A Recipe
– written August 24, 2024
**
There is always a hidden face.
Do you dare to gaze upon my Secret face?
It will burn through skin, the blistering gaze of the terrible angel.
I burn in white fire, endlessly.
These faces that hide, and lurk, and cackle behind the blue velvet curtains.
I drown in black water, eternally.
Behind the golden shiny mission of soulmaking lies the dark underbelly of this work. James Hillman describes them as the pathologies of the soul.
I splatter blood on the pure white canvas of potential, beneath the floorboards of “saving the world” in this time between worlds. Crawl through the bleeding cracks and see the dust of centuries.
Soulmaking is the realm of scavengers in a world of collapse and decay. My fingers grip your chin coldly, long nails pressing crescents on soft skin. I demand you to see. There is no imploring here. Beneath the docile innocence, the demure sensuality, I pry your eyes open like Clockwork Orange. See the wartorn ravaged collapse of this world, do not look away.
Pick up the pieces — fragments of bone and ligament, rebar covered in red dust. I press it to my mouth. It stains my lips as a clownish masque, corners lifted up in a grimace and a smile.
How can we love if we cannot even look. How can we love if we cannot kiss the demons and the ghosts, the entities that tear through the veneer of romantic love with glee.
God, I hate that I love you. This bondage is unbearable.
This world is not simply perfect. It is intolerable. This body, this planet, this aliveness. Reality is perfectly intolerable. You are intolerably perfect. You are disgusting. You are terrible. I hate you. I hate you all. I hate what you make me feel.
I hate you!
I scream this at the world. I whisper this at God, my throat parched raw with screaming and thirst. I am furious. I feel my allyship with Beelzebub, with Lilith, with my demon friends. My friend Layman tells me I am a demon hunter. I agree that I am an excellent huntress. I hunt by befriending, by collaborating, by falling in love. I shoot precise arrows that shatter hard hearts and minds. I am Artemis. I am Fudo Myoo. I am Kali. My neck is hung with skulls and cassette tapes, drips with electrical cords and red threads of fate. In my back pocket is a hidden shard carried through lifetimes. (when you’re not looking, i drop it into the bubbling cauldron)
Soulmaking means that I ensnare you in red threads of history and destiny. This is the theatre of the soul. Our bodies are already in hellish bondage with this earth, with this planet in her tortured aliveness. And it is ecstasy. I move, you move. You move, I move. We move like sticky tentacular creatures. We rip each other apart. Our hearts explode. Ecstatic liberation in guts and soul bondage. Applause! Take a bow.
Soulmaking is not clean or pure, you do not get to transcend the cruelty, the rage, the scarred, ravaged, raped, dark psychotic violence of humanity. We are born into this. You include it and hate it, and in the tempestuous storm, in that perfect still point of infernal rage and rapturous eros, you love it with the wild senseless unconditional animal loyalty of a mother who is bonded to her serial killer child.
You do not get to escape or transcend me.
You must love me. Eat me. Consume me. Guide me. Teach me.
You want it to be simple? Fine, here are the instructions:
Let truth smear dirt, feces, car oil, menstrual blood, thick strings of mucus and semen on perfection.
mix it together with the other ingredients
sift flour with
sunlight that filters through the trees
juicy pink summer peaches
a baby kicking tenderly in the belly,
the intestines of cats
Let it boil and cook, the tender waft of bone broth. Will you take a spoonful? The chef always takes a taste.
Add salt.
This is how humus is fed, dark and thick with tentacular aliveness. The worms are the soulmaking saviours. Eat through my body and come alive.
Carve out an opening and hear me wail in agony. This is how new cultures are born.
The curtains close.
Silencio.