You have to build your difference, they say.
You are divided for love.
But I don’t know who you are.
Do you know who I am?
I can feel your fingers reaching out to me,
so close to having material form it hurts
like an unstruck sound in my heart.
You are surely a reflection,
but when I look for you in the mirror
the only me there is I.
I project the idea onto all of my lovers,
trying to understand the shape of you,
then when they are gone, I retract you
back into the darkness of shadow.
I saw you in the theatre last night.
Three stages, three shows, three facets of you.
I danced with each in my dreams.
You had raw, bleeding knees from the crawl;
an attempt to save yourself from fiction, no doubt.
But one tug on my necklace, one cry from within
and I knew the fall was real.
Orchid's Lantern 
Brilliant. Would you mind shedding some light (ha-ha) on the final stanza?
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Ah yes, the third stanza is me being deliberately obscure I’m afraid! It does have a particular meaning to me, and it’s something I could only really express with elaborate romantic metaphor…
It has to do with the way Jung’s animus concept fits into the kabbalah (a tool I use to understand spiritual concepts). The root idea of male and female are formless beyond the unconscious abyss, which is like a fictional realm to us: the realm of myth and archetype (which reminds me of the theatre). The animus in woman (and anima in man) remains there while their twin lives consciously, waiting to be reunited at death or enlightenment.
I use ‘the fall’ and ‘crawl’ from the Bible story of Eden because they depict the movement from beyond the abyss: idea to form, spirit to man. The tug on the necklace is a reference to a lucid dreaming method of becoming conscious in an unconscious realm, as well as a personal symbol for connection.
And now I’m quite sure I have managed to make the whole thing seem even more impenetrable by attempting to explain it 😩 I really should stick to leaving things open to interpretation!
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Hardly; this clarifies a lot and adds to the story. Sometimes a little explanation is necessary to bridge the gap between the author’s intentions and the reader’s interpretation, because that middle ground is where the magic happens 😉
One last question though: what are the three facets? Is that a reference to the holy trinity? Or something more personal?
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That was a reference to the stages of animus development, though there are actually 4 in total according to Jung.
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Ah, that makes more sense. See? Very helpful 😛
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