Erica Jong - To a Transatlantic Mirror lyrics

When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door. . . -Suzuki Sick of the self, the self-seducing self- with its games, its fears, its misty memories, and its prix fixe menu of seductions (so familiar even to the seducer) that he grows sick of looking at himself in the mirrored ceiling before he takes the plunge into this new distraction from the self which in fact leads back to self. Self-the prison. Love-the answer and the door. And yet the self should also be a door, swinging, letting loves both in and out, for change is the world's only fixity, and fixity her foremost lie. How to trust love which has so often betrayed the betrayer, seduced the seducer, and then turned out to be not even love? We are jaded, divorced from our selves without ever having found ourselves-and yet we long for wholeness if not fixity, for harmony if not music of the spheres. If life is a flood and there is no ark, then where do the animals float two by two? I refuse to believe that the flesh falls from their bones without ever understanding ever coming, and I refuse to believe that we must leave this life entirely alone. Much harumphing across the ocean, my brother poet coughs, clears his throat (he smokes too much), and gazes into the murky depths of his word-processor, as if it were a crystal ball. I do not know all that hides in his heart of darkness but I know I love the thoughts that cloud the surface of his crystal ball. He longs to leap headlong into his future and cannot. This chapter's finished, his self peels back a skin. Snakes hiss, shedding their scales. The goddess smiles. She sends her missives only to the brave.