*
Cast your memory back, let the shell of denial crack open, remember. Remember how it was with you as a child. How vulnerable and weak you were.
No thinking. Estelle sick, and soon thereafter dead. School a nightmare because the meaner kids sensed your weakness after what Max had done (or did they sense your *own* sense of having consented?). Sweet sister Una away at school with the Swiss to be finished and turned into a stranger. A stranger! And so the boys in the schoolyard said, What are you a coward? No. So you went out with them. Then when you backed down they used force. It is like some clerks' compulsion to tidiness, the bully's need to take weakness and make it weaker, as though trying to blot it out like a clerical error in God's copybook. Sad mean fools. Cast your memory back, recall how it was.
Jorge's life: blessed but so bad-feeling. Yet even the suffering came as if wrapped in God's own cotton wool -- joy itself never that far away. To suffer at all, first you have had this gift: existence. And memory is a form it takes.
They ragged you and harassed you first at school, they scented blood. Pretty boy for a greaser. Leave me alone, won't you leave me alone? Am I supposed to hit you? I don't want to hit you.
You looked soft because that's what you were. You were not the hard person you are now. You hadn't been taught to hit others to win their respect. None of that in the garden. It had been assumed that violence was a perversion.
One afternoon the two worst bullies dragged you through the weeds. There was the shack where the caretaker's son lived. The caretaker's son. Now the caretaker's son had been maybe a bit brain damaged from the war, everybody said, some invisible headwound, but that was only the start, it got much worse, he became abandoned by his friends because he couldn't find a way to do things in balance. For instance, if you lie then lie in a hesitant way so as to be believed. But he didn't lie at all. His wife said he'd lost the knack to make love with passion but not overmuch passion, not insistent, now he couldn't find the sweet spot before it bothered her. He tried so hard that she grew irritated. His emotions were not a show. When they were there they just came out -- in honesty, in fact. He'd become a bit of a Christian, the type that people find so boring.
So soon after his father refused to see him, his wife left him. One two. Then he moved into the shack in the woods, squatting on the campus land that hadn't been reclaimed yet. The place was a garden if you looked at it that way. To the shack of the caretaker's son the 2 boys dragged their prey. They pushed then dragged you through the weeds. Jorge, they took you by the shack. And you let them.
Memory does not take you to a different place, it is not an exotic locale, it is right here. All of this is here -- it is both in you and itself is you. You excavate your own present self and find, to your surprise, the past. Still living, still in fact occurring, and still in need of resolution.
They fed you with dope, which just made you feel sleepy and congested, dull and useless. Then they gave you something else and you began to hallucinate. Even the pounding felt like a hallucination. And it was like having a weakness tying you at every articulate point, at every edge. Your tongue, your throat, your brain. The parts of your body all felt depressed by a single weight. Then the things happened to you that were like what your uncle had done and the desolating thought began to hit you that you were somehow willing it on. You lay collapsed in the weeds when the caretaker's son came home. Hardly a person at all. A worm and not a man. Somehow cocooned by joy. Existing, still existing.
Now as for the caretaker's son. His dog had 3 legs. Sometimes she stood as though balancing on the missing leg. As though it was there. She was a stray, wouldn't leave, clung to her chosen master, whose name Kyle sounded like a bark. She would cross a street to follow and follow. Shouldn't have. You're not really mine. That same day a car hit her leg and drove away. From that point we were inseparable.
It was said that some boys had tried to stone the dog. (The weak hitting the weaker, our planet's Darwinian zone, place of God's abandonment, neither "here" nor "there".) When the stone hit, the dog didn't even whimper but master fell down -- 50 feet away. There was a bruise on master's belly, one on his hip, transferred, taken on. The boys dropped their stones and ran away. The caretaker's son, Kyle, he lay in front of the hut. Dog ran up and licked him, crying, Hey what's up? Hey what's up?
I love you, darling. You are my human.
*
It's not the victims barred from heaven. But for their abuser perhaps no hope? At least little hope. The "holiness of the heart's affections", you'd better cling to that. Hold fast to it with what soul you have.
The whole idea of Darwin just disintegrates when 2 hands touch. It's not scientific but just so.
*
A year or 2 later -- as experiences transfer from person to person, shifting meaning ever so slightly -- you lay where the caretaker's son once was sprawled. There were stains on your pants. Blood and shame. Your self-esteem felt squeezed like a tadpole, between fingers, till it burst. I am a worm and not a man. The one thing I know. A comforting misery. Both at once.
When the caretaker's son got back from his job -- he subbed as a bagger of groceries -- the first thing he did, he stumbled and fell down. Tripped on the stranger. Oh yeah, I remember this. He went into his shack, then the crippled dog bounced out. Bounced. Licked with fervor. You might say you were me almost, Kyle said. He poured his last bottle of sparkling water on the boy's face. A bare teen, it seemed.
I love you, Jorge said. No I mean, I really appreciate this.
Yes, said the caretaker's son. I am affirmed, that's good.
One grows ugly, trashy, bald, smelly, now fat, misshapen, stupid, feet planted wrong. The essence shines out now without superficial things covering me up. I am quite good. At least I'm adequate now.
Now to the meal. The sacred meal. Inside the shack, the caretaker's son opened the soup can, Italian wedding. Bless this lovely container we share, all food is good that you provide -- and now enough of these lovely mushy words. While the caretaker's son "cooked", you leaned on the recycled bean bag with the showy gash. There was an ornate decaled skateboard on the floor with a picture of Jesus on it. The 3-legged dog lay on her towel and licked herself. The hot plate became hot. Sacred meal. Fellowship. The holiness of the heart's affections. We slopped food on the skateboard's face -- that was the kind of meal it was. And the caretaker's son was exactly the sort of person you would instinctively have ignored or looked down on, he was gross and misshapen, a soul irreversibly scarred. For that very reason, this man was part of the cotton joy that wrapped our suffering. It was a wonderful feast and even the dog sat "agape" as an apostle would have said. Cast your memory back. Remember.
*
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Jorge - Flashafter
*
Important to specify the crime -- not one of hands -- the crime was not (just) of hands fumbling with a child's belt. What the men did was worse. The meaning was inside, a hot expanse of pavement in one's inside, boiling, hot enough to fry an egg on - that was the soul, burning scaps of itself - here was the crime scene, but no it still has not been said, the whole thing has not been sufficiently said.
The cracked pavement under a bum in a worn out town. Infrastructure bombed and damaged. What are you trying to say?
The crime lay in the response, that it was a response without freedom now. A child internalizes what happens to it. That is the definition of a child, that porosity. The creature that lets abuse just run off its side into the gutter, that is the adult, the very definition of an adult. Hardened. Horrible, you're already practically in the grave, to be like that. Hardened.
The crime came after the hand and lay in the response. It was the little curled up horrible thing in the midst of abuse that said: there is something enjoyable in that, after all. There is something of me in what happened. As though that was what had been supposed to be.
It was a string on a bass that was not supposed to be plucked, at least not plucked in that cavalier manner. The men plucked it, they broke it, and childhood was over in a hurry -- all in one afternoon. And that was the crime at the root of the crime.
*
Important to specify the crime -- not one of hands -- the crime was not (just) of hands fumbling with a child's belt. What the men did was worse. The meaning was inside, a hot expanse of pavement in one's inside, boiling, hot enough to fry an egg on - that was the soul, burning scaps of itself - here was the crime scene, but no it still has not been said, the whole thing has not been sufficiently said.
The cracked pavement under a bum in a worn out town. Infrastructure bombed and damaged. What are you trying to say?
The crime lay in the response, that it was a response without freedom now. A child internalizes what happens to it. That is the definition of a child, that porosity. The creature that lets abuse just run off its side into the gutter, that is the adult, the very definition of an adult. Hardened. Horrible, you're already practically in the grave, to be like that. Hardened.
The crime came after the hand and lay in the response. It was the little curled up horrible thing in the midst of abuse that said: there is something enjoyable in that, after all. There is something of me in what happened. As though that was what had been supposed to be.
It was a string on a bass that was not supposed to be plucked, at least not plucked in that cavalier manner. The men plucked it, they broke it, and childhood was over in a hurry -- all in one afternoon. And that was the crime at the root of the crime.
*
Jorge - The Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 3
*
The problem was the way children felt among adults -- so small, so limited, so vulnerable. So much the worm on the ground, to be either stepped on or saved -- or held in suspense, for years and years. It was like the way of the family dog, sitting in the living room. The dog may in some sense think he's human but never imagines he's on the same level as the other humans. The humans have mysterious powers for bad and for good. They can open things, do things. They open the cans of food and shut them again. They have great powers to caress and to hurt.
One needs them and yet wishes they were gone.
The sinister Max would follow the boy around. And he wouldn't go away. He stayed day after day, for a reason. Not even Estelle seemed to know what it was.
On the back porch, there he sat, every part of him far away except his eyes. Those eyes were always placed upon you. They were wet and moist and yet tight as a clamp. And it was not he who went away but Una, one's soulmate. A week away at a distant Y camp.
So make the horrible part go quickly. Tell it at a distance if you can.
The boy went into the garden by himself. The absence of his sister stood by his side. The flowers all seemed dusty and hairy. there was a rotting smell by the pond. Not just the smell of decay but of new growth too. But he didn't want either one.
He looked behind him and the back porch was empty.
Now he went past the edge of the garden, beyond where he and his sister had ever gone. And there was a cabin there or the shell of one.
The three legged dog stood in front of it and barked. A robust deep sound. Go away! Go away!
The protected space had shrunk to a square, a rectangle. At one edge the dog, at one edge the battered and maimed trees. The nymphs fled from the trees like birds, perhaps they were birds.
Behind was his home. In front of him the cabin. A hermit lived there, a young man with a beard, oh crazy one, perhaps the caretaker's son, brain-damaged, squatting on the campus grounds, I guard the creek from terrorists. We used to see him across the field, always smiling. Everything is all right now, everything is good. He stood in the fog wearing nothing. When Jorge turned around to face home he saw his uncle standing in his path blocking it.
No, I am not going to go on. You have to write with a purpose, a purpose that serves, that offers service to someone but who is served? Cast your memory back like a fishing rod but the fish in this creek are dead now. Move on, move on. Something has happened to you, something bad, Estelle said. Why won't you tell me? And Una sat next to you at night in the TV room, with the TV off, she was so careful not to look at you, she waited for you to speak. And waited. And waited. Auntie's health so bad and the fear the fear of -- no not of being orphaned but worse. Someone else as your guardian. Do not say the name, do not even breathe it.
And Jorge lay on his stomach on the bed, fingering the little Canterbury cross that Estelle had given him. It was a cross without a person on it but the locus of a person. If you spoke to it in a sense it spoke back. And Jorge would ask, over and over:
Why didn't you protect me? Why didn't you protect me better?
*
The problem was the way children felt among adults -- so small, so limited, so vulnerable. So much the worm on the ground, to be either stepped on or saved -- or held in suspense, for years and years. It was like the way of the family dog, sitting in the living room. The dog may in some sense think he's human but never imagines he's on the same level as the other humans. The humans have mysterious powers for bad and for good. They can open things, do things. They open the cans of food and shut them again. They have great powers to caress and to hurt.
One needs them and yet wishes they were gone.
The sinister Max would follow the boy around. And he wouldn't go away. He stayed day after day, for a reason. Not even Estelle seemed to know what it was.
On the back porch, there he sat, every part of him far away except his eyes. Those eyes were always placed upon you. They were wet and moist and yet tight as a clamp. And it was not he who went away but Una, one's soulmate. A week away at a distant Y camp.
So make the horrible part go quickly. Tell it at a distance if you can.
The boy went into the garden by himself. The absence of his sister stood by his side. The flowers all seemed dusty and hairy. there was a rotting smell by the pond. Not just the smell of decay but of new growth too. But he didn't want either one.
He looked behind him and the back porch was empty.
Now he went past the edge of the garden, beyond where he and his sister had ever gone. And there was a cabin there or the shell of one.
The three legged dog stood in front of it and barked. A robust deep sound. Go away! Go away!
The protected space had shrunk to a square, a rectangle. At one edge the dog, at one edge the battered and maimed trees. The nymphs fled from the trees like birds, perhaps they were birds.
Behind was his home. In front of him the cabin. A hermit lived there, a young man with a beard, oh crazy one, perhaps the caretaker's son, brain-damaged, squatting on the campus grounds, I guard the creek from terrorists. We used to see him across the field, always smiling. Everything is all right now, everything is good. He stood in the fog wearing nothing. When Jorge turned around to face home he saw his uncle standing in his path blocking it.
No, I am not going to go on. You have to write with a purpose, a purpose that serves, that offers service to someone but who is served? Cast your memory back like a fishing rod but the fish in this creek are dead now. Move on, move on. Something has happened to you, something bad, Estelle said. Why won't you tell me? And Una sat next to you at night in the TV room, with the TV off, she was so careful not to look at you, she waited for you to speak. And waited. And waited. Auntie's health so bad and the fear the fear of -- no not of being orphaned but worse. Someone else as your guardian. Do not say the name, do not even breathe it.
And Jorge lay on his stomach on the bed, fingering the little Canterbury cross that Estelle had given him. It was a cross without a person on it but the locus of a person. If you spoke to it in a sense it spoke back. And Jorge would ask, over and over:
Why didn't you protect me? Why didn't you protect me better?
*
Jorge - The Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 2
*
The caretaker professed to be an atheist, which was a sort of lie or evasion -- no one in the remote land called America was fully able to disbelieve in God, the belief was so to speak in the blood -- not via thinking, it was not a bypath of mentation, rather lay in the sheer act or ambience of whatever harbored thinking, it was impregnated, as all things in that country were and as any Martian would have instantly seen, with the abiding sense of intention underlying everything. Everything possible had first been made possible. There was God (named or sometimes better not) and God underlay everything. So the caretaker was in this sense a bit of a poseur but in any case he called himself an atheist. Enough of that. He was one of those people who would not answer the door. Did not answer the phone. So care was not taken, the garden had no caretaker, and it needed none. It was beautiful without any human touch. But enough of that. The garden thrived on its own.
Jorge remembered the exact day that the Garden of Orthodoxy shut its gate on him -- like a blossom snapping shut at the tap of dusk -- leaving the insects without access or escape and all the happier stories replaced by more somber ones.
Aunt Estelle was in the kitchen rubbing her hands. Una would stare at her and look away. Uncle Max is coming back from his travels, isn't he?
I supose we need to tell the caretaker to get the place ready, Estelle said. But the caretaker wouldn't answer his door.
One day the caretaker's son went off to war. It was either Korea or Vietnam or Iraq, there were so many wars, there was pretty much always a war rustling that far off kingdom. The caretaker received notice by mistake that his son was dead. The authorities had confused 2 recruits. When the caretaker received the news, all of the blood quite visiblly drained from his face and it never returned. You saw a sort of death before your eyes. No God would have done this to me, he said. Then he closed his door. Functions continued but the main thing had been blocked.
Meanwhile the son, the real son, recovered from his injuries, which were sizable, and knit the heart back together. The college paper proclaimed his return. The son came back and knocked on his father's door but the caretaker wouldn't open.
My son is dead, the man cried. I don't know who you are.
Go away!
*
Meanwhile Estelle tried to keep the children out of the way of these adult happenings but she was very distracted because Max had returned. Her husband had a wandering kind of job and a wandering spirit. He was not there when he was there. Una and Jorge hardly knew him, perhaps only had learned from him the strange lesson that male adults were remote, always preoccupied and "far", as though a species not related to -- what? To the heart's affection as it was understood. As though he was not really family. His handsomeness and darkness suggested another way of being. Adulthood for men was something you would grow up into against your will. It was a path out of here.
At the dinner table, in the living room, his eyes followed the boy everywhere and wouldn't let go. How big and strong you have suddenly become.
Now where do you go in that big garden? What do you do all day?
It's just a big place, Jorge said. We just hang out. Nothing interesting.
But I like things that aren't interesting, Uncle said.
Well, when it's hot we submerge ourselves in the trees.
I would like to do that with you, Uncle said. I would enjoy that so.
Away from adult worries.
One feels so free inside nature. Away from society's eyes. One can do whatever one wants. It's nobody's business, just your own assunto. So you can just be yourself, you know?
Then Estelle came in with her hot pad and cloudy casserole, wondering why everyone was so quiet.
Always his eyes followed you. They were like something clinging to your legs and arms, something you tried to brush away but couldn't. One's hair thickened with fear. Responses became complex, and what wasn't painful turned painful simply because it wasn't. This congested state of being was your future. The heart wished to look away, the heart muscle twisted. The loins lingered and looked back. Then the heart really began to beat strangely, so completely off the beat. Why oh why did this man have to be here?
END OF PART 2
*
The caretaker professed to be an atheist, which was a sort of lie or evasion -- no one in the remote land called America was fully able to disbelieve in God, the belief was so to speak in the blood -- not via thinking, it was not a bypath of mentation, rather lay in the sheer act or ambience of whatever harbored thinking, it was impregnated, as all things in that country were and as any Martian would have instantly seen, with the abiding sense of intention underlying everything. Everything possible had first been made possible. There was God (named or sometimes better not) and God underlay everything. So the caretaker was in this sense a bit of a poseur but in any case he called himself an atheist. Enough of that. He was one of those people who would not answer the door. Did not answer the phone. So care was not taken, the garden had no caretaker, and it needed none. It was beautiful without any human touch. But enough of that. The garden thrived on its own.
Jorge remembered the exact day that the Garden of Orthodoxy shut its gate on him -- like a blossom snapping shut at the tap of dusk -- leaving the insects without access or escape and all the happier stories replaced by more somber ones.
Aunt Estelle was in the kitchen rubbing her hands. Una would stare at her and look away. Uncle Max is coming back from his travels, isn't he?
I supose we need to tell the caretaker to get the place ready, Estelle said. But the caretaker wouldn't answer his door.
One day the caretaker's son went off to war. It was either Korea or Vietnam or Iraq, there were so many wars, there was pretty much always a war rustling that far off kingdom. The caretaker received notice by mistake that his son was dead. The authorities had confused 2 recruits. When the caretaker received the news, all of the blood quite visiblly drained from his face and it never returned. You saw a sort of death before your eyes. No God would have done this to me, he said. Then he closed his door. Functions continued but the main thing had been blocked.
Meanwhile the son, the real son, recovered from his injuries, which were sizable, and knit the heart back together. The college paper proclaimed his return. The son came back and knocked on his father's door but the caretaker wouldn't open.
My son is dead, the man cried. I don't know who you are.
Go away!
*
Meanwhile Estelle tried to keep the children out of the way of these adult happenings but she was very distracted because Max had returned. Her husband had a wandering kind of job and a wandering spirit. He was not there when he was there. Una and Jorge hardly knew him, perhaps only had learned from him the strange lesson that male adults were remote, always preoccupied and "far", as though a species not related to -- what? To the heart's affection as it was understood. As though he was not really family. His handsomeness and darkness suggested another way of being. Adulthood for men was something you would grow up into against your will. It was a path out of here.
At the dinner table, in the living room, his eyes followed the boy everywhere and wouldn't let go. How big and strong you have suddenly become.
Now where do you go in that big garden? What do you do all day?
It's just a big place, Jorge said. We just hang out. Nothing interesting.
But I like things that aren't interesting, Uncle said.
Well, when it's hot we submerge ourselves in the trees.
I would like to do that with you, Uncle said. I would enjoy that so.
Away from adult worries.
One feels so free inside nature. Away from society's eyes. One can do whatever one wants. It's nobody's business, just your own assunto. So you can just be yourself, you know?
Then Estelle came in with her hot pad and cloudy casserole, wondering why everyone was so quiet.
Always his eyes followed you. They were like something clinging to your legs and arms, something you tried to brush away but couldn't. One's hair thickened with fear. Responses became complex, and what wasn't painful turned painful simply because it wasn't. This congested state of being was your future. The heart wished to look away, the heart muscle twisted. The loins lingered and looked back. Then the heart really began to beat strangely, so completely off the beat. Why oh why did this man have to be here?
END OF PART 2
*
Monday, October 30, 2006
Useless poems - 10
*
There was a hand in the sun. It was my hand
yet not my hand. It touched me like a hand
and made me warm. Its substance was the sun.
Or else the person of the sun -- because
I felt intention in that hand -- but not
my own because at that time I had none.
I wanted badly not to block the sun
with my ephemeral trauma. To be healed
I knew I had to slow down, had to yield
and do this not in such a willful way
that the sun became only appliqué.
I had to let the outside enter me
with its most inexplicable caress
to unkink and de-stress my deep distress.
*
There was a hand in the sun. It was my hand
yet not my hand. It touched me like a hand
and made me warm. Its substance was the sun.
Or else the person of the sun -- because
I felt intention in that hand -- but not
my own because at that time I had none.
I wanted badly not to block the sun
with my ephemeral trauma. To be healed
I knew I had to slow down, had to yield
and do this not in such a willful way
that the sun became only appliqué.
I had to let the outside enter me
with its most inexplicable caress
to unkink and de-stress my deep distress.
*
Monday, October 23, 2006
Jorge: Flashforward
*
And after his innocence was lost -- or exploded as nonexistent -- Jorge would walk the garden of orthodoxy and watch the birds explode too, as if all the leaves had blown away in a sphere of chatter. So the fall surrounded his fall.
They were not birds but nymphs, the lost nymphs of poetry. They blew out of the trees.
They flew in a burst out of the trees, all the nymphs, all the exiled nymphs. They were too delicate to protect.
You bad man! You bad man! they chattered, as Jorge walked under them and all the roving ones stared after him. You have chased us away! the nymphs cried.
Not me, Jorge answered. I want you here. I love to watch you flashing your little skirts and flying over my head. Or hiding in the trees, which are your abode and possession, after all. Every tree to its nymph.
I have not exiled you. But his heart sank as the nymphs deserted their milieu. And the campus developers scouted yet another piece of land, hungry for dorms, hungry for labs, needing something to fill what they saw as empty absent space.
All this was well after Jorge was defiled. The birds left long ago.
*
And after his innocence was lost -- or exploded as nonexistent -- Jorge would walk the garden of orthodoxy and watch the birds explode too, as if all the leaves had blown away in a sphere of chatter. So the fall surrounded his fall.
They were not birds but nymphs, the lost nymphs of poetry. They blew out of the trees.
They flew in a burst out of the trees, all the nymphs, all the exiled nymphs. They were too delicate to protect.
You bad man! You bad man! they chattered, as Jorge walked under them and all the roving ones stared after him. You have chased us away! the nymphs cried.
Not me, Jorge answered. I want you here. I love to watch you flashing your little skirts and flying over my head. Or hiding in the trees, which are your abode and possession, after all. Every tree to its nymph.
I have not exiled you. But his heart sank as the nymphs deserted their milieu. And the campus developers scouted yet another piece of land, hungry for dorms, hungry for labs, needing something to fill what they saw as empty absent space.
All this was well after Jorge was defiled. The birds left long ago.
*
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Thoughts on place
*
A place is enclosed, unlike space. It might be enclosed by sky but still it is closed. Otherwise how could one even be there? All this nonsense of being somewhere virtually -- forget it!
Perhaps this is why poetry of all the arts captures "place" so well. The lovely click-I'm-closed of end rhyme like the border of one's spiritual dwelling, yours precisely because it doesn't contain or even acknowledge all that space beyond that is *not* yours.
I have never seen a "place" captured in a photograph. Never the buzzing balmy edge of things, that gaseous outline that permeates it and permeates you and makes it yours as it binds you to it. Rarely in a painting, never in a photograph -- except maybe in a black and white photo of old architecture? maybe. Also in sepia stuff and old Civil War hallucinations. And Hitchcock's "The Birds" is full of a specific place.
*
A place is enclosed, unlike space. It might be enclosed by sky but still it is closed. Otherwise how could one even be there? All this nonsense of being somewhere virtually -- forget it!
Perhaps this is why poetry of all the arts captures "place" so well. The lovely click-I'm-closed of end rhyme like the border of one's spiritual dwelling, yours precisely because it doesn't contain or even acknowledge all that space beyond that is *not* yours.
I have never seen a "place" captured in a photograph. Never the buzzing balmy edge of things, that gaseous outline that permeates it and permeates you and makes it yours as it binds you to it. Rarely in a painting, never in a photograph -- except maybe in a black and white photo of old architecture? maybe. Also in sepia stuff and old Civil War hallucinations. And Hitchcock's "The Birds" is full of a specific place.
*
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Useless poems - 9
*
A beautiful lostness
(near Covent Garden, 10/3/06)
They move from A to B, they move from B
to A -- and then cancel each other out.
Some move too certainly -- they know their way
too well and don't guess what is blocking it.
The blockage is itself an opening.
To see it, feel it, first you must be lost.
It is a queasiness, a presupposed
for knowing where you are, because to know
is pain, this knowledge is a form of pain.
The grid is in the shape of shattered glass,
it slithers in this dance of randomness,
improvisation. In the broken lane
confusion twists like a kaleidoscope
into perfection and comes to a stop.
*
A beautiful lostness
(near Covent Garden, 10/3/06)
They move from A to B, they move from B
to A -- and then cancel each other out.
Some move too certainly -- they know their way
too well and don't guess what is blocking it.
The blockage is itself an opening.
To see it, feel it, first you must be lost.
It is a queasiness, a presupposed
for knowing where you are, because to know
is pain, this knowledge is a form of pain.
The grid is in the shape of shattered glass,
it slithers in this dance of randomness,
improvisation. In the broken lane
confusion twists like a kaleidoscope
into perfection and comes to a stop.
*
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Useless poems - 8
*
Sonnet of the placement of a place
(London 10-1-06)
To understand the placement of a place
is past impossible -- I dream of it
by walking some monotony of bricks
that suddenly have disappeared. The foot
stands on what isn't there and I wake up.
The terror of support withdrawn conveys
in no logical way the preciousness
of having something under one. But what?
What makes the haunting placement of a place?
You might say time consists of pondering
the deep significance of place -- what is
and isn't, in succession. And the way
it now withdraws is very long and deep
to study. And I go there when I sleep.
*
Sonnet of the placement of a place
(London 10-1-06)
To understand the placement of a place
is past impossible -- I dream of it
by walking some monotony of bricks
that suddenly have disappeared. The foot
stands on what isn't there and I wake up.
The terror of support withdrawn conveys
in no logical way the preciousness
of having something under one. But what?
What makes the haunting placement of a place?
You might say time consists of pondering
the deep significance of place -- what is
and isn't, in succession. And the way
it now withdraws is very long and deep
to study. And I go there when I sleep.
*
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Useless poems - 7
*
"The hunger not to do so"
In the midst of my acting any act
there comes a voice -- like someone in a room
whose echo is offensive, much too loud
to be so inner and perhaps unreal,
a room that is not meditation but
the hunger for it -- hollowing my act,
a voice that clamors for all acts to stop.
It undermines me and will not shut up.
It has this restlessness as if it were
tied down, yet what it wants is not to move
at all -- it wants to lay my will down on
the floor and walk away -- wants this so much
that now it has become the opposite:
it wishes just to sit -- and cannot sit.
*
"The hunger not to do so"
In the midst of my acting any act
there comes a voice -- like someone in a room
whose echo is offensive, much too loud
to be so inner and perhaps unreal,
a room that is not meditation but
the hunger for it -- hollowing my act,
a voice that clamors for all acts to stop.
It undermines me and will not shut up.
It has this restlessness as if it were
tied down, yet what it wants is not to move
at all -- it wants to lay my will down on
the floor and walk away -- wants this so much
that now it has become the opposite:
it wishes just to sit -- and cannot sit.
*
Friday, September 15, 2006
Useless poems - 6
*
God in the body
The body has its way -- a laying down
like tracks -- of how it can bend, how it can't --
of how, by definition, it can be.
The soul is in denial. If you say
the soul is what the body lets it be
the words don't even form -- they can't be said.
Our words are like a wiping of the slate
on which they're written. Not that they are false.
Their core is sheer evasion. But their sound
is physical. It is the way a slab
of meat would cope with the emergency
(emergence?) of a leak. Some substance leaks
into and through the damage. Someone speaks
a tell me tell me. Who is it that speaks?
*
God in the body
The body has its way -- a laying down
like tracks -- of how it can bend, how it can't --
of how, by definition, it can be.
The soul is in denial. If you say
the soul is what the body lets it be
the words don't even form -- they can't be said.
Our words are like a wiping of the slate
on which they're written. Not that they are false.
Their core is sheer evasion. But their sound
is physical. It is the way a slab
of meat would cope with the emergency
(emergence?) of a leak. Some substance leaks
into and through the damage. Someone speaks
a tell me tell me. Who is it that speaks?
*
Monday, September 11, 2006
Useless poems - 5
*
Judgment
I want to take the coat of judgment off
and lay it folded neatly on the ground.
Someday somebody else can put it on,
not me, not me. I want to take it off.
I won't say that it's bad or dangerous,
I won't even say that the time is wrong
for the garment to be worn, and I won't judge
the one who puts it on, if someone does.
I plan to understand much less of it.
I want to think this out a different way.
I want to hear some things I haven't heard.
The right or wrong of what a person does
will be the sound that comes from a locked room.
I heard it but I didn't make the sound.
*
Judgment
I want to take the coat of judgment off
and lay it folded neatly on the ground.
Someday somebody else can put it on,
not me, not me. I want to take it off.
I won't say that it's bad or dangerous,
I won't even say that the time is wrong
for the garment to be worn, and I won't judge
the one who puts it on, if someone does.
I plan to understand much less of it.
I want to think this out a different way.
I want to hear some things I haven't heard.
The right or wrong of what a person does
will be the sound that comes from a locked room.
I heard it but I didn't make the sound.
*
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Useless poems - 4
*
The door
The door opened as pain, opened with pain,
was pain -- the tearing open of a wound.
To be inside the room would be to bleed.
You didn't want to pass through what this was
to pass but had no other, easier,
more civilized, more human avenue
to where the knowledge was nor did you know
what it was that you didn't know, just knew
that there was only one way into it.
Pain with the separating feel, the feel
of isolation -- no one else would know
the special grip that it applied to you
nor were you sick enough to want them to:
it was your door, just yours, yours to pass through.
*
The door
The door opened as pain, opened with pain,
was pain -- the tearing open of a wound.
To be inside the room would be to bleed.
You didn't want to pass through what this was
to pass but had no other, easier,
more civilized, more human avenue
to where the knowledge was nor did you know
what it was that you didn't know, just knew
that there was only one way into it.
Pain with the separating feel, the feel
of isolation -- no one else would know
the special grip that it applied to you
nor were you sick enough to want them to:
it was your door, just yours, yours to pass through.
*
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Useless poems - 3
*
The path
There are places and there are paths.
Places become internal. Paths must not.
Your path can't be explained but must be there.
No place exists without a path to it.
Depression is your path to joy.
Depression is crammed full of intense meaning
that can't be used, that really has no point
of access, and becomes unbearable.
You must walk it, which means to fathom it.
Its whole reason to be is where it ends,
your place of understanding. You must not
medicate or deny the path you walk.
Your pain is not to push down but to know.
Your understanding is the way you go.
*
The path
There are places and there are paths.
Places become internal. Paths must not.
Your path can't be explained but must be there.
No place exists without a path to it.
Depression is your path to joy.
Depression is crammed full of intense meaning
that can't be used, that really has no point
of access, and becomes unbearable.
You must walk it, which means to fathom it.
Its whole reason to be is where it ends,
your place of understanding. You must not
medicate or deny the path you walk.
Your pain is not to push down but to know.
Your understanding is the way you go.
*
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Useless poems - 2
*
An inward world
Why was the trip forward so much like
an excavation? How was it that the path
out of oneself chiseled this inward world?
It was like falling into one's own nerve.
Within the pain one did not feel the pain
but was the pain and became what it meant,
and what it meant was quite impersonal,
a sort of unbounded commodity.
It was an awareness that did not belong
to the one who walked its, let us say, its canyons
and salmon-colored shadows, attributes
of a personage well grounded as a place.
God was not lost. God was at home. God was
the owner of this place. God was the place.
*
An inward world
Why was the trip forward so much like
an excavation? How was it that the path
out of oneself chiseled this inward world?
It was like falling into one's own nerve.
Within the pain one did not feel the pain
but was the pain and became what it meant,
and what it meant was quite impersonal,
a sort of unbounded commodity.
It was an awareness that did not belong
to the one who walked its, let us say, its canyons
and salmon-colored shadows, attributes
of a personage well grounded as a place.
God was not lost. God was at home. God was
the owner of this place. God was the place.
*
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Useless Poems - 1
*
A horror of being
You had a horror of the sort of being
that was like standing in a light, exposed
to comment --where this comment was defining,
was itself an exposure and was you.
You wished to be not watched, simply to be
without that light of someone else outside
not understanding and not caring to.
And still it wasn't solitude you sought.
You must try to say nothing but the truth.
What you sought was the "someone else" who was
in fact inside and therefore understood
the ground and underpinning of your being
so hard to hold up to the light -- unless
the light was his not just your emptiness.
*
A horror of being
You had a horror of the sort of being
that was like standing in a light, exposed
to comment --where this comment was defining,
was itself an exposure and was you.
You wished to be not watched, simply to be
without that light of someone else outside
not understanding and not caring to.
And still it wasn't solitude you sought.
You must try to say nothing but the truth.
What you sought was the "someone else" who was
in fact inside and therefore understood
the ground and underpinning of your being
so hard to hold up to the light -- unless
the light was his not just your emptiness.
*
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Jorge - the Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 1
*
You were Jorge.
You looked just like Una, your sister, but with a twist that was indefinable and changed everything.
What was balanced in her face became unbalanced in yours.
What made you more than an ordinary man was that you were a worm and not a man.
When other people talked of self-aggrandizement or even self-improvement you would take a breath and scan that very self. Not theirs but yours.
It was moist, it was long and thin, it moved through the earth and disgusted the people who had to look at it. A worm nature.
Offensive to men. Beautiful to God. God felt an absence of repugnance for the worm, God even loved the worm.
Once you had been a human like the others. Una and you were children, living in the Garden of Orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs, Orthodoxy is a place, a world, a realized wing. It is a place beneath the wing of God. One does not "behave well" there. One is close to God there and all behavior is intrinsically "well".
The wing itself shelters you from other kinds of living that you do not really even understand, the kinds of life that lead or unfathomably come to be led astray, de-winged, the flavors of existence that are no longer effectively attached to existence, which in effect shouldn't even be one of the possibles. Because the Garden was in fact everything and everywhere. And so in some sense the Garden still contained even the people who had simply walked away -- who had walked out of the garden one day, as if temporarily, casually, but fully intending to come back.
For Jorge and Una, the Garden of Orthodoxy was a place of sheer poetry, because God was there. They were little children, they took the bliss for granted. The taking for granted was itself the substance of bliss. One moved freely in the shelter of what was not anxious and would never need to be. For the garden thrived in the indifference of time -- not that time was absent or even suspended -- not that time ceased to do whatever it did -- but the concern was a thing that lived miles away, "in the next county", far on the other side of the stiles and hedges and small shimmering animals. There was not the constant bruising reference to time, the looking at one's watch that was said to be the definition of adulthood.
Only protected can one be free.
*
The light was horizontal like the branches of certain trees. How can it be like that? Una asked. Doesn't it come straight down. How are there shadows on these red barks instead of the ground.
I think the light comes oozing out of these dark places, Jorge said. The light comes second, the dark comes first, I think we see things in reverse -- the source is more mysterious than what we see.
The sunlight flows every which way from these dark places. The foundation is darkness -- light is like something placed on top. It's not as real.
Well, should we be scared? I'm not scared at all.
They would look back at the house. Sometimes the back door was open, sometimes Aunt Estelle, practically a widow, was standing on the porch. She wasn't monitoring them, she was simply there. She was always half doing something and half listening to the sound of children's voices. So it seemed.
Her little prayer book in her lap. The children turned and dismissed her from consciousness but not completely. Aunt Estelle. Warm and quiet. Touching the links of the chain on her neck as though it were -- almost a rosary or some such thing.
There was a pond in the back yard, the keeper of the moist stones. Tadpoles and the whiff of frogs. Fish who would surface for food and then suddenly sink into nonexistence, if existence is appearance. Beyond it, more fields and the touch of forest. The land was too still to belong to anyone. In hide and seek, so many hiding places, one had to make the effort to be found. Pine needles on the pathway, don't run barefoot. Smells of honey and tar.
There was the preternatural clarity of an intense single moment. Yes but it went on for years and years.
Look at the way those branches -- those pine branches, those branches of pine -- they almost make a square, the way they are posed in the clearing. And look at that three legged dog!
Una and Jorge wanted to catch the dog and make it a pet but -- oddly and wonderfully enough -- it ran too fast to be caught.
As though its piercing disfigurement needed to be -- here and only here -- caressed and furthered -- within the Garden of Orthodoxy that bound them all.
So the dog ran, free and free forever. And the 2 children knew better than to chase it into the infinity in which it lived.
For they knew -- and this was the Orthodoxy -- not to go too far.
Did they know? In fact, did they? Dusk would be falling, not the dusk, but the state just before dusk, a sort of tableau of clear glareless light, the anticipation of gloom. The outer woods were ahead of them, with the big campus on the other side. We'd better go back, Una said. Dinner will be waiting for us.
At the edge of the wood was where the feeling of rightness began to thin, like scarce oxygen on a mountain height.
Una, protected by an instinct her brother didn't have, would pull at his hand. The aunt would be waiting patiently for them at the back door. It was amazing how dark it suddenly was, how quickly the day's light had been sucked away. But oh how good existence was!
END OF PART ONE
*
You were Jorge.
You looked just like Una, your sister, but with a twist that was indefinable and changed everything.
What was balanced in her face became unbalanced in yours.
What made you more than an ordinary man was that you were a worm and not a man.
When other people talked of self-aggrandizement or even self-improvement you would take a breath and scan that very self. Not theirs but yours.
It was moist, it was long and thin, it moved through the earth and disgusted the people who had to look at it. A worm nature.
Offensive to men. Beautiful to God. God felt an absence of repugnance for the worm, God even loved the worm.
Once you had been a human like the others. Una and you were children, living in the Garden of Orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs, Orthodoxy is a place, a world, a realized wing. It is a place beneath the wing of God. One does not "behave well" there. One is close to God there and all behavior is intrinsically "well".
The wing itself shelters you from other kinds of living that you do not really even understand, the kinds of life that lead or unfathomably come to be led astray, de-winged, the flavors of existence that are no longer effectively attached to existence, which in effect shouldn't even be one of the possibles. Because the Garden was in fact everything and everywhere. And so in some sense the Garden still contained even the people who had simply walked away -- who had walked out of the garden one day, as if temporarily, casually, but fully intending to come back.
For Jorge and Una, the Garden of Orthodoxy was a place of sheer poetry, because God was there. They were little children, they took the bliss for granted. The taking for granted was itself the substance of bliss. One moved freely in the shelter of what was not anxious and would never need to be. For the garden thrived in the indifference of time -- not that time was absent or even suspended -- not that time ceased to do whatever it did -- but the concern was a thing that lived miles away, "in the next county", far on the other side of the stiles and hedges and small shimmering animals. There was not the constant bruising reference to time, the looking at one's watch that was said to be the definition of adulthood.
Only protected can one be free.
*
The light was horizontal like the branches of certain trees. How can it be like that? Una asked. Doesn't it come straight down. How are there shadows on these red barks instead of the ground.
I think the light comes oozing out of these dark places, Jorge said. The light comes second, the dark comes first, I think we see things in reverse -- the source is more mysterious than what we see.
The sunlight flows every which way from these dark places. The foundation is darkness -- light is like something placed on top. It's not as real.
Well, should we be scared? I'm not scared at all.
They would look back at the house. Sometimes the back door was open, sometimes Aunt Estelle, practically a widow, was standing on the porch. She wasn't monitoring them, she was simply there. She was always half doing something and half listening to the sound of children's voices. So it seemed.
Her little prayer book in her lap. The children turned and dismissed her from consciousness but not completely. Aunt Estelle. Warm and quiet. Touching the links of the chain on her neck as though it were -- almost a rosary or some such thing.
There was a pond in the back yard, the keeper of the moist stones. Tadpoles and the whiff of frogs. Fish who would surface for food and then suddenly sink into nonexistence, if existence is appearance. Beyond it, more fields and the touch of forest. The land was too still to belong to anyone. In hide and seek, so many hiding places, one had to make the effort to be found. Pine needles on the pathway, don't run barefoot. Smells of honey and tar.
There was the preternatural clarity of an intense single moment. Yes but it went on for years and years.
Look at the way those branches -- those pine branches, those branches of pine -- they almost make a square, the way they are posed in the clearing. And look at that three legged dog!
Una and Jorge wanted to catch the dog and make it a pet but -- oddly and wonderfully enough -- it ran too fast to be caught.
As though its piercing disfigurement needed to be -- here and only here -- caressed and furthered -- within the Garden of Orthodoxy that bound them all.
So the dog ran, free and free forever. And the 2 children knew better than to chase it into the infinity in which it lived.
For they knew -- and this was the Orthodoxy -- not to go too far.
Did they know? In fact, did they? Dusk would be falling, not the dusk, but the state just before dusk, a sort of tableau of clear glareless light, the anticipation of gloom. The outer woods were ahead of them, with the big campus on the other side. We'd better go back, Una said. Dinner will be waiting for us.
At the edge of the wood was where the feeling of rightness began to thin, like scarce oxygen on a mountain height.
Una, protected by an instinct her brother didn't have, would pull at his hand. The aunt would be waiting patiently for them at the back door. It was amazing how dark it suddenly was, how quickly the day's light had been sucked away. But oh how good existence was!
END OF PART ONE
*
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Poem: A Struggle
*
There comes a moment when she pulls away.
You find yourself fighting the very thing
you recognize and know: that she consents
to her own going, but more, as she goes
she both consents and was forced to consent
because death has become not just the choice
but what is choosing, and is what she wants,
not "wants" but can no longer not. This death
of her resistance is the death of her.
And you are also forced this other way,
to hold her here, to keep her "secular"
against her will. You have to. You have to.
You must do what your God has asked you to:
keep her alive, but she just wants to go.
*
There comes a moment when she pulls away.
You find yourself fighting the very thing
you recognize and know: that she consents
to her own going, but more, as she goes
she both consents and was forced to consent
because death has become not just the choice
but what is choosing, and is what she wants,
not "wants" but can no longer not. This death
of her resistance is the death of her.
And you are also forced this other way,
to hold her here, to keep her "secular"
against her will. You have to. You have to.
You must do what your God has asked you to:
keep her alive, but she just wants to go.
*
Friday, June 30, 2006
The worm and his killer
*
Ooo! Pierced.
"I am a worm and not a man."
So there it is.
The little worm slithered along the path that his worminess made. God looked down and loved his worm, that was taken for a given. It wasn't a path or a skeleton, or a safety net, just a given.
Sun, that ambiguous good, beat down.
The orioles chirred and whivered in the palm tree. They did not eat the worm nor did the woodpecker peck it.
There was a moment of not being pecked. Existence, the richest robe, the brightest gemstone, always a match for your birth.
The words of existence were few. You cannot have too much of it and you cannot hate it because even your hatred would be more existence. To exist is inexplicable and wonderful.
The worm slithered in the middle way. Neither fear nor confidence but the middle way. Not happy, not un-, the middle. Purposeful, drifting? Neither. Predator, prey? Neither one. Kind or mean? Not that. Boastful? Humble? Not there yet. Striving, at rest? Musical or dumb?
In the middle of the middle of the middle.
There was a little child with her foot in the air. Coming down, coming down. Gratuitous shape, death in shoes. Now does the cut worm really forgive the plow? Does it really? Does it really? Is that just what the plowman says?
The worm traveled neither in forgiveness nor unforgiveness, no, but the middle way, in between. Not afraid, not unafraid, no, not brave, not cowardly, not hopeful, not exactly. Ready? Open? Hopeful without grounds for hope? Existence too abundant to simply be boxed in this world?
The worm rested in God's hand, which was not a material object and was not subject to sun. A human foot was a thread it wove.
If you love God's work, you love all of it.
I will aim for the heart, the little child thought.
But she couldn't see the heart. It eluded her and twisted.
*
If hope was a sickness, the worm had no wish to get well.
*
Now if the child had simply walked away, she would be a person who had no story, which is like damnation, not having a story. But she stayed and looked down. The nisus had fled and the creature was in pieces. It was "dead" -- what is "dead"?
It is irreversible, right?
So she cried to see the irreversible mess beneath her foot. The yolk would not go back into its shell. It clung to her and defined her.
Tears of accountability.
Bottomless pain -- and everyone had it in some way. A person's story.
"I am a worm and not a man."
END OF PART ONE
*
In time the girl grew over the hole where she once killed a worm. It existed and hurt inside her. Her husband would laugh at her delicacies and phobias. Every corner of our house has a spider, honey. Why not get rid of just a few of them?
You would open a book in this house and a spider would leap out, a little fist of congealed ink.
Let it be.
Wherever the woman went, cats and dogs and children would materialize around her. It is odd how safe and strong a basically timid person could feel.
There was some Buddhist sage who lived in a hut filled with cobras. He didn't bother them and they didn't bother him. He was only careful where he sank his foot.
She attended a rather pokey church near the university. Her husband refused to go. Organ music from a time long ago -- that was what characterized the church. She was comfortable in her great discomfort there.
The sermons merely restated things long known from the gospels. The same ideas were shuffled around and re-voiced. She felt that this was appropriate.
The hymns used phrases that no real person ever ever ever could have said. They were not exactly God's words but certainly not the words of a human. She found some melodious sonnet rolling on her tongue.
One day a young woman wandered into the church and sat down. She was not appropriately dressed, not suitable, she looked like a flower child or really a grass child, as though she'd just gotten up from the grass. The worshippers unconsciously did that horrible thing that worshippers did: they moved away as if she were unclean. They stared at the stranger, forgetting even Leviticus. Elise -- shy as all get-out and far from either a mover or a shaker -- stood up and sat next to the stranger, took her hand. it was as soft and boneless as a worm. The girl was as fragile as a worm.
They went to lunch and shared stories but later in the day the elder woman couldn't remember a word of it -- just that the girl was Una. She was "one" then. But one of exactly what?
That evening, leafing through the paper, Elise found the girl's picture among the stories of brief wonders and accidental deaths. She didn't say anything to anyone. Scott kept his own counsel as always.
She set up a cot in the back room. Her husband raised his eyebrows -- just a millimeter or two -- and said nothing. Since that was characteristic, one didn't really know what it meant.
The old hymns rolled like wagon wheels through the old woman's head. Oh, not so old really. Perhaps neither one was altogether old.
*
Does that girl live here or not? Scott asked.
I feel there's a ghost in this house.
*
Before Elise went to bed she tried to run through some form of evening prayer. As always, she was too tired to focus. It often became a deep and debilitating nap.
Sometimes the psalms were there in the core of dream and sometimes they were absent.
As she fell asleep the book in her hands softened and morphed, it began to move slowly. It was so soft that the slightest squeeze would crush it. It had an ever-newborn feel.
She knew who she was holding. "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." The most beautiful one submitted oneself, himself, to utter danger, even the danger of being despised. Our God had no shell, no armor.
Elise woke up shaking and in deepest devotion -- deep in the most pierced place there was. What do I do now? Where do I move from here?
What else was there to do but what you always did? The heavy woman pulled herself somehow out of the chair's suction grip. She put on what passed for a nightie then she brushed her teeth. She navigated herself to the underground region of her husband's snore. She lowered herself to bed and lay herself down.
*
Ooo! Pierced.
"I am a worm and not a man."
So there it is.
The little worm slithered along the path that his worminess made. God looked down and loved his worm, that was taken for a given. It wasn't a path or a skeleton, or a safety net, just a given.
Sun, that ambiguous good, beat down.
The orioles chirred and whivered in the palm tree. They did not eat the worm nor did the woodpecker peck it.
There was a moment of not being pecked. Existence, the richest robe, the brightest gemstone, always a match for your birth.
The words of existence were few. You cannot have too much of it and you cannot hate it because even your hatred would be more existence. To exist is inexplicable and wonderful.
The worm slithered in the middle way. Neither fear nor confidence but the middle way. Not happy, not un-, the middle. Purposeful, drifting? Neither. Predator, prey? Neither one. Kind or mean? Not that. Boastful? Humble? Not there yet. Striving, at rest? Musical or dumb?
In the middle of the middle of the middle.
There was a little child with her foot in the air. Coming down, coming down. Gratuitous shape, death in shoes. Now does the cut worm really forgive the plow? Does it really? Does it really? Is that just what the plowman says?
The worm traveled neither in forgiveness nor unforgiveness, no, but the middle way, in between. Not afraid, not unafraid, no, not brave, not cowardly, not hopeful, not exactly. Ready? Open? Hopeful without grounds for hope? Existence too abundant to simply be boxed in this world?
The worm rested in God's hand, which was not a material object and was not subject to sun. A human foot was a thread it wove.
If you love God's work, you love all of it.
I will aim for the heart, the little child thought.
But she couldn't see the heart. It eluded her and twisted.
*
If hope was a sickness, the worm had no wish to get well.
*
Now if the child had simply walked away, she would be a person who had no story, which is like damnation, not having a story. But she stayed and looked down. The nisus had fled and the creature was in pieces. It was "dead" -- what is "dead"?
It is irreversible, right?
So she cried to see the irreversible mess beneath her foot. The yolk would not go back into its shell. It clung to her and defined her.
Tears of accountability.
Bottomless pain -- and everyone had it in some way. A person's story.
"I am a worm and not a man."
END OF PART ONE
*
In time the girl grew over the hole where she once killed a worm. It existed and hurt inside her. Her husband would laugh at her delicacies and phobias. Every corner of our house has a spider, honey. Why not get rid of just a few of them?
You would open a book in this house and a spider would leap out, a little fist of congealed ink.
Let it be.
Wherever the woman went, cats and dogs and children would materialize around her. It is odd how safe and strong a basically timid person could feel.
There was some Buddhist sage who lived in a hut filled with cobras. He didn't bother them and they didn't bother him. He was only careful where he sank his foot.
She attended a rather pokey church near the university. Her husband refused to go. Organ music from a time long ago -- that was what characterized the church. She was comfortable in her great discomfort there.
The sermons merely restated things long known from the gospels. The same ideas were shuffled around and re-voiced. She felt that this was appropriate.
The hymns used phrases that no real person ever ever ever could have said. They were not exactly God's words but certainly not the words of a human. She found some melodious sonnet rolling on her tongue.
One day a young woman wandered into the church and sat down. She was not appropriately dressed, not suitable, she looked like a flower child or really a grass child, as though she'd just gotten up from the grass. The worshippers unconsciously did that horrible thing that worshippers did: they moved away as if she were unclean. They stared at the stranger, forgetting even Leviticus. Elise -- shy as all get-out and far from either a mover or a shaker -- stood up and sat next to the stranger, took her hand. it was as soft and boneless as a worm. The girl was as fragile as a worm.
They went to lunch and shared stories but later in the day the elder woman couldn't remember a word of it -- just that the girl was Una. She was "one" then. But one of exactly what?
That evening, leafing through the paper, Elise found the girl's picture among the stories of brief wonders and accidental deaths. She didn't say anything to anyone. Scott kept his own counsel as always.
She set up a cot in the back room. Her husband raised his eyebrows -- just a millimeter or two -- and said nothing. Since that was characteristic, one didn't really know what it meant.
The old hymns rolled like wagon wheels through the old woman's head. Oh, not so old really. Perhaps neither one was altogether old.
*
Does that girl live here or not? Scott asked.
I feel there's a ghost in this house.
*
Before Elise went to bed she tried to run through some form of evening prayer. As always, she was too tired to focus. It often became a deep and debilitating nap.
Sometimes the psalms were there in the core of dream and sometimes they were absent.
As she fell asleep the book in her hands softened and morphed, it began to move slowly. It was so soft that the slightest squeeze would crush it. It had an ever-newborn feel.
She knew who she was holding. "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." The most beautiful one submitted oneself, himself, to utter danger, even the danger of being despised. Our God had no shell, no armor.
Elise woke up shaking and in deepest devotion -- deep in the most pierced place there was. What do I do now? Where do I move from here?
What else was there to do but what you always did? The heavy woman pulled herself somehow out of the chair's suction grip. She put on what passed for a nightie then she brushed her teeth. She navigated herself to the underground region of her husband's snore. She lowered herself to bed and lay herself down.
*
Thursday, June 29, 2006
The worm's soliloquy
*
Here is what I know about myself.
I am a worm and not a man.
If I do something worthy of a man, it is not me, it must have been you who have done it.
"I fell silent and did not open my mouth,*
for surely it was you that did it."
Although I have never committed a murder, my hands have this strangling thing intrinsically threaded through them. They shake with it, a worm's ghostly vertebrae. I will not deny. I will not deny. I will stop denying.
I am not -- no no -- in no way sexually attracted to children and so what terrible thing inside me impels me to insist on even saying that? Why is it necessary?
I am not different from others in feeling impelled, whenever I see something soft and vulnerable, to crush it, and this even though I myself am soft and vulnerable and essentially without defenses.
What stops me from being myself? You do, Lord.
You are restraint. You are the stopping of my native self-hoaxing. When I don't feel you elsewhere I feel you there. And this is my true vertebrae, not the other one. Insofar as you hold me back, strip me and lay me low, I love you.
Restraint is in itself a good, but I am a creature of the American 60s, the time of the worm, and so my zipper is always down, my belly and my dick exposed, everything always open and all over the place until I too am disgusted. I do not know how of myself to find measure and be measure and live within measure, to be just so. Not everywhere and everything all over the place, not standing nowhere talking on my cellphone or watching the abyss of a dancing monitor, no no no, but to be measure and to be just so. No more no less no other.
You know all this, God. Why can't i just submit to you? But in fact I know the answer.
I am a worm and not a man.
*
Here is what I know about myself.
I am a worm and not a man.
If I do something worthy of a man, it is not me, it must have been you who have done it.
"I fell silent and did not open my mouth,*
for surely it was you that did it."
Although I have never committed a murder, my hands have this strangling thing intrinsically threaded through them. They shake with it, a worm's ghostly vertebrae. I will not deny. I will not deny. I will stop denying.
I am not -- no no -- in no way sexually attracted to children and so what terrible thing inside me impels me to insist on even saying that? Why is it necessary?
I am not different from others in feeling impelled, whenever I see something soft and vulnerable, to crush it, and this even though I myself am soft and vulnerable and essentially without defenses.
What stops me from being myself? You do, Lord.
You are restraint. You are the stopping of my native self-hoaxing. When I don't feel you elsewhere I feel you there. And this is my true vertebrae, not the other one. Insofar as you hold me back, strip me and lay me low, I love you.
Restraint is in itself a good, but I am a creature of the American 60s, the time of the worm, and so my zipper is always down, my belly and my dick exposed, everything always open and all over the place until I too am disgusted. I do not know how of myself to find measure and be measure and live within measure, to be just so. Not everywhere and everything all over the place, not standing nowhere talking on my cellphone or watching the abyss of a dancing monitor, no no no, but to be measure and to be just so. No more no less no other.
You know all this, God. Why can't i just submit to you? But in fact I know the answer.
I am a worm and not a man.
*
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
The worm on the cement
*
He called himself a worm but the worms called him an untouchable.
*
So what did the worm do then? He pretended to be okay. He simulated the sort of life that someone who was okay would have. He pulled himself bodily out of the darkness, the mud, the massed bed that bore our color and light. Blinking like a blindman he surfaced into the light and stretched. The world was good and he himself was perfectly normal. Right with God. Average in the sin department, neither a case of bragging nor of shame. Ha ha people said. A worm and not a man. Made an S on the cement and then a question mark. He shivered, finally revealing the truth about himself. He knew that God would have mercy on who he was, not who he pretended to be.
Feet came down solidly on the sidewalk and just missed him or else they didn't.
*
He called himself a worm but the worms called him an untouchable.
*
So what did the worm do then? He pretended to be okay. He simulated the sort of life that someone who was okay would have. He pulled himself bodily out of the darkness, the mud, the massed bed that bore our color and light. Blinking like a blindman he surfaced into the light and stretched. The world was good and he himself was perfectly normal. Right with God. Average in the sin department, neither a case of bragging nor of shame. Ha ha people said. A worm and not a man. Made an S on the cement and then a question mark. He shivered, finally revealing the truth about himself. He knew that God would have mercy on who he was, not who he pretended to be.
Feet came down solidly on the sidewalk and just missed him or else they didn't.
*
And not a worm either?
*
You - you strange boy - you call yourself "a worm and not a man" -- and yet the worms themselves want no part of you. They would prefer you call yourself something else not a worm. For they too have their worm standards of purity -- and you know you are not pure.
*
You - you strange boy - you call yourself "a worm and not a man" -- and yet the worms themselves want no part of you. They would prefer you call yourself something else not a worm. For they too have their worm standards of purity -- and you know you are not pure.
*
Friday, June 16, 2006
The life of a worm
*
Here theology.
I knew a worm. Let me describe a worm.
Drank. Drank too much.
The mouth of the bottle moved its lips a hypnotic serpent.
The two would kiss. Terrible taste. Pseudo love. Nirvana for Dummies.
The worm hated this relationship. In some sense even succumbing he would not succumb.
Would say: I know God means better for me.
Now the moral folk would look at him and shake their heads.
To preserve their holiness would move away and try to shut him out from -- what?
God's grace?
But what did the rich know, in effect, about God's grace? Even Protestants now thought they'd achieved their own prosperity by their own hands. Forgetting Luther they were digging themselves up by their own root.
Meanwhile the worm drank because.
Exclusion. Bad memories. Habit.
A depression that Christians claimed to be sin. Wilderness blues.
Too deep even to explore. But God was there.
Even in depression God was there.
The worm never lost his grip on God and with his worminess even had more to grip with. A grip on God's goodness. God's presence in places mere humans wouldn't go.
The worm would often say: I want to stop kissing the bottle and kiss God instead. And this is possible!
And this was even what the drinking meant.
The drinking was a fervent wish not to drink.
Imitation and perfection seemed to be out of the question. The worm could only love God and pray.
So now the question: what were God's own feelings about this worm?
*
Here theology.
I knew a worm. Let me describe a worm.
Drank. Drank too much.
The mouth of the bottle moved its lips a hypnotic serpent.
The two would kiss. Terrible taste. Pseudo love. Nirvana for Dummies.
The worm hated this relationship. In some sense even succumbing he would not succumb.
Would say: I know God means better for me.
Now the moral folk would look at him and shake their heads.
To preserve their holiness would move away and try to shut him out from -- what?
God's grace?
But what did the rich know, in effect, about God's grace? Even Protestants now thought they'd achieved their own prosperity by their own hands. Forgetting Luther they were digging themselves up by their own root.
Meanwhile the worm drank because.
Exclusion. Bad memories. Habit.
A depression that Christians claimed to be sin. Wilderness blues.
Too deep even to explore. But God was there.
Even in depression God was there.
The worm never lost his grip on God and with his worminess even had more to grip with. A grip on God's goodness. God's presence in places mere humans wouldn't go.
The worm would often say: I want to stop kissing the bottle and kiss God instead. And this is possible!
And this was even what the drinking meant.
The drinking was a fervent wish not to drink.
Imitation and perfection seemed to be out of the question. The worm could only love God and pray.
So now the question: what were God's own feelings about this worm?
*
Poem: Christianity for worms
*
So pitiably were we
unfit to meet God's terms
that we needed a Christianity
just for worms.
We had no kinship
with the saints
whose job was to sweep
us out of their tents.
We already
knew we were
unworthy
to approach the altar
so huddled
in outer
cold
unsure where
our own God was -- not was
in terms of doctrine
but for real and for us
in our desolation.
For the low and stepped on
would there be
inclusion, redemption
finally? -- or were we
tubes of hopelessness
condemned to bake
sad S's
on the sidewalk?
*
So pitiably were we
unfit to meet God's terms
that we needed a Christianity
just for worms.
We had no kinship
with the saints
whose job was to sweep
us out of their tents.
We already
knew we were
unworthy
to approach the altar
so huddled
in outer
cold
unsure where
our own God was -- not was
in terms of doctrine
but for real and for us
in our desolation.
For the low and stepped on
would there be
inclusion, redemption
finally? -- or were we
tubes of hopelessness
condemned to bake
sad S's
on the sidewalk?
*
Poem: The worm in robes
*
The worm looked at the photographs. It saw
itself before it had become a worm.
Elbowy humans in their long black robes.
The sun fell like a stone. One couldn't move.
The light was like a quarry where one's limbs
lay with no possibility of shade,
no hint of shade, there never would be shade.
Light was a giant slab. It couldn't blink
or flicker or not be. Not move. Not think.
Not be a place to grow. The graduates
could only back away from where they stood
embedded in this standing -- yet our God
was there -- orthogonal to our reward,
God was the shade we would soon be dragged toward.
*
The worm looked at the photographs. It saw
itself before it had become a worm.
Elbowy humans in their long black robes.
The sun fell like a stone. One couldn't move.
The light was like a quarry where one's limbs
lay with no possibility of shade,
no hint of shade, there never would be shade.
Light was a giant slab. It couldn't blink
or flicker or not be. Not move. Not think.
Not be a place to grow. The graduates
could only back away from where they stood
embedded in this standing -- yet our God
was there -- orthogonal to our reward,
God was the shade we would soon be dragged toward.
*
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Poem: The worm and the bathtub
*
The worm sits on a bowl -- in pain, content,
both things at once. There is a theatre
confronting it -- a bathtub, white, recessed,
expectant, with a hollow to fill up.
The California shadows want to be
performers -- want to act a mystery
and not just be mysterious, as now.
A red towel hangs, a victim as it were,
and not just what a victim would have worn.
Cloth is kin to the creature dripping blood
into the bowl, the worm. A play begins,
a mystery. The tub is bare and white!
There is a stubborn doorway through its bright
recess -- both open wide and now shut tight.
*
The worm sits on a bowl -- in pain, content,
both things at once. There is a theatre
confronting it -- a bathtub, white, recessed,
expectant, with a hollow to fill up.
The California shadows want to be
performers -- want to act a mystery
and not just be mysterious, as now.
A red towel hangs, a victim as it were,
and not just what a victim would have worn.
Cloth is kin to the creature dripping blood
into the bowl, the worm. A play begins,
a mystery. The tub is bare and white!
There is a stubborn doorway through its bright
recess -- both open wide and now shut tight.
*
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Poem: Christianity for worms
*
The icon looked and maybe did not like
the thing "it" saw -- there was no mirror here,
there was a harrowing disconnectedness
which was no doubt the thing the icon saw.
He saw a worm, no human, just a worm
pressing its body to the filmy break
on the protected space from which one's God
looked out and not just looked, not merely looked
but reached to pull all those within his reach
those golden, beautiful, reachable ones
who "imitated Christ" -- but who were they?
And why was everyone looking away?
He pulled -- even a worm could feel the pull.
It was suffused with blood and wonderful.
*
The icon looked and maybe did not like
the thing "it" saw -- there was no mirror here,
there was a harrowing disconnectedness
which was no doubt the thing the icon saw.
He saw a worm, no human, just a worm
pressing its body to the filmy break
on the protected space from which one's God
looked out and not just looked, not merely looked
but reached to pull all those within his reach
those golden, beautiful, reachable ones
who "imitated Christ" -- but who were they?
And why was everyone looking away?
He pulled -- even a worm could feel the pull.
It was suffused with blood and wonderful.
*
Friday, May 12, 2006
Poem: Truth as a walk
*
What made the numbers had no number,
maker of place, the one
who lifted water like a box
and slid it under land or up in sky
then poised to fall in scintillations,
the scintillating sheets torn by the trees,
this one, the one who placed, could not be placed,
but lay and deeply lay within the waste,
a presence? could you call God that?
an absence? that was just a word
that poets used, but true words had to be
walked into, truth was more a kind of walk
that you had to *do* even to
know what you were trying to *do*.
*
What made the numbers had no number,
maker of place, the one
who lifted water like a box
and slid it under land or up in sky
then poised to fall in scintillations,
the scintillating sheets torn by the trees,
this one, the one who placed, could not be placed,
but lay and deeply lay within the waste,
a presence? could you call God that?
an absence? that was just a word
that poets used, but true words had to be
walked into, truth was more a kind of walk
that you had to *do* even to
know what you were trying to *do*.
*
Monday, May 01, 2006
Chapter 400?
*
Kierkegaard somewhere said that you cannot confront another person's ilusion head-on. You need to come from behind. What does this mean? The insight will not come out of the violence of a debate -- your respondent then just digs in and fights. You need a new arena that changes all the terms.
One is convinced by one's own experience, not someone else's. And the Spirit pushes inward from between the shoulder blades, not from outward into the eyebrows.
*
Una moved through the edge of the campus with her God behind her. He flowed into her movements as she allowed him to. Just insofar. Now God was not the thesis of an argument she had. He was not a point to be made. He was not a historical artifact to be sustained or recovered or polished or put away. Not just discussed per se, not possible. He was not a set of rules, relevant or otherwise. He was not an "experience". He was not an event in her spiritual autobiography. What he was she had to keep from blocking, she had to let him come into her perception -- into the act of her perception -- fostering it, sustaining it, keeping it from its own abject death and oblivion -- so that she might somehow be able to see the way he saw. One momentary flicker would be enough to nibble on for years and years.
She looked behind but the gardener could no longer be seen. Strongly felt but not located. Ahead of her the ruined chapel, left in decay. Crumbs and condom wrappers, graffiti on the helpless softening walls. A depression one simply needed to walk through. An ugliness that ate itself up. In the windows spiders rolled and unrolled like little yoyos.
The dorms at dawn were all in a tilted condition. They leaned like loose teeth. The light they were made of seemed a wavering substance, a flashlight in a jiggling hand. The buildings were only half plugged in -- were one to pull the plug, if you reached and pulled it, what happened to the contents, their existence? If the physical plant were turned off, what happened to the life inside? Would its being turn off too? Was it cradled elsewhere? How solidly grounded was this thing, existence? In what exactly was it grounded? Where did it come from, what was its source?
So much transience littering the soul. She felt the power behind her at an impossible angle, she felt the Lord move her forward, she rested in this immense capability. She yielded to his grandeur: Gelassenheit. Then the inexpressible joy. She walked and was walked.
Her breathing breathed her and left her breathless. "You are my refuge". Do not abandon me.
By the stairwell of the dorm, 2 students she knew slightly were lounging in their old chairs dangling coffee cups. One of them stood up to get more coffee.
Una stood next to the urn but the other didn't even look at her. Didn't see her. When she put her hand on the shoulder the woman shuddered and didn't move. They were not present to each other but rather haunted by each other.
I am invisible, Una thought.
*
Then each of the women backed away from the other as though what she'd touched had been a burning stove.
*
Photons are selfish little things whose dearest wish is to eat each other up, in the Physics that seals the land of God's abandonment. Their nature was to be overenergized and deadly. Through the sweep of them -- the concatenated physical hypotheses that popped inside the dorm staircase and made it occur -- Una moved carefully, the mud on her feet burning and cracking. Over her head the building was a construct as fragile as an untended row of trees. Sycamores say that no one loved enough to groom. She expected it to wink out of existence at any moment. She reached the floor of her own room and paused to catch her breath and pray, since even though the building felt unreal, her own prayer might still be grounded and hence a point of reference, and if so, one much needed. It would be the only surviving link between herself and this space. She opened the door and instantly her roommate rose up from her bed screaming and pointing.
You're dead! she screamed. What are you doing here? You are dead!
You have been certified already!
*
Kierkegaard somewhere said that you cannot confront another person's ilusion head-on. You need to come from behind. What does this mean? The insight will not come out of the violence of a debate -- your respondent then just digs in and fights. You need a new arena that changes all the terms.
One is convinced by one's own experience, not someone else's. And the Spirit pushes inward from between the shoulder blades, not from outward into the eyebrows.
*
Una moved through the edge of the campus with her God behind her. He flowed into her movements as she allowed him to. Just insofar. Now God was not the thesis of an argument she had. He was not a point to be made. He was not a historical artifact to be sustained or recovered or polished or put away. Not just discussed per se, not possible. He was not a set of rules, relevant or otherwise. He was not an "experience". He was not an event in her spiritual autobiography. What he was she had to keep from blocking, she had to let him come into her perception -- into the act of her perception -- fostering it, sustaining it, keeping it from its own abject death and oblivion -- so that she might somehow be able to see the way he saw. One momentary flicker would be enough to nibble on for years and years.
She looked behind but the gardener could no longer be seen. Strongly felt but not located. Ahead of her the ruined chapel, left in decay. Crumbs and condom wrappers, graffiti on the helpless softening walls. A depression one simply needed to walk through. An ugliness that ate itself up. In the windows spiders rolled and unrolled like little yoyos.
The dorms at dawn were all in a tilted condition. They leaned like loose teeth. The light they were made of seemed a wavering substance, a flashlight in a jiggling hand. The buildings were only half plugged in -- were one to pull the plug, if you reached and pulled it, what happened to the contents, their existence? If the physical plant were turned off, what happened to the life inside? Would its being turn off too? Was it cradled elsewhere? How solidly grounded was this thing, existence? In what exactly was it grounded? Where did it come from, what was its source?
So much transience littering the soul. She felt the power behind her at an impossible angle, she felt the Lord move her forward, she rested in this immense capability. She yielded to his grandeur: Gelassenheit. Then the inexpressible joy. She walked and was walked.
Her breathing breathed her and left her breathless. "You are my refuge". Do not abandon me.
By the stairwell of the dorm, 2 students she knew slightly were lounging in their old chairs dangling coffee cups. One of them stood up to get more coffee.
Una stood next to the urn but the other didn't even look at her. Didn't see her. When she put her hand on the shoulder the woman shuddered and didn't move. They were not present to each other but rather haunted by each other.
I am invisible, Una thought.
*
Then each of the women backed away from the other as though what she'd touched had been a burning stove.
*
Photons are selfish little things whose dearest wish is to eat each other up, in the Physics that seals the land of God's abandonment. Their nature was to be overenergized and deadly. Through the sweep of them -- the concatenated physical hypotheses that popped inside the dorm staircase and made it occur -- Una moved carefully, the mud on her feet burning and cracking. Over her head the building was a construct as fragile as an untended row of trees. Sycamores say that no one loved enough to groom. She expected it to wink out of existence at any moment. She reached the floor of her own room and paused to catch her breath and pray, since even though the building felt unreal, her own prayer might still be grounded and hence a point of reference, and if so, one much needed. It would be the only surviving link between herself and this space. She opened the door and instantly her roommate rose up from her bed screaming and pointing.
You're dead! she screamed. What are you doing here? You are dead!
You have been certified already!
*
Monday, April 24, 2006
Shoulder blades
*
As Una walked, someone alighted on her shoulder blades. They folded like Origami in intricate linen, and the weight upon them only made them lighter than before. God was behind her not in front. He dug into her with his vivifying spade. "Where could I flee?"
Orthogonal to the divine is still the divine. You turn 90 degrees and something different stands in front of you. But the same one stands behind. Always there, but only now noticed.
*
As Una walked, someone alighted on her shoulder blades. They folded like Origami in intricate linen, and the weight upon them only made them lighter than before. God was behind her not in front. He dug into her with his vivifying spade. "Where could I flee?"
Orthogonal to the divine is still the divine. You turn 90 degrees and something different stands in front of you. But the same one stands behind. Always there, but only now noticed.
*
Monday, April 17, 2006
The tears in the water
*
You ask about the stream and the chapel. How did they come to be? You know about the cheerleader who cried? No indeed.
She fell in love with the football star. You are the one. He told her how special she was. The girls warned her. Be independent. Don't let a man push you around.
Good rule -- but not in this case. His words were love-infused and love-informed. He meant what he said. Surely. She abandoned herself as if he were a little god. Or a big god.
An idol in shoulder pads. Blissful love like a giant stop in her ordinary life. The stop swelled like a bruise, the life disappeared. Then he grew distracted.
The team had an away game and for some reason she wasn't supposed to go. Or didn't go. Her friend convinced her to check out the locker rooms, the sanctum of the alpha males. Let's see how they live.
There in the men's room with the toilet paper lying dissheveled on the floor. Words about her on the wall, words in permanent ink. He had written the words, she recognized the hand.
Dear Lord. That man has reduced me.
Then the cheerleader began to cry. She was unable to stop crying. She squatted on the cold gray floor and cried. The tears accumulated as she cried herself away.
The tears flowed and at the same time stood still, had nowhere to go. So the standing still became this landmark, it was on the map -- and at the same time the landmark was nothing but this constant flow. Children played next to the water. The young tour guides would bring their visitors, the prospective freshmen, to the side of the stream and stand there looking out. The chapel stood next to the water. It was the cheerleader's place and at the same time stood there empty and abandoned. Abandonment was what such a girl was. It was like her attribute. But she herself had cried herself out and was no longer anywhere to be found.
*
You ask about the stream and the chapel. How did they come to be? You know about the cheerleader who cried? No indeed.
She fell in love with the football star. You are the one. He told her how special she was. The girls warned her. Be independent. Don't let a man push you around.
Good rule -- but not in this case. His words were love-infused and love-informed. He meant what he said. Surely. She abandoned herself as if he were a little god. Or a big god.
An idol in shoulder pads. Blissful love like a giant stop in her ordinary life. The stop swelled like a bruise, the life disappeared. Then he grew distracted.
The team had an away game and for some reason she wasn't supposed to go. Or didn't go. Her friend convinced her to check out the locker rooms, the sanctum of the alpha males. Let's see how they live.
There in the men's room with the toilet paper lying dissheveled on the floor. Words about her on the wall, words in permanent ink. He had written the words, she recognized the hand.
Dear Lord. That man has reduced me.
Then the cheerleader began to cry. She was unable to stop crying. She squatted on the cold gray floor and cried. The tears accumulated as she cried herself away.
The tears flowed and at the same time stood still, had nowhere to go. So the standing still became this landmark, it was on the map -- and at the same time the landmark was nothing but this constant flow. Children played next to the water. The young tour guides would bring their visitors, the prospective freshmen, to the side of the stream and stand there looking out. The chapel stood next to the water. It was the cheerleader's place and at the same time stood there empty and abandoned. Abandonment was what such a girl was. It was like her attribute. But she herself had cried herself out and was no longer anywhere to be found.
*
Monday, April 10, 2006
Poem: The hook
*
The chosen one, he thrashes like a fish
upon the hook -- and the hook like a choice
one did not choose, a choice I did not wish
to have -- this choice a sheer transparency
through which the chooser, not myself,
chose my own choosing -- I have not
brought this upon myself, it was imposed.
It was thrown into me, a hook
of suffering on which my body closed.
Should I reject it, "I" becomes a word.
This I like flesh, it isn't really mine
but someone that invades me. Till my voice,
my poem has no subject of its own.
It's just a skin -- with God the flesh and bone.
*
The chosen one, he thrashes like a fish
upon the hook -- and the hook like a choice
one did not choose, a choice I did not wish
to have -- this choice a sheer transparency
through which the chooser, not myself,
chose my own choosing -- I have not
brought this upon myself, it was imposed.
It was thrown into me, a hook
of suffering on which my body closed.
Should I reject it, "I" becomes a word.
This I like flesh, it isn't really mine
but someone that invades me. Till my voice,
my poem has no subject of its own.
It's just a skin -- with God the flesh and bone.
*
Friday, April 07, 2006
The blade of forgiveness
*
What is the pressure between those blades? Forgiveness, it is forgiveness. Given received. The shoulders loosen and relax, they go lower, they sink down -- the shoulder blades fold and brood, a dove making ethereal gulp sounds, while the heart lifts to the sky. It is forgiveness that pushes you forward. And the will? What exactly is the will? Is it the little guy who sweeps the street in front of you so that you can move at all?
*
What is the pressure between those blades? Forgiveness, it is forgiveness. Given received. The shoulders loosen and relax, they go lower, they sink down -- the shoulder blades fold and brood, a dove making ethereal gulp sounds, while the heart lifts to the sky. It is forgiveness that pushes you forward. And the will? What exactly is the will? Is it the little guy who sweeps the street in front of you so that you can move at all?
*
Monday, April 03, 2006
Imitation and Kierkegaard
*
Kierkegaard talks of true faith as "imitation" of our "prototype" Christ. But (1st but) imitation is impossible because the distance is too great! But (2nd but) recognizing this distance leads one to "grace". But (3rd but) "grace" then becomes a device for the human to go on living as before that same empty life and relying on "grace" like a crutch. But (4th but) all of this is what the human does only as facing forward and willing her redemption. But (5th but) that is not how it works, dear Mr K.
Grace is not in front of one to be willed but behind one and between the shoulder blades. It pushes the blades and so you move tentatively toward the God who is everywhere. But (6th but) doesn't the will get in the way of this? Or can you will to be pushed ever so gently by that push?
*
Kierkegaard talks of true faith as "imitation" of our "prototype" Christ. But (1st but) imitation is impossible because the distance is too great! But (2nd but) recognizing this distance leads one to "grace". But (3rd but) "grace" then becomes a device for the human to go on living as before that same empty life and relying on "grace" like a crutch. But (4th but) all of this is what the human does only as facing forward and willing her redemption. But (5th but) that is not how it works, dear Mr K.
Grace is not in front of one to be willed but behind one and between the shoulder blades. It pushes the blades and so you move tentatively toward the God who is everywhere. But (6th but) doesn't the will get in the way of this? Or can you will to be pushed ever so gently by that push?
*
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Thursday, March 02, 2006
The dog in God's hand
*
At the crossing, a little dog
a little dog
has 4 legs now,
has 4 legs now
looks at the girl and turns
looks back at the girl
walks to the girl
sits by the girl
wags his tail at the girl
runs away from the girl
laughing on 4 legs -- has 4 legs!
splashes in existence
swimming in the ivy like a dog swimming in the ivy.
God's hand
God's hand
my surface is God's hand
God pets the dog
God throws a bone.
God's throw. God's bone.
*
At the crossing, a little dog
a little dog
has 4 legs now,
has 4 legs now
looks at the girl and turns
looks back at the girl
walks to the girl
sits by the girl
wags his tail at the girl
runs away from the girl
laughing on 4 legs -- has 4 legs!
splashes in existence
swimming in the ivy like a dog swimming in the ivy.
God's hand
God's hand
my surface is God's hand
God pets the dog
God throws a bone.
God's throw. God's bone.
*
Conversion
*
At transitional points, at breaks -- where the skin turns into fingernail: that is where conversion occurs.
*
At transitional points, at breaks -- where the skin turns into fingernail: that is where conversion occurs.
*
Chapter 15: Green trees
*
Una walked with the crown of her head as touching heaven, her spine straight as a thrust spear. The core lay upward and became squeezed. Her heart seemed to pierce the clouds. The book of the shoulder blades closed, tight shut. The granite dormitories stood skewed on either side, as if unable to resist the pressure of God's thumb. There was a crack down the front of the world's rational complacency and coherence, an opening of mathematical wrongness -- there for students to ponder, to fall through or ignore. It lay quietly across her forehead too. The world -- considered by itself -- did not add up. But as a kneaded paste of what was to come, it made a different kind of sense or was about to -- always on the verge, just like a human.
There was a man in the garden. Who was that man? He did his work and didn't look at her.
She was certain she knew him. She couldn't remember how. He was very attractive to her. Not knowing what to do with it, she took the attraction and shelved it like a book on some back shelf (behind the shoulder blades?), leaving it there to be latent and ready. Then she looked back and found the attraction unshelved, in front of her, bursting her heart. It had nothing to do with sex. As she stepped forward the man no longer stood in front of her, was no longer visible. But he was still there.
All around her were the green and succulent trees. As still as her own heart.
*
Una walked with the crown of her head as touching heaven, her spine straight as a thrust spear. The core lay upward and became squeezed. Her heart seemed to pierce the clouds. The book of the shoulder blades closed, tight shut. The granite dormitories stood skewed on either side, as if unable to resist the pressure of God's thumb. There was a crack down the front of the world's rational complacency and coherence, an opening of mathematical wrongness -- there for students to ponder, to fall through or ignore. It lay quietly across her forehead too. The world -- considered by itself -- did not add up. But as a kneaded paste of what was to come, it made a different kind of sense or was about to -- always on the verge, just like a human.
There was a man in the garden. Who was that man? He did his work and didn't look at her.
She was certain she knew him. She couldn't remember how. He was very attractive to her. Not knowing what to do with it, she took the attraction and shelved it like a book on some back shelf (behind the shoulder blades?), leaving it there to be latent and ready. Then she looked back and found the attraction unshelved, in front of her, bursting her heart. It had nothing to do with sex. As she stepped forward the man no longer stood in front of her, was no longer visible. But he was still there.
All around her were the green and succulent trees. As still as her own heart.
*
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Poem & Digression: On loving the enemy
*
You must know what's at stake to understand
what cursing curses and who is
the enemy one must forgive but first
there has to be an enemy -- one must
live where these stakes continue to exist --
where men are wrenched in pieces and their blood
accumulates and starts to flood
all judgment. You cannot stay wrapped
in affluence like cotton. Never boast
you have no enemy or you are lost!
Faith must be founded in reality,
this little piece of it that juts out from
the wider providence you cannot know,
except as bone that breaks the way you go.
*
You must know what's at stake to understand
what cursing curses and who is
the enemy one must forgive but first
there has to be an enemy -- one must
live where these stakes continue to exist --
where men are wrenched in pieces and their blood
accumulates and starts to flood
all judgment. You cannot stay wrapped
in affluence like cotton. Never boast
you have no enemy or you are lost!
Faith must be founded in reality,
this little piece of it that juts out from
the wider providence you cannot know,
except as bone that breaks the way you go.
*
The shadow of God's hand
*
As she walked the mud spread and covered her -- it was a mask. One that expressed and revealed, not concealed, or one that spread its palm over untruth to conceal that and reveal the other.
God the potter spun the sharp wheel and shaped a pot or a girl. Una rolled down the hill exhilarated, hung in her cocoon of devotion. The creed was a bodily space that the body moved through. Her flesh solidified over time and flaked off. She was new.
The greatest miracle was the Crucifixion, not the Resurrection. For given an "entity" that is God, who can be surprised about its being born again from oblivion, which is merely standard behavior for a god. But that God, being who he is, would have bent forward to hollow out his own eternity and allow it to be submerged in death? Not that a given man would live forever but that God, our God, would dare to experience the other thing.
He must be crazy about us, Una said.
*
So why didn't everyone walk down her pleasant campus path, the garden walk of faith? Oh because the access was so much pain. The path was pain. So all because of pain. Or rather the fear of pain -- which is actually a form of pain.
*
As she walked the mud spread and covered her -- it was a mask. One that expressed and revealed, not concealed, or one that spread its palm over untruth to conceal that and reveal the other.
God the potter spun the sharp wheel and shaped a pot or a girl. Una rolled down the hill exhilarated, hung in her cocoon of devotion. The creed was a bodily space that the body moved through. Her flesh solidified over time and flaked off. She was new.
The greatest miracle was the Crucifixion, not the Resurrection. For given an "entity" that is God, who can be surprised about its being born again from oblivion, which is merely standard behavior for a god. But that God, being who he is, would have bent forward to hollow out his own eternity and allow it to be submerged in death? Not that a given man would live forever but that God, our God, would dare to experience the other thing.
He must be crazy about us, Una said.
*
So why didn't everyone walk down her pleasant campus path, the garden walk of faith? Oh because the access was so much pain. The path was pain. So all because of pain. Or rather the fear of pain -- which is actually a form of pain.
*
Monday, February 27, 2006
The intelligent design
*
If there were a God, "how would we know?" the scientist asked. (American Scientist, Jan-Feb 2006, p, 4).
The answer might be that If I *didn't* know, then I *wouldn't* know. There is no way I "would" know unless I "did" know. In pretending the slate is bare the writer is starting from a fictional position and so will never come to the one awkward fact. It is more than pre-supposed. I would say that my "knowledge" of God was hard-wired in my being -- certainly deeper than a postulate. Whatever in me knows would come from this, or this would be what knew, or what did the knowing. You can't exactly dispute about a wiring nor can you, the wire, redo the wire. Nor prove, nor disprove. This is deeper territory than the flat hall of debate, unless you imagine a debate that you ride inside like a wild train and come out as a being changed and disclosed, maybe killed. That would not be very scientific.
*
If there were a God, "how would we know?" the scientist asked. (American Scientist, Jan-Feb 2006, p, 4).
The answer might be that If I *didn't* know, then I *wouldn't* know. There is no way I "would" know unless I "did" know. In pretending the slate is bare the writer is starting from a fictional position and so will never come to the one awkward fact. It is more than pre-supposed. I would say that my "knowledge" of God was hard-wired in my being -- certainly deeper than a postulate. Whatever in me knows would come from this, or this would be what knew, or what did the knowing. You can't exactly dispute about a wiring nor can you, the wire, redo the wire. Nor prove, nor disprove. This is deeper territory than the flat hall of debate, unless you imagine a debate that you ride inside like a wild train and come out as a being changed and disclosed, maybe killed. That would not be very scientific.
*
Saturday, February 25, 2006
The landscape
*
Had the landscape then been evil? She could not see it that way. Even the bugs being eaten were not in themselves suffering evil. Death was not an evil, it was something that occurred. Death gave life its shape.
Where then did evil come from, since it was so swarmingly there? Was the devil -- who was not a real entity on his own but more like a virus that could seize a distracted will and simulate existence -- so was his whole existence nothing but your own loss of focus?
*
Suppose that suffering were something external that the will encountered as an object. Its final meaning might be what the will made of it. It might be like a weight whose lifting made you stronger. That was what it was as an object, not a subject. Why didn't it stay that way?
*
Through some terrible metamorphosis, no, it was a literal invasion and a passing through the membrance, suffering became subject instead of object, it became you. The person suffering the pain became the pain. all sentience about anything became pain's mentation, a damned entity to be sure. There was evil. There was damage. You might say that when this happened, even the devil now had hands and feet of his own to flex. But how did it happen?
*
Was it about focus? Did it happen because a human, knowing it had a goal, took its eyes off the goal?
*
Was it about the periphery being allowed to seep in and take control?
*
Was it when the creature, already full, felt its own fangs being sunk into food that it didn't even want? Then food rose into consciousness and began its ugly sobbing. And the sobbing was waste and about waste. Something now gone off track.
*
Had the landscape then been evil? She could not see it that way. Even the bugs being eaten were not in themselves suffering evil. Death was not an evil, it was something that occurred. Death gave life its shape.
Where then did evil come from, since it was so swarmingly there? Was the devil -- who was not a real entity on his own but more like a virus that could seize a distracted will and simulate existence -- so was his whole existence nothing but your own loss of focus?
*
Suppose that suffering were something external that the will encountered as an object. Its final meaning might be what the will made of it. It might be like a weight whose lifting made you stronger. That was what it was as an object, not a subject. Why didn't it stay that way?
*
Through some terrible metamorphosis, no, it was a literal invasion and a passing through the membrance, suffering became subject instead of object, it became you. The person suffering the pain became the pain. all sentience about anything became pain's mentation, a damned entity to be sure. There was evil. There was damage. You might say that when this happened, even the devil now had hands and feet of his own to flex. But how did it happen?
*
Was it about focus? Did it happen because a human, knowing it had a goal, took its eyes off the goal?
*
Was it about the periphery being allowed to seep in and take control?
*
Was it when the creature, already full, felt its own fangs being sunk into food that it didn't even want? Then food rose into consciousness and began its ugly sobbing. And the sobbing was waste and about waste. Something now gone off track.
*
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
The mud
*
What was the mud? The mud was penance. The mud was made of penance, soul-building pain.
Her body was softer than a worm's, more vulnerable. She fell through this putty-like water and felt it reshape her. That was yieldedness. It was terrifying. An ana-baptism!
The process: you yielded to God (a yielding like death), you felt God knead you, and you then resurfaced into the world but it was now a different world. The world you left was a godless one, the world you re-entered was God's world. Here you were in no way alone.
And the filth made no difference.
And it didn't matter now how frail and damageable your own being was. You no longer brooded on that. God was in control.
And in that thought you submerged and were kneaded once again.
*
What was the mud? The mud was penance. The mud was made of penance, soul-building pain.
Her body was softer than a worm's, more vulnerable. She fell through this putty-like water and felt it reshape her. That was yieldedness. It was terrifying. An ana-baptism!
The process: you yielded to God (a yielding like death), you felt God knead you, and you then resurfaced into the world but it was now a different world. The world you left was a godless one, the world you re-entered was God's world. Here you were in no way alone.
And the filth made no difference.
And it didn't matter now how frail and damageable your own being was. You no longer brooded on that. God was in control.
And in that thought you submerged and were kneaded once again.
*
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Chapter 13: The invertebrate
*
So Una gave herself to God to be kneaded -- a worm within the mud. The walls of the body were just about nothing -- they were liquid or putty. They were ready -- to be shaped into anything.
She fell off an invisible cliff without any purchase at all. The risk of death -- well, it was more than a risk. Was this nothing but the force of gravity? Was God really there?
As for gravity, that too was no more than a shape that God shaped.
All of the elements dissassembled and gave themselves to God.
I hate a world where all the creatures eat each other, she cried. But the cry, that was eaten too.
And the falling continued to fall. She felt her being continue to pull into pieces, softish ones. A poor shell-less invertebrate, what could it do but expose its own weakness in utter hope?
*
So Una gave herself to God to be kneaded -- a worm within the mud. The walls of the body were just about nothing -- they were liquid or putty. They were ready -- to be shaped into anything.
She fell off an invisible cliff without any purchase at all. The risk of death -- well, it was more than a risk. Was this nothing but the force of gravity? Was God really there?
As for gravity, that too was no more than a shape that God shaped.
All of the elements dissassembled and gave themselves to God.
I hate a world where all the creatures eat each other, she cried. But the cry, that was eaten too.
And the falling continued to fall. She felt her being continue to pull into pieces, softish ones. A poor shell-less invertebrate, what could it do but expose its own weakness in utter hope?
*
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Food
*
Darwinian pit, abandoned by God but perhaps not by his son. They say that Jesus recognized that food had become the subject (subject not object) within our wicked hearts and that blood was tickling our souls with lust -- a forbidden engorging -- and so he came, broke into our vile fratty games and put his own breast in the path of the fang -- "I am the bread of life" -- so that through his own and voluntary breaking-open, food could be clean once again.
*
Darwinian pit, abandoned by God but perhaps not by his son. They say that Jesus recognized that food had become the subject (subject not object) within our wicked hearts and that blood was tickling our souls with lust -- a forbidden engorging -- and so he came, broke into our vile fratty games and put his own breast in the path of the fang -- "I am the bread of life" -- so that through his own and voluntary breaking-open, food could be clean once again.
*
Feeding
*
A terrible truth about Darwin's land. When the ants there fed on a scorpion, and ingested her alive, it was not her stinger, her poison or her carapace that they relished, it was her resistance, that was what they fed on and what tasted so good to them.
*
A terrible truth about Darwin's land. When the ants there fed on a scorpion, and ingested her alive, it was not her stinger, her poison or her carapace that they relished, it was her resistance, that was what they fed on and what tasted so good to them.
*
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Chapter 11: Una's encounter
*
They said that every encounter with God ran the risk of death. That was why so many even who called themselves religious shunned that encounter.
Are you orthodox? Are you orthodox? How can you be alone in the mud?
To most it seemed better to live in echoes of the encounter and to retell the old stories that concerned it, simply as stories. Good things to share with our children, they said. History, art, politics, anything but truth.
When a story ended it was like a curtain coming down on a play. Everyone stood up and went home. But an encounter was different from a story.
The people had curled themselves into a ball and hung immersed in the stream that burst the mud. A tadpole sewed through and pierced their sphere, and a demon looked down from a leaf overhead. Behind another leaf Una now hid. She was frightened of this world. Oh Darwinism is the land of God's abandonment. Now there was a membrane separating Una's realm from that land -- one quick movement would make it tear.
So she was smart enough to be afraid.
The creatures in the sphere made a village, a community. We are one, we are close. But some of them were tied and hung upside down. Others slithered along the bloodshot surface. They would nip each other and chew slowly. Sometimes a carapace would suddenly implode. Love was predation in Darwin's land. There was a pair of people each of whom was busy eating the other's haunch. They reached their extensors into each other's belly, pulling out pieces of meat.
It's all just natural, someone said, a budding ethicist, or a demon probably. It's just the way things are. Nothing beyond this. Accept it.
On the bank a group of peasants in yellow pajamas engaged in a tug of war but the thing being tugged was themselves and the flesh would be pulled back and forth until you couldn't recognize it. One of them grabbed her wrist to pull her into the healthful game.
She was now terrified enough to risk the encounter with God. The risk of instant death, that was why more people didn't do this. The kneading of your heart in God's hand, the potting that might kill you.
Conduct, sullen and inexpressive boy, held her other hand as if to encourage her -- or to keep her from running away.
*
They said that every encounter with God ran the risk of death. That was why so many even who called themselves religious shunned that encounter.
Are you orthodox? Are you orthodox? How can you be alone in the mud?
To most it seemed better to live in echoes of the encounter and to retell the old stories that concerned it, simply as stories. Good things to share with our children, they said. History, art, politics, anything but truth.
When a story ended it was like a curtain coming down on a play. Everyone stood up and went home. But an encounter was different from a story.
The people had curled themselves into a ball and hung immersed in the stream that burst the mud. A tadpole sewed through and pierced their sphere, and a demon looked down from a leaf overhead. Behind another leaf Una now hid. She was frightened of this world. Oh Darwinism is the land of God's abandonment. Now there was a membrane separating Una's realm from that land -- one quick movement would make it tear.
So she was smart enough to be afraid.
The creatures in the sphere made a village, a community. We are one, we are close. But some of them were tied and hung upside down. Others slithered along the bloodshot surface. They would nip each other and chew slowly. Sometimes a carapace would suddenly implode. Love was predation in Darwin's land. There was a pair of people each of whom was busy eating the other's haunch. They reached their extensors into each other's belly, pulling out pieces of meat.
It's all just natural, someone said, a budding ethicist, or a demon probably. It's just the way things are. Nothing beyond this. Accept it.
On the bank a group of peasants in yellow pajamas engaged in a tug of war but the thing being tugged was themselves and the flesh would be pulled back and forth until you couldn't recognize it. One of them grabbed her wrist to pull her into the healthful game.
She was now terrified enough to risk the encounter with God. The risk of instant death, that was why more people didn't do this. The kneading of your heart in God's hand, the potting that might kill you.
Conduct, sullen and inexpressive boy, held her other hand as if to encourage her -- or to keep her from running away.
*
Monday, January 23, 2006
Surveying the landscape
*
As she walked the devil hovered and became *there*. The Place of Poetry was one of his special lairs -- he loved to break in and tear it down. The tears of humans were a precious food. Were he but the bodily trappings of a disordered will, so be it. He revelled in a destitute existence, unlike any modern Christian. So the devil perched, between the bladder and the bowels, holding on tightly and flapping his horrible wings. Inside the body deeply.
A beetle crawled across his face in the mud, with a chemical sting at its nether opening, and the sting was slipping and sliding like a hose filled with poison. The devil grabbed the bug and wedged it into the mud, embedding the sting. Then he contentedly ate the front half still alive. Una walked through the slush without even looking back, actually she was praying her head off, and the devil not only got left behind but was miniaturized, diminished to a mote.
God lay ahead
*
As she walked the devil hovered and became *there*. The Place of Poetry was one of his special lairs -- he loved to break in and tear it down. The tears of humans were a precious food. Were he but the bodily trappings of a disordered will, so be it. He revelled in a destitute existence, unlike any modern Christian. So the devil perched, between the bladder and the bowels, holding on tightly and flapping his horrible wings. Inside the body deeply.
A beetle crawled across his face in the mud, with a chemical sting at its nether opening, and the sting was slipping and sliding like a hose filled with poison. The devil grabbed the bug and wedged it into the mud, embedding the sting. Then he contentedly ate the front half still alive. Una walked through the slush without even looking back, actually she was praying her head off, and the devil not only got left behind but was miniaturized, diminished to a mote.
God lay ahead
*
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
In the sludge
*
I want to be good, she said, don't know how. The others reduce me, the others, my equals. Gravitational force of human stuckness, the sludge of dailiness. That sludge of dailiness itself grows daily. I pull away and then seem alone -- want to pull away but not be alone. Conduct -- the man she loved -- pulled away from her. His nature. Standing on the cliff above the gully, not a cliff, just a discontinuity. Because life is ringed by death and death is ringed by God -- and you want to move through it.
Don't hang on me, the man said. Don't be one of those girls you see at convenience stores, leaning on their man pathetically. Little Tammy, sweet Diane. The guy smokes her like a cigarette. She looks like someone who's given herself away -- entregada -- to nothing but a human! Treating a human as godlike -- godlike powers. But he too is distorted and weak. That guy is no god.
Your conduct has to be your own.
But here at college, the girls were having sex with the boys and didn't even want to. Didn't even want what they seemed to want. Didn't even know what they want. Sluggish like those not dead not alive. Sluggish being. Pull out pull away. And not be alone there. You are not alone.
If you are not alone, who are you with? God be with me even in this mud.
*
I want to be good, she said, don't know how. The others reduce me, the others, my equals. Gravitational force of human stuckness, the sludge of dailiness. That sludge of dailiness itself grows daily. I pull away and then seem alone -- want to pull away but not be alone. Conduct -- the man she loved -- pulled away from her. His nature. Standing on the cliff above the gully, not a cliff, just a discontinuity. Because life is ringed by death and death is ringed by God -- and you want to move through it.
Don't hang on me, the man said. Don't be one of those girls you see at convenience stores, leaning on their man pathetically. Little Tammy, sweet Diane. The guy smokes her like a cigarette. She looks like someone who's given herself away -- entregada -- to nothing but a human! Treating a human as godlike -- godlike powers. But he too is distorted and weak. That guy is no god.
Your conduct has to be your own.
But here at college, the girls were having sex with the boys and didn't even want to. Didn't even want what they seemed to want. Didn't even know what they want. Sluggish like those not dead not alive. Sluggish being. Pull out pull away. And not be alone there. You are not alone.
If you are not alone, who are you with? God be with me even in this mud.
*
Monday, January 09, 2006
She tripped and fell...
*
into the water, yes, but he was there with her, the intentional one whose remoteness was a form of love.
She reached for the mud of the stream-edge and seemed to close her fingers upon a grub, too soft for a human hand.
She remembered the day she'd fasted to the point of exhaustion and fallen praying onto the vision of a grub. Some creature so thin it not only didn't have a shell but didn't have any protection at all. So that even touching it seemed to hurt it. And permanently. How could things so weak be thrust into the world, things born to die, how could God allow their life as nothing but carnage? Yes but inwardly this vulnerable image had been Jesus himself, the one who had opted to be without defenses, though the most powerful being in the world, gaping with softness, inexplicable. Sheer threads of hurting hanging down. Now remembering this image, she grabbed onto the poor creature and squeezed it with a practiced selfishness.
... was pulled back onto the shore. Where all the dead bugs lay. The losers in the battles, resting and decomposing.
*
into the water, yes, but he was there with her, the intentional one whose remoteness was a form of love.
She reached for the mud of the stream-edge and seemed to close her fingers upon a grub, too soft for a human hand.
She remembered the day she'd fasted to the point of exhaustion and fallen praying onto the vision of a grub. Some creature so thin it not only didn't have a shell but didn't have any protection at all. So that even touching it seemed to hurt it. And permanently. How could things so weak be thrust into the world, things born to die, how could God allow their life as nothing but carnage? Yes but inwardly this vulnerable image had been Jesus himself, the one who had opted to be without defenses, though the most powerful being in the world, gaping with softness, inexplicable. Sheer threads of hurting hanging down. Now remembering this image, she grabbed onto the poor creature and squeezed it with a practiced selfishness.
... was pulled back onto the shore. Where all the dead bugs lay. The losers in the battles, resting and decomposing.
*
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Chapter 8: The fear
*
In the wheeling fields of storage and memory behind the campus, there was a complete forest at play. At prayer, at play. Free space between. All of it a form of memory. Of past and present and future. More comprehensive than mere time.
This was the domain of the One whom it was perilous to describe and at the same time imperative to try to try to try to understand. And then speak His name. Did God walk the earth or was the entire earth like a single footstep of God? To walk in wonder the playspace or prayerspace and then let its wind blow you through.
You don't know where it came from. You don't know where it's going. It fills your consciousness and rises.
There were large segments of protected space with trees pushing through it. All of it to be read only -- now listen, be quiet, ponder what you move through.
She wondered if a word could listen and not just pontificate. If a sentence could be filled with openness and questioning instead of this pressing demand to expound and to "know".
Then the wind reached and lifted her for a second, "bodily", over the threshhold of the muddy path that fenced off the cliff and led to the rushing water overhead, no: it was down below. A rushing sound that came from every direction.
What a magnificent fear this was!
*
In the wheeling fields of storage and memory behind the campus, there was a complete forest at play. At prayer, at play. Free space between. All of it a form of memory. Of past and present and future. More comprehensive than mere time.
This was the domain of the One whom it was perilous to describe and at the same time imperative to try to try to try to understand. And then speak His name. Did God walk the earth or was the entire earth like a single footstep of God? To walk in wonder the playspace or prayerspace and then let its wind blow you through.
You don't know where it came from. You don't know where it's going. It fills your consciousness and rises.
There were large segments of protected space with trees pushing through it. All of it to be read only -- now listen, be quiet, ponder what you move through.
She wondered if a word could listen and not just pontificate. If a sentence could be filled with openness and questioning instead of this pressing demand to expound and to "know".
Then the wind reached and lifted her for a second, "bodily", over the threshhold of the muddy path that fenced off the cliff and led to the rushing water overhead, no: it was down below. A rushing sound that came from every direction.
What a magnificent fear this was!
*
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
The breath
*
So she let the breath breathe her.
Her own role small. The breath initiated. From where? To where?
Where are you? Who are you?
Twigs that shifted, dry brush breathing. As if sinking after exercise. Wind like a billowing towel. Can you talk? If you can talk, you are still within range. So go further? She sank down into recovery, let go. The thoughts between the thoughts were almost within grasp.
In the forest Una reached forward her hand and then a hand grasped her hand. Who are you?
Fear a great teacher. One's eyes wide like a horse's. Looking back, there are dorm windows, golden, swollen, people inside. Many miles away. Existent, remote.
But out here, the between that surrounded things was like a leaven. The place was growing.
The breathing was not hers.
What did she bring back? Not information, nothing but wonder.
*
So she let the breath breathe her.
Her own role small. The breath initiated. From where? To where?
Where are you? Who are you?
Twigs that shifted, dry brush breathing. As if sinking after exercise. Wind like a billowing towel. Can you talk? If you can talk, you are still within range. So go further? She sank down into recovery, let go. The thoughts between the thoughts were almost within grasp.
In the forest Una reached forward her hand and then a hand grasped her hand. Who are you?
Fear a great teacher. One's eyes wide like a horse's. Looking back, there are dorm windows, golden, swollen, people inside. Many miles away. Existent, remote.
But out here, the between that surrounded things was like a leaven. The place was growing.
The breathing was not hers.
What did she bring back? Not information, nothing but wonder.
*
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
The wood of New Year
*
New Year's Day. She stepped into the woods behind the dorm. No one there, no color beside wet black and softest white. Black of trees and thorns, very heavy the way it dipped. Moisture within and without.
Be with me there.
Between each thought the same substance as between each twig. Between the branches of the trees there stretched a "there" that was not space but something deeper and perhaps more frightening: the possibility of space. The fact of a space, the opening that as if condescendingly allowed space to be there.
The poetry of the place was the place itself. No, the place was a decal and beneath it what the mere shell of the colors covered.
Be with me there.
In the New Year and at any other time.
*
New Year's Day. She stepped into the woods behind the dorm. No one there, no color beside wet black and softest white. Black of trees and thorns, very heavy the way it dipped. Moisture within and without.
Be with me there.
Between each thought the same substance as between each twig. Between the branches of the trees there stretched a "there" that was not space but something deeper and perhaps more frightening: the possibility of space. The fact of a space, the opening that as if condescendingly allowed space to be there.
The poetry of the place was the place itself. No, the place was a decal and beneath it what the mere shell of the colors covered.
Be with me there.
In the New Year and at any other time.
*
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