*
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.
*
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
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.
*
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