JUAN KORKIE

Mother. The first touch, smell, taste. The first sound. The first “other”. The first word. The first concept beyond words.

Mother. The first visceral experience of the world. The first attempt to connect. The first request to the world. The first relationship. The first expression of need and discomfort. The first soothing, comfort and warmth. The first discrepancy between need and reality. The first limitation, imperfection. The first frustration of need. The first absence, loss and pain.

Mother. The shaper of the phylogenesis of a species, of the most primary and essential experience of what makes us human, of living together in mutual cooperation, touch and caring. The foundation of nurturance, belonging and acceptance.

Mother. Just another person, with a mother. The cross-generational distortion of Mother. The fall of Mother. Mother as Atlas, carrying the emotional security, responsibility and duty for an entire race, for an entire lineage. An impossible burden resting on the shoulders of a fragile being who can only fail.

Mother (mother). Revered. Judged. Longed for. Carrying the projections of all in struggling with the pain and imperfections of the world. Because mother can never be Mother.

Mother, and mother. A difference obscured. A critical difference. The difference between divine and human, and her being just another person.

Finding mother among all of this.

My mother.

Father. The shadowy figure at the edge of growing up, the scary one, the angry one, the irritable one, the silent one.

Father. The seed of the unknowable other. Seeing and dreaming things yet to come. The pain of a rational man who saw beyond the veil, the powerlessness.

Father. Entangled in the stories of others, obscured, distorted, hidden. Getting to know him, the man. Just a man.

Father. Walking his own path of guilt and shame. Atonement. Changing, softening, caring. Showing the way of compassion in his own fragile way. Showing that people can change.

Father. Now, many years later, revealing more fragments of his story. Witnessing the grief and loneliness. Witnessing the silent burden for the sake of others. Just a man, knowable.

Father. Vulnerability. Sacrifice. Integrity.

My father.

The minister came to our door and my dad said he does not believe in that stuff, meaning the whole business of selling religion door-to-door, and church, and so we were branded the atheists who lived next to the church because of a misunderstanding

On Sundays we mow the lawn and work the garden

While the church-people walk past us on their way to god

And the boy I was feel ashamed from the stares and judgment

Of these nicely dressed-up people filled with the love of Jesus

So somewhere I stopped believing

In this god who seemed just too human:

An anthropomorphic convenience useful but not true

One side punitive, demanding subservience, threatening hell

One side all loving impotence and illogical

So instead

Inside of me I found (created) a place

Where I am carving god

And have been doing so for 50 years

Trying to get beyond the layers that we stuck to him/it

Sticky layers of need and wanting and existential dread

With this blunt knife (me)

One day when I have carved to the bone

I hope this carving comes to life

And flies away

And God will be free for me (from me)

For a moment

I don’t know if it will happen,

But I have faith

It feels the world:

A noisy and invasive place, riddled with wrongness

Each interaction causes it pain because it cannot Not see and feel

The layers of hidden demand and need and coercion that happens between people, the violence of words,

Speaking soft words with smiling faces talking about “we”

Utterly alien, deeply disturbing

A visceral dissonance

This is a strange place where it does not belong

And where it is judged and shamed and silenced

For feeling (too much), caring (too much), saying (too much)

This place, these people

And so, it retreated inside its cave (me), a coiled intensity 

And in me created an internal world that is vast, complex and magnificent

Carving out the deep spaces of who I am

Bringing forth life, complexity, beauty

At first a retreat and an escape

But with time, more,

My own world, the essence of who I am

This coiled serpent inside

This fiery furnace of volatile intensity

You are the worst of me

You flood me with anxiety, you overwhelm me

But also, you are the best of me: 

My creativity, my passion, my caring

My very humanity

We will struggle to the end, but I choose you because you make me the man I want to be

We are one

I am dragon

Every moment (movement) 

Integrity

As the light falls

And with a ruthlessness accentuates

Light and dark

The exertion of the dancer for perfection

The merging of the dancer and the body

An open dialogue

“Good enough” is not good enough

It is average, mediocre

Like a photograph out of focus

Every movement (moment)

Part of a path (endlessly spiralling, repeating)

Curving into and out of darkness and light

Balanced

With perfect poise, posture

There is no stillness (the luxury of hindsight)

Only movement and action

Self is not a string of adjectives and words, but action

Decision and intentionality

And anything else

Insignificant

I am not the dancer (the means, the vehicle, the body)

I am not the narrative about dancing, dance or dancer

I am not the light

I am not the darkness

I am the weaving who stumbles in search of perfection (integrity)

I am the dance

In the ruins of an abandoned old house there is a line that must have been put up years ago by vagrants who squatted there and since also moved on, leaving nothing but a washing peg

For as long as I remember I have collected discarded everyday objects and been intrigued by their beauty, things of utility, mass produced in some factory somewhere and yet, on its own, more

I see the story of its life, of the thousand moments and threads of lives that it touched, literally, completely invisible in its service, in its doing

I see a beauty that has nothing to do with “pretty”, but about perfection of function, form and design,

An aesthetic of invisibly doing what it does so well that is submerged in the background of life, not noticed because it plays a tiny part in the flow of living, bringing ease

And this is my joy: 

that I see it

the child in me takes joy in discovering and seeing something for the first time, and in that moment, it becomes more because of my gaze, pulled into the foreground where it is honoured for the what and the how of it

There is a place between self and other

Where both beauty and horror arise

What we see is not what (who) is there

But a projection of the self onto the other

And even though there may be threads that connect the other that I think I see and the self that is projected

The essence of what is seen belongs to the one who sees

Which means we are mostly,

Not seen

When I speak to you, I catch glimpses of the me you see

Some distorted, incomplete, fractured, twisted version of me in you

the projected self (you) onto the other (me)

and the dissonance between me and that version of you that you think is me

(not me)

and the arrogance that you believe you are seeing me 

and want to tell me all about me

and always, wanting me to be more (fill in whatever sentimental value here)

but essentially more like you

It is a rare thing to be truly seen

Because being seen means that all of me or you are seen

Not the varnish to make the surface bits shine

Because inside I am not nice, and you are not nice,

And perhaps this is unbearable

So perhaps all I can ask is this:

Stop looking, and

Push your hands into me

I am warm inside

Life is hidden in death

And in death life unfolds to dismember and take apart

To render substance into something that can grow and flourish

Beyond what the corpse could do

That has reached its limits

Life emerges again and again and this is death:

The recurrent transformation

And transubstantiation

Cycle after cycle

A falling apart and return to first principles

An essence purified

This has nothing to do with a morose and morbid fascination with death

But about always knowing that this self, this me,

This woven story of identity,

Is but one of many outcomes and that the next iteration of it (me) can be better

But only if this version of me

Dies

The shamans say that Death is always standing behind us, 

Just over our left shoulder

And that we should embrace him as companion

I think I am starting to understand this now:

We have to become Death, 

And in doing so,

We become more alive.

I remember a story about Jesus, walking with his disciples, and as they passed the decaying corpse of a dead dog, he stopped, and commented on its’ beautiful teeth

And when I heard this story for the first time,

I understood something in myself:

My fascination for things that decay, that are broken, rusting, falling apart

When things decay its truth is revealed, the body (of anything) being the recorded evidence of its doing, function, purpose,

And in that moment, it is laid bare (to the bone)

Its essence to be witnessed

There is nothing repulsive in this

It is sacred

So, when my time is done and Jesus walks by my corpse,  

I know that he will stop, 

(to the dismay of his disciples)

and find something in the mess he likes

I should have been dead

I tried really hard 

To get it right

Researched extensively just how many pills

For months collecting two packs (14 tablets) each week, double strength,

Always a different pharmacy so they don’t get suspicious

I needed 100 to get it right

Twice

The minimum lethal dose

I remember the night

I remember dying 

This body shutting down

And I remember the hand reaching into my chest 

Surrounding my heart

And making it beat again

It is a strange thing to have gone through that door

To have challenged God to show himself

And to have lived

And to have seen Him there

Behind me, saying

“I have always been here”

That night unmade me

And set me free

This is my journey:

to find that place, the balance, between myself and the world

between my internal spaces and the world of people and relationships

between my own self-regulation and the abrasive noisy world

between my safe space and the needs of those important to me

I know that other place of running around in the street, of passionate intensity

Getting lost, consumed and dissolved in feelings and relationships

becoming untethered where the falcon cannot hear the Falconer

where things fall apart

where I give too much, care too much, burning out completely

I also know that other place where I am so deep in myself 

Travelling where none can follow, in the shadow lands, 

creating dark dreamcatchers and weaving forbidden magic

Or that place where I fly and create and see beyond the structure, that beautiful place of process and flow

But also, where I cannot hear the need of those around me

where I cannot be present, connect…feel

or simply that I am just so far away 

and do not hear the need, the pain, the loneliness

Of those most important to me

The cobbler is at ease on the threshold (or just inside)

Immersed in his mastery, grounded, shielded

But still available, connected, present

Balanced

In my Spring I was 

Asleep, detached and disconnected

I could not see what I could not see

Secrets upon secrets

I was married for 3 years and no one even knew

Because I did not share

Anything

In my Summer I emerged 

Like a dog in heat, compelled to connect

Endlessly pursuing (and not finding) intimacy

An increasingly lethal cascade of being dissolved in the other

I was awake

But only to find a vast emptiness inside

In my Autumn I had to pick up the pieces

Of the fractured fiction of myself

And start walking the path with a heart

The dancing of the dragons

But also

(for the first time)

Sharing

Opening

In my Winter

The sadness of what has been lost

The shame and guilt

And not being ok

An obese creature running out of time

Rushing towards the end

And now, in my second Spring,

Awakening to the song of my body, of caring for me,

Of loving me

I fell in love with what was not there

But hidden

Like holding a seed but seeing the tree it is and will/can become

Not because of me but of her and her path that has brought her here (karma)

And me (mine), Catching glimpses of her (our) path extending into time

And moments on that path

And the gifts I saw in the yet unfolded pattern

And when her unfolding will challenge me to become a better man

And that she will unmake me

And so I was not compelled 

Like a moth (me) to a flame (my pattern) 

Or a fantasy of unmet need and primal desire

No, by then I had already passed through the valley of death

And chose to walk a path with a heart

And knew that all such paths have a difficult beginning

And so I did not fall in love

And there was no love at first sight

But rather the slow awakening of a path 

And a thousand deliberate decisions to die (individually) and grow (together)

And the commitment to be unmade a thousand times

And grow into something (her and me/us) completely Other

Because in truth

She chose me and I relinquished control

Not to a child or girl or women

And not to my pattern

But a fiery goddess that brings life itself

Hiding in the body of a vulnerable child

Hiding in the body of an injured young girl

Hiding in the body of an annoying friendly young woman

For as long as I remember I was scared that I will be a bad father

And yet you chose us, me:

For it is said that children choose their parents 

You have been and continue to be the greatest gift of my life:

A bundle of contradictions

A thousand strange and delightful moments 

So completely an individual

But above all, you pull me into this world like nothing else can do

You (and your mother) are the catalyst of who I have become

Your need reaches me when I am deep inside myself

Closed and disconnected to the world

Your voice rips me into Now

And I wish I could be more

Give more

But I have lived so long so deep in me

And I try but struggle to remain in

Relationship 

For long

But because of you I keep trying

To untangle myself from myself

To be present

To be here

I look back at all those moments

That unmade me

That hamster wheel of the story of myself I told (tell) myself deep into the night

Each time so brutally disrupted

And each time like humpty dumpty

I tried to put myself together again

And only now I start to glimpse a truth:

That integration is (perhaps) not the point

How much time we waste to spin gold from straw

(constructing self as artifact)

How desperate we are to say “I am” and fall in love all over again with (yet another version) of ourselves

How desperate we are to clothe ourselves once again with stories, labels, meanings, values, morals, ideals

How needy and narcissistic to demand loyalty to the idea of me/you

The name of God: I am that I am

Not the endless toil to find and tell the story (meaning/theme/interpretation) and carry it through the streets like a golden cow to be worshipped and adored

Not the narcissistic self-reference expecting loyalty and followers

But rather

The listening to the still small voice

Beyond dismemberment and integration

Beyond form and pattern

Beyond projections of need and longing

Beyond desire and connection

And this is my journey:

To embrace the vastness that I am

The thousand threads and stories all at once

The irreducible multiplicity that is me

And then

To leap over my own shadow