Lately something has been catching in my throat. Maybe it's just one of the places in my body where sadness lives.

But poetry and writing share a common origin in song.

Venus rules the throat, and this has always struck me-- that the human voice itself is ruled by the feminine, by the impulse toward peace and toward beauty, which are Venus's domains.

There have been times in my life I was so heartbroken I couldn't speak at all.

I lost faith in my right to language. Something happened to me that I blamed myself for, or I blamed my language-- I wasn't sure if it was me or my language...

I could barely speak or perform. My voice would tremble. I'd go down on my knees, wishing I could sink into the earth.

There have been times I've longed for silence and become addicted to it and also been swallowed by it.

I decided to work with Stewart Pearce a week or so ago (I'm writing you this letter at the end of March), because he specializes in helping women (especially women) release trauma and connect to power through their voice. There is something mysterious about the way a voice can seem to mend inner wounds, or even carry an entire generation, a culture, a whole world of people.

Partly, I've been missing Michael Silverblatt, whose voice carried all of literature in it.

I think I am also starting to feel dread about what Rita called "artificial eyes" when we were texting about this letter that you're now reading.

"With all its eyes the animal world observes the Open"-- (Rilke)

I don't quite know how to explain it: lately I've felt a tremor, or a stammer-- it has come back into my throat, like there's a "split" between what I am able to say and what I actually know, between what comes out when I write and what I feel as I move through the day.

Maybe it is part of a broader fracture-- in culture-- in the collective-- where it feels like our soul is portioned out and having to live partially among multiple registers, because they cannot be reconciled-- the whole truth cannot be held, by the social, or the familal, or even the field of art-- and there is a lot, a LOT of self-censorship in art. And art is the freest space we have.

It reminds me of how bitter and hopeless I felt when the "War on Terror" started, and how I didn't feel seen or understood by anything til I heard Leonard Cohen sing "I die for the truth in my secret life." Things are bad when the most important life you live, and the only way you can serve the truth-- is in secret.

It slowly turns life inside out and upside down.

I wasn't planning to host anything at Invisible College this year. MOON DROPS just fell into my consciousness. I think it has to do with the truth Leonard Cohen died for in his secret life, and the wound I feel in my voice when I try to speak about what matters most these days.

Through the years at Invisible College we have studied -- rigorously studied-- the humiliation of the faculty of speech and the abuse of language. Language roots in the body in mystical and mysterious ways, and when it speaks the truth in utter fullness it carries immense power.

I know this-- we all know this-- and yet. A quiver has reentered my throat.

Why do I still feel like I have to hide. Or that I still need to suffocate and domesticate, or train and manage, something immense that is very very angry about being caged.

Maybe it's partly an ambient contraction-- sucking down fear and loathing like they're drugs (and they are.) It feels like that's what everybody's on....

Why do I still contract around the mystical. I still apologize for and minimize this dimension of my experience. Why do I do this, me of all people, even given what I know and what I've made space for?

Family and sexual trauma are what the contraction shudders toward. It seems to me that "the zone" has been flooded not only with chaos and war, but a certain mercilessness, and abuse on a mind-boggling scale, because it not only exhausts cognitive proprioception-- the natural urge to grasp and get to the bottom of something, to get to the truth-- but it also triggers nightmarish forces to awaken in the subconscious and the unconscious.

I feel that it is sexual wounding that has left a stammer behind in my voice, or an audible scar-- something leftover from girlhood (and I am no longer a girl) that still wants to apologize for power, or hopes no one in authority will notice it, and most of all, desperately doesn't want to offend her mother with it.... For many years it seemed like I had healed this-- it really dropped away. But lately, maybe also because I am moving in new directions, and there's a vulnerability to that-- it's back.

Why is all this important to the structure of MOON DROPS, and the most marvelous lines in this poem? "Affairs are now soul size. The enterprise / Is exploration into God." Hell yes. This names the stakes and the journey of our times with perfect accuracy.

WHERE, asks the poem, are you making for? I love this, because it resonates perfectly with the mission of this project. Invisible College is making toward a WHERE that is still to come, providing foundations and re-seeding and re-wilding for a richer culture. I am deeply proud that in 6 years remarkably powerful and profoundly ambitious artworks have been made through the inspiration and nurturance we work hard to provide here: novels, poetry collections, concept albums, paintings and sculpture, new businesses, theses and dissertations, television and film.

The kind of "truth" our normative mind is exhausted in the search for-- and being goaded to give up on-- is of the whodunnit variety. We know in no uncertain terms who and what is responsible for the condition in which we find ourselves morally, spiritually, socially, and politically on this planet.

MOON DROPS asks us to dilate unto the infinite, to let go, and fall into the deepest recollection: to encounter that which was, is, and ever will be--true. "Thank God our time is now"-- I love that-- giving thanks for bad times, because they leave us no choice but to take "the longest stride of soul we ever took."

Anyways, this was a longer letter than I intended to write...

Yours,

Ariana