The ancient crone Lilith was so offended by Isolde and her Tristan to be, she cursed them, transforming them into the Succubus and Incubus, each forevermore bound to bastardize their one love so true by lusting all those who are not.
In the fuller story the narrator’s collection of suicide notes is titled “metallurgy”. Reading the Sandman a decade late helped me sort these things I knew in an early acid trip somewhere between, but it was a baker’s dozen years later before I met the words. The work itself is called suicidemary, named for my effort at a garage band in the 90s which failed to murder grunge. None of us had heroin or morphine so we huffed gas in a barn in south Texas, lost by the lack of hills for our skateboards and lack of vocabulary for our crushes. By three lifetimes later I had dug more graves at historic Cave Hill cemetery in Louisville than all the funerals attended by all the people I’ve ever known thrown together and pilloried away. It was rare for a week to go by anywhere in the year, with folks not needing diggers to double as pallbearers, so it was the only vocation in my life to have me willing to keep my hair cut, because respect had to come at a moment’s notice. People forget when they’re wrestling angels how angels taught the devils everything they know about fighting dirty.
The conspiracy theories that Shakespeare actually authored nothing are offensive, coming from the frame of mind insisting that only inheritors of pillaged wealth are capable of greatness, and never the muddied serfs obliged to keep them alive. Eat Musk. The most greedy and gluttonous entitling themselves to ownership of every love’s labor’s lost at the expense of everything under the sun is hardly a ridiculous strawman, it’s the story of every nation’s fall. Shakes had kids to support and to entertain, he’s nobody’s patsy. Not concrete on anything outside my senses, but I’ve never been persuaded by arguments the author was his sister or Bacon or a secret cadre of her royal majesty’s copy-editors. Innovation comes from folks who spent the other 99% of their time working to keep up with the Joneses. When everyone’s a writer, someone is going to be the best. As the bulk of peoples past and present are leading lives of quiet desperation the chances it would be someone without rank or privilege is pretty high. I’ve over half a million words in essays at my blog and I’m operating on a GED from over 20 years ago. These things happen. All of human civilization came from the dirt. Naysayers are projecting the class bias they’re defending. The inventors of mathematics, philosophy and democracy in the doing were the ones who built from nothing the libraries. Not persons who paid for unearned degrees. At one point 5 or 6 years ago there were over 500 gofundme pages by teachers across the USA needing help with basic supplies for their students. It was the last time I tried pitching to proper society’s commercial press as nobody would bite. Neither help or ingenuity ever arrive from above. Biggest legends never realize it, while the biggest bellends pray nobody else does.
My uncle Joe and I lived out the film Good Will Hunting a year or more prior to its existence, so it was a family joke for the longest while. He chaired the department of philosophy at Worcester’s Holy Cross, I was 17 but had dropped out of high school as a 14-year-old junior, to work. Would’ve graduated by 15. For most of two years enveloping my 18th birthday I was invited to audit every course by every professor in his department. I ghostwrote papers for some of his students on the side, which he always graded nicer than ones turned in under my own name. He’d grow to love/hate my talent for drawing parallels or conclusions without having read the right books, as though quoting someone else were more important than conveying ideas with my own words. I was never cocky about it, which only made it more tragicomic. He was loved by his students, so I was a welcome curiosity. At some point he introduced me to a professor over in classics who for months met me for lunch just to talk about what we were reading for fun. Somehow had it to give me an advance hardcover of The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, the later piss-poor film adapt saved by Bowie as Tesla. Around the fastly-changing day jobs I was sitting in on classes regularly or semi-regularly, and lectures, through multiple departments and starkly different circles of people. Theater students pulled me into the favor of their main teacher, allowing me to attend rehearsals/wrap parties for 2 consecutive senior plays despite my not being a student. I helped build and paint sets for an experiential spin on Little Shop of Horrors which incorporated elements crossed over from Rocky Horror Picture Show, as well as a production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile, authored by Steve Martin. And as the first collegiate performance he sent the director a giant check similar to the old sweepstakes commercials, for one cent as his private donation. At keg parties I’m in a kitchen table circle burning bills to prove my foresight was mad. I was a comic relief for kids already set financially for life, but one who was afforded ample time and space, as the key-holders to vehicles in the parking lot of the gods needed to hear what I’d say next as much as they needed my assistance in random emergencies of overflowing toilets or calling paramedics or carrying couches up and down flights of stairs, menial labors of common sense cause and effect none so privileged and entitled could sort for themselves.
For some weeks I lived secretly with a small group of female theater majors in their dorm on campus, all of them several years older than myself and one notably engaged all the while. They could have been expelled and I could have been arrested, yet they’d hang a sign on the door when I needed the showers. The most non-threatening sexual tension. Given the chance I’d have had no idea what to do with any of it, but even at the time I understood that they needed my humility more than my fear, and positively not the alternatives of love or cruelty either one. The instincts were always present for me even while the words were always in progress.
Because I knew students, faculty, as well as employees from months working the storeroom for the cafeteria, I’m the only person I know who’s spent time inside both the old fallout shelter underneath said cafeteria ss well as the secret room within the clock tower of the main building on campus, accessible only by wooden ladder inside the closet of an office of the philosophy dept. There was a small gym mat up there purportedly for a getaway meditation spot, but I swear there were sex stains all around it, up the walls, etc. People with means obsess way more over immediate gratifications, like they were never told as children to stop playing with it. At cheaper schools, there was less time for stoning out to Dorothy and Dark Side in off-campus apartments because more of the student body is off working jobs they will never flee from. The one and only way you really earn a degree is when you cannot afford it. So I am without pedigree and without degree, my one point of pure pride. Spend enough time and space hiding inside a gated community and one invariably forgets what reality is. I’d left New England’s wormtown to locate the corpse of my father. I was named for him, a junior to his senior. When we held a memorial service for him months after the fact, I waited til after proceedings began to decide to go. Sitting in the back of the church where my parents had been married and where I had been baptized decades of a lifetime prior, none acknowledged me as I heard the priest talk of gathering to honor the passing of Richard Caldwell. My fortune was to never lose that perspective, being a ghost at a funeral of my own.
The past year and months I wonder if maybe I’ve a tumor in my head applying for the time being added pressure on my Pineal gland, and soon it will be far too late, like the clarity of word and deed only death-row inmates know. My heart and lungs are so much worse though, I wake up choking blood out of my eyes, my heartbeats either trudging once per minute or 23,000 times per minute and never in between, and I cannot ever sleep more than 2 or 3 hours at once in any 24-hour block, not for 6 or 7 years now at least. My energy is in windows and my strength is in windows, my abilities to focus on anything for more than moments diminish day by day, and I constantly find myself hopeless for multitasking matters which before I’d done unconsciously. But the words I formulate are meaningful, my thinking and my speech and my writing all unified to unnerving effect for all those sampling more than one. I totally get schizophrenics intercepting every unanswered prayer.
You are not special, and the who/what/when/where/why to any non-lethal matters you might like or dislike are altogether irrelevant and inconsequential to all those suffering their own. When we deny this about ourselves, we reveal what we hold in common with the absolute worst persons ever to’ve walked the Earth. When fed it grows into every lethal issue. And when we deny it in others we enlist in cults of personality, by degrees foregoing our own resources and opportunities for nothing grander than a falsehood.