“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” — Patti Smith
Two nights ago I dreamed I was Hope Sandoval. Can you believe that? What a dream it was moments before it faded.
“Make your way to Glastonbury, and I’ll see you there, okay?”
The thing is, we’re drops of water vapour. I’m a drop of water vapour. You’re a drop of water vapour. And you and you and you. Until we have thousands of drops and then millions and we have ourselves a cloud. And even a cloud seems like nothing, floating ghostlike in a bluish bubble, impossibly close to the nihilist howl of space, until those clouds become bruised purple thunderheads and one day, one moment really, they unleash their collective deluge on the thirsting flanks of a mountain, whose altitude turns them to snow, and they gather and layer for weeks and then months, and one spring day they melt and begin to cascade down channels we call rivers and then hit their limit and flood millions of hectares of land, ruining human lives and drowning livestock, all from vapour. Vapour.
Rain is a killer.
Rain is a cloud suiciding.
Disappointment at the end, written into the world’s DNA.
“I waited and waited for you, beyond the horizon, within the protected perimeter, and though I believed in you, you never came.”
The terraced mound a carved breast, its nipple erect, caressed by scarves of mist. Oh Guinevere, oh Avalon, oh holy stonemasons.
“Where were you? Why won’t you answer?”
We are generational, interstitial, living in the spaces between. Good, bad: meaningless. Spillage is unavoidable, though all of us ticks swell fat with the boiling unspilled blood of rank injustice.
The gin-soaked priest and the holy fool and the painted jezebel find their way out of the maze of alleys and enter the rain forest. New stories spin and branch from that great trunk. This is how epics begin. It’s really not much, at least not at first.