But for now I was just my mother’s son or rather I had become someone found in a game of hide-and-seek...a self through being born and now having matured...all that was left to do was die. It is all the path of psychodrama, the suicide of self, that which the artist who is truly an ARTIST must come on up against, get on up in, and finally and brutally soothe...that nothing, not a goddamn single page, piece, thought, line, stroke, or move would ever remain beyond the false sense that one had a body, that the bag of blood and puss and shit and that wholly made and run on food thing was really you, or me, or any wise creature...the name only makes it so...vocare est invocare...we ride the chariot of false vows and illusion...
So sleep in paradise young man, sleep with no ceilings, sleep within feet of your mother for the kingdom of drunken god is close...dream signs in the earth of blood and fire and vapours of smoke, wake in media and flee the hardening flesh of nocturnal remission...come of age Parsifal, for it is your pure foolery that remains innocent and dormant in my lowly bones, Caryatidinal bones of resexualized Phoenix that were to rise up and rattle the hermaphrodites for their loose wisdom nickels and dimes...”so ought men to love their wives as their own bodies...” I see my body now transcendentally pure, equal in all times through eons of misfortune, and able to extinguish afflictions on sight...for I am I...and will have turned my eyes from resounding fame, and I will have been led from trail-blazing darkness of doubt and confusion to the quinine polar moon of bliss...for now, cradled in the winter heat of central America, floating in the embryonic mist of my creator, I could begin to break the pressure of others, the cycle of acting on someone else’s volition, things endured never undertaken, the neurosis of friends, pettiness, doubt, jealousy, dissatisfaction...In my acidity I often try to blame them, condemn them, those friends, and now want only to take apart myself...for these are my tender afflictions, my dog, my disease, my personality, my penis...all a social fiction...set to dissolve in this solitude...
I slept in such a soft bed, deep breaths of the tumid air and the frowsy late morning cat-naps of a content population...but the bed was too soft so I achieved my hardness through morning ritual of lotus-sitting contemplation, half-hour sessions of mental brakes put to the floor, ritual rushen to cut through layers and layers of conceptual morass and habit, built in American thought factories that sat like hot siestas at high noon, the slow rides through familiar territory...
God in the guise of Herman Hesse had put me on the path by the lovely and simple words of Siddharta, his story of Buddha...It was my diminutive sensitive charming amigo Burton, always one or two significant steps ahead of me and whom I’d always shared some special discovery self-comraderie, a genius mirth rock of friendship......It was he who had insisted that I read this book and it was he who then changed the course of my existence, he who broke through my load-bearing wall...this was the long-awaited chemical buzz of wisdom that only round 11 can bring...and that was 10 years ago (“stuck in my cabana living on bananas and blow”) when on mad I-70 trips in my ’68 Chevy Impala convertible to and from the villas Aspen and Vail on borrowed youth-time and pints of tequila in back seat marathon chewing tobacco and story binges where Burton and I saw each other for the first time, our heroic individual selves under the golden blue canopy of Colorado summer in Glenwood canyon, the gothic highway project that tore through the high walled purgatorial canyon of purple sage and river cut granite, this 40 year man-made bridge and trellis wonder...oh how we flew through high on our instinctive momentum, visions of cunt and cunnery at our final destinations, or revelry akin to the passage of rites that only a male can really know...but my greenhorn self, like the shedding of an orphanage fetish, was acquiring insights and habits at a furious pace, and other than the knowledge of enlightenment, I had my first taste of tobacco, a can of copenhagen, in that holy canyon...
-Michael Price
