The Perfection of Our Imperfection by Margot Van Sluytman/Raven Speaks. Heyoka

Prufrock Again

In this our divine
Comedy of delight
Of destruction
Troubled waters
Calm. Quenching
Us yet again
For in
Our penchant
For beauty
We remake
Over and over again
The tale that tries to
Tame us. Gathering
In circles of hope
Once more we remember
How we remember

© Margot Van Sluytman

I have been a word lover since I have been. Particular words. Particular phrases. Paint their meaning. Their meanings upon my flesh. Tattooing my soul. My spirit. Engraving my every waking moment with clarity. Conundrums. Compelling compulsion to create. To re-create. To manacle. To liberate. To let fly free a version of the essential meaning of what it means: to be.

A meaning that is intricately linked to what it means to belong. Shattering notions of family. Of friendship. Exploding and expressing easily digested and easily tossed out definitions and descriptions of worth. Of worthiness. Descriptions and definitions that seek to pin. Pinion. Permanently position.

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Thomas’ brilliant, kindred poem I read when I was in my teens. Thomas Stearns Eliot’s use of two words: pinned and etherized, have woven and tethered themselves onto my very soul of understanding. Since a young teen, I have thought about J Alfred’s straight jacket life. Self-silencing. Tenacious truncation of his spirit.

Internal voices, that in Thomas’ exquisite poem, point to J Alfred’s persistent, persuasive penchant to dictate, dismiss, deny his very life. What caused him to make the choices he did? What is his lamentation about? Who was he trying to please? Where was he trying to fit? The answers to each of these queries, predicated upon context: personal and historical, among other vast and varied aspects of how and what it means to be and to belong. The perfection of his imperfection means that though he is lamenting, his life was his perfect life. The perfection his very imperfection. And who is the “judge” and the “jury”? Why?

Spending time with my sister-in-law and my niece here in my sanctuary of poetry and papier-mâché. The three of us shared Kimchi. Sunflower seeds. My Guyanese “cook-up-rice.” Black beans. Chunks of pork. Fat okra. Red pepper. Cubes of tofu. Perky-pungent slashes of garlic.

Talking, listening, laughing. Tears too.

The Perfection of our Imperfection is the phrase that came to me as we imbibed the scent of stories. Tea steaming. Rice sizzling.

My sister-in-law and my niece and I visit but once a year. We live in different countries. We lead different lives. I am the senior-senior-senior in our triumvirate. Steel-grey cropped hair to their long black tresses. Yet how our stories flowed.

Stretching over millennia of knowing living in each of our bones. The three of us, in our bones, in our very marrow, and beating blood, and sweat, know of the lives we did not live. The delight of leaning in to listen. To hear. To be heard. Burrowing into the fulminating vibrancy of how our lived-experiences have formed and shaped each of us. As we too shape them. Fragile. Fraught. Fermenting. Feisty. Fulsome. The joy. The glee. The fire of creativity in volcanic explosions of lives past, present, and those to come. The shattered emotions. Divided loyalties. Mended fences. Those which cannot be rebuilt. Safety. Sanity. The clarity and the wisdom of unbreachable boundaries.

And so many trees planted. Roots beating in bounty beneath Gaia’s Delight. Branches stretching. Reaching. Speaking with and for and to and about the leaves. The breath and being of our symbiotic relationship. Lungs filled. And again filled. Until the last drawn breath. Every life. Every death. Every turn of that wheel. The deliverance from the womb. The womb of the body. The womb of the Earth. Gaia Delights in the perfection of our imperfections. Raven Speaks. Heyoka and Kali signal, sign, sing the Mystery that we are. The lives we did not live. The lives we still know for they wear us. Wearing into us as they burnish our being. Our belonging. Our excluding. Our being excluded. Like excommunicated Spinoza. Like a million other souls that swell in our books. Speaking through our brushes. Sunflower yellow. And blue of blessed sky. Above. And too mirrored lakes. Ponds. Our two eyes as we peer in to see. Being ever seen.

The perfection of our imperfection, a process of reaching inward. Tasting of myth and memory. Meandering with marred and mired vision. Blurred images in shattered glass. Mirroring visage upon visage. Reflecting rumour. Recitations streaming from ghosts long dead. Phantoms whose rhythm resides in the very pulsation of our beating heart. What story speaks today through our action? Inaction? Reaction? Redaction?

Waving magic wands that is the penning of potentiality and possibility, poetry and prose. Dramaturge. And dragon dragging up resurrecting dismantling to once again rearrange and fit together, puzzled pieces. The world, after all, is a stage. Merely players we.

In the imperfection that is our very perfection we rise. And again rise. No sleep, save the final sleep, is the cessation of this rhythmic arising and falling. In dream and nightmare and desire. Desire to hold on to. Desire to let go of. Desire to begin again anew. Renewed. The wand waved. Spellbinding witchy wants flutter easily upon the page. Mimics upon the stage. Flash bulb flickers. New stories glow: in the perfection of our imperfection. And in our shared-humanity:

Sawbonna Speaks.