the Desecration of my Temple by the Gypsy Noemi

Noemi takes my face into her hands and gazes through the pitiably tragic Character of Leopold Charles into the Soul hidden behind my Self. In response to her calm penetration I attempt the habitual initiation of self-consciousness, but for once that most prized ability of mine lies elusive. How intoxicatingly fresh her eyes are! as brilliantly vibrant a green as a young blade of grass in the spring sun; they radiate light from within, and the Light of her Soul is so piercing, so immense that it could pierce any Self, explore any island. I am so inexplicably lost in her eyes that I know of nothing else: I cannot even recall the contours of my own visage. The urge to be in control has vanished like the smoke of a burnt-through cigarette.

She steps from her boat to the shore of an island named Leo. Without greeting we explore the line where me meets the tide, bathe in the delta of my great river, marvel at the exotic wares of my bustling city: I the childishly excited host, she laughing delightedly at my candid friskiness. I tell her of the eccentric and important travelers with whom I have traded knowledge for wisdom, art for beauty. I describe the mighty parties held in the mansions and in the passing cruise ships. I tell her of the great revelations borne before my hearths: talk of reason, of love, of living. A fascinating existence, she says. Is she making fun of me? She points to the top of my mountain, the heart of my kingdom, the citadel which shelters my Temple, and I tremble.
The thing I want most of anything is to find the confidence to lead her to my sanctuary. From deep within me builds the urge to break free from my shackles of contenting entertainment but before I allow myself to grasp this greatness and guide her to my home, I flee and lose her, the instinct transformed to art by any overly-curious travelers I meet. I scurry to the heights of my towering Trojan walls, look down on the town where I can do my business in safety: I can play by my own rules and barter only what I feel like exchanging. The maze of its streets and aloofness of its habitants is a masterpiece cultivated to guide travelers into my mind but to lead them astray when they seek for my heart. And yet this vile and treacherous gypsy with whom I so gladly shared of my precious time and energy has no interest in business or in entertainment. How she laughed at me when I shared of my life with that near imperceptible, that mocking twist to her lips. How dare she come here and disrespect all that I have built!

I look down for her. She must have left, for I cannot feel her presence in my city or the surrounding countryside. She must have sailed off to make light of some other fool’s creativity. I convince myself of this comfortable notion and turn to face my sacred sanctuary and I find her. In horror I watch her drifting through my inner ways: paths in pleasure gardens full of rotten produce and stale memories but empty of life, where the hidden radios repeat the crackling tunes of half-remembered songs and the wide-screen televisions depict a woeful world with worse partiality than FOX.

But how is she here? Once only has this occurred otherwise, and at that time I swore it would never happen again. By some witchcraft, some trickery, or some power beyond my understanding she breached the formidable gates of my guise to enter my sacred citadel. I stagger, lose her, find myself looking down at my wonderful city and I wonder: Where are the inhabitants? They cower in their abodes, prideful and meek. The streets are bleak, the harbor is empty save for her skiff, the perceived greatness is ever less frequent and less extravagant. As once I walked the streets by day and shared stories with captains at night, now I venture from my corrupted comfort rarely. This is not the city I know as mine own. The river does not seem my river, for it runs muddied and low. I watch her from my highest window, terrified that the revelation of my long-secret bleakness will taint her purity, that my terrible sadness has already overwhelmed her joy (as it has mine own). But, as ever, I am wrong. She laughs away the chains dangling from the rafters; she ventures into the dark ways I dare not tread. She approaches my Temple and I tremble.

I watch her with Desire at its weakest: not romantic, not sweet; desperate and pathetic and inexcusable. She is the most beautiful thing imaginable, walking in white amidst the sobriety of my graveyard. I hurry to my tower.

She approaches my Temple and I tremble, for it is that bastion which is the most holy of my Holies, the most secret of my Secrets. At the entrance she stands pondering, for before her is a façade of demons grinning and angels pious, pillars spiraling and porches veiled, simplicity unraveling and subtlety misleading, all carved intricately: an impressive and frightful artifice, yet one she but admires with impersonal appreciation. With a smile she enters and I am infuriated and confused. How can I allow a fiery pagan bent on desecration the privilege of my cherished institution? Or is she but a humble pilgrim, proven by her palpable will to worship? Or a priestess long lost, returning with wisdom from her travels to restore to beauty what sits decrepit?

I can see her no more. As I listen to her soft footfalls in the silences of my hall, I look out at my citadel and find it a strange and lifeless ruin. By her careless permeation I know my fortified walls, though crafted with such discipline and toil, in defeat defunct. By her unembarrassed presence, I find the ugly truths I have long cowered from and I see the darkness as but large shadows of small things.

As I listen to her soft footfalls in the silences of my hall, I imagine her taking in my most precious collection of attachments: handling my Fears tenderly, considering my Comforts dispassionately, acknowledging my Melancholy empathetically. She pauses to taste of my spring at its source, where it is pure, and therefore she knows that I am the polluter and the dam-builder. I slowly tear myself from my window to face my room. There she is, in the doorway, the Angel sent from Heaven to save me. Tears fill my eyes and roll down my cheeks and I know them to be that perfectly equilibrious concoction of the bounding happiness and painful sadness of letting go. She steps so lightly! delicately placing her celestial foot—toe by toes by ball by heel—into my last sanctuary. I quaver mightily. As I know her here, I know the plague hidden within my walls has been discovered and with ease eradicated; I know with that same terrible, wonderful equilibrium that I am not and will never be the same, and that I never was how I thought I was. I know that I shall leave this lonely island forsaken for I find my Self naked and uncertain before the awesome valor of a goddess. Our gazes touch gently and, helpless, I drink and I drink of the fountain of her Youth. My longing is unquenchable and ever exponentially increasing. I shudder at the bottomless, knowing sadness in her eyes. I study the streaks of black and white, those playfully dancing cosmos, emanating from the pupil, a black hole, a center of the Universe, a great, fathomless emptiness amid the entire emptiness of existence which I strangle with my sad and desperate illusion of Self. In her Gaze I find the beginning: the Love that found its niche in the Big Bang that created Earth from whose bosom sprang the king Sapien, who in fear and vanity created the Idea of God in an attempt to explain Love.

Then she smiles her Smile of Radiance unreserved and my last vestige of self-protection and emotional distance dissipates, disappears and it is but we alone, here, now, and I know that it will be so from here to everywhere, from now on to forever. We are in motion: flowing towards one another with the graceful hesitancy of liquid. We two lost Souls seeking, the one in exploration and the other in salvation, pirouette, meet. Like coloured oils we kiss, dissolve energetically, by the eternity of unity we change and are changed by the other, separate curious to delve into the strange new subtleties with which we are now infused, begin to once more seep into the canvas of our perceived lives until Mitch the Cat arrives with sauntering swagger and with whale-lunged thunder laughs his Laugh of Alchemy and our timid, oily Selves transform into water and we two meet his third to flow on together and somehow along the way I forget my tainted, enlightened fortress and my desecrated, purified temple… and I too am laughing.