*
And so the yoga instructor held a class on Christmas day and the atmosphere was very strange. A special day, yes, but in what way exactly? Everything shut down and everyone withdrawn into a familial warmth, except for those without family. For them, all strange.
Was there joy? Merely strangeness?
The teacher went through a sun salutation but there was no sun anywhere. Then she stretched what would not stretch.
Do not force the muscle, treat it like a gentle beast -- it resists when you push hard but there is always a way to coax.
But first of course you must coax the thing that coaxes -- that is the will, the coaxer. It too resists prodding but responds to persuasion. An exasperating donkey of an organ. You must not push past without respect.
Bend the knee and, if you can, lift the foot. Lift it rather high and hold it in your arms, rock back and forth. Hold it with both hands.
Hold it like a baby. You are like a mother, holding this thing, this self, in loving arms, and rocking it with infinite tenderness. Not the self but something closer than the self. Try to love what you have.
So the day rocked within an enormous tenderness that no one quite understood. And you were its child.
*
Monday, December 26, 2005
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Kenosis
*
She walked into the path, the Place, and found herself empty, even deliberately emptied herself. It was called for. It was necessary. "Depression", whatever that was, had to be a valley one walked through and finally left behind. So the emptiness was like an exhalation, making space for the joy that one would soon inhale. It took a kind of courage.
As for "Depression" (whatever that really was!) did you medicate it? Of course you medicated it, if you had to, if the alternative was a collapse into death. But there would always remain the concern that this painful kneading you walked into was not something to deflect but something to walk through -- that medication might be an evasion of a truth that needed instead to be faced.
There was an odd truth inside the atrocious pun of your "equal" relationship with God: "I need God -- and God kneads me".
*
She walked into the path, the Place, and found herself empty, even deliberately emptied herself. It was called for. It was necessary. "Depression", whatever that was, had to be a valley one walked through and finally left behind. So the emptiness was like an exhalation, making space for the joy that one would soon inhale. It took a kind of courage.
As for "Depression" (whatever that really was!) did you medicate it? Of course you medicated it, if you had to, if the alternative was a collapse into death. But there would always remain the concern that this painful kneading you walked into was not something to deflect but something to walk through -- that medication might be an evasion of a truth that needed instead to be faced.
There was an odd truth inside the atrocious pun of your "equal" relationship with God: "I need God -- and God kneads me".
*
Friday, December 23, 2005
Lord Kelvin's casino
*
Life is like a casino (I say -- pretending to be some big expert on this -- never having gambled in my entire life -- but understanding it the way an obedient priest understands sex). The kids in the casino are playing a losing game, because the percentages are set at 51% for "the house", so if you play long enough, there is no uncertainty to this: you will lose. But all the players think they are exceptions somehow and maybe manage to be, for awhile.
But if you continue to play you are going to lose. What you most like about your body, or your mind, or your circumstances, that is what you are certain to lose -- the better it is the bigger the loss.
And when the casino closes for the night, all the takings are gathered -- where?
What is this "house" that always wins? Not God, nothing to do with God. Whoever runs the house, that person too is also playing, and also guaranteed to lose. So the game makes no sense and something else entirely has to be operating.
You could create an indirect proof for the existence of miracles by proving how exhausted, empty and non-existent is the alternative world, the one where people play against the "house" and lose.
The "house" is where people go who are turning away from God. So of course one loses there!
*
In Lord Kelvin's Casino, everybody play the laws of thermodynamics and everybody loses. The players lose, the house loses, the owners lose, even people who are just looking on, they also lose. So don't play that game. Maybe you walk through a space where those laws reign but you don't have to live there -- living by definition takes place where there is the possibility of life -- in a casino there is none. Life is elsewhere, in a garden of faith, where abundance somehow knows how to bloom itself even out of destitution. And there, everybody wins.
*
Life is like a casino (I say -- pretending to be some big expert on this -- never having gambled in my entire life -- but understanding it the way an obedient priest understands sex). The kids in the casino are playing a losing game, because the percentages are set at 51% for "the house", so if you play long enough, there is no uncertainty to this: you will lose. But all the players think they are exceptions somehow and maybe manage to be, for awhile.
But if you continue to play you are going to lose. What you most like about your body, or your mind, or your circumstances, that is what you are certain to lose -- the better it is the bigger the loss.
And when the casino closes for the night, all the takings are gathered -- where?
What is this "house" that always wins? Not God, nothing to do with God. Whoever runs the house, that person too is also playing, and also guaranteed to lose. So the game makes no sense and something else entirely has to be operating.
You could create an indirect proof for the existence of miracles by proving how exhausted, empty and non-existent is the alternative world, the one where people play against the "house" and lose.
The "house" is where people go who are turning away from God. So of course one loses there!
*
In Lord Kelvin's Casino, everybody play the laws of thermodynamics and everybody loses. The players lose, the house loses, the owners lose, even people who are just looking on, they also lose. So don't play that game. Maybe you walk through a space where those laws reign but you don't have to live there -- living by definition takes place where there is the possibility of life -- in a casino there is none. Life is elsewhere, in a garden of faith, where abundance somehow knows how to bloom itself even out of destitution. And there, everybody wins.
*
Through death?
*
Christianity is in essence to move through death into life. Well, I've got the death part down. I have memorized death. I know this immersion. Death is clear. What I need to learn is that next movement. This is hard.
Death has got me down. But if you stop there everything before it also dies. Move on, it is imperative to move on.
*
Christianity is in essence to move through death into life. Well, I've got the death part down. I have memorized death. I know this immersion. Death is clear. What I need to learn is that next movement. This is hard.
Death has got me down. But if you stop there everything before it also dies. Move on, it is imperative to move on.
*
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Dear Christian, imagine...
*
Dear Christian, imagine what it would be like to really *be* a Christian. You yourself are not yet a Christian, though you believe you are....
*
Dear Christian, imagine what it would be like to really *be* a Christian. You yourself are not yet a Christian, though you believe you are....
*
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Chapter 6: Conduct imagined as a person
*
There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.
Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.
His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.
For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.
Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.
You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.
*
There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.
Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.
His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.
For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.
Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.
You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.
*
Monday, December 05, 2005
Like rain like drought
*
Grace like rain, it falls like rain. But is sometimes disguised as drought. Very very effectively disguised. Very very oh so dry now.
*
Still must be grace, even so. Only this drymouth feels like reading Oswald Chambers every morning, leaves you feeling hopeless by comparison to real Christians (where are they now?), you seem to be an F-student in sanctification. Hopeless? Or is that emotion merely a ladder to the floor above, which is itself hope and not just hope but grounded hope? And suddenly your mouth floods with words.
But she cared about what it really was, not how it felt.
*
Grace like rain, it falls like rain. But is sometimes disguised as drought. Very very effectively disguised. Very very oh so dry now.
*
Still must be grace, even so. Only this drymouth feels like reading Oswald Chambers every morning, leaves you feeling hopeless by comparison to real Christians (where are they now?), you seem to be an F-student in sanctification. Hopeless? Or is that emotion merely a ladder to the floor above, which is itself hope and not just hope but grounded hope? And suddenly your mouth floods with words.
But she cared about what it really was, not how it felt.
*
Sunday, December 04, 2005
The holy drought
*
Have you ever shucked off all caution and stood outside in the drought, as that girl did, and let it fall down, fall on top of you? To stand in the drought, feel it fall down, let it cover you and soak you till your clothes are heavy and your shoes make an unhappy squishing sound. In the drought, penetrated by the drought, feeling it fall and accepting it as a gift.
As one of the things God has given. A dryness that is not dry at all.
She walked through it steadily, not pretending it wasn't there, but not seeing it as ultimate either. Drought has a fruit of its own, drought has (I hope it has) a purpose, a measure that measures a kind of abundance, also a direction, a slant, a way of cleaning you off as it moves through. So say it, thank you for this dryness, thank you for the emptiness and the hunger and even for this dull feeling inside me that doesn't want to thank you at all, that feels a bit like dying, even thinks it is already dead, there is even a submerged and sullen thankfulness hidden inside that, waiting to be savored.
And the drought came on coming down. Month after month after month. The path to the garden covered with dust.
*
Have you ever shucked off all caution and stood outside in the drought, as that girl did, and let it fall down, fall on top of you? To stand in the drought, feel it fall down, let it cover you and soak you till your clothes are heavy and your shoes make an unhappy squishing sound. In the drought, penetrated by the drought, feeling it fall and accepting it as a gift.
As one of the things God has given. A dryness that is not dry at all.
She walked through it steadily, not pretending it wasn't there, but not seeing it as ultimate either. Drought has a fruit of its own, drought has (I hope it has) a purpose, a measure that measures a kind of abundance, also a direction, a slant, a way of cleaning you off as it moves through. So say it, thank you for this dryness, thank you for the emptiness and the hunger and even for this dull feeling inside me that doesn't want to thank you at all, that feels a bit like dying, even thinks it is already dead, there is even a submerged and sullen thankfulness hidden inside that, waiting to be savored.
And the drought came on coming down. Month after month after month. The path to the garden covered with dust.
*
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
God's fire
*
The world? Are the atheist and the Christian both correct about it? "One world, after all"? The bend, the shape of it is the same bend and the same shape for both people -- if it is different the difference still bends the same way and ends up with the same shape -- so both believer and non- somehow manage to live there and be right about where they live. But is that true?
Imagine God as a fire. Then imagine there being both a closeness and a distance from that fire. The place might even be chosen. Chosen by you. Chosen for you. Or just chosen without more ado. The world in its peculiar bend and shape. A shape that either someone shaped intentionally to look as if randomly shaped (and that random look is correct) or else that something shaped randomly in such as way that the shape seems intentional (and in fact it is). And the place is cohabited by people who believe in the shape and people who do not or cannot believe in it, that is, as a shape. As shaped. The world, the "case", about which one is somehow correct.
And the disbeliever and the believer are often, in effect, a single person.
So you are close to the fire -- a believer -- or distant from it -- and as if condemned not to believe. The same world. Only the placement changes.
The same events, the same kind of events, happen close and happen far: death, as one example. But the meaning differs. Burning with intention? Not so? A different event, burning or not burning with intention. But the same world. The burning at least is for real.
It seems that the atheist's beloved Darwinism (clung to like a faith) is indeed true but just distantly true, a sort of abandoned truth most true to that category of truth tellers that is identified or self-identified as the abandoned. To them it's not just true but truer than true, this bloodsport of being is like a dye that saturates all truth and makes it true. The ancient emperors believed in it too in the deepest way. This is the truth that bites and sucks its believers but of course that doesn't make it anything but true in the place where it is true -- in the remoteness from God's fire.
But when you try to understand even this Darwinian truth, and God's place (even posited as remote) within this truth, you find yourself moving closer to the fire, God's fire, and it is as though you have no choice. The fire burns with love for you, with your own love. Even for you. The moment you approach it, that other truth is no longer true and indeed somehow never was. That is, the fact thaat it never was true somehow becomes true (though wasn't before) but this movement of truth is all in you, not in the truth itself, and certainly not in the world.
So that what ends up mattering is not what truth you have reasoned out or into with so much labor. What matters is where you are. Close to the fire? Far away from the fire? Not very sure?
Are you burning yet?
Think of not what you think but where. God will burn all our reasonings.
*
The world? Are the atheist and the Christian both correct about it? "One world, after all"? The bend, the shape of it is the same bend and the same shape for both people -- if it is different the difference still bends the same way and ends up with the same shape -- so both believer and non- somehow manage to live there and be right about where they live. But is that true?
Imagine God as a fire. Then imagine there being both a closeness and a distance from that fire. The place might even be chosen. Chosen by you. Chosen for you. Or just chosen without more ado. The world in its peculiar bend and shape. A shape that either someone shaped intentionally to look as if randomly shaped (and that random look is correct) or else that something shaped randomly in such as way that the shape seems intentional (and in fact it is). And the place is cohabited by people who believe in the shape and people who do not or cannot believe in it, that is, as a shape. As shaped. The world, the "case", about which one is somehow correct.
And the disbeliever and the believer are often, in effect, a single person.
So you are close to the fire -- a believer -- or distant from it -- and as if condemned not to believe. The same world. Only the placement changes.
The same events, the same kind of events, happen close and happen far: death, as one example. But the meaning differs. Burning with intention? Not so? A different event, burning or not burning with intention. But the same world. The burning at least is for real.
It seems that the atheist's beloved Darwinism (clung to like a faith) is indeed true but just distantly true, a sort of abandoned truth most true to that category of truth tellers that is identified or self-identified as the abandoned. To them it's not just true but truer than true, this bloodsport of being is like a dye that saturates all truth and makes it true. The ancient emperors believed in it too in the deepest way. This is the truth that bites and sucks its believers but of course that doesn't make it anything but true in the place where it is true -- in the remoteness from God's fire.
But when you try to understand even this Darwinian truth, and God's place (even posited as remote) within this truth, you find yourself moving closer to the fire, God's fire, and it is as though you have no choice. The fire burns with love for you, with your own love. Even for you. The moment you approach it, that other truth is no longer true and indeed somehow never was. That is, the fact thaat it never was true somehow becomes true (though wasn't before) but this movement of truth is all in you, not in the truth itself, and certainly not in the world.
So that what ends up mattering is not what truth you have reasoned out or into with so much labor. What matters is where you are. Close to the fire? Far away from the fire? Not very sure?
Are you burning yet?
Think of not what you think but where. God will burn all our reasonings.
*
Monday, November 28, 2005
Crackle
*
Because made. The world, the whole thing. Not just there. "There" is a word excavated and occupied. Occupied by. Billion dollar prepositional phrase, quest of lifetime: "by". By whom? To know the whom all the way. Lifetime task. Lift a rock, never find nothing. Because made. What would nothing be? A counter for computations?
Finish the "by". Digging your heart for treasure.
Even nothing has something inside.
No that's not right. Not something. Someone.
The difference between "thing" and "one"? Finish the "by", would you please. Tried and tried. Even the being at a loss, even that is movement forward. A quest, no?
Every second a package to be unwrapped. In fear. Might explode. Crackling paper. Fear.
It kneads you. No stopping. When stopping stops it goes on. A dryness folded into the water. All right.
Made. Made by. Finish the by.
She herself was the package.
Afraid to open. Easier, just clutch it and hold on. Suspension, abeyance. All that sad vocabulary of not yet.
Cowardice is understandable. But that is not what I wanted to understand.
Syntax, that would sustain your thinking but not change it. Not the virtual particle flitting that you like to be. Not committing, never committing.
No one was ready really.
The freedom of not being anyone, that was what people wanted. People themselves wished not to be occupied. Instead of excavating. The occupation was not you but another. It might require something.
To pregnancy, they brought a scalpel. The horror of being someone, having a history. A syntax.
Better to just fly?
The students walked over not upon the campus. The sidewalk. There were sad nymphs leaning half in half out of the trees. The students didn't see them. Poetry now nothing but Poundian flotsam. Frags of self delight. Rap in a workshop. Fun to write, painful to read.
Well, God spoke in days and weeks, not just individual words. You had to wait. Even the moment of true waiting, that too you had to wait for.
*
Because made. The whole thing. Not just there, really.
*
Because made. The world, the whole thing. Not just there. "There" is a word excavated and occupied. Occupied by. Billion dollar prepositional phrase, quest of lifetime: "by". By whom? To know the whom all the way. Lifetime task. Lift a rock, never find nothing. Because made. What would nothing be? A counter for computations?
Finish the "by". Digging your heart for treasure.
Even nothing has something inside.
No that's not right. Not something. Someone.
The difference between "thing" and "one"? Finish the "by", would you please. Tried and tried. Even the being at a loss, even that is movement forward. A quest, no?
Every second a package to be unwrapped. In fear. Might explode. Crackling paper. Fear.
It kneads you. No stopping. When stopping stops it goes on. A dryness folded into the water. All right.
Made. Made by. Finish the by.
She herself was the package.
Afraid to open. Easier, just clutch it and hold on. Suspension, abeyance. All that sad vocabulary of not yet.
Cowardice is understandable. But that is not what I wanted to understand.
Syntax, that would sustain your thinking but not change it. Not the virtual particle flitting that you like to be. Not committing, never committing.
No one was ready really.
The freedom of not being anyone, that was what people wanted. People themselves wished not to be occupied. Instead of excavating. The occupation was not you but another. It might require something.
To pregnancy, they brought a scalpel. The horror of being someone, having a history. A syntax.
Better to just fly?
The students walked over not upon the campus. The sidewalk. There were sad nymphs leaning half in half out of the trees. The students didn't see them. Poetry now nothing but Poundian flotsam. Frags of self delight. Rap in a workshop. Fun to write, painful to read.
Well, God spoke in days and weeks, not just individual words. You had to wait. Even the moment of true waiting, that too you had to wait for.
*
Because made. The whole thing. Not just there, really.
*
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Conversion
*
One Sunday she walked into a church. She opened the door and the building swallowed her. Then she returned the next Sunday to the dark eaves and the glass pictures. She "was never seen again". She died to the bulk of her friends. She walked the labyrinth and got her feet tangled in the thread of a turn, was never able to extricate herself, she unravelled as she moved. Converted. Converted. Unable simply to leave. Stuck listening to an organ whose reverberations never died. Exchanged the peace with strangers. Felt that peace.
*
Recited the creed. Didn't blink, didn't clutch, didn't clear her throat. Didn't hold back. Took the miracles in stride. In stride. Darling, there they are. Deal with them. Believe. She didn't fan herself with old syllogisms. Didn't play the game of being too adult to commit herself. Didn't fetishize the game of disobey. Actually didn't play the age old games. Walked the rolling green of the great lawn. Labyrinths of larches. If not the garden she grew up in, at least a snapshot.
Sang when asked to sing. Got down on those sharp knees. Didn't play the role of confessing, no. Confessed. Actually did it. Refused to look around and judge. Managed not to project her own weakness into the crowd. Loved her enemies, admitted she had them. Handed her hatred to God without pretending not to have any. Skipped the step of hating God. Helped an old lady to the altar. Took bread and resolutely chewed. Did not bother to cover her mouth.
*
Church is a building you enter but don't leave. If you leave, you didn't enter, because entering is the act of not leaving. Its walls smear your skin like honey or chocolate. They leave a mark, a permanent mark. You are there. You can't rub it off you nor you off it. You are there and are never not there, not anymore. You walk in. You don't walk out. Church.
This is not real estate but God's fleshy hand squeezing.
*
The heavy, hard, perhaps mean-spirited people walking to the altar. They are desperate to change. The desperation is real and the change is what is hoped for. This is church, you are in church. Forever. Have a good day!
*
One Sunday she walked into a church. She opened the door and the building swallowed her. Then she returned the next Sunday to the dark eaves and the glass pictures. She "was never seen again". She died to the bulk of her friends. She walked the labyrinth and got her feet tangled in the thread of a turn, was never able to extricate herself, she unravelled as she moved. Converted. Converted. Unable simply to leave. Stuck listening to an organ whose reverberations never died. Exchanged the peace with strangers. Felt that peace.
*
Recited the creed. Didn't blink, didn't clutch, didn't clear her throat. Didn't hold back. Took the miracles in stride. In stride. Darling, there they are. Deal with them. Believe. She didn't fan herself with old syllogisms. Didn't play the game of being too adult to commit herself. Didn't fetishize the game of disobey. Actually didn't play the age old games. Walked the rolling green of the great lawn. Labyrinths of larches. If not the garden she grew up in, at least a snapshot.
Sang when asked to sing. Got down on those sharp knees. Didn't play the role of confessing, no. Confessed. Actually did it. Refused to look around and judge. Managed not to project her own weakness into the crowd. Loved her enemies, admitted she had them. Handed her hatred to God without pretending not to have any. Skipped the step of hating God. Helped an old lady to the altar. Took bread and resolutely chewed. Did not bother to cover her mouth.
*
Church is a building you enter but don't leave. If you leave, you didn't enter, because entering is the act of not leaving. Its walls smear your skin like honey or chocolate. They leave a mark, a permanent mark. You are there. You can't rub it off you nor you off it. You are there and are never not there, not anymore. You walk in. You don't walk out. Church.
This is not real estate but God's fleshy hand squeezing.
*
The heavy, hard, perhaps mean-spirited people walking to the altar. They are desperate to change. The desperation is real and the change is what is hoped for. This is church, you are in church. Forever. Have a good day!
*
Saturday, November 19, 2005
How poetry killed
*
When she sat under a tree God took the tree and threw it at her. The leaves became spears, the trunk made a passageway. Ants and spiders thrashed within pockets. Her meditation pierced so that she could not move. One's body wallowed in a Shelleyan blood. What is good pain? Might this be good pain? Pain from God -- not from a man -- would be good pain, bountiful pain, a throbbing that you lick in your subjection to what is real. A pleasure thrown forward from this Place, which is the throw.
So if words spoken in this Place should kill you, might that not be good? Would they not still be good words? The good not in the words but behind the words. Godly words.
It must be the case that poetry "can kill a man", as a certain person said. Poor "corazon" now sits chained and afraid, biting the air around it. The girl could barely clear her head to study, she could barely breathe.
If this was absence, what in the world could presence be?
*
When she sat under a tree God took the tree and threw it at her. The leaves became spears, the trunk made a passageway. Ants and spiders thrashed within pockets. Her meditation pierced so that she could not move. One's body wallowed in a Shelleyan blood. What is good pain? Might this be good pain? Pain from God -- not from a man -- would be good pain, bountiful pain, a throbbing that you lick in your subjection to what is real. A pleasure thrown forward from this Place, which is the throw.
So if words spoken in this Place should kill you, might that not be good? Would they not still be good words? The good not in the words but behind the words. Godly words.
It must be the case that poetry "can kill a man", as a certain person said. Poor "corazon" now sits chained and afraid, biting the air around it. The girl could barely clear her head to study, she could barely breathe.
If this was absence, what in the world could presence be?
*
Friday, November 18, 2005
The veil
*
The logicians merely killed time, discussing the gray and dirty veil that dangled over reality but not saying the one necessary thing, that it *was* a veil, that it hid the subject matter they wanted to discuss. And the veil examined closely was their own words.
When she stopped discussing with them she went and sat in the Place -- movable, withdrawn -- that harbored the text from the past. The past always knew more. Scripture there did not enter the logical game and did not even refuse to play. The Scripture and the Place were two overlapping circles.
In that Place the experience of reading was to let God hook words onto His bow and shoot them straight through a given sentence, no longer veiled. Words were vertical not horizontal, and they would enter the heart with great pain, a flourishing of bloody feathers that was not a discussion. Reading them turned into living and not mere talking.
It was so difficult to speak of what one lay inside.
*
The logicians merely killed time, discussing the gray and dirty veil that dangled over reality but not saying the one necessary thing, that it *was* a veil, that it hid the subject matter they wanted to discuss. And the veil examined closely was their own words.
When she stopped discussing with them she went and sat in the Place -- movable, withdrawn -- that harbored the text from the past. The past always knew more. Scripture there did not enter the logical game and did not even refuse to play. The Scripture and the Place were two overlapping circles.
In that Place the experience of reading was to let God hook words onto His bow and shoot them straight through a given sentence, no longer veiled. Words were vertical not horizontal, and they would enter the heart with great pain, a flourishing of bloody feathers that was not a discussion. Reading them turned into living and not mere talking.
It was so difficult to speak of what one lay inside.
*
Monday, November 14, 2005
Chapter 5: A room without windows
*
Imagine a room without windows, a room without doors. How did you get in, how will you get out? That's not the pont. You are imagining. Imagination flows through walls, goes everywhere, especially impossible places. So imagine you're there. Locked within those walls. Nothing but walls.
It is a place without a feel. It is a place without poetry. It is a place in which to focus. A box, an empty box? No, so far from empty. Even a vacuum swirls with virtual particles. There is quite a lot here.
Here you do not leave the world but focus on the world without interruption. It is a box of bliss.
What is here? Existence is here. Existence fills the room to overflowing. It kneads you without ceasing. "It"? Can anything that moves you so merely be "it"?
There is a place where greed and anxiety are, if not extinguished, not quite that, at least put away in a drawer. Put away for now. The drawer is closed -- so closed that it essentially disappears. It is a room without furniture and you sit inside its blue. The air is blue. Birdsong sweeps the air a little bit. A sense of birdsong without birds. Perhaps the swish of passing cars. They seem to erase themselves.
The blue is not placed there, the blue is not appliqué. It seems to emanate from what is there. Existence cannot be put in a drawer, existence always comes to swell and increase. The folds of this place's garment are blue. Now the blue takes on a deeper blue. The pine needles pierce it slightly.
The room is rare and wonderful. And it *has* no walls!
*
Imagine a room without windows, a room without doors. How did you get in, how will you get out? That's not the pont. You are imagining. Imagination flows through walls, goes everywhere, especially impossible places. So imagine you're there. Locked within those walls. Nothing but walls.
It is a place without a feel. It is a place without poetry. It is a place in which to focus. A box, an empty box? No, so far from empty. Even a vacuum swirls with virtual particles. There is quite a lot here.
Here you do not leave the world but focus on the world without interruption. It is a box of bliss.
What is here? Existence is here. Existence fills the room to overflowing. It kneads you without ceasing. "It"? Can anything that moves you so merely be "it"?
There is a place where greed and anxiety are, if not extinguished, not quite that, at least put away in a drawer. Put away for now. The drawer is closed -- so closed that it essentially disappears. It is a room without furniture and you sit inside its blue. The air is blue. Birdsong sweeps the air a little bit. A sense of birdsong without birds. Perhaps the swish of passing cars. They seem to erase themselves.
The blue is not placed there, the blue is not appliqué. It seems to emanate from what is there. Existence cannot be put in a drawer, existence always comes to swell and increase. The folds of this place's garment are blue. Now the blue takes on a deeper blue. The pine needles pierce it slightly.
The room is rare and wonderful. And it *has* no walls!
*
Saturday, November 05, 2005
The place of being - Chap 4: The damped feel
*
The forest was God's ear, God's mouth and God's garment. "Take your hand from the folds of your garment" (Ps 75.11, NIV?). In other words, make actual what you have implied. Speak to me!
The feel was damped and distant. She could not feel the Place but only be there. But to a person with the longing that kneaded her now, even the feel of no feel became a powerful force, poignant and full of emotion. Silence took the mask off what sound had only played at. It was as though her longing were the object of what she longed for, looping back into her, refracted. And destitution -- the soul's dark night, poetic, dangerous, ever so alluring -- offered an odd kind of solace, an unexpected rest. Sadness was a pleasure (if it could ever be such a thing) that came into her very much subdued and very much delayed. And even her walking through it waited for it.
*
The forest was God's ear, God's mouth and God's garment. "Take your hand from the folds of your garment" (Ps 75.11, NIV?). In other words, make actual what you have implied. Speak to me!
The feel was damped and distant. She could not feel the Place but only be there. But to a person with the longing that kneaded her now, even the feel of no feel became a powerful force, poignant and full of emotion. Silence took the mask off what sound had only played at. It was as though her longing were the object of what she longed for, looping back into her, refracted. And destitution -- the soul's dark night, poetic, dangerous, ever so alluring -- offered an odd kind of solace, an unexpected rest. Sadness was a pleasure (if it could ever be such a thing) that came into her very much subdued and very much delayed. And even her walking through it waited for it.
*
Monday, October 31, 2005
The place of being - Chap 3: Depression
*
One m0rning the girl woke up and the Place was gone. It couldn't really have been gone but the feel of it was gone. The world persisted and classes occurred, even classes in poetry, but the subject matter, or again the feel of the subject, had fled. The thing talked about was not to be known. And she walked the wooded area adjacent to the campus and felt herself bereaved again. Something had been taken away, although it still was there.
Her life continued, her grades were good, her friends thought of her as happy. Her professor saw great promise in her as he followed her with his eyes.
On the path to the creek, the elite girls stood and complained. This place has grown common, they said. People have invaded this place who don't *understand* it. It isn't the way it was before. Nothing is as before.
What has poetry stooped to become? A bunch of nobodies taking the mike for their own and reciting their hip-hop *jingles*.
Mere therapy. Poetry has lost its outward motive.
We were seeking grace and clarity. A world whose lines were pure. Comprehension circulating lucidly in motes of light.
The rich girls complained with a sing-song lilt, making the poetry of regret with their mouths. But no one wanted to hear it. They were the evicted nymphs of the Place. Their soft membranes were tearing in this new harsh air. Poetry is weak, poetry is dying. It cannot survive the bustle of the world.
The girl stood beneath the bleak buckeyes and wondered whether the feel would ever return, the feel that expressed the world. God's beautiful world with its soft colors and torn hornsounds, its flute-thin outlines shivering like thistle fluff, the undersurface of a world not meant to be simply used but to be -- what? What exactly was this world for? What was the mission of this place that was more than a place, this haunted domain with its surrounding echo, its abiding sense of purpose, its providential push? Reality rhymed and rhymed. There was someone intending and someone hearing -- someone objective but not human -- someone standing in the place waiting for her, this was the deity she was unable to engage. The Place of Poetry was like a place of assignation, she had had an appointment there with God and had missed the appointment, now nothing to do but wait and wait. What else could be the purpose of this *place* with her in its middle?
*
One m0rning the girl woke up and the Place was gone. It couldn't really have been gone but the feel of it was gone. The world persisted and classes occurred, even classes in poetry, but the subject matter, or again the feel of the subject, had fled. The thing talked about was not to be known. And she walked the wooded area adjacent to the campus and felt herself bereaved again. Something had been taken away, although it still was there.
Her life continued, her grades were good, her friends thought of her as happy. Her professor saw great promise in her as he followed her with his eyes.
On the path to the creek, the elite girls stood and complained. This place has grown common, they said. People have invaded this place who don't *understand* it. It isn't the way it was before. Nothing is as before.
What has poetry stooped to become? A bunch of nobodies taking the mike for their own and reciting their hip-hop *jingles*.
Mere therapy. Poetry has lost its outward motive.
We were seeking grace and clarity. A world whose lines were pure. Comprehension circulating lucidly in motes of light.
The rich girls complained with a sing-song lilt, making the poetry of regret with their mouths. But no one wanted to hear it. They were the evicted nymphs of the Place. Their soft membranes were tearing in this new harsh air. Poetry is weak, poetry is dying. It cannot survive the bustle of the world.
The girl stood beneath the bleak buckeyes and wondered whether the feel would ever return, the feel that expressed the world. God's beautiful world with its soft colors and torn hornsounds, its flute-thin outlines shivering like thistle fluff, the undersurface of a world not meant to be simply used but to be -- what? What exactly was this world for? What was the mission of this place that was more than a place, this haunted domain with its surrounding echo, its abiding sense of purpose, its providential push? Reality rhymed and rhymed. There was someone intending and someone hearing -- someone objective but not human -- someone standing in the place waiting for her, this was the deity she was unable to engage. The Place of Poetry was like a place of assignation, she had had an appointment there with God and had missed the appointment, now nothing to do but wait and wait. What else could be the purpose of this *place* with her in its middle?
*
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Forgiveness as being: The shop of bones
*
Bread is a clothing that coats the bone. "Give us... our daily bread."
*
But bone is a clothing too. (What exactly does it clothe?)
*
The Place of Poetry was a clothing store where the bones went to put on their clothes. But the bones themselves were a clothing that was put on and someday taken off. What did the bones clothe?
What they clothed, that was what you saw milling around the shop (or desperately queueing in a Russian breadline), hovering if it had the power to hover. Hovering and waiting for bone. This inner "thing", this "what they clothed" was something desperate for a metaphor, something that cried out to be clothed in metaphor, so that it could actually *be*.
Because being, too, that was something external that a creature put on.
*
Bread is a clothing that coats the bone. "Give us... our daily bread."
*
But bone is a clothing too. (What exactly does it clothe?)
*
The Place of Poetry was a clothing store where the bones went to put on their clothes. But the bones themselves were a clothing that was put on and someday taken off. What did the bones clothe?
What they clothed, that was what you saw milling around the shop (or desperately queueing in a Russian breadline), hovering if it had the power to hover. Hovering and waiting for bone. This inner "thing", this "what they clothed" was something desperate for a metaphor, something that cried out to be clothed in metaphor, so that it could actually *be*.
Because being, too, that was something external that a creature put on.
*
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Forgiveness: Parable of the Coat
*
When I wear my little coat -- the one of which I've spoken dear -- I feel lighter by ever so much. Lighter by the weight of the coat. when I wear my coat my own self-hatred becomes a non-issue. Not that it disappears darling. Not that it completely disappears but it is perhaps folded and put aside. Let us put a parenthesis around that -- let us just bracket that one and leave it undealt with for awhile! That is what I do with those particular concerns. It is as though the coat becomes a mask over my sorrow, only here darling the mask is truer, more authentically worn, so to speak, than what it covers, and so I no longer know really what it covers. I am in the dark because the mask is not a disguise. My relief from the self-hatred is actually truer than the self-hatred. The form is true, the formlessness it covers is, not exactly untrue, of course, but a lesser truth, a true less true, a sad half-truth that would lead (if it existed) into the evasions and lies of a typical inauthentic person being authentic. And thus cannot really be true. How can something that moves inevitably into lies itself be true? I'll have none of that.
Well leave that thought floating without a registry, let it die. In this case, my coat covers my shabbiness with the truth of my forgiveness, that is, my simultaneously being forgiven and forgiving. I think I can love that if I can't love myself.
So I wear my little coat and feel okay going into strange rooms, mingling with stranger, and that is someting new, I can tell you. There is a buffer now between myself and whatever is strange, including myself, the strangest of all. So now how I feel in that room is as underfined as ever but the feelings that buffer me and that I wear can be predicted. So they form a protection.
The coat will neither harm nor be harmed. So if I can just wear it my dear, I will be okay. And I do intend to do that.
So I wear it as often and awkwardly as possible and I am quite happy to sweat inside it, as long as it is there.
It is you might say my creator's coat; and even when I put it on, even then, he himself did not previously take it off.
So who is really wearing it, I don't know. Nor do I exactly care. In my current dissheveled state, I only care that the coat is there, I don't care who owns it. What a waste of time such a question would be! I don't care who puts it on as long as I'm wearing it. I don't care if the wearing is mine to brag about. Wear it and shut up, I tell myself. Stretch it where it goes. And I am sure there are people wearing it right now who don't even know that it exists, and covers them, and they also don't realize whose it is.
*
When I wear my little coat -- the one of which I've spoken dear -- I feel lighter by ever so much. Lighter by the weight of the coat. when I wear my coat my own self-hatred becomes a non-issue. Not that it disappears darling. Not that it completely disappears but it is perhaps folded and put aside. Let us put a parenthesis around that -- let us just bracket that one and leave it undealt with for awhile! That is what I do with those particular concerns. It is as though the coat becomes a mask over my sorrow, only here darling the mask is truer, more authentically worn, so to speak, than what it covers, and so I no longer know really what it covers. I am in the dark because the mask is not a disguise. My relief from the self-hatred is actually truer than the self-hatred. The form is true, the formlessness it covers is, not exactly untrue, of course, but a lesser truth, a true less true, a sad half-truth that would lead (if it existed) into the evasions and lies of a typical inauthentic person being authentic. And thus cannot really be true. How can something that moves inevitably into lies itself be true? I'll have none of that.
Well leave that thought floating without a registry, let it die. In this case, my coat covers my shabbiness with the truth of my forgiveness, that is, my simultaneously being forgiven and forgiving. I think I can love that if I can't love myself.
So I wear my little coat and feel okay going into strange rooms, mingling with stranger, and that is someting new, I can tell you. There is a buffer now between myself and whatever is strange, including myself, the strangest of all. So now how I feel in that room is as underfined as ever but the feelings that buffer me and that I wear can be predicted. So they form a protection.
The coat will neither harm nor be harmed. So if I can just wear it my dear, I will be okay. And I do intend to do that.
So I wear it as often and awkwardly as possible and I am quite happy to sweat inside it, as long as it is there.
It is you might say my creator's coat; and even when I put it on, even then, he himself did not previously take it off.
So who is really wearing it, I don't know. Nor do I exactly care. In my current dissheveled state, I only care that the coat is there, I don't care who owns it. What a waste of time such a question would be! I don't care who puts it on as long as I'm wearing it. I don't care if the wearing is mine to brag about. Wear it and shut up, I tell myself. Stretch it where it goes. And I am sure there are people wearing it right now who don't even know that it exists, and covers them, and they also don't realize whose it is.
*
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Poem of Forgiveness
*
Forgiveness is like the yellow suddenness
inside green leaves, not placed on top
but inside, welling out from the core
of that distant tree, a substance not
an attribute, not hanging like some ornament,
more truly what the live tree hangs upon,
available yet hidden, a primary
color so easily blended in the soot
of my own evaluations: "that tree
is blocking the sun from me".
I wish I could hold what it contains, I would like
this brightness to cover me, no not cover me
but issue from me -- so that I might be
forgiven, as the leaves are, effortlessly.
*
Forgiveness is like the yellow suddenness
inside green leaves, not placed on top
but inside, welling out from the core
of that distant tree, a substance not
an attribute, not hanging like some ornament,
more truly what the live tree hangs upon,
available yet hidden, a primary
color so easily blended in the soot
of my own evaluations: "that tree
is blocking the sun from me".
I wish I could hold what it contains, I would like
this brightness to cover me, no not cover me
but issue from me -- so that I might be
forgiven, as the leaves are, effortlessly.
*
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Interlude on forgiveness
*
FORGIVENESS AS CLOTHES
Forgiveness wasn't something she had but someting she put on, a sort of invisible coat that altered the current of the air in both directions. What seemed magical could be seen as everyday and recognized as reality, after all. It was not a transaction, not part of a trnasaction: "forgive and you'll be forgiven". Rather the 2 were a single act, they happened as one or did not happen. If you could feel it coming in, you could let it go out as well. That was because it wasn't you, wasn't yours. It was something beyond the human auriole, a golden plasma on which the human fed. She tried to wear it like a coat. The hard part really was to forgive yourself, to let it go, to entrust.
*
Forgiveness was the kind of clothing that you could not take off. It was a clothing that you wore communally. It was the natural thing to have on. Natural, actually rather bizarre and awkward. Always in the style of no style. It was so always right, so profoundly right, that it had even made its truce with fashion, long ago, as no other clothing ever had: forgiveness was out of fashion the year it was introduced, out of fashion the following year, out of fashion now, and had never for a single moment, even by accident, been in fashion. Its transcendence had been to be despised always. It fit awkwardly onto every size. And yet there were always people who, as if unable to control themselves, had felt moved to put it on, take it on. Without these people the world would probably have run down long ago. Though you never saw them on runways or in magazines, that was ever so okay with them, they were altogether fine with that, my love. Or if not fine, for God's sake, the thing was simply to forgive and move on. Wearing beautiful clothes.
*
NAKEDNESS
Forgiveness is a coat that leaves you more naked. Well, at least as yourself. It's not really your coat that you've put on, to be sure. The one that actually owns the coat, that one has never worried about such a petty thing as hiding His nakedness. So the coat doesn't do that, doesn't bother. Au contraire, as the Irishman said. Amd now all your belongings are on show, and, my my, how basically little you are. Better not take the coat off, you bottom, you yawning bowel. Because the coat has taken away all your pride. You are nothing now but your own acceptance of the needy thing you are.
*
DIRT OF FORGIVENESS
There are a lot of people walking around wearing the coat of forgiveness now. Some of them sincere, some maybe not, but that (you are forced to say) no longer matters, for a reason to be made clear in a moment, but not now. The people's intention in a way doesn't matter, what matters is simply that they have put the coat on.
These people do not pray the "angry" psalms. They rush through the "angry" psalms as fast as they can, hoping the building will not fall on them till they get past it. That rushing is a thing to be forgiven.
Now this whole forgiveness thing the people have is a crass transactino. The people in the coat are probably trying to scam God, of all lunatic things to do. They are trying to hide themselves in forgiveness, even though forgiveness makes them naked. It makes them look ugly and that too is a device they use to make God look away, not look too closely at them. We are wearing our forgiveness, God, we would like not to be tested anymore. Leave us alone, turn your glance away. We want to pass the test just as we are. Just for showing up in these corny, awkward, unfashionable clothes, we deserve to pass. The people think all this nonsense, and then they look around and see all the scammers in the room with them, people who are using God instead of loving God. So many losers wearing or trying to wear the coat, for the shallowest reason. Phonies. Liars. But these are words the people do not use, these words are not allowed. Not only not to be spoken but definitely never to be thought. Because --
Because we want to be forgiven. And the price (since we have introduced price into this relation), the price is that we can't use judgment to sweep our dirt away. The bargain is that we must remain dirty and let dirt be our cleanliness. And we are obligated to turn a loving eye, a kindly eye, on our neighbor's dirt. In fact, when I put the coat on, my neighbor is the one I put it on.
*
FORGIVENESS AS CLOTHES
Forgiveness wasn't something she had but someting she put on, a sort of invisible coat that altered the current of the air in both directions. What seemed magical could be seen as everyday and recognized as reality, after all. It was not a transaction, not part of a trnasaction: "forgive and you'll be forgiven". Rather the 2 were a single act, they happened as one or did not happen. If you could feel it coming in, you could let it go out as well. That was because it wasn't you, wasn't yours. It was something beyond the human auriole, a golden plasma on which the human fed. She tried to wear it like a coat. The hard part really was to forgive yourself, to let it go, to entrust.
*
Forgiveness was the kind of clothing that you could not take off. It was a clothing that you wore communally. It was the natural thing to have on. Natural, actually rather bizarre and awkward. Always in the style of no style. It was so always right, so profoundly right, that it had even made its truce with fashion, long ago, as no other clothing ever had: forgiveness was out of fashion the year it was introduced, out of fashion the following year, out of fashion now, and had never for a single moment, even by accident, been in fashion. Its transcendence had been to be despised always. It fit awkwardly onto every size. And yet there were always people who, as if unable to control themselves, had felt moved to put it on, take it on. Without these people the world would probably have run down long ago. Though you never saw them on runways or in magazines, that was ever so okay with them, they were altogether fine with that, my love. Or if not fine, for God's sake, the thing was simply to forgive and move on. Wearing beautiful clothes.
*
NAKEDNESS
Forgiveness is a coat that leaves you more naked. Well, at least as yourself. It's not really your coat that you've put on, to be sure. The one that actually owns the coat, that one has never worried about such a petty thing as hiding His nakedness. So the coat doesn't do that, doesn't bother. Au contraire, as the Irishman said. Amd now all your belongings are on show, and, my my, how basically little you are. Better not take the coat off, you bottom, you yawning bowel. Because the coat has taken away all your pride. You are nothing now but your own acceptance of the needy thing you are.
*
DIRT OF FORGIVENESS
There are a lot of people walking around wearing the coat of forgiveness now. Some of them sincere, some maybe not, but that (you are forced to say) no longer matters, for a reason to be made clear in a moment, but not now. The people's intention in a way doesn't matter, what matters is simply that they have put the coat on.
These people do not pray the "angry" psalms. They rush through the "angry" psalms as fast as they can, hoping the building will not fall on them till they get past it. That rushing is a thing to be forgiven.
Now this whole forgiveness thing the people have is a crass transactino. The people in the coat are probably trying to scam God, of all lunatic things to do. They are trying to hide themselves in forgiveness, even though forgiveness makes them naked. It makes them look ugly and that too is a device they use to make God look away, not look too closely at them. We are wearing our forgiveness, God, we would like not to be tested anymore. Leave us alone, turn your glance away. We want to pass the test just as we are. Just for showing up in these corny, awkward, unfashionable clothes, we deserve to pass. The people think all this nonsense, and then they look around and see all the scammers in the room with them, people who are using God instead of loving God. So many losers wearing or trying to wear the coat, for the shallowest reason. Phonies. Liars. But these are words the people do not use, these words are not allowed. Not only not to be spoken but definitely never to be thought. Because --
Because we want to be forgiven. And the price (since we have introduced price into this relation), the price is that we can't use judgment to sweep our dirt away. The bargain is that we must remain dirty and let dirt be our cleanliness. And we are obligated to turn a loving eye, a kindly eye, on our neighbor's dirt. In fact, when I put the coat on, my neighbor is the one I put it on.
*
Monday, October 17, 2005
Poem: Epigram on form
*
The form of things was such that even it
was formed, had form, would gesture like a hand
and make some curve, and the curve curved, and that
was more real than what the form curved around.
Redemptive of what happened was this way
it happened. Stuff broke down. Its form would stay.
*
The form of things was such that even it
was formed, had form, would gesture like a hand
and make some curve, and the curve curved, and that
was more real than what the form curved around.
Redemptive of what happened was this way
it happened. Stuff broke down. Its form would stay.
*
Monday, October 03, 2005
The place of being - Chap 2: Poetry as a place
*
There was once an upper class girl who went to a good college and felt she lost her religious faith there -- not that she really *could* lose something so intrinsic to her -- something whose whole essence was the not getting lost -- but in any case she'd lost the ability to express it clearly and fearlessly within this skeptical milieu enfolding her and she'd lost the courage to brave the ridicule that would have fallen on her for having what people insisted could no longer be had. Not in this lucid, fluorescent-lit world of ours. Not in a world lit like a drugstore. She'd lost the public face of faith. So it went into hiding and yet somehow became stronger for the tribulation it was passing through, and it waited for the day when it could break out again and be jubilant and noisy, like all strong things. That would be a different story. Meanwhile the girl read poetry by the hour, a candle-burnt substitute, a sort of secret link to what she still sensed but could no longer share.
She majored in poetry if that were possible.
That is, poetry became the place she lived. Or, to turn the trope around, she discovered poetry as a place -- discovered that the true nature of poetry was to be a place. The words for this broke open like bubbles.
So poetry was not a book? Poetry was no longer a book?
It was not a series of lines bright with images, repeated stresses, musical rhymes? Not an incantation with its sound accidentally sawing something open or slamming down the lid of an inward box?
Wasn't poetry a column of fat expressive lines on a page? No indeed. Poetry had become a place. It was better described by a cartographer after a rich dinner than by a linguist whose own skills of wielding a language might be depressingly bare and exposed. Because nothing here was exposed. Everything was hidden. The linguist stood outside the magic circle, the linguist watched a game whose prime rule was to elude him, even became intent on eluding him, designed expressly to baffle him. Poetry was a place. It had an entrance, it had sides. It needed to be walked before you could understand the grounds for its existence, if indeed there were grounds. The throat needed to be placed there first before it could begin to talk or try to talk.
This was a place closed to all the liberalism that, as by definition, resided nowhere and floated over every "place". Here the feelings were not something you had and then ceased to have; rather here the feeling you would walk through and sometimes would find yourself as if lost inside, so that you carried it outside from that point on, from now on a part of you, and a part of "outside", if there really were a place "outside", a place that was not simply of poetry.
*
The girl understood the place because its inexpressible dimensions -- its way of only becoming clear to the person who was actually there within the clarity -- evoked that other lost world of faith, that world she felt she'd lost, that world of faith that refused to become clear on a secular tongue, because only residing was really saying, the only way to say was to occupy what was mysteriously said. So she had exchanged one scorned place for another, unless they might have actually been the same place. Were the 2 places kin? Unrecognized, unacknowledged, but sharing all the essential proteins and membranes?
Name this place, the wind said. Do it now, without fear. Ha. The name was like ha or like aha.
*
Its borders were damage. Its borders were what the wind blew down. The frail and collapsing structure of its edgeless edge led people to dismiss it, just like that other place. Here one corner was demarcated by a wounded animal, a stray dog with 2 legs, the 4th having been eaten by a passing car. It was not the dog himself but his harrowingly unquenched spirit, his need to live, the way he continued hoping and hopping without his 4th leg -- that was the corner of this world. That was one corner of the Place that was Poetry. No corner at all, no common structure whatsoever. Unless aspiration were something you could call a structure.
The 2nd corner was a grove of trees in a rainforest, a grove inhabited by dissheveled nymphs, ladies of rain from a Ronsard verse, the bureaucrats of dream, no no, it was really just filled with chattering monkeys and bright jagged birds, geckos saturated with paint. The spider webs bent into their backbends, opening their glistening and manly chests to the scented breath of the wind, silly wind, while in the center of each web a little animal lay unplucked, a tiny ripening fruit. Neurotically quivering, the whole grove seemed to twist in avoidance as the strangers approached with their torches, craving the farmland, and this was the second corner of the Place called Poetry. Going gong gone! Sand through the hand. Yet everything inside this dry red-rubbed boundary was so moist and vulnerable and impossible. Everything outside was by contrast healthy and pramatic and to be feared, so it seemed. The bored liberals in their SUVS watching on little portable televisions. The girl walked softly on the softer side of life, holding her breath, afraid to exhale. Babies, be ever watchful!
The third corner of the Place was nothing but a sound. Did it occur? Had it occurred yet? Did it move the air when it moved? One heart and tried to interpret this sort of torn membrane of speech, the song of the reaper that Wordsworth half-heard in the field. It gnawed at the ear and made it the object. It had meaning. The meaning could not be left alone or dismissed or really discussed, you could not say you didn't care what it meant because then the sound would become a trifle and it wasn't that, no, you cared what it was but didn't know what it was. So you follwed it and it eluded you, harbored somehow in some sense of transcendence reminding you that the place you stood was only a placeholder or a pointer, the outward sign of a certain invisible bliss and the emanation of the one who was the cause of all bliss. Do not forget him, whatever else you do! And his hymn filled your life, this hymn that came from another room, where someone else was ecstatically singing. And this sound was the third corner of the Place.
The fourth corner could not be described or encompassed. It loosened the idea of perimeter and left you suspended. It was like wine that had changed from water. Its darkness was like the portal to another place less clearly charted. You were wisely afraid to approach. The words that recurred in rhyme and meter were as if its shadow. When people said that this fourth corner was an illusion, you couldn't refute them. You couldn't just point it out to them. You couldn't even rely on Euclidean geometry, not here. There was nothing here that could be known at second hand. It was not something that could be poured from a box and reconstituted with water. You could not teach it in a class. It was not formatted for download. It did not appear on the schedule. It wasn't an experiment that you could replicate because even having it happen once was somehow for most beyond all hope. You could not just trap it and bring it to the surface because delicate things explode and lightless things burn in the light. You might lose your hands even touching it. So you did not call but responded to the call, that is, you hoped you did and hoped you could.
*
She was a girl who found it easier to love her neighbor than to love herself. Herself she did not love. Yet it was a kind of mandate to do so, to try. Poetry dissolved matters of esteem and it softened the self. She found it easier to live there.
At night the old malaise recurred and rocked her. She dreamed of the process of salvation. By definition -- a judgment wedged in the very structure of things -- one's loathsome aspects, in their greasy wrappers, could not be saved. You could be saved but the aspects no. Saying so was silly smalltalk. So if backbiting was a thing you did, that thing would be surgically sliced away. If anything was left it might be saved. In her dream she walked a hallowed place with half of her being cut and extricated, thrown into the landfill of nothingness -- Sheol. What remained was good but could it even stand? Was there even one leg left for standing? Was there enough of the tongue left to talk? "Sharper than a razor", that organ.
When she awoke the poetry stood around her in silence, having somehow dispensed with words.
*
There was once an upper class girl who went to a good college and felt she lost her religious faith there -- not that she really *could* lose something so intrinsic to her -- something whose whole essence was the not getting lost -- but in any case she'd lost the ability to express it clearly and fearlessly within this skeptical milieu enfolding her and she'd lost the courage to brave the ridicule that would have fallen on her for having what people insisted could no longer be had. Not in this lucid, fluorescent-lit world of ours. Not in a world lit like a drugstore. She'd lost the public face of faith. So it went into hiding and yet somehow became stronger for the tribulation it was passing through, and it waited for the day when it could break out again and be jubilant and noisy, like all strong things. That would be a different story. Meanwhile the girl read poetry by the hour, a candle-burnt substitute, a sort of secret link to what she still sensed but could no longer share.
She majored in poetry if that were possible.
That is, poetry became the place she lived. Or, to turn the trope around, she discovered poetry as a place -- discovered that the true nature of poetry was to be a place. The words for this broke open like bubbles.
So poetry was not a book? Poetry was no longer a book?
It was not a series of lines bright with images, repeated stresses, musical rhymes? Not an incantation with its sound accidentally sawing something open or slamming down the lid of an inward box?
Wasn't poetry a column of fat expressive lines on a page? No indeed. Poetry had become a place. It was better described by a cartographer after a rich dinner than by a linguist whose own skills of wielding a language might be depressingly bare and exposed. Because nothing here was exposed. Everything was hidden. The linguist stood outside the magic circle, the linguist watched a game whose prime rule was to elude him, even became intent on eluding him, designed expressly to baffle him. Poetry was a place. It had an entrance, it had sides. It needed to be walked before you could understand the grounds for its existence, if indeed there were grounds. The throat needed to be placed there first before it could begin to talk or try to talk.
This was a place closed to all the liberalism that, as by definition, resided nowhere and floated over every "place". Here the feelings were not something you had and then ceased to have; rather here the feeling you would walk through and sometimes would find yourself as if lost inside, so that you carried it outside from that point on, from now on a part of you, and a part of "outside", if there really were a place "outside", a place that was not simply of poetry.
*
The girl understood the place because its inexpressible dimensions -- its way of only becoming clear to the person who was actually there within the clarity -- evoked that other lost world of faith, that world she felt she'd lost, that world of faith that refused to become clear on a secular tongue, because only residing was really saying, the only way to say was to occupy what was mysteriously said. So she had exchanged one scorned place for another, unless they might have actually been the same place. Were the 2 places kin? Unrecognized, unacknowledged, but sharing all the essential proteins and membranes?
Name this place, the wind said. Do it now, without fear. Ha. The name was like ha or like aha.
*
Its borders were damage. Its borders were what the wind blew down. The frail and collapsing structure of its edgeless edge led people to dismiss it, just like that other place. Here one corner was demarcated by a wounded animal, a stray dog with 2 legs, the 4th having been eaten by a passing car. It was not the dog himself but his harrowingly unquenched spirit, his need to live, the way he continued hoping and hopping without his 4th leg -- that was the corner of this world. That was one corner of the Place that was Poetry. No corner at all, no common structure whatsoever. Unless aspiration were something you could call a structure.
The 2nd corner was a grove of trees in a rainforest, a grove inhabited by dissheveled nymphs, ladies of rain from a Ronsard verse, the bureaucrats of dream, no no, it was really just filled with chattering monkeys and bright jagged birds, geckos saturated with paint. The spider webs bent into their backbends, opening their glistening and manly chests to the scented breath of the wind, silly wind, while in the center of each web a little animal lay unplucked, a tiny ripening fruit. Neurotically quivering, the whole grove seemed to twist in avoidance as the strangers approached with their torches, craving the farmland, and this was the second corner of the Place called Poetry. Going gong gone! Sand through the hand. Yet everything inside this dry red-rubbed boundary was so moist and vulnerable and impossible. Everything outside was by contrast healthy and pramatic and to be feared, so it seemed. The bored liberals in their SUVS watching on little portable televisions. The girl walked softly on the softer side of life, holding her breath, afraid to exhale. Babies, be ever watchful!
The third corner of the Place was nothing but a sound. Did it occur? Had it occurred yet? Did it move the air when it moved? One heart and tried to interpret this sort of torn membrane of speech, the song of the reaper that Wordsworth half-heard in the field. It gnawed at the ear and made it the object. It had meaning. The meaning could not be left alone or dismissed or really discussed, you could not say you didn't care what it meant because then the sound would become a trifle and it wasn't that, no, you cared what it was but didn't know what it was. So you follwed it and it eluded you, harbored somehow in some sense of transcendence reminding you that the place you stood was only a placeholder or a pointer, the outward sign of a certain invisible bliss and the emanation of the one who was the cause of all bliss. Do not forget him, whatever else you do! And his hymn filled your life, this hymn that came from another room, where someone else was ecstatically singing. And this sound was the third corner of the Place.
The fourth corner could not be described or encompassed. It loosened the idea of perimeter and left you suspended. It was like wine that had changed from water. Its darkness was like the portal to another place less clearly charted. You were wisely afraid to approach. The words that recurred in rhyme and meter were as if its shadow. When people said that this fourth corner was an illusion, you couldn't refute them. You couldn't just point it out to them. You couldn't even rely on Euclidean geometry, not here. There was nothing here that could be known at second hand. It was not something that could be poured from a box and reconstituted with water. You could not teach it in a class. It was not formatted for download. It did not appear on the schedule. It wasn't an experiment that you could replicate because even having it happen once was somehow for most beyond all hope. You could not just trap it and bring it to the surface because delicate things explode and lightless things burn in the light. You might lose your hands even touching it. So you did not call but responded to the call, that is, you hoped you did and hoped you could.
*
She was a girl who found it easier to love her neighbor than to love herself. Herself she did not love. Yet it was a kind of mandate to do so, to try. Poetry dissolved matters of esteem and it softened the self. She found it easier to live there.
At night the old malaise recurred and rocked her. She dreamed of the process of salvation. By definition -- a judgment wedged in the very structure of things -- one's loathsome aspects, in their greasy wrappers, could not be saved. You could be saved but the aspects no. Saying so was silly smalltalk. So if backbiting was a thing you did, that thing would be surgically sliced away. If anything was left it might be saved. In her dream she walked a hallowed place with half of her being cut and extricated, thrown into the landfill of nothingness -- Sheol. What remained was good but could it even stand? Was there even one leg left for standing? Was there enough of the tongue left to talk? "Sharper than a razor", that organ.
When she awoke the poetry stood around her in silence, having somehow dispensed with words.
*
Thursday, September 22, 2005
The place of being - Chap 1: Parable of the garden
*
The 2 children were not evicted -- from the Garden of Orthodoxy, where they'd grown up -- but, more simply, wandered away from it one day and were unable to get back. Or was it really "wandered"? Had there been a plan?
What was it that we did? the girl wondered. What closed the door?
Was it like the heart's semilunar valve -- the valve that allows egress, lets you out -- but doesn't afford a path for returning? So was it a natural process?
Oh no, her crazy brother said. Face it, sister, we were booted out. We grew up. No place for adults in *that* place.
Orthodoxy (he said -- with the air of certainty people use when they are not sure but wish to be) -- this orthodoxy is for children. We are moving beyond. And high time.
Then he went back to his college and she to hers -- and they rarely saw each other after that. Because that painful thing -- dispersion-- was one of the side effects of their banishment. If "banishment" was the right word, the correct word to use. If that was not too harsh.
She was no longer sure of this or of anything. She continued to pray, morning and evening. She continued to believe, even as she stood in a wide place of unbelief and felt herself not estranged from its wideness. When her roommate laughed at her gestures of faith she still did not waver. That was something to remember.
For surely you can talk to me of impersonal science. But I have lived in a place where even impersonal things -- insofar as they were there -- had a face, had an intention -- acknowledged that they too were part of a larger plan. It wasn't what they knew but where they stood that mattered.
People today will grovel in their uncertainty. In the past we never did that. It never occurred to us. Maybe it wasn't possible to do that, where we were.
*
In her adulthood she found faith but not the comfort of faith. A certain part of her soul was as if starving in its speculative abundance.
The pain was not trivial. It was not something you could brag about overcoming -- or simply dismiss -- or discuss in a casual conversation -- or measure on a dial. Simple meditation could not shuck it off. No exertion took it away. Drugs and alcohol were not an option, though her roommate insisted she would feel better if she only let herself relax.
Because faith is not something that you "have" but is more like the register of a dial. It points to something outside it that is pointing to *it*. It is a measurement of something immeasurable and it lies inside the will but is not something you will.
So the girl -- the straight backed nubile woman -- thrown out of her garden now, walked through the place in which she found herself. Wearisome, full of pain, a path sharply pointed.
Yet shaped and cultivated. Like a garden.
*
The 2 children were not evicted -- from the Garden of Orthodoxy, where they'd grown up -- but, more simply, wandered away from it one day and were unable to get back. Or was it really "wandered"? Had there been a plan?
What was it that we did? the girl wondered. What closed the door?
Was it like the heart's semilunar valve -- the valve that allows egress, lets you out -- but doesn't afford a path for returning? So was it a natural process?
Oh no, her crazy brother said. Face it, sister, we were booted out. We grew up. No place for adults in *that* place.
Orthodoxy (he said -- with the air of certainty people use when they are not sure but wish to be) -- this orthodoxy is for children. We are moving beyond. And high time.
Then he went back to his college and she to hers -- and they rarely saw each other after that. Because that painful thing -- dispersion-- was one of the side effects of their banishment. If "banishment" was the right word, the correct word to use. If that was not too harsh.
She was no longer sure of this or of anything. She continued to pray, morning and evening. She continued to believe, even as she stood in a wide place of unbelief and felt herself not estranged from its wideness. When her roommate laughed at her gestures of faith she still did not waver. That was something to remember.
For surely you can talk to me of impersonal science. But I have lived in a place where even impersonal things -- insofar as they were there -- had a face, had an intention -- acknowledged that they too were part of a larger plan. It wasn't what they knew but where they stood that mattered.
People today will grovel in their uncertainty. In the past we never did that. It never occurred to us. Maybe it wasn't possible to do that, where we were.
*
In her adulthood she found faith but not the comfort of faith. A certain part of her soul was as if starving in its speculative abundance.
The pain was not trivial. It was not something you could brag about overcoming -- or simply dismiss -- or discuss in a casual conversation -- or measure on a dial. Simple meditation could not shuck it off. No exertion took it away. Drugs and alcohol were not an option, though her roommate insisted she would feel better if she only let herself relax.
Because faith is not something that you "have" but is more like the register of a dial. It points to something outside it that is pointing to *it*. It is a measurement of something immeasurable and it lies inside the will but is not something you will.
So the girl -- the straight backed nubile woman -- thrown out of her garden now, walked through the place in which she found herself. Wearisome, full of pain, a path sharply pointed.
Yet shaped and cultivated. Like a garden.
*
Thursday, September 08, 2005
"Poetry makes nothing happen."
*
Poetry makes something happen, after all:
poetry readings, poetry submissions,
poetry contests, poetry prizes, sections of poetry in bookstores,
canonic anthologies, workshops, courses in schools,
there is an entire industry, employing thousands,
counting part-timers in kitchens at night,
a market or something that wants to be
buying and selling, but more selling than buying.
Does all of this make something happen?
Is it counted as something by the mysterious ones
who count the world's significance and make the significance?
And in the legitimacy of these awful beings
does poetry play a part?
If you asked one -- a politician controlling grant money --
he (she? it?) might say
in that hollowed tone that says what it thinks
another thinks,
that "poetry is the bedrock of a civilized society"
or something equally bedrocky
and null -- so null,
and the words would be simultaneously
a vote for poetry and a vote against,
because anyway nobody buys or sells bedrock
and nobody cares about it.
The real question is whether power stores poetry
by the bedside and, if so,
does he read it, actually read it
and, if he does, does something happen? Did it make something happen?
Did it make nothing happen?
What would count as happening for him?
I think poetry -- not the thing, I doubt there's a thing
but say the industry -- the activity, the practice, the living it --
is like Hollywood, a place negligible from a foot away,
but enter it and suddenly it's everything,
not only makes things happen but is what happens
and is the feel of the happening, and
that is where you and I stand now?
Or has the sweet foot crept out of the circle?
*
Poetry makes something happen, after all:
poetry readings, poetry submissions,
poetry contests, poetry prizes, sections of poetry in bookstores,
canonic anthologies, workshops, courses in schools,
there is an entire industry, employing thousands,
counting part-timers in kitchens at night,
a market or something that wants to be
buying and selling, but more selling than buying.
Does all of this make something happen?
Is it counted as something by the mysterious ones
who count the world's significance and make the significance?
And in the legitimacy of these awful beings
does poetry play a part?
If you asked one -- a politician controlling grant money --
he (she? it?) might say
in that hollowed tone that says what it thinks
another thinks,
that "poetry is the bedrock of a civilized society"
or something equally bedrocky
and null -- so null,
and the words would be simultaneously
a vote for poetry and a vote against,
because anyway nobody buys or sells bedrock
and nobody cares about it.
The real question is whether power stores poetry
by the bedside and, if so,
does he read it, actually read it
and, if he does, does something happen? Did it make something happen?
Did it make nothing happen?
What would count as happening for him?
I think poetry -- not the thing, I doubt there's a thing
but say the industry -- the activity, the practice, the living it --
is like Hollywood, a place negligible from a foot away,
but enter it and suddenly it's everything,
not only makes things happen but is what happens
and is the feel of the happening, and
that is where you and I stand now?
Or has the sweet foot crept out of the circle?
*
Sunday, September 04, 2005
In the Garden of Orthodoxy
*
It was the sweet garden of refreshment. It was not a creed but a wish. Your wish to be there was how you came to be there. It was not work that you did that got you there. It was your wish to be there you walked along. The path was a wish. The wish then became the place or was the place. The creed in a sense came later, the creed was words of history, historical words that you took for your own in order to describe where you were or really who you were. Words described things correctly but what mattered was what they described, that was really all that mattered. The place you walked to.
The plants hung in exertion and strain.
You walked along the path. As for this sweet scented garden, you never knew when you'd arrived - it was so lucid and so transparent that, even as you were standing in an industrial parking lot, you might say you were there. It extended its branches everywhere potentially. Sitting on a public bench you were there. That is, if you wanted to be.
*
In the Garden of Orthodoxy, there was no law. As one walked toward God -- if one did -- no law was needed or possible. The walk itself was obedience. Without obedience the feet couldn't even move.
So... if faith was lawful, that was only an attribute that it had. It was like the smell that the flowers gave off, as if by nature. As if in no way coerced to obey. Because obedience itself is impossible to coerce or constrain. So as a person walked, the walk itself did all of the work - that is, if the walk was the right one, in the right direction. And then everything else followed. The attention turned that way and then the heart followed.
*
It was the sweet garden of refreshment. It was not a creed but a wish. Your wish to be there was how you came to be there. It was not work that you did that got you there. It was your wish to be there you walked along. The path was a wish. The wish then became the place or was the place. The creed in a sense came later, the creed was words of history, historical words that you took for your own in order to describe where you were or really who you were. Words described things correctly but what mattered was what they described, that was really all that mattered. The place you walked to.
The plants hung in exertion and strain.
You walked along the path. As for this sweet scented garden, you never knew when you'd arrived - it was so lucid and so transparent that, even as you were standing in an industrial parking lot, you might say you were there. It extended its branches everywhere potentially. Sitting on a public bench you were there. That is, if you wanted to be.
*
In the Garden of Orthodoxy, there was no law. As one walked toward God -- if one did -- no law was needed or possible. The walk itself was obedience. Without obedience the feet couldn't even move.
So... if faith was lawful, that was only an attribute that it had. It was like the smell that the flowers gave off, as if by nature. As if in no way coerced to obey. Because obedience itself is impossible to coerce or constrain. So as a person walked, the walk itself did all of the work - that is, if the walk was the right one, in the right direction. And then everything else followed. The attention turned that way and then the heart followed.
*
Friday, September 02, 2005
Poem: The form of her house
*
When someone dies, the house they occupied
becomes so strangely like the animals
we'd model from papier-mache.
Each animal held a balloon inside
upon which children slathered pasted strips
of paper then would decorate
that slather till the moment that
we popped and tugged the now useless balloon.
Its shape remained but it was gone
except that the departure shaped
a ghostly form that stood as though it had
a core -- but didn't -- and now never could.
*
When someone dies, the house they occupied
becomes so strangely like the animals
we'd model from papier-mache.
Each animal held a balloon inside
upon which children slathered pasted strips
of paper then would decorate
that slather till the moment that
we popped and tugged the now useless balloon.
Its shape remained but it was gone
except that the departure shaped
a ghostly form that stood as though it had
a core -- but didn't -- and now never could.
*
Monday, August 29, 2005
Elf as a Christian (poem)
*
She wants to be a Christian, wants to pray
doesn't pray, wants to, tries or tries to try
to be the thing she says she is, she tries
to speak with God, to be with God, to say
to him the things a Christian says
and live the Sabbath on the other days,
to rest within his presence, just
to rest not moving, not wanting to move
nor wanting not to, simply being there,
then doing all the other things she does
as one who is continually seen,
and acts as if God sees, because
the truth is that he does.
So she wants to be his because she is.
*
She wants to be a Christian, wants to pray
doesn't pray, wants to, tries or tries to try
to be the thing she says she is, she tries
to speak with God, to be with God, to say
to him the things a Christian says
and live the Sabbath on the other days,
to rest within his presence, just
to rest not moving, not wanting to move
nor wanting not to, simply being there,
then doing all the other things she does
as one who is continually seen,
and acts as if God sees, because
the truth is that he does.
So she wants to be his because she is.
*
Monday, August 01, 2005
The Death of the Devil
*
The one that finally broke her was the prostitute. She was dying, Duessa was "ministering" to her. Her stiffish hospital garb was raising rashes on her ill-fitting flesh and then she noted that the prostitute had stopped listening to the scientific crap she was reciting to her and soon enough Duessa stopped listening herself. So nobody was listening. And at the end when the hooker started clutching a little cross around her neck, the devil (usually one to berate that particular symbol) found herself nodding off, and she hadn't bothered to do anything about it. She had failed to mock, failed to belittle, failed to reduce. She found herself withering like a dried pea inside her role. She didn't even feel hostile to that cross -- or at least not hostile enough.
*
Her desire -- to gnaw everything and make it bleed -- was dying.
*
And at the burial she had felt it only numbly when 2 or 3 of the woman's friends had begun to heat up, actually heat up at the sight of the remains, their souls had actually begun to heat up, move their particles more urgently in the "void" that surrounded them and become more interesting. With one pass their souls had grown tastier, worth the energy of destruction, of temptation. And yet she felt it happen but did nothing. She let them go! It was as though she'd reached the point where she could relish a taste but refrain from eating. It was as though their potential salvation left her unmoved. They blushed and cried at the touch of a hymn, and yet she did nothing! And the people left the service and went away unharmed.
And in the parking lot she felt dry sobs of self pity twist her body, as all the people rushed past her to their cars, scarcely registering her ill will for them, scarcely giving her a thought. So in this terrible new era -- filled with a faith without substance, shut up in styrofoam like cold pasta -- she found herself beginning to twist with self-pity, paralyzed, her faith in herself fallen to a new low. The evil seemed to have nothing real to live on.
*
Throughout the country, as differences between people began to decay, so did her memory of her own role in the decay, so did that memory itself, so did it decay. Those she had turned away from goodness had no particular badness to achieve. It was their reality and hers that had been gnawed away. People bored her and their collapse was beginning to flatten out, it wasn't interesting. And she was the one who had made it uninteresting, and this realization was quite terrible. Or rather this too had become old and flat. She was dying, she was dying.
*
Once people had been like pocks in stone, ready to hold rainwater or gather up the passing filth of their world. They had been like characters in fiction, blank and promising, they had not been so closed, so wised-up and hard. They had been more like vessels, open to receiving things from the world. And it had been her joy to fill them with her profoundly bad offerings. Centuries had accumulated with the brittle joy of people's destruction. But now the people simply filled themselves. There was no space left for herself or for the others whom she was careful not to think about. Her daughter, her darling daughter, lost forever....!
Oh such woe. It was as though people had simply become denial. And not only denial of the others, her kindly rivals, no, not only of them, but there was a new unpleasant flavor to the world, a new denial of herself. She too had become denied, her interest and her relevance. And though this too was a form of demonic nutrition -- though she ate people together with what they denied and though their denial was like a spice that helped her to consume them utterly -- still it had come to have the flat taste that she now recognized all too well. She was continually tempted to spit them out. They provided no satisfaction.
How contagious the feeling of flatness was!
There for eternity they lay stupefied, unable to feel, unable to suffer in a satisfying way. The change had eaten them up from the inside. There was no longer anything for her to enjoy.
*
And the others, her brothers and sisters, were so boring in their unawareness that she couldn't bear to spend time with them. And so it seemed that the end had come to some unmarked era but an end with no distinguishing marks, no character of its own, and almost no existence of its own. It didn't even feel evil! It didn't even offer that temporary relief.
*
The graduate student was hanging from a bar inside the freeway underpass. The cars pounded indifferently overhead, that was a satisfying sound. But where was the dead one's soul? What had happened to it? The devil fell to her hands and knees, pawing the ground.
There was a condom flattened against a twig in the mud. A broken beer bottle whose label was completely washed out. A scum of froth clinging to the bottle. Further down, there was a weed near the bent bottom of the slope, and this weed bore a single flower. It breathed heavily and ingested a mucousy substance, thinner than a wet tissue. The film on the weed -- that was the vagabond soul. The rest of it, of the soul, lay like a little wisp of foam on the ground. It wasn't even strong enough to hold itself together and *be* a soul.
The devil tasted it, gagged, and quickly spit it out. And she had never done that before!
Then this craven being suffered her deepest breakdown. For 39 days -- she was too wicked to be allowed the forty of her enemy -- she sat motionless, lower back slumped like trash, resting in the wild like a piece of eroding wood or stone. She was -- not pitiful, no one so wicked could be pitiful -- but almost fragile, propped in space like any piece of nature that a passerby might despoil. What seemed to have imploded was that iron core of will.
Even naughty runaway kids were afraid to approach where the devil rested. It was impossible to believe that what was seen could be other than a trap. At the same time the expression in her eyes was too much like the expression on a failed parent, an authority figure whose authority had dwindled to nothing. Also there was that terrible skeleton rattling by her side, the spectre of the dead man floating in the air.
So when the devil died no one much noticed.
*
But before that happened, she was visited by a homeless or "unhoused" man and caught a brief glimpse of the underkingdom, of her own kingdom. And then they say that she passed out her spirit, or as they say: gave up the ghost. That was the thirty-fifth night. Toward the end she opened her eyes to find the homeless man sitting next to her. Ah, I knew there was someone still at home in there, the man said. Greetings. The skeleton shivered and clicked his teeth.
The devil lay crumpled in a position that would destroy her own bones if she didn't move. But she didn't move. And then the other one said:
Look, do you feel it? Everything is softening now. The people up there, you can't hear it from her, but they're getting soft now. They are preparing for something. Do you know what I mean?
*
It seemed that a couple of days passed.
The man cut a slice of bread with an army knife. When the devil slumped even further, the stranger raised it to the edge of the other's mouth.
Like a beast, the dying creature snarled. Go ahead and bite me if you want, the homeless man said. Of course I know it's no longer fun when you're given permission. So go ahead but of course you won't. You were built on contraries and that's a house that can't ultimately stand.
You are a garment that God has shucked off and tossed away.
*
The homeless man had taken on an aura of holiness. The softening had begun. The things of the future began to happen, not before their "time" -- because "time" was a thing that God held as if in tongs.
The bread lay, a hideous tasteless mass on the thick part of her tongue. She was on her back now. I don't eat bread, she said. I can't, I don't know how.
The rest of the days passed, as many as there were. One day the graduate student's skeleton just got up and walked away to join its soul.
*
You know you are softening too, the homeless man said. His voice had the gentle tone that people use with pets. The devil was appalled, disgusted, nauseated -- its morality of evil lay profoundly offended. But she, now just an it, seemed to have less will to move than the ooze that lay on the mud. Even physiological decay could embody a kind of justice.
The devil sank -- and this was by far the most horrible part -- through its own kingdom and found there was nobody there anymore. The caves and warrens were empty like a broken ant-farm. The sinners all were gone or flattened. And the place wasn't cold and wasn't hot, wasn't high and wasn't low, wasn't terrifying or even trivial, it wasn't even nonexistent, but give it one kick and it would crumble. And the floor was the muddy clammy texture of the underpass. It *was* the underpass. There wasn't anything else, not for it, not anymore. Little cheerful worms were making tunnels under the road. That's all there was, except for the noisy place -- was it over the head or under the ground? -- where you heard the commuters, they were ferocious and grim, hurling at the speed of light on their urgent errands.
Yes but the goodness that the devil fed upon, that stilil existed of course, if not here. But the devil found itself unable to touch goodness and still *be* the devil. A great transition was about to occur!
*
The one that finally broke her was the prostitute. She was dying, Duessa was "ministering" to her. Her stiffish hospital garb was raising rashes on her ill-fitting flesh and then she noted that the prostitute had stopped listening to the scientific crap she was reciting to her and soon enough Duessa stopped listening herself. So nobody was listening. And at the end when the hooker started clutching a little cross around her neck, the devil (usually one to berate that particular symbol) found herself nodding off, and she hadn't bothered to do anything about it. She had failed to mock, failed to belittle, failed to reduce. She found herself withering like a dried pea inside her role. She didn't even feel hostile to that cross -- or at least not hostile enough.
*
Her desire -- to gnaw everything and make it bleed -- was dying.
*
And at the burial she had felt it only numbly when 2 or 3 of the woman's friends had begun to heat up, actually heat up at the sight of the remains, their souls had actually begun to heat up, move their particles more urgently in the "void" that surrounded them and become more interesting. With one pass their souls had grown tastier, worth the energy of destruction, of temptation. And yet she felt it happen but did nothing. She let them go! It was as though she'd reached the point where she could relish a taste but refrain from eating. It was as though their potential salvation left her unmoved. They blushed and cried at the touch of a hymn, and yet she did nothing! And the people left the service and went away unharmed.
And in the parking lot she felt dry sobs of self pity twist her body, as all the people rushed past her to their cars, scarcely registering her ill will for them, scarcely giving her a thought. So in this terrible new era -- filled with a faith without substance, shut up in styrofoam like cold pasta -- she found herself beginning to twist with self-pity, paralyzed, her faith in herself fallen to a new low. The evil seemed to have nothing real to live on.
*
Throughout the country, as differences between people began to decay, so did her memory of her own role in the decay, so did that memory itself, so did it decay. Those she had turned away from goodness had no particular badness to achieve. It was their reality and hers that had been gnawed away. People bored her and their collapse was beginning to flatten out, it wasn't interesting. And she was the one who had made it uninteresting, and this realization was quite terrible. Or rather this too had become old and flat. She was dying, she was dying.
*
Once people had been like pocks in stone, ready to hold rainwater or gather up the passing filth of their world. They had been like characters in fiction, blank and promising, they had not been so closed, so wised-up and hard. They had been more like vessels, open to receiving things from the world. And it had been her joy to fill them with her profoundly bad offerings. Centuries had accumulated with the brittle joy of people's destruction. But now the people simply filled themselves. There was no space left for herself or for the others whom she was careful not to think about. Her daughter, her darling daughter, lost forever....!
Oh such woe. It was as though people had simply become denial. And not only denial of the others, her kindly rivals, no, not only of them, but there was a new unpleasant flavor to the world, a new denial of herself. She too had become denied, her interest and her relevance. And though this too was a form of demonic nutrition -- though she ate people together with what they denied and though their denial was like a spice that helped her to consume them utterly -- still it had come to have the flat taste that she now recognized all too well. She was continually tempted to spit them out. They provided no satisfaction.
How contagious the feeling of flatness was!
There for eternity they lay stupefied, unable to feel, unable to suffer in a satisfying way. The change had eaten them up from the inside. There was no longer anything for her to enjoy.
*
And the others, her brothers and sisters, were so boring in their unawareness that she couldn't bear to spend time with them. And so it seemed that the end had come to some unmarked era but an end with no distinguishing marks, no character of its own, and almost no existence of its own. It didn't even feel evil! It didn't even offer that temporary relief.
*
The graduate student was hanging from a bar inside the freeway underpass. The cars pounded indifferently overhead, that was a satisfying sound. But where was the dead one's soul? What had happened to it? The devil fell to her hands and knees, pawing the ground.
There was a condom flattened against a twig in the mud. A broken beer bottle whose label was completely washed out. A scum of froth clinging to the bottle. Further down, there was a weed near the bent bottom of the slope, and this weed bore a single flower. It breathed heavily and ingested a mucousy substance, thinner than a wet tissue. The film on the weed -- that was the vagabond soul. The rest of it, of the soul, lay like a little wisp of foam on the ground. It wasn't even strong enough to hold itself together and *be* a soul.
The devil tasted it, gagged, and quickly spit it out. And she had never done that before!
Then this craven being suffered her deepest breakdown. For 39 days -- she was too wicked to be allowed the forty of her enemy -- she sat motionless, lower back slumped like trash, resting in the wild like a piece of eroding wood or stone. She was -- not pitiful, no one so wicked could be pitiful -- but almost fragile, propped in space like any piece of nature that a passerby might despoil. What seemed to have imploded was that iron core of will.
Even naughty runaway kids were afraid to approach where the devil rested. It was impossible to believe that what was seen could be other than a trap. At the same time the expression in her eyes was too much like the expression on a failed parent, an authority figure whose authority had dwindled to nothing. Also there was that terrible skeleton rattling by her side, the spectre of the dead man floating in the air.
So when the devil died no one much noticed.
*
But before that happened, she was visited by a homeless or "unhoused" man and caught a brief glimpse of the underkingdom, of her own kingdom. And then they say that she passed out her spirit, or as they say: gave up the ghost. That was the thirty-fifth night. Toward the end she opened her eyes to find the homeless man sitting next to her. Ah, I knew there was someone still at home in there, the man said. Greetings. The skeleton shivered and clicked his teeth.
The devil lay crumpled in a position that would destroy her own bones if she didn't move. But she didn't move. And then the other one said:
Look, do you feel it? Everything is softening now. The people up there, you can't hear it from her, but they're getting soft now. They are preparing for something. Do you know what I mean?
*
It seemed that a couple of days passed.
The man cut a slice of bread with an army knife. When the devil slumped even further, the stranger raised it to the edge of the other's mouth.
Like a beast, the dying creature snarled. Go ahead and bite me if you want, the homeless man said. Of course I know it's no longer fun when you're given permission. So go ahead but of course you won't. You were built on contraries and that's a house that can't ultimately stand.
You are a garment that God has shucked off and tossed away.
*
The homeless man had taken on an aura of holiness. The softening had begun. The things of the future began to happen, not before their "time" -- because "time" was a thing that God held as if in tongs.
The bread lay, a hideous tasteless mass on the thick part of her tongue. She was on her back now. I don't eat bread, she said. I can't, I don't know how.
The rest of the days passed, as many as there were. One day the graduate student's skeleton just got up and walked away to join its soul.
*
You know you are softening too, the homeless man said. His voice had the gentle tone that people use with pets. The devil was appalled, disgusted, nauseated -- its morality of evil lay profoundly offended. But she, now just an it, seemed to have less will to move than the ooze that lay on the mud. Even physiological decay could embody a kind of justice.
The devil sank -- and this was by far the most horrible part -- through its own kingdom and found there was nobody there anymore. The caves and warrens were empty like a broken ant-farm. The sinners all were gone or flattened. And the place wasn't cold and wasn't hot, wasn't high and wasn't low, wasn't terrifying or even trivial, it wasn't even nonexistent, but give it one kick and it would crumble. And the floor was the muddy clammy texture of the underpass. It *was* the underpass. There wasn't anything else, not for it, not anymore. Little cheerful worms were making tunnels under the road. That's all there was, except for the noisy place -- was it over the head or under the ground? -- where you heard the commuters, they were ferocious and grim, hurling at the speed of light on their urgent errands.
Yes but the goodness that the devil fed upon, that stilil existed of course, if not here. But the devil found itself unable to touch goodness and still *be* the devil. A great transition was about to occur!
*
Sunday, July 31, 2005
The migraine
*
The paradox that struck this wretched creature was the fusion of the need to pray and the inability to pray.
The devil opened the door of her condo and was greeted by a migraine of stupendous width and depth and emptiness. It was not a creation of the bright sun. It was not the wheeling configuration of planets in her head. It was not something she had eaten. It was a thing wedged inside her, it was definitional, intrinsic, basic. It was *her*.
When she managed to open her eyes again, she saw the Zen warrior, a different person now, zooming past her on his bike. From the boom box slung behind him came the sound of praise songs. they said the name over and over.
She was nauseated and unable to vomit.
Make this a dream, please, she said. But who was she speaking to?
The door handle moved. The world was real. She was not dreaming -- at least not more than usual.
The plight was that she knew the name. She knew the one from whom she might have begged relief. But to beg she would have had to release this person she held, this person full of pain, this self. She would have had to cease to be herself.
Thus there was a redemption offered but it was offered to another person. And this other person she flatly refused to become. Or simply could not become.
*
She heard it like music through a closed door. Redemption through a closed door. The sound of a person taking heart and opening a door. The fact of it, the fact that the change was there and was on offer. All through that muffled door, the ear itself muffled. And she could not, would not, open the door.
*
The paradox that struck this wretched creature was the fusion of the need to pray and the inability to pray.
The devil opened the door of her condo and was greeted by a migraine of stupendous width and depth and emptiness. It was not a creation of the bright sun. It was not the wheeling configuration of planets in her head. It was not something she had eaten. It was a thing wedged inside her, it was definitional, intrinsic, basic. It was *her*.
When she managed to open her eyes again, she saw the Zen warrior, a different person now, zooming past her on his bike. From the boom box slung behind him came the sound of praise songs. they said the name over and over.
She was nauseated and unable to vomit.
Make this a dream, please, she said. But who was she speaking to?
The door handle moved. The world was real. She was not dreaming -- at least not more than usual.
The plight was that she knew the name. She knew the one from whom she might have begged relief. But to beg she would have had to release this person she held, this person full of pain, this self. She would have had to cease to be herself.
Thus there was a redemption offered but it was offered to another person. And this other person she flatly refused to become. Or simply could not become.
*
She heard it like music through a closed door. Redemption through a closed door. The sound of a person taking heart and opening a door. The fact of it, the fact that the change was there and was on offer. All through that muffled door, the ear itself muffled. And she could not, would not, open the door.
*
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Death's feet
*
Her decline continued. One night Duessa dreamed that her bedroom was a thing falling on her head. It was not a space open for a soul to occupy, not a carved space with an openness. It was like a block of wood. Duessa's pillow was a damp and lumpy heap, it did not give to the head. The light-fixtures were inert, the light itself was nothing but a thing. One stubbed one's toe against the wall and discovered that toe and wall were of a single texture bereft of all life. The light was a thing, the chair was a thing, the air lying loose on the chair was just a thing. The ache in her toe was a dead thing, just like her toe. All the bones were torpid. The skin was a used-up cloth. The face repelled the fingers, the cranium was a dead item and what was inside the cranium, only another thing. Her soul was a thing, not worth thinking about or being inside. And everything about her was just used up. Such was her dream.
She woke with a mixed feeling of relief and dread. But no, the feelings were there but they did not mix. And the dread dominated everything. When she went to the window there was no view otside, neither air nor no air. There wasn't gray, there wasn't blue. There wasn't not-gray either. There wasn't anything. Nor was there nothing.
She placed her dead feet on the matty edge of the rug and slid over to the door but the handle wouldn't turn. It had no grip on anything. The sound of panic in her throat died for lack of a medium to carry it. The room began to fold upon her like a cardboard box. And then she woke up for a second time, lying there for some hours, unable to move. There was no thought to move to that would be different.
*
Her decline continued. One night Duessa dreamed that her bedroom was a thing falling on her head. It was not a space open for a soul to occupy, not a carved space with an openness. It was like a block of wood. Duessa's pillow was a damp and lumpy heap, it did not give to the head. The light-fixtures were inert, the light itself was nothing but a thing. One stubbed one's toe against the wall and discovered that toe and wall were of a single texture bereft of all life. The light was a thing, the chair was a thing, the air lying loose on the chair was just a thing. The ache in her toe was a dead thing, just like her toe. All the bones were torpid. The skin was a used-up cloth. The face repelled the fingers, the cranium was a dead item and what was inside the cranium, only another thing. Her soul was a thing, not worth thinking about or being inside. And everything about her was just used up. Such was her dream.
She woke with a mixed feeling of relief and dread. But no, the feelings were there but they did not mix. And the dread dominated everything. When she went to the window there was no view otside, neither air nor no air. There wasn't gray, there wasn't blue. There wasn't not-gray either. There wasn't anything. Nor was there nothing.
She placed her dead feet on the matty edge of the rug and slid over to the door but the handle wouldn't turn. It had no grip on anything. The sound of panic in her throat died for lack of a medium to carry it. The room began to fold upon her like a cardboard box. And then she woke up for a second time, lying there for some hours, unable to move. There was no thought to move to that would be different.
*
Sunstroke continued
*
So Dave lay down his burden, lay it down, that heavy burden -- took the armor off. One nudge and it clattered down to the ground.
Duessa lay like a fossil embedded in the ground, pterodactyl boneship, unutterably pitiful, so wedged in that she could hardly move. She somehow managed to shift into supine mode. Dave, Dave.
Dave, my good man, dig me out of the ground so that I can die with a little dignity.
Reaching toward light she bent herself into one of those impossible yoga position that her daughter would toss off almost apologetically in class. With the mother it looked innate, natural. Dave shook his ugly bald head but the vision didn't clear.
If they'd just left me with my old sunstroke I could tell whether you were lying to me. I would not guess, I would know. But they shot me with these drugs that have restored my common sense and taken away my discernment. God's voice is but a whisper.
Dave, that's what they did to me too, Duessa said. That's why I was so bad, she said.
Our bad deeds are imposed on us by something we don't even know.
Dave knew she was lying, really, he knew, he absolutely knew. She was at just the point of depravity where one not only cannot play innocent but can't remember why another simpler being might want to. In a word she was lost. This he knew, this he caught even from her words; nevertheless, there he was already reaching forward to loosen the dirt around her. Of course she took him by the neck, of course she fastened her teeth on his lips. And era obvio, it was obvious, that she didn't even want to! She was like the dog who found himself lungeing before he'd even decided to do so. Her thrashing tore the man like a piece of paper. His lips bled as she pulled him bodily into cast off dirt and took away his ability to breathe, and now he wasn't even surprised. He'd known what she was going to do because this was just her -- the way of her -- what her definition entailed. And as he began sinking into rocks, swallowing them and assimilating himself to them, he heard a sort of discontinuous pop that released him from her power. Elf had crushed her mother's head in with a rock. She hadn't killed her but at least she had knocked her, like a croquet ball, into some other continuum.
So the devil sank into the earth, not to die -- not yet -- but to flutter and expand into some other part of the planet that was ready for her.
*
So Dave lay down his burden, lay it down, that heavy burden -- took the armor off. One nudge and it clattered down to the ground.
Duessa lay like a fossil embedded in the ground, pterodactyl boneship, unutterably pitiful, so wedged in that she could hardly move. She somehow managed to shift into supine mode. Dave, Dave.
Dave, my good man, dig me out of the ground so that I can die with a little dignity.
Reaching toward light she bent herself into one of those impossible yoga position that her daughter would toss off almost apologetically in class. With the mother it looked innate, natural. Dave shook his ugly bald head but the vision didn't clear.
If they'd just left me with my old sunstroke I could tell whether you were lying to me. I would not guess, I would know. But they shot me with these drugs that have restored my common sense and taken away my discernment. God's voice is but a whisper.
Dave, that's what they did to me too, Duessa said. That's why I was so bad, she said.
Our bad deeds are imposed on us by something we don't even know.
Dave knew she was lying, really, he knew, he absolutely knew. She was at just the point of depravity where one not only cannot play innocent but can't remember why another simpler being might want to. In a word she was lost. This he knew, this he caught even from her words; nevertheless, there he was already reaching forward to loosen the dirt around her. Of course she took him by the neck, of course she fastened her teeth on his lips. And era obvio, it was obvious, that she didn't even want to! She was like the dog who found himself lungeing before he'd even decided to do so. Her thrashing tore the man like a piece of paper. His lips bled as she pulled him bodily into cast off dirt and took away his ability to breathe, and now he wasn't even surprised. He'd known what she was going to do because this was just her -- the way of her -- what her definition entailed. And as he began sinking into rocks, swallowing them and assimilating himself to them, he heard a sort of discontinuous pop that released him from her power. Elf had crushed her mother's head in with a rock. She hadn't killed her but at least she had knocked her, like a croquet ball, into some other continuum.
So the devil sank into the earth, not to die -- not yet -- but to flutter and expand into some other part of the planet that was ready for her.
*
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Sunstroke in the garden
*
The warrior only met God via sunstroke.
If given water and shade, the warrior recovered, became an ordinary human, lost contact with God.
Sometimes the warrior refused food and water and shade.
Foolish person, they said. Foolish person, they said.
Yes but sustenance had a cost. Food masked his own true nature as a creature dying and almost dead, almost alive again.
I would like to be alive, not just fed. Foolish person, they said and shook their heads, blurry in his no longer functioning vision. Foolish -- the word swishing like a weak whip.
Why would anyone wear a mask? Why would anyone want to be anything other than what he was?
If you craved salvation, and that he did, if you craved, how could you expect your craving to be, no, how could you ever expect a creature with your name to gain it, to gain salvation, any creature other than the one single creature that you actually were? The creature that your one name called? How would you expect a mask or fantasy to win what only a naked creature could have?
Why then mask that same nakedness and pain?
At least that was one argument.
So the warrior turned down water and hallucinated, or that was what the onlookers said. The word foolish lay coiled and waiting upon their tongues.
No, this vision is real, he said, but the onlookers laughed. That is just exactly what he *would* say.
*
But isn't this your true self? Calm and washed, sober, able to speak about what you see? You aren't saying that this is a mask?
*
The warrior said that he walked with God but the world saw his thrashing on the park bench, acting up. So they took him to the hospital and medicated him and he complained about the flatness.
The drug is like a door that has closed between me and God.
No, Elf said. It's more like the door to a room with other people.
Solitude won't do. God is meant to be worshipped with other people. He is God of the living, not of the dead.
The man named Dave became a human again, most reluctantly. He talked earnestly to the priest and to Elf in the eating room while the others -- "addicts" people called them -- huddled in a line to get their own cross. When they got their own cross they found a corner and huddled, holding it close to them, risking of course ridicule, no no, braving ridicule, enjoying it -- such were the ones we called "addicts". The one they called the knight of the Red Cross babbled to himself by the altar and, I don't know, made sense in a way, but people looked at his furry-shouldered girth and took care not to come too close. Foolish person, foolish person. But Elf, Dave said, won't you at least let me tell you what I saw?
To ease this rapture from my craw -- like a little dachsund spitting up the Snickers wrapper, slowly.
Let me tell you what I saw when I wandered alone. I saw the witch, I saw the devil. Her body lay disorganized like a decayed landfill, cans strewn everywhere, a piece of junk in the garden. Rejected recycling. When I gave her water she wouldn't swallow. Foolish body, lacking reason.
Whose body was it? Elf asked. Whose body?
It's so hard to remember -- you've medicated me and now I don't see so well -- you've made me human again. Now I don't see that other place as I did. I no longer quite know when I am reporting as opposed to making up what I say.
I think that body was your mother's -- it was the devil or at least like the devil -- but what is the devil's shape without a body to feed on? Isn't the devil qua diabolus nothing but a virus without a host? What is evil when it has to live on itself? What if not short term? Nothing to speak of, right? I wouldn't think destruction has much of an independent essence to describe.
But it seemed to me that she was giving up and dying, the man said.
She was shriveling and ceasing to take much notice.
If only that were true, it would mean that the new time that has been coming and coming might finally just come.
*
The broken ones -- the ones who could not call themselves Christians but only would-be Christians -- they could not stop pondering the meaning of orthodoxy, this structure that contained them and that they themselves could not contain. What for you is orthodoxy? A set of decreed beliefs? Dead beliefs? Are you sure that's what it is?
People object to being ordered what to think. Yet the spell is very strong. It needs to be defined a different way.
For the warrior, orthodoxy was not a code but a place. To this place he brought his considerable doubts, which is just to say that he brought himself. He did not bring a mask of someone else, behind which one might hide from whatever was to come. It couldn't just be the tongue that walked this aisle. The whole body had to follow.
Name this place. I cannot, will not. Not yet.
In the safety that was this place -- both garden and hallowed building and still but the precinct of a building -- hanging like the shadow of a raised shield -- doubt itself became protected and so faith flourished, beyond all expectation. The warrior rested. People walked here together, awkwardly, like cripples approaching their Sunday cup.
Name this place. Name this place. Say the name.
After the meal with his friends, Dave walked unsteadily to the stable behind the garden. His armor clanked against his thigh. There was a bruise that led to a wound that led to a pool of blood beneath his belly where the soul lay, face up, mouth open, desperately hungry. The metal clanked, it was foolish to wear.
There was a compost heap by the garden and, some feet further away, a dried-up place filled with things that were unable even to be treated as compost. There she lay, breathing but only barely.
Dave turned to cry out to his companions but his head -- only half sticking out from the cotton wadding of the drugs -- felt too dizzy even to judge its position and his throat was too dry to speak.
He felt alone. But alone with God. Orthodoxy extended even here. That is, if you wished it to. If you acknowledged its scope and its power.
Salute the sun in the name of the one you are afraid to name.
*
Lord, save us from even the wickedness we have triumphed over. Save us from feeling triumph.
*
The warrior only met God via sunstroke.
If given water and shade, the warrior recovered, became an ordinary human, lost contact with God.
Sometimes the warrior refused food and water and shade.
Foolish person, they said. Foolish person, they said.
Yes but sustenance had a cost. Food masked his own true nature as a creature dying and almost dead, almost alive again.
I would like to be alive, not just fed. Foolish person, they said and shook their heads, blurry in his no longer functioning vision. Foolish -- the word swishing like a weak whip.
Why would anyone wear a mask? Why would anyone want to be anything other than what he was?
If you craved salvation, and that he did, if you craved, how could you expect your craving to be, no, how could you ever expect a creature with your name to gain it, to gain salvation, any creature other than the one single creature that you actually were? The creature that your one name called? How would you expect a mask or fantasy to win what only a naked creature could have?
Why then mask that same nakedness and pain?
At least that was one argument.
So the warrior turned down water and hallucinated, or that was what the onlookers said. The word foolish lay coiled and waiting upon their tongues.
No, this vision is real, he said, but the onlookers laughed. That is just exactly what he *would* say.
*
But isn't this your true self? Calm and washed, sober, able to speak about what you see? You aren't saying that this is a mask?
*
The warrior said that he walked with God but the world saw his thrashing on the park bench, acting up. So they took him to the hospital and medicated him and he complained about the flatness.
The drug is like a door that has closed between me and God.
No, Elf said. It's more like the door to a room with other people.
Solitude won't do. God is meant to be worshipped with other people. He is God of the living, not of the dead.
The man named Dave became a human again, most reluctantly. He talked earnestly to the priest and to Elf in the eating room while the others -- "addicts" people called them -- huddled in a line to get their own cross. When they got their own cross they found a corner and huddled, holding it close to them, risking of course ridicule, no no, braving ridicule, enjoying it -- such were the ones we called "addicts". The one they called the knight of the Red Cross babbled to himself by the altar and, I don't know, made sense in a way, but people looked at his furry-shouldered girth and took care not to come too close. Foolish person, foolish person. But Elf, Dave said, won't you at least let me tell you what I saw?
To ease this rapture from my craw -- like a little dachsund spitting up the Snickers wrapper, slowly.
Let me tell you what I saw when I wandered alone. I saw the witch, I saw the devil. Her body lay disorganized like a decayed landfill, cans strewn everywhere, a piece of junk in the garden. Rejected recycling. When I gave her water she wouldn't swallow. Foolish body, lacking reason.
Whose body was it? Elf asked. Whose body?
It's so hard to remember -- you've medicated me and now I don't see so well -- you've made me human again. Now I don't see that other place as I did. I no longer quite know when I am reporting as opposed to making up what I say.
I think that body was your mother's -- it was the devil or at least like the devil -- but what is the devil's shape without a body to feed on? Isn't the devil qua diabolus nothing but a virus without a host? What is evil when it has to live on itself? What if not short term? Nothing to speak of, right? I wouldn't think destruction has much of an independent essence to describe.
But it seemed to me that she was giving up and dying, the man said.
She was shriveling and ceasing to take much notice.
If only that were true, it would mean that the new time that has been coming and coming might finally just come.
*
The broken ones -- the ones who could not call themselves Christians but only would-be Christians -- they could not stop pondering the meaning of orthodoxy, this structure that contained them and that they themselves could not contain. What for you is orthodoxy? A set of decreed beliefs? Dead beliefs? Are you sure that's what it is?
People object to being ordered what to think. Yet the spell is very strong. It needs to be defined a different way.
For the warrior, orthodoxy was not a code but a place. To this place he brought his considerable doubts, which is just to say that he brought himself. He did not bring a mask of someone else, behind which one might hide from whatever was to come. It couldn't just be the tongue that walked this aisle. The whole body had to follow.
Name this place. I cannot, will not. Not yet.
In the safety that was this place -- both garden and hallowed building and still but the precinct of a building -- hanging like the shadow of a raised shield -- doubt itself became protected and so faith flourished, beyond all expectation. The warrior rested. People walked here together, awkwardly, like cripples approaching their Sunday cup.
Name this place. Name this place. Say the name.
After the meal with his friends, Dave walked unsteadily to the stable behind the garden. His armor clanked against his thigh. There was a bruise that led to a wound that led to a pool of blood beneath his belly where the soul lay, face up, mouth open, desperately hungry. The metal clanked, it was foolish to wear.
There was a compost heap by the garden and, some feet further away, a dried-up place filled with things that were unable even to be treated as compost. There she lay, breathing but only barely.
Dave turned to cry out to his companions but his head -- only half sticking out from the cotton wadding of the drugs -- felt too dizzy even to judge its position and his throat was too dry to speak.
He felt alone. But alone with God. Orthodoxy extended even here. That is, if you wished it to. If you acknowledged its scope and its power.
Salute the sun in the name of the one you are afraid to name.
*
Lord, save us from even the wickedness we have triumphed over. Save us from feeling triumph.
*
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Even the devil
*
Can the Devil be saved? Can even the Devil be saved? Origen the great and incautious theologian thought such a thing was possible, and Jerome attacked him for saying so.
The problem is not merely that this notion upgrades a parasitic virus into the status of an independent entity, a *being*. Because, after all, even a virus might evolve into something else with a definable will of its own. But the problem is deeper and worse.
The problem is that when a truly evil being -- Hitler, let's say, to make it easy -- is thought of as saved, then it follows that the most basic cord has been cut. The cord of things happening. Suddenly the evil was a phase, thus not quite real. And the life that the evil destroyed is now turned into a joke. What happened didn't really happen, after all.
Or say that Hitler, a mere human, after all, might repent and yet somehow remain himself (something I can't imagine but perhaps for God somehow imaginable). Then you must turn and go back to the example of the devil. Because evil is part of the devil's definition. If the devil were saved he would no longer be the devil. Were such an entity saved, would that turn all the evil into a joke? Would it all be a silly reversal out of Aristotle? If the evil were not a joke, then in what sense would the entity saved not be some limp skin of blessedness hanging in a void? In what sense could that saved one still be Hitler or whoever it was? Or Saddam Hussein? What real thing would have been saved? How would history itself not be scandalized and debased?
So, in this case at least, Origen's forgiveness sucks the soul, and its very meaning, out of the world.
The devil cannot be saved.
*
Can the Devil be saved? Can even the Devil be saved? Origen the great and incautious theologian thought such a thing was possible, and Jerome attacked him for saying so.
The problem is not merely that this notion upgrades a parasitic virus into the status of an independent entity, a *being*. Because, after all, even a virus might evolve into something else with a definable will of its own. But the problem is deeper and worse.
The problem is that when a truly evil being -- Hitler, let's say, to make it easy -- is thought of as saved, then it follows that the most basic cord has been cut. The cord of things happening. Suddenly the evil was a phase, thus not quite real. And the life that the evil destroyed is now turned into a joke. What happened didn't really happen, after all.
Or say that Hitler, a mere human, after all, might repent and yet somehow remain himself (something I can't imagine but perhaps for God somehow imaginable). Then you must turn and go back to the example of the devil. Because evil is part of the devil's definition. If the devil were saved he would no longer be the devil. Were such an entity saved, would that turn all the evil into a joke? Would it all be a silly reversal out of Aristotle? If the evil were not a joke, then in what sense would the entity saved not be some limp skin of blessedness hanging in a void? In what sense could that saved one still be Hitler or whoever it was? Or Saddam Hussein? What real thing would have been saved? How would history itself not be scandalized and debased?
So, in this case at least, Origen's forgiveness sucks the soul, and its very meaning, out of the world.
The devil cannot be saved.
*
Thursday, July 14, 2005
The Death of the Devil - begun
*
Did Duessa reconcile herself to the loss of her daughter? She did not.
Did she want her daughter as a husk to feed on? That is what she wanted.
Did she have millions of other souls in her grasp? Indeed she did.
Did she find a shortage of lost souls as she winged through the night, long past curfew? She never found a shortage.
Did the death of a stranger have the same satisfying taste as the death of one's own daughter? Oh, the witch moaned, how could it?
My darling, you are my own flesh. How I need you! The mother's lament floated through the night like a ballad -- echoed like the legendary ladies of the canyon in the old folk song, reverberated in sentimental ears and became heard and misinterpreted by singers all across the land: the cry of a mother for her child.
*
In the same way that, in cheap movies, a psychopathic killer is seen as all but invincible, breaking locks and entering private houses with ease, always creeping just behind the heroine, as if invulnerable in sheer badness -- never leaving tracks or prints, flowing this malice everywhere -- in the very same way, the common imagination will picture the devil as impossibly slick, impervious to all misfortune and unhappiness. People seem to think that every evil plot succeeds. And every plotter happy. But how could a life that is founded upon evil be so grounded in happiness? How could such a parasite -- feeding on goodness and happiness without even feeling them or having them -- how could such a thing summon your envy?
If you believe in God, why allot to the devil so much power? Why do you give the devil a happiness so inappropriate and impossible?
The parasitical figure is the weakest in the world.
She is a virus, she is not even alive. She only comes to life -- or pseudolife really -- when your own will is invaded and you let her drab capsid enter your own warm cell. She does not exist until you let her exist or make her exist.
*
Did Duessa reconcile herself to the loss of her daughter? She did not.
Did she want her daughter as a husk to feed on? That is what she wanted.
Did she have millions of other souls in her grasp? Indeed she did.
Did she find a shortage of lost souls as she winged through the night, long past curfew? She never found a shortage.
Did the death of a stranger have the same satisfying taste as the death of one's own daughter? Oh, the witch moaned, how could it?
My darling, you are my own flesh. How I need you! The mother's lament floated through the night like a ballad -- echoed like the legendary ladies of the canyon in the old folk song, reverberated in sentimental ears and became heard and misinterpreted by singers all across the land: the cry of a mother for her child.
*
In the same way that, in cheap movies, a psychopathic killer is seen as all but invincible, breaking locks and entering private houses with ease, always creeping just behind the heroine, as if invulnerable in sheer badness -- never leaving tracks or prints, flowing this malice everywhere -- in the very same way, the common imagination will picture the devil as impossibly slick, impervious to all misfortune and unhappiness. People seem to think that every evil plot succeeds. And every plotter happy. But how could a life that is founded upon evil be so grounded in happiness? How could such a parasite -- feeding on goodness and happiness without even feeling them or having them -- how could such a thing summon your envy?
If you believe in God, why allot to the devil so much power? Why do you give the devil a happiness so inappropriate and impossible?
The parasitical figure is the weakest in the world.
She is a virus, she is not even alive. She only comes to life -- or pseudolife really -- when your own will is invaded and you let her drab capsid enter your own warm cell. She does not exist until you let her exist or make her exist.
*
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
In the church forgiven
*
Why is it that I need the institutional church, the institution and not just a prayer book?
*
Well look, Elf said, sometimes I feel ready to explode. I feel so full of God's love I'm ready to explode. And then what? What follows?
What do I do when I feel this love?
Commit a crime in the name of Jesus? No, I don't think so!
*
When I take off all my blotters and my masks, when I feel God's power or some sliver of it, what keeps me from imploding with my joy and terror?
*
I need the church to hold me in and keep me human. In solidarity with other humans. Let's say that their own imploding tendency pulls me out of my own dangerous place. Okay. No prophet, thank you, no cult figure, no indeed. I don't want no human blocking my access to God. Let the institution -- laws not men -- sustain my walking into these arms I have.
Tradition keeps me honest. It holds me close. I hunger for orthodoxy as a place to walk and explore.
If you find a truth and then you want to sustain it and want it to *persist*, well, then you too want those walls. Why expect another broken person to sustain your brokenness.
You too are going to institutionalize, to walk inside. You too. Then maybe you will have to wait for your own Luther to free you from what you have done. But first, do it.
*
The van full of disciples became raucous with prayer. An upright rational onlooker would have been deeply offended, scandalized. The Zen warrior sat humbled in prayer, the queer sat with his eyes closed. The dancer stood arrested in mid step. The van slowed down, it stopped. The people lay down and feel asleep, ragged scripture clutched to their breast. Let be not be so haughty that I ever pretend not to need this. As for myself, I really don't know a thing.
Less each day.
Praise, thanksgiving, seal me off from my own silly penchant to wander in despair.
*
The devil knew they were there and longed to kill them off -- "one well placed bomb, really" -- but the wakeful ones wouldn't stop singing hymns -- those corny antiquated hymns. Duessa heard the hymns and her stomach turned. Commonplace thoughts, voices out of tune! Somehow she lost heart to pursue them and teach them new sorrows. She became depressed, disconsolate. And the people were all suddenly and provisionally free. They sat in a circle in the garden of prayer -- the place where a eucharist could happen for them and within them. A protected space -- at least for now.
*
Why is it that I need the institutional church, the institution and not just a prayer book?
*
Well look, Elf said, sometimes I feel ready to explode. I feel so full of God's love I'm ready to explode. And then what? What follows?
What do I do when I feel this love?
Commit a crime in the name of Jesus? No, I don't think so!
*
When I take off all my blotters and my masks, when I feel God's power or some sliver of it, what keeps me from imploding with my joy and terror?
*
I need the church to hold me in and keep me human. In solidarity with other humans. Let's say that their own imploding tendency pulls me out of my own dangerous place. Okay. No prophet, thank you, no cult figure, no indeed. I don't want no human blocking my access to God. Let the institution -- laws not men -- sustain my walking into these arms I have.
Tradition keeps me honest. It holds me close. I hunger for orthodoxy as a place to walk and explore.
If you find a truth and then you want to sustain it and want it to *persist*, well, then you too want those walls. Why expect another broken person to sustain your brokenness.
You too are going to institutionalize, to walk inside. You too. Then maybe you will have to wait for your own Luther to free you from what you have done. But first, do it.
*
The van full of disciples became raucous with prayer. An upright rational onlooker would have been deeply offended, scandalized. The Zen warrior sat humbled in prayer, the queer sat with his eyes closed. The dancer stood arrested in mid step. The van slowed down, it stopped. The people lay down and feel asleep, ragged scripture clutched to their breast. Let be not be so haughty that I ever pretend not to need this. As for myself, I really don't know a thing.
Less each day.
Praise, thanksgiving, seal me off from my own silly penchant to wander in despair.
*
The devil knew they were there and longed to kill them off -- "one well placed bomb, really" -- but the wakeful ones wouldn't stop singing hymns -- those corny antiquated hymns. Duessa heard the hymns and her stomach turned. Commonplace thoughts, voices out of tune! Somehow she lost heart to pursue them and teach them new sorrows. She became depressed, disconsolate. And the people were all suddenly and provisionally free. They sat in a circle in the garden of prayer -- the place where a eucharist could happen for them and within them. A protected space -- at least for now.
*
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Monday, July 11, 2005
The back of the van
*
And in the back of the van was none other than Balaam's ass, a demure creature. But Balaam himself was not there.
And in the back of the van sat the Nazi Kommandant's wife. But there was not much left of her.
Not far from her Don and Dave sat next to each other, not saying anything. In peace, although, my God! no one is ever really in peace, in a site such as earth, what in the world would peace be here? Here everything is turmoil but still there is such a thing as a peaceful turmoil. Where the tongue lies at rest and accepts the turmoil, as it were, as it can.
And in the back of the van....
*
In the back of the van sat Body and Soul, and the two of them weren't talking much anymore. Soul had not a bone that could be described as unbroken -- his ethereal carapace of thought was now one big bruise. Does that still need to be explained or do the soulful ones finally understand where the devastation comes from? Meanwhile Body propped her husband up and held him wherever it didn't hurt. If she was submissive, if Soul found her pathetic to be so submissive, nevertheless, when the moment of need came and came and came, he found himself welcoming her submission and feeding on it to keep himself alive. For indeed the fools of the world are a kind of medication and not the over the counter kind either, their foolishness is necessary and what you laugh about is what also keeps you in one piece, once the laughing has stopped.
Soul lay in the van as one enormous bruise. Soul had had his long fling with the devil, while friends had urged Body to leave him for good, to leave him for *her* good, but Body couldn't do it, she knew so very little and one of the many things she did *not* know was how to be unfaithful to the small bare pledge that she had made. So she stuck around and was branded as a fool -- not so different in nature from Balaam's sweet natured ass next to her -- they were sisters. Body and Soul did make a part of the van, took up space in it, but he was only suffered to be there because she was. Meanwhile the anchoress lay in the very back, cancer ridden, her inner passages knotted and congested by strokes and clots, but she was not ready to be counted out, after all.
There were families with kids but they were strangely subdued and quiet.
There were animals of various persuasions. There were broken items of every type, the rejected items of a spiritual garage sale, waiting to be -- waiting to be taken?
Teddy bears with bent ears and broken legs. Old dolls who'd served their time. Lots of faithful people, bruised and damaged.
Wherever we are going, Elf said, it will be a good place and I will be happy. Because *she* will not be there.
*
"The lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."
*
And in the back of the van was none other than Balaam's ass, a demure creature. But Balaam himself was not there.
And in the back of the van sat the Nazi Kommandant's wife. But there was not much left of her.
Not far from her Don and Dave sat next to each other, not saying anything. In peace, although, my God! no one is ever really in peace, in a site such as earth, what in the world would peace be here? Here everything is turmoil but still there is such a thing as a peaceful turmoil. Where the tongue lies at rest and accepts the turmoil, as it were, as it can.
And in the back of the van....
*
In the back of the van sat Body and Soul, and the two of them weren't talking much anymore. Soul had not a bone that could be described as unbroken -- his ethereal carapace of thought was now one big bruise. Does that still need to be explained or do the soulful ones finally understand where the devastation comes from? Meanwhile Body propped her husband up and held him wherever it didn't hurt. If she was submissive, if Soul found her pathetic to be so submissive, nevertheless, when the moment of need came and came and came, he found himself welcoming her submission and feeding on it to keep himself alive. For indeed the fools of the world are a kind of medication and not the over the counter kind either, their foolishness is necessary and what you laugh about is what also keeps you in one piece, once the laughing has stopped.
Soul lay in the van as one enormous bruise. Soul had had his long fling with the devil, while friends had urged Body to leave him for good, to leave him for *her* good, but Body couldn't do it, she knew so very little and one of the many things she did *not* know was how to be unfaithful to the small bare pledge that she had made. So she stuck around and was branded as a fool -- not so different in nature from Balaam's sweet natured ass next to her -- they were sisters. Body and Soul did make a part of the van, took up space in it, but he was only suffered to be there because she was. Meanwhile the anchoress lay in the very back, cancer ridden, her inner passages knotted and congested by strokes and clots, but she was not ready to be counted out, after all.
There were families with kids but they were strangely subdued and quiet.
There were animals of various persuasions. There were broken items of every type, the rejected items of a spiritual garage sale, waiting to be -- waiting to be taken?
Teddy bears with bent ears and broken legs. Old dolls who'd served their time. Lots of faithful people, bruised and damaged.
Wherever we are going, Elf said, it will be a good place and I will be happy. Because *she* will not be there.
*
"The lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."
*
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Running from a werewolf
*
One must hit bottom and go through the bottom to reach the place of peace, the garden one has always wanted. But first one must hit bottom.
*
Duessa leaped with her pads up some dark steps and her maw opened as if 360 degrees. A scream as big as the "world". One poor clerk had made the mistake of walking home that night. She seized the Christian's throat, tore it and fed on the person alive. This was the lady who was now senior warden of her church, a pillar of a community that was falling. Be sober, you just never know when the fiery words of Ezekiel will come alive again: "[They] are like wolves tearing [their] prey, shedding blood, and destroying lives in order to get unjust gain" (Ezekiel 22:27, HCSB).
There is a superfluity based on another's pain that is a weedpatch where the devil lives.
Now when the siren rang her shoulder blades began to tingle, a precision instrument, and she loped into the void.
*
Elf stood over her attacker and wailed: I didn't do it. I didn't intend, I didn't mean to. His shoulder was so dislocated that it was almost a separate object -- a sacrificial offering. The siren stopped, the door of the vehicle opened, and she stood quietly waiting to be arrested. Wolves hopped through the alley, no longer boys at all.
But it was it was the chubby priest Sam or Samuel driving the van -- a rescuer! -- and look, all her other friends are inside. Get in, they said. We're taking you away from here.
As though 40 days and 40 nights -- although she was not worth such a thought of comparison.
She got into the van and the strange man, Dave, her fellow worshipper, briefly hugged her and then let her sit in peace, a woman of violence, but no, ultimately no. There was corny Christian music playing on the radio, you offer me the aroma of God as filtered through static and thick red cloth. Elf collapsed and had her breakdown in a safe place, moving closer and closer into God's arms, the only safe place in the entire world -- those arms' invisible touch like something huge and warm and protective, because their "like" was reality. And her mother would never never never be allowed into this car.
*
One must hit bottom and go through the bottom to reach the place of peace, the garden one has always wanted. But first one must hit bottom.
*
Duessa leaped with her pads up some dark steps and her maw opened as if 360 degrees. A scream as big as the "world". One poor clerk had made the mistake of walking home that night. She seized the Christian's throat, tore it and fed on the person alive. This was the lady who was now senior warden of her church, a pillar of a community that was falling. Be sober, you just never know when the fiery words of Ezekiel will come alive again: "[They] are like wolves tearing [their] prey, shedding blood, and destroying lives in order to get unjust gain" (Ezekiel 22:27, HCSB).
There is a superfluity based on another's pain that is a weedpatch where the devil lives.
Now when the siren rang her shoulder blades began to tingle, a precision instrument, and she loped into the void.
*
Elf stood over her attacker and wailed: I didn't do it. I didn't intend, I didn't mean to. His shoulder was so dislocated that it was almost a separate object -- a sacrificial offering. The siren stopped, the door of the vehicle opened, and she stood quietly waiting to be arrested. Wolves hopped through the alley, no longer boys at all.
But it was it was the chubby priest Sam or Samuel driving the van -- a rescuer! -- and look, all her other friends are inside. Get in, they said. We're taking you away from here.
As though 40 days and 40 nights -- although she was not worth such a thought of comparison.
She got into the van and the strange man, Dave, her fellow worshipper, briefly hugged her and then let her sit in peace, a woman of violence, but no, ultimately no. There was corny Christian music playing on the radio, you offer me the aroma of God as filtered through static and thick red cloth. Elf collapsed and had her breakdown in a safe place, moving closer and closer into God's arms, the only safe place in the entire world -- those arms' invisible touch like something huge and warm and protective, because their "like" was reality. And her mother would never never never be allowed into this car.
*
Monday, June 27, 2005
The Story of Elf: Almost finished
*
Now when soldiers die, does that count as tragedy or not? Take the soldiers in their clean white underwear, sitting in their bunkers at Peal Harbor? If God has taken them into his nursing bosom -- if their death was a thin screen of asphyxia that dissolved like powder never to return -- was this not a good thing? Were they then lucky? Does it feel lucky to think of them?
*
God knows, we don't. "You take away their breath and they return to their dust" (Psalm 104). Going on: "They you send forth your spirit and they are born again." New creatures equivalent to the old, on the tired planet earth. Or are they born again for real, not someone like them but themselves for real?
*
Of course she was not a martyr, and when he reached to tear her clothes and stare at her bruised front, she flinched and she jerked. Her body protected her. And there the hoodlum stood with his shoulder hanging loose from himself. Like a slab of meat in a slaughterhouse! I didn't do that, Elf said. I didn't, I couldn't have done that.
So the demons stood in the darkness like giant hunks of melting wax, giving off the horrible smell of meat. And it was their very definition that smelled so bad that seemed so utterly incompatible with redemption of any kind. "You take away their breath and they return to their dust." As if wanting to be there. As if renewal were a universe away.
*
Now when soldiers die, does that count as tragedy or not? Take the soldiers in their clean white underwear, sitting in their bunkers at Peal Harbor? If God has taken them into his nursing bosom -- if their death was a thin screen of asphyxia that dissolved like powder never to return -- was this not a good thing? Were they then lucky? Does it feel lucky to think of them?
*
God knows, we don't. "You take away their breath and they return to their dust" (Psalm 104). Going on: "They you send forth your spirit and they are born again." New creatures equivalent to the old, on the tired planet earth. Or are they born again for real, not someone like them but themselves for real?
*
Of course she was not a martyr, and when he reached to tear her clothes and stare at her bruised front, she flinched and she jerked. Her body protected her. And there the hoodlum stood with his shoulder hanging loose from himself. Like a slab of meat in a slaughterhouse! I didn't do that, Elf said. I didn't, I couldn't have done that.
So the demons stood in the darkness like giant hunks of melting wax, giving off the horrible smell of meat. And it was their very definition that smelled so bad that seemed so utterly incompatible with redemption of any kind. "You take away their breath and they return to their dust." As if wanting to be there. As if renewal were a universe away.
*
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Running (Part 3)
*
It was possible to create and animate images of things that had never happened. These things moved along a flattish panel. If your eyes once locked into this panel, you first almost couldn't turn away and later the "almost" was taken away and you were hooked. According to the media experts -- and the prophets -- there were people all through the kingdom who had started as noble structures -- humans -- and had at one time taken responsibility for themselves -- but now spent their days gazing at flat pictures -- at pictures flatter than flat -- to the point where they too had taken on the flatness of unreality -- having no real past, no real future, just the reductive annihilation of zen, you couldn't even call them unhappy. Not even that. There "were" such people if you could say they still "were", if the word "were" could still be fastened to them. And this was the devil's realm.
They sat in bus stations watching. The bus had gone without them and there was nobody to rouse them, only others liewise afflicted, such as Ainsley, depicted on the everpresent screen, now nothing but bones, clutching a doll like a child. You need to lose a little more weight, just above your hips, you're so close to your target, dear, her trainer said, a familiar, a witch, omeone very well known. Duessa looked out of the screen into the sports bar and saw her daughter running, a speck. So there you are.
Let us step out of this telenovela.
The girl Ainsley, the affluent anarchist, was surrounded on the screen by raffish beaux, dressed in the cutesy pseudo-ruffian style that the top designers liked. Tattoos were sited according to the highest principles of feng shui, etc. They looked like pet poodles dressed as thugs but were not for that reason necessarily "safe", in fact not by any means. There were strategic rips in their expensive cloth and 2 day's growth of beard, no more, never less, trimmed every day by an expert to be exactly 2 days' and never more. And certainly never less. Nevermore ravens. Go get her and destroy her, Duessa said, and the pasty young men dispersed like hungry dark birds, white thugs, passing right through the TV screen and alighting on the bad block where they lived, forever overcast and grim, the contagious block of "hopeless" poverty. Where whatever you had was taken from another.
Now they flapped and shifted into the punks who had so often terrorized her walking home. The leader had a bandage on the finger Elf once tore, in the days of her violence. They surrounded her now.
I cannot be a pacifist -- it's just a theory. The world is other than the wishes one has.
Elf knew *well* from her mother how to hurt the young men, how to maim them and pluck their glossy feathers. But she was a -- well, almost was -- well, she was a Christian now, or trying to be, and she was going to kick over that "almost" and rise aloft, any day now. Almost was almost over. She wanted to be what she was born to be and she was resolved not to hurt anyone. She was not going to hurt anyone. She was through hurting people. She wanted to imitate Christ.
A difference sustained her spirit and paralyzed her attack reflexes. No one must be hurt.
*
Dear God! They could hurt her if they wanted to. If that was what they did. "Every day is a good day because God is good." I will not play this game of endless escalating violence. Christ set me free from that.
Moving forward she felt like a surfer riding a polluted set of waves, a stacked form of terror that would be banished from the kingdom of God, if she ever made it there. As her two feet balanced, her image darkened and blurred on screens around the world, where all the boozy demons and couch potatoes sat and watched. Breath and commercials lay suspended.
*
If they were going to kill her, that was okay. Death might be finality to one who did not believe in a kingdom of the -- well, the ones who were not dead. Sarah and Jacob, help me! As a dancer she had one foot in this death but the other foot in -- well, what was it in and where was it really? Where was this? What was this healing substance that one sank into? And where could the sound of that siren be coming from?
*
It was possible to create and animate images of things that had never happened. These things moved along a flattish panel. If your eyes once locked into this panel, you first almost couldn't turn away and later the "almost" was taken away and you were hooked. According to the media experts -- and the prophets -- there were people all through the kingdom who had started as noble structures -- humans -- and had at one time taken responsibility for themselves -- but now spent their days gazing at flat pictures -- at pictures flatter than flat -- to the point where they too had taken on the flatness of unreality -- having no real past, no real future, just the reductive annihilation of zen, you couldn't even call them unhappy. Not even that. There "were" such people if you could say they still "were", if the word "were" could still be fastened to them. And this was the devil's realm.
They sat in bus stations watching. The bus had gone without them and there was nobody to rouse them, only others liewise afflicted, such as Ainsley, depicted on the everpresent screen, now nothing but bones, clutching a doll like a child. You need to lose a little more weight, just above your hips, you're so close to your target, dear, her trainer said, a familiar, a witch, omeone very well known. Duessa looked out of the screen into the sports bar and saw her daughter running, a speck. So there you are.
Let us step out of this telenovela.
The girl Ainsley, the affluent anarchist, was surrounded on the screen by raffish beaux, dressed in the cutesy pseudo-ruffian style that the top designers liked. Tattoos were sited according to the highest principles of feng shui, etc. They looked like pet poodles dressed as thugs but were not for that reason necessarily "safe", in fact not by any means. There were strategic rips in their expensive cloth and 2 day's growth of beard, no more, never less, trimmed every day by an expert to be exactly 2 days' and never more. And certainly never less. Nevermore ravens. Go get her and destroy her, Duessa said, and the pasty young men dispersed like hungry dark birds, white thugs, passing right through the TV screen and alighting on the bad block where they lived, forever overcast and grim, the contagious block of "hopeless" poverty. Where whatever you had was taken from another.
Now they flapped and shifted into the punks who had so often terrorized her walking home. The leader had a bandage on the finger Elf once tore, in the days of her violence. They surrounded her now.
I cannot be a pacifist -- it's just a theory. The world is other than the wishes one has.
Elf knew *well* from her mother how to hurt the young men, how to maim them and pluck their glossy feathers. But she was a -- well, almost was -- well, she was a Christian now, or trying to be, and she was going to kick over that "almost" and rise aloft, any day now. Almost was almost over. She wanted to be what she was born to be and she was resolved not to hurt anyone. She was not going to hurt anyone. She was through hurting people. She wanted to imitate Christ.
A difference sustained her spirit and paralyzed her attack reflexes. No one must be hurt.
*
Dear God! They could hurt her if they wanted to. If that was what they did. "Every day is a good day because God is good." I will not play this game of endless escalating violence. Christ set me free from that.
Moving forward she felt like a surfer riding a polluted set of waves, a stacked form of terror that would be banished from the kingdom of God, if she ever made it there. As her two feet balanced, her image darkened and blurred on screens around the world, where all the boozy demons and couch potatoes sat and watched. Breath and commercials lay suspended.
*
If they were going to kill her, that was okay. Death might be finality to one who did not believe in a kingdom of the -- well, the ones who were not dead. Sarah and Jacob, help me! As a dancer she had one foot in this death but the other foot in -- well, what was it in and where was it really? Where was this? What was this healing substance that one sank into? And where could the sound of that siren be coming from?
*
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Digression: A Christian Koan
*
The warrior was used to solving problems quickly, with finality, and was not a one to doubt.
His adversary, before he died, taunted him with a question:
What is the one word, the enlightened single word, that the Buddhist monks will not say and cannot say it and yet they say it and say it and continually say?
Speak to me that word.
The warrior guffawed through the blood but was later taken aback. Could there really be such a word? Years later, when his physical and spiritual wounds had incapacitated him for living -- nor had in any way prepared him for dying -- he wandered his native land as best he could. He flipped though it hobbling. The teacher's monastery was nothing but a smelly cave and the teacher smelled too. The warrior sat in front of him and waited in silence, nursing his wounds in an elastic sensibility that would then turn on him, that would pierce his core and would not relent. Howling would not have made the wounds feel better. Nor was silence any salve. He just had to move through it.
The so-called Void has a name and is not void. But those who know it will only say it not saying it. All the same, in their silence, the name is said and can no longer be unsaid. Once said, the saying is final, irreversible, the name has been named.
What is this one word? the warrior asked.
Why do you say one? the teacher asked. Why not two? Why not no word at all? the teacher asked.
Are you so dependent on words? Can't anything be said without a word?
Yes but the warrior needed a word.
I could so easily kill you and who knows? I might feel no remorse for it.
But instead I am sitting here talking softly, even reasoning with you, the warrior said.
The teacher hit him savagely with his curved stick. Was that because of his presumption? His arrogance? Or was it only for the remorse?
You already know the word, the teacher said. Its name is Jesus. But I will never say it to you again.
You already knew it anyway.
Now the warrior -- long ago born a Quaker into a different world -- felt the old delicious sting of unasked-for transcendence, a knowledge unasked-for and perhaps not even wished. It was not that this one word salved his pain exactly, more that the pain was now reaching (through even more pain) as if to move into the salve. It was on the move finally.
In mere speech, there could be enough pain to render a person unconscious, speechless. Unable to walk away.
There is a word that the sages will not say and cannot say, and yet they say it and say it and continually say. Those who know it say it even not saying it. You know the word.
*
The warrior was used to solving problems quickly, with finality, and was not a one to doubt.
His adversary, before he died, taunted him with a question:
What is the one word, the enlightened single word, that the Buddhist monks will not say and cannot say it and yet they say it and say it and continually say?
Speak to me that word.
The warrior guffawed through the blood but was later taken aback. Could there really be such a word? Years later, when his physical and spiritual wounds had incapacitated him for living -- nor had in any way prepared him for dying -- he wandered his native land as best he could. He flipped though it hobbling. The teacher's monastery was nothing but a smelly cave and the teacher smelled too. The warrior sat in front of him and waited in silence, nursing his wounds in an elastic sensibility that would then turn on him, that would pierce his core and would not relent. Howling would not have made the wounds feel better. Nor was silence any salve. He just had to move through it.
The so-called Void has a name and is not void. But those who know it will only say it not saying it. All the same, in their silence, the name is said and can no longer be unsaid. Once said, the saying is final, irreversible, the name has been named.
What is this one word? the warrior asked.
Why do you say one? the teacher asked. Why not two? Why not no word at all? the teacher asked.
Are you so dependent on words? Can't anything be said without a word?
Yes but the warrior needed a word.
I could so easily kill you and who knows? I might feel no remorse for it.
But instead I am sitting here talking softly, even reasoning with you, the warrior said.
The teacher hit him savagely with his curved stick. Was that because of his presumption? His arrogance? Or was it only for the remorse?
You already know the word, the teacher said. Its name is Jesus. But I will never say it to you again.
You already knew it anyway.
Now the warrior -- long ago born a Quaker into a different world -- felt the old delicious sting of unasked-for transcendence, a knowledge unasked-for and perhaps not even wished. It was not that this one word salved his pain exactly, more that the pain was now reaching (through even more pain) as if to move into the salve. It was on the move finally.
In mere speech, there could be enough pain to render a person unconscious, speechless. Unable to walk away.
There is a word that the sages will not say and cannot say, and yet they say it and say it and continually say. Those who know it say it even not saying it. You know the word.
*
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Bad dreams and bereavement (Running, Part 2)
*
To know bereavement intimately, first there is the need to have. First you have. That way you come to know what withdrawal means.
Elf could no longer go to church -- to any church -- because her mother was there. It was a mother of many other things besides herself. She could not go near.
She wandered her own city, a lost thing. Although there were other church doors, the fact is that faith is not so promiscuous as that == because there is a kind of promiscuity involved in swinging through different doors, cruising for your faith, given that membership is so much like marriage. So she swung around outside the doors and dreamed her dreams.
*
In one dream, Esau ran forward to his brother and embraced him. Esau then ran forward. In her dream he moved as from right to left -- like Hebrew.
In her dream he fell upon his brother's neck and kissed him and wept. A family restored, although broken.
In her dream the hairy man rushed up to kiss the one with the wounded thigh.
Israel tried to run but was unsupported in the thigh, weak, with a thigh touched from above. Open and wounded. Through that partition Elf entered the dream. Through the wound.
I have no one kissing me.
Israel's thigh was wounded and he could not run.
I can run but don't know where to run to. Only from, of course.
In the dream the other one rushed forward and the hair on his shoulder blades preened like feathers. Israel could barely stand but was supported. What did this dream signify?
In her dream the brothers embraced. Oil ran down the beard. In her dream God hovered, strangely present and pushing against her.
She woke up and sensed God's presence. But without a church she had no way to express it. And since she couldn't express it, it felt less real. Only the running felt real.
*
To know bereavement intimately, first there is the need to have. First you have. That way you come to know what withdrawal means.
Elf could no longer go to church -- to any church -- because her mother was there. It was a mother of many other things besides herself. She could not go near.
She wandered her own city, a lost thing. Although there were other church doors, the fact is that faith is not so promiscuous as that == because there is a kind of promiscuity involved in swinging through different doors, cruising for your faith, given that membership is so much like marriage. So she swung around outside the doors and dreamed her dreams.
*
In one dream, Esau ran forward to his brother and embraced him. Esau then ran forward. In her dream he moved as from right to left -- like Hebrew.
In her dream he fell upon his brother's neck and kissed him and wept. A family restored, although broken.
In her dream the hairy man rushed up to kiss the one with the wounded thigh.
Israel tried to run but was unsupported in the thigh, weak, with a thigh touched from above. Open and wounded. Through that partition Elf entered the dream. Through the wound.
I have no one kissing me.
Israel's thigh was wounded and he could not run.
I can run but don't know where to run to. Only from, of course.
In the dream the other one rushed forward and the hair on his shoulder blades preened like feathers. Israel could barely stand but was supported. What did this dream signify?
In her dream the brothers embraced. Oil ran down the beard. In her dream God hovered, strangely present and pushing against her.
She woke up and sensed God's presence. But without a church she had no way to express it. And since she couldn't express it, it felt less real. Only the running felt real.
*
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Running (Part 1)
*
She ran without thinking. She left her job without notice, left her belongings without looking back. Her community, that was now history.
She begged God to take her in. Yes but God acted on earth through humans and humans were always twisting God's will for their personal ends. So that actually facing God, finding God was harder than anyone would admit. Her own church had stood in the way.
The garden receded from her.
She was the devil's daughter. Why would God bother with her?
In the roadhouses every television had been twisted off station. Every TV showed endless loops and arabesques of the devil.
On one station they were playing "Babes in the Woods". In this episode Elf and her dead brother were sent outside to "play" -- or just rot -- while their mother entertained a gentleman caller. Above the children the trees bent like hoops and the paths were clammy, there was even a stagnant pond with tadpoles, the 2 of them were entranced. But when Elf crossed the water, she felt something or more candidly someone pulling her into the woods. It was not a question of "something vs nothing" but of "nothing vs someone". The garden had someone in it and this was her first taste of God, an experience not to be trivialized; nevertheless, her bossy brother pulled her back into the sunlight. We're not supposed to go there. Momma doesn't 'low it. And then they stumbled onto the well and looked into it, it was full of human bones. That's where Momma's boyfriends go, her brother said. Look away. Look away. And on another channel a chic blonde announcer, Duessa again, was cheerfully pushing some low carb diet while a circle of women, all of them as thin as skeletons, nodded their heads in anxious agreement.
END OF PART 1
*
She ran without thinking. She left her job without notice, left her belongings without looking back. Her community, that was now history.
She begged God to take her in. Yes but God acted on earth through humans and humans were always twisting God's will for their personal ends. So that actually facing God, finding God was harder than anyone would admit. Her own church had stood in the way.
The garden receded from her.
She was the devil's daughter. Why would God bother with her?
In the roadhouses every television had been twisted off station. Every TV showed endless loops and arabesques of the devil.
On one station they were playing "Babes in the Woods". In this episode Elf and her dead brother were sent outside to "play" -- or just rot -- while their mother entertained a gentleman caller. Above the children the trees bent like hoops and the paths were clammy, there was even a stagnant pond with tadpoles, the 2 of them were entranced. But when Elf crossed the water, she felt something or more candidly someone pulling her into the woods. It was not a question of "something vs nothing" but of "nothing vs someone". The garden had someone in it and this was her first taste of God, an experience not to be trivialized; nevertheless, her bossy brother pulled her back into the sunlight. We're not supposed to go there. Momma doesn't 'low it. And then they stumbled onto the well and looked into it, it was full of human bones. That's where Momma's boyfriends go, her brother said. Look away. Look away. And on another channel a chic blonde announcer, Duessa again, was cheerfully pushing some low carb diet while a circle of women, all of them as thin as skeletons, nodded their heads in anxious agreement.
END OF PART 1
*
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
The feet (Part 2)
*
The next is terrible but has to be told. The next is terrible. Are all the spiders crawled into the sanctuary? Why are my ankles so spidery all of a sudden? Who has planted all these carnivorous plants in the entryway? Why is everything so chilly of an unexpected and somber sudden? The next part will hardly go onto the page. It took me months to write it down -- I don't handle evil well, don't know how to describe it without facing the ghastly invitation to partake and die. The next part I don't like. The ink shrinks into itself and closes up its hands. Now when Elf went into the sanctuary the organ was playing, not music but the sort of scrolling or scribbling sound that an organ would make talking to itself. A hollow sound. This was the night of vigil, the night of prayer. My love walks into the blackness -- voluntarily! Pushed into the voluntary. All through the room people hung over the backs of their pews, praying and shivering. There were so many strangers, people drawn into the orbit of the holy week, almost the last sacred space left in America. At the far side a bony woman hung down with her blond hair over her eyes. Why had Don run away?
Elf huddled at the back of the church where seekers usually hovered. On this Thursday, however, people did not seek but were only found. The sweat of the Lord fell like a mound of blood. Indrawn breath grew harsh with the sense of divinity near.
The interim rector spoke words of simulated humility while the organ played. It played -- and yet there was no music for this service. Then people started filing forward to have their feet washed. Elf folded her damp socks and walked along the wet feeling upward-tilted cement. Then the first foot washer slipped away and another person down at the tub who, when she looked up, had Duessa's eyes -- mother's eyes -- blue spring water with ice prickles floating as in air. It was Duessa, smiling and shaking her blonde mane that was thousands of years old. The devil incarnate. A horror in the holy place. A sacrilege as quiet as a prayer.
Oh my darling daughter. I've caught up with you at last.
But no! Elf cried. You're not allowed in church! Go away! Leave me!
END OF PART 2
*
The next is terrible but has to be told. The next is terrible. Are all the spiders crawled into the sanctuary? Why are my ankles so spidery all of a sudden? Who has planted all these carnivorous plants in the entryway? Why is everything so chilly of an unexpected and somber sudden? The next part will hardly go onto the page. It took me months to write it down -- I don't handle evil well, don't know how to describe it without facing the ghastly invitation to partake and die. The next part I don't like. The ink shrinks into itself and closes up its hands. Now when Elf went into the sanctuary the organ was playing, not music but the sort of scrolling or scribbling sound that an organ would make talking to itself. A hollow sound. This was the night of vigil, the night of prayer. My love walks into the blackness -- voluntarily! Pushed into the voluntary. All through the room people hung over the backs of their pews, praying and shivering. There were so many strangers, people drawn into the orbit of the holy week, almost the last sacred space left in America. At the far side a bony woman hung down with her blond hair over her eyes. Why had Don run away?
Elf huddled at the back of the church where seekers usually hovered. On this Thursday, however, people did not seek but were only found. The sweat of the Lord fell like a mound of blood. Indrawn breath grew harsh with the sense of divinity near.
The interim rector spoke words of simulated humility while the organ played. It played -- and yet there was no music for this service. Then people started filing forward to have their feet washed. Elf folded her damp socks and walked along the wet feeling upward-tilted cement. Then the first foot washer slipped away and another person down at the tub who, when she looked up, had Duessa's eyes -- mother's eyes -- blue spring water with ice prickles floating as in air. It was Duessa, smiling and shaking her blonde mane that was thousands of years old. The devil incarnate. A horror in the holy place. A sacrilege as quiet as a prayer.
Oh my darling daughter. I've caught up with you at last.
But no! Elf cried. You're not allowed in church! Go away! Leave me!
END OF PART 2
*
Monday, May 16, 2005
The feet that stood still (Part 1)
*
The afternoon of Maundy Thursday. Mr and Mrs Hypostasis in the gym. She was Body. He was Soul. This day she was anxious to get to church and pray. She felt uneasy but he as usual took the antagonistic role, flexing his moral muscle, so to speak, pushing her to improve herself in the way that he chose. He was quite adverse to pain -- in himself -- but welcomed its powerful effect on his mate. She sat miserable at the 10th station, lifting blackish blocks of metal. He supervised.
Shouldn't we wash and get ready for church? she asked.
One more set, darling. One more set.
Oh it's time. Oh it's time.
And when there no longer really was enough time, he brushed his hands and said: Come on, let's make tracks. Not be late. Rude to be late. And the 2 of them went off to their separate ablutions. Driving to church, quarreling of course, they passed the gym instructor, another member, and offered her a ride. It would be so nice to have you in the car with us. No thanks, you are so kind but no, Elf said. I love to walk.
Passing with head high through any questionable blocks. Above her the sun lost confidence and its butterscotch candy melted away. Elf walked through the beautiful garden, its darkness and protection, and entered the church.
To find Don in the entryway, white as a coat of paint, unable to speak. What's wrong? What's wrong?
And he dashed out of church without saying a word.
END OF PART 1
The afternoon of Maundy Thursday. Mr and Mrs Hypostasis in the gym. She was Body. He was Soul. This day she was anxious to get to church and pray. She felt uneasy but he as usual took the antagonistic role, flexing his moral muscle, so to speak, pushing her to improve herself in the way that he chose. He was quite adverse to pain -- in himself -- but welcomed its powerful effect on his mate. She sat miserable at the 10th station, lifting blackish blocks of metal. He supervised.
Shouldn't we wash and get ready for church? she asked.
One more set, darling. One more set.
Oh it's time. Oh it's time.
And when there no longer really was enough time, he brushed his hands and said: Come on, let's make tracks. Not be late. Rude to be late. And the 2 of them went off to their separate ablutions. Driving to church, quarreling of course, they passed the gym instructor, another member, and offered her a ride. It would be so nice to have you in the car with us. No thanks, you are so kind but no, Elf said. I love to walk.
Passing with head high through any questionable blocks. Above her the sun lost confidence and its butterscotch candy melted away. Elf walked through the beautiful garden, its darkness and protection, and entered the church.
To find Don in the entryway, white as a coat of paint, unable to speak. What's wrong? What's wrong?
And he dashed out of church without saying a word.
END OF PART 1
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