"The problem with advertising isn't that it creates artificial longings and needs, but that it exploits our very real and human desires.... Above all, advertising promotes a corrupt and bankrupt concept of relationship.... In the world of advertising, lovers are things and things are lovers....

Locked in our perfect boundaries, bound in loving thrall to ourselves alone, and finally from this endless worldstorm safe within, we turn within spiraling deeper with each turn, the widening gyre this time inward, for solace, for nurture, for some much needed comfort that we never knew, pulled on, compelled by the invitation, call of an elusive falconer, the language indistinct but strangely moving, ineffable, obscure yet fascinating, voices that almost seem to be saying... almost... can it be? words and pages that are nearly readable as in dream, trying to make them out, get closer, focus, let go of all fear, of all doubt and hesitation, fall into pure meaning, unmediated, unconditional, come to the place, to the center from which there is no more direction in, a point of light indistinguishable from darkness, and there find at last that those gods who called us here are dolls of straw, kachinas with blank unseeing eyes, and know them as the toys of our childhood, how we clumsily stitched them together from bits of rag and buttons, held them and rocked them and told them our stories our secrets our hopes and fears, invested them with the magic only a child can weave, from bits of loneliness and beauty, and there find at last those gods of our own creation, silent, bound in loving thrall to ourselves. Alone.

Do you understand now why I tried to break you? Tried to pry open the rusted-shut doors of your heart? No. You don't. You never did. "He sees me!" you told your friends, who were happy for you then. The same friends who would later counsel you to escape, to flee, to protect your precious inviolable self. Because, what I saw in you and loved you for was more than you saw in yourself. Deeper than you were willing to go, instead holding in the middle depths, toying with a numinous obscurity whose true power you have never fathomed.

"Does it scare you," I asked, "when you paint?" And you said well of course it did. Of course. But your eyes said you only partly understood the question. Just enough to be scared by it. Understood that without touching real fear, without descending to that final place in which we are nothing but ourselves, we can bring back nothing. Nothing of value, only hints and posturings, only art that is artifice, intimations that we have touched the fire, let it burn us till there was nothing of us left, and without that only lies, only shameless pretense.

You never let yourself fall into that believing -- your line. Never let yourself go all the way. And you tell yourself today, well who does and why should I? That way lies madness, darkness, negativity.

Let me tell you something, although you'll never hear it, fingers stuffed into your ears, eyes blindfolded to my seeing that you once so loved. That way lies the shadow of your sunny funny-money dis-position, which guards the threshhold on which you pretend to stand waiting, from which you beckoned, on which you dared me to join you. But you have never crossed that line yourself, but made of it a line, a come-on, an accessory to ornament your pretty lovelessness, let others pay the toll for your deceit, your cowardice, your vaunted "integrity" with which you beat me for not loving you enough.

So hard to weep for you. So hard to see and keep seeing what you have made of yourself. Locked in your perfect boundaries, so proud, assured that what you did was not betrayal, after so long, after so much, of us both.

And let me tell you one last thing, though you have let me know in every way you could you are no longer listening. It is this: that from that darkness, Psyche, from which you shy and flee, to which you have convinced yourself you need never repair, from that last and deepest darkness, and only from that place, emerges the one truly simple choice. Life or death. The place from which Prometheus, defying the gods, brought back fire and the alphabet as gifts to the human race. And was punished for it, suffered endlessly. But this fire is life itself. It brings both light and pain, joy and grief. And these letters here, these words and sentences I write today, no longer for you, but for the people, all of us, whom you placed yourself, in your empty arrogance, so far above -- this alphabet burns with a passion you will never know. If it burned you it was not my curse, but the blindness with which you were so fascinated, via Borges and the rest, or Celtic runes, Egyptian hieroglyphs, always some fabulous new bullshit, more icons of your false and faked-up insight that left you dreaming, spinning in that ever deepeing cocoon of silence and withdrawal: you yourself alone.

Pay your own toll.

Yes, I saw you. Saw us together, each and both. I see you still, a wraith, a ghost, an absence of your own design, a vacuum of disconnected desire.

And this anger all that I will give to grief. Though it burn me forever, I will not forget. The black blood from this pen, forming this letter, then that, the next, breaking open the heart of the world from which it flows, my only legacy to sorrow for what might have been.

Go then. Be gone. Make some world more to your liking. Find your own story from whatever bits you can plagiarize with your daddy's dark blessing of your self-absorbed black bricolage. Write your vision, on tablets of stone, on papyrus, on vellum, on the fucking wind for all I care, to someone who'll maybe half believe it. Eros will not be winging his way to wake you this time, babycakes. Your only vision the perfection of death. Fleeing your shadow, you become one, folded forever into Persephone's funereal embrace.