I am undone

Eugene Thirion - Jeanne d’ Arc, 1876, fragment

Journal Excerpt from July 9, 2015

I am undone, and that is just the truth. No matter what I think there remains the fact that my corset is unstrung and I don’t know that I’ll ever put it back on again. Why would I? The boning hurts my body, the compression limits my breath, and the way it pushes and prods me into a plentiful shape makes me feel all the less a woman.

Whatever this is - perhaps the cry for creation, the longing for expulsion - this is what my whole being can’t avoid any longer, won’t be denied altogether, and can’t stand away from for the rest of my life.

My head feels full at points like little pieces of magnets are pulling thoughts and energy to a cluster of non-movement, especially in my right temple. There is a bit of uneasy stomach and chest flutters to accompany the nerve pain. My body hurts and there’s a piece of me that feels panic. Panic that I have no health coverage, panic that I don’t know what to do...but I do...I do know what to do...I just don’t want to. I don’t want to because thinking of it fills me with this same sense of panic. I am scared. I have so much fear inside me and it just keeps coming out. I continue to panic that this fear is endless. That it will be pouring out ceaselessly till the end of my days - and then what am I to do? How am I to function? At what point do I scream “THAT’S ENOUGH!” and believe that it is enough? I have had enough, and it’s time to let go of the string at the end of the balloon that would otherwise keep me soaring through space forever.

I feel like I’m avoiding something. I am trying to allow whatever it is to unveil itself to me. This feeling of being lost, what does it provide? Is it a catalyst? A catalyst for motion? And yet even at rest we are always in motion, for there is no such thing as stillness, there is no such thing as nothing, and I am already found. In truth I have never been lost...only deceived.

Poet, dancer, knight of the arts. I live and breathe and fight my demons for solvency and grace. Integrity takes on a combative feel as I become the gilded sword. In the words of the chosen Saint Joan: “One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”

Who shall be my recompense? Who shall play the notes I write? Transfixed in time, the notes stare back at me like beady eyed ants in their hill. A colony of drones. I too am one with the essence of all there is, call it what you will. Yet, I am at once here and gone, never to be seen again. I fly through the air in secret, hiding my laurels and singing the sweet song of night’s approach.

I am the wind and the bird, the cloud that vanishes with the breeze. I have nothing left, therefore nothing to share for all that I am has been before. All that I am shall come again....and where am I now? Where are the dewey eyed swallows? At what point do I say “ENOUGH”? At what point do I lay down and return to her?

Frank Schoonover ~ Often They Appeared ~ Joan of Arc ~ 1918

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