Tricksters
You may have heard it said...
My people grant names based on where we are sent
so here I am upon Earth, the magnificent paradise:
Terra Augustus Utopia!
But, you can call me Tau.
You may have thought, more or less charitably,
how theatrical.
Well, about that...
You think Terra Augustus Utopia is an act,
more a character than a contract;
a performer, an entertainer, a jester --
not a guest. But, maybe a trickster.
Maybe that is the safer assumption.
After all, I am full of the lies called fiction
but I assure you to my very best,
I am as real as my flesh,
though
if I told you all my secrets,
you'd find they wouldn't quite fit --
But, into what, I wonder?
In the puzzle of each other,
or in the riddle of you, my other?
You think it isn't true
because it can't all be true,
not all at once, not like you think.
You think the writer and the word distinct,
but only where you can break the link.
You think that fictions cannot be real
though stories cannot help but reveal.
Intuition illuminates
while the head hesitates.
Mysteries command your deference;
you only think
empiricism is different.
The evidence may surprise
when peer-review finally finds
what peers from behind your eyes.
You'll find traveling faster-than-light
to be much more dream-like
than the sort that needs space-flight.
Information can transit
where a body cannot fit;
do you physicists follow?
Will you dig up his body when you get the news
of how eerily accurate, the words Sagan did choose
that we are the universe experiencing itself?
How could the vastness of Creation have a self,
or be tricked by a trap as small as your cap?
Of course I was sent to this dirt,
just like none of you weren't.
But, what I say,
it doesn't matter.
The point of an oracle
is that no one believes her
until it is their own hands
living the prophecy.
If there were a phrase to make you believe
what I wish you'd understand
only tricksters would use it
to make you believe bullshit.
Author's comment:
Tau, both the stage persona and my personal name of address, are the result of taking inspiration from my disjunction. If I were being cute, I'd describe my brain as neurospicy. The DSM-V has a long set of words for my differences, and all of them are looking in from the outside. I'm the one looking out.
No one can ever speak to the reality of your experience but you. For schizotypal people, who struggle with paranoia and dream-like vexations, this means an immense part of your lived experience is... not quite trustworthy, and not quite real -- at least not like real is real for other people, I guess. I channel it into my art, and -- can we be real with each other, as theater nerds? When are you really separate from your art?
Schizophrenia is still one of those scary as in dangerous categories of distinct perspectives. It's cheap as free to let us be but freer still to make us still, you might say. I grew up masking in a lot of different ways, and I find it hard to unmask -- or rather, I don't know that my masks and I are that different. Are they all masks, or many shifting faces? What would it mean to have an answer? Isn't it more livable to make peace in the moment, here, where you just don't know?
Or:
What does it mean to feel most like oneself?
