Sunday, November 25, 2012

Mea Culpa


For all intentions of being a prolific writer and profound thinker, I must admit to being merely...vainglorious?  For all wishes held in one hand of recording anecdotes and musings of a childhood witnessed, I have the shit of the mundane, the normal and the usual piling up in the other.  Tough to type with both hands full.  Mea culpa.

And for all of my professed love of Italian cars, I must admit to my daily driving betrayal:  a 1963 Mercedes Benz 220SEb.


Plush leather, real wood, just the right dollops of chrome. Brutish but crisp mechanicals.  Imagine--fuel injection in 1963!  A beauty, with the heft and grace that you might expect of a Teuton goddess.  There are cars and then there are automobiles... and this was an automobile nonpareil.

I've recently sold it after a long ownership.  My unforgiving anima.  Mea culpa.

I kept some personal memorabilia in a little leather pouch in the glove compartment, which I removed before selling the car.  It took some time and coaxing from a 18 year old single malt before I was willing to open the pouch and review the contents.  Included is a Laguoile knife, the 1950's leather key fob from my grandfather's Cadillac and a gold amulet brought back from La Finistere some moons ago.  Then there is the old newspaper photograph of Ry Cooder and son motorcycling through the streets of Havana, Cuba taken from Wim Wender's film "The Buena Vista Social Club".  I've written on the bottom "Vocatus Atque, Non Vocatus Deux Aderit", which if you've seen this movie and you've seen Ibrahim Ferrer's face at the conclusion of the Carnegie Hall concert in New York City, you might know my inspiration.  Beautiful.

And in my own handwriting:  snippets of poetry; some of my own, some from Raymond Carver and this from Wallace Stevens:


"Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch.  O mind
Gone wild, be what he tells you to be:  Puella.
Write pax across the window pane.  And then

Be still.  The summarium in excelsis begins...
Flame, sound, fury composed... Hear what he
says,
The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.




A momentary pause.  Here is a photograph of myself on a boat in Elfin Cove, Alaska on a particularly beautiful day many summers ago.  The spectacular landscape behind me contrasted sharply with the barrenness I felt inside of myself on that very day, almost at that very moment when that photograph was taken.  Indeed I wanted that picture taken at that moment to never forget that I had just joined Eve in the Garden.  That I too had taken a bite of that forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and of the power of life and death.  As wide open as the sky and the Gulf of Alaska were, so crushing was the weight of this fall from grace.  Mea culpa.

This old wound has never really left me.  But it continues to heal me.

Again I hold my breath.   Amidst the last few bits and scraps in that leather pouch is an old love letter from a previous life.  Beautiful musings from a beautiful and intelligent woman.  Another pause as I simply say "thank you" at once anonymous and eponymous.  Can I confidently say this?!  She and I may or may not have deserved more that we were willing to give to each other at the time.

Well... Mea culpa.

This leather pouch and the old Mercedes seemed to be the appropriate receptacle for these items--the ark and its sanctum sanctorum, by my own imaginings. I shall miss this  ark.  And the pouch and most of its contents will be tucked away carefully someplace else now.  Nonetheless, I'm grateful to allow these objects, these memories, these emotions and thoughts flight, that the sacred becomes the profane, and that the profane becomes sacred.  As is above, so is below.


To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence