Laying
awake, enduring the
hatred
of the topsy-turvy status quo,
I
put my temple to your
back
and can feel your
heart
beating and am assured
it
is in there somewhere.
My
wrongs are your wrongs.
We
want to be someplace
other
than where we are,
and
in so doing we slight God
and
the attributes he has
given
us both.
We
want to love our own
way
unholy
though it may be.
Interview
TSTmpj: How
do you reconcile the "unholy sacredness" of an intimate relationship
with the necessary compromises of life?
Gordon
Purkis: I believe we seek an ideal in
others that we cannot possibly find in them or in ourselves. As a child I
struggled with the concept of a fully-god, fully-human person in the form of
Jesus. I felt being made less than perfect was unfair and while I have been
largely unaware my whole life of where I come up short (and over-aware of the
defects of others), I have in recent years opened myself up to the spiritual by
elimination of most forms of mind alteration and the resulting weight of the
knowledge of my imperfections has been a difficult hurdle. I feel my failures
so much, in particular with my failure to form strong and lasting relationships
with others. I must strive to accept the ineptitudes of myself and others, find
the love and tolerance for them that I would want for myself. I cannot seem to
escape the judgment, either of self or others, and compromise is exactly that,
a short cut to an easier way that does not exist, not when I know in my heart
how to act, and persisting in sabotaging my own life by allowing my defects to
control my actions.
*
TSTmpj: Are
most relationship damages always, necessarily hidden?
Gordon
Purkis: Much like a box that arrives on
your doorstep you can't be sure of the condition of its contents until you open
it. In the search for truth and reality we try to take the subjectivity
out of it, which cannot be done. But, I need to strive to be the person who's
looking for the person who's looking for me. I don't want to be a chameleon or
necessarily go along to get along, but I can say my truth and hold my beliefs,
not necessarily be in conflict with others while continuing to work on self in
order to create a better environment for those around me. Kind of like the
"customer experience" we want to know how your "Gordon"
experience is, we value your opinion and will take into consideration your
comments. We also don't know the lesson that God is trying to teach us until we
have learned it, so in that sense it continues to be a mystery.
*
TSTmpj: "My wrongs are your wrongs"
reminds me of a love sonnet by Pablo Neruda, in which he also alluded to the
merging of two selves into one. How far can this merging be taken, for
you?
Gordon
Purkis: I do not know the Neruda poem
but I have found that the errors we spot in others are the errors in ourselves.
As relationships go we all mirror one another and in that sense we are all one,
but our separateness is what keeps us confused, our personal sovereignty and
the lifelong dialogue we have with ourselves creates a story that takes on a
life of its own. Other people seem to fit into our story in various ways, some
better (for lack of a different word) than others. But I am so far away from
true companionship and intimacy with another human being at this stage than I
could hope to be. Better than it once was but still distant.
Bio Note
Gordon
Purkis, a writer and artist, currently resides in suburban Atlanta, GA. His
most recent book Prayerland is available on Amazon.com.
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