*
So for those who are mad "why" is really a tragic word -- a soft articulation of the tragic -- it has a tragic sound. Not because events don't have a meaning (I believe they always and everywhere offer up meaning for whoever seeks it) but because the meaning so often can't be used. It seems to point outward to the transcendent place that is outside even "outside" or that extends beyond "extension" itself. Take something like the death of an innocent person, say that young woman in Iran, whose death a cellphone recorded.
The sane shake their heads and move on. But the mad brood over it.
They can't shake it. The event is like a string tied to something we are aware of but can't see. The string leads out of history to another dark and intuited place. A "place" with no place in the world.
"She is in heaven." What is heaven? Is heaven just the lumber room where everything is stored that doesn't fit elsewhere? No. It has an order of its own. How do we know that? How do we infer its having an order? We know this because "order" itself is one of those things that is always being killed in history. It is killed yet it survives and so must have a "place" to survive. So the transcendent itself must be ordered and orderly.
And the tragic part of this is that all the wonderful things that are killed and yet survive cannot survive here. We are here and everything we love is elsewhere. We can't let them go and move on because there is no place we would want to move that doesn't contain them. They pull us out of the world. They seem to make life impossible.
*
Now you ask the mad to get over this vast melancholy and move on. But they say no. They seem to insist on staying where they are.
What is the "why" of this?
Surely the best reason is the most obvious -- the melancholy contains a deep joy that no one who feels it can relinquish. It is like a little lane through the broken glass into the things that most matter. The core of the "why". The sustained land of what is intrinsic and beautiful and completely useless.
"Reason not the need".
But the sane rub their hands and worry, saying: you must go on. You must live. You must move forward.
And the mad are forced to see the logic of this. It seems that reality doesn't stop. It too is transcendent. There is something transcendent about history itself, always picking itself up and moving on past disaster.
Itself full of tragic gestures.
So we pick ourselves up too. We move on. We move on a little bit but never completely.
If we should break a little bit while we are moving then the poor people who love us will need to follow that breakage to its "place". The place where the breakage is stored.
Always asking this question: where is why?
I sometimes feel that in some way this place is impossible to describe to those who don't believe in God. They can continue not to believe but then can never understand this place. This storage and what it stores.
They will call it absurd and thus substitute a word for an understanding.
It exists or it doesn't.
But if it exists then humans can run away. But it never runs away.
*
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Story: A sorceress
*
At a certain point, desperate to win his lady's love, Gilles resorted to magic. Maybe magic -- maybe nonsense, he didn't know. In introspection and dismay he crossed the trackyard and went into a different part of town. his best friend, Peter, had told him about a sorceress in his building.
You don't have to believe, Peter said. All you have to do is ask. And then watch.
If nothing happens, you're still right where you are now. Right? The pain won't go away but it won't get any worse, man. There's no place worse than this, right?
Gilles had to laugh. Peter was like what you'd call an A student in love. All the pretty ladies loved him and always had. He'd never had to work a day in his life for love. His problem had always been fending them off. Or limiting the selection. Choosing only one.
Whereas for Gilles? There was one there was one there was only one there would forever be only one, one heart, one soul. And the fact that this one ignored him, scorned him, well that was just annihilation. It was like not existing at all but feeling it deeply at the same time. It was an unsustainable way of life. It made death sound like something easy by contrast. Little did he know perhaps.
As he walked along the flowered side path, a large limbery dog -- sleek and handsome -- ran at him. He let the big guy lick his hand and wished he had treats in his pocket. The dog flicked his head like a horse and made a gentle whinny sound, mostly a form of soft breathing. So big guy, why are you loose? Who's your owner? When Gilles reached down to inspect the collar the dog backed away. Okay. Past Peter's apartment, the sorceress's front door.
Hey do you really want to do this?
At the first ghost of a knock the front door opened. Come in, said the lady in the leotard and Gilles trundled in, feeling like a clumsy beast. Sit, she said and handed him a glass. She was so thin she looked about to break. Down into cross-legged fusion with her mat. The drink she gave him tasted like "Tang Slime" and immediately turned his stomach upside down. She'll be out in a minute, said the woman who turned out was not the sorceress.
He could not seem to sit in his low chair without creaking but every time he moved the perspective changed in the apartment, now like a long tunnel in a deep-focussed lens, what was happening to him? What was in that drink? From far away he heard the muffled sounds of someone fussing in a bathroom. Another lady came out of perhaps the kitchen holding a tray. She was wearing even less than the first one. She was intensely beautiful and her hair was white. Gilles felt more and more like a beast invading this ultra feminized space that was at least twice the size of what it possibly could have been from the building you saw from the street. He needed to get up and walk around but the chair was so very low. Not comfortable, debilitating. I'm Giselle, the second lady said. She went to the front door and opened it. In came the dog, twitching his head in a way so oddly familiar. He flattened himself onto some tiles. Then Giselle climbed on top of him and made herself comfortable, loading her weight onto the haunches, good gooood dog. There was a buzzing sound from the bathroom and then someone kicked the sliding door off its runner and a young woman burst out, clad in a towel, partly clad in a towel, clad in part of a towel. A sorceress.
Crap! she said. Walked over to a sickly potted plant, picked up a figurine and slammed it into the crown of leaves. They shattered and what seemed like a million white bugs swirled into the air. Oh, you grisly little things. She swooped a handful of them into her fist and pivoted to the center of the room smiling. Animalcules into the little pot and then grind and grind. Let us pour some of that terrible orange fluid into the paste. Get over here, the witch cried and Gilled tried to get out of his chair. He felt rubbery, doubled in size and covered in bristly hair, was that just his nerves on end? Could he walk across the room without destroying it? Could he step over that dog? Why were men so damn clumsy?
Hand me her picture, sweetheart, the witch said and the big beast that was Gilles reached into his faraway pocket and gave her something he would have been ashamed to explain or justify: it was a picture of Karen in the shower -- unaware of the camera -- something that he had no business owning or seeing. Nor could he have explained to anyone how he'd gotten it. It was clandestine, illegal, and the sorceress cooed over it, then brooded. Then she tore it into little bits. A girl like that is easy, she said. But what about you? A coarse monster like you.... Young man, you are lucky that I'm not attracted to you.
Something about the way she said "young man" gave him a sudden insight into her. She did look about 16 years old. And yet when she moved into and out of the light minute wrinkles rose all over her face, stippled lines that seemed to open and close but vanished whenever you focussed on them. She could have been 100 years old. But no, she was very young and very corrupt and it was only the corruption itself that looked so old. When she handed him the filthy brew he didn't hesitate but drank it all down. In his hideous paw the cup was as small as a thimble. So it seemed. The other girls moved around the room and seemed to be three or six or twenty girls. No towels, no need for towels. The features of their wings made the air seem heavy and he had to lean on the sill, panting heavily and staring out the window at her huge garden, her estate filled with cypresses and swallows. Jungle drumming inside his ears. Even within the vision he knew he was very sick, hallucinating, so light headed that he couldn't touch the ground with his feet. It was like the time he lay in a spa, reached forward to touch his toes and found them missing. Then the great dream-ship in his head turned abruptly left and the scene changed. Help me, help me, madame, he cried. The dog whimpered and circled below his feet.
Our merciful lady placed the namaste stone in his hand and at once he felt placed again, feet flat upon some Turkish carpet. Now you keep this stone on your person, she said. And whenever you next touch your lady, even to shake her hand, she will be yours.
He went home and slept a plenitude of time, then wasn't sure, when he awoke, how much had really happened and how much had seeped out of his usual crazy dreams. The namaste stone, that was real -- it lay on his night table. The love he felt, okay, that was just as intense and sharp and hurtful as ever.
He went out looking for Karen. It was a Saturday and she was at the church, doing something beautiful and characteristic to the sanctuary with flowers. Herself a flower, that went without saying. How it hurt him even to look at her. When she saw him she took on a look of concern, conferred with her friend, backed out into the breezeway. Before he could follow, the friend came up to him and said: If you're going to walk the labyrinth with us, there are rules.
You don't bother the other people there. You don't talk to them or touch them. You let God lie thick between you.
God. Thick. Of course, Gilles said, not understanding a word. They labyrinth was outside, lying under the pale sun, painted and partly carved on the cement. He had trounced it a thousand times, barely noticing it, on the way to some store or other. Peter used to practice his roller blading within its old fashioned curved lines. Twitching his head like a lion.
Pretentiously solemn people moved along a sinuous curve and then stood still in the center with their lips moving. Gilles clutched his namaste stone in his pocket, warm and swollen as a piece of flesh. If he could only touch her hand casually in the center of this place, then she would be his. Involuntarily, even -- that part didn't seem to matter. He stepped onto the pattern and felt it shift slightly like the deck of a boat. Because others had, he closed his eyes. He felt the nudge of something, a tug. Move this way, now this. When he opened his eyes, she was next to him on a lane moving opposite. She ignored him, they separated. She wore a pin that said: Take no thought for your life. I go before you. He began to feel intensely dizzy, surrounded by mostly women, a paltry couple of men, and they were all so quiet, so solemn, a million miles away. And the damned platform continued to turn under him. Even balancing was hard. When his foot touched the carved edge of the path his whole body felt the tingling shock. Touching it was like a sin. His palm was on the line and his head ached. Breaking a rule, Karen reached from the center and plucked his shirt, pulled him upright again.
She was so beautiful he couldn't breathe. He realized that what he wanted was not even to marry her, not (in some alternate reality) sleep with her, but just to inhabit the same world that she did. Her spirit seemed completely lifted and, being near him, lifted him up. Cured him of a depression he didn't know he'd had.
The stone in his pocket was unbalancing him and pulling him back to the ground. He didn't want magic anymore. It would only be a wall separating him from her. And his old ugly grasping soul, that was another wall.
He stepped into the wavery pool at the labyrinth's center, its hot core. People were picking up and then abandoning stray objects: a shell, a feather. Gilles reached down and put his hated stone on the exact central prick of the design. Ooh, calmness. He could feel how wrong it had been, how misshapen. It made the invisible water dirty, it sullied the air. He put it back in his pocket. This vile thing goes back to its owner.
On the other side of the circle Karen looked at him as though he were a stranger. If he was ever to win her it would have to be a different way.
That night he had the "bear" dream for the first time in many years. Something was thrashing in the backyard, shaking the bushes of flowers. His companion, a women he couldn't quite see or identify, held him by the elbow. A large creature trapped in a black bear suit, an oversized and clumsy guy with sad trapped eyes, a human -- but all animals looked human when you gazed at them. Oh look! the invisible woman said. Look! Somebody to play with!
And the bear suit flapped loose but wouldn't come off. There was no other skin underneath.
In the morning Gilles drove by the apartment building but it was as dark and derelict as a movie set. He called Peter on his cell but got no answer. At his work number the same. No one had seen him for a week.
Things felt wrong. He felt like a crude clumsy animal. He blamed it on that stone. It was a sort of clot blocking the world's normal flow of grace. Yet he couldn't just throw it into the road. He had to give it back. He drove again to the apartment building, stone in his right hand. Knocking on the sorcereress's door left an echo that seemed suffused with something, blood maybe. She was in there not answering, could that be?
But when he knocked on Peter's door the sound was different, hollow in a different way. It seemed that no one would be home for longer than he'd ever be able to wait.
He heard a snuffling noise behind him. He turned and saw the dog -- or a dog -- or was it the dog from before? He was now so emaciated it would seem he'd have trouble even walking. And he had that horrible look in his face, was it love yearning? Could a dog yearn? And he twitched his head in that all too familiar way. When he put his snout on Gilles's hand he was shivering.
I will feed you. I will feed you as soon as I can, Gilles said. The dog nudged the apartment door and began whining, no, it was not a whine but an even more complicated sound. It was worse than the sight of starvation. Just that sound.
Could you be .... ?
And Gilles turned to knock at the door, even harder than before. The echo of nothing -- something -- nothing. The sound of nobody there was like somebody there. No one. Someone. And he knocked again.
And knocked again. And again.
*
At a certain point, desperate to win his lady's love, Gilles resorted to magic. Maybe magic -- maybe nonsense, he didn't know. In introspection and dismay he crossed the trackyard and went into a different part of town. his best friend, Peter, had told him about a sorceress in his building.
You don't have to believe, Peter said. All you have to do is ask. And then watch.
If nothing happens, you're still right where you are now. Right? The pain won't go away but it won't get any worse, man. There's no place worse than this, right?
Gilles had to laugh. Peter was like what you'd call an A student in love. All the pretty ladies loved him and always had. He'd never had to work a day in his life for love. His problem had always been fending them off. Or limiting the selection. Choosing only one.
Whereas for Gilles? There was one there was one there was only one there would forever be only one, one heart, one soul. And the fact that this one ignored him, scorned him, well that was just annihilation. It was like not existing at all but feeling it deeply at the same time. It was an unsustainable way of life. It made death sound like something easy by contrast. Little did he know perhaps.
As he walked along the flowered side path, a large limbery dog -- sleek and handsome -- ran at him. He let the big guy lick his hand and wished he had treats in his pocket. The dog flicked his head like a horse and made a gentle whinny sound, mostly a form of soft breathing. So big guy, why are you loose? Who's your owner? When Gilles reached down to inspect the collar the dog backed away. Okay. Past Peter's apartment, the sorceress's front door.
Hey do you really want to do this?
At the first ghost of a knock the front door opened. Come in, said the lady in the leotard and Gilles trundled in, feeling like a clumsy beast. Sit, she said and handed him a glass. She was so thin she looked about to break. Down into cross-legged fusion with her mat. The drink she gave him tasted like "Tang Slime" and immediately turned his stomach upside down. She'll be out in a minute, said the woman who turned out was not the sorceress.
He could not seem to sit in his low chair without creaking but every time he moved the perspective changed in the apartment, now like a long tunnel in a deep-focussed lens, what was happening to him? What was in that drink? From far away he heard the muffled sounds of someone fussing in a bathroom. Another lady came out of perhaps the kitchen holding a tray. She was wearing even less than the first one. She was intensely beautiful and her hair was white. Gilles felt more and more like a beast invading this ultra feminized space that was at least twice the size of what it possibly could have been from the building you saw from the street. He needed to get up and walk around but the chair was so very low. Not comfortable, debilitating. I'm Giselle, the second lady said. She went to the front door and opened it. In came the dog, twitching his head in a way so oddly familiar. He flattened himself onto some tiles. Then Giselle climbed on top of him and made herself comfortable, loading her weight onto the haunches, good gooood dog. There was a buzzing sound from the bathroom and then someone kicked the sliding door off its runner and a young woman burst out, clad in a towel, partly clad in a towel, clad in part of a towel. A sorceress.
Crap! she said. Walked over to a sickly potted plant, picked up a figurine and slammed it into the crown of leaves. They shattered and what seemed like a million white bugs swirled into the air. Oh, you grisly little things. She swooped a handful of them into her fist and pivoted to the center of the room smiling. Animalcules into the little pot and then grind and grind. Let us pour some of that terrible orange fluid into the paste. Get over here, the witch cried and Gilled tried to get out of his chair. He felt rubbery, doubled in size and covered in bristly hair, was that just his nerves on end? Could he walk across the room without destroying it? Could he step over that dog? Why were men so damn clumsy?
Hand me her picture, sweetheart, the witch said and the big beast that was Gilles reached into his faraway pocket and gave her something he would have been ashamed to explain or justify: it was a picture of Karen in the shower -- unaware of the camera -- something that he had no business owning or seeing. Nor could he have explained to anyone how he'd gotten it. It was clandestine, illegal, and the sorceress cooed over it, then brooded. Then she tore it into little bits. A girl like that is easy, she said. But what about you? A coarse monster like you.... Young man, you are lucky that I'm not attracted to you.
Something about the way she said "young man" gave him a sudden insight into her. She did look about 16 years old. And yet when she moved into and out of the light minute wrinkles rose all over her face, stippled lines that seemed to open and close but vanished whenever you focussed on them. She could have been 100 years old. But no, she was very young and very corrupt and it was only the corruption itself that looked so old. When she handed him the filthy brew he didn't hesitate but drank it all down. In his hideous paw the cup was as small as a thimble. So it seemed. The other girls moved around the room and seemed to be three or six or twenty girls. No towels, no need for towels. The features of their wings made the air seem heavy and he had to lean on the sill, panting heavily and staring out the window at her huge garden, her estate filled with cypresses and swallows. Jungle drumming inside his ears. Even within the vision he knew he was very sick, hallucinating, so light headed that he couldn't touch the ground with his feet. It was like the time he lay in a spa, reached forward to touch his toes and found them missing. Then the great dream-ship in his head turned abruptly left and the scene changed. Help me, help me, madame, he cried. The dog whimpered and circled below his feet.
Our merciful lady placed the namaste stone in his hand and at once he felt placed again, feet flat upon some Turkish carpet. Now you keep this stone on your person, she said. And whenever you next touch your lady, even to shake her hand, she will be yours.
He went home and slept a plenitude of time, then wasn't sure, when he awoke, how much had really happened and how much had seeped out of his usual crazy dreams. The namaste stone, that was real -- it lay on his night table. The love he felt, okay, that was just as intense and sharp and hurtful as ever.
He went out looking for Karen. It was a Saturday and she was at the church, doing something beautiful and characteristic to the sanctuary with flowers. Herself a flower, that went without saying. How it hurt him even to look at her. When she saw him she took on a look of concern, conferred with her friend, backed out into the breezeway. Before he could follow, the friend came up to him and said: If you're going to walk the labyrinth with us, there are rules.
You don't bother the other people there. You don't talk to them or touch them. You let God lie thick between you.
God. Thick. Of course, Gilles said, not understanding a word. They labyrinth was outside, lying under the pale sun, painted and partly carved on the cement. He had trounced it a thousand times, barely noticing it, on the way to some store or other. Peter used to practice his roller blading within its old fashioned curved lines. Twitching his head like a lion.
Pretentiously solemn people moved along a sinuous curve and then stood still in the center with their lips moving. Gilles clutched his namaste stone in his pocket, warm and swollen as a piece of flesh. If he could only touch her hand casually in the center of this place, then she would be his. Involuntarily, even -- that part didn't seem to matter. He stepped onto the pattern and felt it shift slightly like the deck of a boat. Because others had, he closed his eyes. He felt the nudge of something, a tug. Move this way, now this. When he opened his eyes, she was next to him on a lane moving opposite. She ignored him, they separated. She wore a pin that said: Take no thought for your life. I go before you. He began to feel intensely dizzy, surrounded by mostly women, a paltry couple of men, and they were all so quiet, so solemn, a million miles away. And the damned platform continued to turn under him. Even balancing was hard. When his foot touched the carved edge of the path his whole body felt the tingling shock. Touching it was like a sin. His palm was on the line and his head ached. Breaking a rule, Karen reached from the center and plucked his shirt, pulled him upright again.
She was so beautiful he couldn't breathe. He realized that what he wanted was not even to marry her, not (in some alternate reality) sleep with her, but just to inhabit the same world that she did. Her spirit seemed completely lifted and, being near him, lifted him up. Cured him of a depression he didn't know he'd had.
The stone in his pocket was unbalancing him and pulling him back to the ground. He didn't want magic anymore. It would only be a wall separating him from her. And his old ugly grasping soul, that was another wall.
He stepped into the wavery pool at the labyrinth's center, its hot core. People were picking up and then abandoning stray objects: a shell, a feather. Gilles reached down and put his hated stone on the exact central prick of the design. Ooh, calmness. He could feel how wrong it had been, how misshapen. It made the invisible water dirty, it sullied the air. He put it back in his pocket. This vile thing goes back to its owner.
On the other side of the circle Karen looked at him as though he were a stranger. If he was ever to win her it would have to be a different way.
That night he had the "bear" dream for the first time in many years. Something was thrashing in the backyard, shaking the bushes of flowers. His companion, a women he couldn't quite see or identify, held him by the elbow. A large creature trapped in a black bear suit, an oversized and clumsy guy with sad trapped eyes, a human -- but all animals looked human when you gazed at them. Oh look! the invisible woman said. Look! Somebody to play with!
And the bear suit flapped loose but wouldn't come off. There was no other skin underneath.
In the morning Gilles drove by the apartment building but it was as dark and derelict as a movie set. He called Peter on his cell but got no answer. At his work number the same. No one had seen him for a week.
Things felt wrong. He felt like a crude clumsy animal. He blamed it on that stone. It was a sort of clot blocking the world's normal flow of grace. Yet he couldn't just throw it into the road. He had to give it back. He drove again to the apartment building, stone in his right hand. Knocking on the sorcereress's door left an echo that seemed suffused with something, blood maybe. She was in there not answering, could that be?
But when he knocked on Peter's door the sound was different, hollow in a different way. It seemed that no one would be home for longer than he'd ever be able to wait.
He heard a snuffling noise behind him. He turned and saw the dog -- or a dog -- or was it the dog from before? He was now so emaciated it would seem he'd have trouble even walking. And he had that horrible look in his face, was it love yearning? Could a dog yearn? And he twitched his head in that all too familiar way. When he put his snout on Gilles's hand he was shivering.
I will feed you. I will feed you as soon as I can, Gilles said. The dog nudged the apartment door and began whining, no, it was not a whine but an even more complicated sound. It was worse than the sight of starvation. Just that sound.
Could you be .... ?
And Gilles turned to knock at the door, even harder than before. The echo of nothing -- something -- nothing. The sound of nobody there was like somebody there. No one. Someone. And he knocked again.
And knocked again. And again.
*
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