Note on “A.K. Reader.” I’ve just unearthed a number of manuscripts that may be of interest to one or two people around the world. (As Gertrude Stein said: “I write for myself and one other stranger.”) This is the first A.K. Reader offering. I don’t know how often I will produce them — all as pdfs, at least for now.
HUMAN FEAR OF THE BEAR: A Fable for These Times
I wrote this extended essay in 1989 and carved it into its current form years later, in 1998. From 1998 until now happens to be 12 years, one Jupiter “cycle of opportunity.”
This 38-page prose piece is ostensibly about the dynamics of the relationship between a man and a woman, its dramatic tension spiralling the core of experience into wisdom — or at least into “lessons learned.” And it is that. At least, on one level.
The dynamic between this man and this woman is viewed psychologically and sociologically, and wider: the male and the female are rendered archetypal, and their story feels peculiar to late-20th century experience of at least some humans born on Earth during World War II.
At the time I wrote this story, none of the few friends to whom I showed it liked it. Nor did I. First of all, I ask myself now, why was it written so impersonally? Maybe because it was just so weird and intense. Does the story still carry that charge?
Two days ago I unearthed “Bear” from its hiding place and plunged through all 38 pages — though it did take me two sessions. Still very intense. But I admired the woman who looked her experience in the eye and learned from it, bit by bit, mouthful by mouthful, often overwhelmed, but always willing to go through any personal or interpersonal process to the other side, no matter how long or involved or difficult.
And now, 48 hours later, on the day when the New Moon conjuncts my natal Ascendant at 28°45 of “truth-telling” Sagittarius and Uranus turns to go direct on the root point of my chart, I’m actually willing, if still a bit hesitant, to share it.
I would love to have a few others read it too and give me your feedback, whether private or public. Any one interested?
Please realize that I feel quite vulnerable, on this second day of what I call the “Epochal 12 days of Christmas,” 2012, in asking for your response to this essay that strips the veils from long ago dimensional reverberations of intimacy.
What especially strikes me now, a few days from my 70th birthday, is how, over the decades, intensity has transmuted into incandescence. Though still dwelling (at least in part) within 3-D, I’m longer buffeted by biology. Body is centered within mind and mind within spirit. I have done the work that I was asking of myself. The hole that I used to “plug” with a lover has filled. I am whole, holy.
What scared me is the sacred.
I had to learn to eat fear.
What a journey! For many years, like a stormy sea.
Perhaps you too, will resonate with the empathy and amazement that arose in me while re-entering this account that aims to express, describe, understand and, ultimately, tame roiling currents of episodic, all-too-human, fullness of feeling.
We humans are so sensitively attuned to one another and to the Earth and to the Cosmos, — even when, especially when, we think we are not!
Here’s the pdf.
