When you reach a certain age, you’re no longer the protagonist of your own actions: all you have left are the consequences of things you’ve already done. The seeds you’ve sown have been growing away, out of sight, and now suddenly they burst up in a kind of jungle that surrounds you on all sides, and you spend your days trying to hack out a path with a machete just so you can breathe. It soon becomes clear that any hope of getting out is completely false, because the jungle’s spreading faster than we can cut it back and, more importantly, because the very idea of “getting out” makes no sense: we can’t get out because at the same time we don’t want to get out, and we don’t want to get out because there’s nowhere else to go, because the jungle is us and getting out would mean a kind of death, or even death itself. And maybe once we were able to die a certain sort of seemingly harmless death, but now we know such deaths were the seeds we sowed of the jungle we’ve become.

But today, around sunset, I saw a few reddish rays of sun reflected in some glazed ceramic bricks and realized I’m still alive, in the true sense of the word, and even able to place myself within myself: it’s all a question of finding the right balance, by means of a kind of spiritual acrobatics. I can’t get free of the tangle of consequences, and there’s no point trying to be the protagonist of my own actions again, but what I can do is find my lost self among these new patterns and learn to live again, only differently. There’s a way of going with the flow that means you end up in the right place at the right time, and this “going with the flow” is what allows you to be the protagonist of your own actions——when you’ve reached a certain age.

*

A few days ago, I dreamed about a group of priests in different-colored robes. I remember one of them in particular, whose robes were a very bright purple. They adopted various positions, which in turn combined to form further positions, and I realized they were expressing the secret of Alchemy.

COLONIA, NOVEMBER 1991

COLONIA, MAY 1993

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Funder Acknowledgments

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