The Layers Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: 'Live in the layers, not on the litter.' Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
"I'm trying to speak to you in your dreams. Can you hear me calling out to you, animal to animal?"
This art was created in 2019-20, at the beginning of the trauma that would lead to my eventual CPTSD. I have been an artist all my life, but only after that first, most devastating breakdown did I feel the suffering intense enough to divert into obsessive production of art: painting, writing, poetry; along with many less healthy outpourings.
'Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born With nowhere yet to cast my head.' Matthew Arnolds
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