*
A church bell rings -- in your head, not outside. When you recognize it, then it's physical sound, a vibration. It was inside first somehow.
It sings: true prayer is conduct! Prayer is conduct! True prayer is behavior.
Never pray for someone you can materially help without also providing that help. The help and the prayer: one seamless thing to God. A pretty garment.
So Elf's bones grew moist in the Christian air.
She could not close off -- moved in the mist of conversion, where being Christian still seemed easy, natural.
Free of the triple demons? (Avarice, gluttony, self-esteem). By no means. But they were placed, limited, parenthesized for now. She fed on God and fed herself with God.
Ordinary (?) people found her hard to be around. Her boss would complain about the times she would pause on the floor, move through a trance on the gym floor, in the middle (so to speak) of her own swinging arms.
I feel elated and I can't explain. Her own body spoke in tongues to her. No time or space to analyze this.
Serving the hot meals, she smiled like an idiot. That's all right. I am an idiot. With incorrectness she gave her loose money away. The "poor" found her a bit eerie, but interesting. You could say otherworldly.
Wrapped in time, not at al ltimeless, but in a different time going a different way. She hovered more than cycled.
When happiness walked the labyrinth in the porch behind the kitchen it would seem to sink into the turns and acquire a spin that difficult to carry back into ordinary, repetitive, humdrum daily life.
*
Depression would recur when she brought her gaze back to the people around her: from those near homelessness to those like Ainsley who were richly housed and miserable. Happiness was not an art to be taught, did not have prescribed steps, could not be passed on like a disease. If you scrutinized it coldly it disappeared -- like faith. It remained but wasn't yours anymore.
Don't just stand there, honey, you have to dish out that soup. Elf would fill the bowls so high that clients had trouble carrying them.
This is absolutely the finest soup in the world, Loopy Billy said one day. Listen, if you put this soup in cans and sold it, you'd turn the church into a billionaire. This soup is magic. This is the best soup ever made. (Pointing to a pot of zucchini soaked in salty tomato.)
Billy talked on and on in his sweet disorderly way, while in the background, behind him in the hall, Elf saw (but was too repressed to pursue) a familiar wraith moving from table to table, eating pieces of bread that others had left behind. It was her love, her true one, her lost one, now reduced below destitution, her beloved Dave. But by the time she managed to track him he was long gone.
*
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
The Eucharist Repeated (Part 2)
*
There were days when she felt like an uncontrollable child. She would fidget during the sermon, she would not attend to the mass of wordage they called "prayers". The music would push her away. And then the liturgy would begin, the story- telling, the blessing of the bread and the wine. Then they would all walk up to the altar, fat and thin, infirm and otherwise (if any otherwise). The priest would offer those things from the table and the people would swallow them, take them in. And no matter what -- no matter what -- she would return to her seat assuaged.
You could talk about the strangeness of a God giving as a gift what was not at all a separated gift but rather that God's own self. The words were ture but they were orthogonal. The Eucharist went a different way, did a different thing. It silenced the words. And she would return to her seat assuaged.
*
On some Sundays the established families would plant themselves in their seats without even looking around. Had Christ sat next to them, had he even looked like one of the classic portraits, they would not have been likely to notice. In a separate fluttering group, remote and not quite estranged, the so-called seekers would sit as close to the door as possible, expressing with their bodies that they were there and yet not 100% there or at least not yet... and what a long patch of space and time that "not yet" surely covered! Indeed the seekers did not like to be categorized, not even as seekers. They hovered like hummingbirds over their own sweet tasting hestitation. Can I just plunge in? When will I know the answer for sure? Is it all right never to know? Is it all right to stay where I am forever?
And the established families and the seekers co-existed as if *too* comfortably, their mutual tolerance almost saying that this incomplete state was the best thing attainable, a sort of final happiness, not even to be questioned: a good as the enemy of the best. And Elf sat neither established nor a seeker, not exactly, nor could she say se was in-between the two. Perhaps God wanted more from her.
The service was always too long, the interim pastor liked his own voice so much too much, and the congregation tried to routinize its exaltation -- the presence of the Lord -- as if it could be automatically captured at the exact same moment every Sunday, as though exaltation could be trapped like that, or isolated from this other strange hodge-podge that we call human conduct. It was always there but it was elsewhere. So her mind wandered without rest. Then the wandering suspended and the Eucharist began. She rose from her seat, approached. And even before she reached the altar, it always happened.
She was assuaged. She couldn't help it.
*
There were days when she felt like an uncontrollable child. She would fidget during the sermon, she would not attend to the mass of wordage they called "prayers". The music would push her away. And then the liturgy would begin, the story- telling, the blessing of the bread and the wine. Then they would all walk up to the altar, fat and thin, infirm and otherwise (if any otherwise). The priest would offer those things from the table and the people would swallow them, take them in. And no matter what -- no matter what -- she would return to her seat assuaged.
You could talk about the strangeness of a God giving as a gift what was not at all a separated gift but rather that God's own self. The words were ture but they were orthogonal. The Eucharist went a different way, did a different thing. It silenced the words. And she would return to her seat assuaged.
*
On some Sundays the established families would plant themselves in their seats without even looking around. Had Christ sat next to them, had he even looked like one of the classic portraits, they would not have been likely to notice. In a separate fluttering group, remote and not quite estranged, the so-called seekers would sit as close to the door as possible, expressing with their bodies that they were there and yet not 100% there or at least not yet... and what a long patch of space and time that "not yet" surely covered! Indeed the seekers did not like to be categorized, not even as seekers. They hovered like hummingbirds over their own sweet tasting hestitation. Can I just plunge in? When will I know the answer for sure? Is it all right never to know? Is it all right to stay where I am forever?
And the established families and the seekers co-existed as if *too* comfortably, their mutual tolerance almost saying that this incomplete state was the best thing attainable, a sort of final happiness, not even to be questioned: a good as the enemy of the best. And Elf sat neither established nor a seeker, not exactly, nor could she say se was in-between the two. Perhaps God wanted more from her.
The service was always too long, the interim pastor liked his own voice so much too much, and the congregation tried to routinize its exaltation -- the presence of the Lord -- as if it could be automatically captured at the exact same moment every Sunday, as though exaltation could be trapped like that, or isolated from this other strange hodge-podge that we call human conduct. It was always there but it was elsewhere. So her mind wandered without rest. Then the wandering suspended and the Eucharist began. She rose from her seat, approached. And even before she reached the altar, it always happened.
She was assuaged. She couldn't help it.
*
Friday, March 25, 2005
The Eucharist repeated (Part 1)
*
At Elfs covenant class, veteran members taught her the rudiments of faith but also and most of all they taught her that she was worth teaching. And this was a lesson that embossed itself on one's heart, on anyone's heart. Am I worthy of learning this? The members treated her with courtesy, with respect, with a certain subdued something that she decided was love.
And after a certain number of weeks, the group took a breath and seemed to agree that it was time. Prayer occurred, a meal, fellowship. She walked through an ancient forest with Elise, confessing how low and broken she felt. We know that, Elise said. Then there was an awful time of hesitation, a cleared throat of minutes and days, and Elf became the Christian that she already imperceptibly was. She no longer needed to cross her arms at the altar. The Eucharists began and then began to be repeated.
Father Sam, oh Father Sam (she wrote), I am the same thoughtless idiot as I was before, and yet now I am sealed. As if protected. Boosted. And somehow exhilarated, almost as if without a cause and this is so disconcerting.
Father Sam (she wrote), I am afraid -- that I might be a hypocrite and fooling everyone.
END OF PART 1
*
At Elfs covenant class, veteran members taught her the rudiments of faith but also and most of all they taught her that she was worth teaching. And this was a lesson that embossed itself on one's heart, on anyone's heart. Am I worthy of learning this? The members treated her with courtesy, with respect, with a certain subdued something that she decided was love.
And after a certain number of weeks, the group took a breath and seemed to agree that it was time. Prayer occurred, a meal, fellowship. She walked through an ancient forest with Elise, confessing how low and broken she felt. We know that, Elise said. Then there was an awful time of hesitation, a cleared throat of minutes and days, and Elf became the Christian that she already imperceptibly was. She no longer needed to cross her arms at the altar. The Eucharists began and then began to be repeated.
Father Sam, oh Father Sam (she wrote), I am the same thoughtless idiot as I was before, and yet now I am sealed. As if protected. Boosted. And somehow exhilarated, almost as if without a cause and this is so disconcerting.
Father Sam (she wrote), I am afraid -- that I might be a hypocrite and fooling everyone.
END OF PART 1
*
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Elf (Part 10): The boys
*
The day before her covenant class Elf stayed late at the gym and has to walk home in full dusk. There weren't very many bad parts in the town, the maybe weren't even enough bad neighborhoods really -- there were only a few blocks here and there that the residentialists and purists had forgotten to take a good look at. Some of these were demoralizing to something of an extreme. And one of them was in her path.
The boys stood doing so little. The boys stared at her. She suddenly had the most appalling sense of herself, something that she knew she had to hide from the boys: a sense that she was prey.
I am not prey.
But her sense of being only half a Christian hit her very hard.
She believed -- she was safe -- but one foot still lay wedged in unbelief -- it tried to pull her into peril that she couldn't even imagine properly. Nor did she want to. And then the ugliest boy in the gang took a metallo-plastic object, a tiberius, out of a paper bag and began to threaten her with it. To describe the apparatus would be to cede the story to a hoodlum. For such is the sucking force of empathy and imagination that, in a work of art, merely to describe something is to add a sort of hallowing to its meaning, even when you reject that meaning and everything it implies. And I won't do that.
So he wielded it and insulted her with it, saying: Happy Valentine's Day, sweet girl. And Duessa, flipping idly through the stations on her Cosmical TV of Evil, abruptly sucked in her breath and watched with great interest.
Elf looked at the other boys, at their liquid, rather nonexistent faces. She suffered a sudden horrible memory of wielding a knife, of cutting through a monster's substance in a visionary nightclub. Shaking off her memory, she took the thug's wrist and pushed it away from her. There was a small snapping sound inside his wrist, the crying out of a tiny bone. Then the punk began crying like a baby and the others, the ones with no faces -- they simply disappeared, gone almost without a breath of air, it was hard to believe that they had been there, that anything had happened. Ultimately nothing had.
The woman walked home, miserable now, feeling as if she had been raped, although she hadn't, not quite. What had been raped somehow was the innocent piece of ground that lay where she walked. One sensed a demon's shadow over the block she traversed. She prayed, hyperventilated, and closed her eyes.
Mother is near. Protect me, Lord.
*
The day before her covenant class Elf stayed late at the gym and has to walk home in full dusk. There weren't very many bad parts in the town, the maybe weren't even enough bad neighborhoods really -- there were only a few blocks here and there that the residentialists and purists had forgotten to take a good look at. Some of these were demoralizing to something of an extreme. And one of them was in her path.
The boys stood doing so little. The boys stared at her. She suddenly had the most appalling sense of herself, something that she knew she had to hide from the boys: a sense that she was prey.
I am not prey.
But her sense of being only half a Christian hit her very hard.
She believed -- she was safe -- but one foot still lay wedged in unbelief -- it tried to pull her into peril that she couldn't even imagine properly. Nor did she want to. And then the ugliest boy in the gang took a metallo-plastic object, a tiberius, out of a paper bag and began to threaten her with it. To describe the apparatus would be to cede the story to a hoodlum. For such is the sucking force of empathy and imagination that, in a work of art, merely to describe something is to add a sort of hallowing to its meaning, even when you reject that meaning and everything it implies. And I won't do that.
So he wielded it and insulted her with it, saying: Happy Valentine's Day, sweet girl. And Duessa, flipping idly through the stations on her Cosmical TV of Evil, abruptly sucked in her breath and watched with great interest.
Elf looked at the other boys, at their liquid, rather nonexistent faces. She suffered a sudden horrible memory of wielding a knife, of cutting through a monster's substance in a visionary nightclub. Shaking off her memory, she took the thug's wrist and pushed it away from her. There was a small snapping sound inside his wrist, the crying out of a tiny bone. Then the punk began crying like a baby and the others, the ones with no faces -- they simply disappeared, gone almost without a breath of air, it was hard to believe that they had been there, that anything had happened. Ultimately nothing had.
The woman walked home, miserable now, feeling as if she had been raped, although she hadn't, not quite. What had been raped somehow was the innocent piece of ground that lay where she walked. One sensed a demon's shadow over the block she traversed. She prayed, hyperventilated, and closed her eyes.
Mother is near. Protect me, Lord.
*
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
An imbalance to restore
*
Time passed, a current, a churn. The 2 young women, trainers at a gym, were stretching between classes. Ainsley's leg was raised in an impossibly perfect liftt. She looked like a beautiful slim bird. She pressed her spine into the blue foam and switched the 2 legs like a magician waving 2 scarves. They sliced the air acutely. Elf was a clumsier model altogether. She lay back and let that hard abstraction Exercise crunch her stomach like a hungry ogre. She was feeling too happy to concentrate. She watched as her friend seemed to "dance upside down".
Still I think you're going to have to do it (she finally said). You're going to have to learn how to pray for him and with him. I'm talking about, well you know who I'm talking about.
Oh no, Ainsley said. It is logically impossible. I pray but when the object of a prayer is so impossible, so false, then the prayer becomes false. And therefore worthless. No prayer is possible. Not for him, not now, not yet.
She had collapsed to the floor, as if invaded by an imbalance. The 2 of them began vigorously exercising, immersed in a willful pain whose purpose they wouldn't have been able to describe, though that didn't mean they didn't know what it was.
Elf said later: you must have been called to do this. The fact that it disgusts you so much is probably a sign that you must do it. Maybe. Why would something be disagreeable if it weren't also important.
But I can't have been called to do something I am physically unable to do!
I don't see why not. Lots of people have had exactly that happen.
If exercise is so painful yet necessary and deeply sought, wouldn't the same thing be true of the ultimate exercise? Namely, of course, prayer?
And if it were only easy would it need to be done?
*
Time passed, a current, a churn. The 2 young women, trainers at a gym, were stretching between classes. Ainsley's leg was raised in an impossibly perfect liftt. She looked like a beautiful slim bird. She pressed her spine into the blue foam and switched the 2 legs like a magician waving 2 scarves. They sliced the air acutely. Elf was a clumsier model altogether. She lay back and let that hard abstraction Exercise crunch her stomach like a hungry ogre. She was feeling too happy to concentrate. She watched as her friend seemed to "dance upside down".
Still I think you're going to have to do it (she finally said). You're going to have to learn how to pray for him and with him. I'm talking about, well you know who I'm talking about.
Oh no, Ainsley said. It is logically impossible. I pray but when the object of a prayer is so impossible, so false, then the prayer becomes false. And therefore worthless. No prayer is possible. Not for him, not now, not yet.
She had collapsed to the floor, as if invaded by an imbalance. The 2 of them began vigorously exercising, immersed in a willful pain whose purpose they wouldn't have been able to describe, though that didn't mean they didn't know what it was.
Elf said later: you must have been called to do this. The fact that it disgusts you so much is probably a sign that you must do it. Maybe. Why would something be disagreeable if it weren't also important.
But I can't have been called to do something I am physically unable to do!
I don't see why not. Lots of people have had exactly that happen.
If exercise is so painful yet necessary and deeply sought, wouldn't the same thing be true of the ultimate exercise? Namely, of course, prayer?
And if it were only easy would it need to be done?
*
Monday, March 14, 2005
What is -- no, where is -- discernment?
*
Discernment is not a human attribute, like one more thing that a person has or boasts; if that were all, we would hardly respect it. Discernment not only exists but, if you will, pre-exists. Pre-exists the discerning human for sure. A human can only attain it as something that was already there before it was attained -- a measure that knows the way to measure what in reality is -- what is -- but "what is" itself includes discernment.
It is not a ring you put on because, if you do discern (not many do) then the truth is that discernment is wearing you, not the other way around.
You can't boast you have it. It isn't yours.
It can't just be described and measured like the height and width of a house. It built the house and built the measure that measures the house. The act of measure is its own. It is not a thing to be manipulated and mistreated. The only way to describe it is to have it -- that is to wear it, to attain it, to let it well up in you. It is like clothes that you have borrowed, like a style that you have assumed.
Discernment isn't yours. And it is hardly impersonal. "For that we would be unclothed but clothed upon."
*
Do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it one two three four.
*
There is a paradox of involvement here as well as a refusal on discernment's part to be talked about as though the talker stood airily above it and examined it from the outside. There can be no tourists of discernment. The paradox is like the one about making a vow. You say to yourself that it is wrong to keep making vows that are not kept, that such behavior wrongs the Lord of all vows, who is also the Lord of *you*. So you say: I will stop vowing and simply try to live the best I can, day by day. A worthy goal, but this "rejection of the vow" is in the final analysis also a vow. So you simply cannot be uninvolved and need to stop trying.
*
Discernment is not a human attribute, like one more thing that a person has or boasts; if that were all, we would hardly respect it. Discernment not only exists but, if you will, pre-exists. Pre-exists the discerning human for sure. A human can only attain it as something that was already there before it was attained -- a measure that knows the way to measure what in reality is -- what is -- but "what is" itself includes discernment.
It is not a ring you put on because, if you do discern (not many do) then the truth is that discernment is wearing you, not the other way around.
You can't boast you have it. It isn't yours.
It can't just be described and measured like the height and width of a house. It built the house and built the measure that measures the house. The act of measure is its own. It is not a thing to be manipulated and mistreated. The only way to describe it is to have it -- that is to wear it, to attain it, to let it well up in you. It is like clothes that you have borrowed, like a style that you have assumed.
Discernment isn't yours. And it is hardly impersonal. "For that we would be unclothed but clothed upon."
*
Do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it one two three four.
*
There is a paradox of involvement here as well as a refusal on discernment's part to be talked about as though the talker stood airily above it and examined it from the outside. There can be no tourists of discernment. The paradox is like the one about making a vow. You say to yourself that it is wrong to keep making vows that are not kept, that such behavior wrongs the Lord of all vows, who is also the Lord of *you*. So you say: I will stop vowing and simply try to live the best I can, day by day. A worthy goal, but this "rejection of the vow" is in the final analysis also a vow. So you simply cannot be uninvolved and need to stop trying.
*
Friday, March 11, 2005
Continuation
*
How can I? Ainsley said. I want to but how can I? You can't pray for something that voids your mouth and makes your prayer nonexistent.
So the girls sat talking.
I cna't do it, Ainsley said, not won't but can't. How do I pray for the social security I love and at the same time for *him*?
It is like praying no prayer.
Elise carefully sat silent. She let the girls go on talking. She embraced listening as a discipline. A long pause.
What I think you do (Elf said) is pray for his discernment. You leave a little space there. You are pretty sure you know what he *should* discern but you don't pray for *that*.
You simply pray for discernment, more or less throwing your own self into God's hands. Then you don't look down!
There is a right way, there must be, so you pray for him to find it. Security is worth praying for. He must think so too. (A long pause.)
*
Elf (Elise said) you are a person of discernment yourself, a person of faith. I am glad you are a part of this parish.
Because you discern discernment very well.
(However, discernment is nothing without vigilance.)
*
How can I? Ainsley said. I want to but how can I? You can't pray for something that voids your mouth and makes your prayer nonexistent.
So the girls sat talking.
I cna't do it, Ainsley said, not won't but can't. How do I pray for the social security I love and at the same time for *him*?
It is like praying no prayer.
Elise carefully sat silent. She let the girls go on talking. She embraced listening as a discipline. A long pause.
What I think you do (Elf said) is pray for his discernment. You leave a little space there. You are pretty sure you know what he *should* discern but you don't pray for *that*.
You simply pray for discernment, more or less throwing your own self into God's hands. Then you don't look down!
There is a right way, there must be, so you pray for him to find it. Security is worth praying for. He must think so too. (A long pause.)
*
Elf (Elise said) you are a person of discernment yourself, a person of faith. I am glad you are a part of this parish.
Because you discern discernment very well.
(However, discernment is nothing without vigilance.)
*
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Elf (Part 8): The inability to pray
*
The oddest thing about Ainsley was her inability to pray for George Bush. This woman of faith was not a rebellious Christian, that is, she didn't think so. She did not pride herself on independence, au contraire. She felt strapped to God. She loved the very places where she couldn't move. Close to God, who would want to be elsewhere? All right, it wasn't that. Her problem was something else. She was not a Democrat, not even close. Furthermore, she never refused to pray for an enemy, say a warrior, a zealot, a sociopath, or for any person who happened to wish her ill (and few did). She did not refuse prayer for any human on earth, whether known to her or unknown. This was, as far as she knew, simply the truth. She did not refuse prayer for anyone, not for no one, definitely, including the President. So. No refusal was involved, rather inability. She could not pray for this one. Her throat closed like a pipe when the indicated moment came. This one thing she was unable to do.
I believe the end of civilization has come and this strange man has somehow brought it, she said. Now here is the eerie part.
I know very well (she said) that the inhabitants of the future will make fun of all the people like me for our intensity. They will quote what they will call my overreaction and they will laugh. And laugh and laugh, I can hear the sound. But what will be the nature of that laugh? How to assess that laugh? That is, the quality of the feeling's future, so to speak.
Babies will be born. Schools will exist. The old will survive, a few of them. And despite attempts to eradicate the poor (as opposed to eradicating poverty), there is no question but that the poor will still be with us, that is, with *them*, the laughers. Yes but who exactly will be laughing when the future laughs? Will there be a person inside the sound of the laughing? When they make fun, who will it be that is making fun? Will those people still exist, in a civilized sense, *as* a civilized sense?
If the person laughing is *not* a person, then won't I be in fact the one laughing? If a culture of measure exists now (and I think it does), what guarantee that it still exists then? And if it doesn't, if measure is gone away, what then will there be to laugh about?
In other words, will my inability to pray for him be vindicated even if it's not? Will the person who laughs at me no longer be a person?
*
The oddest thing about Ainsley was her inability to pray for George Bush. This woman of faith was not a rebellious Christian, that is, she didn't think so. She did not pride herself on independence, au contraire. She felt strapped to God. She loved the very places where she couldn't move. Close to God, who would want to be elsewhere? All right, it wasn't that. Her problem was something else. She was not a Democrat, not even close. Furthermore, she never refused to pray for an enemy, say a warrior, a zealot, a sociopath, or for any person who happened to wish her ill (and few did). She did not refuse prayer for any human on earth, whether known to her or unknown. This was, as far as she knew, simply the truth. She did not refuse prayer for anyone, not for no one, definitely, including the President. So. No refusal was involved, rather inability. She could not pray for this one. Her throat closed like a pipe when the indicated moment came. This one thing she was unable to do.
I believe the end of civilization has come and this strange man has somehow brought it, she said. Now here is the eerie part.
I know very well (she said) that the inhabitants of the future will make fun of all the people like me for our intensity. They will quote what they will call my overreaction and they will laugh. And laugh and laugh, I can hear the sound. But what will be the nature of that laugh? How to assess that laugh? That is, the quality of the feeling's future, so to speak.
Babies will be born. Schools will exist. The old will survive, a few of them. And despite attempts to eradicate the poor (as opposed to eradicating poverty), there is no question but that the poor will still be with us, that is, with *them*, the laughers. Yes but who exactly will be laughing when the future laughs? Will there be a person inside the sound of the laughing? When they make fun, who will it be that is making fun? Will those people still exist, in a civilized sense, *as* a civilized sense?
If the person laughing is *not* a person, then won't I be in fact the one laughing? If a culture of measure exists now (and I think it does), what guarantee that it still exists then? And if it doesn't, if measure is gone away, what then will there be to laugh about?
In other words, will my inability to pray for him be vindicated even if it's not? Will the person who laughs at me no longer be a person?
*
Monday, March 07, 2005
Duessa grooming
*
Duessa lingered in the ladies room of the coffee shop near the gym. She pondered her bag of wrinkles. Put on this one, take off that. Who shall we be today?
She had eyes like light blue stones. They were great for girl to girl talks and they also fascinated men.
The person they no longer interested was herself. The mirror sagged in weariness to see her face once again. Evil is banal and derivative. There's nothing there to keep you getting up in the morning.
She placed a thin line at the side of her nose.
Duessa was weary, ready to die. Could she do it?
She knocked her bag at the side of the sink and all the pictures of Elf fell out. Daughter dear, you hate me, I don't care. As long as I can have just a wee bit of control.
She smiled at her mug in the mirror and rearranged all the byways. A woman came into the room, stared at the pictures on the floor and frowned. Duessa pointed her finger at her and cursed silently, watched the stranger clutch her stomach.
Why isn't evil fun anymore? she just had to wonder. After all, what profit was there for her in someone else's pain? No artistry, no anything. I think my imitation life is a waste of time. Depression fell like a weighted blanket. And nothing like Zoloft was ever going to work on her, not on her.
Her misery was an itch that no medicine in the world would ever scratch. She couldn't even feel proud about that -- it was just a fact.
*
Later she sat in the coffee shop pondering. When the coffee came she gave a quick taste and then forced herself to swallow some. Gran dio! It had the taste of sulphur, the aroma of sulphur, its essence was sulphur. It left terrible orange burn marks down the sides of her soul. She began to retch in a delicate way so that no one could see, while behind her paramedics came to take away the woman stranger in the ladies' room. Duessa cried into her coffee but the tears were of no consequence, not for her. Because the tears were only for herself, they were for no one. Her daughter would probably never see them.
So her tears led to nothing, meant nothing. She waited and waited for her heart to feel "strangely warmed". But the warmth didn't come, not for her. And never would. And never would.
*
Duessa lingered in the ladies room of the coffee shop near the gym. She pondered her bag of wrinkles. Put on this one, take off that. Who shall we be today?
She had eyes like light blue stones. They were great for girl to girl talks and they also fascinated men.
The person they no longer interested was herself. The mirror sagged in weariness to see her face once again. Evil is banal and derivative. There's nothing there to keep you getting up in the morning.
She placed a thin line at the side of her nose.
Duessa was weary, ready to die. Could she do it?
She knocked her bag at the side of the sink and all the pictures of Elf fell out. Daughter dear, you hate me, I don't care. As long as I can have just a wee bit of control.
She smiled at her mug in the mirror and rearranged all the byways. A woman came into the room, stared at the pictures on the floor and frowned. Duessa pointed her finger at her and cursed silently, watched the stranger clutch her stomach.
Why isn't evil fun anymore? she just had to wonder. After all, what profit was there for her in someone else's pain? No artistry, no anything. I think my imitation life is a waste of time. Depression fell like a weighted blanket. And nothing like Zoloft was ever going to work on her, not on her.
Her misery was an itch that no medicine in the world would ever scratch. She couldn't even feel proud about that -- it was just a fact.
*
Later she sat in the coffee shop pondering. When the coffee came she gave a quick taste and then forced herself to swallow some. Gran dio! It had the taste of sulphur, the aroma of sulphur, its essence was sulphur. It left terrible orange burn marks down the sides of her soul. She began to retch in a delicate way so that no one could see, while behind her paramedics came to take away the woman stranger in the ladies' room. Duessa cried into her coffee but the tears were of no consequence, not for her. Because the tears were only for herself, they were for no one. Her daughter would probably never see them.
So her tears led to nothing, meant nothing. She waited and waited for her heart to feel "strangely warmed". But the warmth didn't come, not for her. And never would. And never would.
*
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Elf (Part 7): The girl who fell in love with God
*
Dear Father Sam (Elf wrote). Everything I have God has given me. When I feel most autonomous, no, indeed, at that precise moment in fact, the power I feel is God's power. The release, the freedom, the autonomy -- whose are they but of God.
Father Sam (Elf wrote), I am in love. I cannot stop thinking about the one I love. A teenage insomnia from too much love. A song on the radio that lasts for hours.
Father Sam (Elf wrote), I think there is a chance that even a piece of crap like me can become a -- whisper that word -- a Christian, Father Sam. Maybe God will work this strange effect in me. I can't say not, how would I know that?
Maybe, Father Sam (Elf wrote), my parentage will not determine the rest of my life from now on. After all, the devil is not *really* a parent and never engendered anything. Except in a manner of speaking. Which is a manner I wish to renounce.
Father Sam.
Father Sam, Father Sam. Why did you never mention this joy, not once, not even in passing? It is the feeling of being on track -- or at least on track to being on track. Not to be but to be on the way to being.
Father Sam, I stopped resisting. I walked in and sat down. And there they welcomed me or seemed to. Now I am one of those stereotypes, a "churchgoer". How very strange.
Father, how I wish you were here with me. I am so sorry that they have dismissed you yet again.
*
Father Sam, pray for me. That I can be the thing that I want to be. Not a finished person but at least a yearning. (And what was I before?)
*
Dear Father Sam (Elf wrote). Everything I have God has given me. When I feel most autonomous, no, indeed, at that precise moment in fact, the power I feel is God's power. The release, the freedom, the autonomy -- whose are they but of God.
Father Sam (Elf wrote), I am in love. I cannot stop thinking about the one I love. A teenage insomnia from too much love. A song on the radio that lasts for hours.
Father Sam (Elf wrote), I think there is a chance that even a piece of crap like me can become a -- whisper that word -- a Christian, Father Sam. Maybe God will work this strange effect in me. I can't say not, how would I know that?
Maybe, Father Sam (Elf wrote), my parentage will not determine the rest of my life from now on. After all, the devil is not *really* a parent and never engendered anything. Except in a manner of speaking. Which is a manner I wish to renounce.
Father Sam.
Father Sam, Father Sam. Why did you never mention this joy, not once, not even in passing? It is the feeling of being on track -- or at least on track to being on track. Not to be but to be on the way to being.
Father Sam, I stopped resisting. I walked in and sat down. And there they welcomed me or seemed to. Now I am one of those stereotypes, a "churchgoer". How very strange.
Father, how I wish you were here with me. I am so sorry that they have dismissed you yet again.
*
Father Sam, pray for me. That I can be the thing that I want to be. Not a finished person but at least a yearning. (And what was I before?)
*
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