BE IT WHAT IT WILL, I’LL GO TO IT LAUGHING.

☆彡