Peter Ristuccia's Blog

Red is living that bleeds, flush with imminent delight and fresh wounds. Full of body and heat. Red arouses in us all that makes vibrant, ready to compress from life our own way to doing things. It is germinal infant and crashing iron, seething with annihilation and generation, all things converging. In red do we come together and break apart. Love and war are the same color.

Some think blue is sad-but I find it grand. Simple things-the sky and it’s for free. Ocean, the true mantle of the Earth. Ways of mind and paths of mercy. The fourth heaven is blue and where pattern forms, and are given creation in the world of idea. Lights that awaken and yet soothe the soul. The blue is the depth of things, the innermost place where things that live transpose to where, still living, they live no more.

Purple is a time of year, wine pressed from out of our lives. Purple is royal, the true color of blood, what courses through our veins. The dangling, feral gentility of wisteria and orchids. The most costly of linens and dyes from the under the sea. At the borders of what we can perceive, the furthest reaches of our small and precious spectrum.

The purple lights about us presage illumination, the final colors before everything fades into white. Treading upon violet paths are the surest and straightest ways, humble for it being affluent and full of worship. Thick and old vines fructify impurpled, roots deep into the earth where is old blood from those dead long ago. And now, an impossibility of eyes looking out into the world of rare shades and telling spring from out of old things laying deep in the earth. In the spring, all around us, purple is the halo of the wonderfully old made young again, and about it in circumference, feeling purple is the crossed threshold of wisdom.

The city burns during the day and shines at night. There is smoke and fire and people contesting. There are meetings, things coming together and in fusion creation manifests itself most fully. The human condition blossoming out in fireworking displays, loud and both ugly and beautiful at once. Blazes enkindled within the cores of man, while he labors and exhausts himself to pains for an end.

The city is wrought metal, poured concrete and polished glass. Spiring pointedly through skies made redder at sunset from its breath. It pulses and glows when things get cold and yet remains warm like a thing that is alive. And men walk in it and bargain with it to their own means while living with it is choices that come from out of young designs.

I’ve made some choices. We all have. Some of them were good, and some of them were bad. I knew the good ones were good when I made them and I knew the bad ones were bad when I made them. But I did it anyway. With bad and good there are consequences, and not necessarily matching ones. Often, when I’ve done the right thing, something very undesirable was my reward. Often, when I’ve done the wrong thing, I was gratified. These are the conditions that define us. It’s what occurs afterwards that shapes what is to be. We make decisions about who we are and in the end it is up to us. Good and bad are both rewarded and punished, at different times. But as time passes and we see the effects these have in the world about us, we decide if we are to be conscious and responsible for our actions, or unconscious and enacting whatever behavior seems appropriate for the occasion. This is the difference between being an animal and a human being. Freedom is liberating, it is true. But, perhaps taken to its logical conclusion, freedom should also be terrifying as it is dangerous. And then, from fear, respect may naturally follow.

I’ve done things that I’ve done before, things that have happened I’ve seen them again. I read it yesterday; yes I read it then. I went there once and then returned it was the same, but different and different in a sad way that made the memories happier than when they were what I lived in. A centennial has passed and all that is will be all that was and there is wind in the trees and clouds chasing horse-like, galloping across a stormy night-sky. I saw you then, under a fire-worked sky, with happy lights like crocuses in the above, and we were familiar-always so. We’ve always known each other and memories tell us, what was then or is now or someday yet will be as wheels in heaven turn and there is a certainty.

I wrote my name on the walls of life all these years. Letters scrawled, nearly unreadable, they were so immediate and full of the moment, just getting it down was the thing. I’ve walked about the sacred labyrinth and I’m told there’s an end to it and when it’s over and I look back there won’t be a maze but a straight line that led me from beginning to end I just can’t see it now.

Scratched in granite in dimly lit halls, I could barely make out the task at hand. Flickering torches and tightened eyes. Feeling the script was as important as seeing it. Long slashes, crosses, and dime shaped divets. Carved dull white and sometimes red on the grey of the walls.

There were times when I forgot myself, I wrote for so long. All that it seemed I was doing or ever did was write. All that I am is a story, that’s all any of us are. A story at times, prose a poem, perhaps just a few lines that felt or seemed important and made no sense except to ourselves and our memories. An illuminated text to the ages, a part of an infinite canon, manuscript among all the others, innumberable.

There is a Tree that spans the worlds. Its boughs stretch into the furthest heaven, its roots descend into the underworld, its trunk is in the middle. I’ve climbed the Tree many times in my life. I’ve clambered up its rough bark, scraping myself sometimes, and sat amid its branches. At times I’ve played it safe and stayed low to the ground. At others, feeling more adventurous, I’ve gone clear to its crown and been dazzled by the brilliant panorama of exposed and naked sky, a reddening sun and wind like fingers.

There have been times under the Tree of lengthening shadows and royal stars. Of festivals and fires and raucous village dances close to the Earth. There was rain and the smell of wet loam and fallen leaves and those that have passed. There were pellucid thoughts and blank notebooks waiting for inspired pens to strike them, when instead, I did not want to disturb the moment and chose not to write at all.

I’ve eaten its fruits and they were worlds, informing me of events that are immortal-for all their having happened, they occur again and again, differently but the same for all those that eat of the Tree as I have done.

All my life I’ve known the Tree and when I die I still shall no matter where in the Earth I am interned or where in the sky my spirit wanders.