Poem: "Prayer"

*

Savior
feed me your sweat --
however bitter
I thirst for it.

May the slimy earth
in its crudeness
give birth
in me to grace

and at the bottom
of my homelessness
may the home
I find be a fenceless

slippery place
that is heaven not space.

*

Poem: "God your reader"

*

Writers are guarded --
it's for humans
they write -- but imagine they had
a different audience

irony would be pointless --
if you were upset
as a person is
you would say it

no need to look around
for a peer
to approve -- none to be found
or needed anymore.

You would just write what's already known
to this one you've never known.

*

Poem: "The hypostasis"

Our being
was that place in the road
where one unknown thing
and another met and bled.

They were neither
one
nor were
quite two nor two's fusion.

They were separate
and yet the place
where we met
became a thing and was

and our way was a road
inside our hearts but outside.

Reflection: "Everything is elsewhere" (London, 6/24/09)

*

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.

*

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.

*

Story: Safety

*

Giles would meet with his therapist in his office on the most exposed floor of a tourist hotel -- what a strange place for therapy! The location might have been chosen to facilitate the "purging through dreams" that the therapy promised. A dreamlike location seemed guaranteed to hasten the whole process. That was the theory.

The worst part -- was it the worst? -- was stepping into that elevator. The entry door closed with an indecent whoosh. Ahead not only was the whole view exposed but management had taken the glass out in order to intensify the thrill. The chute leaned inward over the fantastically high lobby, which meant that anyone careless would fall and make a permanent splash. You had just enough time to recognize the danger but not enough to ward it off. And then you were there, on a very high floor, but still 20 stories from the top, and you were hanging over all those milling people, your brothers and sisters who were like yourself looking up at you. Later how would you ever get out of here?? You were even afraid to pry your fingers loose! But when the elevator wiggled to its stop the force of attraction more or less vanished. It too was somehow mechanically generated. He tumbled to the floor and rolled out of the elevator.

Among the therapist's many sayings -- for he was a man built out of healing cliches -- was the following: I don't ask you if you wish to be cured, I only cure you. His techniques were unpleasant. Also there was no evidence that they worked. You wouldn't even find brochures with testimonials. Most who consulted him were in no shape to ask for anything like an evaluation. The patients merely came and then went. Did they ever ask themselves if they were better? If so, how did they judge? In emotional terms, Giles today was only where he'd previously been but that outcome might have been the best of all the different possibles. Without this treatment he might have been worse. In any case he came back another time. When he fell out of the elevator there was no floor beneath him. The rumor was that the very space was digitized and that management did whatever it wanted with the result.

Abruptly Giles had that sensation he hated so much, of looking out the airplane window and seeing ocean above and sky below. It was that moment when you were upside down and simply supposed to trust that the pilots knew what they were doing to get you rightside up. A panic attack had come and enclosed him so that he couldn't move. Oh don't let this happen here! when I'm not even sure what "here" amounts to: here? He wasn't going to faint or cry -- he couldn't do anything. The wings slanted and righted and now he could see the lobby underneath him. Of course what guarantee did he have that it wouldn't disappear again? And this breakdown in trust was in fact the sum total of Giles' neurosis and had the same trapdoor structure that paranoia had, namely, that its fears were largely grounded and founded -- they were true -- but had to be considered sick and demented at the same time.

The flight attendant held him by the elbow. But no she was a tourist holding a matinee ticket and only wanted to get past him into the elevator. He knew the importance of giving the impression that he wasn't suffering or sick. He stood rigid like a strong and independent man, a soldier, a guy with no problems. He moved aside for her like a gentleman from a romance. The pretence actually made him feel healthy, though it was just pretend healthy, but you get points even for pretend. And so the minutes passed. And when he walked down the corridor he was able to pretend, like everyone else, that there was a florid hotel rug under his feet. Another one of the therapist's sayings: your feet aren't crazy, only you are. So let them walk you somewhere better. Giles walked. Even though he knew. He knew it would be manipulated. But another look out the window, a whoosh of the panic returning, no. No. He walked. His ex-wife mumbled in his ear as they walked. She spoke just loudly enough that he could hear she was speaking but not loud enough for the sense to be grasped. You know how that bothers me, he said but then corrected himself, rephrased the comment, since there was a need not to antagonize her, or anyone.

Darling, my ears are buzzing, I can't hear you.

A mumble like the substructure noise on a plane.

Why are you here? he asked. I am the one who is sick.

Oh Giles, you know what the therapist always says: I divide the world not into the sick and the well but into those who know they're sick. And those who don't.

Whatever relief or knowledge you receive here, I want it too.

It is no longer safe not to "know yourself". The airplane glides, the sky turns upside down. Your children look at you strangely. The car won't stay in its lane. Strangers scream at each other in the supermarket. You get home, sit in your kitchen chair and find yourself crying, without a reason but the truth is that the reason is plain, what is missing is the realization that you should always have had: "know yourself".

As the therapist says: Queasiness is the single path to health.

Giles looked down and the plane's window was underneath his feet. He closed his eyes and took another step. The lavatory door was locked, his wife was gone. Only a tourist with a ticket in her hand, walking briskly to the elevator. Women were the only thing in the world that he really liked.

As the morning progressed, the path stretched like a rubber band ahead of him and the office receded forever until suddenly, in its own mysterious time, it was simply there. It chose the moment in which it was to manifest itself, in space: another form of realization. I can see the sense in which space could be envisioned, Newton-like, as God's sensorium, the issue being that space cannot simply exist, outside anyone's consciousness (or why would there be space instead of non-space?) and yet that consciousness cannot belong to a puny human. Because space encloses us and transcends us. It transcends us but does not transcend consciousness. Ergo the consciousness belongs to one unimaginably large. And we are mere tokens on its gameboard.

So it was that when these dreams and visions invaded Giles' own space, he had no obvious way to turn them off, given that that mega-space of mutual claims that we call "reality" was by no means under his own control. God controlled it, he did not. And the dreams, those also were of God. He hoped so.

He stepped into the long foyer. Delectable slim girls -- that is, women -- were filing, almost dancing along the corridors, hidden by the svelte columns, they had a sort of private domain, and the women were running, running. Why would anyone run in an office environment? He kept trying to see their faces but couldn't. Way down at the end of the room was the emperor, no, the therapist, wearing an expression of undiluted delight, waiting for him. Giles' feet sank into the marquetry as though it were taffy, he could not get his footing. When he reached the blue rug in front of the dais, he wedged his foot down into what was no rug at all! It was sheer air, a 20 story drop and he screamed as he fell, It was a very quiet scream, more the thought of a scream. And the therapist cried out: you needed that! You needed that!

You must learn from suffering!

When he picked himself up, he found himself at the building's utter top, as though he had fallen up not down. He was shaking so much he couldn't move. The penthouse restaurant swung above the city like a kind of lighthouse beam. Businessmen in very expensive suits wee crashing the elevator. You typed the number of the floor you wanted and it told you which letter elevator to use, but the businessmen crowded in front and wouldn't let others get on. Giles shook like the last leaf of autumn and he still could not thrust himself forward.

Finally (in the late afternoon?) a lady with a kindly and familiar face put her arm around his shoulders and led him to the open door. Let this man get on, she said. Get out of our way. Perhaps she pushed him inside. So, with his back to the spectacular view he descended to the ground floor, let himself be kneaded into the lobby and somehow, through some unrepeatable maneuver that was like opening a can, got himself outside. Later he was seen walking along the atrociously crowded sidewalk, and he was going goodness knows where. Goodness knows.

Come back soon!

*

Poem: "I looked into the icon's eyes"

*

I looked into the icon's eyes
but they looked to my right -- I could-
n't turn I couldn't take my own
eyes off those eyes but wondered did

he see his father behind me?
so could I if not face to face
still feel the presence of my own
creation in the icon's space?

The self was not the center of
this gold place -- but felt an assuage-
ment rise, a great weight taken off
these shoulders lifting like a bridge.

*