*
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.
*
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
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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