Prelude

The Prance of the Panther


I’m not a number
My fingerprints belong to me
--my fingertips
what I do is my life
 & not for public scrutiny
your opinion does not count
I don’t care
I’m not your number
And time is when we share this planet
But I didn’t create your rules
If I was in some other time
There would be other scorecards
I walk away from chains and uniforms
There’s freedom but not
On your time.
There’s freedom on my mind
But it’s not your kind

Premise:


     I am going to tell you a story about a girl.  Let’s call her Electra. She creates a comic strip that tells a story. Within the comic strip is a diary that is known as Electra’s Dictionary. Through this it is possible to tell. There is no need to explain or apologize. There is no type of repercussions for the things that she reveals.
     The density of words allows more to be said as the interpretations of words can always be defended by the subjective tendency to error in understanding, especially on the behalf of the reader. I think that in order to be a good secret agent you really have to be a good spy.
     If this were a trail of clues the blue print would look like splices of a cross-section diagram. You put different colored films over the surface and examine how this influences the way that it looks. Other realities are exposed. Within every one of those realities is an infinite number of interpretations. Which is the right one? This question is irrelevant because all and none would be the answer and I know that is a contradiction in terms. Follow me.
     You take a knife and cut into the cross section. You lay a film of ultra-marine over it and then alizarin crimson. You take away one and view. You put them together in two separate orders. Ultra violet is my favorite color; it contains so many, like the violet dawn.
     I would make a series of mobiles; three-dimensional sculptures to explain that the dimensions actually are more than three-d. Maybe they are like solar systems. Every planet, every moon, every galaxy… contains many mobiles, many cross-sections and infinite dimensions. With so many possible realities the pondering of Truth becomes erroneous.
     I remember being handed my assignment before I was jettisoned to life. I forget my way and exhaust possibilities while spinning in a battle to steady the focus. I get lost.
     I am lost.
     But let’s talk about her. Our heroine. The one who draws a comic strip. Why comic? Is it funny? The tragedy of life is hysterical. I still think the Greeks did it best. So let’s invite their chorus for this comic book opera and this splice may be seen through Freud’s interpretations or the lunatic inside. Either way. Not sure. Which way it goes. Or will go.
     Ready? Let’s go…


Let Go
I am Electra.
  As old as time…..
          I’ve been called so many things, so it doesn’t matter what my name is. Dinosaur or Thesaurus Rex-- wrecks…. the web, the lines get tangled and often overlap. Literary or literal, words never say enough….



Electra…. Who is she? A psychological assessment would give us a clinical, deeper understanding of her. But would it show her in her truest light….? In the absolute sense of truth?
     We consider the Greeks as our birth of thought.
  
     What do we know of Electra? And here, I do not mean the classical Electra, as in Euripides or Sophocles, nor am I referring to Freud’s Electra. Our Electra, who remains silently locked inside a dark world and uses symbolic suggestions instead of language to keep her barriers up and to politely snub the world. The dictionary, or lexicon is a primer, every line spoken in rhymed code. And yet we do know that her use of the choice of calling her diary Electra’s Dictionary is obviously meant to suggest all classical references to Electra in the ancient and modern sense. A guise,  concealed behind what seems like simple self-analysis woven in a diary.
     The question remains, as it always has, how much do we tell or how much do we distort in order to tell everything and remain safe within anonymity? I have written pages, volumes and years of this, at this very task. Those volumes have been destroyed. By me and by someone else who discovered them…. and acted to keep certain secrets safe. Or to just keep them. Some pages sit in legal offices, confiscated by…. one of many enemies
     It took that last lesson to finally learn mother’s rule of “never put anything in writing….” Both my mother and the man who fathered me left no physical evidence or documentation. I know this because I have looked and searched.
     What is a poet to do? Find solace in poetic license. These facts must be revealed in riddles of alliterations and allegory for the purpose of the secret(s) I am and have been bound to, and the need to unburden my soul.
     We must begin somewhere. A starting point?
     Words work for you and against you. My cryptic language is not intended to be mistaken for pretentiousness. The simplicity of words are intentionally dense. Fewer words said the more truth is stated. Look for it. You must accept these rules, as they have been the very rules, which have crippled me. Double meanings. Lines written invisibly or grammatically oblique. You see, I am committed to truth. And why should anyone care? It doesn’t matter if you do or not. Not to me. Just that I tell. This. But I will not spell it out because-- I think it was Cocteau who once said, “the matters I relate are true lies.” The truth lies somewhere between the lines. Sometimes I do not know which is myself. Mother was a good liar. She kept track. I never could.
     What relevance do I have to this selfish greedy world only interested in immediate self-gratification?
Truthfully,
   So-often I despise my species….

Hmmm….
     I think I will entreat you with temptation.
     Come in:
     [in a whisper](As an emotional vampire that feasts on the delicacy of the untainted
                              I ask you--
How pure is your soul?)
--Because I don’t want your blood.
Cocteau also said, “The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”
I am an artist but I am a poet first.
I will use poetry to reveal what I must and to conceal what must be concealed. I must be cautious in what I say. Suggest but never say aloud. Be careful what you miss. If you care or dare, take it or leave it. This is a story that must be told.

With 21st Century’s electronics and the Internet it makes sense to use
    --along with my poetic license
              images….
I am an artist –but, you see, nobody cares about art anymore.
So I will draw in modern cult style.
I always loved Batman and his Gotham city as a kid… and all those dark B
movies in black and white…    

Electra’s Dictionary

The very first time that it happened, I had not known that I could do it. It happened by itself spontaneously as sheer pain spliced through my senses. The skin to flesh slaps had stung like fire, like a scorpion’s venom, but the lick of the belt sent me clear over the rainbow. A flash of neurological overload and some blinding red pain. Was I going to die? Was I still afraid to? Because there it wouldn’t hurt so bad. Anymore. I heard thoughts the way a lightning bolt vibrates your spine. I heard, you are safe… I’m watching you… come with me for awhile and lets talk as this chastisement continues… I watched it all happen to me from some other far away place. I was enclosed in a net of magical protection, so familiar that I knew to trust it beyond my life. So I did. Part of me fell asleep. Part of me was healed-- that was the part of me that was eternal and knew of an infinite knowledge I had temporarily forgotten. I was six.
     I watched the small red haired girl get whipped by her dad. I watched the rage and venom pour out of him like a physical energy of spite. The little thing took every blow. She lay there unmoving and unmoved. She was … hollow. They picked her up and brought her out to the living room and lay her on the sofa. Hours passed. Nobody stirred her. She stared senselessly at the ceiling. Her dad was far away. Mother was far away. Her sister was far away. Everything was far, far away. She lay in God’s hand and his fingers kept her safe. Days passed. She saw the fear in the faces that peered over her. Grandmother was there. She looked alarmed. She was shouting at Mother. Loud voices between Mother and her dad. She went away for awhile again, closing her eyes.

     That was the first time it had ever happened. She could slip out of her body. It was a way out. Some force had brought her to safety there and told her to return there any time she was in danger and she would be safe. Not with words, she just knew. It was understood as if from a previous conversation before landing.
     Sometimes it was only in that other place that I existed. So many days passed and they are forever lost to me. Like a sleep walker, I could perform in life as I was somewhere else. Why could I do that? Was I a super hero? This brought a laugh in reply. There is really only one super hero. All others are messengers. This pain was not my penitence. There was some other task more pressing to accomplish or fall from grace.

     The last entry of the diary was gone. Incomplete now, like someone erased I got lost inside my reflection knowing someone had got in. The reflection stared. Who’s in there? “the face in the mirror won’t drop…” was it so important that I know who she is? I am not my body. It is the soul that is eternal, why should the rest matter? It is the uniform. If I wear my French maid uniform then that is the part I play. Does this provide insights or hints? Humility. But why? Why a French maid? You’re not a French maid, you are a female. A female person-thing. No, I am a bastard, not a French maid, almost the same thing. How so? Because that role is enslavement, there is no freedom there. Freedom… what is that? A stupid lie they tell.
     Who is she? My face looks like nobody from my family, really. It used to bother me. It used to anger mother when I asked her about it. It was something I was not supposed to be suspicious of. Maybe I was adopted? All kids think that at times. Why the cover up? I knew Trisha was born a bastard, I figured that out when I was fourteen, years after her death from a drug overdose. She was a hippie. She was my idol, my role model, My goddess. My life was empty after she died. And then we moved far, far away from everybody we knew. We moved overseas. Dad was an ad man.
     If ever there could be my most poignant antithesis it would be a commercial materialist. So my dad and I were destined to be natural enemies. He once told me I was the bane of his existence. When he said that, I remember how it had hurt. Looking back, though… now—I’m proud of it. All the terror of my childhood can be forgiven if I believe that what he called me was really true; The Bane of his Existence. I caused him pain. How did I do that? All I wanted was to be daddy’s little girl and to know a father’s love. He never loved me. My first heartbreak was his rejection. Then hers.
     I think that moving to Europe helped me, but not for the reasons most Americans go to Europe for. I was eleven when we moved there and deep in a depressive state as grandmother and Trish’s deaths were only months past. I had become obsessed with dreaming up methods of suicide.
     It was Europe that saved me that time. My vines took root in the romance of the landscape and architecture that I got exposed to everyday - The school field trips to famous art museums that housed the most splendid of masterpieces. The meaning of life went beyond this one me, this one self, and being awakened to that woke me up. I flourished. I became some tuning fork for the gods of the muses and became visited by inspiration like a re-occurring fever. For the first time ever, I felt alive but only when engrossed in one of the arts. Visual arts, literature, classical music took me to a better place and that was the only place that I chose to ever exist.
     I know that is where the key is buried.
     There I am not lost.
     But there is where I am. There is Electra. There before the grace of God go I….