pilgrimage: wilderness
June 2012
"I made a pilgrimage to save this human's race
never comprehending the race had long gone by"
- Modern English (I melt with you - 1982)
The stone lady receives me violent. Lovely.
She winks at me, biting her lip, then slaps my face - the cold Mistral. Yes, this is my pilgrimage, one that starts in the world, at its roughest, and always ends in my gut.
Some walk to Santiago, all the way from France. I, instead, return; smokes in my pocket replacing the huge scallop shell that identifies the pilgrims on their way. Aside from that, differences are negligible. I'll walk, yes, and I'll sleep wherever some hospitable soul receives my exhaustion. High priestesses and nuns of mysterious sisterhoods can love in ways unkwnown to monks, and provide blessed rest too. Sandstone blocks and dirty streets can lead lost steps as well as paths crossing the mountain forest. Whatever remains untame in the shores of Cantabria turns feral, when exacerbated by the densest of humanities, in the eyes of this Medusa - and you know what she does, when you look at her.
Yes, I'm stoned, totally. Between a rock and a hard place - the saying goes - me, so soft. Softened by the beauty of strength, tension, hardness; by the evidence of reality in seduction omnipresent. All that is Dyonisiac, all that is sensual and ferocious in me seems to crash against these boulders, chipping their (and my) edges.
I bleed.
And my blood goes unnoticed. Sweat, tears, blood, semen - all sucked into the porosity of this pumice: Marseille, so abrasive. Polishing my soul like sandpaper, and showing me the path to enlightement is usually far from the light.
On such shores of life - the wilder ones, of course - the exit leads in.
