good bye
i will miss you
i will miss the beauty of your smile, your hands

i never found you, not really
i never loved you, not really
we were sheep that passed in the night
unable to love one another
unable to forget

why did you waste yourself?
why did you lie?
why did i hate you so hard?
why did i lie?

the love is always there
just out of reach
in all the memories

your beauty
my isolation

my longing for an embrace that you never gave
what were you longing for?
did the men you grovelled for, did they make you happy?
now and then?

was it worth it?
did you have a good life?
i hope so.
i hope it was worth the love lost
i hope it was good a lot of the time
the times when i wasn't a part of it
i hope you were happy

i loved you and wanted so much
our relationship was one long continuous failure to connect

goddess bless you now
wherever you are, wherever you go
forever and ever
i do love you

but please don't come back
let this be the end of our story

j.b.b.w r.i.p

x marks the spot

question: when you agreed to be interviewed, you told me that you wanted to call our talk 'how she overcame him." we've been talking for awhile now and i'm not sure what that phrase has to do with what we've been talking about.

diana: every step you take will bring you closer or further away from you who really are. walk away. that's how to overcome him.

question: is it a particular him that you are trying to overcome?

diana: in a way. individuals manifest aspects of elementals or archetypes. it's an ocean of feelings and attributes, forces pulling and pushing your identity to form itself. advertising and politics are tame games compared to the cosmic battle for your own soul.

question: him?

diana: we are in a time when our only god is a him and our men treat us as if we didn't exist as separate ego-identities. women have as much need to manifest their true selves as do men. our egos function the same way, as booster rockets to get us going til we are ready to let them go and float the rest of the way home. i know, i know, how to overcome him.... the way to overcome any him, from god to man and little boy, is to walk your own path, don't use him to define your identity or your purpose.

question: but you actually killed your father. if you could just walk away, why didn't you do that?

diana: it's a family tradition. my father killed his. and i don't have a brother to do it so i had to do it myself. he was expecting it.

you don't own me

impressive functionality

bogustimulations
bogustipulations
tepid intrepid limp squiggles

pursed lips

emotional break down
sag
fold
empty
dance

cry, scold

she never loved me
and why should she?
is there a law that says your parents have to love you?
even if you aren't very lovable?
all expectation and hunger
longing for her embrace
or his
or anyone's really
anyone's at all

zinnia

my grandmother loved zinnias. her sister loved peonies. roses have lost their odor. when the roses regain their odor, i will know that we are on the path again towards life. but zinnias are amazing, the patterning, the tempo of a zinnia, is truly refreshing. peonies are lush, falling all over themselves in wanton delight.

young love

question: i had such a powerful dream of twinship embodied in a lover scenario and i kept looking for that. it took me a long time to realize that i was discounting the importance of the otherness of the other person.

diana: this is such a fascinating area of inquiry, the self and the other.

question: the chicken and the egg.

diana: the hunter and the hunted.

question: they arise together. separately but together.

diana: they call each other into existence, with their need of one another and their willingness to engage with one another.

xstatic

i wish i could say i was sorry but i'm not. i've enjoyed my life. it's more operatic than most people's; that's sure. but i think that's changing. i think we are moving slowly into a larger view of ourselves as we prove over and over again what a wealth of talent and resources we have inside ourselves.

question: it's the think globally, act locally thing but on a psychological level. it's ok to think abstractly but we have to live actually.

wanton cruelties

question: who can believe that love is so rare when it is the ground we stand on, the air we breathe, the foundation of everything we are. so why is it as hard to find as a rare jewel on the sidewalk?

vast indifference

nothing. that's what i want to say when i think about my childhood, how i came to be what i am. but, if i shake that off, i have another skin, underneath how you judge me, a skin of delicacy and power that is all about discipline and walking my path with courage and facing the devil when i saw her in myself or anyone else.

question: but you didn't stand up to the devil when he told you to kill people.

diana: i dn't think you've heard anythign i'm saying. you keep thinking of killing as one thing, as one terrible thing. that means life is terrible because it's causes us to die. that way of thinking is religion not rationality. killing is interworven into life in an intricate way and is best handled with some respect adn delicacy because you, me, we are all part of the web of life and when it's cut, it affects us all. but killing itself is not a bad thing.

question: see? this is where you freak people out. i don't want to write that. and even if i wrote that, no one would let it get in the paper.

diana: that's ok. but i want you to know, to understand. i was taught how to participate in part of the dance that the "general" population refuses to participate in and i'm trying to say that being a butcher is not an ignoble profession.

question: yikes! what about mass murderers? are you lumping yourself with them?

diana: not at all. you have a plot of land. many things are growing on it. ot's a big mess. do you choose to weed it and clear it and plant it or pave it over with a parking lot? which action is more deadly?

question: the parking lot.

diana: but you are going to kill a lot more up close and personally if you decide to weed and plant. and isn't that part of why we have abandoned our land and allowed it to be paved over indiscriminately?

until then

how long does it take to make a connection with someone? sometimes, it takes lifetimes of loving before a connection is made. i wish i'd been able to make a connection with my parents. but they were narcissists, a surprisingly pretty name for a fantastically ugly way of being.

question: we all project our selves and our stories onto other people but narcissists are unusual in that projection is the only way they relate. you get close enough to a narcissist

diana: and it's like entering a dance with the footprints already printed on the floor.

question: suddenly you realize that everything's scripted.

diana: when people stop laughing at themselves.

question: that's pretty much the end.

diana: yeah.

question: so. can a murderer laugh at herself?

diana: sure. i think so. yes. try me.

trouble in paradise

javascript:void(0)question: nothing but trouble in paradise, right?

diana: no. in fact, it's because i found real joy and peace that i was able to turn myself in. i think paradise is right here and our bullshit is stuck on our eyes so thickly, we can barely perceive it so we call it a dream. in fact, the crap in our eyes is the add-on. the basic reality is wildly, extravagantly beautiful.

safety

i'm not sure what safety is. when i feel the best, i'm not worrying about my safety, i know that. that's all i'm sure about, about safety. i think insurance has made us insane, thinking there's a way to walk the world "safely." if we have imagined it all. if we are each walking our dream, nothing, no insurance, nothing, can keep us from meeting what we have created for ourselves. so safety could maybe mean creating in a kind way, kindness so that you have that coming back.

question: killing with kindness?

diana: of course.

radical faith

querulous

she asked me to help her, but it was a ruse. it was a way of ending the discussion, throw herself on my mercy, because she knew i had mercy and she didn't have any, not when it came to winning.

the articulation of the conceptual models underlying these conversations, well, it begs belief. even i wonder if i was making it all up. how can we ever know someone else's motivations? how could i know whether or not she wanted me dead most of the time? if i felt rejected and neglected, maybe she wasn't meaning that. maybe, in her mind, she was only thinking of herself, only noticing her own soap opera of emotional longings, her own unfulfilled dreamscape. me, me, mine. oh yeah. that's all it takes to create paranoia in the other person. am i real? do i matter? obviously not. i can't be real if you can't see me, can i? is it legitimate to be real only to oneself?

post partum est

don't be wicked. do be kind. don't be cruel. do be kind. don't be harsh but don't be soft either. find the middle way. let go of the truth and embrace the honey mead of languorous desires.

they waft
with an odor so sweet
you cannot mistake it for sadness
you cannot think you are in hell
but you have to be able to breathe it in
you have to be able to let it touch you willingly
inside
alter your being
the scent of life
the descent of beauty

the only way to know the now is to be in it. the only problem with being in somewhere is that we lose our bearings immediately. you can either know where you are or how you are but not both, some of the brain has to be spent on the immediacy of the experience.

sometimes you have to trust the love and let it lead you to where you need to go.

sometimes you have to turn your back on love and walk away.

somewhere you have to trust that you know what to do.

somewhere you have a way to do this thing called life.

so that was my dream, that's what she said.

question: are you sure she was an angel?

diana: no. i'm not sure of much anymore. i've been in this place for awhile. they don't want me near the general population. i might incite them.

question: the woman huntress returns.

diana: something like that. never mind that the hunter has an obligation to be as compassionate and elegant as the soldier or the scientist. sometimes i think they don't want women to do that because they don't want to admit that we have souls just as flexible as men's.

question: it's always easier to minimize the other's complexities.

diana: i'm too old for easy.

question: i know what you mean. easy loses its charm after awhile.

ordeal or deals

no more trauma drama baby i'm over you

my mother

i don't think i had the worst mother in the world but certainly she was among the categories of worseness. our lady of perpetual selfishness. our lady of persistent greed. our lady of a masochism that longed to blossom into sadism but never dared. but i can't say she was altogether useless. because apparently, according to the latest spiritual cognoscenti, i created her to act iin my life in such a way as would take me or challenge me to take the path that best suits my spiritual unfoldment. whew. that's a mouthful. she was a woman who smelled bad and so because known for her outrageously expensive perfumes. you were lucky to never have to smell what she really smelled like.

she liked to involve me in her sexual foreplays. it was casual and cruel, her perfidies but the way they felt to me as a young person was like that scene in bertolucci's 1900 where the black shirt mussolini groupie lovers take the young boy by the feet and swing him around in circles bashing his head in as they go and laughing. the first time i saw that scene, i thought bertolucci had read my life somehow.

little do we know

question: i can't decide if i admire you or not.

diana: i know what you mean. i feel that way about myself.

question: the acceptable roles for women to play is so narrow and we're not used to hearing women speak philosophically about the world as we're living in it. and the academics are still slogging through some medieval feuds and alliances. i don't know how to think about my life when i factor my femininity into it.

diana: yeah. it's all well and good to want to be the equal of men but, in their terms? really? i can say honestly that i can keep up or better most men in the endeavors in which i excel. so, as a competitor, i do not acknowledge that being a woman is a handicap in any way. but i feel we are living half blind. i sense another set of experiences that could be available to us. but i can't articulate what that would be and i keep getting sucked into proving myself, again and again in a man's world to be as good as a a man.

question: but it's not a man's world. not at all. it's a world full of creatures, none of whom is the boss of anything really. all of us powerless in the face of the energies that surround us and yet creatively potent. there is a river of possibility that runs through everyone that is the essence of the female within.

diana: i like that.

kites

i wish i could tell a story from beginning to end that encompasses all the factors that led to me, to what i did. but it's such a fine and complex weave of smells and silences. choirs resounding joy and fear echoing in corridors of powerlessness.

i want to conquer words the way i would a wild stallion or the way those invented creatures from avatar tame the wild flying creatures to be their partners and yet, of course, their minions, do their will. aargh. this is where i get stuck. i can feel my way to a grace that does not include turning other creatures into servants but when i attempt to dialogue even with myself, even in the privacy of my own mind, i am repeatedly coming up against the limits of a language meant for commerce and battle.

they say that dante's italian is the one spoken in italy now but it was from his native dialect basically and finessed a bit. when our languages no longer root in organized violence (extended to include theft and betrayal) then maybe we can get them to describe these places of extreme joy, these many ecstasies that ebb and flow and crash into us as we go from job to home to wherever we twitter.

just us justice

the ass- assi- nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were so different than the post-modern assassinations.

i think the distinguishing feature is the attitude but some people think the main difference is the purpose. the modern assassin, the assassin of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a loner acting out rebelliously against the perceived elitist. the post-modern assassin is a groupie, an ideological bandwagon standing, self-sacrificing fool. needless to say, i consider myself a modern assassin. i act alone. i don't need or want to be caught. there is nothing self-sacrificing in my business, it's strictly self-aggrandizing. it's all about the money.

question: i think it's hard to follow what you are saying because you're wrong. i think the assassins are always the same, people who realize that they can make a difference through an act violence.

i eye aye

words bring me so much pleasure and yet they are a constant barbed wire climb of ripping and tearing the symbol away from the truth of the moment.

hitler

what a fuck up. working for the dark side is just a self aggrandizing version of suicidal. nothing glamorous except you want to take a whole lot of people with you.

gorgeous

i know that everything worthwhile in life comes from some sort of loving.

frogs

i want to blame her husbands and i'm glad that they're dead. i have not an iota of regret but i know it was her own authority that wrote her story to be one of self-annihilation. she filled her thoughts with hate and cruel critique and ate her soul into a frayed remnant. i think the men are often merely pawns in the hands and stories of women bent on their version of the end of the world.

ebb and flow

my mother was always searching for a truth that she could look up. when in doubt, what do i do? because she had lost touch with her inner dialogues and had no connections to spontaneous emotions. she had controlled herself in order to gain position and power and the price was the loss of her connection to her organic self. she rotted from the inside out. and as she did, she became a heavier user of perfume. but nothing could hide the scent of her deterioration. nothing.

desire

what i remember is the longing, the wanting, the waiting. as if life were always somewhere else while i was in a hell of isolation and perverse cruelties. all i imagined was escape and escape was erotic and then revenge. i have a weakness for revenge. i love to wallow in the imagined miseries of my enemies. watch them hung alive on barbed wire while carrion birds feed off their live flesh. i can be very imaginative. so learning the discipline of killing was like a relief. no it was a relief, not like anything but itself. like being able to breathe out of your nose after a long sinus infection; an entirely new experience of life. a far more connected and sensual connection to life.

catch a rising star

question: it's terrible to think you're purposeless.

diana: so true.

question: but aren't we all powerless?

diana: it's probably in how you want to define power, right? there's a way in which everyone is equally powerful and equally powerless too but there's lots of other ways to have limited aspects of power and that's really where all the competition takes place, in the shuffling around of bits of power.

question: maybe we have to do that. i mean, if we weren't all busy trying to outdo each other, what would we do with ourselves?

but

the way i see it is, i was a prisoner of war. not restricted in my move- ments but con- stantly under mental seige and always within a worldview that is usually described as kill or be killed.

so, of course, i was attracted to soldiers. at first, so that they would fight for me, take me out of the hothouse of death i was born into. but then, because they were the only people who understood what it is like to carry around death, like a bridal train.

a lot

it happened like this. my father was an orphan, and he got hooked up with some really negative people and from that he got twisted around so that his whole value had to do with success in other people's eyes. and, in this society, murderers are highly regarded as long as they don't get caught. so many of our millionaires, well, that's another story. and all aristocracies. no, not now. i am telling one man's story here, not a whole civilization. so he found my mother, like attracts like; she had come to the conclusion early in her life that the Best things in life are at the top of the ladder and all you have to do is keep climbing and eventually you will get there. it doesn't matter where it is, as long as everyone else wants to be there too.

so they met and fell in greed with one another. each one thinking that the other one would buy their way to the top of the ladder and everyone would look in awe, genuflect.

unfortunately, it didn't work like that. put two killers in a bag, no one is coming out alive. i mean, they did remain physically alive but they eradicated what was left of each other's souls. ever after, neither one was capable of loving in the moment or even considering that there might be a life outside of butchery.

eventually they had me and immediately began the training. now, they had given up on each other but i could be the one who would take them to the top of that ladder. and so we advanced all together, if killers can be said to be together with anyone, we advanced. we got very good and very well paid but the price was higher than we could pay and eventually, one dark night it was mother against father. you know the drill, they even made a movie out of a relationship like this, with angelina jolie and brad pitt and this turned them on enough to cause them to be married but in my family's case, they didn't get closer, my father killed my mother's spirit, ran her off into oblivion.

she found my stepfather, who wasn't as good a killer as my father but he was average and was able to keep the charade of ladder climbing going without really ever being a threat to my mother. that's what she thought anyway, that's what she thought until she died, poisoned by her second husband. it was money to him, not social standing. he got all her money and then i killed him.

at first my father was proud of me, but then he got paranoid and when he jumped me in the night in marseilles, i was ready and i got him first. i don't know hoe they figured it out but they did and here i sit in jail now, waiting for my trial.