The place of being - Chap 1: Parable of the garden

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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.

*

"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?

*

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.

*

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.

*